Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Dec. 8, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:55:10

Death After God: Stefan Molyneux & Dr. Duke Pesta

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	I'm Dr. Duke and I'm really pleased to be joined by Stefan Molyneux, We've had a lot of great conversations in the past, Stefan.
	Me introducing you is kind of like a little brother introducing a big brother.
	They all know who you are. More of them probably don't know who I am.
	But for those who don't know, you're a philosopher.
	You're probably the foremost, most famous philosopher and the most...
	The greatest defender of philosophy in the modern world.
	That's how I like to describe you when I talk to my friends.
	You're somebody who is... Well, of course, though, to be fair, for some people, popularity equals crassness and superficiality.
	So if you all want to think of me as the Justin Bieber of philosophy, that's totally fine.
	Reach is important.
	But yeah, I would certainly say at three quarters of a billion views and downloads, we've dropped a few truth bombs on the planet over the years.
	Well, count me a Belieber.
	Yeah. Well, we're going to have an interesting conversation today because this is, I think, one of those questions that people started following you for, these big how and why questions.
	And the question is this. Has America finally joined the ranks of Europe and the rest of the Western world?
	Are we now post-Christian America?
	And for a long time, the United States was that last holder on, wasn't it, to a serious belief in religion, one that wasn't just topical or cultural or sociological.
	But now it seems, Meg, have we reached the point where America, too, has gone post-Christian, like the rest of the Western world?
	And what does it mean? What does it mean for the rest of the world if that is true?
	What are your opening thoughts on that?
	My opening thoughts is a question.
	Let me ask you this, because this has been kind of rolling around in my brain like a seesawing bowling ball these days.
	So when you set out on your intellectual career to become a professor, to teach children the joys of literature, how Well, have you achieved, and whether it's under your control or not, another issue, but just in terms of relative to what you wanted, what have you achieved and what's the gap, if any, between those things?
	Well, I'll be very honest with you with this.
	I became a professor because I, as an undergraduate, I was the first person in my family to go to college, right?
	And it often happens with a first-generation college kid.
	They go all the way, right?
	They get carried away with it.
	They find there things they could find in the greater world, but they don't ever get there because they see the apogee of being a PhD and entering and remaining in college.
	So I went, like a lot of kids did, first-generation kids, I went all the way.
	But I've got to tell you, I came from a very poor family.
	My dad died when we were very young.
	My mom was working 50 hours a week.
	We had three boys. We didn't have a lot.
	In fact, my mom somehow found a way to help us to go to Catholic schools, which is probably the saving grace of my life, religion aside.
	The quality of education I got in a Catholic school 35, 40 years ago vastly superior to what I was even getting in the public schools before I transferred over.
	So that was perhaps the single important thing that happened to me as a young person, that we were able to do that in spite of the lack of money.
	And I got to college.
	I fell in love with – I was a business major.
	I figured I got to make money. I'm not going to be poor ever again.
	I'm going to go out there. I'm taking all these economics classes.
	I'm getting – I shall serve the god of mammon.
	Exactly. So I'm getting C's in economics because I just didn't care.
	I mean, I admire – I mean, to be economically ignorant is a danger, as our culture is finding out.
	But it wasn't in my mind.
	I mean, mathematics, going through all of that analysis to come up with two square times pi, eh, it left me cold.
	I was an idea guy.
	And I found in the great books of Western culture, I found a reason for things.
	The great books, even the pagan Greek and Roman books, the Judeo-Christian books moving forward, fell in love with them.
	By the end of my sophomore year, I was taking three English classes.
	I was taking Roman history, I was taking Russian literature, and I was taking one business class.
	I said enough, right? So to me, being a professor, which doesn't pay a lot of money, as you know, I mean, the average college professor in the humanities makes less than a high school teacher by the time their careers.
	By the time we get to the retirement period, the public school teacher will make more than I do and will have a much better retirement than I am.
	And much lower debt. And much lower debt.
	So for me, I'm wandering a little bit, but for me, The beauty of being able to teach that to other people is why I did it.
	It opened my eyes.
	It was a way of fighting back against materialism.
	It was a way of overcoming the creeping socialism that's about to swallow us up, it seems.
	This idea that there is only one world, only three dimensions, five senses, a world that never appealed to me.
	Religion, of course, plays a big role in that.
	But the great stories of Western culture is where I became religious, if I can phrase it that way.
	Religion didn't lead me to the classics.
	The classics taught me to recognize a reality greater than the one that we can perceive with our material senses.
	And so in terms of success, I will say this.
	The one thing that's kept me in the classroom after all these years, I started college 35 years ago this year as an undergraduate, 35 years, and I've never spent one semester out of it since.
	As a student and then as a teacher, that's why we're so mistaken, professors, is we never have to account for a payroll.
	We never have to make sure somebody else is getting health insurance.
	We don't have to do any of that stuff.
	We're like children. So for me, I will say this, that I have many times thought to leave it, and I did not because I've been relatively successful.
	You give me 75, 120, between 75 and 120 kids each semester.
	And these are kids who are completely materialist kids.
	These are kids who are completely awash in the here and now.
	They've lost their ability to think critically.
	They've not been given much of an education by the time they get to college.
	And I have a pretty good track record.
	I would say that every semester of that 75 to 120 kids, I can wake up 35 of them.
	I can wake up 40 of them.
	And that's a great number for me.
	It's why they keep taking my classes.
	It's why at the universities – I taught at seven universities.
	With my worldview, you don't stay very long at one place.
	But the reason I keep getting back in the business is because there is a huge resource of kids.
	That keep defending my classes, keep defending me from the bogus charges the university wants to level against me.
	And oftentimes these are very liberal kids who are honest enough to say things to me like, well, I don't agree with you all the time, but I am so pleased to be able to hear the other side of things.
	No one ever tells these kids the other side of things.
	There's at least two sides to every story.
	You want to romanticize socialism?
	Colleges can do that, but no one, I mean, no one's telling them anymore what the other historical consequence of socialism is.
	So for me, I've said this to you on earlier programs you and I have done, I now find it to be missionary work in a sense, and not just the idea that I'm trying to waken them up to God.
	I mean, I think in my worldview, my worldview only makes sense is at the end of it there's an intelligent creator.
	That makes sense any other way.
	But I'm not trying to get them that far.
	I mean that's like teaching these kids how to speed surf when they're barely learning how to crawl.
	I just want to open their eyes to the lies, if I may, of pure materialists and pure rationalists, the calculated dishonesty of that kind of a worldview to anybody who's lived anything like a reflexive life.
	Much of what you're told from that perspective is just so transparently false.
	But I've been very successful at it and it keeps me going.
	It's heartbreaking work in the sense that there's almost nobody who thinks like me.
	There's almost nobody I can have a conversation with at the university level.
	But when I go into the classroom and I close the door for an hour, hour and a half, twice, two or three times a week, I can connect with those kids and show them something else.
	But you despair about that.
	That's 50 kids a year in a 13,000-seat university who maybe you can move a little bit.
	That's kind of what it is.
	And the big picture stuff – look, the individual contributions are fantastic and it's a ripple effect.
	It's a butterfly effect and all of that.
	But I actually first saw you doing a very passionate and powerful presentation.
	I've seen it both in person and online – Against Common Core and, of course, against secular humanism, against materialism, against socialism.
	What were you expecting in terms of the stuff that you have done outside of the Joy of Shakespeare and Chaucer and so on?
	How has that played out relative to what you wanted or what you thought you could affect in the public square?
	It's a complete failure. I mean, in the sense that I've almost 1,000 talks on Common Core and the rise of federal education, 48 states, 1,000 talks over five years.
	I've been testified before 20 different state legislatures.
	I've done radio programs from China to Mexico and from England to Australia on this issue.
	And we've lost every battle.
	The good thing for me is that being a Christian, being awakened to this through reading a lot of Christian literature, I knew that you're never going to fix materialism.
	I went into this knowing what Christ tells me in the Gospels is success for somebody like me is not measured in what happens here, it's measured in what happens next.
	So I never, I never felt, I never took myself too seriously.
	Even when I was out there and I was getting a lot of attention for the Common Core stuff, I knew even then that most of it wasn't gonna go anywhere.
	In fact, almost all of my activism outside of the university has been a complete and utter failure.
	Everything we warned about 10 years ago is here.
	Everything we talked to, every Catholic, Roman Catholic bishop I talked to, trying to get them to get it out of the Catholic schools, and they looked at me like I was crazy, now they destroyed the Catholic schools with this stuff.
	Every public school teacher I talked about, about what this is going to mean for you as a teacher, they've been completely shut down for what they're able to do.
	It's all here. And I feel a little bit like...
	Cassandra in the Iliad, right?
	Remember Cassandra, she was the prophetess.
	She was given the gift of prophecy.
	She could tell everybody the truth, but she was also cursed by no one would listen.
	So that when it comes to public education, when it comes to that kind of stuff, I've been right all along with it.
	I have no modesty about that whatsoever.
	I can't think of a single thing I was wrong about, and yet it's here.
	And everybody who didn't believe me then, they will not acknowledge, they will not acknowledge that we said it was coming.
	It's staggering when you look at human beings' ability to, materialist, rationalist human beings, their inability to recognize or even to pretend to recognize what they've been told when they've been told it.
	It's on us now, it's here now, and they'll deny to the nth degree that this had anything to do with what we said before.
	Well, and they are people who probably have great praise for science and criticize religion as being too dogmatic and not taking into account facts and reality and material truths and physics and so on.
	And these people are the same people who say that religion is dogmatic when they experience a fact counter.
	To their propaganda, it's like you can see them willing it into non-existence in a reflexive manner.
	And in fact, counter-narratives tend to reinforce the lies that they already believe.
	So, this is a big question, right?
	This is really, really core to what I think we should talk about today, which is, you know, obviously a negotiation.
	So, why do it?
	You say for the afterlife or for heaven.
	Were you expecting to succeed and then have accommodated with a relative failure?
	And the failure is not of you. You put out Herculean efforts in this round.
	The failure is, of course, you can lead a horse to water, blah, blah, blah.
	You can't make him drink. So the fault is not in you.
	The fault is not in the stars.
	The fault is in the people who have listened and chose to remain ignorant.
	But when you started this, was it with the goal of achieving a particular end which you didn't?
	Or it's like, I just want to go on record.
	I want to ease my conscience.
	I don't want to have any regret that I could have done more.
	And didn't? I honestly came to...
	When I was struggling really hard to be a business major, and I was doing it because I thought that's what the world wanted, that's what the world needed.
	I had to... If I was going to have a family one day, it was going to be a different kind of family.
	If I was going to, you know, go out into the world, I wasn't going to live the life that I had lived before, a life of relative poverty, so to speak.
	I mean, we never slept out of the street, we never starved to death, but, you know, in the material culture of America, you want better for yourself.
	So, for me, it wasn't that.
	I... Honestly, I'll tell you what it was.
	By the time I got to my master's degree, I graduated from about middle way as a sophomore in college when all this changed for me.
	I was taking all the business courses, but I was really reveling in all the humanities courses.
	And I remember writing an exam for a professor.
	And I was doing an essay exam, those little blue books that they used to give you.
	Wait, wait, sorry. You're giving me flashbacks here.
	Just a moment. I need to breathe into a paper bag or something.
	It's going to give me bad dreams.
	I think I'm prepared for – okay, go ahead.
	I mean I was writing this essay and it was completely 100 percent opposed to what I actually thought.
	And I didn't even realize I was doing it.
	I mean, the more I sat in a college classroom, the more I was just becoming them.
	And I'm writing this, and I'm thinking to myself, this is complete bullshit.
	I don't believe any of this stuff.
	And that's the moment that my eyes opened, and I recognized by the time...
	I dropped the business, I became an English major, I started taking the really hardcore...
	Classical books. This is the late 1980s, before you had identity politics classes, before – even when you had liberal professors, they were oftentimes teaching conservative books, right?
	I mean, really remarkable.
	I mean, these were liberal professors when they were outside of the classroom, but they loved Milton as much as I did, even if they weren't Christians, or they loved Dante as much as I did.
	… were in the university, but weren't the university.
	That's right. That's a great way to phrase it.
	And so for me, what happened was I decided at that point, by the time I got into my master's degree two years later, what I really wanted to do was save the West.
	I wanted to save these ideas.
