What Happens When a Civilization Forgets Its Stories? — Jonathan Pageau - SF668
⏰ BE HERE AT 12PM PT / 3PM EST / 8PM GMT ⏰Show more I sit down with Jonathan Pageau for a wide-ranging conversation about symbolism, faith, culture, and what happens when the shared stories that once held society together begin to collapse. We explore fairy tales, Christianity, beauty, authority, identity, and why meaning can’t survive without sacrifice, humility, and a coherent spiritual centre. It’s a deep, searching dialogue about navigating chaos, resisting hollow ideology, and rediscovering truth through symbol, tradition, and lived faith.
If you want to go deeper into Jonathan’s work, you can explore his latest illustrated books:
The Tale of Snow White and the Widow Queen
https://bit.ly/PageauSnowWhite
The Tale of Jack and the Fallen Giants
https://bit.ly/PageauJack
The Tale of Rapunzel and the Evil Witch
https://bit.ly/PageauRapunzel
Jonathan Pageau’s website
https://www.pageau.com
Jonathan Pageau on X/Twitter
https://twitter.com/PageauJonathan
ENTER THE REBORN GIVEAWAY — I’ve partnered with Reborn for a massive giveaway where you can win a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 392 plus $10,000 cash. I actually use several of their products myself — the Methylene Blue Tincture, Methylene Blue Capsules, Bovine Colostrum, and Creatine Powder — and all of those count as bonus-entry items if you grab them through the giveaway page.
Enter here: https://tryreborn.com/pages/current-giveaway Show less
Ladies and gentlemen, Russell Franz Russell trying to bring real journalism to the American people.
Jonathan, I've got a lot of things to ask you.
Can I start?
Yeah, whenever you want.
Thanks for sending us those.
Thanks for sending us those books.
Can you frame them for our audience so that the audience knows what I'm talking about when I say thanks for those books?
Yeah.
Snow White, Rapunzel.
Oh, they're beautiful looking, by the way.
Jack and the Beanstalk, isn't it?
That you did?
Jack.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're so good.
It's beautiful.
We read me.
I've got a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old and a two-year-old.
That's pretty.
Yeah.
We read it to Mabe's, my daughters.
I read it to my daughters and we took in turns to read it.
We read, we started a Rapunzel.
We did Snow White.
We haven't done Jack and the Beanstalk yet.
Jack and the Beanstalk, I now tell the story.
When we last spoke, Jonathan, I said to you, oh, it seems to me there's less folk tales for men than women.
And I sort of proselytized on why I thought that would be.
And then you listed a few and I said, but I don't understand Jack and the Beanstalk.
And gosh, I've just come off a podcast, Jonathan, where I've just publicly claimed on record, I go, I don't think I ever talk to anyone and think that they're cleverer than me.
I said, like, sometimes I talk to people and they know stuff I don't know.
Of course, that happens every second of every day.
But like the faculty, and I used like Jordan as the example, like I don't often, I'm not often listening and thinking, I don't understand this unless they're talking about maths or astrophysics or something like that.
And now God has put me in front of you because like when we spoke and I said, Jack and the Beanstalk, I don't understand that.
And you said, you said to me, he has to exchange the milk for the seed.
And I was like, oh, man, that's so cool.
And since then, I've been telling, I've been telling when I have to mentor or advise or chat to young men, I tell them that story.
And I don't give you any credit.
I say that I've worked that out on my own.
It's the story itself.
It's in the story.
So if I found it there, it's because it's there, you know?
So you don't owe me anything.
Thank you.
So what, like, you, what is your, with these, in particular, these brilliant and beautiful books, the illustrations are incredible.
Your storytelling is fantastic.
I was very surprised that you created one sort of meta narrative where the three stories are interconnected.
I thought that was interesting.
I wonder what challenges that presented and why did you embark on this project as a whole.
Give us a sort of a general overview.
Yeah, I think, I mean, the biggest thing is that it felt like Disney was dropping the fairy tales.
It didn't want them actually.
And so in the last few live versions they've made, they've been very cynical.
And then the Snow White version they made was horrible because they don't know what to do.
They don't like the fairy tales.
They don't know how to handle them.
And so I thought this is a sign for us that those of us that actually love these stories, that care for them and they care for our heritage, you know, it's time to pick them up and to tell beautiful, celebratory, smart versions of the tales.
Not cynical, not trying to make them into some kind of political commentary, but rather just kind of tell them in a celebratory way.
Yeah.
That was the plan.
That's very good.
And I think you've executed that plan.
They're beautiful.
And I'd recommend them to anyone.
I love the copies that you've sent me.
And normally when I interview people, I haven't looked at the thing that I'm meant to be promoting, you know, like sometimes quite complex things like films that are about COVID or, you know, great tracts about geopolitics.
And I have to sort of go, yeah, yeah, I get the idea.
But this, I've actually read it and engaged with the material.
And it's really, really beautiful.
And I can't recommend it heartily enough.
And there's a link in the description and a QR code if you want to get Jonathan's books, these sort of beautiful triptych, this trilogy of excellent retold fairy tales, then you can get them here by clicking on that link.
Hey, Jonathan.
And one of the things I want to say, one of the things, I want to say one thing is that one of the problems we have too is that a lot of the people that are complaining about culture that are complaining about the state of culture, that's where they stop.
They just complain and then they don't do anything.
And so I've been complaining for a few years about the state of culture, but there's something nagging in the back of my mind saying, well, Jonathan, if you don't like the state of culture, what are you going to do about it?
And so that's why we started the Symbolic World Press and we started telling these fairy tales, but we're going to take it into a larger direction where we're going to try to retell all of the great tales of our heritage, you know, from the Greek myths all the way to King Arthur and try to tell them in a beautiful, celebratory way that's also relevant to modern days.
So what a brilliant project.
Also, all the IP is free, so it's viable financially.
That's fantastic.
Now, a minute ago, in your first answer, you said that Disney is not retelling folk tales well.
I think I know why that is, but will you tell me why that is?
Well, I think one of the things that happened, of course, in Disney is that it got taken over by, I guess, what you could call the woke mind virus.
It wanted to, it started with a kind of feminism trope where they wanted, they didn't like the idea of the princess that meets her prince.
They wanted to liberate her.
It started with, I think, with Rapunzel, actually, where this whole story is about her own self-development and the guy is just a detail in the story.
And then it just kept getting worse and worse as they moved down the progressive line to a point where the images in the fairy tales didn't make sense to what they wanted to make anymore.
So by the time they got to Snow White, that's why it took like, I think, three, four years to make Snow White is because the first version they made was so political and they realized that no one is going to want this because it's Disney, Disney is, you know, that's that story, particularly Snow White, it was the first full-length animation.
It was a massive moment in culture when Disney made that movie.
And they were basically dragging it through the mud by making it into a kind of postmodern commentary.
And so I think that's what it is.
And now the problem they have is that they realize that they realize that they're in trouble.
Nobody wants to see their movies anymore.
Nobody cares.
But it's hard to get rid of people.
Once the company itself is made of people that think in a certain way, I don't know.
I don't think they can recover from this.
No, nor do I.
