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Nov. 6, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
45:16
Bret Weinstein - On Israel-Palestine & Existential Crisis

Bret Weinstein on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the next pandemic & spirituality.Watch my conversation with Bret Weinstein in full on Locals: bit.ly/BretWeinsteinLocals Support this channel directly here: https://rb.rumble.com/Follow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand

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Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
You can watch me on a variety of platforms right now, for we stream wildly and widely, widely and wildly, but our home is that sweet home of free speech itself, Rumble.
I'm going to do a brilliant interview right now with Brett Weinstein.
You know him.
He's the evolutionary biologist and co-host of the Dark Horse podcast, which you can see on Rumble.
The link's in the description there.
Here I am with Brett Weinstein.
Stay free.
See it first on Rumble.
Brett Weinstein's with me now, the evolutionary biologist, host of the Dark Horse podcast, and I would say free speech and freedom movement advocate.
Thanks for joining me, Brett.
I am thrilled to be here.
It's very exciting to have you here.
Have you been participating in ARC with Jordan Peterson et al.?
I was at the ARC conference and I was at the, I don't even know what you would call it, but the Jordan Peterson extravaganza at the O2 last night as well.
I'd call it an extravaganza.
Did you enjoy yourself?
Oh, I did enjoy myself.
Met lots of interesting people and it's always great to see Jordan on stage in his element.
Yeah, of course it is.
It's fascinating.
We've been speaking and communicating recently and I suppose there's a sense, an unavoidable sense, Brett, that we're in a very critical period.
It's not that long ago, it seems to me, that the apocalyptic preachers were peripheral and marginal figures, derided and maligned at the time as crackpots and lunatics and conspiracy theorists.
Indeed, they were the first to be picked off, cancelled, removed, even before the term cancelled existed.
There were people that were eliminated from public discourse for a variety of reasons, but in retrospect, It looks like they were right about a good many things.
You will see a series of global crisis, an escalation of tensions, an increase in censorship, the legitimisation of surveillance.
This is something that you've been talking about yourself for a while, I would say from a more credible and certainly from an academic background.
That was germane during the pandemic, which was a time of great cleansing, censorship and control.
Now that we're to a degree on the other side of it, how do you feel that the continuation of control will be exerted going forward?
Now that if we're indeed not in the pandemic era, how is it going to be possible to legitimise the kind of authoritarianism that became normalised in that period?
Well, there are a number of answers to that question.
The most obvious of them has to do with the World Health Organization and the pair of structural modifications that are currently moving through that body under the heading of pandemic preparedness.
Yes.
For those who are not paying attention to this, these documents, I think they are designed to be so boring that you will not notice them, but what they contain Is essentially the framework for a global tyranny that could be triggered by the next pandemic, but pandemic is defined so loosely that anything will do, including climate change.
And that having defined such a pandemic, all of the signatory countries to the World Health Organization would effectively become subordinate, our sovereignty would evaporate.
And within the treaty modifications that are being proposed, there are various requirements, for example, that if the World Health Organization were to decide that Some threat to public health was sufficiently severe.
It could, for example, mandate things including vaccines and gene therapy.
I kid you not.
It's actually it's named in these these proposed modifications and maybe the icing on the cake is That they have also anticipated the conversations that might break out if they attempted this, and they have carved out a right to dictate to the signatory countries what sorts of censorship measures they might have to deploy.
So.
I think the way to understand this is if you look at what happened during the COVID so-called pandemic, they attempted to deploy a narrative that we were simply supposed to swallow.
And it didn't work because effectively the force that was imposing this didn't really understand the danger of podcasters discussing these things outside of the normal channels.
And so the narrative Broke apart.
And, you know, in the US now we have something like 3% of people are taking the latest boosters.
That tells you how badly the narrative fared.
But they have decided to not lose to us again, and they're creating the architecture that would make it impossible to have the kinds of discussions that we did have during COVID.
And that's frightening.
Yes, when the word globalism is used, I understand it as meaning the subordination of sovereignty in the manner that you describe, the anti-democratic process that seems to be enshrined in this treaty, the ability to just demand that nations impose preordained regulations, including I feel like it's 5% of the national health budget, and Yeah, and as you say, a curiously loose definition of the term or word pandemic itself.