	I knew I couldn't do it alone.
	I knew I wouldn't get to do it alone, but I wanted to make the case why you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, that you are not recognizing this radical swing to the left.
	You are getting rid of many of the books that created The freedoms we have now.
	That, you know, you're seeing that we're reaping this terribly, terribly reaping this now.
	This idea that we've taught for two generations, we've taught young school kids that America is only a racist country, that there is no – that the Constitution was written for white men, that there is no progress, that America is a wicked, evil culture.
	They believe it now.
	Right? And I saw that.
	I knew that's where we were going to end up.
	Ten years ago, I said this.
	Wait a minute, guys. If you pull down all the Confederate flags, For what you think is a good reason, I get it, that that's associated with slavery, but if that's all that flag means is slavery and nothing else, then you're gonna have to pull down the American flag too, because it flew over slave states a lot longer than the Confederate flag did.
	And that's the attitude, right?
	I tell my university kids all the time, I asked them just the other day, these are juniors and seniors fit to graduate, giving me that same speech now.
	This is all done for white men, these books are all just white privilege, this is, I ask them the question, Why?
	If Western culture is what your teachers tell you it is, evil, homophobic, bigoted, irredeemable, how come human rights, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights… End of slavery.
	Right. How did that happen here?
	Why is it that black and brown skin people… If we're as bad as you say we are, why are they dying to get here?
	And I had one smart-ass kid say to me just the other day, well, the way we market ourselves is this incredibly exceptional culture.
	They get here and they're disappointed.
	I said, how disappointed?
	Do they ever go back?
	Well, no. I said, do they ever get here?
	I mean, because you're the one, I said to the kid, you're the one who are underestimating black and brown-skinned people.
	You're basically saying that once they get here, they're too stupid to see how much we hate them.
	Too stupid to realize that they had it better in Mexico.
	He didn't know what to say.
	Yeah, Western countries statistically don't even show up in the top 20 of most racist countries by any objective measure.
	But this is something that people...
	I always try to reduce things to a personal level because people understand things, abstract things, at a much more personal level, and it's really, really valid.
	I mean, morality, it's great to have in the abstract, but you've actually got to do something with it in your life.
	And if anyone is out there, listen to this, right?
	If you've ever been in a verbally abusive relationship, You will understand exactly what's happening with colleges and the media in America.
	So in a verbally abusive relationship, which is an abusive relationship, in order to exploit you, they have to break down your sense of pride, your sense of self-esteem, your sense of value, your sense of achievements, and that way you end up demoralized Not liking yourself and then you're open for exploitation.
	In other words, if you can convince someone who's got money that their money was stolen and it was on the black market or it was profits from blood diamonds or genocide or something like that, then they're a lot less likely to fight hard to hold on to it because they feel guilty and bad.
	This is the way that people in abusive marriages and relationships, they get exploited because nothing they do is good.
	Every achievement they have is unearned, and they owe everyone else everything, and that's how they get plundered and exploited.
	The American population, the Western population as a whole, are the victims of verbally abusive relationships coming out of the media where everything you do is wrong.
	Everything you have was stolen.
	Everything that you own was pillaged and you can't ever do anything right.
	It's simple, straight up verbal abuse, except, you know, that the world's Homeless shelter.
	So the world's abuse shelter used to be America, and now there's not that many places left to go to get out of these verbally abusive relationships.
	Because you look in the past, right? The verbally abusive relationship of slavery.
	You're nothing. You're a piece of property.
	The verbally abusive relationship of being a serf.
	You're nothing. You're just like a piece of livestock.
	You should be bought and sold with the land.
	You have no value. All of this predation requires on the destruction of people's sense of pride and value.
	And when you go around doing that, oh yeah, you'll get a couple of things.
	Number one, you'll be able to exploit people in the short term, but you get some Lorena Barbit blowback.
	It's kind of an older reference for the woman who hacked off her husband's penis because she claims he abused her for many years.
	So you'll get that kind of blowback.
	And then the demoralized people will say, oh gosh, well if me having anything, if me creating anything is bad, is immoral, is evil, I just exploit, I guess I'll stop doing that, and then you kill the goose that lays the golden egg and things get pretty bad, you know, late Roman Empire style quickly.
	Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
	I think that's a brilliant way of phrasing it.
	You and I had a conversation probably five years ago already about culture.
	One of the first ones we did was cultural Marxism.
	And we were sort of explaining this as it was unfolding.
	They'd already had deep roots.
	But now you're seeing five years later the triumph, right?
	I do think the premise of our conversation is right.
	We've crossed a boundary now.
	What happened in the last few years, really since the election of Donald Trump, which is perhaps the last one great hope of staving off some of this.
	Whatever you say about Trump, he took on those bogeymen.
	He said he – just MAGA, just the way that MAGA drives them crazy.
	A stupid little red hat with Make America Great Again just makes them go apoplectic because he's simply pointing back to the fact that undoubtedly Western culture is remarkable.
	I don't think there's a culture – I mean you study history.
	I don't think there's a single culture in the history of the world anywhere in the world that is as self-loathing as this one is.
	And the irony about that to me is there's also never been a culture in the history of the world that's accomplished as much as we have.
	I mean, it's almost like a complete disproportion, a dereliction of reality.
	The greater the achievements of Western culture, the more we have to despise this.
	My mistake is... No, but it's called leveling.
	Leveling, it is. It's a very, very clear psychological phenomenon, right?
	Where if your brother is doing better than you are, then you have a great temptation.
	It's a really devilish temptation.
	Now, it is both a stimulant and a temptation.
	If your brother's doing better than you are, maybe he makes more money, he's better educated, got a nicer family, better...
	Whatever it is, right? So you have two choices.
	Well, I guess you have three. One, you can just live with it, which very few people do because it kind of eats away at us Cain and Abel style, right?
	The second is you can say, wow, if he can do it, boy, oh boy, I can do it too and I'm going to get out there and I'm going to go to night school and I'm going to take risks and I'm going to sit at his knee and learn his wisdom, which, you know, a certain percentage, which will probably remain in the single digits, decide to do. And then, of course, your third choice, which is the really devilish choice, is I'm just going to pull him down.
	I'm just... Now, for other cultures, I mean, the legacy of the West is glorious.
	And I say this, you know, I grew up in the West, but I try to, you know, this is the Voltaire argument, right?
	Like, what if you were just a space alien or, you know, he used, of course, somebody from the New World and he found...
	This is the way he pointed out some of the absurdities, as you know, in French society, was to...
	Pretend to be somebody from the New World, like an indigenous population in North America, coming over and trying to understand French society.
	So just coming in from outside, from Alpha Centauri, from Betelgeuse, where you come in and you say, okay, you guys invented the zero.
	Yeah, that's pretty cool. This is a telescope.
	That's pretty cool. Okay, so what do you guys got?
	Oh, okay, so you've got philosophy.
	Yeah, that's pretty good.
	That's pretty important. You have universal rights, so not an in-group tribal preference for morality, but a universal morality.
	Not thou shalt not kill thy fellow tribal members, but thou shalt not kill as a universal morality.
	Well, that's pretty good.
	Okay, so really cool architecture, fantastic art.
	Universal human rights, emancipation of women, you are the culture that single-handedly ended slavery around the world, including the fact that England was paying the debt off for 150, finally finished paying off the debt for slavery in the 1980s.
	That's pretty good. And, oh, you invented the free market pretty much in its modern form.
	Modern science, well, that's pretty important.
	Modern medicine, facts, evidence, double-blind controlled studies, well, that's pretty good.
	Boom, boom, boom, right? So, you know, and I admire the culture that I grew up in.
	I can't say that I'm proud of it like it was me.
	I'm trying to add to it in my own way, as I think everyone should.
	But I can't imagine what it's like to come from another culture and say, look at this culture and say, okay, so what did we do?
	Okay, well, it's bright burning.
	The Muslim slave trade was 20 times that of the North American slave trade and still goes on in some countries.
	And again, you can look at the dark spots of the West and compare it with the light spots of other cultures, which there definitely are dark spots in the West and light spots and wonderful spots in other cultures, other civilizations, other religions.
	But in aggregate, What is the world doing when looking at the glories of the West?
	Are they saying, wow, what one man can do, another man can do.
	What one woman can do, another woman can do.
	Let us try to surmount it.
	Wouldn't it be wonderful? Hey, I'm happy if some other culture decides to surmount the West and gives me jetpacks from wherever.
	That's wonderful. I'd love it if somebody else built a passenger spaceship to Mars so I could bounce around weighing 60 pounds.
	That would be fantastic. But in general, and of course the communist culture being so destructive, they can't compete with the productivity of capitalism.
	censorship cannot compete with the excellence of free speech and the mainstream media can't compete with you and i and we know that because you know you and i talking heads tiny budgets i was regularly pulling more viewers than national broadcasters in many western countries until right until they were like oh yeah but but he is a nazi so eliminate him until you go back until the great reset you are greatly reset we can we can go get get that ad revenue because people don't understand mainstream media talking about us
	it's like coke talking about pepsi if pepsi is really successful and cool and moral but um so rather than say let us take and extend and further beautify and universalize the principles that western philosophy and culture and economics and science have generated let's overleap them let's take that as a challenge What they've done is they've got old Tonya Harding on us, right?
	Which is, if you can't compete, well, just take a bat to your opponent's legs and then consider yourself the victor.
	Just before we got on the air, I just happened to see this.
	It makes your point perfectly.
	I think it's like the blazes got the story right now.
	A Chinese sociologist today said that before it's all said and done, we Chinese, 1.4 billion Chinese, who rise in the morning and urinate, who go to bed at night and defecate, who live all day long eating and sleeping and thinking, we will drive the United States to death.
	That's it, right? We will – 1.4 billion of us will drive you to death.
	Why? And what is the – where would China be right now without all that stolen Western technology?
	I mean we'd still be dealing with a third world country.
	China hasn't invented technology.
	China has stolen it in most cases.
	It wasn't true of the ancient world.
	Well, the same thing was true – the same thing was true of the communist countries.
	That's exactly right. I mean just look at the Soviets with the bombs through the Rosenbergs, right?
	I mean they just – I remember reading a book many years ago, East minus West equals zero, which is you just look at the communist countries, all they did was espionage and pillage and industrial spying and so on to get any kind of productivity until they just couldn't anymore.
	And it's one of the things – this is – speaking of Nazis, at least you can say of the Germans that they were producing and creating.
	They were just – they were pushing technology, right?
	And I would argue that that is – as evil as fascism was, maybe evil is at least as – I'm not quite sure about that.
	I mean to say that the communists – I think it's odd to say it.
	I mean, the horrors of the Holocaust cannot be denied.
	But we don't ever want to talk about the murders of the Communist Chinese or what they – or what the Imperial Japanese.
	We never teach that to our kids, what was going on in their experimental rooms or the long history of the Soviet Union, what they were – how they were torturing people for quote-unquote knowledge.
	Not to, again, let the Nazis off the hook, but just to point out that the history of communism is as bloody, if not more bloody, but most of it's covered up.
	And the communists were killing their own people, right?
	The communists were murdering their own people.
	But when you think about...
	At the end of World War II, it was a real race to see who was going to split the atom, wasn't it?
	It was a real race to who would get the first jet airplane.
	I think the Germans actually did it.
	It was too late to help them.
	But you can see what the Germans were doing inside Western culture and where they got their spark and their emphasis, whereas we were the ones – if we weren't lending the communists, we weren't lending Stalin, lend-leasing them all sorts of tanks and planes, what would they be?
	How would they be able to continue doing what they were able to do?
	So even if you're measuring the horrors of Western culture and non-Western culture, or in this case communism, to suggest in some way – so a question I make to my students all the time is, who's the greatest killer of the 20th century?
	And they all say Hitler. I mean none of them immediately think of Stalin who was much better at it and they had much more time to do it.
	Again, if we told the tale of history correctly – and this is one of the things that I think is most remarkable about Western culture.
	Unlike most of those cultures, we look at our own warts.
	I guarantee you Chinese students aren't learning about the bad things in Chinese history.
	I'm reasonably sure that Russian students in today's former Soviet Union are learning the real things that went on with the Bolsheviks.
	I'm pretty sure in American schools, our kids are learning about American slavery at the expense of almost everything else.