Yeah, in a sense, they've been stymied by their own peculiar and sort of spiraling gen agenda there.
I was just thinking, though, how do we align these peculiar parcels, Jonathan?
Like that, you know, initially, Disney takes a cultural artifact like a Grimm or a Hans Christian Anderson fairy story that's redolent with relevant imagery and ideas precisely because it's somehow presumably accessing deep archetypal truths.
Then Disney in its earlier incarnation is somehow able to, in a sense, amplify or at least reiterate those principles through the medium of animation.
A hundred years later, Disney is not even able to stay true.
Isn't it amazing how fast our culture moves?
It isn't even able to stay true to its own interpretation of source material.
Like I noticed it a bit.
I watched like the live action Pinocchio and I see it seemed like they weren't comfortable with lying or something like that or consequence.
So I was like, this is fucking pointless.
What are they even talking about now at this point?
And it's a shame because, you know, there's a darkness in human beings.
And there's four, there's a darkness in fairy stories and folk stories because there's a darkness that has to be addressed.
And if you'd sort of deny that darkness, I wonder what happens to a culture.
But now I've like this is my set of questions, having made that point.
See something like Snow White, right?
That's a folk cultural object, should we call it?
And likely pagan.
It's a sort of a pagan object.
How do we as Christians, Jonathan, align pagan cultural artifacts with Christian interpretations in a culture that's in a sense a neo-modern progressive paganism?
And one would think that the original paganism of some of the source material, taking paganism to mean the worship of entities and essences found within nature, both inverted commas, external and internal.
How do we as Christians, and how did you as a Christian, given you've been doing it, how did you manage that?
How do you make sure that Christ and the truth of Christ is present in these pagan artifacts as well as tackling the political sort of vicissitudes of political thought?
Yeah.
Well, there are a few things to your question.
I would say the first thing is that I don't think that that's, I don't think it's true.
I think that the idea that these are pagan stories, I think is something that was made up by 19th century anti-Christian thinkers that tried to do that for everything.
They told us that Christmas is pagan, Easter is pagan, pretty much everything that's Christian is pagan.
I think it's just bullshit.
I think it's just bullshit.
I think that these stories, although they clearly take sources in pre-Christian stories, like they're a development, they're a continuation of pre-Christian stories.
But by the time that they're transcribed, they have a very, very deep Christian structure, right?
They've been transformed, you could say, from these ancient, ancient Greek myths, and they've been in some ways fiddled with, they've been retold, they've been remembered in a manner that in fact has a deep Christian root to it.
And so when I told Snow White, for example, I tried to pull the threads of the story that would make you see that this is a Christian story.
I mean, the story of Snow White is a story about resurrection.
It's a story, you know, it's like it's a song of songs.
It's about a bride that finds her lover.
If you watch the early Disney version, you can see that when the prince kisses her and wakes her up, he actually takes her to heaven.
Like he takes her to a castle in the sky.
And so Disney knew very well that this was a resurrection story, that it was a very deep Christian story.
And so, but I can, if I can back up a little bit and say, how is it that Christians deal with these?
You know, early Christians and the kind of late classical Christians, they had no problems with the Greek myths in the sense that they, you know, St. Basil said that you had to read the Iliad and the Odyssey before you read the Bible because you had to be a cultured person to be able to have a kind of story track in your mind.
You had to have these stories kind of ingrained into your thinking so that when you read the Bible, you could understand the stories there.
It's the same with the supposedly northern myths.
You know, everybody talks about Thor and Odin and how these pagan myths, but you know who wrote those stories down?
It was Christians.
Christians are the ones who actually wrote down the Greek myths.
They were written when the people in Iceland converted to Christianity.
And so there's a very deep misunderstanding about this in the Christian stories.
C.S. Lewis talked about how, in fact, Christ is the true myth.
And so in all the pagan stories, there's a hint, there's like a little glimmer, there's something of Christ in those stories.
And it's our job in some ways to be able to make that little something shine and to help point it in a direction that is positive.
So that's what I think about that.
Thanks.
Because I suppose to truly be Christian, you accept his atemporal and a spatial nature, meaning that even pre-incarnate, his presence will be felt in story and myth and culture universally.
I mean, I wonder sometimes, as someone that's read a little of the Maharabha and some of the Vedas, that when encountering aspects of, say, well, specifically the aspect of Krishna, Krishna is very Christ-like, a very Christ-like deity.
I mean, he sounds like Christ, and there's a child, Krishna, and he's kind of a playful kid.
And, you know, I don't know that it has the sort of key and necessary tropes, but I'm not making the claim that it's absolute.
But are you saying, are you in a sense, and did C.S. Lewis to some degree do this too, collapsing the separate category of paganism?
Because to accept it as a separate category would be to deny the universal nature and ubiquitous presence of Christ.
I think that's the right way to see it.
But I mean, we can be cautious.
So you can imagine in the early Christian fathers, there's two strains.
You know, is Justin Martyr and Tertullian as the kind of two extremes?
So you have Tertullian saying, you know, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?
All of this pagan stuff.
We have to get rid of it.
We have to kind of cut it out.
And then you have people like Justin Martyr who said, all truth is God's truth.
All place where you find the truth of the Logos in the past is God's.
And he said that the ancient philosophers were Christians before Christ.
And this is in the second, like early third century.
Okay.
So this is very, very early.
So I think that that's the way to think about it is that, yes, sometimes there's some things in the pagan stories, obviously, that we can't stomach and that we kind of have to weed out.
But the things that point to that which is true, sometimes even in the negative, even sometimes there are things that are kind of a counterpoint that you can understand as an image of evil or an image of excess, that those things can be, I think that those things can definitely not only be preserved, but they can be part of the story.
You know, we just finished reading Dante's Divine Comedy, which is in some ways the great synthesis of medieval thinking, of the great synthesis of medieval Christianity.
And the pagan references are everywhere in Dante's Divine Comedy.
All the way up to heaven, he will reference these kind of pagan images as a deep cultural baggage that he can use to talk about the Christian mystery that he's encountering.
And so I don't see a problem with that at all.
You find, you almost describe them as notes in the symphony and melodies that to do without would be, would create a kind of deprivation.
So if there is these kind of symbolic truths that somehow, if not lose their luster, become less articulate when transferred into language, do you believe, helping me with my new journey into scripture, Jonathan, that there are points where in, like, say, at the moment, I've been spending some time in like Daniel and Ezekiel and I'm reading Revelation.
And we are clearly in a terrain where building the sort of narrow bandwidth of language, whether you're talking about, you know, obviously I only speak English.
Let me declare that right up front.
Whether it was in Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic or King James Version or New International Version, the primary translation you're dealing with is from the mind of God to the mind of man.
So when I'm encountering whether it's burning bushes or apples or lampstands or the potter and the clay, and actually, Jonathan, I'm having an empirical experience of this.
I was meditating under instruction on the light, on the coming of the light, that I am the coming of the light, and that we are not separate.
We're not separate from the light.
And somewhere in the midst of this experience, the Isaiah, I think it's in Isaiah, but I think it's in Psalms also somewhere.
And I think Paul references it, of the clay, I feel like I felt the prima materia of me that is not language, that is, that is expressed in language, but not language, being changed and molded.