I was unaware.
I missed what seems to be a crucial point, the ability to censor.
I'm always struck by how this new form of tyranny is masked in the livery of a kind
of gentle bureaucracy of care. Recently, we received more YouTube restrictions. We've
already been demonetized. It seemed that the UK government asked for our channel to be
demonetized, and YouTube in particular agreed. But this has been escalated, actually, and
now we can't post. It seems kind of niche to say you can't post external links and stuff
like that. But really what this is, is censorship and control of information is being posed
and imposed to an unprecedented level because, I suppose, of this unprecedented technology.
I suppose how I came to look at the pandemic was as a period of revelation.
It revealed how pre-existing power structures operate, how their interests converge, and what their agenda looks like.
Visible Not only in the instances where it was carried out, but in particular, perhaps, where it was resisted.
And you are saying, Brett, that this WHO treaty is, in a sense, the legislation for the continuation of those measures after this initial attempt, which to a degree failed, but to a great degree succeeded.
If by success you mean the profits of those pharma companies, if by success you mean the ability for nations where you wouldn't have believed it possible to
have successful lockdowns or the measure of control exerted, people giving up norms pretty
much almost immediately and largely unquestioningly, the kind of good faith that was handed
over. And it seems that to me since then, that there's been... Perhaps I don't know when it began
anymore, Brett, was it...
Was it 2001?
Was it 2008?
But there's just this never-ending sense of crisis, this escalating sense of fear and dread.
And now the kind of casual advocacy for war on potentially three fronts is being normalized also.
What new complexity does this conflict bring, in particular, to this matter of centralizing control, closing down dissent?
Do you see this as part of the same trajectory, potentially?
When you say this, are you talking about the Who Treaty or are you talking about the conflict in the Middle East?
This conflict.
The Middle East.
Yeah, and actually the sets of conflicts and the way they're being funded in bundles spoken about and conflated in quite peculiar ways.
You know, the most recent package of 106 billion, some of it for Ukraine, some of it for Israel and Palestine, some of it for China, Taiwan, all of it for the military-industrial complex.
Do you see this as being Well, there are about 20 things in there and I know I'm going to forget some of them, but there are a number of things going on.
always have as their end point, regardless of the complexity within the crisis, the ability to assert
control? Well, there are about 20 things in there and I know I'm going to forget some of them,
but there are a number of things going on. One is there is this incessant push for centralization
and the violation of a sensible principle for governance that actually oddly comes out of
Catholicism called subsidiarity.
Now, it's interesting.
Subsidiarity was a big theme at the art conference, and I know Jordan Peterson has talked about it occasionally.
Three years ago, I thought it was the only person in modern times who was even using the term.
Maybe that was wrong, but subsidiarity means Everything should be governed at the lowest effective level that it can be governed, right?
The who should not be dictating your relationship to your doctor, for example, or how your local park functions.
But these excuses, these crises create the pretext for moving power upwards.
So it's farther from our ability to exert any kind of countervailing force.
And it really is.
It's an excuse.
You know, the pandemic masqueraded as a series of interventions that would only make sense in the context of a government that was absolutely obsessed with our safety.
But we know that our governments are not obsessed with our safety.
They put us in danger in many different ways, you know.
Every day of the week.
Yes.
So the idea that they're suddenly so concerned that we're going to catch COVID and that we, you know, might end up in the hospital over it is preposterous in light of, you know, the food supply and the poor quality of what it is that they're allowing us to eat.
And in fact, you know, the strange food pyramids that they've put together that have us eating exactly the wrong things.
Total failure to recommend.
Going out and making vitamin D in the sun, right?
They're not upset.
They're not obsessed with our safety and well-being.
But if they can claim a crisis in which they can invoke that, then they can do all sorts of things, you know, including censor us.
They can take all sorts of freedoms.
So with respect to the crisis in the Middle East, it is playing a number of roles here.
One, Maybe it's just pure luck.
In fact, I think we have to assume it is, but it is distracting people from this, you know, guided missile headed directly for our sovereignty and our capacity to even invoke informed consent in the defense of our own bodies, right?
