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Oct. 4, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:57
STORIES SAVE SOULS!
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Let's start with the general question that you have, which is, what is the value and purpose of stories?
So think of a gymnast.
Now, a gymnast will often start...
Doing gymnastics at the age of three or four or five or six.
I had a friend of mine's daughter who's an incredible dancer.
She was begging her mom, who was also a dancer, to get into the dance program when she was, I think, five or so, and has done enormously well.
Now, if you think of a gymnast who might practice for, I mean, generally, the more hungry they are, they will practice to the edge of physical endurance because gymnastics is pretty harsh.
I don't know.
I don't know what that number is.
Maybe something like 20 hours a week.
So 20 hours a week times, you know, 50 weeks a year, you know, we're talking a huge, huge number of hours, a thousand hours, right?
And after 10 years, you get your 10,000 hours in.
You've done 10,000. And then it comes down to one jump or one routine or one...
Beam walk or whatever it's going to be, right?
It comes down to that. And those things are like maybe a minute, you know, Kerry struck with her wounded ankle jumping over the horse once doing her flip.
That occurred, you know, the whole thing start to finish was maybe 10 seconds.
And so you look at that 10,000 hours versus 10 seconds.
And it's not even versus, right?
That's the purpose of it.
And so, if you think also of wolf pups, or I guess puppies as a whole, right?
So, what do they spend their time doing?
Well, they spend their time doing three things.
Number one, sleeping.
Number two, breastfeeding.
Number three, play fighting.
Now, why do they play fight?
Why is it that, you know, parents often get involved, it's more of a dad thing, get involved in Play fighting with their children.
Why is it when I was a kid, we played Endless Games of War, the kind of thing that I write about in my novel, Almost.
You should check it out, fdurl.com forward slash almost.
And why, why, why?
Well, because it all comes down to 10 seconds.
It all comes down to 10 seconds.
So the reason why the wolf pups are spending thousands of hours or hundreds of hours at least play fighting is so at some point they gotta chew on a rabbit.
And if they don't chew on a rabbit, they die, right?
So it's all preparation for life, for success.
And sadly, in the realm of sports, people don't generally remember The third or fourth or fifth or sixth place.
I remember working once with a guy who was a rower in the Olympics.
And I think they came in fourth or something like that.
And I mean, I hate to say it, but it's like, okay, so what was the point of all that?
Because fourth is completely forgettable.
It's like, oh, yes, well, I went to the Olympics.
It's like, hey, that's really cool. Don't get me wrong.
That's way better than anything I ever did from a sports standpoint.
But as far as Endorsement deals as far as, you know, being able to make your Michael Phelps millions, you know, you might as well have not gone.
Now, I get you get all of that health and exercise and camaraderie and so on, but training for elite sports is hell on earth in many ways, and it also can leave you with significant injuries down the road.
A friend of mine who's in his 70s, Was a volleyball player when he was younger and had one crunch.
And, you know, he kind of shook it off and worked his way back and so on.
And then, you know, like 45 years later, like he can't walk.
And he's had to have a knee replacement.
And it's really, it's rough.
It's really, really rough.
And the knee replacement didn't quite take and all that.
So it's pretty brutal, not just in the short term.
And listen, I've never trained for elite sports, but I did train for a lot of sports.
I trained for tennis.
I trained for water polo.
I trained for competitive swimming and so on.
And I also trained for long distance running.
So I did a lot of training and...
You know, the times where you've got to get up at, you know, two hours before school to go and train for swimming.
I did okay. I came in like the top 10 in Ontario.
I think I was sixth or seventh in Ontario for front crawl.
And so I never got very far.
Because my problem is, just anybody who's curious, my problem is that there's a lot of genetics involved in training.
How much can your tendons take?
How much can your muscles take?
And I obviously never took any supplements for that, and I just, I can't take that much training.
You know, the people who bulk up and get huge muscles, I mean, I guess part of it's artificial, but there's also a genetic issue.
Aspect to it.
And I've often had trouble with soft tissue damage, tendons.
I just don't have that kind of...
My tendons are not like ropes.
And I suffered from lumbago when I was a child, which is...
It's sort of a condition where your bones are growing...
Taller or your bones are growing longer than your tendons.
And so I used to have to take these blindingly hot baths to relieve this ache in my legs because my tendons were being stretched abominably by my bones.
Because, you know, genetics is a real dice roll.
And so if you end up in a situation where you just happen to have longer bones genetically and shorter tendons genetically, then you're going to end up with that issue.
And tendon has been an intermittent issue throughout the My life, sort of.
So I couldn't get particularly far in sports because I would just end up with tendon damage.
And I've never been able to touch my toes.
And people would always say, oh, just stretch more, man.
It's like, no, no, no. I did like 45 minutes of stretching and body work a day when I was in theater school.
And you cannot stretch further.
You cannot stretch further.
You just can't do it. You can train your body or you can train yourself To begin to minimize the pain of stretching, but you can't make your tendons longer.
They're like ropes. They're not like elastics, otherwise they wouldn't work.
And I still have to stretch every day before bed.
I have to stretch just to make sure I don't get jimmy legs, you know, where you just get this tension in your legs.
And I remember flying back from New Zealand.
Oh, man, it was brutal. I just couldn't get a comfortable position.
So... The point of that somewhat tangent-y thing is to basically tell you that, you know, training for elite sports is pretty tough and it's expensive.
It's very time-consuming.
There's a lot of people who are out there having fun and heading to the mall and all that and you're going in to train.
And it's kind of competitive and catty and bitchy even among the males.
But it comes down to that 10 seconds.
Huge amount of preparation comes down to that 10 seconds.
I mean, think of the most common game for children, the game of hide-and-go-seek.
Well, why do children enjoy the game of hide-and-go-seek?
Because the children who didn't enjoy the game of hide-and-go-seek weren't able to hide from predators, didn't have practice about where to hide, and thus would get killed and eaten, right?
Hopefully in that order. Because hide-and-go-seek...
Is learning all of the great hiding spots and how to be absolutely silent and get the thrill of not being found so that if a bear or a wolf comes into your environment, you know how to hide, where to hide, and your practice and how to get there and all of that.
So the kids who didn't enjoy hide-and-go-seek would get killed and eaten more often and that would be selected out of the gene pool over time.
And so... A huge amount of practice, right?
Kids will play hundreds of hours of hide-and-go-seek, and as a result, they may have a 10 or 20% better chance of surviving some sort of predation.
Same thing with TAG, which is a way of avoiding either animals or people running at you and trying to grab you, whether it's a bear or a Combat or pedophiles, it's just a way of...
Right, so there's a huge amount of preparation, which comes down to a very short moment.
Now, of course, it is a series of moments, but the preparation is virtually endless, and it comes down to that one inverted pyramid of a moment in your time, in your life.
So, this is why we have stories.
We have stories in order to train a muscle that we can't train in the moment.
Train a muscle we can't train in the moment.
