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Oct. 6, 2023 - Stew Peters Show
59:16
LIVE - WRONGTHINK: The Cure to a Feminized Society? Teach Men To Embrace Suffering Again
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Thank you.
Thank you.
It's really difficult to sit here and watch sort of the regression of this country, of the entire Western world.
Truly, Western society has become so incredibly feminized over time, it's hard to believe there was once a time when men lied about their age simply so that they can be put on the front lines and go to war for the country that they loved so dearly.
Now we're taught to hate our country.
Now we're taught that there are words that can hurt feelings.
Now we're taught that if your feelings are hurt, then it is the responsibility of everybody around you to make you feel good again, to make you feel safe.
And why is that?
Because let's be clear.
What that is is a sign of weakness.
Weakness is somewhat tolerated in women, and I think that's okay.
Women are built different than men, and that is for a purpose.
We are meant to be the nurturers of society.
And so it's less important that a woman is tougher, per se, but for men, the people who are supposed to be leading our society...
That's where it hits us the hardest.
When we start to see men who are hurt, their feelings are hurt by mean words, or you misgendered them.
What does that even mean?
You tell somebody from the greatest generation, oh, you misgendered me.
You think they're gonna know what the hell you're talking about?
And even if they did know what you were talking about, you think they're gonna care?
No, and why should they?
Why should they?
The truth is, life has become too easy for people.
And in short, they've created hard times for themselves.
They've created suffering for themselves because they don't have it in their own lives.
And when you don't have suffering or you have times that are too good, it's hard for you to really put things in perspective.
So misgendering feels like you're going to war We're not living in a time when people can really put things in perspective anymore.
We're not living in a time when, more importantly, men understand the importance of suffering.
It's quite interesting watching the regression of society, and there's been a lot of discussions about it.
I think a lot of people get wrong what happened, what's going on with this masculinity crisis in this country, but a lot of people actually get it right.
What I am happy about, I can say, is that I'm just happy that we're finally having this conversation openly.
What went wrong in America?
What happened to masculine men?
What is their role or what should their role look like?
How can we fix this crisis?
Because I think most people can wake up and tell you that there is indeed a crisis when you see men who are wearing three masks on the subway as a result of a virus with a less than 1% mortality rate.
I think we can all agree that that's a problem when you see that.
And then you look at World War I, the Great War, We're men who are not even men, but like 12 year olds lied about being 18 so that they could fight in that war.
I'm not kidding you.
You can read tons of stories of people who lied about their age simply so that they could go fight for the country that they loved so much for their families that they loved so much.
They had a sense of duty.
We don't have that anymore.
And today we'll be examining why exactly that is, what happened to men, and in turn, what happened to our country, and what happened to the entire Western Empire.
higher.
So stay tuned for this episode of wrong think primetime.
And welcome to wrong think primetime.
I'm Anna Perez.
Thank you so much for being here on this Friday night.
I have a really special episode for you guys today.
I had an amazing discussion with my good friend Joe Enders over not just masculinity, but a whole slew of topics.
We kind of went through the whole gamut of what went wrong with this country when it came to masculinity, because it's all wrapped into one problem.
And that is, of course, the loss of suffering, hence the title of the show, or I should say the loss of understanding of how to deal with suffering.
And we'll get into that in a moment.
But I just wanted to start off the show to just say that really what inspired me to cover this topic overall was the fact that and I think you could probably agree with this.
There have been a lot of takes circulating on social media, on the Internet, coming from people who aren't Christian, some claim to be Republicans.
right?
And we're hearing a lot of different takes about What it means to be masculine.
What went wrong.
There's a lot of finger pointing.
A lot of blaming one another.
Men and women blaming each other.
And those are all factors.
And I think in large part most people at least get a certain percentage of the story right.
Some people are completely off.
But others, they do get at least a piece of it right.
But I think one thing that we kind of don't really get at the root of is the fact that really what caused us to get to this point is...
Comfort.
Comfort can be, sometimes, a society's worst enemy.
They say that necessity is basically the...
I forget the actual quote that I'm thinking of now.
Necessity is the mother of invention or something like that.
Basically, when you need to invent something, when you absolutely need something, you're going to do it, right?
And I think that's true for human nature overall.
Where there's a will, there's a way, so to speak.
And when you don't have to do something...
Humans are pretty amazing.
God made us...
In his light, in his image, right?
He made us in a certain way where we are capable of a lot of things.
When we need to do something, we can do it.
But on the flip side, when we don't need to do something, we won't do it.
And so whenever I think about this conversation surrounding masculinity, I think of one specific quote.
And that would, of course, be hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, and good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
That quote is from Michael Hoff.
He's an author.
I actually didn't know who it was from.
I've been using it for years, but I actually didn't know who I was quoting exactly until very recently.
But essentially, guys, the point we're at right now is that we have a lot of weak men who are currently creating hard times for us.
And you could see that exemplified in a lot of different ways.
You go to college campuses and there's certain words you can't say.
They have like safe zones for you can't make people feel unsafe.
You can't misgender someone.
Well, do you think that in a third world country where people are just trying to figure out where their next meal is going to come from, that they care about misgendering?
You think they even think about their gender?
No, they don't have time to.
They're too busy surviving.
And I'm not saying that we should implement that here in the United States, here in the Western world, but we will inevitably get to that point again because the cycle repeats, right?
