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Oct. 26, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
52:20
Jordan Peterson Part 2 - “Why The Woke Agenda Is A Path To Lawlessness & Social Collapse!” SF478
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In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there you Awakening Wonders.
Welcome to a very special edition of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
We are, in order actually to make up for some of the catastrophic technological challenges of the last week, giving you an additional conversation with Jordan Peterson that should only be available to our Awakened Wonders.
That's our local subscribers.
Have you watched Break Bread yet?
Did you see my conversation with Tucker Carlson?
Did you see my conversation with Ruslan?
He's a Christian YouTuber and commentator.
It's a brilliant conversation.
You might want to consider becoming an Awakened Wonder.
And even if you don't, you will certainly want to watch this conversation between me and JP. By the end of it, I'm talking about Christianity more openly than ever before.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for remaining true and faithful to us while we've had these technological challenges here in the United States.
And thank you for being part of our new community.
Here's my conversation with Jordan Peterson filmed.
In the local studio in Miami, getting deep about Christ in the way that only Jordan Peterson can.
One day recently, me and my mate Joe, we were travelling down a country lane.
Joe, me and him, we walked the path together.
He participated, in fact, in my baptism.
Catholic lad, good lad.
Joe has passed and he can look after himself physically, shall we say.
We're stopped by the police on a winding rural road in England because a tree has fallen.
We can see the tree arcing over the road.
It's not yet entirely fallen and the local constabulary tell us You can't go down there because that tree's fallen.
And I say, well, are you saying that we're not allowed to go down there?
Or are you saying that you will prevent us from going down there?
Are you just advising us that it's dangerous?
Or are we sort of free and we can assess for ourselves whether or not we're willing to take that risk?
And the guy says, you're not allowed down there.
Me and Joe bridle a little bit of the assertion of this authority.
we get back into the car and Joe says like that, you know, what kind of impulses occurred to him under those circumstances.
And I said, it's very interesting, isn't it, Joe?
Because if you'd have acted on those impulses, imagine the consequences that would unfold from that kind of confrontation, given how seriously those matters are treated, understandably, because the thin blue line between sort of order and chaos...
Isn't it curious to reflect that if you take an atemporal perspective on this, the power that they are utilizing and deploying to prevent us going down that pathway has the same genesis as the impulse that we had to curtail in so much as a long,
long time ago there were various tribes and some of those tribes were more successful than those other tribes and eventually over time They coagulate and become a monarchy, and the monarchy requires a police force, and the police force is formed, and the police force is charged with keeping order.
What undergirds all of that power, ultimately, if you trace it back far enough, you know, you could argue in a well-run system, and that would have to be some kind of electoral democracy, some sort of representative order, wouldn't it, on some level, although, you know, I've heard people make cases for feudalism these days,
or benign dictatorships, that the power itself of authority is just a line of The power that those police were able to hold over us was the same power that we might decide to use to overpower them in that moment,
just with a few badges and a uniform.
And a bit of time.
Some time ago, these institutions and organizations were formed.
On what basis?
The ability, who, you know, it's sort of a Foucault argument, which I know you won't like.
Who's allowed to use violence?
Who is allowed to kill?
Now, I suppose what's interesting there is even in a moment like that one, we're talking about who should have power?
Should it be me, the individual?
And what's my power undergirded?
I've heard you talk many times like the malpower is ultimately underwritten by violence.
We'd have to sort of make a decision.
Oh, are we going to take this to the point where we're going to What is unquestionable power?
What is indefatigable, indisputable power?
When you talk about this sort of ambivalence, the chaotic characters that enter continually through myth, normally in the guise of some harlequin or trickster, a person that refuses to, you know, either the face is covered, they don't bear the mark of the divine, they're not made in his likeness, they are pied, they are neither the light pillar or the dark pillar.
These figures are terrifying as precisely as you said because they're not operating within that order.
Now what I think we're in at the moment Is that merely the prelude, we are eating the appetizers, not the main dish, and something like the Olympic ceremony is part of the inauguring of that ambiguity and chaos.
Hey, Jesus Christ, your most revered figure, let's play him like this!
Or, oh, it was just Dionysian, it was just a bit of Bacchanalian fun, kind of curious reference in itself, actually.
That's for sure.
And what flows, I would offer, and I'm asking, what flows out of that is now the assertion of a centrifugal force that benefits from the chaos that was temporarily induced through the sort of the offerings of hedonism, through licentiousness, through, hey, there are no boundaries to sex because they're quite an odd...
The concomitant component of this, Jordan Peterson, is there is, in my country, I recognise, and I've been the subject of, an odd puritanism and a conflating of the, you know, it's a conversation that we had some time ago, actually, the ability to attract as predation.
That all the while, this permissiveness, hey, be what you want, do what you want, do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law, this literal satanic shit that's sort of flowing out, is this odd puritanism.
It has to happen.