You can't take some kid, some, I don't know, 15-year-old girl, put her up against Romania's Nadia Comaneci in her prime if the other girl has never had any training in gymnastics and say, go compete because she can't train the muscles in the moment.
The muscles... The skill all has to be trained.
The mindset all has to be trained ahead of time.
Training ahead of time is the essence of success.
Extemporaneous speaking, which I'm good at, very good at, is something that I have been doing since I was very little.
Fighting anti-rational arguments is something that I was brutally trained in with an insane mother and a crazy cultural environment from a very, very early age.
Public speaking is something that I did in the business world when I would do presentations and I spoke at conferences and all of that.
So I've had lots of training and experience in that as well.
I was reading philosophy for Two decades, or more really, before I got into the public realm and had engaged in countless arguments and debates, and I had written books and all of that.
So all of that occurred before I emerged into the public eye, and people were like, whoa, that's a lot of talent.
It's like, okay, maybe.
Maybe there's some aspect of that involved.
And there are some things that are accidental about what I do in that, you know, fairly decent looking.
I have a pleasant voice that people comment is very soothing and all of that.
So that's accidentally positive.
But the rest of it is just a massive amount of preparation.
And of course, when I was going through that preparation, not to mention my academic training, but when I was going through all that preparation, I had no idea what was going to be occurring.
It's funny because I wrote a novel 20 years ago about a guy who made philosophical speeches to a webcam.
This is long before there was anything that was like that on the internet.
So I guess there was some, in a sense, a rational premonition about the possibilities that were going to be occurring.
So what are stories for?
Well, stories...
Are for preparing you for the make or break moral moments in your life in the same way that a gymnast's 10,000 hours is to prepare her for the make or break 10 seconds at the Olympics.
So at some point in your life, there's two conditions of moral temptation.
There's two conditions of moral temptation.
So the first condition of moral temptation is...
Cure, not prevention.
And it's the most common one.
So someone will come along at some point in your life and that person will offer you gold for your soul.
They will do that.
It could be a hundred million dollars from Spotify.
It could be Turn against your friend and I will open the gates to you for success.
It could be date me or have sex with me and I will advance your career.
It could be any number of things.
It could be within the family. It could be stay silent about the abuse you suffered and I'll include you in my will.
Someone, somewhere is going to offer you gold for your soul.
It's the oldest story of theology.
It's the oldest story of philosophy.
And it's happened to me.
It's happened to me when I was early on in my career.
I was offered by two women publishing deals if I would have sex with them.
And I was hungry for publishing deals.
I mean, I was just treading water in the business world waiting to leap into the art world.
That was my major thing.
And I was punished.
So it's not just the offer of gold.
It's the stick and the carrot.
I was also punished repeatedly for being anti-socialist, anti-communist.
And I wasn't cast.
I was lashed out against.
I was railed against. I was punished for my views.
Because, you know, the devil offers you the gold, and if you don't take the gold, he doesn't just wander off and go and offer someone else.
The devil will offer you gold for your soul, and if you deny him, he will work to destroy your life.
Because if he can't get you on greed, he will try to get you on fear.
Now, when that person comes into your life, and by the way, that person might be you.
That person might be you.
That person might get impatient with the long, hard, high, thorny road of virtue and say, well, we can do a lot more good if we just get ourselves a bigger platform or we just get ourselves more notoriety or we just get ourselves, like, I'm going to make this little compromise in order to do a greater good.
So you may be your own devil, you may be your own tempter, but it's going to happen.
And the devil may also tempt you with inconsequentiality.
There's lots of temptations in this world.
The devil may say to you, well, you could go out into the world and start fighting for good, but man, that's going to be super risky.
Check out this, they've just released a new Halo game.
You know, just play a little Fortnite and, you know, think it over.
Delay, distract, delay, distract, minimize, inconsequentialize.
And next thing you know, you've been worn down to nothing.
And you've made so many compromises that there's nothing left of your atomic scattering to pull yourself together to anything approaching a spine.
So, you will get tempted to either become evil, To avoid evil.
To dismiss evil.
To minimize evil.
And to do the great betrayal of assuming that somebody else will solve the problem of evil in the world.
You're going to get tempted.
Might be someone else.
Might be you.
But it's going to be someone. And that is the moment that you don't want to practice that muscle in the moment because it won't work.
You have to have prepared yourself for being able to say no to evil and to survive the inevitable backlash that evil is going to strike you with if you reject evil.
Evil doesn't like to be alone.
Evil doesn't like to think that it is in solitude.
And evil likes to spread in a way that good doesn't, which is one of the reasons why the state is so dangerous and evil tends to triumph over time.
Tends to, doesn't mean an absolute.
But evil likes to believe that everyone is corrupt, that everyone betrays, that everyone simply mouths Moral platitudes, but will give up their soul in a moment.
If offered, if asked.
It's all posturing.
All morality is posturing and pretend.
Now, evil sells its soul on the basis, well, everyone does.
Like, everyone does.
Everyone will. Everyone does.
So why on earth would I not do it?
Soon, easily, just do it.
Just do it! I mean, if you know, take a silly example, right?
So you wake up in the middle of the night, and you gotta pee.
You lie in there in bed.
I mean, not like, maybe, maybe, but like, man, I gotta pee.
And you know, you know that you're going to get up to pee.
But it's kind of warm. It's kind of cozy.
Maybe you've got, like, I have a weighted blanket that's like an elephant expired on your chest.
It's really cozy. And you know, oh, it's so cozy.
It's so warm here. Maybe your girlfriend or your wife is half awake and you cuddle with them and it's just about as nice as things can be.
But you know, now you know you've got to get up to pee.
So, what you do, which I do, is you say, oh, let's get it over with.
Just get up and pee.
Studiously avoid looking at the time, because you don't want to know where your body clock is.
Studiously avoid looking at any lights, and just grope your way, do your thing, wash your hands, go back to bed.
So, if you know you have to do something, it makes sense to do it sooner rather than later.
Because, of course, if you're lying in bed, the longer you're awake, The more likely it is you're going to stay awake after you pee.
So you might as well, you know you got to do it.
You might as well do it sooner rather than later.
That's the view of an evildoer with regards to corruption.
Everyone is corrupt.
That's the human condition.
Morality is just pretend.
Everybody is just a grasping mammal seeking resources, and sometimes they seek resources by mouthing moral platitudes, and other times they just grab and dash.
But they just, you know, it's all nonsense.
It's all posture. Morality, they say.
And so they may hold out.
They may hold out until they get an offer that satisfies their vanity.
But that's the only thing that delays them.
And, I mean, have you ever been in this situation?
If you've ever been in this situation, let's say you got into a relationship with a girl and the sexual chemistry was off the charts.
And you loved the sex, but kind of loathed that that was the main reason that you were there.
And so did she, probably even more than you.
And then you break up.
And then you say to her, oh, come over.
Let's stay friends. I'll make you some food.
You know, we'll watch a little movie or something like that, right?