That's the whole point.
Because we have weak men, because we've had so many great times, great times where comfort has been provided and they haven't had to really endure hard times.
They haven't had to suffer, right?
And if they did have to suffer, in any capacity they did suffer, whether it be, oh, you misgendered me, or oh, you said a mean word to me, they don't know how to deal with it.
They don't have discipline, so they lash out, and they actually create a more dangerous society.
When men are not in control of themselves, you have a more dangerous society.
For women, it's different.
You know, women, they're created for different reasons.
We're nurturers.
You know, that's what the Bible says about us.
We're meant to be You know, the matriarch of the home, meaning that's our domain, is the home, right?
And so we're supposed to be looking over our children, right?
Men, on the other hand, they serve a different purpose.
And if they show weakness, if they're not able to endure suffering, then our society will crumble.
And that's exactly where we're at in the cycle.
Our society is crumbling because of weak men.
Now, I came across this video that I think actually explains it really well.
This is from Richard Grannon.
I've actually never watched one of his videos up until today, and I thought that this was a great illustration of what exactly I'm trying to preface this show with, and then I'm going to get into the interview.
But this is, I think, really important that we kind of grasp the whole concept of why suffering Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And weak men create hard times, and so the cycle continues.
Is this true?
I believe it's true.
I believe that the phases that we go through, the cycles that we go through, probably follow something like this.
If it's not been absolutely true throughout history, then this little cute aphorism is true enough for this moment we're in now, where The hard men that went before us have created good times, they've created opulence, they've created excess, they've created luxury and the capacity for consumer capitalism to flourish And this absolutely has made for weak men and weak women and weak people.
Human beings were evolved for massive, massive hardship.
We don't have strong teeth.
We don't have a strong bite.
We don't have big claws.
We don't have armor.
Our superpower is flexibility, plasticity, and adaptability.
But we are, it seems ironic to say, struggling to adapt To excess and choice and options and wealth.
And all these things seem to be doing is making us very, very soft.
The softness manifests in strange ways, so...
When you think of mental health issues, you're probably not thinking of ideology and politics and economics.
You're probably thinking, in the way that we've been trained to think, oh, childhood trauma, or this individual has a genetic predisposition to anxiety or to obsessive-compulsive tendencies or towards narcissism or whatever it is.
Actually, I think this is false.
I think that the overwhelming majority of issues that people go to therapists for and go to doctors for that are classed as mental health issues are actually Issues of the good times, the wealthy times, the opulent times in which we live.
The message that we're being given right now during these opulent and good times is consume, consume, consume.
Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.
And you think, well, that sounds great.
As opposed to what?
Plague, famine, war, genocide, you know, fighting for survival against starvation.
I mean, if you think in terms of the history of the human entity, the history of the human animal, what would have killed most of us?
Well, probably disease.
And if not disease, probably starvation.
And if not disease, starvation, probably disease brought on by being malnourished through Starvation and a lack of calories in the environment.
So now we have medicine.
Now we have an excess of calories.
Now in the Western world, more people die from obesity and obesity-related illnesses than they do from starvation by a huge amount.
But that's the problem.
That is the problem.
It's now too easy.
And this period, our culture, our environment is not a good evolutionary match for the creature that we are.
Indeed, you have people trying to find challenge, trying to find hardship, just so that they can feel alive, they say, so that they can feel good, so that they can feel cleansed, so that they can feel purposeful.
They're deliberately bringing challenge and hardship back into their lives.
What happens when things are good?
When things are good, people try to enjoy themselves as much as they can.
Isn't that a good thing?
No, it isn't.
It's not the entity that we are.
We are not machines of consumption and enjoyment.
Sure, you should have a good time.
You should enjoy yourself.
You should consume if it brings you pleasure.
But we must do this wisely.
We need to have the wisdom to know that there's an upper limit to how much pleasure we can endure.
Yeah, he's 100% right.
I wanted to stop it right there because he's spot on.
We're not machines of consumption and enjoyment.
That's exactly what he said.
We're not.
See, what we've abandoned here is the whole idea of us existing.
God made us for purpose, not merely consumption and enjoyment.
He made us to worship Him, to worship God.
That is our purpose.
Chasing comfort and the frills of life, that's not actually going to bring you long-term happiness, but purpose will.
And that's the difference here.
These people who constantly seek Big Pharma's medication, that constantly seek therapy, they don't have purpose.
What they don't understand is that a medicine will numb you, but it won't give you purpose.
It will numb the unhappy thoughts you have as a result of being inundated with all of this constant pleasure, this consumption culture.
But it won't bring you purpose, which is the one reason we exist.
And sometimes, pursuing purpose, in fact, all the time, pursuing purpose requires some amount of suffering.
Sometimes a lot of suffering.
Anything that's worth achieving usually isn't easy to get.
And usually the reason we have to achieve that is because that's, well, always, if there's a reason we have to achieve something, or we feel it on our heart to achieve something, it's because God wants us to.
That's God's path for our life.
And so we are going to have to endure some suffering to get there.
And we've forgotten how to do that.
We've forgotten how to suffer.
We don't want to suffer.
So we numb ourselves and we consume and we consume and we consume and we take the easy path.
And if our feelings are hurt, if we're feeling uncomfortable, well, then we cry.