I feel like I felt it, Jonathan.
So to read, whether it's folk tales or the Iliad or the Odyssey or Norse myth or whatever, are we saying that the point of it is to allow it to lure you into a pre-verbal state?
Okay, there's a lot in what you said there.
You could say for sure there is this sense definitely that all that which is communicated, that is all the revelations and then everything that's downstream from the revelation is pointing to something which is beyond.
And so if you think of the hierarchy of the tabernacle, you get a sense of that, which is in the deep center, right?
In the center of centers, there is a place that is inaccessible to anyone except for one person.
And that person, you know, is in great danger going there if they're not completely pure from all their sins.
And so this is where the glory of God appears and the glory of God is beyond, like you said, all of expression, all of word, all of language.
And then it unfolds within the world through images and then through structures and then through laws and et cetera, et cetera.
And so in Orthodox theology, we have this idea of what we call apophatic theology and cataphatic theology.
And therefore, this idea that God is always beyond, like what you're saying, that there is the true reality of God is beyond all expression, all word, you know, even being itself.
God is beyond that.
And then we have what we call cataphatic theology is also understanding that all things are in some ways expressions of God.
You know, all things that are good are expressions of God because he is the source of all things.
And therefore, we have to always find a balance between those two.
If we're not careful and we focus too much on the apophatic sense, we become Gnostic.
We start to have, we believe that the world is Maya.
We believe that the world is illusion.
We believe that all the things in the world are evil in themselves.
And that is definitely, that's an error, at least from a Christian point of view, because God is a God of love.
But if we focus too much on the external parts, then we become idolaters.
We start to confuse the expressions for that which is being expressed.
And so there's always a kind of sway between those two.
There's a play between both understanding how God is beyond all things and that God is present in all things and being careful of not going into only one direction.
Is that the sort of transcendent and imminent argument in some way recounted?
Is that comparable or similar?
Yeah, those two are not opposed.
That's important.
Like the idea that transcendence and imminence are not opposed, but that in fact one is the cause of the other.
It's because God is transcendent that he is fully imminent in all things because he is the source and the origin and the kind of transcendent source of all that exists.
Yes.
There's something in the idea that at some point a vibration collapses into matter.
through pattern and symbol.
It's very difficult, isn't it, to try to physically track what we're talking about when we say that vibrations appear to create mandala and symbol.
And at some point, these detectable mandala and symbol undergird more discernible and detectable reality.
And at some point, must transform, become flesh is a very difficult thing to understand.
And what I want to sort of say as well, as I'm sort of as I touch the hem of esotericism as best as I can, at least, is that while I'm in all this, Jonathan, I feel myself like it's close to not, I don't want to say madness, but a kind of, how does, how do we keep our feet on the ground?
How do we remain rooted?
How do we remain, how do we remain earthed?
How do you earth yourself?
How do you do it?
Well, I mean, you have to go to church.
That's how you do it.
In the sense that you have to be part of a body and you also have to acknowledge some kind of authority.
And of course, we understand that these relationships, like let's say the body, the participation, the going to church, the liturgy, and also the structure of authority is not everything.
It can become corrupt.
It can become, but it's necessary in some ways to keep you grounded and to avoid what the church fathers or the ascetic fathers call prayless, which is spiritual delusion.
Because that's the problem if you're alone and you're just kind of having these spiritual experiences and you have nothing against which to test it.
You have no one to help you discern and to help you know how to live it.
You have nobody that you're knocking your elbows against that have, you know, that are annoying you at church and that are being, you know, all these things that happen in the community.
Those things are there to help you ground you so that you don't start to have spiritual delusions.
Yeah, you don't go crazy.
Yeah, that happens to me.
Okay, so there's a few things.
Yeah, because, but I wonder, you know, like, I wonder what it was like for Elijah.
You know, I wonder what it was like.
Now, like, are we then to assume that like that actually, well, given, let me try and sketch out.
You know me well enough to know there's not going to be any sort of actual questions, just sort of a great deluge of sound that I want you to make a tune from.
And here's the next set of sound.
You're looking at Jung's red book and seeing those peculiar geometric shapes.
And I know that he says it's, you know, Siegfried and stuff.
Like, but what's all that early egg geometry and all them reptile drawings in there?
What is all that?
And this weird concerto of matter that seems like someone trying to track and trace vibration becoming form and the interstitial material between it, vibration and form.
How does that connect to something that seems so boldly literal, like Elijah seeing and hearing and actually being able to take it to the test and burn up altars and stuff like that?
Do you feel, Jonathan, that in this age, we're gonna, it's not gonna be enough to be getting some sort of geometric clandestine insight in the way that Jung did.
Aren't we gonna need like Elijah to start blowing shit up?
I mean, I think that we definitely need holy people, that's for sure.
And we need we need holy people.
And a lot of holy people are they can become very harsh.
You know, there are, there's a, you might not know about him, but there's a monk, an Archimandrite who passed away recently, Elder Ephraim.
And he started, you know, dozens of monasteries all across North America, came from Mount Athos.
And his monasteries are known for being quite harsh.
And a lot of people kind of fear his monasteries because they're quite demanding of the monks there.
And in some ways, he's establishing that harshness as a root, you know, a kind of living in the desert and living out the more difficult aspect of Christianity.
But then those monasteries have been quite fruitful.
We have one that's close to my house, maybe about 45 minutes.
And it's actually a wonderful place where you can feel the fruits in the community.
You can feel the transformative effect of that holiness on the people.
And so I do think that we need kind of Elijah type characters.
We need Elijah type figures.
But you have to remember that Elijah, although it feels to us like he's alone in the story, it says that he saved the prophets, you know, that he hid them in a cave and he wasn't alone.
He was actually in a kind of, we don't know the structure exactly, but the structure of prophetic brothers that probably lived somewhat like monks at the time.
And so I think that we still have that.
You know, I met the abbot of a monastery in Mount Athos just a few years ago.
And when I saw him, he was glowing, you know?
I mean, he wasn't like, I mean, it's hard to explain because obviously he wasn't glowing like if you had taken some kind of measuring tool that you had seen if there was, but there's no other word I can use besides that he was glowing because his presence was so arresting and his and his eyes were so piercing that it reduced everyone in the room to absolute silence.
And I was there with like two billionaires and Jordan Peterson and all these like very, very high level people.
And everyone was reduced to absolute silence and everybody became teary-eyed.
And if you and if it's weird because if you had, if you had like a transcription of what was said, you know, what the monk said, you would say, well, this is just, you know, it's just saying what Jesus said.
He's not saying anything that sounds so intellectual and extremely, but it was really just his presence and him saying the words of Christ and saying simple words of encouragement with so much presence that made you feel like, yeah, you were standing in front of someone like Elijah, you know.
Do you want to support me?
No, I don't.
Yes, you do.
Support me and support Rumble Premium.
You won't only be supporting me.
You'll get additional access to Monk Club, that's Crowder's Geek, Tim Cast, that's Tim Paul's racket, and Glenn Greenwald's additional content.
Join us on Rumble Premium.
We make content every single week through Rumble because Rumble supports free speech.
