The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 376. Truth and Adventure as an Antidote to Suffering | Douglas Murray

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Douglas Murray, author of “The War on The West,” discuss how a misguided purpose leads to abject misery, the cowardice of experts who choose silence in the face of malevolence, the psychology of fear, and the necessity of willful exposure to combat it. ​​Douglas Murray is a British writer, playwright, media correspondent and political commentator. He is the founder of the think tank the Centre for Social Cohesion, which is now part of the Henry Jackson Society. His publications include but are not limited to:  “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017),” “The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019),” and most recently “The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason (2022)”. Murray has also written columns for publications such as “The Wall Street Journal” and is an associate editor for “The Spectator.”   - Links - For Douglas Murray: The War on the West (Book) https://www.amazon.com/War-West-How-Prevail-Unreason-ebook/dp/B09HM74J3X/ The Madness of Crowds (Book) https://www.amazon.com/Madness-Crowds-Gender-Identity-BESTSELLER/dp/1472979575/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= Murray on Twitter @DouglasKMurray https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with author, columnist, and political commentator Douglas Murray, who's been on my podcast a number of times. We talked about his latest book, not so long ago, The War on the West. We discuss how a misguided purpose leads to abject misery and hopelessness, the cowardice of experts who choose silence, experts and others, let's say, who choose silence in the face of malevolence,

the psychology of fear, and the necessity of malevolence, the psychology of fear and the necessity of willful exposure to combat that fear. So we went out for dinner last night to Royal 35, which was very good. That's a steakhouse that looks like a classic mafia also place, as far as I'm concerned, but they make great steaks. And one of the things we talked a little bit about was your burgeoning interest in purpose. And so I'm curious about that. So the first question I have, I guess, is why you think that's attracted your interest, that particular topic? I think it's because I just increasingly noticed, as I'm sure you do, that it's the question underneath for Miss All Questions in our day.

question underneath all questions in our day. A lot of the things that you and I spend a considerable amount of our time railing against are things we critique, criticize, find holes in, push back against. But you're always confronted by the fact that you're dealing with somebody who believes that they find their sense of purpose from the thing that we find, untruthful, irritating or worse. And you see all of these versions in our day, I think, of misguided purpose. Purpose used to the wrong ends. Meaning found in places that really don't give much satisfaction. But give people the drive to get up in the morning and act sometimes well,

often malevolently, more often than not, perhaps malevolently. But it seems to me that this sort of meaning crisis is one that many of the people that you and I have problems with, should we say, are actually addressing. I mean, in their own inept and sometimes malevolent way, they are sort of speaking to a death. Well, one of the things the left does very well. There's a developmental psychologist named Jean-Pierre J. who was a great psychologist, and he called himself a genetic epistemologist actually because he was interested in knowledge

structures and how they developed. So he really thought he was a practical philosopher, but in any case, he noted that human children as they develop, go through stages of development. Each stage was in some ways a different, you can say a different theory of being. And that the last stage that he identified was the messionic stage. And developmental psychologists haven't paid much attention to that because they tended to shy away from anything that's smacked of, let's say, religious thinking. Even though PHA was motivated fundamentally by the desire to bridge the gap between science and religion, which by the way,

I think he did quite well. The messianic period is late adolescence, and you might think about it anthropologically, I suppose, as associated with the need for individuals of that age to move away from their immediate local friendship group, which would have been the bridge from dependence on their parents, to identification with the broader culture. And so what they're trying to find at that point is something like a sense of universal purpose, right? And that touches on this issue of purpose, obviously, and meaning. And you, you, in the way that you laid this out when we began this discussion, you, you implied a number of presuppositions of that there are malevolent purposes, that there are fractured purposes, that there are

counterproductive purposes, that there is purpose. I presume you would also agree that there are shallow purposes and deep purposes. Absolutely. There are shallow enjoyment and deep enjoyment. One of the things that Burke says, and he's working the the spline is that of course there are things you immediately know to be enjoyable and they're required pleasures. And that's just on the level of pleasures. He gives example, I think, of cigars smoking or whiskey, I think, as an example, a pleasure you don't get straight away.