We say we're being misgendered.
Well, not me, but a large percentage of people do, sadly.
And we seek comfort.
And that might bring you short-term happiness.
That might actually put a band-aid on it.
But the reality is you're not seeking purpose.
You need to endure some suffering.
And we've forgotten how to do that.
In particular, men have forgotten how to do that.
And so I came across this article from my friend Joe Enders where he wrote about this very issue.
And I thought this was so prevalent, guys.
Take a look at this.
This was his article entitled, The Unconditional Duty of a Christian Man.
Suffer well.
And nobody had really just...
I never read an article where somebody just put it so bluntly.
It's totally true.
Everybody's scared of saying it, but the reality is suffering is a necessary component of life, particularly as a Christian.
God wouldn't call on us to do something that wasn't good.
He's not going to ask us to do things that are easy all the time.
But good.
Good doesn't mean easy.
Good means what is the best.
What is for the best of for his will.
For God's will.
And sometimes that requires us to suffer.
And ultimately, that's for our betterment as well.
As he puts it, it isn't a choice.
So you better learn to manage it.
And he did a great job of breaking down exactly what that looks like, how men need to start dealing with their suffering, rather than either avoiding it or allowing it to consume them.
Because we have a problem in society, too, where I think men are over-emotional a lot of the time.
And it's true, they are.
We don't need more women.
We have women for that, right?
But men have forgotten how to sort of manage this, manage their suffering.
Suffering is inevitable.
Right?
And it could be the smallest thing or it could be the biggest thing.
And right now we're making, you know, big deals out of the tiniest thing in society.
And that's the problem is because everything's out of whack.
Everything's out of perspective.
And if we feel the tiniest bit of discomfort, we run away.
Don't run away.
There's a reason why.
And Joe did an amazing job explaining it.
I actually had the opportunity to speak to him about his article because he did have a lot of great knowledge to impart.
I thought his analysis was great.
If you want to check out the full article, it is on churchmilitant.com.
But guys, without further ado, I do want to go ahead and play the interview that I got to have with him.
And like I said, we covered a whole slew of topics.
So stay till the end of it as well because it is...
Probably one of the best conversations I've had in a while with someone.
So guys, without further ado, here is my interview with Joe.
And joining me now, as promised, is Joe Enders, host of the Red Top Report.
He also writes for ChurchMilitant.com.
Joe, thank you so much for being here.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
I hear we got some suffering to talk about.
Yeah, really important subject, honestly, because I actually tweeted out about a week ago.
I know we had planned on doing this interview a week ago, but it didn't work out.
But I did tweet out.
I said, I don't just hate what feminism did to women.
I hate what it did to men.
Western man barely has a protective instinct.
And you replied with an article that you wrote, which is called The Unconditional Duty of a Christian Man.
Suffer well.
And I thought that this was such a perfect response because oftentimes I think the conversation surrounds second wave feminism, which is obviously a problem.
Don't get me wrong.
But I also think But it's more of a biblical problem.
It's a fact that we have, so many men have strayed from the Bible, even men who do call themselves Christians, and they've forgotten that a part of sort of their manhood is suffering.
Explain a little bit about what this article was about and what inspired you to write it, essentially.
Well, you know, one of the things that I think is the most important for men just in general to recognize when they're When they're specifically younger and maturing is that there seems to be this culture in America and it's largely prompted by individualism.
What's best for me?
What should I do in these situations?
What a lot of people don't realize is sometimes doing what doesn't feel like what's best for you is sometimes the thing that actually is best for you.
And I often think about suffering as one of those things.
It's often very good for you to suffer.
I mean, good grief, when you're in the weight room and you're lifting weights or something like that, yeah, it hurts.
You suffer while you're doing that, but in the end, you actually get stronger from it.
In the end, it's actually healthy for you.
That's actually a pretty good analogy.
The idea, though, is you're just going to suffer in your life no matter what you do.
It doesn't matter if you're a degenerate left-wing LGBT social justice warrior.
It doesn't matter if you're a conservative Christian father and husband.
It doesn't matter what happens.
You will suffer.
The question that people don't seem to be asking is how to best deal with suffering.
All we ever hear about from the psychological community and the psychiatric community is how to cope with suffering as opposed to how to suffer through it well.
And that's the difference.
Yeah.
Speaking about the suffering management theory you have there, you brought up three different ways to deal with that.
You have accept suffering as a gift, manage your passions, and choose the right moment.
Can you briefly go into some of those, an explanation as to what you mean by those things?
Because I think you're absolutely spot on there.
Yeah, and you know, a lot of this stuff isn't really coming from me.
This is just stuff that's been taught throughout Christian history, throughout church history.
I'm a Catholic, so I cited a lot of the Catholic church fathers in this article.
I even talked about Pope St.
John Paul II, who said, suffering is almost inseparable from man's earthly existence, right?
Part of existing is suffering, because we live in a sinful world, we've chosen the fall, and we've done all of those things.
And the first thing that you need to do is accept suffering as part of God's If you accept the suffering as being part of God's plan, one of the things that you're Manage this in a way that, okay, God exists, right?
If you're a Christian, God exists.
You believe God exists.
You need to know that God would not create a suffering so unbearable for you that you are just destined for hell and to fail at whatever God has put in front of you.
You are always capable of overcoming whatever suffering God actually does allow in your life.