When I was under attack from the British government and the British media, Rumble stood firm.
Yes, of course, there's crazy people on Rumble.
There's crazy people everywhere.
There's a crazy person living under this hat.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have the right to speak freely together.
By supporting Rumble Premium, you're supporting me and content creators like me.
You get additional content.
And what I will say even more, drink down deep on the delicious irony in this one.
You get an ad-free experience.
If you want an ad-free experience of Rumble, get Rumble Premium.
In the meantime, stay free.
Presence.
Presence is the word, I suppose, that presumably, I suppose, in that instance, one might try to understand that he must have undertaken so many practices and disciplines that by the time you had that encounter, there's yeah, more Christ than, you know, less of the man and more of the Lord.
And yeah, okay, I'm trying to think of my own encounters with that.
Say when I think of someone like Amma, the hugging saint, when I met her, very earthly, very warm.
She has like a 10,000 person ashram.
And I can tell she's, you know, as best as I could tell, she's living like a saint.
She's not going around the back and having sex or something.
You know, there's not some secondary motive.
And another person, Krishna consciousness man, I met Radhanath Swami, who I became friends with actually and spent times with.
The first time I encountered him, Jonathan, I like, I sort of got very elevated and enervated.
I was young and I was only just off drugs, huh?
And like, and I remember I goes, oh, so what?
This isn't the final level of reality.
You know, it's just like a video game and there are other levels of reality.
And I started talking real quick and stuff and he just laughed and held my face and I sort of then I nearly cried and I felt embarrassed, like as if I was attracted to someone like I would be sexually.
It wasn't sexual, but it was a level of attraction, you know.
And then, so like, and that His Holiness the Dalai Lama, when I met him, because he was such a sort of sanctioned figure of holiness, I was trying to think, right, Russell, objectively, come on, is this holy what you're encountering, or is this because you've been told in advance it's the Dalai Lama?
And man, I tell you, Jonathan, I was so fascinated by the amount of paraphernalia, you know, the followers, the literal carpet being laid down, like shit like that.
You know, so it's interesting because almost part of the deal with Christianity is you, one has to sort of enter into what one might regard as a sect like, you know, even Eastern Orthodoxy for its scale and then sort of monasteries within that.
And then an individual, like you said, with the tabernacle, the holiest of holies, you know, you have to, it seems like to encounter it somewhat pure, you one has to undertake that kind of journey.
And what I feel like, you know, my mission, ministry, some sort of felt pressure internally, externally, I don't know anymore.
Like where you've gone, I'm going to contribute to the culture by do it.
Look, you know, I can do this.
I'm going to do it.
Mine, it feels so like fast and karming and so radical, Jonathan.
This has all happened from, you know, like in such a succession of harsh, real incidents that felt like I've been dragged out of one life and just thrown into another one like that.
Like I was going one direction and God went, you're going that way.
And, you know, and I'm just acclimatizing to it and trying not to impose my hubristic, egotistical, selfish rustleness all over it again.
Because, you know, I've always known grace.
I've always known glory.
I've always known light.
And at various times, I've transformed that into, why don't I have sex with loads of women?
Or why don't I become famous?
And now it's, I feel it coming again.
You know, the grail comes a second time.
I feel it.
And I'm afraid.
You know, I'm afraid.
I'm afraid.
I know that it could be unto death.
I know all of these things.
I know about my grandiosity.
And I'm trying to marshal it all.
And I don't know what to do is the truth.
Well, you should, you should let me take you to take you to Mount Athos and meet some holy men, you know.
Maybe you need someone to like to maybe kick you around a little bit.
That could be helpful.
Yeah.
Okay.
Monathos.
Where is that?
And what happens?
It's in Greece, Mount Athos.
Yeah.
It's one of the most, it's an island of around in all maybe like 60 monasteries.
There are official ones, but like 60 monasteries.
I mean, there used to be 10,000 monks there.
Now there's about 1,000.
And now there's no women are allowed.
It's only men.
And it's a kind of, only a few people are allowed to go a day.
It's very restricted, but it's actually a magical place.
It's one of the few places that it's a very thin place, you know, to use those terms.
It's quite a magical place.
Okay.
You should look it up.
Mount Athos.
Yeah.
Do you know Paul Kingsnorth then, Jonathan?
Do you know him?
Yeah, of course I know Paul.
Yeah, I know him well.
He's down that row with you.
Have you talked to Paul?
Have you had a chance to talk to Paul?
Yeah, a couple of times.
Yeah.
He's interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's had a similar experience.
I mean, he wasn't the same kind of person as you, but he's had a similar experience as you had, a kind of being just pulled out of his life and thrown into the life of Christ in a way that he didn't, that he could never have predicted, you know?
What I feel like my offering is, and I don't know, because, you know, who knows, but I feel like when what surprised me most is that I thought I knew what was in the Bible and I thought that it wouldn't be robust enough to cope with my, I don't know, anti-authoritarianism, my poeticism, my psychedelia, my mysticism, you know, all of these things.
And then I get deeper and deeper into the word and I become more, it's transforming me.
I'm being transformed by the word and by the experience and by Christ.
And I can't believe how it's sort of like the, I feel some protein thing within me being reformed around it.
But of course I feel the additional tension of my flesh, of my humanness.
You know that bit you alluded to in Elijah when like God or Yahweh or whatever, excuse me, Yahweh says like, yeah, there's 70 others.
I remember now I'm like, how dare you?
That's my response to that.
Like I really want an important part in the merging of the kingdoms.
So I still have that, man.
I still have that.
I still have that self-ness that I'm trying to shirk off.
And maybe that does require, in the same way that I'm looking for it in martial arts, you know, like I get sort of beat up and stuff.
Like maybe I need that kind of that monastic encounter.
I don't know what it will do to me.
I don't know what that would do to me.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's also, clearly you're someone who wrestles with authority.
But it would be, maybe it would be good for you to have just like one person that you're accountable to.
You know, it's hard, but I think it's useful.
You know, I think it's useful.
Someone who gets to know you, someone who you can trust, but then you, that, that can, that you also are willing to, to in some way submit your will to their wisdom, you know.
How do you do that, if I may ask?
I mean, I have my confessor, you know, my confessor in some ways is someone that I trust very much.
And he guides me and he gives me advice.
And, you know, I take his advice very seriously.
You know, and if he tells me to do something, I try very hard to do it.
You know, so it's a good way to have an external person that is some kind of that you're accountable to.
What's your practice?
In terms of what?
In terms of confession?
When you get up every day?
I try to do my, we have, I have morning prayers, you know, the I try to do my morning prayers, and then I mostly do the Jesus prayer on and off during the day.
You do you know about the, I mean, I'm sure you know about the Jesus Prayer, right?
It's a, it's like the basic spiritual practice of the Orthodox Church.
And so it's a very simple prayer.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
And usually it's, it's done with just a kind of breathing, or you breathe in the first part of the prayer and you breathe out the second part of the prayer and you kind of try to still your thoughts and to not, you know, to get rid of the all of the noise.
You know, and so it's a good way to resist temptation, but it's also kind of a good, good, just a good practice to have during the day.
You know, and a lot of Orthodox Christians practice that.