	Sorry to interrupt, but this is why the media is constantly beating this drumbeat of war against Russia.
	I think I'm going to go.
	Is, you know, people would talk to me about the evils of capitalism or they would talk to me about the evils of National Socialism.
	You know, there's evils within capitalism because there's bad people in a good environment and the evils of National Socialism are nothing to be taken lightly.
	I mean, it was one of the greatest regimes of death in the history of man.
	But I would say, okay, what does the word holodomor mean?
	And you maybe meet one person in a hundred who'd even heard of the term.
	And it's like, to me, it's like, this is one of these basic, are you propagandized questions?
	Do you know, well, what is the rape of Nanking?
	What is, who were the biggest concentration camp owners and managers?
	How many people died under Mao's starvation program?
	But the Holodomor question is one of these just basically, if you don't know the Holodomor, hey, nobody has to.
	It's not like it's a requirement for living or anything like that.
	But I'm just not interested in what people have to say about history if they're simply being fed this conveyor belt of one-sided information.
	And it just means that they've just yeeted themselves out or disqualified themselves from any kind of really objective perspective on human history.
	The sad thing about that, though, is these people are now in charge of the university.
	You ask the average university professor, or they might have heard of Holdemore, but they certainly don't equate that to what was going on.
	And so the problem that we have now as a culture, and you asked me this question to begin the talk, what I overestimated as going through all this, what I overestimated is the degree to which facts and proof would turn the day.
	I actually thought naively well into my first university job.
	I taught at seven universities.
	I first got a full-time job at a university in 1997, 23 years ago.
	I've been at seven since.
	And so I remember even halfway through my few years there, absolutely convinced that if I could just show people what the truth of the record was, they'd see it.
	But it's this denial, right?
	I mean, we have universities full of people who could probably tell you what the Holdemore was in theory, but will completely disregard it.
	They can talk to you about the rape of Nanking, but that pales in comparison to what Western culture has done.
	I get it. It pales.
	The big mistake for me was believing – because I didn't know enough about communism when I was younger because that's what happens, right?
	You go all in in convincing them of the first great lie.
	In this case, the first great lie is that America is irredeemable because at that point, once you've convinced them of that, there's nothing you can throw at them from history that's going to unlodge that.
	And America is evil because it's so copious.
	I've done programs.
	I've had published articles on this.
	My university kids, they don't – most of them believe that America created slavery.
	Eighty percent of my university kids cannot name another slave-holding state in the history of the world, eight out of ten.
	America had slavery for what?
	A grand total of about 84 years from the founding of America to the Civil War.
	America had the least number of slaves, just about many more slaves went to Central and South America than to America.
	It had the least amount of slavery for the shortest amount of time in all of human history and fought a big bloody war with the ostensible aim of ending slavery, as did the British Empire, spend massive amounts of blood and treasure to intercept slave ships, buy off the slaves, bribe people to end the worldwide scourge of slavery.
	But, you know, as the old saying goes in business, no good deed goes unpunished.
	And the fact that the only culture that had slaves for the shortest amount of time and worked to end slavery alone in all of human culture is the only, sorry, it's the only culture still blamed for slavery.
	That's right.
	It's woefully predictable to those who know what abusive relationships are all about.
	There was never any time in American history when more than 5% of homeowners actually had slaves.
	I mean, the other statistic that blows me away, in 1776, I asked my students this too, what percentage of the world lived under some form of slavery, chattel slavery or other form of slavery?
	About 85%, 88% actually.
	So when you think about that, That in 1776, 88% of the world's population lived in some form of indentured or chattel slavery.
	It's a pretty staggering number.
	And it's primarily been cleaned up in the West, like you said.
	And so when my university kids, they're serious about this.
	I asked them to name one slave-holding culture in the history of the world, including Christian and some Jewish kids.
	You'd think they'd be able to say Pharaoh, right?
	The Egyptians. They can't do it.
	What is so decimating about the way we're teaching kids is… What did they think Moses was fleeing exactly?
	They don't. Most of them haven't read it.
	Most of them haven't even read it or they don't think about it in the same way or it's so long ago it's a fairy tale.
	That's the other thing I would point out apropos to our title, our topic here.
	When I started teaching at a college 23 years ago, I was teaching as a grad student somewhere like 27 years.
	Purdue University, rural Indiana.
	All of my kids then, most of my kids were first-generation kids, a lot of rural kids, but they all knew the basic stories.
	I mean, they knew the basic narrative of American history.
	They didn't have a lot of facts.
	They certainly knew what the basic story of Christianity was.
	Even if they weren't Christian, they knew the basic tenets.
	And those kids were in college for the first time, and unilaterally they felt bad about what they didn't know.
	They knew they didn't know things.
	They wanted to learn things.
	Fast forward 27 years, the ignorance is even worse.
	But now the attitude is, not knowing that stuff makes me woke.
	Not knowing white history.
	Not knowing the history of religion or the history of Christianity.
	Not knowing what the founding fathers really were about.
	I'm morally superior by not having studied that stuff.
	My mind hasn't been tainted.
	I know the real story.
	I know the real story that America is evil.
	And I will not let your history, which now all history except revisionist history, is suspect, right?
	The traditional narratives of America is exceptional.
	All that stuff now. It's jingoism.
	It's white supremacy. Our kids would believe that.
	The only thing they're allowed to believe is that it's irredeemably horrible.
	And the minute they start to deviate that, they're starting to separate the white kids out.
	For white supremacist training, right?
	Cultural sensitivity. And the black kids get their seminars and Black Lives Matter and how, while they were building societies in Egypt, white people were hanging out of caves in frozen Europe.
	I mean, this is what, the worst aspect of the 70s, the whole Black Athena movement, right?
	Watching their heads spin, go back to the 1970s when they were to say, well, you know, African Americans created Egypt, right?
	The first great human civilization, while Europeans were still living in caves.
	Okay, I'm more than willing to accept that, although to suggest that a sub-Saharan African and a Northern African is the same thing might be a little bit offensive to Arabs?
	Well, You want to go that way?
	Go that way. But then when you point out to them that also you have to recognize that makes you the first great slave-holding state in human history.
	That they can't process.
	That's a lie, right?
	Like those pyramids were all built by happy Egyptians who got together and hauled, spent their whole short lives hauling huge stone blocks to create Pharaoh's dream.
	Like all that was done sympathetically.
	Right. So, Regarding the sort of life work stuff, right?
	Are we in a post-Christian?
	And to me, post-Christian means post-moral.
	And I'll sort of get into my reasons behind that.
	And I say this with somewhat bitter, ashes-in-the-mouth kind of regret, because that's kind of been my job.
	So I'll tell you a little anecdote here.
	It's really, really powerful for me.
	And I'll tell you sort of what I think it means to the possibility that reason is going to save the day.
	So, many years ago, I was at a park with my daughter.
	She was very little. She was about four or whatever.
	So, I was playing around with her because you can't just let a four-year-old go to the park, right?
	Anyway, so, standing in the park with, you know, some babies in prams were these two women.
	And they were discussing, and I could hear sort of very clearly, they were discussing how to get free stuff from the government.
	And it was very calculated.
	You could almost expect them to pull out a spreadsheet on a tablet or something like that.
	It was very, very calculated. It was very, well, you know, if you apply for this, then they will give you an avenue to that program.
	Now, it gets you free dental.
	And your kids never have to pay for their braces.
	They never have to pay for their dental stuff.
	And then if you apply for this, you get rent subsidies.
	Or sometimes you can even get free rent.
	And it was just like... And they were really just back and forth.
	You know, like how to get all the free stuff in the known universe.
	Now, you could, of course, make the case, and it's a good moral case, that...
	By running to the government for money, the government is going to force other people to pay for them against their will, or is going to borrow against their children's future, or is going to print money and destroy everyone's savings, like all these kinds of things, right?
	And so I was listening to this conversation, fascinated and horrified, as any moral examination of the moral world tends to give you that sort of feeling.
	And I was really sitting there thinking, okay, so these, and I've done some research into this kind of stuff, right?
	So, you know, a woman with two kids, single mom, She gets, like, the equivalent of $70,000 to $80,000 worth of income from the government, free, so to speak, right?
	That's quite a lot of money right there, right?
	So I imagine thinking to these women, you go up to these women and you say, you know, ladies, I've got to tell you, what you're talking about is...
	Chillingly anti-empathetic.
	It's not even non-empathetic.
	It's anti-empathetic because all the people have been forced to pay for all of your bad decisions and there were no husbands around.
	They sort of mentioned this being single moms and all of that.
	It's pretty bad. Now, let's just say they're at the low end and they're already getting $50,000 worth of goodies tax-free from the government every year.
	Or they would have to earn $50,000 to make whatever they get, right?
	Okay, so let's say $50,000.
	Let's say you invest... A big sum of money at 5%.
	So how much money do you need to get $50,000 a year?
	Well, you need a million dollars, right?
	And you get a million dollars, 5% a year, and there is your income, right?
	So basically, they won the lottery and they got a million dollar annuity that's going to pay them $50,000 a year or something like that.
	So what you're doing is you're walking up to people and say, you should not cash this winning lottery ticket for a million dollars.
	Because it's going to have some negative consequences down the road, economically or whatever, right?
	Well, you could stand in front of any convenience store and anybody's coming in saying, I won the lottery!
	I won the lottery! You can say, hmm, you know, religion cashed that.
	The government doesn't actually have any money and it doesn't allow competition and it prints the money.
	They're just going to end up with a lottery winner-sized hole through your chest as they go in to get their free stuff, right?
	And when it comes to having a moral conversation with someone, It's really unfair because we have the high road, the hard road, the hardship road.
	You go to the women and say, you know, but it's good for your kids if they see you working or it's good for your kids if you get a husband who's going to take care of you and the kids and all that stuff.
	And what they'll say is, okay, well, let's say I go get a job.
	I make $15 an hour because I'm not that skilled.
	And the extra cost in taxes knocks me down to like $10 an hour, which means I'm making about $1,600 a month.
	Quality daycare for two kids, maybe about $1,500 a month.
	So you want me to go to work for $100 a month.
	62 cents an hour.
	You want me to miss my kids to go and have all the stress and difficulty of having a career for 60 odd cents an hour.
	You are insane. Now, how are mere words?
	It's one thing if you say to someone, oh, you know, you're smoking, that's bad for you, get sick, whatever it is, right?
	Okay, well, smoking costs money and it does interfere with your health even before you get sick.
	But what if smoking feels fantastic There are no perceivable ill health effects.
	And the government is paying you a million dollars to be a smoker.
	And then you go up to people and say, hey, you quit smoking.
	No smoking is bad for you.
	Oh my gosh.
	I mean, how are we supposed to compete with the helicopter of free stuff and all of the moral and philosophical and cultural corruption?
	That tends to reinforce those values.
	I mean, I can talk people in and out of a whole bunch of stuff.
	I just can't talk people out of cash to get a winning lottery ticket.
	And that, I think, has been the sum total of the moral work.
	I won't speak for you, but the moral work that I've been doing, yeah, it's helped some individuals for sure, but it really has to be about preventing mistakes.
	It's sort of like if you're having a heart attack, there's no point calling you a nutritionist.
	The nutritionist will say, well, maybe I could have helped you 10 years ago or 20 years ago, but right now, you've got to call Yara.
	And I sort of feel like we're the nutritionists and society is having a heart attack and we're just not on the speed dial.
	Well, like you, it's much easier to anatomize the corpse than it is to pump life back into a dead body.
	But one of the things that I've gone over with you time and time again in all of our conversations is, God aside, what drew me to a Christian understanding of the universe was its emphasis on the individual, as opposed to the collective.
	These girls, these young ladies were sitting there talking collectively.
	When I first moved here to this job I have, and that was only about eight years ago, I was having some money problems.
	My wife needed some extraordinary health care.
	So I got a part-time job working the third shift at a quick trip.
	So I was a professor at the university, and for three years I worked pretty much six to eight hours a night overnight doing this.
	Now, again, I didn't refuse to say I didn't take any money.
	I didn't sign her up for any programs.
	We didn't try to get her on any kind of benefit or anything.
	I did that. I took another job.
	And the reason I did that is because I felt that.
	I felt that in this country you could find ways of doing it without having to become a burden to other people or take other people's money.
	And I would sit there the whole time I was working there.