Now, God doesn't obviously actively will these horrible things to happen to us all the time, but he does allow it to happen because it gives us the opportunity to show our faith.
One of the things that Mary said in Scripture was, my soul magnifies the Lord.
That's something that a lot of people should think about.
This is in the Gospel of Luke.
She says, my soul magnifies the Lord.
And what she means by that is when your soul magnifies, Magnifies the Lord.
What you're doing is you're allowing God to put something in your life, and you need to make a choice.
And when you make that right choice, God's glory shines through you because you've chosen to allow Him to enter into your life.
Now, when you apply something like this to suffering, and you can not only accept it, but embrace it because you know you can beat it, because you have that That mental drive to say, oh my gosh, I am going to embrace this.
Thank you, God, for permitting this in my life because now I have the opportunity to glorify you.
What a magnificent thing.
Once you start being able to do that, you're invincible.
And that's the way that you should see it as a Christian.
It's an opportunity to grow your faith and also show gratitude towards God for this opportunity, essentially, because it's going to make you into a better man, a better Christian.
It's going to grow your faith as you brought up there.
But what I want to talk about too, and you kind of alluded to this earlier, is the fact that we have this kind of like comfort-obsessed society that we live in.
And that's kind of what's driven us away from this embracing of suffering.
Like you have, what are those like, zones on college campuses where you can't say certain things.
We're like, free speech is not a thing because we have to make sure everybody feels okay.
We can't say certain things.
You can't do certain things.
Again, the whole toxic masculinity culture, it's like We've kind of created a society where comfort is put above anything else.
And you're never going to grow as a person, whether you're Christian or not, but you're never going to grow as a person or as a believer or in any aspect in life if you don't endure some sort of groundbreaking change in your life where it's going to tear you to pieces and then you have to build yourself up.
And this is particularly applicable to men rather than women because if men are going to be the leaders of society, which they should be and which they are called to be, they have to have gone through that suffering in order to endure that leadership position.
What do you think went wrong there?
Because there definitely is this embracing of comfort over suffering.
Men don't recognize their role or who they are, and their wives also don't recognize their role and who they are.
When you think about the idea of what a marriage is, which is the foundation of the family, you know, that is the leadership structure of the family.
You have the husband on top, you have the wife below him, and then you have the children below both of them.
And it's a very hierarchical structure.
I mean, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything that God has created that doesn't have some form of hierarchy.
Creation itself has always had hierarchy.
Even the angels have hierarchies.
You have your seraphim.
You have your cherubim.
These are all ordered.
God creates order.
He doesn't bring about chaos.
He's not random.
Everything is done with a purpose.
So obviously, there's going to be an order of people.
There's even an order in heaven.
That's a different subject, though.
So what I want to get at...
It seems to me that men don't realize that as the head of the family, they are the pastor of a church.
And it's called a domestic church.
That domestic church is where the father stands in the place of Christ in his household.
He is responsible for carrying the crosses of the family.
He is responsible for teaching them to carry their crosses.
He is responsible for everything they need to know about actually learning the faith at large.
If your irresponsibility leads to one of your children not going to heaven, you are held account for that at your final judgment.
A lot of women like to glamorize being independent.
They like to glamorize being a leader.
No, no.
Being a leader is a great responsibility and it actually requires a greater submission because there actually is not many people that are over us.
We have this massive responsibility to make the right choice and always make that right choice as the heads of our households.
And the only thing that we have to defer to is the church and Jesus Christ.
That's a lot.
That's a lot to take in.
So if you're not prepared for this, if you're not training yourself in fortitude, if you don't understand how to deal with suffering, what you're going to do is you're going to find yourself in a situation where you're actually breaking down in front of your family in some way.
You're demonstrating that you don't have control, that you don't have leadership.
And think of it with the church analogy.
I mean, imagine if your pastor broke down crying, oh, I didn't I have so much work to do.
I'm so stressed out.
I'm not going back to that church.
I'm not going to trust that guy with my soul.
So why on earth as a man in a household should you think that you can act any differently?
Yeah, no, I'm so glad you brought that up because I've gotten a lot of hate before for saying that as a husband, as a father, you really shouldn't be showing weakness in front of your wife and your kids.
It makes it very difficult to be respected as a man when you're showing that kind of weakness.
Now, obviously, if you're at a funeral and your mom dies or something...
Cry away.
Cry like a baby, right?
That's not weakness.
What I mean is don't show weakness in a sense where you don't know what to do.
You don't know what decision you're going to make next.
Don't put that on the wife, actually, because what happens in that case, and if you want to make this on a broader scale, the way society's seen it, the way society's reacted, is what happens is when men step away from a leadership position and they show feminine qualities, It is that women step in.
And when women step into leadership roles, things go wrong because that's not really the natural place for a woman.
And that is made very clear in the Bible, as you pointed out.
What's the way back from this?
Because you bring up this whole culture of like independent, strong women, career driven women.
And it doesn't seem like I think there's a pushback.
There's definitely a counterculture movement.
But can we really undo some of the damage that we've caused in the sense that can we bring ourselves back to a place where we can recognize, hey, this probably isn't best for society?
Because every time I look around, there's still another female candidate running for office or this or that, whatever.
And like, look, I'm not saying that I have a problem with every single woman running.