So my point is this.
What's this peculiar contradiction and hypocrisy that exists in this apparent permissiveness?
Do you see that Olympic festival as a sort of a bizarre ceremony of jokers, almost?
Do you see ambiguity as a precursor to a more stringent Order.
Because I recognize, obviously, almost on a sort of a, there's a snake level.
That ambiguity is fucking terrifying.
And I wonder, though, why it's terrifying.
I reckon it's a precipitous and uncanny fear that where on some level you know some dark thing comes, something slouches towards Bethlehem to be his antichrist, his satanic.
We know that it only appears to be ambiguous, but what follows it is quite definitive.
I want to make all that.
Thank God it's you on the other end of this conversation.
Otherwise, the answer might be, I don't know what you're talking about.
Okay, so the first thing I would say, we could use as an example what's happened at many university campuses.
Okay, so there's an insistence in our culture that all forms of sexual conduct whatsoever are not only allowable, but laudable and to be celebrated.
No matter what they are.
And that makes itself manifest, I would say, not only, but quite particularly on university campuses, where all forms of identity are given equivalent worth and celebrated, right?
Everyone can love who they want the way that they want, let's say, as if what we're talking about is love, and very rarely is.
All right, so it's the same campuses where you see And this was particularly true about five years ago, where there was insistence from often the same people that any interaction that was physical between a young man and a young woman of any sort had to be bounded by something approximating a written contract.
What does consent mean?
And the reason for that, so what you see first is that everything goes, and then you see second, yeah, but nothing is permissible, which is exactly the response you'd expect from that chaotic hedonism.
And what's the reason for that?
Well, the reason for that is that anything goes, that's too much.
It calls out for a kind of regulation.
It's too much.
It's too confusing.
I can be anything I want.
I can do anything I want whenever I want with anyone I want.
It's like, that's too much.
It's too destabilizing.
It's too upsetting.
And it's actually also literally dangerous.
You're throwing your hands.
One of the things we know, for example, this is a terrible thing too.
There have been personality analysis of people, men in particular, but it's also true for women.
So imagine that there are people who tilt towards long-term commitment and there are people who tilt temperamentally towards short-term mating opportunities.
That's how the evolutionary biologists talk about it.
So long-term commitment, short-term sexual access.
Alright, then you can map the personalities of the people on those two extremes.
The men who prioritize short-term sexual access are Machiavellian, narcissistic, Psychopathic and sadistic.
And so, the hedonism that characterizes the sexual revolution throws women into the hands of predators.
The consequence of that is the terror that produces the desire for regulation of sexual behavior.
The demand for the regulation is precisely proportionate to the degree of disarray on the hedonistic side.
Right, so part of it is Many young people are just forgoing relationships altogether.
Maybe the young men are turning to pornography.
God only knows what the young women are doing.
And you get this call for the heaviest possible hand of the intrusive patriarchal state.
So that's part of the answer to the multitude of questions that you put forward.
You see, the psychoanalysts always knew this, is that there's some target that's being aimed at.
And if you stray too far in one direction, you get a counter-response on the other, in the same person.
So if you're The person who's thrown themselves into hedonism headlong will have an unconscious longing for the order that will either suppress that in the pathological sense or rectify it, bring it back to the middle, bring it back to the place that's more meaningful.
Now, what you'd hope for in a situation like that would be something approximating a genuine religious transformation.
Right.
That's what you'd hope for.
Now, and that brings up another point that you made that touches on the postmodern issue.
So you said when you were with your friend and you were dealing with the tree authoritarians, you had a flight of fancy that indicated that the authority that the police were using was a derivation of the same rebellious spirit that made itself manifest in you.
Ability to enact violence.
Right, right.
And part of the heavy hand of the patriarchal state, and you referenced Foucault.
So there's a real question that underlies all that, and the question is, on what authority is the legitimate state founded?
And Foucault would say, there is no authority but power.
That's the postmodern claim.
It's a vicious claim.
It's the postmodern neo-Marxist claim, to be more precise.
There is no authority but power.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, exactly the inverse of that is true, because the insistence within the Christian tradition in particular, though it's got its roots in Judaism, is that the king of all kings is exactly the person, so if that's Christ, the king of all kings is precisely the person who subordinates their sovereignty to true service to the most downtrodden and outcasts.
Exactly!
It's the inverse, it's the absolute inverse of the power principle.
That's why Christ so peculiarly forgoes his ability to use authority, even in the face of mortal threat, and the Jews who are surrounding him at that time, this has nothing to say about Judaism, the people who surround, his own people who surround him at that time, are struck dumb that he doesn't come Forward in all his glory as a figure of power.
But there's a transformation there, and the transformation is predicated on the idea that the most fundamental and redemptive form of sovereignty itself, the authority on which the state is based, is service of the highest to the lowest.
Right?
Right.
And that's...