And so yes, I mean, there are things that can drive people and give also an ephemeral sense of purpose. But the issue of a deeper purpose is one I just see as being very dangerously unaddressed in our day. And I think it's, I've referred to this recently in the speech in London saying, if for instance the left approach you with the opportunity to spend your life rampagingly campaigning to provide, you know, I know cosmic social justice on this earth now. Saving the planet. Saving the planet. Not burning to death tomorrow or various other things. not burning to death tomorrow, various other things, and also are driven by things like envy,

resentment, very, very deep, deep human instincts, in a radical human instincts, that if you don't like what they're doing and what they're suggesting, you can't just answer on a technicality. And the example I gave in that speech in London was, if you have people telling you to get a burning sense of meaning in your life by being resentful, conservative

or somebody on the right, cannot simply say, well, we've got a tax break we've discovered. Right, right. I mean, it might be something. You also simply say that resentment is wrong because the alternative isn't well fleshed out. Well, the alternative as Nietzsche says is gratitude. Well, right, right, right, which is, which is doable, but you need to work at that more than you need to work a resentment. Yeah, well, that okay. So there's a bridge there between the idea of longer term and acquired purposes and Practice and work you said that you have to work at gratitude, right? And so that makes it a practice

And I don't think that I think that people generally presume that a Sentiment or state of mind like gratitude is something that descends upon you rather than something that you acquire through effort And I think that that's a real mistake Absolutely. I mean you and I and I, I think both probably have the same after you've done this, which is that we know that, you know, we're very lucky today to be sitting in a city which has its problems, but is very successful. You've got some chance of being mugged in the street, but not all that much. If you do, you can get justice. There is a justice system. There are people who hear you if you have suffered an injustice. We know that all of these

things are actually worldwide at the moment and also historically very, very unusual. So you and I might have quite a developed sense of gratitude because we might remind ourselves of these things on a daily basis. I might remind myself, I walk past some Patrick's Cathedral this morning, I think, what a building. Now, you can take that for granted, or you cannot, and you can think even for a second about the amount of labor and devotion that went into that. But that is something that some people need to be reminded of. My suspicion is that the societies were living now in the developed West. You do have to work at it. And the reason why is that there's this massive context collapse whereby we assume that the state that we are in is the natural state of mankind. And somebody I know who's...

Well, and he's also conservatives and the progressive types tend to differ on what constitutes the natural state of mankind because the conservatives, and I would say the wiser people, tend to be more influenced, you might say, by Thomas Hobbes than by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And we assume that, let's say, that the state of British natural life is, or the state of natural life is British and short and miserable, rather than some pre-industrial, paradisal state where everyone lived in harmony with nature. Well, I gave the example in my last book in the war on the west of his brother, delicious, but savage lesson that a group

of French sailors learned after Brutus, their big Brutarians, they land on an island in New Zealand and assume that the natives live in a state of nature and I think they're all killed in Eton. The ones who survive the expedition end up with a very low opinion of Rousseau. Right. They looked at the hard way. That's the same Rousseau that led all his children rot in orphanages, right? Yes. But anyhow, I think that this issue of, are you talking at comparable deaths remains important? Gratitude is obviously a part of this. Gratitude becomes easier to feel if you know what the alternatives are.

One of the things I would say about resentment is that's a good opposite, I think. Yeah. And I know a school who says that the single biggest thing that will change the behaviour of a child is if they are of an immigrant background and go back in the school holidays to their country of origin. Right. You know, if you meet your second third cousins in Pakistan or Algeria or Sudan, you have a different view of Canada, Britain, or America. Yeah, well, that also touches on part of the reason that you laid out for in gratitude, the way you conceptualized it to begin with, say, talking about walking down the streets

of New York, being unable to compare that with anything outside of New York in this presence. So ignorance is actually one problem is that if you don't know anything about history, and there's there's also, I suppose, as well as willful, as well as ignorance, there's willful blindness and the unwillingness to put in the effort that it would require to be grateful. Absolutely. So, you know, I've been considering the book of Job in some depth recently. And it's a very interesting book and it pertains to purpose, I would say. So by the time the book of Job is written

and eventually introduced into the biblical corpus, there's a real transformation in the conceptualization of God. And one, there's a key figure in that transformation, which is extraordinarily interesting. The figure is Elijah. So when Christ is transfigured on the mount, two prophets appear with him. One is Moses, and that's obvious why that is. But the other is Elijah. And Elijah, compared to Moses, is a relatively minor figure. And so there's some chapter or some verses devoted to his story, but not a lot.

But what, what, the here's the key psychological significance, let's say of Elijah. So Elijah set himself up against Jezebel, who was a queen at that time, a foreign queen of Israel, who had introduced the worship of Baal into the Israelite Paul into the Israeli culture. And Paul was a nature god. And so Elijah has a famous dispute with the prophets of Paul and ends up with Yahweh's help defeating them. And so he establishes supremacy over Paul. This is golden calf. Yeah. He builds an altar. He builds an altar. And challenges the prophets of Ball to have the sacrifice destroyed by their God. And that doesn't happen.