I'm just saying, generally speaking, women are stepping up because men won't.
And I think that's the problem.
And you know what?
I think that a lot of people don't recognize this, but the antidote to this is essentially Ephesians 5, verse 24.
And in Ephesians 5, verse 24, it's very clear.
It says that as the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.
Now, obviously, the caveat to that is acceptance sin.
If your husband tells you to, you know, go commit adultery, don't do it.
Yeah, we're talking like those Adam 22 types that are just completely weird psycho people.
But...
But looking into the subject deeper on suffering, what men need to realize, and I like how you actually said this, because men are supposed to be submissive.
Men are not supposed to not be submissive.
They're just not supposed to be submissive to their wives or their children.
We are subjects of the church.
We are subjects of Jesus Christ.
If Jesus tells us to do something, if the church teaches that we must believe something, we do not go around and say, well, you know, I don't think I'm going to do that because I am not high and mighty.
I am a layman.
I am a member of the church.
And it's not my job to reopen theological questions about whether or not Jesus Christ was the son of God or not, for example.
That's not my place.
That was never my place.
I am subject to the church.
I am subject to the Apostles' Creed.
I am subject to the Nicene Creed.
I believe what I say in those things because I am submissive to the church.
They are lords over me.
That's what people seem to miss.
Christ is a king over me.
I come crawling to him on my knees and beg him to help me, to show me mercy, to help me become stronger, to help me do all of the things that I need to do, to not be so I'm not submissive to my wife.
This is one of the things that a lot of people don't understand about Christianity.
You know, there's this whole neo-pagan movement on the internet right now, and they're always talking about, you know, oh, we need to be like the Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, and all these great pagan philosophers that talked about not showing emotion.
This is actually an overreaction to the radical hedonism that we've been dealing with in our culture right away, because our culture is, you know, ah, take a pill, it'll get better, it'll go away, or ah, just, you know, cry in front of your wife and you'll feel better.
It's not about feeling better.
That's the problem.
It's about stability.
It's about order.
It's about command over oneself.
It's about self-mastering.
Yeah, and the irony in all of this is that if you take the easier route, if you do decide, well, I don't want to go through that suffering, I don't want to have to submit myself I don't want to have to go through all of that because it's easier.
It's easier to just believe in myself, that sort of thing, and live a comfortable life, not go through the suffering.
Well, the irony in that is you actually wind up living less of an enriching life because the whole purpose of suffering is purpose.
It gives you purpose.
God is building you up for a greater purpose.
And that's not something you can do on your own.
That's not something you can do just sitting there being comfortable and assuming that you're the god of your own life.
Sorry.
Yeah, no.
This is why God gave us emotions.
Excuse me for one second.
God gave us emotions.
So we had the capacity to use those emotions for good.
We're not Stoics.
We don't believe that emotions are intrinsically evil.
God gave us passion.
God gave us the ability to express them to one another.
And he allowed us to grow in love and in relationship and trust in one another.
That's why all of these things actually exist.
And through doing those things, we actually glorify him.
The thing that men today don't seem to understand For the most part is that there is this word.
It's a Greek word.
It's called kairos.
It means opportune time and place.
You can control when you feel your emotions.
I do not buy this.
Even at funerals, I've been able to hold my tears until the right time came about for me to cry.
And I'm talking about family members that I've lost.
You have to have mastery and control over when you feel your emotions.
The idea with Christianity that separates us from the hedonists and from the Stoics is that we don't think that feeling emotions are bad, and we don't think that feeling emotions all the time is bad.
The idea is that we need to feel emotions.
And when we feel those emotions that are good and that are from God, This is the important part because this is the only time you should be entertaining the feelings or the emotions is when it's for something good that you can recognize.
This is why scripture says to take all your thoughts captive.
So you can recognize whether your emotion is coming from a good place or a bad place and whether it's okay to express it or not express it.
And then once you do express that emotion, after taking that, once you do decide that you will express that emotion because it is good, what you then need to do next is, What you need to do next is you need to take that thought captive.
And once you do, you express that emotion.
I'm losing my train of thought.
I'm trying to get it out right now.
And then you need to...
I cannot remember what I was going to say for the life of me.
Good grief.
Well, I think you're really onto something there because it's all about, you know, you feel something, okay, then you have to have sort of this discipline of how you're going to handle that situation.
And what modern society has taught us, one that is very much not Christian at all, the message is that discipline isn't necessary.
You do you, queen.
You get fat if you want.
Don't hit the gym.
Don't lift those weights because being fat is beautiful.
It's like they want you to completely...
Not have that aspect of your life where you say, okay, maybe I do feel like eating a bag of chips, but I'm not gonna do that because I have discipline.
Yeah, and this is what I'm getting at.
When you choose to entertain an emotion, because the emotion is good, sometimes it's good to have a couple chips here and there.
It's not bad for you or anything like that.
You're supposed to enjoy the things that God has created in life.
So once you do choose to entertain that, the next thing you need to say is, when's the best time to express this?
If you're sitting in front of somebody who, for example, is struggling with obesity or something like that, now's not the time to pull out the bag of chips and start eating it in front of them.
And let's say it's something more serious, like somebody dying like that, and you do choose to entertain this emotion and crying.
You don't lose control in front of your family.
You don't do anything like that.