And then obviously I go to church.
I try, you know, I travel a lot.
It's difficult, but I try to at least go to liturgy once a week and then for feast, maybe if I can.
Those are my practices.
Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
How do you align those words in English with the idea that Christ may be hosted within the field of your individual consciousness?
Well, the idea is that in some ways Christ is, of course, Christ is in you, that Christ is your center, you know.
And so, but there's also this sense that you're always falling short of that, you know, in your individuality, you could say.
Sometimes we differentiate the idea of person and individual, that is, as a person, as a full kind of embodiment of a human in the center of you because of Christ's incarnation.
You could say that Christ is in you, he's in your heart.
You know, that's a nice kind of even Protestant way of saying it.
But that with all the distractions and everything else.
And so, in the invocation, if you think of the prayer, there's two parts, right?
There's an invocation.
Say, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God.
So you're kind of invoking Christ into your heart, although He's already there, but you're kind of, let's say, entering into your heart.
That's how the fathers talk about it.
You have to enter into your own heart, and there you will find Christ.
And then, in some ways, you ask Him to compensate for your insufficiencies.
You say, Have mercy on me, a sinner, because I know that I'm not always in my heart.
I know that I'm not always in that center.
I'm not always in that place where I'm fully myself and fully united with God, but I'm distracted, I sin, I'm prideful, all of these things.
And so, I think that that's the best way.
Does that help answer your question?
Yes, yes, it does.
I wonder how we are to for you, like you've chosen or been chosen for the path of Eastern Orthodoxy.
And I understand as best, you know, peripherally and superficially, I suppose, what you're saying, the advantages of that.
And as a person that lives in the Florida panhandle, and I attend a kind of a, what I feel like the jargon, the language to describe it is an Acts 29 church.
That's the vernacular, an Acts 29 church, you know, and it's kind of, it seems like much of the focus is ethical and moral.
And even in this relatively small and not super populated area that I'm in, there's churches everywhere.
Like up one road, there's like a vision church, which, as best I can tell, they're more into the flags and the speaking in tongues.
Then there's like a destiny church, which has a like that's really gotten it down with the music.
And, you know, the one I go to is in what I think they call a set up, tear down church, Redeemer, where they're, again, that, but you see this thing you mentioned about authority.
I can see how what I might regard as the sort of institutional paraphernalia, the outfits, the candelabras, the sigils of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy might lend themselves to sort of submission.
And isn't that the nature of apostolic authority and of these symbols and the paraphernalia?
Is it sort of like, does it, is it about authority?
And is it about submission, submission of the culture and submission of the individual?
I mean, yeah, there's a way of seeing it that way.
In some ways, there are two ways of understanding the outward aspects of the church.
Let's say the way that the way that the priest dress, let's say the music, the architecture, the icons, all of that.
In some ways, you could say it is a manner in which we submit to God, obviously.
But we can also understand it also as a way that it's a celebration.
It's actually the way that creation can celebrate, can worship, can, you know, resonate in, if I use a language that you would understand, in God's will.
And so it's like God's will has a, looks like something in the world.
God's will has a shape.
And therefore, when we kind of shape the world like that, then we're celebrating God's presence and we're participating in God's presence in the world.
But in terms of the actual hierarchy, let's say the hierarchy of bishops and of priests, of course, there's an aspect of that which has to do with authority.
But the church also has saints, you know, and saints are more like they're more like the prophetic, you could say, in the sense that they, because the hierarchy is always corrupt, you know, the hierarchy, the priests and bishops.
I mean, there are wonderful priests and bishops, but there will always be corrupt bishops.
There will always be bishops who make decisions for the wrong reasons.
And that's from the beginning.
We know that we have all the stories of all the corrupt bishops from the beginning.
But then you also have then ascetics and saints that come and shake things up, you know, and usually get abused by the church somehow and ultimately get vindicated.
So there's a way in which these things end up balancing themselves out.
So there's, yes, of course, you have to have to submit to authority and participate in that, but there's always other things around that are there.
You know, we even have the tradition of holy fools in, you know, especially in the Russian church, where you actually have characters that act completely out of line, that they do all kinds of wild things in the church in order to break the sense that this is just an institution with just a kind of simple, simple submission, you know?
And so we have all kinds of things to balance things out.
Because if it can't incorporate chaos, how can the institution endure?
What about when St. Francis says, if like in response to his father's condemnation in court, as I understand, this is based on Chesterton's writing about St. Francis.
If I am to be a fool, I'll be the fool in the court of King Jesus Christ.
I like that.
I like that, of course, for obvious reasons, I suppose.
But also, also, anytime that we pick an institution or a lineage or a livery, it's, of course, many doors closed.
Hopefully it's the doors that he wants closed that are closed and the doors that he won't open open, as David says.
But I do, as I've said to some of my friends that are Catholic, like, do you think then when Christ returns in the cloud and the light and the bronze boots and the, you know, however we're to understand these images, is it going to be like, okay, who's Catholic?
Or, okay, who's Eastern Orthodox?
Everyone else, fuck.
Like, you know, that's collapsing.
You know, so do what do you, how do you, how do we reconcile the improbability of that outcome with a personal decision to belong to one particular discipline, Jonathan?
Yeah, I mean, the way that I see it is I tend to see it rather in the positive, you know, which is that if you ask me what is the tradition, what is the church that is the fullest, that has the fullest of the revelation of Christ, that has the most sure way towards, you know, theosis and union with God, I would say that that's the Orthodox Church.
And that's why I am Orthodox.
And that's also why I would tell people to become Orthodox.
As for the others, it's just not my, it's not my prerogative.
Like, I'm concerned with my salvation and I'm concerned with, you know, living that out as best as possible.
And so that's all I can really speak for.
The rest, you know, how God's mercy functions and how these divisions in the body of Christ, what they mean and what fruits they're going to yield.
In some ways, I kind of leave that up to silence, you could say.
Yeah, that makes sense.
What do we, I've got two areas that are on my mind.
One is our mutual friend, Jordan Peterson, and my prayers for him and his wellness.
And I don't know even if this is the right sort of thing to talk about in this context, really.
And then the other thing I'm thinking about is recurrent, again, recurrent images and how one might be spoken to and through from and through image.
And, you know, like the appleness of an apple, the burning bushness of a burning bush, what we're to do with this language of symbol and whether that, once you've made the choice, of course, no, yeah, once you've made the choice that you're Eastern Orthodox and that you're concerned with your own salvation, then why have a venture about folk tales?
You know, because I'm having these conversations with the people around me.
I'll tell you, I'll give you as much background as I can and as quickly as I can.
We watched this movie on Netflix that's called Jay Kelly, in which George Clooney plays an actor very much like himself, experiencing a crisis of confidence and meaning towards the end of his career.
And it's very difficult not to sort of watch the film, which is brilliantly made by Noah Baumburg, who's an excellent filmmaker.
He's got a great cast, Adam Sandler, like brilliant actors and stuff.
What's weird, though, when you watch the film is you think, well, this is a film about the kind of hopeless meaninglessness of being inside an institution like Hollywood, and in this instance, specifically Hollywood.
And yet there is the possibility of real friendship within it and things that are real.