And then he calls on Yawa who sends down fire to destroy the not only the sacrifice, but the altar itself. And then he has the prophets of Ball put to death, which doesn't exactly thrill Jezebel, and then he runs away because she's after him. And this is where the radical transformational curse. So he's hiding out in a cave, if they, and he feels he's the only one left who's still in acolyte of Yahweh

and the entire, you know, and the entire Israeli, Israelite polity. And a thunderstorm happens, a very, very violent thunderstorm, followed by a very violent earthquake. And Elijah realizes that God is not in the earthquake and not in the thunder, that he is instead the still small voice. That's where that phrase comes from. So it's the first, it's the first market internalization of the notion of the deity, is that whatever the highest deity is, is something that you can commune with internally,

that is roughly equivalent, let's say, to the voice of conscience. And so that's Elijah. So, Maiden, now, what happens in Job? It's so interesting, because in what happens in Job is so interesting because in the story of Job, God has a bet with Satan. It's very nasty story, right? And the most brutal story. It's a brutal story. It's a brutal story. It makes you wonder why it wasn't edited out of the biblical corpus. And the constellation of the end isn't much because it's exactly, exactly. And so

Exactly, exactly. And so, Job is a good man and God thinks so. And so to Satan, and Satan is invited by God to have a few words with him and says, I bet you that I can destroy the faith of your good man, Job. And God says, yeah, I don't think so. Have at her, buddy. And so Job loses everything

and in the most painful possible manner. And what he does, as far as I can tell, is that he uses that internal guide of conscience, which was now, say, allied with the voice of God in some sense, against these terrible external forces that are conspiring to bring him down, right? Because his wife dies. The children die. The cattle die. The children die. The children die. The cattle die.

He's covered in boils. Yeah. And his friends are making fun of them because they think he must have done something to deserve this, right? So he's like, he's like taken to the bottom of reality. But he refuses to lose faith. Now you might say, and this is where the story, I think, transcends something like mere rationality, but we can argue about that. You might say that the logical

consequence, the logical conclusion from that misadventure is that Job has every rational reason to shake his fist at the sky and curse God, right? But he doesn't. He maintains faith in the goodness of being despite the fact that he's suffering dreadfully. And despite what the voice and the whirlwind says to him, which is the least comforting thing that the voice could say, which is who are used to question the Lord of their God. Right, but this is such an interesting issue here, because I've watched people in the deep throes of misery, and I can tell you that one of the things that will make misery hell is in gratitude. And so part of the story of Job seems to me to be an injunction. That is that no matter what happens to you, and that means

in some sense, no matter the facts at hand, that you are called upon never to lose faith in the essential goodness of being, right? To conduct yourself as if, as if what would you say? The cosmos itself is well structured despite the evidence that happens to be being presented to you within the confines of your life and I think that's the same as I think that's the same as the practice of gratitude. I agree by the way,

bringing that to a rather maybe not obvious segue, but we were also talking last night about the fact that I saw you discussed recently a question of euthanasia and the way in which Canadian authorities have been doing this. I mentioned to you that some some years ago I went to speak with euthanasia doctors and indeed patients in Belgium and the Netherlands. They're very advanced on this. I wrote several long essays on the subject. It's a horrible subject to dwell on, of course. But actually, one of the reasons why I've always remained

exceptionally suspicious of legalized diet, so to call it. I have, as we all have, friends who, you think at the end I wish of suffering could just start. Yeah, so I call it, I have, as we all have friends who you think at the end, I wish of suffering could just start. Yeah. So I recognize that it's, do you want it to be in the hands of the government or any more in the hands of the doctor than it already is?

Let alone the hands of the family or anything. I'm not sure about that. Allow the crossover of physical suffering to be equated with mental suffering and start putting down depressed youths as they are in the continent or example Being given we and moving towards that in Canada. Absolutely. I mean as a poor girl who survived the Brussels airport attack She's almost her classmates blown up her life didn't really recover and she was put down The view from Asia by the Belting State last year at the age of I think 24. Now, apart from the insanity of a society that will not out a principle, execute the perpetrator of an attack, but will kill a victim.

Apart from the insanity of that, and all we know about the genuinely slippery slope in this area. One of the instincts I realized I had that I just couldn't let go of was that there was something fundamental about us as human beings. It means that it is deeply ungrateful to what we have to give it up even a minute earlier than you have to. And that, you know, in the end, I have quite often revert to literature, but I think it's a gloss that he says in King Leah, you know, man must enjoy his going hence, even as his coming hever. And that actually endurance, endurance of birth, endurance of death is part of the cycle, but there is something that the resentment you feel, for instance, when somebody commits suicide, and people around, somebody who commits suicide, very often

do feel resentment as well as deep guilt, is partly, you've broken the pack to the fundamental level. You've made all of us see something we didn't wish to see or conceive something we didn't need. And left us powerless and left us powerless. And anyhow, I mean, it's a fact that in that so independent of whether or not you want to put the power to euthanize people in the hands of the state, which and the answer to that is most definitely 100% not. Well, I mean, I have said, I would say if the Canadian government can't work out

how to organize the banking system or passport delivery or some of the roads, I don't want to give them life and death, particularly not over mentally ill people. So when you see people suffering, I mean, I saw this in my clinical practice a lot, is that if you, and I saw this with my daughter, you know, we talked to her too about this one, because she was very, very ill as a child, and we did everything we could to stop her from being bitter. And the reason for that, and this is an interesting, it forces an interesting consideration of the relationship between facts and values.