	I'd have kids, 19-year-old kids come into the store at 1 in the morning, and they worked for six months at a construction job.
	They're 19 years old.
	They're living in their mom's basement.
	Mom feeds them, gives them free room and we're bored.
	Mom lets her drive her spare car.
	This kid comes in with five of his buddies.
	He has a food stamp card for $2,500 a month.
	$2,500 a month because he was a single guy who, you know, he was working and then he got unemployed.
	And so all his needs are being met by his mom.
	And they were literally loading up, I mean, hundreds of dollars of beef jerky and Pringles and soda pop with this $2,500 benefit.
	And I'm thinking to myself, another time a young woman came in, my anecdote rivals yours, did the same thing.
	She's griping about, you know, she had two kids and she was pregnant again.
	Obviously, those kids were with different daddies, right?
	And she was pregnant again.
	And she was griping about how little she was getting.
	She had, I think, $3,200 a year, a month, $3,200 card, right, that she always paid with.
	Because I would see it when it would go down.
	And so she was griping that that wasn't enough to live on.
	So we were hiring.
	At the time, this was $12 an hour, but it had benefits and everything.
	I handed her – I knew it was going to be trouble – handed her an application and said, hey, we're looking for people.
	She said exactly what your young women would have said.
	She said, you expect me to work 40 hours a week to make a couple hundred dollars a month more than I'm making now?
	It was unbelievable.
	In fact, she told me.
	This is what blew me away. She said, I got pregnant the third time because my benefits, when you've got more than two kids, they more than double.
	So by having that third kid, she said, I don't just get for three.
	I'll get the equivalent of six.
	So she got pregnant as a way of maximizing her benefits.
	I didn't know what to do.
	And what's the difference between the two situations, right?
	I mean, I felt guilty about, in a land of opportunity, not maximizing my choices.
	I'm married. That's the golden rule.
	But that is... This is you, as a good Christian, saying treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.
	And you would like it if other people worked rather than had their...
	Yes. A pretty powerful thing.
	And of course, if you were to say to this woman, so everybody should quit working and have babies to get government money, the first thing she would say is what?
	Everyone else is doing it. No, that's not good.
	No, no, no. You can't do that.
	Somebody's got to pay taxes. If everybody's taking for the government, the whole system collapses.
	So she relies upon your integrity in order for the scam.
	To work. And so she has to recognize your virtue, your pride, your refusal to do what she's doing is the only reason she can do it at all.
	And that is the opposite of empathy, is relying on the virtue of others to be forcibly put in the service of your own vices and irresponsibilities, recognizing It's sort of like how the lion recognizes the zebra and recognizes the health of the zebra and recognizes the speed of the zebra and recognizes which way the zebra is going to turn and run.
	It doesn't do that. It empathizes, so to speak, with the zebra, right?
	You've got to put yourself in the mind of the zebra, says the ace lion hunter to his children.
	You've got to be the zebra.
	You've got to think like the zebra.
	You've got to inhabit, possess the zebra.
	Which sounds a little bit like empathy, but you're doing it in the same way that a torturer studies the human body, not because he wants to heal it, but because he wants to make it hurt as much as he possibly can.
	And I really do believe that what leads to that mindset is entitlement, right?
	It's an entitlement mindset that's predicated on a collective view of humanity.
	We don't matter as individuals.
	We're all part of a collective.
	I'm just getting my share, right?
	I happen to be the young mother without a husband.
	So there's a collectively I belong in this pool.
	I deserve money. And by having another baby, regardless of whether – calculatedly having another baby, I am getting more of the collective money.
	I think that before we got there, before we got to a universal acceptance of this, we had to change the way that – Almost 2,000 years of Christian thinking ingrained in kids was morphed overnight over the last hundred years into something very different.
	And if you look at the philosophical model behind Christianity and the philosophical model behind communism, to me that explains it perfectly, right?
	What does communism want?
	It wants a universal nanny state.
	It promises you. You give us all your power, a small monopoly, a small oligarchy, right?
	Give us all your power.
	We'll tell you what to do and we'll take care of you.
	Cradle the grave. You won't have to pay for anything.
	We don't tell you you're not going to accomplish anything either.
	But we're going to take care of all your needs.
	You give up to the collective state your individuality.
	We then will entitle you.
	It's why the Brits so desperately love the NHS. I mean, you talk to a Brit—they'll gripe and complain about how—or a Canadian.
	They'll gripe and—I've never met a Canadian, not one, who didn't gripe about how long it took and how I can't get this, and by the time I get this service, I'm going to be dead.
	I heard it over and over again.
	At one point, you had the prime minister of Canada fly down to Florida to get a heart valve operation that it would have taken him months in Canada to get.
	But then when you say – you point out to them, well, maybe the problem is that with national healthcare, they erupt on you like, how dare you threaten my free – my entitlement?
	Even when the entitlement ends up killing them, as long as they don't have to pay for it, that's – it's impossible to shake that.
	You're going to pay one way or the other.
	That's right. So the post-moral thing.
	Okay, so this is an argument.
	I had this interview with Dennis Prager many years ago where he was talking about you cannot get – The ought without the God.
	You cannot get the morality without the God.
	The laws of physics operate independent of consciousness.
	And this is, you know, the big poised breath in America that's occurring about the election at the moment is people are saying, well, wait a minute.
	Laws were broken. Machines were connected to the Internet.
	Chain of custody was lost.
	Data has been destroyed.
	Evidence has been destroyed.
	People weren't allowed to oversee.
	The law has been broken. And now people, of course, are beginning to We realize what many of us have realized in the past.
	Man, the laws of man are not the laws of physics, man.
	You take an orange and you drop it to Galileo-style off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it's going to fall.
	You don't need a warrant.
	You don't need a judge to approve.
	It's just going to happen. It operates independent of human consciousness.
	But laws, well, I said this many years ago, laws are opinions with guns, right?
	And they are enforced selectively.
	We know this from social media, where people like me get kicked off for not even any explanation, whereas other people can post the most appalling stuff and get featured and interviewed and so on.
	So the laws say, oh, but they broke the law.
	And it's like, okay. And it still requires human beings to have the moral will To enforce those laws against increasingly staunch and dangerous opposition.
	You know, if it comes down to a judge trying to certify Trump as being the president of the United States, then it may in fact come down to Clarence Thomas saying to Joe Biden, who ran the whole Anita Hill lynching of Clarence Thomas back in the day, it may come down to Clarence Thomas.
	In a true biblical cycle of vengeance, it may come back to Clarence Thomas determining whether the guy who hunted him with Anita Hill actually becomes president or not.
	But imagine how much pressure that judge is going to be under.
	And is that judge going to stand?
	Is that judge going to fold?
	Are they going to go for his family?
	I mean, this is a lot of feral stuff out there at the moment in the realm of politics.
	Why I'm not really there.
	It's not a philosophical place to be at the moment.
	It's a legal place to be.
	But the laws without God.
	I mean, I knew this was coming.
	I knew this was coming.
	I knew this was coming.
	And so one of the first the second article I ever wrote as a minor public intellectual was proving libertarian morality.
	How do we get to the non-degression principle?
	How do we defend property rights?
	Because it was easy to see that the religious justifications weren't going to hold for a lot of the population.
	For a lot of the population they will, and I respect that enormously, but For a lot of the more secular population or, you know, the correlation between growing up without a father and being skeptical of God is unfortunate and in my case may even be motivational.
	But that's why I wrote universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
	It's why I went on a speaking tour to promote it.
	It's why I did like 30 or 40 or 50 shows and debates and presentations and PowerPoints to make this case.
	It's why I gave the book away.
	And it's been downloaded millions of times.
	And unfortunately, you know, I had people like David Gordon from Mises and other people were just really blocking this and trying to discredit it in ways I don't exactly know why.
	I thought it was a very good proof and it's very interesting approach to the question of ethics.
	But the reason I did that was because you cannot drive people out of the church if you've got no place for them to go.
	Because, man, it's a harsh world out there.
	It is a Nietzschean, will-to-power world, particularly between countries, between cultures.
	There's a lot of in-group preference out there.
	There's a lot of mine against thine.
	And if you're not going to give people any universal values with which to battle the increasing tribalism within society, then you're driving them in a hailstorm, in raining frozen frogs in lightning.
	In a truly revelation-style storm of the end times, you're taking them out of the only shelter they got, which is a church.
	You're driving them out into the woods, and you're saying, good luck with the bears, good luck with the lightning, good luck with the hail.
	You've got to give people some place to go, and I worked very hard to do that.
	The theory has taken a lot of hits.
	I think it's stood the test of time.
	I've debated it countless times, and I've never found...
	A counter to it.
	So I stand by that edifice of secular morality, which is great.
	You know, me and 12 other people managed to find refuge from the collapsing churches.
	But that's the one thing that was deeply, deeply, deeply shocking for me.
	And I'm still sort of reverberating, you know, like the fat guy with the cannon going to his belly.
	I'm still sort of rippling and reverberating that reality about the secular community, about the atheist community, because I thought, my gosh, They're going to come at this theory like a man dying of thirst comes to a bottle of Evian.
	Evian spelled backwards is naive.
	That's kind of what I was, right?
	Because what happened was I came with, hey, I've got secular ethics solved, the Holy Grail.
	I've got the secular ethics solved, people.
	And I would think they'd be like, oh, I didn't want to be elevated.
	They're just like, yay, you know, this is really great.
	And... I don't know if you've seen, there's a little bit, it's a funny video on the internet, and it's a bunch of goths, and they turn around the corner, and there's a bunch of Catholic priests coming towards them, and they literally turn and flee.
	And that's what, I'm coming forward with secular ethics to the godless community, who've never solved the problem of ethics.
	And I come with secular ethics, universal ethics, to the godless community, and I literally was like, it was like a cross to a vampire.
	Except vampires flee from it and they just basically attacked and attacked and attacked.
	And I was like, wait a minute.
	Doesn't this solve the problem of ethics?
	No, no, no. Turns out, funny story, turns out they were just...
	The tip of the spear to crack the church so communism could get in.
	Turns out there's no interest in ethics whatsoever.
	No, in fact, counter-interest in ethics.
	Because I was sitting there saying, oh, here's something that can blunt your attack upon universal ethics.
	And I'm like, well, we'll take the spear from the church and throw it at you about 4,000 times for now.
	We'll go back to the church when you're down.
	But that was the whole progress and process, and that was...
	I'm still processing it, in case you can't tell.
	What they couldn't abide was universal.
	Because whether you know it or not, and I think as you've grown over the last 10, 15 years, you see that as well, right?
	That it doesn't work without God.
	That when you talked about a universal ethics without God, the universal was kind of a giveaway, right?
	You didn't have to make that last step.
	I've read it.
	I think it's very coherent. I think it's exactly right.
	But it does give away the gift.
	I think personally what they could not abide was if you push it one step further...
	You've allowed universals, which means there's no reason you wouldn't allow God.
	Oh, so for them it was a gateway to God rather than a repudiation of socialism.
	Yep. Whether they recognize it or not, because when I read it, that was my first thought.
	I really need to remember to bring my helmet to these conversations.
	This is why Dostoevsky is my favorite writer because I don't think there's any writer in human history who saw that.
	If you think about the Grand Inquisitor scene with Ivan, what is the Grand Inquisitor saying to – for those of you – we should do this really soon.
	It's just 20 pages out of that 800-page novel.
	But in the story – Jesus comes back to 16th century Spain.
	And he walks through the space.
	Nobody knows how. He just reappears.
	He starts healing people.
	He starts working the miracles.
	So much so that the local priest is convinced it's Jesus.
	And the first thing the priest does is arrest Jesus and throw him in prison where the Grand Inquisitor comes and visits him.
	And the Grand Inquisitor says, you fool, you fool, you fool.
	Why did you come back?
	Don't you know that what you offered them was too much for them?
	You offered them individuality.
	You predicated their own salvation on their own choice.
	They don't want that.
	Do you not know that we, the church, have spent 1600 years correcting your mistake?
	We give them food when they're hungry.
	We take care of them. We let them think that their sins are forgiven because we somehow have the power to forgive them.
	What they don't want is you.
	You underestimate, he says to Jesus, you underestimate how people really don't want to be free.
	That freedom is a burden.
	Freedom of choice is a burden.
	How quickly will human beings give their freedom to the nearest benevolent dictator for security?