Maybe a better place is to do it in prayer, to actually embody that idea of male submissiveness to Christ, that idea of male suffering in the church.
Now, what I want to...
Kind of do to bring all of this together is to say that what a Christian does is they take their suffering.
They have it.
It's in their minds.
It's in their hands.
And they say, Christ, you have bore all of this suffering.
You have bore all of this grief on the cross.
All the wages of sin were paid for by the cross.
He died on that cross.
He experienced all of it.
All you have to do is say, here it's already on the cross and say, please take this from me because you did take it from me.
The temporal effects of things don't go away.
You have to give them to Christ.
And when you offer those things up to Christ crucified, it actually allows you to build your fortitude.
It actually allows you to build your temperance.
It actually allows you to have a mastery over your emotions that you didn't even know was possible.
Like I said, with psychology and psychiatry, you're stuck in this situation where you're not actually dealing with your emotions.
You're only figuring out different ways how to either stave them off or how to make yourself feel comfortable with having them.
It's not actually dealing with them.
You're not offering them to anything.
And if you can't offer your emotions to anything, they never go away.
And then what happens?
They pile up.
And that's dangerous for you mentally.
Yeah, it's true.
And I think that I absolutely agree with the idea that the stoic nature that is sort of being pushed on men, this philosophical idea of, oh, just don't have emotions.
Well, that's not really realistic.
What you're going to create is then a society of men who are actually quite dangerous because they either have pent up aggression or they don't have that discipline to begin with.
They know because it's almost impossible to actually just stop yourself completely from having emotions.
So then they don't know how to deal with it.
They don't know how to embrace it and deal with it, which is obviously what the Bible tells us to do and what you are advocating for in your article.
So instead, they become dangerous to society.
What is really all of this sex craze phenomenon going on right now in society?
Well, it's because this whole push for LGBTQ, it's all about, well, if you feel this way, you should have the right to act on it.
And that's why, for that, you can justify rape that way.
Are we going to start justifying rape that way?
No, that's disgusting.
That's horrible for society.
But yet, that is the logic that the left uses, that this satanic culture uses, essentially, to justify their means.
Well, if you feel that way, love is love.
No, you have to control yourself or else you are a danger to society.
This is the important thing because you need to think of it this way.
This goes back to a foundational principle, but men are not able to actually...
Men are not able to control their passions anymore.
Men are not able to do any of these things because we have fell prey to this idea of individualism.
And it started with the idea that we could abstract what we can and can't believe by God.
And that started in the 1500s.
And then after that, we brought about all these other ideas.
Okay, well, maybe actually every individual person is equal and we don't actually create things in a hierarchy anymore.
Things are not as hierarchical anymore.
This happened, you know, Further after the Enlightenment, it started with equal rights and then now it's turning into equality of outcome.
And this is obviously what Marx started promoting.
And then, you know, your audience may or may not like this.
I'm going to say it anyways.
Yeah.
First wave feminism, guys.
Major individualism.
I say it all the time.
And you know what?
What's so dangerous about first wave feminism is what it did was, is it told women that they are actually equal to the man in the home and therefore have the equal weight in the decisions.
What a lot of people don't understand is that the first cell of society before first wave feminism was actually the household.
And with the first cell of society being the household, it's not that the wife didn't weigh in on how the vote was cast for the household.
She obviously talks to her husband about politics and she's obviously one of the top advisors in the home to the husband.
She should be the top advisor in the home to the husband.
And then the man is simply the one who goes and casts out the vote as the leader because the final decision ultimately lies on him.
It was a very structural and hierarchical thing.
When feminism removed that, what it did was it set the foundation for families to have different opinions within itself, and that tears it apart.
And when families are torn apart, they're ripped apart by disagreement, by strife, by this idea that you have a right to be an individual and not part of something, Then came this idea that you could be part of whatever gender you want, or you could be part of any sexual action that you want.
You could have sex any way you want, which would be like, oh, you know, I can just contracept and abort all my children so I don't have any kids, and now we have a demographic crisis in Europe.
It all leads back to that one simple principle of individualism.
That is such a good point.
I'm really glad you brought up first wave feminism because many people are scared to bring that up.
I agree with you there.
And I also think that one of the things that that did is it disincentivized women from getting married because you bring up an excellent point.
Obviously, when a man is about to make a decision as the head of the household, he's obviously consulting his wife.
In a normal marriage, in a marriage that is biblical, there's all this flack that's out there about how biblical Christian families are run.
The reality is there is a lot of consultation that goes on between men and women, or the husband and the wife.
Yeah, the man ultimately executes the action as the head of the household and he has the final say, but obviously it's a team effort in the sense that they're talking to each other about it.
And with that said, You did have a voice through your husband as a woman, even if you didn't have the right to vote.
You had your family.
It was one vote per family.
That was the idea behind it.
Your husband would cast the vote.
And yeah, that was obviously your input mattered, or it should if you married a man who loves you, which the Bible calls on men to do, right?
So with that said, what happened when they got rid of that and they made it all about individualism, as you pointed out, Women started then going off on their own and saying, well, I can have my voice heard without having a family, without being married.
And I'm not going to say this is the sole reason as to why women stop, where people stop getting married and stop having children.
But I think it contributed to the fact that there was a stepping stone.
Right.
That's what it was.
It was that stepping stone.