It's a stunningly brilliant inversion, and it's sufficiently stunning, by the way, historically speaking, independent of its theological connotations, is that the revelation that that attitude constitutes demolishes Rome and destroys the pagan world.
Right, so say what you want, theologically, the force of that Re-capitulation, that re-imagination of what constitutes the basis of proper sovereignty is so powerful that it defeats imperial Rome, a country based on power and very effectively, right?
Very effectively.
And so that's a thing that's so bloody remarkable.
And then with the English state, you know, the English state itself, insofar as it was a benevolent It was a form of benevolent social organization, and it was to a marked degree.
It wasn't predicated on the, what would you say, the taking to the state of power.
It wasn't predicated on that.
It was predicated on the proper Relationship of the sovereign king to the highest form of sovereignty.
I think that was exemplified, for example, by Queen Elizabeth, who was a remarkable monarch, not least because it wasn't about her.
It was about her fealty.
It's just something that was above her, and she was unbelievably effective at that.
I know she's not a true temporal leader, but she was certainly a leader and example.
The rest of the conversation is going to be off YouTube.
Click the link in the description if you want to see the rest of this conversation.
I like that not only is there the position of king as servant by his associations, his relationship, his practices in the Gospels, there is also the silence at the trial.
While on trial, under human conditions, Christ says next to nothing.
He says the bare minimum.
This married to the idea that he experiences the real anguish of Gethsemane.
He's not.
There is no part of Christ that's, well, I'm actually God, so this is going to be okay in the long term.
This has to take you beyond reason.
This has to deliver you to a peace beyond all understanding.
This does have to show the limitations of the pagan world and of the empirical power of Rome.
It must, therefore, transcend that.
And then if I can add to it, Jordan, when we were chatting outside, we were saying that, you know, all things have a symbolic connotation.
To sort of exist at all, meaning must be derived from them, or exist, stroke, be registered, be read.
Another of those moments that I've experienced in my personal conversion, and I'd be interested of course because I know you've just done some work on the Beatitudes for your university, is that when I think about the last shall be first and the first shall be last, the assumption is that that's a reordering based on economics.
But when I apply that in my own life, the first shall be last and the last shall be first, who's first in my life?
Me!
Who's last in my life?
People that can't do anything from me.
When I am with Christ, the people that I can't do anything for become most important to me.
And I myself become least important to me.
And that is how I know that I am with Christ.
To this point you made earlier about power for power's sake.
I suppose, you know, that all these dynamics and hegemonies are founded upon the Foucauldian idea that its only power is power for power's sake.
Indeed, is that not...
Or power for hedonism's sake.
And that's a relevant feature of Foucault, as far as I'm concerned.
Right, certainly the way he carried it on.
Absolutely, 100%.
Well, the other thing, too, is that part of, you've got to ask yourself, is why do you need power?
And the answer is, so I can get you to do things for me that you don't want to do, right?
Things I want you to do that you don't want to do.
So power is the handmaiden of hedonism in very many ways.
Power is the handmaiden of hedonism.
I still think you may have that inverted.
Well, that doesn't matter.
You can make the contrary case as well.
It might be circular.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Yeah, it's a dance.
When, yes, relational, perhaps like a sort of an inversion.
Definitely, that's exactly what's portrayed in Cabaret.
An inversion.
An inversion of the trinity, an inversion of the relational aspects of the Father-Son and the Holy Ghost, an absolute interpersonal superstate of potentiality that only collapses into wave or particle in relationship with another conscious entity, i.e.
man made in God's image.
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I just want to wrap up with this point.
Oh, yeah.
Once you extract God, and like, of course, you're the person that's probably popularized, certainly more than anyone I know, the idea that even if you don't believe in God and you're an atheist and a materialist, if you have any values at all, that is functionally God in your...
Whatever you put in the highest place is God functionally.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
If you remove God-God, divinity, the Christian principle that you just outlined, from the highest to the low, serve to serve to surrender, if you obliterate that, or another word for obliterate, annihilate it, With festivals of nihilism, this is what I think the function of Epicureanism and Hedonism is, I think it is, it does have a telos, and maybe that's a challenge to its ambiguity, that it's to create the conditions where there is no meaning.
Once there is no meaning, we can lay claim to the very authority that we were trying, that the globalism, corporatism, materialism, rationalism, postmodernism, It's trying to deconstruct before our eyes.
Indeed, the only dam, the only guardrails, the only guard against this kind of, this absolute tyranny that we might, I think, be on the precipice of experiencing is God or at least some sort of consensus around good.
Okay, okay.
So let's take that apart for a minute.
Let's think about it in terms of the Nietzschean proclamation of the death of God.
Let's make the assumption that the God whose death Nietzsche announced was Christ, for the sake of this argument.
Okay, okay.
So, now, Christ as sovereign principle is the proposition that the proper source of union of psyche and union of society is the voluntary, self-sacrificial principle that the passion portrays.