	Oh, it's like we're talking about COVID again.
	Well, in 1920, right?
	There were consequences to the, let's just say, expanding the vote across genders.
	There were consequences, right?
	We know factually that one gender is much more security-driven than others.
	Men tend to be more independent, lone wolf types.
	Women tend to be more security creatures.
	Am I surprised in the last exactly 100 years we've moved much more to a nanny state than to a more better construct of individual liberty?
	No at all. I'm completely aware historically where that began to come from.
	But when I go back to the question that you raised, ask yourself this question too.
	All right? Because you've asked me some.
	Let's say the shoe's on the other foot.
	Let's say that Trump won.
	Instead of Biden, but just the same way, with all the tricks and gimmicks and all the statistically impossible probabilities, let's say it happened.
	Do you think the godless left would be doing what the right's doing right now, sitting on your fingers doing nothing?
	They'd be in the street. Well, I would say the right is not sitting on their fingers doing nothing, but they're pursuing peaceful and legal recourse.
	Law, like you just said, is only as good as the people behind it, right?
	Which is why it's not going to probably go anywhere.
	But where would the left be?
	But this is one of the reasons why, I mean, the amazing tipping point in American history, which we're living through this very month, is that no matter what happens, half of America is not accepting this election.
	And we'll even talk about that perhaps another time.
	This is an incredible tipping point of great danger and also great opportunity.
	But, oh yeah, we know, we know.
	We know, of course, that this is what the judge is going to face.
	So the judge, you may put a signature on, yeah.
	Trump won. If that's the way it plays out, and that's what happens, right?
	He knows that his signature is going to have half of America up in flames.
	I mean, that is a hell of a burden to put on a judge.
	He's going to get threatened, and yeah, without a doubt, half of America is going to experience rioting that's going to make Rodney King look like a scene out of Room with a View.
	And so... That is a very, and of course, the violence works.
	Violence works. This is one of the great tragedies and realities of human history, that if you point guns at people, they will comply, because we're designed biologically for survival, not integrity.
	While many Christians have turned violent, that is a betrayal of the principle, not an explanation of the principle.
	And when you mention those goths who turned the corner and saw the priests, they weren't running away from guns and knives.
	They were running away from something more metaphysical, weren't they, an understanding of reality.
	But I think you're exactly right about that.
	And just in the news today before I came on, like every time I talk to you, I look at the news, and there's so many things that demonstrate what we're talking about.
	But in a story, 30% of Democrats, you know, 70-something, 78% of Republicans, but 30% of Democrats think the election was stolen.
	They're not bothered by it, but that's a huge number.
	That's almost one-third of Democrats believe that it was stolen.
	When you add that to 80% of Republicans, you have a huge majority of this country who don't trust the elections anymore, like you said.
	That's a potential cataclysm down the road.
	Not very soon.
	down the road right here no and of course for the people who are darwinian lying is the strategy you know and i i talked about this and showed the other day so i'll really keep it brief here but you know think about fishing right because what you do when you drop a fish hook in the water with a piece of worm on it is you say hey here's some tasty food you'll love this going to be the best food you've ever had right And then you've got a bloody great hook in there that goes through the eyeballs of the fish so you can get some dinner.
	So you're lying to the fish.
	You're saying, hey, it's a hook. You know that the fish doesn't know anything about the hook and you're just fooling the fish.
	And it's the same thing with the tiger and its stripes in the deep grass.
	It's creeping up to the gazelle or whatever the hell it's hunting.
	And it's lying. Hey, man, there's no tiger here.
	Don't worry about a thing. You know, it's just some tall grasses.
	It grew in the wind. It was fine.
	And they'll make sure that they go downwind so it can't smell them or the cuckoo is going to drop its egg into another bird's nest and say, hey, this is totally your egg, man.
	You've got to feed it and you've got to raise it.
	Lying in nature is a perfectly acceptable strategy for gaining access to resources or to avoid danger.
	You know, the cats are going, you know, they kind of puff themselves up in a way that you and I can't quite manage anymore.
	And that's to make themselves look bigger, to fool the predator into thinking that they're bigger.
	You've got moths that imitate poison moths.
	You've got frogs that imitate poison frogs.
	They're all lying. Hey, I've got exactly the same coloring as that poison frog, but I'm not going to expend the resources to actually make poison.
	Hey, man, that's false advertising.
	That's lying. You can't do that.
	But you can in nature.
	And so the fact that the people on the left who are post-ethics and post-God Well, you know, we want resources, and this is how we get it, is to fudge this election.
	Well, that's as much cheating as the tiger stripes is cheating.
	It's not cheating. It's just an excellent way to get resources.
	Or you don't sit there and say to the fishermen, You just lied your way into dinner, man.
	You didn't even tell the fish about that hook.
	And you know that the fish won't eat the hook because if you put the hook in without the bait, you're not getting anything.
	So you're a bad person.
	It's like, no, I'm hungry. I've got to get a fish.
	And so for them, it's like, okay, well, maybe we've got to fetch some numbers.
	Maybe we've got to inject some code.
	Maybe we've got to get some balance. But we want the power.
	We want the resources. And what on earth is stopping us from doing it?
	Because they're Darwinian.
	And falsehood in Darwinian doesn't even exist as a moral category.
	It's a perfectly acceptable strategy to get resources and the lion that says, "Hey, I'm a lion.
	I'm coming to eat you.
	I'm going to go upwind of you and I'm going to jump up and down just in case you can't see me in the grass." Well, that's a lion.
	Well, we don't see those lions.
	Why? Because they never made it.
	Well, that's exactly right.
	And to me, I phrase it the same way.
	Hypocrisy is only possible with human beings with consciences.
	Of all the sins, hypocrisy is the one that you cannot be guilty of in a purely material world.
	The one most heartbreaking question, when kids know what my worldview is, the ones that want to believe come to me with the heartbreaking question.
	Why is there no consequence for hypocrisy?
	Why can the left...
	Why can't they accuse Donald Trump of all of this and then turn around and do it themselves?
	How can they project on us what they do every time and it not bother them?
	And it's what you just said.
	They are creatures – they're materialist creatures, right?
	They see hypocrite. What you and I would see as one of the great cardinal sins of world religion, the hypocrite, because the hypocrite is more – the sinner is bad.
	The sinner is he who knows what's right and wrong and chooses bad.
	The hypocrite is somebody who knows what's right and wrong and pursues or seems to pursue the good while choosing the bad surreptitiously.
	It's much worse than typical sin.
	It's a huge exponential number after the sin you're creating.
	It's one of the worst things you can do.
	Well, the sinner is a warning, but the hypocrite is a seducer, and that's much more dangerous.
	That's right. And the thing is, is that, like you said, in a Darwinian world, hypocrisy is strategy, man.
	Hypocrisy is a huge asset to who could pull it off, right?
	You think about the idea...
	Why is... You'll get to one of the arguments.
	Why is Satan so interesting today to people?
	Look at all the TV shows that are being made about Lucifer and how he's kind of this cad.
	He's this lovable bounder.
	He's this misunderstood, right?
	And one of the reasons why is because...
	As you said, the hypocrite is the seducer.
	Satan, whatever else he is, is the seducer.
	That now is perfectly legitimate.
	You know what's not legitimate anymore?
	Like you said, the lion that stands up and says, me.
	That's Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia, right?
	The Christ figure lion.
	Hey, right? Those characters tell you where they're coming from.
	And it's just not sexy, right?
	And so who are your... And I will couple that with this.
	I think the reason...
	The question I want you to answer for me in a second is in your mind.
	All right, so your secular ethics...
	Right, your questions are quite difficult, so I'm just going to...
	Well, this is the one I want to ask you, is you built this wonderful edifice rational evidence from the ground up about secular proofs of universal values.
	I would like you to talk about what distinguishes that from God in your mind, or you had said earlier in the program that without God it won't work.
	But before we come to that, I want to make one more answer.
	No, no, no, you said without God it No, you did too.
	You did too earlier. Sorry, I meant it works logically, but I don't see much evidence that it's working practically.
	Sorry, I just want to make sense. But I want you to explain that in a second.
	The thing that I wanted to share with you briefly is this.
	Is this idea that in terms of human behavior, how does one go about this?
	I think the reason Christianity is dying is not because we've rejected Christianity.
	I think one of the premises of our talk today, and I believe this is true, I think in the last five, since the election of Trump, we were first time noticeably entered by watching the opposition to Trump.
	We've really entered a post-Christian world largely.
	When you think about how tech corporations, along with the technology companies, Along with Hollywood, along with academia, journalism, the public school system, when you look at, in concert, how many forces are arrayed against what I would call traditional Western values, it's overwhelming.
	We are clearly in a post-Christian era.
	And I don't think it's because...
	Well, Twitter is majority owned by a Saudi prince.
	Yes. Who ain't Christian at all, right?
	And so the idea that Christian ethics are...
	You've got Marxist ethics, leftist ethics, and Saudi ethics, so to speak, driving Twitter and driving people off Twitter.
	Right. No, and I think that it's not that Christianity has been argued out of usefulness.
	I think what's happened is for a long time we've made people embarrassed about Christian truths.
	So the same Christianity that gave us Dante and Milton and Dostoevsky and C.S. Lewis no longer has any intellectual leadership.
	Name a serious Christian writer.
	Name a serious Christian artist right now.
	What happened was we didn't overthrow, logically, Christianity.
	In fact, the necessity of Christianity is more now than it's ever been when you watch what's happening to the culture.
	But what we've done is we've made it unfashionable to be a Christian intellectual.
	To be a creator with that set of...
	It's not hip, man.
	It's not cool. And for a long time, we have taken what used to be the hallmark of Western culture.
	Now, the average Christian, as Dostoevsky points out, the average Christian is Christian because he's too afraid to be anything else.
	Because the church offers him...
	A welcoming that the jungle won't, right?
	And Dostoevsky says that's fine.
	For certain of us – that's the Raskolnikov argument, right?
	Certain of us belong – we're sheep.
	Certain of us belong with shepherds.
	We can't do it on our own.
	That's human nature. But what you always had in Christianity up until the last 50 years or so was serious intellectuals and artists who were making those claims in books, in movies, in paintings, in sculptures.
	But ever since really the 20th century, we have so made Christianity to be socially awkward, socially untenable, something we don't talk about at the dinner table, something mythological.
	And the reason Christianity is we've moved past it as a culture.
	There are no more serious voices, intellectual voices, who are defending it.
	Again, where's the Christian art now?
	Where's the Christian worldview that for 2,000 years allowed the sheep to be sheep, but then gave an incredible encrustation of intellect and philosophical, all of that stuff?
	Where's it gone? And so...
	What are we teaching our kids?
	We're teaching our kids that religion is superstition.
	We're teaching that Christianity is white supremacy, all that stuff.
	We don't even teach Christian art to them anymore.
	Why are they pulling the classics out of the classroom?
	Because kids are going to get Christianity by accident if they're reading Shakespeare or Milton or Dostoevsky.
	Get rid of it. The only way you can do it is to expose themselves to a completely Christian-free world, to make sense of the new, whatever you want to call it, the new materialism.
	But to me, that's the big problem.
	I mean, we don't have anybody like a Dante or a Shakespeare or a Milton or a Dostoevsky, any of those people.
	They're gone. And so culturally, what do we look at?
	Well, they're not gone. They're no longer allowed into the public square.
	They're kept outside. I'm sure you know this, but my original goal was art.
	My original goal was I was acting, playwriting, I wrote a bunch of novels.
	And here's the most amazing thing to me was that, so one of the novels was writing about the hypocrisy of atheists.
	It was called The God of Atheists.
	The God of Atheists is vanity.
	And The novel, I went through a whole writing program, the Humboldt School for Writers.
	It ended up going out to a professional reviewer with a PhD in literature, and it blew my mind.
	He was a theologian with a PhD in literature, not unlike yourself, I suppose.
	And he wrote a review back to my agent where he said, finally, we have the great Canadian novel.
	This is deep.
	It's passionate. It's powerful.
	It examines morality. It examines human choice.
	It is an amazing book.
	I said, I've never read anything like it.
	So I'm sitting there like, okay, that's about as good a review as you're ever going to get of a book that you've written.
	And my writing teacher loved it.