So she had 40 deteriorating joints and each of them were painful. And that's a lot of joints and that's a lot of pain. And that was only a few of the things that were wrong with her. But had she become resentful and bitter, then she would have had all those problems, plus she would have been resentful and bitter. And as far as I can tell, the way you turn tragedy into hell is by becoming resentful and bitter. Now, here's a fact value problem.

So you tell me what you think about this. So she could have said to me, Dad, given the facts at hand, the logical conclusion to derive. So that's an induction, let's say, the logical conclusion to derive. So that's an induction, let's say, the logical conclusion to derive is that, you know, life is terrible and unjust, and it would be irrational of me not to be bitter.

And, you know, I think, and this is the conundrum that you see in Job too, is that, you know, when you set up a story so that someone loses everything, you set up the story so that someone loses everything, you set up the story so that they have lost everything. And the conclusion to derive from the loss of everything, the logical conclusion seems to me almost pro forma given that you've lost everything is that you have every right to shake your fist of the sky. Yes, but the oddity of it and the oddity is, you know, about

resentful people or bitter people is that, and against point I've made a lot since the War on the West came out, is we are, I think we probably all have the same experience everyone watching and you and I, which is we've probably all come across very bitter and resentful people in our lives who seem to have quite a good lot. I mean, for instance, who are financially secure.

Yeah. I suspect we've also come across people who seem to have who have nothing materially or otherwise, who live lives of gratitude and great ways. Those are the people that are really straight. Those people really straight you when you meet the absolute. But this one of the reasons I'm interested in this is because it seems fascinating to me that you can have an attitude which every socio-economic thing doesn't actually matter. You know, if you're a resentful person and you're given a million dollars tomorrow, you will be a resentful person the day after or the week after as well. Right. This isn't going to make any difference. Right.

Well, so does that imply? See, this is, I'm trying to wrestle with a distinction, let's say, between faith and reason, let's say. And so, like, it seems to me, first of all, I don't think faith is the willingness to believe in superstitious nonsense for which there's no evidence. I don't think. Which is the definition that has mainly written through the last few decades. Yes. even superstitious nonsense for which there's no evidence. I don't know. Which is the definition that is mainly written through the last few days.

Yes, exactly. But I think faith is a decision to act in courage and trust. And I think it's a decision to make that a practice. And I think in some ways it's a decision to make that a practice. God damn it. Regardless of the evidence. So, you know, I have a friend who was brutally tortured in a Canadian residential school when he was a kid and you can't listen to what happened to him

without it like Terry, you can't listen to it. It's unbelievably brutal and awful. You know, and he was devastated by that and was on the street for a good while drinking and doing drugs and like tearing himself into pieces. And he had great grandparents who really loved him and he wasn't in heritor of his cultural tradition of genuine inheritor.

And so he made a decision that he wasn't going to live a bitter and resentful life, that he certainly wasn't going to pay that catastrophe forward with his children. He learned to play, he learned to lurk at himself in the mirror again, you know, and he's conducted himself as a good man for decades now. And that's, you already made the case, you know, that you see people who have everything in some real sense and who are bitter and resentful nonetheless. And then you see people who have everything in some real sense and who are bitter and resentful nonetheless and then you see people who have nothing who aren't and so you can take the same set of

facts or even an opposing set of facts and derive different conclusions. And this points at the fact value problem, right, is that the facts don't speak for themselves in some deterministic manner and it seems to me that there has to be something approximating. Something we've always defined as a leap of faith in the positive direction. And that's tied to. It's tied in a strange way to something you said earlier, which is that you know, there are shallow pleasures and meanings and deep pleasures and meanings. And the proper faith is faith in the deep pleasures and meanings. And the proper faith is faith in the deep pleasures and meanings. And so, yes. And I'd add one other thing to that, which is, and the faith, the recognition of the depth is telling you something. Yeah, well, so I've been trying to puzzle through what depth technically, let's say. So in the scientific literature, your work is deeper. That's

one way of thinking about it. The more other people cite it, so it's a dependency network, right? So here's a definition of depth. More ideas are dependent on a deep idea than ideas, than the number of ideas that are dependent on a shallow idea. So it's like criticality, right? So you can imagine a web of presumptions with some presumptions at the fundament. Okay. So I think that religious axioms are the deepest fundament. And I think that I think we could say that by definition. And here's part of the reason for- The fairly so you speak to the deepest

fundamentals. Well, but I think that's part of- and this is where it gets complex again, that's part of the evidentiary structure. You know, if you're- if you know you have a profound aesthetic sense and so some things move you deeply. And in principle, those are profound things.