Okay, so that's the highest principle of sovereignty.
That's actually the pattern that generates order out of chaos, the willingness to confront chaos, mortality, malevolence.
And to do that voluntarily, to put yourself at that service and to do it in the service of what's lowest.
That's the supreme principle.
Christ announced that as the essence of the law and the prophets.
And John announced that as identical to the word that existed at the beginning of time.
That's the supreme principle.
Okay, now you destroy that.
All right, so then you ask, well, what subsidiary gods emerge to rule?
Well, Nietzsche already knew this.
Nietzsche said, well, nihilism will rear its head immediately, because the highest meaning deteriorates.
It calls into question whether meaning at all exists.
Nihilism, he said, will turn to radical communal ideology.
And he actually identified communism, per se.
And he said that hundreds of millions of people would die in the ensuing centuries as a consequence.
Right, and so...
So you could think about that as the emergence of power.
Now, it's a particular Marxist version of power, but that's fine.
Power.
The other thing that emerges is sexuality.
You can even see that in what happened, is that Freud, for example, psychoanalyst, secular, who emerged right in the aftermath of Nietzsche, said, oh, well, God's dead.
Freud is a secular atheist.
What rules?
Sex.
Right?
Adler said power.
Nietzsche said power.
You know, Nietzsche is more complicated because he's such a sophisticated figure.
But let's just think about it practically.
You remove the principle of voluntary sacrifice from the highest place.
Well, what are the next two sub-gods that emerge?
Well, how about power as a unifying force?
He's like, if it's not God, then what is it?
Well, how about power?
If it's not power, well, how about sexuality?
Well, yeah.
Well, of course.
Well, obviously, right?
Obviously.
And then you get the degenerate state of power and the degenerate state of sexuality.
Of course that's how it's going to work.
In the helix model, how power moves through matter is sexuality.
How power exists through matter.
How energy, how charge, how life, biopolitics, how life moves through matter and moves through time is sex and sexuality.
And oddly oxymoronic.
Odd and oxymoronic is the fact that it's forms of sex that are not procreative that become most celebrated because they have as their terminus, to quote an idea from Jeremiah, instead of the continual flow of the living waters, all of us make cisterns of our individual identity.
All of us form pools of pleasure, epicurean little pools of effluvia to sort of Splash around in, dowsing ourselves in the stink of personal epicurean joy instead of being part of the flow, i.e.
that pleasure is a byproduct of the sexual function.
It's a pool that becomes stagnant and corrupted very rapidly.
This was also something Dostoevsky understood.
It's like that, see, I mean, part of the problem, you might say, why not?
I think this was true of the events in your own life.
It's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.
If you can have an endless vista of hedonistic pleasure, particularly in a sexual front, why wouldn't you?
And one answer is, well, unbeknownst to you, it devours itself.
It does it socially, it does it psychologically, and you will inevitably experience that.
Now, most people aren't in that position, because they...
They don't have that vista available for exploration.
And then their morality is, well, I wouldn't do that even if I had the chance.
It's like, yeah, right.
Wait until it's dangled in front of you there, buckle.
What is Faust?
What is Midas?
Here you go.
Try it.
What is the genie?
What is all of it?
Try it.
Try it.
See what happens to you.
And not everyone gets to experience the access.
And when indeed the only thing that possibly could have prevented me having that journey would have been...
Probably some kind of patriarchal or divine feminine principle or some alliance of the two that would say, even though this would seem expedient, even though your culture is glorifying this for yourself...
It's a hallmark of success.
Yes, a hallmark of success is what you're supposed to be doing.
The Whore of Babylon has a golden cup.
There's a reason for that, right?
It's like, this is what wealth offers you.
Unlimited access.
It's the very definition of success.
You know, and there's something that's true about that, right?
Because one of the things that is predictive of male success on the sexual front is socioeconomic status.
It's the best predictor.
Like, this is a very complicated problem.
It's like, why isn't...
Infinite sexual access, a valid predictor of hierarchical success.
Well, the reason, turns out to be, is that it devours itself.
It devours itself.
It's not a sustainable game.
It's not a sustainable game, psychologically or communally.
And I think part of the reason, look, this dark tetrad literature is very, very...
What's that, dark tetrad?
Psychopath, narcissist, Machiavellian, sadistic.
That's the constellation of personality traits that...
Because one of the things that is inevitable, if...
Inevitable concomitant of that is that if you treat...
If you have exceptional access to interchangeable women, you...
Train yourself to have the spirit of a psychopath.
That's what happens.
There's no way out of that, because you're commoditizing people.
And so if you train yourself to commoditize people, you will suffer the consequences of doing exactly that.
Now, if you happen to be a psychopath, it's like, hey, no problem.
But if you don't, It's not going to be, it will eat your soul.
It will eat your soul.
Yes.
Yes.
And you'll think, well, I've got everything anybody could want.