We're not noticing that because we have this very dramatic crisis and we are right to be paying attention to that crisis.
there's a tremendous hazard in it that this crisis, A, as bad as it is in the Middle East
and as critical as what goes on in the Middle East is to the world, it also could escalate
into a global crisis in which we might be very directly involved.
So there's all sorts of reasons to be paying attention, but the fact that our attention
span is divided between these crises, and as you point out, that there is a pattern
in never-ending series of crises that almost looks like it was designed to keep us reacting
out of fear, to keep our amygdala in charge and to sideline our conscious minds.
I don't know, maybe that's just the nature of the modern world, but to the extent that we are stuck in this, you know, reactive, fear-based response, we're not thinking very clearly.
And we need to, because the only way out of this stuff is to think clearly.
You know, what options are we not seeing, right?
We're being told that everything involves two sides.
You're going to pick which side you're on and we'll know whether you're a decent person based on which flag you're waving.
Right.
That's not how any of this works.
And it's a disaster for humanity.
And I hope we will get to this later in the discussion.
But it is a disaster for humanity to allow ourselves to be dragged back into a previous mode in which civilizations functioned and away from the superior mode that, yes, we had never completed, but we were well on the way to getting there.
We had a really good prototype of an alternative system that was, in fact, Fairer, safer, more liberating, more prone to have us pursue meaning and compassion and all of the things that we value about ourselves.
Those were on the table and they're slipping away from us as we're now very focused on conflicts that we've been told are so utterly binary that, you know, we will out ourselves as immoral if we ask any questions at all.
Do you mean that liberal democracy was succeeding?
That there was a period sort of in the, are you saying the 20th century, where it appeared like there was meaningful progress and something has pivotally, there's been a pivotal and fundamental change.
What is the period that you're talking about where things were on the table, to use your phrase?
What has been lost and when did this happen?
People who follow me will know that I use a term called metaphorical truth.
And what I mean by metaphorical truth, these are ideas that if you act as if they're true, they work.
They work in your favor.
That doesn't mean that they're perfectly literally true.
The story I would tell, which I think is at least metaphorically true, and I believe it's probably close to literally true also, is that the founding fathers of the United States accidentally solved a problem in trying to confederate the colonies.
They created a system that didn't perfectly solve the problem of people rigging the system in their own favor, but it solved a lot of the problem.
Enough that the system actually founded the modern West.
And it became contagious because when people saw how productive a system that did not rig itself in favor of particular constituencies was, they, of course, wanted in.
So they mimicked it.
Right now, sometimes they mimicked it without the particular constitutional provisions that really made it work.
But as long as everybody was loosely on board with free speech, for example, it didn't really matter whether it was inscribed in your constitution.
So, to make the story succinct, the West is essentially the agreement not to rig the world in favor of your people, to collaborate with people based on the fact that they bring something to the table that makes them worth collaborating with and to ignore their skin color and the shape of their noses and the particular traditions in their religious places of worship, right?
You would put those things aside and you collaborate because there's wealth to be produced by teaming up.
Now, this system is better in virtually every way that it could be better, but it has one vulnerability, which is it's fragile.
And the problem is that when it breaks down, we should know why it breaks down.
It breaks down because the productivity runs out.
The growth that it would produce runs out.
And when that happens, it's like a game of musical chairs in which the music has stopped.
And instead of being one chair short, You know, 30% of the chairs are missing and people start looking for who they can trust.
And then all of that lineage stuff comes back.
And my claim is that this is where we are in history.
That all of the growth that we would normally be able to produce has run its course.
There will be future bits of growth that we will get to by innovating new technologies, for example, but we never know when this is going to happen.
Many games have been played to pretend that we have growth.
Most of those games have run their course and the bills are coming due.
And so as that, you know, looming Unbreakable recession shows up on our radar people default back into this lineage against lineage violence and the problem the really big problem is The world was like that that was all of history until the West emerged
That was terrible.
All of the greatest tragedies are born of this kind of thinking, but it was at least possible for humanity to move along this way.
It probably isn't possible for us to do that.