And yet the artifact and object itself is a film.
That's what you've ended up with, is a film.
Now, any story, one of the things I've sort of felt like I've understood about Christ is the, and, you know, which I guess is merely an extemporization on C.S. Lewis's observation that the maker of meaning, the reason that there is meaning, appears to instantiate and incarnate meaning.
And he tells stories during his mission and ministry that further illustrate meaning.
And then his story is all about meaning, whether it's the vulnerability and innocence of the child Christ or the crucifixion of the Antichrist.
Anyway, so how do I, and of course the resurrection, an ascension, like, how do I, though, as me, old Russ in the world, reconcile these like these sort of concussive and successive and endless sort of tidal revelations with, right, now I'm going to sell reborn supplements or now I'm going to, you know, do my job.
How are you doing it?
So I would say that I find great joy every time I see, let's say, the light of the Logos refracted in anything.
You know, every time I see the light of God reflected in anything, I find great joy, whether it is the way in which, you know, we can find joy in our own stories, you know, our own heritage, whether it is in our own family, in our own friendships, in our relationships.
That's when I find joy.
You know, it's like every time I encounter someone who has become a Christian, I rejoice no matter what, even if I think that Orthodoxy is better than their version of Christianity, I still rejoice.
Every time someone finds meaning, someone who is an alcoholic, who finds sobriety in some kind of submission to a higher reality, I rejoice because every place where I see, you know, the light of truth refracted, I find joy.
And so I would say that's how I live my life.
And that's what motivates all the things that I do.
You know, of course, I'm particularly concerned with beauty.
I believe that in some ways, beauty is a way in for many people, you know, through the fairy tales or through the icons or, you know, all kinds of ways.
And that's a way in which a film can play that role because a film can be an object of beauty, not in the saccharin way, but in, you know, but it can be even harsh beauty, but it can elevate certain aspects of the world and help us see them properly.
You know, and if you have to, if in order to make a living, you have to, let's say, sell things or you have to advertise for things, you know, I would say to just choose them properly, you know, to not be a hypocrite and to pick the things that you believe in and things that you think are powerful.
Like if you're, if you're, I don't know, if you're selling beef tallow, you have to, you have to think that beef tallow is a good thing.
You know, don't, don't, don't try to sell things that you think are, that, that you're cynical about, you know, and I think that would prevent kind of schizophrenic, you know, a kind of breakdown of your psyche.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Stay away from the hypocrisy and the lying.
These are pretty rudimentary.
They're pretty basic, pretty simple thing, you know?
Yeah, they are quite simple principles.
And yeah, I'm doing my best with that.
It's just there's such a lot of stimulus.
Hey, what do you think about okay?
So, yeah, because I guess what that was with that film to unpack it a little bit is, you know, I've been an actor and I've had an entourage and I've had lots and lots of attention.
And it's a world that I've ultimately been, it felt like in some ways, expelled from or exiled from or left in a, you know, and I, and what is interesting for me, particularly since being charged with rape and knowing like I'm standing trial in June, knowing that I, through my objectification and selfishness, have obviously hurt people.
Obviously, I've hurt women with my conduct, but very faithfully believing I've never done anything that was non-consensual, never needed to, never wanted to, don't feel like it's even in the flow of what I'm about or what I do.
But plainly, here I am in this situation.
I must have done something and God must want it to be happening because here it is happening.
And already I can read the obvious benefits of the situation.
You know, I feel differently in my marriage now.
I feel different as a father.
I've been really refined by it.
I've been refined.
It's been a furnace.
It's burned away a lot of dross.
It's burned away a lot of dross.
But I'm a very, I guess I have in me a certain amount of, I don't know, will or robustness or something, determination.
I don't know.
It's both a positive and negative attribute in some ways.
So when I look at things that glorify celebrity, I feel a kind of anger towards it.
I also do think that the world is not, what do you do with the scriptural assertion throughout the New Testament that the world is in the thrall of the evil one?
It is the devil that runs the world.
And one might argue the function of the world to distract you from God and to keep you from God.
Not to deny its beauty, the beauty of nature, the beauty of people, the beauty of art, beauty, all of that I recognize.
How do you handle that in yourself and as an operator in the culture?
Yeah.
Well, I think, I think really think that the best way of thinking about it is that, you know, in the book of Revelation, as you said you were reading the book of Revelation, you could say that there are two images of civilization.
You know, one is a beast with a whore on its back, you know, and so it's a mix of dilapidation and power and greed and corruption, but also control and power and all of these, you know, both of like the kind of loose aspect of civilization and the very harsh controlling aspect of civilization.
And then you also have this image of the heavenly Jerusalem as being the one which is properly submitted to God, you know.
And I believe that those two realities are always there.
These are always present realities and that the same, the same world both has an aspect which is pulling it apart, you know, which is making it with bringing it to submit to evil forces.
And there's also in that there are true things that can shine.
And, you know, I would say that, you know, how do I go through it?
I think that I try to focus on those things that are bright and those things that are truly that are truly moving towards the good.
Obviously, I don't succeed all the time.
You know, like all people, I'm sinful and I have all my all my faults, obviously.
But hopefully, you know, in the end, that's the play, you know, is to try to focus on those things.
You know, and then like there are certain disciplines that I've developed, you know, and everybody has their own kind of practice.
Like I, but these are not necessarily appropriate for everyone.
Like I actually practice forms of anti-attention, you could say.
And so I actually try to not comment on events in the world.
And I usually wait.
I'll wait like three weeks before I comment on anything that's happening, if I'm going to even comment on something.
And so, and so, you know, and obviously it's a competition because obviously I do have to have attention or else I won't be able to do this.
But it's always trying to find the balance between, you know, obviously being able to do what I do and say the things that I think are insightful, but then not being in that whirlwind of attention that the, especially the internet, can cause, you know, because it's like a, it's like a wheel and you have to feed it, you know, or else, or else it starts to, the algorithm kind of pushes you out and you know that's true.
And so you have to keep the outrage and the excitement and the and the and the clickbait going.
But but, you know, I mean, you can also accept the kind of lower level of attention and just find joy in that.
I feel like I'm, I love the place that I'm in.
I, I, I'm not famous, like in the sense that I have people that respect me and sometimes people recognize me once in a while.
I make enough money to support my family, but that's that's great.
Like that's what I want.
I don't, I would, I would actually flee from being super famous because it's probably not good for me.
No, it's not good for I'm not sure that it's who it's good for.
And, you know, like in the Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, when he sort of contests that if you come to our Lord, you will look back and see that your whole life was heaven or the holy city.
And if you reject our Lord, you will look back at your life and see that the whole thing was.
He sort of is offering sort of purgatorial, I think, rather than a beast with a whore on its back.
You know, sort of so awfully diabolical, it almost might be quite good.
When so it gets that evil, you might enjoy it.
Like a beast with a whore on its back.
That sounds like a potentially good evening.
I think a party.
Yeah.
So like this idea that you say that it's, I mean, I guess when he's talking about my ways are not your ways, I guess it might be beyond comprehension, only understood in the most peripheral.