And you know, you kind of know deep down what you're asking her over for.
And she knows it too, but you don't want to say it.
And then what you do is she comes over and, you know, I miss you.
And there's no talk of like what went wrong in the relationship or whether you're going to get back together or whatever.
You just slide down that greasy stripper's pole towards sexual consummation, not actually having made any particular choice to do so or not do so.
But you just, things go step by step and all that, right?
And, you know, you kiss her on the forehead and you just see if she tilts her head.
And you're both just circling the drain, right?
So I guess almost literally, right?
And so all of your, oh, come on over.
Let's be friends. Let's get caught up and all of that.
I'll make you some food.
We'll watch a movie. All of that is just pretense because you just want to have sex.
But you can't say, well, I don't really like you, but the sex was fantastic.
So let's just serve our bodies and scar our souls, right?
So... All of your let's be friends, I'll make you some food, let's watch a movie, that's all moral posturing, so to speak, or it's an avoidance of the central issue, which is your horny.
And so that's the view of morality that evil people have.
Oh, yeah, people are like, oh, I believe in integrity, I believe in honesty, I believe in virtue.
It's all nonsense. All they're doing is holding out for a better offer.
And as soon as they get that better offer, then...
They'll take it. And it won't mean anything.
It won't mean anything, what they said.
It's a kind of greasy game, the evildoers view it, that people engage in.
It's like a woman protesting her virtue.
Oh, I won't have sex with you.
I'm going to hold my virtue. And it's like, well, she's just holding out for a guy.
Who's higher status, or more handsome, or wealthier, or whatever, right?
Again, I'm not saying this is objectively true, although it's true a lot, but the view of evildoers is that everyone, everyone gives it up.
It's the old joke, not really a joke, sort of a commentary, where a guy says to a girl, I'll give you five million dollars to have sex with me.
And She kind of agrees.
And then she comes over.
And then he's like, nah, I've changed my mind.
It's 50 bucks. And she says, oh, 50 bucks?
What do you think I am?
And he says, no, no, we've already established what you are.
Now we're just haggling over the price.
So that kind of temptation...
It's believed to be, like all resistance to temptation is posturing to bid for a higher price.
That's all it is, according to evildoers.
And so if they actually come across someone, actually come across someone who genuinely resists temptation and has no particular interest in what they have to offer, That's enraging to them in a way that is really hard to imagine.
It's absolutely enraging to them.
Why do some people hate me so much?
There's lots of reasons.
But one of them, and a pretty central one, a more personal one, is, you've heard this on my show a million times, that people say, yes, my mother or my father were mean, they were violent, they were drunk, they were abusive, but they had a bad childhood.
And that's some sort of quasi-deterministic excuse as to why the parent behaved so atrociously, so immorally.
Now, I had a bad childhood, a very bad childhood.
I probably had...
I'm probably in the 98th percentile of bad childhoods.
And there's stuff I'll only talk about on my deathbed.
Now, I have become a great father.
And, you know, if you doubt me, you can listen to my shows I've done with my daughter.
We have a great deal of fun. Really enjoy each other's company.
We look forward to spending time together.
And that has taken away the excuse of, well, my mom had a bad childhood, so of course she verbally and physically abused me.
No, I had a bad childhood.
I didn't do that. Now, to create a choice where only absolutes exist is very strange and unsettling and enraging to people as a whole.
It's sort of like Many years ago, Drew Carey, who used to be an interesting libertarian before he became an empty suit, long microphone-spoken head on The Price is Right.
I mean, I think they bought him out.
Hey, you're doing too much of this libertarian stuff.
What's really, really important is you make a huge amount of money having people guess the price of stupid stuff.
It's a real shame. And, but he did a show, or he had an article, I think maybe it was on Reason.com or something like that, where he was talking about traffic and how bad the traffic was.
And one day, one of the people who was complaining about traffic, the magazine, or maybe it was Drew himself, paid for that guy to go to his work in a helicopter.
And of course, instead of it being an hour and a half or two hours, it was like 20 minutes, right?
And so if you have a car and you drive and it's a long commute and so on, if you've been doing it for years and years and years, and then you suddenly realize that there's been a helicopter that's left from your house or just behind your house to the office building for free for 20 years and you just didn't do it, you're going to be really angry, really upset.
Especially if you're just retiring.
It's like, oh my God, for 20 years I could have avoided this three-hour commute.
Save money, lower risk, got more sleep, be healthier, less stress.
And so if you've got this absolute, like, well, I mean, my parents abused me because they had bad childhoods.
And then you come across someone who had a bad childhood, Ended up not just being not abusive, but ended up being a great parent.
Or, well, I have trouble sustaining relationships because my parents divorced.
And then I saw my mother go through a series of terrible relationships and abusive relationships and sex-based relationships, which aren't really relationships at all.
Which is my experience. You say, okay, well, then of course, well, that person is going to have all of these instabilities in their relationships and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you use the template of the past as an excuse for the repetition of the future.
Now, I did go through some not great relationships.
And... I ended up, again, through therapy, through self-knowledge, through philosophy, through willpower, through self-confrontation, and through an acute and accurate identification of corruption and evil in my life, ended up I'm in a wonderful marriage, close to 20 years, and that's it.
Nothing's going to change. And people are always like, oh yeah, you just wait, man.
She's going to divorce you.
Nope. Not going to happen.
I mean, good Lord, given the media, given my reputation, she'd have had some excuse in the past.
No, we're in.
And we said that at the very beginning.
Divorce is not on the table. Divorce is not an option.
Not an option. If it is an option for you, let's not get married.
Especially when you decide to have kids, and we wanted to have kids very early, so it's not an option.
And this bothers people.
It really, really bothers people because they assume that the past is a mechanical robot that writes out your future.
Can't be changed, can't be programmed, can't be adjusted.
And to break free of the past is so impossible.
It's like if a friend of yours complains about his three-hour commute a day and you say, well, why don't you just flap your wings and fly?
That would be an annoying thing to say.
It would be flippant.
It couldn't occur. Like, it would just be a terrible thing to say.
Very annoying. And your friend would be exasperated at you and annoyed at you, and I can understand why.
Because you can't flap your wings and fly.
The physics of the universe make that impossible.
And when people believe in the dumb, blind, Newtonian mechanistic physics of history, They can't stand it when they see someone do the impossible.
Because if you do the impossible, according to people's belief structures, if you do the impossible, it shatters their excuses for corruption.
It's not possible to escape your past.
Oh, that guy escaped his past?
Oh shit.
Oh no.
Oh no.
What if my belief that you can't escape the past is why I can't escape my past?
And it is possible, and it is desirable, and it is better.
It is better.
Then suddenly, what you thought was physics is not physics, but a choice.
Oh man, that's brutal.
And, of course, also another reason why people dislike me, particularly of the parent-based variety, is because I support the child.
I empower victims of abuse.
Now, when you empower victims of abuse, what do they do?
They go and they say, Mom, Dad, you treated me wrong.