It's like, yeah, no, no.
Psychopath is a clinical term.
I wonder if there is a liturgical, ecclesiastical or theological, would it be satanic?
Would it be selfhood?
Would it be glorification of self extracted from external principles?
It's certainly the case that the darkest figures in the mythological landscape are the prideful intellects that want to usurp God's place.
There's no worse sin in the biblical Scheme than the sin of pride.
And that's the usurping spirit.
You see, the serpent that Eve interacts with in the desert, in the garden, is the usurper.
The serpent literally says to Eve, you can take to...
It's so remarkable.
He says something very particular.
It's like, God told you not to Master the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
You can't take that to yourself.
You can't incorporate that one fruit.
You do not get to define the moral order.
You do not get...
God said that!
But he's wrong.
If you take that to yourself, you become like gods.
You become like gods.
And so Eve says, I'm in for that, right?
And she does that.
She presumes that she can define the moral order.
That's her sin of pride, right?
So she eats the fruit.
And then Adam, in his...
Dismal beta malehood says something like, anything you want, dear.
You know, I can reorder things any way you want, as long as it pleases you.
That's the man who will do anything to please the woman.
She's possessed by the spirit of pride, and he'll do anything to please her.
That's the eternal sins of man and woman.
Oh, how cool.
So in a sense, that's exactly what's playing out now.
It's we are saying and living and practicing, we will take it from here.
We, through technology, That's the Tower of Babel.
We will, citizen management, we will control, we will take over, we will, through cultural ideology, replace what appeared to be sort of permanent and even universal realities when it comes to taxonomies.
Those taxonomies can be dissolved now and the only will is the will of the individual.
And let's see how that plays out.
And what do you have to negate?
You have to actualize Nietzsche's prophecy.
Well, what if we extract Christ?
The reversal of the Adam man, the Adamite man, the Adamic man sinned and fell.
Christ comes to absolutely reverse that condition, to say, I will not take that power.
I will place myself in the lowliest position.
Incredible.
Christ is the pattern of the reversal of Adam's sin.
That's exactly right.
He is the reversal of Adam's sin.
Yeah, Christ is the pattern of the reversal of Adam's sin.
Exactly that.
He's the antithesis of pride.
It's the antithesis of pride.
And it's the antithesis of pride that's raised to the highest place in the Christian order.
And that's obviously not power.
Like, obviously.
There is a beauty in it that is beyond rationale.
Like, yesterday, I guess, maybe I was in church.
It is done.
Like, it is done.
Like when he says, it is done, into your hands I commend my spirit.
When he says it's done, that's it, we've completed it now.
The beauty of that, the beauty of the willingness to experience that as we were discussing.
Why do you think that struck you?
Because on some level he knew.
Because on some level he knew that he was going to go through that.
Why did that strike you?
Because that he would do that for me.
That he would do that for us.
That Christ would do that for us.
That is the love.
That love is what's behind all of it.
Well, you made a point earlier, I think, before, when we were talking before, maybe before this discussion, that you had worked with a screenplay writer who insisted that the most appropriate way to demonstrate true love in the course of narrative is the only way, the only way, is to indicate willingness to sacrifice.
Right, right, right.
And so then the question, if that's true, and it could easily be, the only question is then, what constitutes the ultimate sacrifice?
And you can say, well, it's the ultimate offering of self and son, or self and child.
Well, the Christian passion unites both of those.
All right.
Right, right, right.
So that's exactly what Abraham does.
No, really.
Right, right.
Well, he's willing, but he gets his son back because he's willing to sacrifice him.
That's the moral of that story.
And that's exactly true in life.
If you're willing to sacrifice your children to what's highest, you get them back.
That's exactly right.
It's precisely right.
And so...
Abraham's sacrifice is of his son, because he's called upon to make a sacrifice of the highest order.
It's the culmination of a sequence of sacrifices that Abraham participates in that transform his personality.
Is it the highest form of sacrifice?
Not exactly.
The highest form unites the sacrifice of self and the sacrifice of child.
And that's exactly what happens in the Christian Passion.
It's God's Son and Christ Himself that are voluntarily sacrificed.
So it's the union of two archetypal patterns of sacrifice.
And indeed, you cannot achieve that on the plane of reality.
It's an apex point.
You cannot achieve those two simultaneous realities except in the ultimate reality.
Yeah, well, that's where the story seems to, what would you say...
It drifts up into the ineffable.
Yeah, and paradigm breaks and become ineffable, and the connotations of that, the historic connotations that you've already alluded to, are the end of paganism, we can't just worship nature as the expression of a deity, and imperialism, we cannot achieve absolute power on the material level.
So, yes, it annihilates those things.
Well, it even violates the principle that sovereignty is associated with power.
It demolishes that principle.
It violates the principle that sovereignty is predicated on power.
No one can believe that.
No one believes that anymore.