	My agent loved it. And this reviewer and a couple other reviewers were just like, okay, like paved the way.
	This is a renaissance book kind of thing, right?
	So I would go to work every day.
	In my computer, I was a software entrepreneur.
	So I'd go to book, and every time the phone would ring, I would think, okay, this is it, man.
	Here we go. Here we go.
	Book publishing deals. It's going to be a movie.
	It's going to be exciting, right? And nothing.
	I just finished recording a 20-plus-hour audiobook of a novel I wrote.
	I spent a whole year writing this novel before.
	I started my philosophy show.
	It's called Almost. It's a story of a German family and a British family between World War I and World War II. Of course, I'm half British and half German, so I've got all the family stories, all of the history.
	I poured heart and soul into this book and made incredible research.
	I've got Churchill as a character.
	I've got the small personal decisions that lead to the massive appeasement that destroys the West in many ways.
	I think it's a fantastic book.
	The characters were so vivid for me that even when I finished reading it as an audiobook, which I did just yesterday, I felt an ache like I wasn't going to meet these people again for a while.
	Anyway, so that book, again, incredibly positive reviews went out there and nothing.
	Now, I know that there's a lot of secular people in the publishing industry, but I was an atheist and secular.
	But no, it's because it's critical of collectivism.
	It's critical of socialism and communism.
	And it is my kneeling him towards the pulpit of universal morality.
	That is all that civilization is.
	All that distinguishes us from the animals is our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	Fish don't do it. Lions don't do it.
	Zebras don't do it. Apes don't do it.
	All we can do that defines us as human is compare our proposed actions to an ideal standard.
	That's it. That's all we got.
	And these books were all very passionate defenses of that.
	With the most amazing reviews from the most professional people and boom, you know, nothing.
	Can't get it out there.
	Did you get significant negative reviews too that challenged the positive?
	Were there just ignorant negative reviews?
	Not that I... I mean, I never got any forwarded to me.
	The people who were the reviewers were very positive.
	I mean, my very first writing teacher hated my first novel, this one that Christian ended up loving.
	So there was, and he said, I don't even know what to make of it.
	It's like it's not even a book. And again, you know, I mean, it was early stages.
	I was still thrashing out a very unusual writing style that I was developing.
	But no, it is that morality and consequentialism, right?
	Why do bad people get away with stuff?
	Well, the purpose of a novel, in many ways, I think, is the secular equivalent of a morality tale.
	And of course, as you know, stories in the Middle Ages and novels at the beginning were all morality tales.
	Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, all morality tales, which is, hey, ladies, don't choose a rake because he's going to leave you.
	Hey guys, don't put your faith in money because it's going to make you unhappy.
	It's all morality tales. And my novels were very much character arcs of, you know, here are the people who make good decisions and here's why.
	Here's the intermediate characters who can go either way.
	And here's the bad characters who make bad decisions.
	And rather than having to wait until you're 60 and see all of your friends who made bad decisions lying in a gutter by the side of the road or in terrible marriages or addicted to something, You get to see that when you're 20 through the course of a novel, and hopefully it scares the pants on you if you think you can have an affair and you go watch Fatal Attraction.
	That's a good thing to do, right?
	So art is supposed to show you what the food tastes like at the end of the moral recipe without you having to spend 40 years baking and then finding out by the time it's too late that you should have had a whole different set of ingredients.
	And scaring people with fiction is one of the primary reasons.
	Why do we have moral art?
	Why do we have stories that terrify us into avoiding evil and inspire us into being good?
	And I was always very dedicated to that particular approach to life, that the purpose of art is fundamentally moral.
	The entertainment value is just the sugar that helps the medicine go down, but its purpose is not to entertain or to distract or to reinforce cultural stereotypes or woke culture bullshit.
	The purpose is to show you what happens if you're bad and inspire you as to what happens if you're good, and you can't have consequentialist moral art anymore.
	It's just blocked because if you scare people into being good, then they become responsible, and they get self-ownership, and they become productive, and then they don't want the government all over us.
	I think that had a lot to do.
	There are lots of great artists out there, but you cannot get through that collectivist phalanx of people who want to seduce everyone into short-term gain of serotonin, short-term gain of endorphins, short-term gain of money or sex or whatever.
	It's why you've never seen any movies about one of the most common phenomenons in the modern West, which is spinster regret.
	You've never seen movies about a woman who squanders her youth and beauty and sexuality on a series of do-nothing, go-nowhere relationships, and then when she gets cast aside in her 40s, is incredibly bitter and angry and regretful.
	You can't see that art, even though that was very common in the past.
	You know, you better not tarry because all the good guys will be gone, was famous poetry from, what, 17th century, 16th century?
	And the danger of a woman falling prey to sexual vanity because she's high sexual market value and she's young, not using it to, quote, purchase a good quality man and then ending up ignored, alone, childless, abandoned.
	You can't see that story because that might scare young women into stopping riding the carousel of men and actually settling down with someone, which means kids, which means quality people, which means Christianity.
	I think you're going to get married in a church, right?
	You can't have art that actually helps people anymore.
	Art is there to delude and deny people the birthright of moral warnings, which is, you know, you can't learn everything by empiricism.
	You've got to have some abstract principles that are going to guide you.
	You can't have any guidance for people because otherwise they're not going to go off a cliff in the way the elites want.
	That's exactly right. What you're coming at from the publishing angle, I come at from the professorial English professor, right?
	For 2,000 years, we've had literary criticism, which is all about what you just described, what they used to call the Horatian formula literature, right?
	Going all the way back to Horace, that the purpose of literature is to teach morally, And to delight, right?
	You said it. A little sugar to make the medicine of the philosophy go down.
	That's the Horatian formula.
	Take it all the way through Sir Philip Sidney and John Dryden, Matthew Arnold for 2,000 years, over 2,000 years.
	That's what literature was.
	And we who taught literature were moralists.
	We were moral gatekeepers.
	And then comes the 1950s.
	All that's shifted over away from moral veritude and art and beauty as actual truth it keeps, right?
	There actually were. He did believe in truth and beauty.
	You could qualify them and quantify them.
	Boom, 1950 comes, right?
	Everything shifts. And what do we get instead of that?
	Identity politics. Now it's feminist literary criticism, Marxist literary criticism, it's environmentalism, it's queer theory, it's transgender.
	All these now, which are collectivist, politically left-wing activist ways of reading books, are all our kids are allowed to do.
	In the past, I fought tooth and nail against it by myself.
	We redid our theory course requirement as an English department a couple of years ago.
	I said, we've got to go back to a model that taught early and late.
	What the postmoderns are doing doesn't make any sense unless you've read Aristotle's Poetics, unless you've read Longinus on the Sublime.
	How can you have a history of literary criticism that starts in 1950?
	Well, that's what they did. Every kid at my English department takes no history classes whatsoever.
	No surveys of literature are required.
	No historical accounting of literature.
	You remember when we were in school, you used to take Brit Lit 1, Brit Lit 2, American, all gone in my university.
	They have to take a course called 381, which is literary theory, and it starts with all the postmodern stuff.
	So the only way we give kids to read books at the university – and I point this out and no one understands me when I say this inside the academy.
	This is my question.
	When did we decide that it was okay to teach exclusively left-wing activist reading strategies to kids?
	They don't even pretend like it's an issue.
	Feminism, whatever else you call it, is left-wing activism.
	Marxism, environmentalism, queer theory, these are all activist, left-wing political strategies.
	And they have replaced everything else.
	And so here I am, when I teach literature, I don't teach those lenses.
	Because explain to me what benefit reading 20th century feminism is to reading Measure for Measure by Shakespeare.
	What possible benefit can you get in reading the Odyssey by reading it through Marxist lenses?
	I mean, it's the most anachronistic bunch of garbage.
	But when I do that, when I teach Shakespeare through the lens of 16th century philosophy, history, church history, theology, dramatic convention, I'm the one who's being political.
	They say, I'm literally politicizing this.
	You're teaching Christianity in your Shakespeare course.
	Well, how the hell else do you understand The Tempest?
	How the hell else do you understand a play like Measure for Measure whose title comes from the Bible?
	Of course I teach Shakespeare.
	I give them Bible when I give them Shakespeare.
	You have to. That's a political act now.
	But taking a Shakespearean play and reading it exclusively through 25 years of ecology theory, that's perfectly normal.
	That's how out of whack we are now.
	Well, I mean, I remember when I played the leader in Macbeth when I was younger, and it's going to teach you a lot about overreaching ambition.
	Because I've always been a very ambitious person.
	Yeah, I've always been a very ambitious person.
	And if I hadn't played Macbeth, because one thing to study, it's another thing to actually get up and do it.
	And playing Macbeth was like, That's a pretty chilling ending to an over-ambitious life and also a life where your identity is driven by female vanity and ambition.
	Beware the female is something that is pretty common in literature.
	Now, there's beware the male, like the vanity of King Lear and so on, but there is beware the female.
	And male alertness to the capacity for female evil is something that I have always been trying to raise in this show.
	Being raised by a violent woman, I know pretty intimately the female capacity for evil and there's male capacity for evil.
	But the women are a wonderful phenomenon and the feminist all evils in the world come from the testicles.
	That is blinding us to the real machinations that sometimes go on behind the scenes, which is, you know, a lot of male fights are like two women fighting through proxy.
	And even wars can happen that way.
	And, of course, female leaders start many more wars than male leaders in human history.
	So, yeah, forgetting about female evil, that's something that you are never going to get.
	You're never going to get reminders of female evil because in feminist literature, which is supposed to empower women, women are always victims.
	And they're fooled and the men are just perfect chameleons and there's just no way for them to ever figure out that the guy with a swastika tattooed on his forehead could turn out to be a bad guy.
	and that disempowering of female and the capacity for female evil, which is pretty central to Christianity, of course, right?
	And the capacity for female evil all the way back to the Garden of Eden is a pretty important thing to remember.
	But now we have a society just deferred to women, which gives them too much power.
	Power corrupts, and then women become unappealing.
	Birth rates collapse, and so does the civilization.
	Yeah, and that's a great point.
	The only situation in which female empowerment thrives off of female victimhood What we've done is we've taken feminism to convince women they're victims in every circumstance.
	Then we have a culture that makes the victim the hero.
	And so that's what the identity politics is.
	You're only a hero in the modern world if you're a victim.
	You're only a hero if you're not a cisgendered white guy, right?
	Then you're a victim. And we now know that the victim is actually morally better than the achiever, than the creator.
	And so you see what a vicious circle we've got ourselves.
	How do you have morality in a world where the only thing we see as moral is politics?
	We have no – you built a system of universal morality based on reason.
	What is morality based on now to the degree that it exists?
	Politics. You are already moral in this culture if you're a Democrat.
	If you're a Republican, you're not.
	If you're a woman, you already have a moral high card because you're not part of the patriarchy.
	God, if you're a minority, your skin color confers an almost absolute morality on you that requires no sacrifice from you.
	It's just your skin color that gives you.
	And so we're attaching morality now to superficial qualities like race, class, and gender.
	That makes perfect sense in the animal, the nature analogy you gave us, right?
	You cover who you are, right?
	You masquerade.
	It's the armadillo. It's the possum that plays dead, right?
	The creature that lays down before the bear as if it were dead, hoping the bear is going to sniff it and go on.
	That's the aspect of culture we're taking here.
	And that does lead us to that question I wanted to ask you.
	I think it's an important one.
	Having read your secular tower of reason, which from an intellectual position is very satisfying, but it does conclude with a universal set of assumptions about human beings as moral creatures.
	And I just wanted you to talk a little bit now.
	It's been how many years since you wrote that?
	13 or 14. Well, it's been 15 years since I started the essay, yeah.
	Okay. So I'd like to ask you, because you and I over the years, last five or six years, talked a lot about that, right?
	Both of us talking about the clearer we come to understand the world, the more it does depend to some degree on the idea of God, whatever that means.
	And I would be very glad to hear you relate that.
	If you were going to write an epilogue or a postscript to what you wrote those years ago, what might it look like philosophically?
	We're doomed! So, the big question in morality is punishment.
	Morality without consequences, is it really morality?
	It's kind of hard to make that case, kind of like an intellectual exercise.
	In other words, if you have a habit that has no bearing on your health, then do you bring it to your doctor?
	Doctors will say, I don't care. I don't care if you read books hardcover or you read books on a Kindle.