The reason they move you deeply is because they shift large sections of your perceptual and conceptual structure simultaneously rather than the shallow things which are evanescent and irrelevant. And so, and I think as well that we do, in fact, feel movement in the depths. Oh, yes. I mean, you, of course, you know it when you feel it.

I mean, that's why music is an art form. It's so extraordinary because it speaks to a depth that speech can't do. Right. Or it speaks to the register of the speech can't do. If you say, why did you find this particular piece so moving? It's often extremely hard. Even harder if you're a musicologist to explain why. There are certain ways you can explain why. Certain things to do with harmony, tonality, a phrase of music returning to its natural home. I mean, that's a very almost all things that move people are the resolution.

However long delays, in fact, the longer delayed is the better the resolution, the greater satisfaction in it. But it's not just that. It's that sense that this is speaking to us in a register that we understand and we see but we can't quite reach. But it speaks to my, to my, to my mind, music is the closest thing you have to religion, not because I want to make a religion of it.

Various people tried that, including Wagner, but rather that it's the language of religion and sound. President Trump recently issued this warning from his Mar-a-Lago home. He said, and I quote, our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world's standard, which will be our greatest defeat, frankly, in 200 years. There are three reasons the central banks are dumping the US dollar. Inflation, deficit spending, and our insurmountable national debt.

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Protect your savings with gold. Birch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and thousands of happy customers. Text Jordan to 989898 and get your free Info Kit on gold. Again, text Jordan to 98, 98, 98. Yeah, well, and that I would say that's also that's an embodied, that's an embodied phenomenon rather than an, than a, than a conceptual phenomenon. See, I think one of the problems that we have in the West in our conceptualization of meaning is that we're so obsessed with

this semantic and the descriptive that we presume that meaning itself is secondarily derived from this semantic and descriptive. I mean, the postmodernists make this case when they say that everything isn't encapsulated, say in language. And it's simply not the case. Well, that's a game. I mean, that's a game they've been playing since the last war. And my explanation of it, I gave a few books ago, my explanation for that is that it was very important after 1945 to keep philosophy behind police crime call and tape. So what do you do in the philosophy departments?

You play a language game. You talk about her... So why was it important to do that? Oh, it's absolutely crucial because nobody knew how it happened, and they feared that this was one of the components, and we're still working that out. And we were still working that out. That's why there are certain, and as you know, if you speak to somebody who teaches philosophy at any university, there are several philosophers with enormous regularity that always appear as the philosophers that students want to study. Like Nietzsche, Outranks, most people like 30 to one. If you're in

political philosophy, people love Macchi of Ailey. Some might go for high to go. My point is, is that they're known to be dangerous thinkers. Well, and high to go is a to go. My point is, is that they're known to be dangerous thinkers. Well, and high to go is a good example, although the actual texts give you very little compared to what you could take from nature, if you need to, badly, or Machiavelli. But it's very interesting to me that there is this awareness that philosophy could like culture actually in general, which again, you can see in the visual arts and others, in the latter half of the 20th century, become about not very important things.

And it's because there has just been this fundamental whack at the belief that, for instance, philosophy can make you good, that art or culture makes you good. In fact, it's just had the biggest blow and the answer in the late 20th century to how did the most civilized societies on earth end up doing the worst thing? One answer is maybe the civilization was the problem. And a lot of people took that idea away or haven't had the discipline to...

Just medieval, more efficient. Absolutely. I mean, it didn't have the discipline to disentangle accurately what could have happened and what did happen and what didn't. But I think a lot, I've always been sure that the games that philosophy plays in our day are games of deliberate distraction, because people aren't sure they can cope with the questions that they should be asking. And that's a shame that I... Well, it is very difficult, well, you know, it is very difficult to cope with that. I mean, I spent my whole

life, I would say probably since I was about 13 really trying to solve the Auschwitz puzzle. So, you know, while the Auschwitz puzzle is, how could you enjoy life as an Auschwitz guard? And for me, that was an attempt to understand what happened in Nazi Germany at the level of the personal. It's like, well, what sort of person did you have to be like in Nazi Germany at the level of the personal. It's like, well, what sort of person did you have to be like in order to do the terrible things that were done? And the answer is, well, now and then you were a psychopath. But otherwise, you were normal. Yeah, you were like, you were me.