What is sovereignty predicated upon?
The spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice to what's highest.
Amen.
Praise Jesus.
Praise Jesus.
No kidding.
No kidding.
No, it's a remarkable, like merely conceptualized conceptually, it's a remarkable Philosophical achievement.
It's like, what's true sovereignty?
Well, see, there had been hints in that direction.
With the Mesopotamians, for example, the Mesopotamians construed their emperor as an avatar of Marduk.
Okay, so Marduk was a god that had eyes all the way around his head, so he really paid attention, and who spoke magic words.
And Marduk was also the deity who He transformed Tiamat, the dragon of chaos, into the world, who made the world out of the pieces of the dragon of chaos.
Very similar idea to the god in Genesis.
And those ideas are derived from the same geographical region, right?
So, as far as the Mesopotamians were concerned, the emperor only got to be emperor If he was a good Marduk, that was his claim to sovereignty.
It wasn't power.
It was his ability to be an avatar of Marduk.
So already the idea that the true sovereign should pay attention to everything, that's eyes all the way around the head, and speak the magic and redeeming words of truth, that's a Logos idea, that's already there in the Mesopotamians.
And that finds arguably its truest expression in the Christian revolution that makes the case That the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice, the spirit of self-sacrifice voluntarily undertaken in the service of the highest good, is identical to the principle that establishes the order that's good at the beginning of time and forever.
It's like, yep, looks right, looks right.
Because what's the alternative?
Nothing?
Well, then you have nihilism.
Or power?
Well, okay, have it your way.
Or sexual hedonism?
It's like, sure, wander down that road if you want.
Although embedded in Genesis is not the idea of self-sacrifice.
In the subsequent expressions, whether it's in the martyr...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not until John that those ideas are really, really carefully put together, right?
That's what makes John...
Exactly.
That's what makes the opening lines of John so absolutely remarkable.
It's like, Christ is the word that was there at the beginning of time.
It's like, okay...
What the hell?
What the hell does that mean?
It means something like, it means the order that's good or very good is predicated on the voluntary acceptance of the necessity of self-sacrifice.
That's what it means.
It's like, oh, okay, all right, well then.
What about the Erdinger thing?
You know, Erdinger who wrote a lot about Jung, where he says, you'll love this, and I've mentioned it to you before, but it was ages ago, that he talks about, like, here is the behemoth that I have made, and like these William Blake, oh yes, William Blake's illustrations of the Book of Job, Blake that illustrates the behemoth, and the behemoth I do not like, it's even worse than the leviathan, if you ask me, the leviathan, just some serpent down there in the deep, can't press his tongue down.
It's the giant that the hero often overcomes.
I don't like it, Jordan.
Certainly not how William Blake they are, mad genius.
Yeah, well you, with your temperament, you would be more opposed to the Behemoth and the Leviathan because you're more a creature of chaos than degenerate order.
I don't like the way it looks.
It's got no skin and you can see all the sinew in its face and its mad staring eyes.
Elsewhere in this analysis that Erdinger points out, Obviously it's a derivation of Jungian analysis.
He's saying, and if you can map this onto what we have just said about the requirement for voluntary self-sacrifice, how you have to marry those two points together, like in John 1.
He says that we are creating...
Like he says, our Lord says, you will do greater things than me.
That we are believing it into being.
We are its conduits.
In the same way that you're saying ideas are live things, we are a conduit.
It's not like they're dead objects spilled on a page.
Lapidary and useless.
They are the living word.
The living word.
We are the living word.
And in this bit of Erdinger analysis derived from Jung, he says...
That if we don't be God into being, if we don't make ourselves, in the same way in Galatians 20, I die on the cross with him and it is Christ that is born in me, says Paul.
If we don't do that, then actually it's almost It's almost like ontologically true.
Like we do collapse.
We collapse God out of being.
We collapse that possibility.
We collapse that function.
And what would you have to do in order to be a carriage, a vessel, a conduit, a vassal for the Lord, for God?
There must be humility.
There must be the willingness to die for it.
There has to be the willingness to die for the lowest and those that can do nothing for you.
Otherwise, you would inevitably become the tyrant, the psychopath, You'd have to become all those things because you would recognise.
And isn't shamanism the sort of pooling of it?
I recognise it because when I say dabbled in shamanism, what I mean to say is I've felt it.
I've felt it.
I've felt shamanism.
You know it.
You must know it too.
You must know it too.
It's when you think, hang on a minute.
The shamanic routine is the collapse into chaos and regeneration, right?
Voluntary collapse into chaos and regeneration.
And the pathway is continual immersement in chaos, climb, immersement in chaos and climb, up Jacob's ladder.
Like that's the tree of life that the shaman climb, right?
And that's an incredibly archaic.
Yeah, and it occurs in Siberia, Chile, wherever.
They do it everywhere.
Yeah, it's 350,000 years old.