I guess when I say lucid, I actually mean the opposite of how it's normally meant, like a kind of light, like you say, the eminence and the eminence from the abbot of the monastery you described.
And I was when some of something I'm reading at the moment talks about the light by which we even experience light, the light that is beyond light, a kind of light that's not photons.
It's difficult not to see it as analogous or to consciousness, to the consciousness itself, that this might be our participation in the kingdom may be that we are co-creators with him through consciousness itself.
And that do you think of the cross as having some geometric?
How do you break down in a Jonathan Pagot way the cross?
The cross?
I mean, I mean, the cross is a union of heaven and earth.
You know, it's a vertical and a horizontal.
It's a very simple symbol, but it actually is a cosmic one.
And then, you know, the union of the vertical, which is the hierarchy of heaven, and the horizontal, which is the expanse, yields a heart, a center, you know, and that center is, you know, it's in Catholic thinking, it's the sacred heart of Christ, you could say, you know, and it's the holy of holies.
It's the, it's the place where the glory of God, you know, reveals itself.
And I think that, you know, the surprise in some ways that Christ reveals is that that appears as a, as a self-giving, as a sacrifice, you know, because we tend to think of the center as something that is real and is radiating, you know, like the center is this real thing that's radiating.
But Christ reveals that that center is actually an offering.
It's a self, a self-offering.
So that's how I see the cross.
I think it's probably the most Probably the most powerful image because it's so simple.
It's such a simple image, but it contains everything in it, you know.
The tearing of the veil of the curtain there, the tearing of the curtain in that moment.
How do we do?
What do we do about that?
You know, let's say at the very top of our conversation, Jonathan, he goes, I've seen you talking to people everywhere.
I guess some of that's, you know, Candace Owens.
I've chatted to Candace Owens, and she, you know, where I feel like she's living is she's newly Catholic.
She's a type of star that couldn't have existed even 10 years ago.
Any person in the Candace Owens position 10 years ago has got to have been gatekept.
You like you would either your Warner Brothers or NBC or News International or Condé Nast or some big owned institution is going to hold your stuff.
Now, Jordan Peterson, our mutual friend, has been where she has been before and has endured it.
Joe Rogan has been there before.
I've had a little go, you know, like I've had a little go at that.
Now, so I wonder what you feel is the significant revelation in the story of Christ that seems to bring us into such strong adversity with the world, such clear combat, such conflict.
That why is it that telling the truth if that's what you take Candace Owens to be doing, you know, and of course, any person, as you say, the logos refracted through a person, it's going to bear some, it's going to pick up some flesh, you know.
Because I, what I feel like is I'm doing turning point.
Like on the 18th, I'm going there with Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro.
Any one of these people now, there's probably, maybe there's people, Jonathan, in the world, maybe there's people in the world, Jonathan Pajot, that regard you with like fury.
How dare he rewrite Snow White?
You know, and so, man, what is it?
What this tussle for power that seems extraordinarily to center around the holy land, its inhabitants, have you got a way of handling that?
Do I have a way of handling that?
I mean, I think that, you know, for sure, what we're seeing happening is, I mean, it's been happening, been happening for a while, which is that we're seeing the breakdown of a common story, the breakdown of the, it's really the World War II story that's breaking down, and it's breaking down in all kinds of ways, ways that actually don't care about your political allegiance.
They don't care about whether you're right or left or conservative or liberal, whatever.
It's like it's the narrative that's kind of breaking down.
And, you know, in that moment of chaos, there's obviously a desire to retell a new story and to kind of find a new story.
But it's something that you can't totally force, something that in some ways will only just happen, like a Kairos or revelation.
But I think that that's what's going on.
And, you know, in some ways, you know, Israel is the World War II consensus.
It is the incarnation of it.
And so all of the contradictions, all of the taboos of that consensus, all of the, you know, all of the ways in which it served us and the way in which it betrayed us are all contained in that place and in that imagery.
And so it's not surprising that that's the place where the narrative combat is happening.
And I don't know what the solution is.
I don't have a solution.
I can see the problem and I can see that it's breaking down and it's going to continue to break down.
And that's going to lead to possibly war, possibly, yeah, at least more and more conflict.
But I don't completely know it seems like an intractable problem until the solution starts to become clear.
And not just about Israel itself, but the entire story of the liberal West since World War II and the way in which we advocate for open societies, that we advocate for diversity, that we advocate for that we are afraid of identity, we're afraid of nationalism, we're afraid of race, we're afraid of all these categories.
And now they're crashing back and we don't know how to deal with it.
And they're crashing back in all kinds of insane, wild ways.
And we don't know how to manage it.
And so you have all of these characters that are basically yelling at each other and don't understand each other.
That's really important, by the way.
You probably saw the Fuentes Piers Morgan interview that was the last one.
And when you watch it, you realize that these two worlds, they do not, they're not, they're talking and they don't know what they don't understand what's happening on the other side.
You know, Piers Morgan doesn't understand anything about the world of the Groypers.
He has no idea.
And therefore, he thinks he's doing something, but he's not.
And he doesn't know what's going on.
He can't measure the results.
And he doesn't know what's happening because all of these stories are kind of crashing together right now.
Oh, that's a brilliant bit of analysis to take it all the way from World War II to Nick Fuentes and Piers Morgan.
I mean, that's, clip that, send that out.
I mean, because as best as I could follow it, it's like the World War II, even though it was, of course, an incident of conflict, was in its own paradoxical way a unifying event.
It was a unifying event.
The great, it seems, enduring symbol by your analysis there, and I recognize you're just a man on a podcast.
You know, it's not like a treatise you were offering, was like that Israel is one of the sort of offered up consequences, results, some would say, objectives of the Second World War.
But of course, the total collapse of British imperialism and colonialism could be another one and the rise of American imperialism, one might argue.
And of course, communism, Russian Soviet communism.
But what I see and think is interesting because we've got a conversation that's sort of been fused with conversations, even though it's only been an hour, a discourse diverse enough to include why Disney can't make fairy stories no more.
That's a good title for a video, a clip, by the way.
And related to the World War II consensus, too, by the way.
Yes, because there's no agreement on what reality is and what myths are and what stories we should be telling each other.
And, you know, like, and I'd love to throw this your way, even though I'm supposed to be going and doing something else.
Like that Breitbart, Andrew Breitbart says, of course, famously, you know, politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of technology.
And what is technology other than human ingenuity, unmanifest consciousness being instantiated into matter and systems, i.e. the system of mass communication now has gotten so vast and efficient that it's collapsing time.
How can you measure time in the same way in the pre-Gutenberg print and press era and now when we can simultaneously make a claim, have that claim go around the world, have it debunked, dismantled, reinstantiated, sects emerging from it?
I mean, you can sort of see it happening now, like that, like one unified object for a minute.
Like once you would have said Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, that's one thing, Ben Shapiro, one thing.
Now that thing, those people you put them in a room, they might kill each other, you know, like it's extraordinary.
It's extraordinary.
So fragmentation and like there's it's brilliant.
I had this argument with Chat GPT.
Check this, man.
Like I had an argument with Chat GPT because I'm writing a book, How to Become Christian in Seven Days, asterisk, make take 50 years of sin and fake rape allegations to get to day one.