You treated me badly.
And some of that bad treatment might in fact be criminal in nature, and some of it might still in fact be prosecutable.
So how happy are abusive parents that I'm out here talking sense, reason, and virtue to adult children and victims of child abuse?
Well, not happy at all, to put it mildly, right?
So you will be tempted.
It's happened to me. It's happened to me in this show.
Not at this show in particular, but in the past, I've been offered money with promises of complete independence.
But there's no way to guarantee any of that.
I mean, Joe Rogan is having his battle with Spotify now about control, independence, right?
At least one of my shows didn't make it across, so already history is being erased.
And I haven't even really been tempted to...
I haven't even really been tempted.
Because the only way to retain independence is to continue to focus upon you, the dear listeners.
Because if my income is scattered and diffuse...
Then no one can dictate or tempt me with a dictation of what it is that I do.
And I've had people say, oh, do this and I'll donate to you.
Or if you don't stop doing that, I'll stop donating to you.
Whatever it is, right? But no.
Freedomain.com forward slash donate if you'd like to help this whole integrity process or at least aid in the continuation of this integrity process.
This is why I've avoided ads.
If you have ads, you have a single point of pressure that people can attempt to control you through.
So, yeah, you'll be offered.
And that being offered to sell your soul for gold, or at least to avoid the whip, that will happen.
And that will be the gymnast's 10 seconds at the Olympics for you.
And it matters.
It very, very much matters.
In fact, it's decisive as to whether you have prepared for that moment or not.
If you have prepared for that moment, you will pass the test.
Just as if you have prepared for gymnastics, you might get the medal.
If you have not prepared for that moment, you will almost certainly fail.
I would like to say certainly fail in the same way that there's no way somebody without training can do a gymnastics routine and win a gold or place or not be like a laughing stock or a pity stock.
So if, if, if, if, if, if you have prepared for that moment You can get the true gold of integrity and the resulting pride and happiness.
If you have not prepared, you will fail and you will be lost.
Now, you might find yourself again.
It might be, you know, it's not like it comes down to just one moment in the same way that you don't even get to the Olympics in that 10 second moment without having a whole series hundreds of 10 second moments beforehand that step you up to that level.
So it's not like, one, you know, if you have sex once, you're no longer a virgin, despite the born-again virgin jokes.
If you have intercourse once, you're no longer a virgin.
Forever. That's not how it is with morality.
In the same way, like, you can have a drink, you can have a cigarette, and it's not like, that's it, you're dead.
You can accept, and it may in fact not be bad to be exposed to levels of corruption.
In the same way your immune system needs to be exposed to some levels of dirt in order to remain strong.
So I don't think you have to go full-on monk mode non-purity matrix in order to retain your integrity.
It needs to be tested. And failing doesn't mean you're lost forever.
There's no mortal... Well, there are a few mortal sins.
If you wrong people in a way that you cannot make right, then yeah, you're kind of lost.
And it's probably, that's it.
You probably just become scurvy in the mouth of the world.
But yeah, you can do some wrong.
You can make some mistakes. You can fail the test of temptation from time to time.
And in the same way that you can Get the flu and not die.
It matters, right?
But it's all about the preparation.
So stories, stories are all about moral preparation.
Now, you may say, and you'd be quite right, in pointing out, well, modern stories aren't about that.
Well, of course. Of course, modern stories aren't about that.
Because moral stories are setting you up to fail The 10 second test.
Because they're an endless parade of one of two things.
Either A people who succeed without effort through magic.
So if you imagine you want to become a gymnast and you genuinely believe in a magic leotard that will turn you into an elite gymnast with no effort or training on your part.
Then you will spend your time trying to get a hold of that magic leotard rather than actually training to be a gymnast.
And so if you watch superhero movies, Marvel movies, DC Comics movies and so on, all the Stan Lee brain abortions that distract people from true virtue, what do you see?
You see a skinny kid Who's bullied, who's nothing, who then gets a magical intervention.
He gets bitten by a radioactive spider.
He finds out he's from Krypton.
He has powers!
He falls into a vat of socialism.
He finds he has powers.
And almost instantly and effortlessly, he has mastered those powers and can do unbelievable things.
In the 2012 Spider-Man origin story, Peter Parker, of course, gets bitten by the radioactive spider, and then he's in the subway, and he falls asleep in the subway, and a guy puts a beer on his head.
He gets into a fight, and he performs these most amazing, incredible, gravity-defying, physics-defying acrobatic moves.
He didn't earn them. He just got bitten by a spider.
And he then ends up, you know, he does create the webbing for his wrists and so on.
And then he's flying through the city doing these most amazing stunts and flips and all this incredible stuff.
He's not trained really for any of it.
I mean, there's a little bit of him training and all of that, but he doesn't really train much.
He just gains his mastery through accident.
No training. It doesn't take him 10,000 hours.
It's not something that other people can do.
It's magic. Superpowers are magic.
And magic weakens you.
Because magic substitutes for effort.
Magic weakens you in the way that if you believe there's a magic leotard that makes you a great gymnast, you won't train for gymnastics.
And that weakens you.
And it means, for fucking sure, you will never be a gymnast.
If you believe in the magic leotard, you spend your whole time searching for the magic leotard rather than training, you will never be a gymnast.
It kills your capacity for gymnastics.
Everybody wants these shortcuts.
Of course they do. It's understandable.
I mean, of course there are shortcuts that are valuable.
I mean, you're listening to this. I'm not currently in your house or your car or your ear or on your jog or whatever it is you're doing.
Hi. Hope you enjoy yourself.
Hope you find this valuable. But people sell you magic all the time.
Oh, we can just print money.
Oh, we can just borrow money.
Oh, you can just run to the government.
Oh, you can just have an abortion.
Oh, you can just get the government to ban your competitors.
Oh, you can get Section 230 immunities for content, but then you can curate content.
You can be like a magazine, but completely outside the reach of law for whatever you write.
And this is true in the US with regards to libel as a whole.
You have to prove malicious intent.
Yeah, good luck. The legal system is so slow.
Was it in France? I think they just, someplace, they just legally declared that subway bread is not actually legal bread.
And if I remember rightly, it took 14 or 16 or 18 years to achieve that.
So, everybody wants to sell you magic.
You don't need a great sex life, here's some pornography.
You don't need to actually achieve anything in the real world, here's a video game.
You don't need to learn karate, here's Street Fighter II, right?
It just means people don't achieve, don't have a great sex life, and don't learn karate.
Because there's magic. Shortcuts.
All the time. And the devils of distraction and pretend achievement.
I'm higher up in the ranking scores.
My daughter introduced me to a fun little game called Golf Battle where you bet coins and you can win or lose.
And it's fun. But there's nothing real in it.
Right? I mean, we play together and she's into trash talking these days, which is quite a lot of fun.
But it's not real.
It's not like you've got anything.
It's an old Dr.
Phil episode where some guy was into some online video game.