The problem with it, if I may criticize something that seems to be almost part of the fabric of our reality, is that you are becoming, you are it.
When I'm in a constant dialogue with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ now in this moment, like he is here with me, like he is here with me, then the shaman in me yields.
Now, I would have always thought of a shaman as more powerful than a priest, and I would have always observed froms, and I wonder what you think about this, you know, The prophet lives the word.
The priest simply relays the word.
I think we are all called upon to prophesize.
I think we're all called upon to become as prophets.
Elsewise, Jordan, we are dead ends.
Elsewise, we are stagnation.
We have to observe that.
And I guess the reason that you have inevitably, invariably plucked From that new triumvirate of Adler, Freud and Jung.
Jung is the one that remains in metaphysics, remains in the archetypes, remains in the Red Book, in the beautiful etymology, even within geometry.
Remember, he opposed Freud because Freud deified sex.
That's why they split.
Jung told Freud that.
He said, you've elevated sex to the highest place, and that's wrong.
And he said the same thing about Adler and Nietzsche.
It's like, it's not power.
And then what did Jung discover?
Christ is the symbol of the self.
That was Jung's statement.
What does that mean?
It means what you just laid out is that you're called upon.
You're going to become something.
You're going to become an avatar of power.
You're going to become a worshipper of the golden calf.
Some spirit's going to take possession of you.
You're going to invite the dread beast that crouched on Cain's doorstep in to possess you if you're resentful.
Some spirit will possess you.
There's no option.
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There it is.
You can open the door to the proper spirit.
You can do that, right.
And then the question is, what's the proper spirit?
Well, it's not one of power.
It's not one of sexual gratification.
Well, what is it?
Well, that's the real question.
What is it?
If it's nothing, well, then you're a nihilistic house divided amongst itself.
You know, Father Dave, even though he's a Protestant minister, what I like is he's a church I go to back in the UK. When he's doing Corinthians, when he's doing Paul's letter to Corinthians, like Paul says a lot.
He has this, I don't know which translation, I guess this is New International Version, he has this idiomatic pic that's so beautiful.
Do you not know?
Like he uses it as a prefix.
It's such a gentle prefix.
Do you not know that your body is a temple?
And that's how he's talking to them.
Do you not know that your body is a temple, that you should be preparing your body as a temple for the return of Christ?
You can't live in licentiousness.
You can't live in hedonism.
You can't cut it off from the flow and make it into a cistern.
Man, I love that.
As much as I also love that there is something profound in power unexpressed, that to know he had that power, but as part of his sacrifice, he did not express that power.
He went to his death like a criminal, crucified among thieves and murderers, and remained only in dialogue with the Lord, the God, the Father.
And with those gathered at the foot of the cross, man, I love it.
I love what Paul did.
You know, when you get into Acts and Paul's letters, you start thinking, something must have gone down for these people to be doing this stuff.
As much as there was the reification, celebration and glorification of hedonism, Jordan, what was simultaneously done, if I may say...
What's the banalization of Christ?
The banalization.
I mean, I'm talking about my country and I was like in Canada or in this country where, of course, there is a sort of an evangelical tradition, but like it's sort of like Jesus as if it's the most boring thing ever.
I don't think Romans 13 should be in there.
I think it's sort of telling you fundamentally that to love Christ is that you best get ready to die for the highest thing yourself.
You best get ready that something is happening.
This is it.
It's going to happen in your lifetime.
And you'll be called upon in a moment, so you better be prepared.
Yeah, definitely.
That's for sure.
That's for sure.
And that's true of every moment.
Definitely.
Yeah, and the banalization, that's a very interesting phenomena.
You have the reduction of Christ, well, you have the reduction of Christ to compassion, for example, which is not an appropriate reduction.
He was a good teacher.
Yeah, yeah, he was a nice man.
He was kind.
He was a nice man.
Jesus was a nice man.
Yeah, yeah, it's like, no, no, no.
Well, I'm going to need a little more than a nice man for this...
Fucking holy war!
I found myself in the middle of...
Hello, we've brought you a heart...
No, no, no, no, no.
I'm gonna need king of kings.
I'm gonna need willing...
I'm gonna need nail into a cross, flagellation, and flies around my back.
I'm gonna need to know that...
The shifting of the veil that I witnessed was real.
And like when C.S. Lewis writes that at J.P., like when he says, those of us that have seen the shifting of the veil, those of us that know there is more to reality than the material realm, those of us that have glimpsed it, are taken over by a kind of lust.
And like bodily lust, it has the quality of making all else seem trivial.
That's the pearl of great price.
That's the pearl of great price.
That Christ speaks about in the parable, that any wise man, any wise rich man would sacrifice everything he has to purchase the pearl of great price.
It's like once you know what's most valuable, everything looks trivial in comparison.
Right, right, right.