That's there.
Do you know like that subtitle?
Or is it the title?
And then anyway, so like I was writing, I was doing my best because I end up like a lot of my time, Jonathan, is I talk to like working class men because of the conditions of my origin about scripture now.
So like from telling my mate Joe the story of David, I'm like, right, so what it is is, you know, then David, he obviously fights Goliath and we all know that, but his quality was he was happy to die either way, but also he did have the skills, he had the skills, you know, from killing the lions or whatever, but he was also, he was like, if God wants me to win, this motherfucker's got no chance.
And like, and then, but then Bathsheba, and then the consensus, and the place where the atonement for the census is made is where God will come and live with you eternally.
The site of the temple will be the site of your deepest, where you atone for your deepest wound.
And maybe even the father, but God, how do you break that down into metaphysics?
Where the father atones for his greatest transgression is where God will finally come to live in all perpetuity, or at least till the temple is sacked and ransacked and bought down.
Anyway, so I'm telling these stories as best as I can in working class vernacular to working class men, and it forms a big part of the book.
There's one bit where obviously I'm checking in with Chat GPT, Jonathan.
Like, oh, what order did that happen in?
And is that story told different from Chronicles and Kings and Samuel?
And what are the distinctions?
And da-da-da-da-da.
Anyway, I get into it with ChatGPT where I say, I ask it, I wish I'd kept it, man.
I go, was Bathsheba into it?
Right?
I asked ChatGPT.
And ChatGPT goes, well, may it, no, actually, you might actually categorize it as rape because the differentiation, this is by the way, this is Disney execs talking, right?
The pattern, the differentiation in power dynamics between David and Bathsheba means that it might as well consider it a rape.
Now, obviously, that touches a nerve with me, right?
And so I'm like, well, hang on.
She marries him later.
And ChatGPT is like, well, even that could be imposed, particularly in the hindsight of how our culture has evolved and progressed in our understanding.
And I said, wait a minute.
Are you assuming that we're progressing when matter deteriorates?
Why would we not degenerate over time?
Why do you not think that we're degenerating over time?
Like, I'm arguing with my own fucking phone at this point, of course.
Anyway, there's a point where I feel like ChatGPT is like, oh no, abort, abort in every sense of the word.
Like, you know, I see ChatGPT sort of rescinding and trying to get out of it.
Like, well, you know, it's a complicated subject, obviously.
Now, I guess the reason I heaped all that.
Where are we going?
Where are we going, Russell?
Where are we going?
Yeah, where are we going?
I mean, that's what I want to, you know.
Look, I want to, look, one of the things I'm trying to offer to this medium is my raw authenticity, my confusion, my bafflement, my doubt, my wild oscillation between certainty and total collapsing doubt.
And where I suppose I was going with that, well, maybe, I mean, that is a good question, Jonathan.
I mean, where were we going?
Where was I going?
I started it with it about Chad GPT.
You said you had a conversation.
That's how you started this whole thing, but I didn't.
No, that was about 10 minutes into the question.
Oh, okay.
I mean, that was so much, but there was so much before that.
I guess what I was, I guess, oh, yeah, there was the Disney bit.
It was the Disney bit.
Where I was going, Jonathan, where I was going with it was that what's happening now is that time itself is changing.
We're living in a different reality.
And as you say, there's not one story that can accommodate, well, there is one story that can accommodate it, but people are denying that story.
And it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be wild.
But you went from, listen, you went from World War II to Fuentes and Piers Morgan.
So don't Russell brand me.
It was quite coherent, though, I think.
No, but, okay, so let's talk.
Let's just talk about the, I think that your insight is right.
That is that the stories are breaking apart and that we, you know, even in even in the supposedly right or the conservative or the people that are supposed to in some ways be this, those that like the center in the sense of something solid, something, you know, that because of how the story of World War II is breaking apart, now we don't know where to look and we don't know how to,
let's say, reconcile some of the problems that are being presented to us, you know?
And so I do believe that Christ obviously is the solution.
I do believe that Christianity is the only thing that can really, because the problem, okay, so think about it this way.
So the problem that's coming towards us is that since World War II, and for good reasons, we've objected to tribal identity.
We've objected to racial identity.
We've ultimately then moved to objecting even to family hierarchies, to religious hierarchies, actually to anything that is kind of identity that stabilizes.
And we've moved towards openness and diversity and difference, right?
This celebration of difference ever since rock and roll, this idea that rebellion and difference and you have to show how different you are from everyone else.
All of that is happening.
But that, see, that doesn't, obviously, at some point that breaks down.
That becomes furries and it becomes fetishism.
It becomes SNM.
It becomes all of like these kind of idiosyncratic ways of being.
And that doesn't hold.
The world can't hold together.
And so the question is, how do we reintroduce identity into the world without repeating the fascist mistake, without repeating a kind of absolute identity, right?
Or a kind of absolute nationalism or all of the problems that started appearing at the beginning of the 20th century.
How can we now reintegrate identity without falling into the problem that we had?
And that's the problem.
We don't know how to do it.
I do really believe that Christianity is the only solution because it is a self-sacrificial identity.
Christianity has the sense of identity and authority, but that authority is always posited as service.
It's always posited as giving itself.
And the tribal identity, not necessarily so, right?
So if you fall into a kind of nationalism or tribal identity, it can just be, and you see it a little bit in Trump, a little bit in like America only.
And I don't care.
I'll screw everybody over.
It doesn't matter as long as my thing is solid.
And you see that even in some of the right-wing commentators now.
They're like, you know, I only care about my thing.
And as long as it's solid, I don't care about anything else.
That's not a proper that you can't exist in the world that way.
There has to be, obviously, you do have to care about your thing, but you always have to care about your thing in a way that is in communion with others.
There's no other way or else you're going straight towards war.
Like, let's just, let's just plow towards war.
Let's just, let's just not care about anything else that happens in the world.
Just care about ourselves and screw everybody over until we've accumulated so many enemies that now war becomes inevitable.
And so, anyways, this is to say, this is the issue that we're facing: how do we reintegrate identity in a manner that doesn't lead us down the dark path that happened in the 20th century?
Yes, I understand.
The church has to be the center.
The technology affords decentralization and the church can be localized.
I think it's, Jonathan, I could talk to you forever, especially when I ask very long and may I say brilliant, if difficult to follow questions, if you're not clever enough to concentrate.
Say it might come across as incoherent to someone who spends their time writing children's books, but to me, I'm dealing with grown-up shit.
I put aside childish things, Jonathan.
I put aside childish things.
I'm happy.
You know, we actually had a like a little bet in our team, on my team.
And the bet was, is Russell going to wear a shirt in our interview?
That was the bet.
And oh, no, and he take off crabs.
He takes off.
I've got nothing to hide.
That's right.
Thanks, man.
It was great to talk to you, though.
This is, I always enjoy this.
This is fun.
You're fantastic.
I'll come to that monastery at some point in the terrifying future.
At some point in the terrifying future, I'll have to stay away from my.
I cling to my family.
I've got to tell you, I cling to them guys.
But I'd like to be on Mount Athos with some monks really and not caring about my, or my, my treasured identity dashed on the rocks.