I think it was World of Warcraft, right?
And he's like, yes, but I have this helmet and this horse and this sword.
It's like, is any of that real?
Any of that real? No.
No. It's all pretend achievement, which blocks out real achievement.
It's all pretend achievement that blocks out real achievement.
Now, modern novels, modern stories, either says there's no truth, there's no goodness, there's no virtue, or they say, oh, there are those things, but they're magic, and therefore they're completely fucking unavailable to you.
You don't participate.
In the superhero demigods of an imaginary universe where strength, power, efficacy, control, and virtue appear magically out of nowhere.
You don't have to earn it.
You don't have to earn it.
In the movie I just mentioned, the 2012 I think it is version of Spider-Man, Peter Parker is so shy and so...
Spiritually broken. He can't even ask a girl out who obviously wants him to ask her out.
He can't even ask a girl out that he likes.
Which is job one.
It's job one of your teenage years, guys.
Job one. Ask a girl out.
Ask girls out. And keep asking girls out until you get a yes.
I know it sucks.
I know it's horrible. I know equality, equality, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But that's just the way it is. They get PMS, heart flashes, menopause, periods as a whole.
And that sucks.
That sucks. A woman's reproductive arc of discomfort can go from 13 to 50.
That's a long time to be uncomfortable.
And in return, you've just got to ask him that.
You've got to ask him that.
And that doesn't last from 13 to 50, at least I hope not.
So yeah, they'll just sell you all this magic shit that paralyzes you.
Either there's no such thing as virtue.
Oh yeah, there is such a thing as virtue, but it's completely unattainable.
So saying that something requires magic is the same way as saying it doesn't exist and you can't have it.
Peter Parker is so shy he can't even ask a girl out.
And then he's in the middle of deadly combat.
And he's just throwing off these stupid quips like, hey, don't make me hurt you now.
He's totally 150% madly confident.
He gains confidence with the bullies.
He gains confidence with the girls.
He defies his step-parents.
Why? Well, you see, because he got bitten by a spider.
And so all you have to do to gain power in your life, just wait for that fucking spider.
Wait for that spider to bite you and fill you full of superpowers and then all your problems will be solved.
All your problems will be solved.
Oof! Absolutely horrifying.
Absolutely horrifying. And this used to of course occur in mythology in that they would get you to focus on the strengths and powers of the gods.
Because being gods, those strength and powers were unavailable to you.
You understand that gods are invented, demigods, semi-gods, anthropomorphic gods, like the gods of Rome and the gods of the Hindus to some degree and the gods of the Greeks, the Zeus's and the Jupiter's and all of that.
They're invented to abstract power away from you and diffuse it and destroy it.
In the same way that sports teams allow you to pretend that you won something.
And spoiler, you didn't win shit.
You didn't win shit.
In fact, you lost because they're selling you dopamine in return for tax money that you could have actually used to be trained in and learn an actual sport.
And so the stories that are most powerful are the stories that acknowledge the evils and corruptions in the world and that you will be tempted and teach you how to play hide-and-go-seek or how to fight back against the tempters.
And those stories are almost universally attacked.
Whether you want to call them stories or myths or religion is not material at this point.
If you look at the example of Jesus, what is it that the Christians ask themselves on a daily basis often?
What would Jesus do?
Jesus is a template for moral behavior that is perfectly achievable by anyone with will and resolution.
He's not magic.
He's not saying, well, you know, in order to be good, you've got to walk up water and turn loaves into fishes.
That's how you've got to be moral.
No. He gives you very specific instructions on what to do, and it's perfectly achievable.
And this is one of the reasons why Christianity gave birth to the modern world.
It's actually Greco-Christian, I believe.
It's a philosophy plus Christianity because both are universal disciplines.
So the stories which teach you how to be a gymnast and put you through the exercises and give you the models and have you identify with the hero.
Those are the ones that actually allow you to become the hero.
One of mine, of course, was Howard Rourke.
Howard Rourke from Ayn Rand's novel, The Fountainhead.
Why is Ayn Rand's novel...
Novels, really. Why are they so despised and held in such contempt?
Because not only anti-communist and so on, but because it's practical play.
Those novels are practical moral play.
Now, the origin story of Howard Rourke is not particularly inspiring.
He just has this adamantine integrity for reasons that make there's no precedence.
He was an orphan and nobody knows his parents and he just has it.
Well, that's okay. I mean, it's similar to Jesus.
Jesus did not earn becoming the Son of God.
He didn't get the magic leotards or work out until he achieved it.
He just was. And that's not particularly material.
The origin story of Howard Rourke or John Galt and how they achieved their spectacular integrity is not particularly important because they serve as a template for the resisting of temptation.
They said, what would Howard Rourke do?
It's not nearly as powerful as what would Jesus do, but it has its utility in a complicated and complex world.
And I shudder to think how I would have handled the sexual temptations of my youth when I was offered fame and wealth in return for sex.
If I had not read The Fountainhead beforehand, you know, Howard Rourke helped quite a bit.
Howard Rourke helped quite a bit.
I mean, I had a bit of a superpower that Howard Rourke didn't because he was not considered to be particularly attractive, and I was a good-looking guy, scouted for modeling and so on.
I mean, I had that temptation, unfortunately.
It is, and it is unfortunate.
And I'm so glad I lost my hair.
It really, really helped me focus on internal qualities.
So the stories that teach you that train you in virtue that prepare you for the 10 second test where you say yes or no to either a dangled offer of threat or bribery in return for your soul the best stories and I'll be talking to Duke Pester this week about the book The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis about temptation and about evil because I've been thinking about a lot this week so I'm glad you came up with this question so Novels,
stories, used to be about training you up for morality.
As I've said before, I did a whole course on 18th and 19th century novels.
All of them are about training you into virtue, teaching you, street-proofing you, in a sense, teaching you how to recognize a narcissist, how to recognize an exploiter, how to recognize an abuser, how to avoid the bad and embrace the good.
And for men, it was about how to not get taken in by a pretty face and how to look squarely for virtue rather than Fertility signals that overwhelm your reason.
And those are all gone.
And it's not an accident that the fall, the slow fall of Christianity coincided with the rise of the moral novel.
And then, with the introduction of pretty alien elements to the West, you ended up with This moral emptiness or moral magic, which are two sides of the same coin.
Both say morality is impossible.
One because you don't have superpowers and the other because it doesn't exist.
And then into this squalid, decaying midst stride myself and many others.
Who will, once more, train you up on morality through bitter experience, through abstract reasoning.
We will train you up on morality, just as I was trained up on morality and I seek to pay it forward.
So art, at its best, It's about training you for the 10-second test.
And I read a lot of books about heroes when I was a kid.
I read Beowulf, I read Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Fountainhead, At the Shrugged, We the Living, Anthem.
I read some of Dickens' novels, have some fairly heroic people in them.
I read Dostoevsky, particularly, what is it, Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov.
And you read your anti-heroes, of course, Crime and Punishment, and all of that.