If we descend as a globe back into lineage against lineage violence, if that just comes to characterize everything with modern weaponry, I don't think humanity has much time left.
So my claim, and you know, I don't want people to get this depressed sense.
I wouldn't be doing the stuff I do if I didn't think that there was a way out.
But if we don't find our way out, then the point is it's a short ride and we have to reinvigorate the West in order to escape that.
Well Arthur, it seems to me that also masked within that ideology is that the consensus and teaming out that you described was predicated on a set of materialistic ideals.
I don't just mean materialistic in terms of commodity, I mean materialistic in terms of rationalism and that which is measurable.
That it was devoid of a spiritual dimension in so much as that collaboration was only based on productivity And even Marxist critiques, one of the areas where that analysis remains absolutely, verifiably true, is that, as you have said in your own description of this problem, is prone to boom-bust cycles.
And if that becomes the raison d'etre and determining principle of an entire culture, when it inevitably falls into decline, it's exposed as if not nihilistic, then somehow, I don't know undeniably, Entropic.
It feels to me, Brett, that part of the failure is that while the lineage traditions are plainly tribalised and conflict is baked into them, I feel like that Schmittian dialectic of othering becomes germane here.
In order for the in-group to be valuable, we have to have this other group, and that feels to be getting metastasised under some new terrible Global dominion or domain, rather.
Now, what I have long felt is a challenge, whilst I feel that you're entirely right about subsidiarity.
Subsidiarity.
I've got to get into my own accent.
Subsidiarity.
Subsidiarity.
I like subsidiarity because I like the idea of power being as close to the individuals affected by it as possible.
We let go of the idea of progress being about pace and efficiency as if there's some Immutable, incontrovertible telos, this thing that we're trying to get to, when plainly that is baked into the models of commodity and built-in obsolescence and disposability and materialism and individualism.
If all that matters is that which is measurable, then in the end, what I'm left with is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
And it seems interesting to me that many spiritual doctrines are about Caution when it comes to pleasure and suffering being the determinants, your own preferences becoming your default ideology.
It was interesting you said at the beginning of that that people mimicked it without inscribing some of its constitutional principles, and it still worked anyway because it's an effective system.
But where it has failed, it has failed monumentally.
In historic terms, it's Quite quickly in terms of empire like it's like it's rattled itself into annihilation indeed if what we're experiencing now is some sort of burgeoning end time pretty rapidly and I feel Brett and I do and it's not who gives a shit what I feel I'm asking you
Don't you feel that there's a requirement for a set of values and principles that go beyond materialism and individualism and somehow capture something arcane, divine, unitary, and that respects the sanctity of the individual and the community?
And when we rebuild out of this, it's not just built on, why don't we buddy up so as we can trade shit?
Oh, you're 100% right about this.
As I was saying, I was thinking, this sounds good, this sounds alright.
No, you're hitting the nail right on the head.
And so I would say the next thing to understand is that, first of all, evolution is an amazing process.
It has produced all of the most incredible features of humanity in addition to producing all of our worst features.
So it is an amoral process.
I'm not advocating for us to subordinate ourselves to it.
In fact, we need to override it.
Its objective is to have us get our genes as far into the future as we can.
It would be wise of us to recognize that one of the that's that's some that's a sentence you could say for any species, literally any species that has ever existed.
The objective is to get genes that are contained by the organisms in that species as far into the future as possible.
That is not an interesting goal.
It is not something that any reasonable person should want to honor.
You are a robot with that goal, but it's like being a, you know, a cyborg that has discovered you have a mission that you don't think is a good idea.
So we need to override our program and say actually the capacity to engage in rational evaluation, to establish values that are meaningful, to pursue objectives that are not fundamentally genetic, that's actually the better part of what we are.
That's something that we cannot say other species are capable of.
We are uniquely capable of it.
And so the part of us that is special is a means to an end, a genetic end that is not interesting and not honorable.
What we should do is we should turn the tables on evolution and we should say, how do we take the stuff that's actually really cool that we're uniquely capable of and provide an environment that fosters it?
Which does go directly to, I don't know if you want to call it a religious perspective or spiritual perspective or whatever it is.
The way we live has to satisfy that need in us.