Right. Which means that we're not the creatures that we think we are. Right. And that's a very terrifying. So tell me what you think about this. So I've been spending a lot of time walking through the biblical stories recently because I'm writing a new book, which is called We Who Ressel with God. And it should be out in February.

And I've thought a lot about the crucifixion story. And so one of the things you can say about the crucifixion story. So one of the things you can say about the crucifixion story, and Jung said this was that it was an archetypal tragedy, and he had a technical reason for that. And the technical reason for that was that it's kind of like an AI idea, like a large language model idea.

Imagine you took all the corpus of all tragedies, and then you extracted out from that a meta tragedy, which would be like the essence of tragedy itself. Yeah, the tragedy of all tragedy. Mm-hmm, okay, and so the essence of tragedy is something like the most unjust possible thing happens to the- To the most adventurous person.

Exactly, exactly. Okay, so that's pretty clear, right? It's pretty clear that that is So that's pretty clear, right? It's pretty clear that that is the passion story in essence, right? And there's decorations on it, like you're betrayed by your best friend, and not only are you a good person, but even the people who put you to death know it. And your mother has to see it. And you're, yes, exactly.

Your mother has to see it. So like all the details are in there. But you know, what's very interesting about that story is that it actually doesn't end there, right? Because there's a mythological corpus that's arisen around the crucifixion story per se that after Christ was crucified, he had to descend into hell and harrow it. And so, and the way I read that psychologically is that you are called upon, if you want to get to the very bottom of things, not only to face the ultimate tragedy of existence, right, to face that full on, but that that's not enough

that you actually have to face the problem of hellish malevolence itself, and that that actually, that's a worse problem than death. And I think maybe the reason that philosophy degenerated into triviality, following up on your logic, was that it was a lot easier to avoid the problem than to take on both of those burdens. Because I don't think you can understand Naziism. How can you understand Naziism without journeying to the heart of darkness? Some, by the way, even if you journey there, you may learn nothing. I mean, that's, that's, as you know, is the worst possible. I mean, that's, that's, as you know,

as the worst possible. I mean, we hit, we, in our age, we hear people all the time saying things like the lessons of the Holocaust. So what are you talking about, which lessons? And generally, generally it involves into kind of banality of like the nice to people. Like, don't mass murder people, sure.

Okay. Right. Beyond that. Right. And the devil's in the details unfortunately. The devil's in the details on this. mass murder people, sure, okay. Right. Beyond that. Right. And the devil's in the details unfortunately. The devil's in the details on this. In fact, by the way, it's very hard to say anything new about Auschwitz. And you sort of feel everything is being said, that could be said in a way, and at the same time, we know nothing about it.

But I was very struck by a name, as you died recently, wrote a novel in the 90s. It was a very controversial time, called Times Arrow. Everything goes backwards. The whole plot of the novel goes, time is reversed. So if somebody is sick, they go to a pile of sick and inhale it and then walk happily around their day. So anyhow's anyhow, it's a device that works well at times as an abusive parent. The child is crying. The parent smacks the child and he stops cry. It's a device that makes you able to look at things in an interesting way. But he was much criticized for Davis in the 90s because he does the Holocaust. He addresses the Holocaust in the book. And everyone said, oh, you're using it as a literary device. I actually think by doing what he did, he actually showed

one of the very few new insights I've ever seen about the Holocaust, which is that the people whose job it is to take the bodies out of the ovens. We give birth to these people from the ovens. Late in the novel, one of them confides to one of his colleagues that he's getting nervous because the people that they're bringing out of the ovens now don't seem right. They're more and more disabled. They're more and more ill. Right. They're more and more disabled. They're more and more ill. Is it worth even taking them out of the office? So strangely enough, by doing it in reverse, you get an idea of how it started. Right. You get an idea of how it started. Yeah, well, the thing is, which is a terrible thing, start, start one thing at a time. And in this case, again, by a desire on behalf of some people to alleviate suffering, or to, um, or to point to, to point, to leave a suffering, to, to, to view some lives as

less valued than others. Perhaps hardly worth living goes back to what we're saying about Canada today. To views, I urge people to think of it this way around, because if you think about it this way around as much as you see how you start. But the other thing. Well, that is how things started in Nazi Germany too, right? Is that because the progression towards the death camps was a progression through Euthanasia. And I've looked at a fair number of the propaganda films from the mid-30s where the Nazis were starting to clean up the asylum. When they would go in. Like I'd been in backward as the asylum when I worked at the Douglas Hospital in the 1980s, there were still people there who had been on the wards who hadn't been deinstitutionalized, who had been on the wards for like four decades,

and they would kind of lurk in the corridors that were underground at the Douglas Hospital, because it was like a university campus that was connected by underground passageways. And it was like Dante's in Fernodown there. I mean, and you could easily go there and make the case that, you know, oh my God, is a life of being on a backward in a psychiatric hospital, you know, wrapped up in a, in a straight jacket for three decades worth living. And well, that brings that whole terrible conundrum up in front of you. There's no simple answer you can jump to there. But one of the answers, the answer that is something that should therefore be handed to the state to deal with is some efficient manner.