You get a rounded, bulging, vein-popping strength muscle called integrity.
Then when someone says, hey, can you just hold this 20-pound weight straight arm for 10 seconds?
Well, it's like, yeah, I've been working out morally for five years.
I got my temptations in my early 20s.
And holding out that 20-pound weight for 10 seconds was super easy, barely an inconvenience.
It wasn't hard. Now then, the last thing I'll say here is what happens then is once you can't be tempted, you must be destroyed.
Once you can't be tempted, you must be destroyed.
Or silenced. Or exiled.
If you can't be tempted.
So the temptations that happened in this show, I think the last one was probably six or seven years ago.
Offered a significant amount of money to build whatever I wanted.
From Saudi financing.
And, uh, no, sorry.
Sorry, it's not even tempted.
I'm not even tempted. And the warning shots that I got being hidden from search engines, being silenced, being pushed down in rankings, all of that stuff was like change or else.
Stop being good, stop telling the truth or else.
And then what you could consider the worst came to pass and my work of 10 or 15 years was vanished from Twitter or vanished from YouTube.
Yeah, it was a shock. Well, it wasn't a huge shock, but it was unpleasant.
And you adapt, you adjust.
And what's the alternative?
To just shut up?
When you have essential information for the world?
I mean, it's not really a practical alternative.
So that's what...
Novels are four. So if you want to corrupt a culture, the first thing you do is take over the publishing houses.
And I'll tell you. I'm telling you.
Listen to my novels. FDRURL.com forward slash almost.
FDRURL.com forward slash TGOA. They're free.
Great audiobook readings.
It's really good stuff.
It's amazing stuff.
It's great stuff.
And I can't even tell you how much hatred and hostility I received from the publishing world with regards to my books.
Hatred and hostility far out of proportion to any perceived flaws in the book.
Now, the books are good.
They may not be exactly to your taste, but they're about training people up morally.
The God of Atheists is about training people up morally.
Almost is about training people up.
My other novel Revolutions is about a violent revolutionary who has the choice between destruction and getting married and being a father.
I wrote that when I was 26.
I'm very angry at the world and it helped me to carve out the future that I now inhabit and thank God it did.
I wrote another novel called Just Poor, which was, what if you're great and you have a great mind, but you are destined to be immaterial, to be inconsequential, to be ignored, to be silenced?
What would you do in order to gain attention if you have important things to say, but nobody is listening?
It's a terrifying thought because you say, well, part of you says, well, if I have this essential message and nobody's listening, I just need to get louder and louder until people do.
It's dangerous though. That's dangerous.
And the amount of hatred and hostility that I got from the publishing world Was truly staggering.
In the same way that in the theater world, I went from the golden boy to the cursed, ugly stepchild in a matter of weeks, once people understood my political views.
So if you want to corrupt a culture, if you want to weaken people, if you want to allow for the spread of immorality and evil to flourish, you take over the centers of art.
And then you can keep actual hard-nosed moral training far away from the population and you can get them drugged with stupid fucking magical superhero movies that paralyze them because morality becomes impossible because there's no transition other than the accident of external circumstances whether it's Krypton or a radioactive spider it doesn't really matter.
It's not earned. It's inflicted.
Or you tell them that morality doesn't really exist.
It's all just a posture.
It's all nonsense, right? And I'm thinking of house of cards, things like that.
Either way, nobody becomes a gymnast.
Nobody trains up.
And everybody fails the 10-second test.
And nobody blocks the rise of your power.
So, that's my particular thoughts about stories, novels, books, poems.
What do you think? There was a lot in that that I hadn't really thought of myself, to be honest.
So, I am aware of the fact that novels used to have these great messages and great characters and, well, just a wholesome, like, educational quality to them, but what you said that the purpose of them was to prepare you for that 10 seconds where you need to, you know, hold that awesome, even sometimes crushing weight, I don't think I ever looked at it that way.
That's very, very interesting to hear.
Well, if you look at something like, even look at the Disney films, and you can compare something like Tangled, Which was made by a Christian.
I think it was the last Christian who was in charge of one of the movies.
Tangled's pretty wholesome.
And it's about training up for morality.
Yeah, there's magical powers and so on, but Flynn Rider doesn't have them.
And he's got to get over vanity, and he's got to confront his own shallowness.
And the woman, the girl, has to confront her own Addiction to a vicious and destructive mother image.
Mother knows best.
I love that movie as far as that goes.
Pretty damn wholesome. You compare that to something like Frozen 2, which is all anti-Western propaganda about the nobility of the natives and how evil whites just betrayed them and killed them.
It's all just garbage.
Dangerous. It was worse than garbage because at least garbage had utility at some point, right?
But it's all changed, and it's changed incredibly rapidly.
I mean, the seeds were there for a long time.
The communists call this the slow walk through the institutions.
But yeah, it's a whole different matter now.
Or if you look at the stories, Woody Allen was famous for these, where a man and a woman would meet, and they would then end up having sex the same day.
The same day.
And I mean, that's just, it's absolutely appalling.
It's incredibly decadent. It's incredibly destructive.
You know, telling women to live like men is a fundamental way of destroying the family because they can't and they shouldn't and they won't end up being able to anyway.
To say that hundreds, well, millions of years of evolution can all be undone without consequences.
Well, I mean, that's the fundamental difference between conservatives and Liberals, right?
The conservatives say, well, things are here for a reason, and we should probably examine them in great detail before we just toast them, whereas the liberals are like, you know, everything that's passed, everything that evolved is prejudice.
Like, all the different races have all tried living together in the past, and, you know, there are challenges, and we can either examine and address those challenges, or we can just say, well, any of those challenges are just racism, and everyone's an evil person who blah blah blah, right?
So, yeah, it is a big and significant challenge.
And, you know, the people who are saying, let's get back the organs of culture, yeah, there's real value in that.
I mean, it's probably too late, but it's certainly worth a shot.
And that's why I'm back to reading my novels.
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean...
That sort of ties into my secondary concern because I am having this thought recently, especially, that maybe I really can give something to people who would like to listen to me.
me, maybe I can give something incredible and this is the temptation that you were talking about, the temptation maybe I can give something incredible and this is the temptation that you were talking about, the temptation of inaction, of not really even trying, which I think Well, you're not guilty of it if you've just heard about it now, right?
No, I mean that.
But it's not like I'm in myself, if that makes any sense.
So, what I sort of demon-sterry from the writing scene of absolute just ostracization of Endless amounts and amounts.
What if I'm not given like a 10-pound weight, but a 1,000 pounds weight?
There is no way a human can withstand that amount of pressure, you know?
Well, now we may be talking about the story of Jordan Peterson, but anyway, go on.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I think you may be getting on to something, right?
He tried to bear an enormous pressure and he cracked.
He shattered. Well, I mean, it wasn't just the media.
I mean, his wife was apparently dying of cancer, and then she ended up surviving.
So there was a lot that was going on.