That need is a fundamental need.
And I won't say I don't know what it is that would satisfy that need and function in the long term to stabilize what I'm calling the West, this ability to collaborate.
But I'm not arguing that the reason to do it is because it produces Lots and lots of growth and because you know it's it's productive.
I'm arguing that it should be done because of all of the auxiliary things that it allows to take place.
We want a world in which warfare is less likely, in which violence is less likely, in which people are truly liberated to do meaningful things.
And the best hope we have of doing that is putting aside our lineage Differences and collaborating, which is what has happened in the West.
Not perfectly.
We've never completely gotten rid of racism, for example, but we have done better than any alternative.
So that's why I'm arguing we should do it, is actually to foster the best characteristics that humans have and allow those things to spread.
Within the limits of rationalism, it's difficult to continue to advocate only for rationalism when we've seen where rationalism has brought us.
It feels to a degree that that's what you're attempting to do.
I'm reminded of C.S.
Lewis's claim or observation that the rationalist scientist in the laboratory observing a far-off nebulae posits that the rules that are applicable locally
to the scientist would be applicable here using the rationalism that he himself claims is the
result of a set of chaotic processes with no teleology or intention, no trace of divinity. The
temporal is absolute and the spatial is absolute and not necessarily abstract but
potentially sort of localised customs that may not be absolute across the entirety of the
universe. What I feel, and then I would, wouldn't I, is that we're buttressing against some precipice
that's going to require a new resource.
In a sense, this is kind of, I suppose, the Christian idea, is it?
Maybe that you can't get beyond here now unless there is some transformational, transcendent experience.
Unless the individual is willing to somehow, and again, It's not only in Christianity.
It's sort of in Stoicism, certainly Marcus Aurelius, and within Buddhism.
The idea of death of self.
The idea that there is a purpose that is greater.
Now from your perspective and your field of obvious expertise, evolutionary biology, where you can demonstrate the efficacy and the function of genes and how they behave and how they mutate and how they succeed and how they fail.
Of course, I recognise that that is the sort of track that you will use as the Dominant frequency for formulating your opinions and perspectives.
It would be mental if it wasn't.
But I wonder if within that, isn't it necessary for us to collectively invite the possibility that the reason for our distinction as a species is you're going to have to get quite close to saying there is something sacred about human beings or important or special or different or something, and that there is something unitary between us, something shared between us.
Otherwise, I think it's easier to make the argument for domination.
It's easier to say this set is better than that set, which is the argument.
The American hegemony of provoking China into a South Seas war, saying that Russia caused this war themselves, when there's an obvious argument that there was provocation.
In a way, to deny, to somehow say America should get out of these conflicts, that we should be looking at maximum democracy, maximum subsidiarity, in order to make that argument, you have to somehow... I don't know if it's enough to do that on the basis of economics, or that the West was a Great success and look at these pillars and columns or look at Michelangelo or whatever.
I don't think we're going to have to reach deeper into somehow the mystery of consciousness, somehow the limitations of some inkling of the divine, some dormant near silent spark that perhaps may yet feed us something that you might find in the Tao or in Meister Eckhart.
A hundred percent.
And I never would have said anything else.
The further I mean, look, my toolkit is a rational toolkit, but it is I am not rationality first.
I'm human first.
And the fact is, all of the things you're pointing to are essential pieces of the package that got us to this moment in history.
I wouldn't dismiss them.
And, you know, I freely talk in terms of miracles.
I refer to a God that I do not believe is a literal creature that would be recognizable to us.
But I don't hesitate to use the metaphor because I think it's very powerful.
Right.
So I'm comfortable with the idea that the proper way to bring everybody on board with the story that we can rationally deduce must be the way forward is not a rational It's not going to work.
And for one thing, it's just going to strike everyone as too cold to be meaningful.
So, yes, the problem, though, is that when you say, OK, we have all of these traditions and they contain some sort of metaphysics that is fundamentally about the divine, right?
There is a temptation to just simply retreat to these belief systems.
And here's the problem.
Those belief systems evolved.
They are compendiums of wisdom.
Much of that wisdom is decent and honorable.
Some of it is not.