That's definitely not a good. But the idea that it's a question that the individual should wrestle with is naturally the case. I mean, that this is something that people should think about and will always think about as long as people think. It seems to me very obvious. I've always been struck by one of Elie Vizel's works, who was of course in Auschwitz. I don't even know the trial of God. Did you ever read that one? It's worth reading, and there's a version of it.

He replays in another of his books, I think, of the Gates of the Forests called. There's anyhow, it was something that I think Vizel saw in Auschwitz, but there was a night where in the camp They have some rabbis decide that they will put God on trial and they Vizel described it in extraordinary detail and is riveting the silence in the room and Eventually the case for the prosecution the case for the defense, but given by very, very learned rabbis from Poland and nobody could know more than these men routinely knew.

It's just a reminder of what was lost. But in the end, they find God guilty. See, the Jews never did that in the Old Testament. Well, no, but then something very important happened. Oh, okay, okay. Which is that they find God guilty and there's a silence in the heart. When they realize what they've done, and then somebody says, one of the rabbis says,

okay, it's Friday night, we need to go and do our prayers and they do. In other words, That's kind of reminiscent of what happens in the grand inquisitor. Yes, exactly. When the when the inquisitor leaves the door open for Christ, right, even though he's doomed him to hypothetically to death because he's no longer necessary. Well, you know, in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain puts God on trial because Cain is making these sacrifices, which are second rate, Abel sacrifices

are lauded in the stories, but Cain's aren't. And there's an intimation that they're not of the highest quality. Now, Abel offers up animal material to God and Cain vegetative material. And that plays into it as well. But pain calls out God and says essentially something like, you know, I'm breaking myself in half here working on my life and nothing's going my way. And your favored son Abel for reasons that I can't really understand is thriving on all fronts. What the hell is the problem with the cosmos you created? And God says, and I got this from reading multiple translations. God says, first of all, he says, if you do well,

will you not be rewarded? That's the first rejoinder. And the second rejoinder is something like sin crouches at your door, like a sexually aroused predatory animal. And you've invited it into have its way with you. And so, and I've read a lot of the diary material of serial killers and sexual slayers and not sort of people. And you can be rest absolutely assured that they invited that spirit of resentment in

and have been creatively interacting with it. So I was thinking to you know this issue of suffering and death, you know imagine that you have a parent. Let's particularize it because maybe the question isn't what should the state do about exceptional suffering? Maybe that's the wrong level of analysis. Maybe the right level of analysis is something like what would you do if your father was dying a terrible death? And I would say what you should have done was live the life that you should have lived so that at that point of

unbelievable complexity you'd be wise enough to make the appropriate decision and to see your way through but that there would be no way that you could generalize that decision. It would only have to be made in a particularized manner. Absolutely. And you wouldn't have the wisdom to make that decision properly if you hadn't conducted your life with exceptional care. And nobody can make it for you, that's for sure.

No function. That's... So one of the things that frighten me again as a clinician was that, especially when I saw people deceiving themselves, I thought, well, why not deceive yourself if you can escape from responsibility and pain and anxiety? And if you can gain things through minimal effort, why not deceive yourself and other people? And one reason to not deceive yourself is that there will come a time when you're called upon to make a judgment of exquisite delicacy. And if you're fuzzy minded and demented enough because of your own lies that you're incapable of such judgment, you'll make the wrong decision.

And you'll regret being alive as a consequence. Well, that's one good reason not to do something that you're going to regret. I mean, I've said for a long time that there should be a category, perhaps there is one, somebody watching can describe it to me, but I've thought for a long time there should be a category of argument, which is recognized, cannot be solved

because somebody involved in the argument has done the thing and regrets it deeply, but at such a deep level that they could never face up to it. So, the example I've always had in my mind is, if you have an argument like the ethics of abortion, if there's one person in the room who's had an abortion, you're very unlikely to get anywhere in the discussion, because there is somebody who has everything on the line, everything at stake, and either they regret it in which case nothing you can't get anywhere in the discussion because you don't want to open up that pit. Or they have to pretend not to care, in which case you have another glimpse into a pit.