It was the stepping stone that said, well, women are actually separate from the total family unit, which is which...
Because that's the problem.
And this is something that the Catholic Church teaches.
This is something that Christianity as a whole seems to recognize, is that what we build our civilization on is not the individual.
And that's a complete rejection of a foundational point of the Enlightenment, that societies are built on individuals.
No, they're not.
Societies are built on families.
That's the problem.
An unhealthy family is an unhealthy civilization.
That society still has individuals in it But there's nothing to build off of on an individual, because individuals actually require cultivation.
And who steps in when the family is unable to step in?
It's obviously going to be the state.
And the state can have any value, specifically in this pluralistic society that we've chosen to create, that is no longer governed by Christendom, that's no longer governed by the philosophical underpinnings from Plato and Aristotle, St.
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
We're not governed by those principles anymore.
We're in a pluralistic society.
So now, whatever the prevailing political party is, whatever the prevailing social movement is in the country, is actually what dictates how our children are raised.
It's not families anymore.
And when we get to that point, civilization will basically just be what the government tells it to be.
Yeah, and you hit such an important point here because I think one of the faults that America has, and I don't think, so it's a difficult thing to address because I think at first the intention was to some degree that we were going to have these communities full of families where women in particular were in charge of what went on in the home.
They also were able to get involved in the community with other moms and, you know, make it so that we had a family-friendly community.
Our local governments were running properly.
I think one of the reasons why that didn't really last for very long is because there has always been this underpinning of individualism in America.
That is an American value to some degree.
I mean, our founding fathers were scholars of the Enlightenment.
So when you think about it that way, do you think maybe America had that flaw already in its founding?
I think that it depends on the person that was involved in the founding of America.
I want to nuance that.
For example, I don't believe that George Washington was a rabid individualist.
I think that he was a Christian.
I think that he was a believing Christian.
And I think that he held the Bible to a much higher esteem than any Enlightenment individualism idea.
I think that's also the reason that he was chosen to be the first leader of the country.
But when you look at some more radical people like Thomas Jefferson, you can see writing a Bible and taking all the miracles out of it.
Or saying that the state should not be involved in religion in any capacity.
I understand what he meant by that, obviously.
He means like the state shouldn't restrict religion and that's fine.
But what happens is when you completely divorce the state from religion entirely, well then there's no actually codified set of values for them to go by.
And the problem is that what we're founded under is, you know, Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Now, there's nothing wrong with life.
I mean, obviously, we're okay with that.
Liberty.
Is liberty always good?
How are we founding ourselves under platitudes instead of absolute goods?
Why isn't it life, goodness, and the pursuit of truth that we're founded under, for example?
I think these are much more easy principles to enforce.
And then you could even say Christian truth at that.
So you have an identity formed.
And once that identity formed, you can actually form codified moral sense in people that will actually help families better raise their children.
And the majority of this country is still Christian.
Despite everything that's happened, the majority of this country is still Christian.
So if we were going to choose a faith to be the foundation of this country, and especially back then when it was even more so Christian at the founding, You know, you got to think about that.
It's like maybe we should have just embraced our Christianity as opposed to trying to divorce ourselves from it.
I think that was an incredible answer because I think about that so often.
I'm like, how would America have been different had we not emphasized this, you know, separation?
And by the way, the whole separation of church and state, that's not written anywhere in our Constitution or anything.
The left likes to throw that around immediately.
And to your point, actually, if anything, the separation existed to protect said religion, said faiths.
But one thing we don't actually talk about often is the fact that even when they were writing the Constitution and they were protecting, obviously, freedom of religion in the First Amendment, It's not like there were droves of Muslims and Jews coming over.
Let's be real here.
You know, America was founded largely on Christians of differing denominations and at different points in times, different Christian denominations were persecuted in Europe.
So they came over here.
And the idea was we want to be able to protect you as a Christian.
So even if you go that far, even if you look at, I'm not saying that like, you know, Muslims and Jews are not deserving of the First Amendment here in America today.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm just saying when you look at the actual historical context of it, it's worth noting the fact that it was truly meant to protect Christians, largely Christians.
And I think we should have done a better job of embracing that.
Yeah, I think that we absolutely, and this is the problem that I have, is pluralism was basically allowed in because of Enlightenment ideas, because of revolutionary thought at the time.
And that revolutionary thought at the time was the American Revolution, and it led to several other Freemasonic revolutions as well throughout the country.
And these are tenets of Freemasonry.
These aren't tenets of Christianity.
You know, equality, for example, is one of the tenets.
You know, it's equal rights under the law.
Well, you know, I can think of instances where equal rights under the law is not necessarily the best policy for somebody.
I don't think a repeat offender, for example, and we baked all this into our judicial system just because of how absurd of an idea it was to say equal rights under the law.
Does a repeat offender have the right to the same sentence as somebody who committed the same crime?
Of course not.
That's not...
People aren't equal in any capacity, really, except for the fact that they are valued by God.
They're all equal in that sense.
They're all equal in the sense that they have being.
They're all equal in the sense that they're capable of virtue and glorification.
But that's really it.
We're not equal in intelligence.
We're not equal in strength.
We're not equal in wisdom.
We're not even equal in maturity.
There's not really any capacity in which we're equal.
So when...
So when you have that foundational idea that comes from Freemasonry, which most of our founders were involved with the Freemasons, some didn't really know what they were getting into, George Washington being one of them.