If you look carefully at Bibles, you will often find, especially the farther back you go, the more dominated by lineage against lineage violence that they are, you will find perfectly immoral things spelled out very clearly in these texts.
So we can't reactivate that part.
You could act.
You could make the argument that the purpose then should be to select the stuff that we should honor and, you know, downregulate the stuff that's no good.
But there's a more fundamental problem because those belief systems evolved.
They are adapted to the environments in which they came about.
We don't live in those environments.
None of us do.
Any ancient tradition is now placing those who adhere to it in a kind of limbo where our traditions are not a good match for the problems of modernity.
So we have to To the extent that there is a fundamental human need to think of these things in terms of something deeply spiritual, it can't be some version that we reboot from ancient history.
It has to be, it can borrow from those things, but it's going to have to involve a good deal of new material and the fact is you can't, we can't even spell it out.
A selection is going to have to Refine it.
You're shaking your head.
I was just working out something.
Although the accoutrements are doubtlessly cultural and what else would they be?
I mean, it would be odd if they weren't written in Hebrew or Aramaic or Arabic given, you know, and that they didn't bear reference to shepherds and goat herds and the things that were sort of prevalent in that time.
What interests me, I suppose, Brett, And in particular, where there seems to be an invitation to examine the relationship between that which is apparently external and that which is apparently internal.
The fact that there are metaphors and nomenclature that you would anticipate being localised to conjecture otherwise would be pointless and implausible.
What I feel We're perhaps moving towards together.
I consider evolution to be kind of linear, and I suppose one would because it's generational.
It would be split in and diverse and invisible, and I'm sure there are all sorts of patterns that you're aware of that I can't even begin to conceive of.
One of the things I'm noting is that Customised and customary traditions that were necessarily local because of the way the world was then are now being not only applied to a different time, and that's an interesting idea because what does that mean?
Culture has evolved, things have moved forward, have they regressed?
Are the false markers of technology and medicine being used to present an idea of progress that perhaps is not absolutely true?
Aren't many of the problems we're experiencing now from diet to screen time the result of the fact that we're fundamentally similar to the pre-agricultural beast that we once were?
Certainly from a biological perspective, if you dumped me 10,000 years ago, mightn't I adapt?
So what I'm saying is, These ideas don't work.
The areas where we find challenges, it seems, in one way, I'm inviting us to consider it, is when you globalise it and when you try and advocate for a kind of a unipolar position.
When you say that the world should be Islamic or the world should be Judaic or the world should be Christian or the world should be secular, it becomes tense and taut and fraught.
The world should be Zen or the world should be Tao.
Isn't it that This position of subsidiarity has to be deployed.
In order to do that, could it not be argued that within all of these traditions, it could
be argued but certainly it should not be imposed that there are very peculiar local customs
and beliefs that seem somewhat out of step with what you're posing as a Western ideal
for all its problems, has many successes. Which in a way is what we're criticising for
those biblical traditions. They've got some great ideas and wisdom traditions, but they've
also got 'throw someone off a tower' or 'throw stones' or all of that stuff that we point
out the violence and brutality and madness. What I'm saying is that unless the real problem
is an attempt to centralise authority to a degree that whatever it is, even if you're
just into some weird Icelandic thing that you wouldn't recognise as a religion or new
emergent progressive gender identity type of thing.
Unless we get to a point where it's like, what is it that's driving this tendency to centralise and coalesce power?
Why is that happening?
It's obviously creating conflict.
I sense in it, and I wonder if this maps onto your understanding of evolution, That they're trying to resist the opposite.
That what the technology and communication miracle is doing is saying, hey, do you know what?
Actually, we could organize things really differently now.
You could have loads of independent media.
You could have loads of independent dissenting voices.
People could start opting out.
You could live in England and just go, hey, we're not English anymore.
We're going to belong to this subsidiarity.
We're going to run our community like this.
Yeah, we're in the middle of Delaware and we're not paying taxes anymore.
We're going to run our community like this.
Sort of A pan-trans Amish revolution of everyone just opting out of travellers and gypsies here in our country.
We're not paying taxes, we're out!
That could happen sort of en masse as people start to recognise that the central hegemonic forces are not beneficial.