Because not only did Christ undergo it, you know, Stephen undergoes it, he gets ripped apart, and as he's being pulled apart, Yeah, I'm coming, Jesus!
And like, Paul, yeah, yeah, I'll do the time.
I'll do the trials.
I'll do the shipwrecks.
I'll write these letters, chained to a Roman guard.
It's fantastic here.
I'm having a wonderful time.
Wish you were here.
This is brilliant.
Jesus is real.
It actually happened.
You know, like, so what I love about, you know, like, what I'm learning about and loving, like, I can see you, you know, brooding prophet that you are, how much you love it down there in the Old Testament, down there with the Isaiahs and the Jeremiahs and the Kings and the Judges, and gosh, you know, even from a little that I'm learning right now, it's so fascinating.
But why I love Christ is because I see it, I like the activation.
I like the activation.
Like, through the Old Testament, God's continually rolling his eyes at that lot, like, oh, no, not again!
Again, not more false idols in high places.
No, Solomon, you were doing so well.
These ordinary Christians, infused by grace, are willing to do whatever it takes.
And I think that's the story that we're participating in.
And I think that's why they're trying to nullify that story on a global scale.
On a global scale.
Get this Christian stuff.
Make it boring and tedious.
Say it's sexist and old-fashioned.
Like any decent Christian that I chat to, when I say, like, you know, we chatted about it the other day.
You know, like, say, John Rich, who cracked me up when he was on your podcast, John Rich, because I like how straightforward he is, and I like how evangelical he is.
You better accept Christ right now!
I was cracking up at that, and you're like, oh, come on, I've written a book.
No, you accept it right now!
You accept Jesus!
But when I asked John Rich, like, about, you know, hey, how do we parry, like, our Lord's, you know, edict, Love Thy Neighbor, with, like, the sort of edicts and restrictions around licentiousness and e.g.
homosexuality, he goes, you're a sinner the same as me.
You're sinners the same as me.
He got no judgment.
He's got no judgment on anybody.
I'm a sinner.
I got no judgment.
Oh, yeah, well, read the book.
I don't know.
You do what you want to do with that stuff.
But, you know, like, he foregoes that judgment and negates it.
Like, I imagine how Christ...
Imagine is all I can do, of course.
How would Christ be carrying on?
How would he be carrying on right now?
They say when he comes again, he comes as a king, rather than, you know, he comes as a king next time, and it's going to be discerning, and we ain't all going to make it.
But, like, I feel that, you know, that I love the end of the idea of Christ was a nice man, or Christ was compassionate, that Christ is the highest.
Only compassionate.
Right.
Right, right, right.
No, no.
See, Jung pointed something out very, very interesting in that regard.
It was actually the counterpoint of the Book of Revelation to the idea of Christ as purely a nice man.
It's like, no, no.
And there's some of that in the Gospels, this figure of infinite compassion.
And Jung was very interested in why the Book of Revelation emerged as a revelation.
It was also tacked on to the end of the New Testament.
Christ comes back as a judge.
Right?
And he separates the wheat from the chaff, and that's discriminating judgment.
That's actually the manifestation of the sword that turns every which way and is on fire, that guards the pathway to paradise in the story of Adam and Eve, right?
That's that sword, that nothing gets past that sword that isn't, what would you say, sufficiently That lacks the integrity necessary to enter the kingdom of heaven.
That's that sword that turns every which way and burns.
Right, right.
Justice instead of mercy.
Mercy is an element of the divine.
And that's the compassionate element.
And it's tempting to raise that and that alone to the highest place.
That's a temptation, particularly of women, to raise that and that alone to the highest place.
It's like, yeah, yeah.
Mercy.
Justice, too.
Look the hell out.
Right, and that's Christ as, well, that's the terrible, that's the wielder of the terrible swift sword.
God, that's for sure.
That's a terrifying figure.
And that Christ in the figure of Revelation is a terrifying figure.
I've not got to that yet.
Oh man, spoiler alert.
Don't freak me out.
We may go, because we've got to go to dinner around someone's house.
We do.
Exactly.
Thanks, Jordan.
That was a pretty amazing conversation.
Thank you, sir.
It's always great fun chatting with you.
Well, how I know it's a good conversation is I stopped thinking about it.
I didn't think of it as being a thing.
And there were a couple of times before.
I hope this is fucking being recorded.
We captured it all, right?
We got all that.
It's in the can.
We didn't lose it.
We didn't delete it.
That was good.
And I reckon...
Oh, thanks, man.
Thanks, JP. My pleasure, man.
My pleasure.
Well, thanks very much for joining me for this conversation with Jordan Peterson.
Remember, we will be back Monday, streaming live another fantastic show from the wild set of vortices, I've got to learn that word, vortices, that is the United States of America in this weird pre-election ongoing hurricane.
Let me know in the comments and chat what you thought about this chat with JP, and I'll see you on Monday, usual time, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
Until then, if you can, stay free.
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