But these types of ideas crept in, and what they did was they changed what it meant to be a Christian, specifically among the leadership.
And it actually started out with the leadership.
Most of the people were praying Christians.
They had families.
I mean, this is why...
The idea of, you know, separating the vote from the home was so absurd at the beginning.
First hundred years of this country.
And it's specifically because of that.
125 years of this country, actually.
You know, so when you think about it in that way, it's like, yeah, bad ideas can be crept in and it's because they're allowed.
So when you look at other religions like Islam, you look at other religions like, you know, Judaism, for example, and obviously I'm not talking about the Old Testament Judaism.
I'm talking about the, you know, the rabbinic Judaism that exists in the world today.
You do find yourself in this situation where you've got to say, Are we going to allow these bad ideas that come from either these faiths or Freemasonry or Marxism or any of these other philosophical ideas, are we going to allow them, permit them to creep into our society and perhaps become prevalent?
I don't know.
I mean, you asked, it's not like they shouldn't have free speech.
I was like, well, it depends on what they're promoting.
That's why we shouldn't be promoting liberty.
We should be promoting the good and the truth.
I say it all the time, not all cultures are created equal.
Well, if that's the case, then not everything should necessarily be equal as far as the response.
So anyways, Joe, this has been an incredible conversation.
I want to have you back on for another sort of deep dive into this, this whole enlightenment influence.
I think it's fascinating.
But I do have to end it there.
I really appreciate you being here.
Again, just so fascinating.
Yeah, no, thanks for having me on.
I really do appreciate it.
And by the way, always happy to come on.
Love the show.
Love what you promote on social media.
It's good.
Conservatism is all about rebuilding the family for me at this point.
That's what I'm trying to conserve, is that the family needs to be rebuilt.
And if you ever need anything on that, I'm happy to talk all about it with you.
Absolutely.
I'm totally with you on that one.
All right.
Well, have a good one.
You too.
- Thank you. - So I hope you guys enjoyed that.
I found it to be an absolutely fascinating discussion.
I didn't expect for it to go where it went, but I will definitely have Joe on again so that we can continue that conversation.
If you guys did like it, let me know.
If there's anybody else you want me to have on in the near future, definitely let me know as well.
I do have some people lined up, so it's just going to get better from here as far as Wrong Think Prime time goes.
We're just getting started.
But on that note, guys, I do want to go ahead and move on.
I have one last story I want to get to, and I think this one's actually quite important.
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I do want to go ahead and show you this one last clip I came across because I think this is a really important subject.
Tucker interviewed Chris Moritz recently, and this is the first time I think I've actually heard a mainstream conversation about transgenderism, where they actually get why it's wrong right, if that makes sense.
Because oftentimes we hear about how men don't belong in women's spaces, and that's reason in and of itself to not believe in transgenderism.
But the whole idea is transgenderism doesn't exist.
And the reason why that is is because God made women and men, and that's where it ends.
There's nothing more to it there.
When you do decide that in a society that you can be different genders, you're essentially playing the role of God.
You're saying, God, you screwed up.
You're not good enough.
I'm going to take over now.
And that is...
The worst thing you can do, obviously, that is obviously godless and also it leads you in the wrong direction overall.
That's not a good way of thinking in general.
It's not going to lead you down the right path and it's certainly bad for society.
So I was really glad that they actually got that part right in this conversation.
So I'm going to go ahead and play that for you.
One argument can be made.
It's very anti-god.
Right?
You're assigned a gender and that can be changed by medical science.
Because you're God.
Right.
It also looks a lot like human sacrifice to me.
I mean, castrate your sons and you'll somehow benefit.
I mean, most people, I would say throughout, you know, as long as people have existed, kind of want their children to reproduce and sort of carry on the line.
That's like the core human desire.
And this ends it.
I mean, you castrate your son, you have no grandchildren.
Yeah, it's basically human sacrifice.
It's satanic.
there's nothing, there's no way to justify transgenderism where like you can finally make people accept, like, I don't understand why we even bother with these, oh, men shouldn't be infiltrating women's spaces arguments.
No, it should end at, this is a godless concept, okay, and any society that embraces it is a godless one.
And that's why Russia is doing the right thing with banning transgender surgeries.
And in the United States, we should do that here.
But as we've discussed in part today, we are sadly turning into a godless society.
Actually, I would argue we're already there.
So honestly, that's the main problem we're suffering with here.
And I think you probably can see that too.
On that note, guys, we are reaching towards the hour at this point.
So I am going to wrap up.
On that note, guys, please rumble the show.
If you haven't already, hit that thumbs up button and also share the show.
Sorry I couldn't be here live reading the chat today.
I actually am traveling right now so this episode was of course pre-recorded which is why I wasn't in the chat.
But that's why I always like to bring you interesting content when I can't be here live.
That's why I did the whole interview and obviously more to come.
We are just getting started here at Wrong Think Primetime guys.
Thank you so much for tuning in today and I will see you back here Monday guys.
Have an amazing weekend.
Don't forget to tune in to my 3 p.m.
show on Monday afternoon on LFA TV and also, of course, once again, my Stu Peters Network show, Wrong Think Primetime, back here at 9 p.m.
on Monday.
Once again, have a great weekend and I will see you then, guys.
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