So even though there are things in religion, as there are in the Western tradition, that are at odds with the principles that one might encourage and present as defining, Which wouldn't matter, would it, if there wasn't this sort of idea that we're all progressing together and the general trajectory of that progression is one centralised set of interests that are able to dominate and that you can observe because you saw in the pandemic where all the money went.
You know where it is.
We know what strike that is.
So I know I said a lot there, but I'd love to know what you think about it all.
I can't do it all, but I do think I get the central thread of what you're asking, and I absolutely agree with you.
If COVID didn't scare you about the idea of centralization, then you didn't understand what happened.
So believe me, nobody's more terrified about this centralizing idea.
It is not synonymous with what I'm saying about the West.
And here's the point.
We've got two kinds of people on Earth today.
We've got those who are basically up for the idea that we should get along.
Right?
Now, that's not a competition-free view of the world.
That is, hey, let's cooperate to compete.
Let's do this without violence, and let's not rig the world in favor of people who happen to carry our genes, which, frankly, we shouldn't care about at all.
So, I'm not arguing that The West should impose itself on everybody.
I'm arguing that we have a de facto problem, which is that some of us are on board.
And this cuts through, I think, every nation.
It cuts through every population that I'm aware of.
That there are some people who are on board for the idea of, you know, swords into plowshares and Not using violence between lineages to settle stuff.
And there are those who aren't, who see the world in terms of my people need to dislodge other people in order to continue.
And the world is going to have to settle on this superior way of being.
And I mean superior by virtue of the fact that it takes all of the things that we would describe as honorable values and it augments them.
That does not mean that people have to pick the same system that we have to live under some globalized Western system.
It means that we all have to embrace the basic idea of getting along.
Now, in a world where we had embraced the basic idea of getting along, many things are possible.
And I agree with you about You know, the beauty of subsidiarity, it does not fall into the trap of saying, hey, the answer to everything is decentralization, because it isn't.
Who's going to protect the oceans?
The oceans are important.
Somebody has to protect them.
They're not inside of any nation.
They can't be a no man's land where we, you know, strip them of their species.
And that is what we're doing.
So.
The oceans are going to have to be governed by agreement from all of the parties that have an interest in the oceans continuing.
And there is also, I will say, again, I'm a rational guy.
That may be a defect, right?
This might be better done through a spiritual portrayal.
But nonetheless, I'm going to use the tools that I've got.
And the way to do this is to Illustrate the advantages that come to people by embracing these sometimes counterintuitive principles.
And then the trick is to figure out how to stabilize a world so that the ebb and flow, as you point out, the natural tendency, boom and bust, does not trigger us to fall back into that violence.
And this is the hard part.
Because we don't have a trick.
We have never found a trick to make growth consistent.
We've tried, and it doesn't work.
Sometimes we can stave off a disaster, but then when the disaster happens, it's even bigger.
So, I do think, and Heather and I outline this in our book, the Maya appear to suggest a mechanism by which such things might be done.
I don't know how much exploring in Maya territory you've done.
Any?
None?
None.
Oh.
Do you mean the Mayan folk?
Yeah, the Mayan folk.
The Mayan people.
The Yucatan, right?
This is a culture that- Pyramids, calendars.
Bingo.
Those are the ones, right?
This is a culture that- A bit of human sacrifice, I'm sensing.
They weren't perfect.
You know, this is a culture that lasted 3,000 years.
This is a culture that measured time in units of 400 years.
The Bakhtun, right?
400 year periods.
That's very long-term thinking.
This is a culture that had figured out mathematics to the level that they actually had a concept of zero, which the Greeks did not have.
Okay?
This was a sophisticated culture.
They could tell you where in the sky Venus was going to be.
Not an easy thing to predict.
They were farming intensively on very fragile soils, and they were doing it with chemical augmentation.
They had a system of enriching the soil, and this allowed this culture to go on for three millennia.
Now, they also, interestingly, failed before Europeans arrived in the Americas.
So, we know it's not even as if we can say that this was an indefinitely long-lived culture, because it wasn't.
It had its limits, but 3,000 years is a pretty good run.