I think his daughter's marriage was cracked up, and they had a new kid, and it was a whole bunch of stuff.
Oh, yeah. I don't want to throw the guy under the bus because, I mean, that's a hell of a lot to be dealing with, and I do have my sympathies for him.
But, yeah, maybe it was.
Maybe it was a thousand-pound weight for sure.
Yeah, exactly. And I'm not even sure if this is something that is sort of desirable or even worthwhile to attempt.
At the beginning of the call I mentioned that this feels very much like a throwback to my own childhood, that I'm putting myself into a situation where I know I would be probably ostracized or Even worse if I put works out there that have real moral integrity and real moral lessons to them,
just like you said, that these stories and these people who say that things are here for a reason, that there is a natural order to everything, that there is A lesson to be learned and something that even like, I don't know, ridiculous example, but what came to mind is that even a homeless vagrant can become a moral person eventually throughout a series of transformative experiences that they do get attacked.
They do get attacked.
And that's a real concern for me, I think.
Okay, but what happens if the bad guys win?
What happens to your life?
That's going to be even worse, isn't it?
Well, I mean, that's the question. It won't be worse for some people.
You know, there are some people who miss Stalin.
Right? So it won't be worse for some people.
It might be worse for you.
There would be no temptation if it wasn't better for some people, right?
Exactly. But I think it would definitely be worse for me, and I'm probably painting the devil on the walls here, so to speak, but I really don't want to go to war right now.
And if the people who are in charge right now and who are in charge of the great cultural narratives win, it's going to be war.
Well, it may be headed towards there anyways, but if it is, then...
I don't know. It's just a difficult question.
And I'm also wondering about whether it is a desire to take refuge back in my childhood by...
Running in the exact same direction I am coming from and trying to cast off.
So that's another issue as well for me.
Listen, I don't have any magical answers, of course, for any of that.
But, I mean, under communism, I'm dead, right?
Yeah. I'm sorry, but I think pretty much all of the server is dead under communism.
Well, you know, if you're listening to this, I mean, it's, you know, you're kind of in for a penny, in for a pound, right?
Yeah, correct, correct.
Yeah, I mean, so I don't know if it's a repeat of your childhood to fight or to avoid fighting, because if you end up in your childhood, if you were abused or neglected or aggressed against in your childhood, well, maybe it is a repeat of your childhood not to fight so that you end up in that same situation.
That is true. I haven't really looked at it that way.
You know, something else also stuck out to me, just to backtrack a little bit, when you said that the devil tempts you with an action, there is like four lines near somewhere in my city.
That I sometimes pass by and see and it goes something like, now this is a poor translation, but it goes something like, why should I be honest?
They will throw me under the bus anyways.
Why should I be dishonest?
They will throw me under the bus anyways.
Right, right.
Yeah, that's a matter of personal conscience.
I can't obviously tell people do this or don't do that.
I'm satisfied with what I did for 15 years.
And as you know, I've taken a bit of a different path lately.
But no, I'm satisfied with what I did.
And, you know, I don't really think I could have done more.
And so from that standpoint...
That's a matter of personal conscience for everyone.
If I hadn't done it, I wouldn't have the information that I have now.
And so I can't tell you, of course, right?
I know you're not even asking me to.
I'm just being sort of really clear about it.
I can't tell you how much risk to take.
But I can tell you that if nobody takes any risks, we're all doomed.
That's exactly correct.
Yeah, that's for sure. And I think you have taken great risks, especially in the last, I don't know, a couple of months since you've been booted off YouTube.
And I think you have done great work with these great risks.
I mean, sometimes your calling shows are like terrorizing.
Yeah. Yeah.
And it's a great risk to take these on, I think.
And for me, personally, I don't think I am satisfied with the number of risks I'm taking.
And maybe that's why I'm taking this call in as well.
Because it was like a very, very old topic that has been put off either by me or the schedule.
But today I was like, no, I am going to try.
And it seems the opportunity has arrived.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean, no action is a choice.
And it is a choice for a certainty of the future.
And deferring it to everyone else, clearly that's not universalizable.
I mean, if everyone says, well, somebody else will fight the bad guys, well, that's not universalizable, right?
And it's kind of parasitical, right?
Because we only have...
The civilizations that we have because people didn't wait for everyone else to make a better world, right?
So I do think it is something that we need to be aware of.
But again, how much or in what manner people should fight and how much is too much and so on, right?
That's... That's not a decision that can be made for someone else.
I think some action is necessary, but how much is, you know, like, I mean, if it ends up Jordan Peterson was like a shooting star, right?
Burned incredibly brightly. And where he's going to go from here is kind of hard to say, right?
And he and his daughter Michaela in a recent show...
That I saw, you know, he's basically saying, yeah, well, maybe you can just live as I say, not as I do, because it clearly didn't work out that well for me.
I'm literally paraphrasing here, but there is, of course, that concern.
And he had a couple of years, right, of, I mean, truly intense and crazy levels of fame and publicity and so on.
And... Are you a tortoise or are you a hare?
I mean, you know, both of them have value and both of them are valid.
And, you know, it's hard.
You can't really say to other people what levels of risk should you take.
I think he may have overworked.
He may have fallen into the trap of too much.
And it's important not to do that, especially if you're a young man and you want to be around for a while.
I think that's pretty important.
So, yeah, that's my thought.
I think you're correct in your analysis in saying that he basically used up too much of his power trying to help too many people.
He was a brightly burning star, as you put it.
Another question which I have in mind related to this, and this is going back to the abstract angle a little bit, Is the idea of can even writing or stories change the fabric of society so much, especially now that we are at this stage?
It's something I've also been thinking of.
Because you are right about the action or inaction part.
That one everyone has to decide for.
But, you know, it's like writing changes people gradually.
Reading changes people gradually.
People change gradually, generally.
So it's not like, as you said in the beginning, there is no magic wand to, like, turn Peter Parker from an incredibly shy person into...
This outgoing beast who obliterates every single bad guy in his way, but I'm just wondering if that really is the best someone could be doing right now.
Well, I guess the question then comes down to, are we in repair mode or are we in rescue mode?
That's a very sort of important question about that, right?
I'm not going to give you my answer because it's important that everyone think for themselves, obviously, right?
So, repair mode is when you can still land the plane safely.
It may not be a pretty landing, but you can still land the plane.
Escape mode is just get your fucking parachute and get out, right?
And, I mean, because I'm writing about the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler in my novel, almost, I mean, this has been on my mind, right?
So it's a tipping point. Like, at what point do people say...
Because free travel outside of Germany was perfectly allowed up until World War II. You could leave at any time.
So there were people who fought against the rise of National Socialism in Germany.
And then, at some point...
Fighting against it became suicidal, right?
And then they just had to get out. So, whether you are, you know, half the Jews were obliterated in the Holocaust, right?
Half the world's Jews. So, at some point, it's not a repair operation, it's a rescue, or it's an escape operation.