	It doesn't really have any effect on your health.
	So the whole question around morality is centered on punishment.
	Now, I've got to tell you guys, Christianity, you've got the punishment thing completely sewn up.
	You own that. You are like punishment central.
	You are like the clearinghouse of punishment on two levels.
	One is more secular and one is, of course, ecclesiastical.
	The secular one is Sinners are miserable.
	I mean, they're happy for a little while, like cocaine makes you happy for a while.
	So I've heard. But you're miserable in the long run.
	And that's portrayed through biblical stories, that's portrayed through art, and so on, right?
	So there is the secular aspect, and then there is the ecclesical aspect of Union with God versus rejection with God, whether you go all the way to hell or not, whether those different denominations have different views.
	But of course, for a lot of the people who say there is no hell, they say, well, yes, but functionally distance from God after you're dead is equivalent of hell because you get a taste of how wonderful it would be and you've got to live on McDonald's when you just could have had a five-star restaurant or whatever.
	So you guys have the punishment thing down pat and you've got the reward thing.
	down pat and I know this sounds very a silly way of putting it but I'm trying to sort of put it in a context that my atheist friends will kind of grok to right so so the question for me was okay let's say I have this towering edifice to secular ethics good job me now what right and there's no point creating the best diet in the world if nobody ever changes what they eat right so my big question was okay If the non-aggression principle is a virtue,
	then what happens to those who violate the non-aggression principle in principle?
	That's very, very important, right? The people who violate the non-aggression principle in fact, like a murderer or a rapist or somebody who assaults them, they go to jail in general, as a whole, right?
	Or at least they're rejected from polite and civil society.
	But again, that's the heart attack situation and I'm the nutritionist, so that's too late.
	So the question is, what happens To people without God who approve of the use of violence to achieve their ends.
	That's the very, very big question.
	It's a question of punishment, right? Now, if like the two women in the park that we talked about earlier, they were Giant fans of the initiation of force to get their resources.
	They didn't want to do it themselves because who wants to get their hands muddy, right?
	You go and get the government to do it for you because it's much less risky and then it's legal and somehow we've got this weird idea which I thought had been cured at Nuremberg that somehow the legal is the moral or whatever, right?
	So they are very, very happy to get a million dollars worth of value Simply by whining to the government, having the government point guns at people, borrow on their behalf, print money, steal, lie, cheat, whatever.
	Just give me my government cheddar, right?
	So what can a secular society do to punish people, not who've directly used violence themselves, but who approve of the use of violence to get what they want?
	Now, I came up with an answer.
	As you can imagine, it was a pretty obvious question, a pretty obvious problem.
	This goes back to a speech I gave over 10 years ago now, I had a big libertarian conference called How to Achieve Freedom.
	And in it, very briefly, it's called the Against Me Argument.
	And the Against Me Argument is if somebody approves the use of government force to get resources from you or to ensure compliance from you when you yourself are peaceful, you're just out there working, you're raising your family, you're riding your bike or whatever, it's not like you're a killer or a murderer or anything.
	So somebody who says the government should be able to initiate the use of force against you, and if you disobey what the government wants, The government should have the right to kidnap you, throw you in jail where you might get raped by a very large succession of very large men, right?
	So, that's called, like, do you support the use of force against me?
	Now, my argument to the libertarians was, if someone, like, you bring this argument to someone and say, you not only approve of, you praise and consider necessary the initiation of the use of force against me as a peaceful citizen to conform with whatever political ideology you have or want.
	Then you are an immoral person.
	Now, evil is when you act upon it.
	Immoral to me is kind of when you support it in theory.
	And one is subsequent to the other.
	You usually need to have the theory before you have the practice of genuine evil.
	And the theory is, in a sense, where philosophy can intervene.
	Once it gets to practice, you need, I don't know, self-defense or something.
	So I said to all the libertarians, so you all believe that non-aggression principle taxation is theft.
	So the people in your life, the people in your life Whose support and praise the use of force against you are immoral by your own definition of what is moral.
	Now, they're not taking a knife out to you directly.
	They're not kidnapping you directly, but they're supporting the people who do and who will.
	And they want it. Not just supporting it like it's okay.
	They're supporting it like yay.
	And I said, so what are the consequences of people in your life who claim to love you, but want you kidnapped, locked, caged, and possibly raped for disagreeing with them?
	Now, it's pretty clear to me that you can't have people in your life who claim to love you and then support the use of violence against you if you disagree with their preferences.
	I mean, that's completely immoral.
	And so I said, yeah, take some time, educate people and so on.
	But at some point, at some point, you either have to give up the ideals of the non-aggression principle or you have to ostracize those who support the use of violence against you.
	And it's not that complicated an argument when you think about it, right?
	If you hate Nazis, good reason to hate Nazis.
	No problem with hating Nazis. Nazis are hateable.
	But if someone in your life is a Nazi and you're Jewish, what's going on there?
	You know, maybe they're a little ignorant.
	Maybe you need to educate them on what Nazism really means, the anti-Semitism.
	But at some point, do you stay friends with the Nazi if you're a Jew?
	Like, it's a big question.
	And I gave everybody a pretty clear and robust answer in a variety of speeches and articles and so on.
	The against me argument became common parlance In libertarianism, because that's the punishment.
	The punishment is, hey, you support the use of violence against me.
	I am not going to be in your life.
	Like, I can't. I mean, that's just too humiliating.
	It's too ridiculous. It's like, you know, if you're in the KKK, you can't be buddies with me if I'm black.
	Or whatever, you know, cliche you want to put out there.
	It's pretty clear, right? So that was the punishment aspect.
	That was the secular punishment aspect of ostracism, which I've been writing about for a long, 15 years straight.
	I've been writing about ostracism as the means of social enforcement.
	Quick question! How do you think that went as a whole?
	Not well. Yeah.
	But although it goes back to what I said before, because it's a universal answer.
	I mean, what you just said could have been what St.
	Paul said. St.
	Paul said exactly the same thing.
	What do you do with a brother that goes astray?
	You can only walk with him so far that your faith has to come before that.
	And ultimately... Paul calls upon the community to ostrichize those who walk outside the faith.
	I am totally original in this.
	Nobody has said it before me.
	I claim the mantle of complete originality.
	But you are trying to do it outside of the universal box.
	And the problem is that if you called it a sometime solution to the problem, no one would have listened to you either, but at least you wouldn't get this objection.
	But at least I wouldn't be this bitter about it.
	Well, but that – let me ask you a question though.
	That does tie into what I've been saying all along too, is that by removing God culturally as a possibility, you're also really taking away the possibility of internal conscience, aren't you?
	I mean if we argue that human beings are just highly evolved animals.
	Then conscience, whatever it is, could just be an anomaly, right?
	We don't see the lion guilty.
	When a lion kills more gazelles than it needs or when a fox or a cat, a feral cat, gets into my father-in-law's chicken houses, it doesn't just kill the one cat, the one chicken it wants to eat.
	It'll kill 10,000 chickens if it can.
	No guilt there. And if we're just animals, then there's an entire internalization of morality that goes when we materialize culture.
	Even before Christ, you had Socrates.
	Socrates, like you said, right?
	Socrates is one of the 12 people who understood why he was doing what he was doing.
	Like you're one of 12 people who get what you're doing, right?
	But he – and what did he do?
	He was able to internalize that and he does what the important thing to do is.
	He drinks the hemlock.
	His argumentation is based on the internal compass of his morality being part of his soul, not being something from the outside.
	Well, I've made a case that he did that as a giant FU to the culture that killed him.
	Well, that too.
	Obey the state, man. That's going to work out really well.
	My parting curse to you is obey the state.
	Anyway, that's a topic for another time.
	So when I go to libertarians who are very much into the non-aggression principles, the foundation of the morality, and I say, hey, man, you've got to live your values or discard the values, right?
	Because having values and not living them discredits those values.
	It's better to not have those values.
	Like, if you are like, oh, I'm very much into the non-aggression principle, and now I'm going to go play golf with three people who want me thrown in jail for disagreeing with them politically, it's like, please stop saying that you're into the non-aggression principle, because what you're saying is, the non-aggression principle, it's just kind of like an abstract little thing, it's kind of like a fundamental, it's like Sudoku.
	You know, it's just something that's like a crossword.
	You know, it's just something that's like mini golfers.
	It's like something that you just play around with.
	It's not serious or anything.
	And I remember saying this to people who were into my show and say, look, if you really believe in the values and virtues of philosophy, please go and live a moral life.
	If you don't want to go live a moral life, at least according to the ethics that I think are universal that I've defined, that's no problem.
	But then never tell anyone you've listened to my show.
	That's all. Like, if you write a diet book that's really good and a whole bunch of fat people say, I love that diet, what are people going to say?
	That diet's got to be crap.
	You know, so... So when you go to people who've found their entire conferences on the non-aggression principle and taxation and stuff, you go to them and say, shouldn't these ideas have some consequences in your actual real life?
	Wait, that's a cult leader talking.
	No, no. It's not a cult leader talking.
	It's like these are the values.
	I didn't inflict these on you.
	You have voluntarily – I learned these values from some of you.
	You have voluntarily accepted and absorbed these morals.
	And now I'm saying this should have a consequence in your actual social life.
	It is alarming to me how much you sound like Jesus right now.
	Isn't that Jesus' entire lament?
	What's the point of these values? Do you torture yourself for these values?
	Are they just there to make you feel vain?
	Or are they there to just make you feel excluded and different and dangerous and edgy?
	What is the point of all of these values?
	Just torture yourself. Just give up and go with the herd or actually stand with your values.
	But this one foot on the dock and one foot on the pier, you've got the splits and you're like Nadia Kamenichi with two T-Rexes pulling her like a piece of chicken.
	Sorry. My analogy's got away with me there, but...
	Look, the reason I think it worked for Christ was not the...
	Christ foregrounded the illogicality of what he was doing.
	If the world is four dimensions, three dimensions, five senses, then what I'm telling you is illogical.
	It is irrational. It's like Lewis said, C.S. Lewis, let's stop with this romantic idea that Jesus is a good guy.
	Either he is a lunatic...
	And we should condemn him to the lunatic fringe.
	Or if he is who he says he is, then you've got to worship him.
	There's no other option. You have two options.
	You condemn him as a crazy man, or you accept who he is, and you change.
	You live a different life.
	Why do I think Christ was successful for 2,000 years?
	Because what Christ said is exactly what you said, but the truth is not in the logic of the thing.
	It's in what is illogical about it.
	So in other words, God himself, that last step in the universal block, right?
	Because whatever God is, for a God to be worth worshiping, he has to be a universal God.
	He cannot be a specific one.
	If you have a universal God, then you have something.
	And I think that's the next step.
	It's implied in what you wrote, but it's never stated.
	I think that's why they got mad at you, because they could see the implication.
	But it's there. And what Jesus simply said was, is that there is not simply the irrational in the rational.
	There is the rational...
	Follow Steph's book or the irrational.
	Be a Jew who goes, hangs out with, plays golf with KKK members.
	Or there's a third option which Christ points to, which is the supernatural.
	That which is bigger than, a bigger kind of logic than the human mind can process.
	The kind of rationality that would come with a creator God.
	If there is a creator God, if there is a universal God who created the universe, who created logic, who created reason, who created physics and science, then the logicality, the rationality of that God would have to be disproportionately larger than we could squeeze between our temples.
	This is Ivan Karamazov in the Brothers Karamazov, 100%.
	And so ultimately what Christ says is, I am not asking you to be ill.
	This is where the libertarian falls away.
	Well, that doesn't make any sense. Why should I love my neighbor more than myself?
	I'm willing to love my neighbor, but not more than me.
	As a libertarian, I need...
	No! This is a super rationality of the argument you meant.
	Why should the lion lay down in front of the lamp?
	More than just...
	The natural order of things.
	Christianity goes to an alternate logic.
	That that which is logical in the material world, like you so vividly described, lions don't apologize, animals conceal who they are, they're proud of lying, it's part of the strategy.
	Christ says, you have to go the opposite logic from what is worldly truth.
	And that is, the stronger you are, The more competent you are, the more intelligent capacity you have, the more you are obligated not to coexist, but to serve, to serve those who are weaker than you.
	And if there's any truth to that, it seems to me It's too beautiful not to be true on some level that when we see power stooping to service, not to selfishness.