So, what were they doing?
Well, one thing they were doing, those temples that you know of, we think of them the same way we think of, you know, Egyptian pyramids.
It's not what they were.
These were like layers of an onion.
Those temple complexes, and really, I encourage you, You should see these things and you should go to some of them that are not well known.
Some of them that are still somewhat embedded in the juggle and walk on these complexes.
You know, you've got a temple that you see because it sticks out of the canopy, but it's on some giant platform with other structures.
It's incredible.
And they grow with time.
That is to say, if, you know, the archaeologists have gone in and they find layer after layer, these things were built up over the courses of hundreds of years.
What that implies is that this was a culture that had surplus, and what they were doing with the surplus was they were investing it in these public monuments, right?
They were investing it also in an elaborate system of roads, right?
Stone roads that went between these city-states through the jungle.
So, if you do that, if you commit yourself to taking surplus and putting it into public architecture, One thing you are not doing is allowing your population to grow in proportion to the amount of food available.
And the problem with letting your population grow, which is naturally what evolution will do to you, if you have a surplus, your population will grow until you don't have a surplus.
Okay?
That's part of where the boom and bust comes from.
If we've got a surplus, we're going to burn it, and then we won't have one, and then we've got to find another.
So, if instead of allowing that to happen, if instead of allowing, you know, suppose you have 10 good agricultural years in a row because the weather's been hospitable.
Right.
Well, then your population would tend to grow.
And then as soon as you have 10 bad years in a row, you're going to have violence because you're not going to have enough food to go around.
And when people don't have enough food to go around, they do the natural thing, which is they try to get it for themselves and their family.
But if you invest in the years that are really good in the growth of this, you know, if you make a public investment of these giant structures, which Creates work for people it creates an impression that you are part of something very durable much more durable than you are Then in the bad years, you don't have to build them up and nobody has to starve so you can imagine from a Western perspective that if we were to take an enlightened view of the relationship between you know market forces and our well-being and we were to optimize for something like our resistance to violence
That we could invest in something that was publicly available, that enriched us as a people, and in bad times we could invest less or nothing in it and we would not have to resort to any of these other mechanisms.
Right?
That does suggest that the Maya, this long-lived population, had a means for Basically flattening out those boom and bust cycles, which would have been agricultural in their case, in a way that would have reduced violence.
Probably why they lasted 3,000 years.
What are you proposing that the model was?
Are you saying that it was somehow preservation?
Or are you saying it's labour forces?
Are you saying it's population control?
What are you suggesting?
We don't know.
We actually know more about the Maya than any of the other New World cultures because they also, among other great accomplishments, had a written language.
And they inscribed it in stone, which allows us to have seen it now.
Unfortunately, they didn't just inscribe it in stone, and the Spaniards burned all but one of the text that was written on other materials.
It's a weird impulse.
Yeah.
Well, it's actually a very natural end.
Still happening.
Yeah, I still happen to be going after other people's monuments.
But I think what must have happened is that they had a religious story in which the gods undoubtedly wanted them to build up these temples and that those stories, you know, evolved.
And the reason that they stuck and were elaborated was because they insulated these populations from the natural boom and bust violence cycles that they would otherwise have faced.
Right.
And that's that's all of our story.
Right.
All of our traditions are metaphorical wisdom.
Sometimes that wisdom is immoral.
Right.
It tells you to go after your enemies.
It tells you to engage in perfectly horrifying behavior, to enslave other people, for example.
Right.
We can't bring that stuff into the present.
That stuff doesn't belong here.
But these things were metaphorical portfolios of beliefs that if you followed them you did well.
And they have all, you know, the example I often use for metaphorical truth is in the Old Testament you will find that the deity does not want you shitting in camp.
He's disgusted by this and you don't want to piss him off so you don't do it.
Right?
That is a metaphorical belief that gets you to behave as if you understand the germ theory of disease more than 2,000 years before anybody knew what a germ was.
Right?
So that's powerful stuff.
This is life-saving beliefs encoded in a way that's simple and intuitive and easy to transmit to the next generation.
That's what all of those traditions are.
And I don't, I'm not trying to burst anybody's bubble about them.
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