So, are we able to turn it around and Or is it about helping smart people get to places of safety to hold on to civilization until the current system wrecks itself?
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
It could be both. But it's important to keep your eye on that tipping point.
But either way, it's no matter which one you attempt, even if you don't know which one is attempting, it definitely sounds like both are worth giving a try.
Yeah, so you can write novels about people who can fix society, and you can write novels about how society can't be fixed, which is Atlas Shrokes, right?
So in the sort of big three novels of Ayn Rand, We the Living, The Good Guys Lose, The Fountainhead, It's a Draw, and Atlas Shrugged, they win.
But in Atlas Shrugged, they win by leaving.
Just as she left Russia.
She didn't stay in Russia, Solzhenitsyn-style, and try and fix Russia.
Under communism, she left.
And in Atlas Shrugged, they leave.
They've got Galt's Gulch.
They leave. They refuse to participate.
They let the system, it's accelerationism, right?
Let the system collapse and rebuild.
And so you can write novels and enormously help people with an absolute certainty that the existing system cannot be saved.
But the people, people can, right?
The collective can't be saved, the individuals can.
And just as there were people who were writing warning, not just Jews, of course, but homosexuals and free thinkers and libertarians and all of that, to get out of the totalitarian nations.
And through that, people survived and kept the flame.
So sometimes it's about fighting.
And sometimes it's about running like hell.
And that's war too, right?
He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.
Yeah, I think that is an incredibly valuable insight.
I didn't really think of it in this way up until now.
But I feel like that this conversation has clarified a lot of things, and I'm not sure what else to say, so...
No, listen, that's fine.
That's usually when we have...
Look, I've just given you quite the cannon fodder of insights.
It's probably the wrong... Cannon fire!
Probably not cannon fodder, but cannon fire of insights.
So, yeah, mull it over.
And the Aristotelian mean...
Of courage is so, so important to consider.
Courage is a balancing act.
So if you have but a bayonet and there's a machine gun nest, you don't charge.
You retreat. You can't win.
Wars, of course, as Churchill famously said about Dunkirk, wars are not won by successful evacuations, except it kind of was, because if they hadn't evacuated everyone from Dunkirk, they wouldn't have had enough people for D-Day.
So knowing when to stand your ground, knowing when to attack, and knowing when to retreat is very important.
If you are in a situation where retreat is necessary, but you attack, you are not being courageous, you are being foolhardy.
Or as the old saying goes, angels...
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
And if, on the other hand, you can stand your ground but you give way, then you are suffering from the vice of cowardice.
If you only stand your ground when you could attack, then you are also suffering from the vice of cowardice.
So it's complex.
And because of its very complexity, that's why we need these kinds of stories.
That's why we need complex and deep stories.
So it's an old cliche that a friend of mine and I talked about like 30 years ago, right?
So this is an old cliche from World War I movies.
It always seems to be World War I movies.
So in World War I movies, there's always the fresh-faced, boyish, cheek-can't-even-bother-to-shave, doesn't even need to, young boy who's incredibly enthusiastic and gung-ho.
And there's another, a friend of his, a hard-bitten, be-cautious, keep-your-head-down, arms-in-the-man kind of soldier from a play that I read, gosh, in English.
Literature class at university probably, well, well over 30 years ago.
Where he's like, yeah, I'm a mercenary, so my job is to survive.
My job is not to fight to the death, right?
And so there's these two characters in the First World War movies, the fresh-faced kid.
And the fresh-faced kid believes everything and is enthusiastic and believes he's going to win.
It's all going to be over by Christmas.
And he goes over the trench wall and he just gets shot to shit.
And yet the other guy who runs and ducks and hides and is cautious and, well, he lives.
He lives. And that's very much a cliché.
And that is to show that attack, like the truth, is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
You have to weigh. It's out of war stuff, right?
You have to weigh where your strengths are, where your enemy's weaknesses are.
You have to Know when to hold them, as the old song goes, right?
And that's an important virtue to have.
It's an important virtue to have because the most naive and trusting and eager of the First World War soldiers were the ones who died the most and the ones who were more...
I mean, there's a reason why the cynicism of F. Scott Fitzgerald Davos was so popular in the 20s because only the cynical people survived the fucking First World War.
If you look at the 19th century, it's all, you know, heroes and generals and guys on white horses riding up a hill towards the enemy with a sword and all that, and all this enthusiasm for patriotism and nationalism and even war, because it had been so distant for so many years from most of Western Europe, sort of Franco-Prussian war accepted.
And in the 1920s, you get...
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, later on you get John Steinbeck, you get a lot of incredibly cynical writers.
Why? Because the cynics survived the First World War and the eager, enthusiastic, to some degree, mindless patriots didn't.
And I say this with all due respect to those dead more than a century at this point, but they were propagandized into it, they were trained up into the Obedience and a glorification of war, just as I was as a child trained up into obedience and a glorification of war.
I remember very distinctly as a very little child screaming forward for St.
George and my love and to some degree fetishization and addiction to the Second World War is one of the reasons I had to pound out the novel Almost, which is about that in particular.
And so learning the difference between courage and foolhardiness is very, very important.
Why is it that anti-Americanism flourished so much in the 1960s?
Well, part of it, of course, was communist propaganda and so on, but why did it take such a florid route?
Because, because, because, because the patriots all got killed in the Second World War.
And patriotism versus cynicism are aspects of personality that, like all aspects of personality, have genetic bases.
So the most patriotic, the most eager, the most positive, the least cynical, the most trusting, the most sunny, in a sense, the Ward Cleavers versus the Lenny Bruces.
All those people just got shot to shit in the Second World War.
They were in the front rather than lingering in the rear.
How much can you turn around these genetics?
I don't know. War shapes more than just the soul of the nation.
Shapes the body of the nation.
And where are we now?
So it's, I mean, again, I'm not going to answer the question because it's a moving target and it's everybody's personal conscience to examine it.
And there is no answer for the question that is truly objective, at least at the moment.
There may be at some point in the future, it probably will be, but right now, it's a matter of weighing personal risks.
It's like me saying to you, how much should you exercise?
What should you eat? Well, I don't know.
I mean, there's stuff that's bad, there's stuff that's good, but it's very much a personal decision based upon life, age, circumstances, initial health, and so on, right?
So there's lots of things that you can do, even if the system is going to completely fail, collapse, and turn totalitarian, there's a lot that you can do to help the world through art, even if nothing that you write can change anything in time to prevent disaster.
Well, okay. If you know the building can't stand, you can at least rush from room to room telling people to get the fuck out, right?
Even if you can't stand there, like the Hulk can keep it up, right?
So anyway, that's I think enough to mull over.
I really, really appreciate the question.
Thank you so much. To everyone for dropping by, for listening, for absorbing.
I love these conversations so much, I can't even tell you.
And I truly love you guys for keeping this going in these incredibly difficult and challenging times.
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So thanks everyone so much. Lots of love from up here.
Take care.
We'll talk to you soon.
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