	And that's why the American founding, which is going away now, was so critical.
	The founding fathers gave us the first...
	Government who saw government as to serve, not to be served.
	The first time in human history, really, that you codified a government based on the very Christian idea of service.
	That's a Christian notion.
	It's one of the great gifts of Christianity to Western culture, was the idea that power must serve, not simply be served.
	That is, I think, a remarkably Christian understanding of things.
	I don't think it's paralleled really anywhere.
	And if you look at 2,000 years of the evolution of that idea through the founding of this country, In which we elect a government that serves us, that we are theoretically in control of, that doesn't serve itself, well, there I think is an exact example of you cannot occupy a middle space.
	There's a third alternative.
	It can't be logical or illogical only.
	I think when you have that third possibility that something can be universal, because universal can only be in the third.
	You've got the reality of now, you've got logic and its consequences.
	All we can see the logic and its consequences is in their material formats.
	Without that third option, universality is not possible, and that includes logical universality.
	But when you go over to the universal potential, it seems to me, when you cede the possibility, it doesn't have to be God.
	It's certainly plausible.
	That they're aliens somewhere in the universe who have more advanced civilization than we have, who have a deeper capacity for understanding than we do, a more profound cranial ability than we have.
	That's certainly possible. Who are as far evolved above us as we are above snails.
	And we wouldn't call that irrational, right?
	We would say there's, to the degree that we could understand it, we might recognize in those creatures a kind of superior rationality that I would argue, if God exists, would have to be part of what he is.
	And when you look at it that way, it's not irrational and it's not even rational.
	The mandate for those who are strong to serve the weak is an answer that Dostoevsky and I both agree could not have come from a human brain, that that kind of rationality requires something higher.
	Could have come from a mammal's brain for sure.
	No. You think so?
	No, sorry, it couldn't have come from a mammal's mind.
	No, no, no, I don't think so. If we're going to define the human as comparing potential actions to ideal standards, then, yeah, but it couldn't come from evolution, so to speak.
	And listen, I mean, throwing all false modesty aside, it is a kind of hypocrisy.
	I mean, I knew that I was blessed with a number of very potent gifts, you know, eloquence and and convincibility and metaphors on the fly, like all of the things that that make our conversations so great.
	You bring that to the table.
	I bring that to the table.
	And I was very aware when I was younger how much those skills could be used for good or ill, like the gifts that I have been given that I've cultivated, but I've also cultivated because they were quite strong gifts to begin with.
	So the idea that I have, I mean, and I have really put myself in the service of the world at sometimes great personal cost, you know, I mean, it's somebody, I think it was Kaya Jones who posted this on Parler that the closer you are to God, the more you're hated by the world.
	It's like, well, then I'm pretty much, I got to be kind of up there at the moment, because it's pretty bad out there for reputation for clear thinkers and anti-collectivists and all that.
	So I recognize that there was going to have to be a service element, and there was also going to have to be a sacrifice element, and that comes out of the reading of Shakespeare and playing Macbeth and realizing the problems with that kind of vanity.
	But let's scrub past all of that, and let's finish on this particular topic, because this is where you may as well be topless on a pole here, because this is your great seductive move.
	The great temptation, like you put your tentacles up my nose until you find the great temptation that I have.
	I'll be perfectly frank with you.
	My friend, about the great temptation I have, I will tell you this, man.
	There is nothing more tempting to me than being able to outsource punishment to someone or something else.
	Oh, tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
	Because the idea that I don't have to get up there and nag inconstant libertarians to actually live their damn values in their own life, the values they believe should be universal, but they don't want around them.
	It's like, I want this!
	I want all human beings to follow this diet!
	Hey, do you feel like following it?
	No! Why would you think that?
	That would be crazy! So the idea that I wouldn't have to convince people to ostracize immoral people, but that immorality would be punished by a cosmic law of nature, Tell me more.
	That's interesting. I'll tell you for me, and I sympathize with you.
	But again, the answer I think is the Dostoevsky interpretation of Christ.
	Think about Christ as the one figure.
	Let's play make-believe here then.
	Christ is who he says he is.
	Then he is the one figure, whoever walked this earth, who could do that.
	As the creator God, he could do that.
	He could set up a system where...
	Oh, don't get me wrong. I would like to punish people, but it violates the non-aggression principle!
	Well, yes, and also it violates what good is compelled contrition?
	What good is compelled suffering, right?
	And again, the thing that I so much like about the Christian example is he's not just telling you these hard truths.
	He said, now let me go hang on a cross to show you.
	Let me take the suffering that they deserve.
	Let me, who came only to love them, only to serve them, let me take that punishment.
	To be fair, I do have a very harsh Wikipedia page.
	So obviously it's pretty much the same thing.
	Just kidding. Just kidding.
	It's nothing like this. I've watched your career.
	The idea that you haven't paid a price.
	You could have sold out a number of ways and be much more well-received and I'm sure richer if you had stayed on a certain course.
	But I'm glad that you couldn't do it.
	I mean you're a more necessary figure because you haven't done it.
	But, you know, like I said, I mean, maybe this is where my Christianity helps me.
	When I think about him and how he's been ignored all these years, how his principles have been mocked, how his truly sacrificial way...
	I started out teaching college without the grandiosity that I was going to change the world.
	I just felt that if I could change people who read Shakespeare or people who read Western culture's mind, that would be enough for me.
	And it has been. And I'm getting what?
	Maybe one or two out of ten of them?
	That's the only thing that keeps me doing it, because I still, you know, every now and then, once or twice a month, I'll get a note.
	Hey, I'm so-and-so from seven years ago.
	Hey, 22 years ago, I took your class at Purdue, and I want you to know I've never forgotten, and I'm sure you must get it.
	I've read the notes that you get, the comments you get from people who watch your programs.
	Staggering. The help you have doled out to people, the way that you have humanely touched them.
	The rest is just gilding here, but I think that what's I like about this conversation is you and I have talked about this without climbing that last little step, and it's just nice to do it, to climb that last little step and see it.
	I'll leave you the last commentary here.
	I would like you to close up summing up by, all right.
	So, talk about at the end here, how do you handle – I mean, you know that's your fantasy to be able to – that there was some trigger measure that people suffered without anybody having to enforce it for what they do.
	But over and above that, how do you – how do you – Well, the great temptation of power arises out of frustration.
	Frustration that things aren't going fast enough.
	Frustration that poor people don't have access to resources.
	Frustration that the air is not clean enough as you want it to.
	Frustration that the world is not conforming to what you want.
	Frustration that, say, the black community is not doing as well as the East Asian community.
	Or frustration that women don't make as much as men.
	Frustration, frustration, frustration.
	And that is one of the greatest temptations that I have to avoid is frustration because what frustration does is it draws me into Old Testament retribution land.
	And that is piercing back through the bedrock of Christianity, which is still the foundation, as I'm increasingly aware, partly through our conversations and just partly through a lot of things, that Christianity has informed most of my moral examinations.
	I mean, that was my first 12 years of life.
	And I was in the church choir and all that kind of stuff.
	So, the great temptation...
	And everybody has their own different temptations, right?
	But my great temptation is frustration, because when I see people...
	And if Biden gets in, the suffering is going to be truly biblical.
	I mean, the suffering is going to be...
	And then, so then, okay, so I want to warn people away from this kind of suffering.
	I wrote this on Parler the other day that smart people learn from arguments, average people learn from experience or evidence, and less able people learn only through suffering.
	And you want to avoid that suffering.
	You want to avoid that suffering occurring in the world and this Cassandra thing.
	And you get really frustrated.
	You get really frustrated that people aren't listening to simple reason.
	And that's like that fine people hoax that is the foundation of the whole Biden campaign that Trump said that white supremacists are fine people.
	It takes literally 15 seconds to go look at this transcript and find out that that's completely not true.
	Completely not true. And no one's ever been banned on Twitter for saying it.
	No one's ever been banned on Twitter for saying it.
	I mean, the lies that are told about me, again, they're very easy to disprove.
	I put out whole videos and articles about this stuff.
	I mean, it's not even taken out of context.
	It's completely reversed, right?
	So the frustration, the way to vent the frustration is through punishment.
	That's one of the things that frustration drives you to do.
	Now, that's not always a bad thing.
	Punishment is perfectly appropriate and acceptable in certain circumstances and certain situations.
	I'm not a radical pacifist, that kind of way, in any way, shape, or form.
	But, of course, it is the pendulum swing of restraint followed by licentiousness with regards to frustration and punishment that is one of the great dangers for me.
	Because what the world does is it taunts you into hating the world.
	It behaves badly.
	It lies about you.
	It provokes you. It destroys your source of income.
	It attacks your reputation.
	It tries to split you up from your relationships.
	I mean, it just acts demonically towards you in the goal of returning hatred for hatred.
	And then, to the untrained eye, because the majority is invisible, like water to a fish, To the untrained eye, you look like you're King Lear-like railing at the elements for no purpose.
	You look crazy. You look immoral and all that.
	So taunting you into hatred.
	And this is something that Jesus didn't do.
	He didn't get there.
	That's what he said. Yes, what he said is if you could find a way to love them instead of wishing to punish them, then that breeds one thing.
	You will suffer for them.
	And maybe that's where the – and to some degree you are.
	You're not just suffering for yourself and not reaching them.
	You're suffering for them. And to me, that's the final piece of the puzzle.
	That, to me, is where the next step goes in my reading of your secular universal declaration of that.
	Because I'm like, I'm half on that thing of like this Old Testament.
	Good. Yes. Good.
	You didn't listen to me for 40 years about communism, and now a communist facilitated virus is decimating your life.
	I believe like you, the Old Testament is justice, baby.
	That was not harshness.
	That was justice God was dealing out.
	Is there something more to mercy than justice?
	And that's what the New Testament's about.
	I think it's the hardest thing in the world to do.
	Suffering is easy, relative, right?
	Suffering, especially if you're victimized in suffering, because there's a certain self-justification to that.
	But what if he's right about that last step?
	I mean, certainly the model of his life seems to reflect that.
	If you can turn the hatred, turn that need to want them punished, which is what was different between the Old Testament and the New, a new covenant.
	If you can find a way to love those who hate you, then of necessity, you will suffer for them.
	And maybe that's the answer.
	The fundamental, I think, answer to that as well, and not to speak for Jesus, it would be ridiculously presumptuous, but the argument could be, okay, so if you love your enemies...
	They conquer you and they kill you.
	That's better than living in a world where you cannot love.
	Well, I don't think so. I don't think Christianity, Christ made Christ a, Christ did not make Christianity a suicide cult.
	In fact, you had some of the most righteous wars under the banners of Christ, right?
	That you can, if I believe what Christ, sacrificing for you means if you're a Jew in a gas camp, I have a moral obligation at times.
	To try to liberate you.
	I mean when Christianity – it's what do I have to do in suffering, right?
	It can be as painful to free you as it is to suffer with you.
	Or you think about what the great martyrs did.
	Like what was – in the concentration camps, what was his name?
	Who – was it the Christian?
	No, no. The Christian who gave his life to save a Jewish person.
	He was imprisoned.
	The great – I can't remember about it.
	I know who you're talking about.
	It's not Ryan.
	What is his name? Anyway, you know who I'm talking about.
	Not Ryan Holler, but it's someone like that.
	Somebody like that. Anyway, I mean that.
	So I guess my point is that once you embrace the approach of Christ...
	Then you do have a platform for which the confrontation of evil – there's more ways to confront evil than to fret about it or to pray over it, right?
	That we have a mandate then to seek redress through physical action or even to the degree that it costs us, right?
	What did Christ say? There's no greater love than that a man lay down his life for someone else.
	It doesn't make a lot of sense in the world of logic or illogic, but it makes a lot of sense.
	It's funny because it's anti-Darwinian, yet it has produced the most successful culture ever.
	That's right. I guess this is the shard of divinity or supernatural that comes in to the grim repetition of eat, screw, and die that characterizes the natural world.
	If the opposite of Darwinianism has produced the most successful culture ever, Didn't I say average people would learn from evidence?
	Okay. I've got to mull that one over, and I've got to stop here at another call, but thank you for a great conversation.
	Great talk. And listen, your inspiration and guidance in these matters is deeply important to me, and I really, really do appreciate that.

▲