Now, actually, again, you and I talked about it last night, Helen Joyce made this brilliant observation about the trans issue recently, which was that we, for the rest of our lives, will all be facing a certain type of person who cares more about that issue than anyone else in the world, because they've done the worst possible thing to their child and they will never concede it. Or to themselves. Or to themselves. They will never concede it. But moving away from that negative, if I may, I mean, we get back to this thing of people deceive themselves very often, unless somebody comes along and says exactly that. That's one of the things I've found

of a nature about the person of resentment is Nietzsche's observation that the secular priest would be required to stand over the person's life and say, you are right, there is somebody who has destroyed your life in this world, the person is you. Now our mutual friend Anthony Daniels said that when he was a prison doctor, he was one of the few people actually used to do this with his remarkable person. The one for man. And theatre, Del Rimple, for those of you who are listening, he's written great books. And he had the observation, he said, told me once that he's quite often in prison, would have people coming to him saying,

oh, doctor, I think I'm, I think I need some pills, some antidepressants. Why would you, why do you want antidepressants? I go, I think I'm depressed. Why do you think you want to press? I think I'm suffering from low self-esteem. He said, he would reply, well, there's one thing you've got right. He's right. Almost without exception, whenever he did this, the patient laughed because they've been caught out. Right. At the point, you're in prison for doing a terrible crime. You want to be depressed.

That's why it's a penitentiary. It's why it's a penitentiary. You ought to be suffering. You ought to be questioning yourself a steam at this point. This is a very good time to do it. And you ought to take a decade. Yeah, and you ought to take medicalize it away. And the state maybe shouldn't help you

to easily medicalize away whatever you're feeling in that situation. But I was always struck by that story because I thought, how few adults, I always say there's so few adults in the room these days, but there are so few adults who will stand over the life of anyone and say, I'm sorry, Buckhobe, but it's you. And I had this. You know, it's so funny because one of the reasons that my lectures have become popular is because I have done

that for young men, right? And suggest to them, well, if you're miserable, it's possible. It's because you're useless and you're not doing what you should be doing. And you could think perversely and should think likely that why in the world would that possibly be a salable message? You know, and the answer is, well, if the person that you're addressing is genuinely, genuinely miserable and hopeless, and you say, well, maybe there's something that you're not doing quite right, then they now have an avenue of movement forward. Right. And if you say instead, well, it's no wonder you're

miserable because the cosmos and the patriarchy are structured such that you're a victim of circumstance without recourse. I had this reason. I was on a program the other day where there was a black British woman on who claimed to have suffered hurt from slavery. And I'm fed up with that claim now. I said, you not suffered anything. You haven't suffered any hurt, and no one alive has caused you the hurt. Now, of course, a lot of people will say

who are you to say that you are just another privileged white guy or something. But I actually think it's necessary to say that to people because, actually, as Clarence Thomas points out in his recent Supreme Court judgment on affirmative action, if you don't get that out of the way, the rest of history is going to be a competitive grievance competition. And so you actually need people to say, no, I'm not falling for this. You may have fallen for it. You may have decided that everything in your life would be sorted out if reparations were paid to you

by the state of California. I'm not convinced that would help you. I think you'd have a fantastic shopping binge for a few days and be as unpleasant and unhappy a week from Tuesday as you are today. And but it's very striking, there's something missing in our societies of people saying that, of just saying, you know, we're not going along with your self-perception. And that's on so many things. We're not going along with your

self-perception and agreeing to it, not just because it's bad for you, but it's bad for all of us. It's bad, yeah, it's bad for their men for all of us simultaneously. And you know, that one of the things I've been really shocked by, I would say, with regard to my fellow therapists, is their absolute cowardice, and almost almost universally so. I assume cowardice. I assume cowardice on behalf of almost everybody is so. I don't expect terrorism in our ages. It's wonderful when it happens, but you should see how it happens.

I think it's particularly egregious on the therapeutic front with regard to self identity. Yeah. Because every, so here's two things that every psychologist who's actually trained knows. If they are worthy of the name, the first is identity is negotiated by anyone who isn't too, like literally, by three, you negotiate your identity. And if the whole, the definition of being a civilized person is that you negotiate your identity and if the whole the definition of being a civilized person. Is that you negotiate your identity and you do it constantly mean you and I sitting here in open dialogue. Are negotiating our identities right because we're attempting to modify the manner in which we perceive ourselves and present ourselves as a consequence of exchanging information we We couldn't even talk. Well, of course,

the people who pushed the self-identity mantra also claim that there's no such thing as free speech, right? There's no honest exchange of ideas between men of good faith, let's say, or good will. So that's one thing, psychologists know, and they absolutely know this. And part of what you do is a psychologist. If you have any sense at all, is you teach people how to negotiate their identity more effectively. And so the second thing that psychologists know is that you expose people voluntarily to the things that frighten them. Yes. Instead of protecting them, you know, in this trigger warning fashion.

And all psychologists know that that, that kind of over what, that overprotective attitude is definitely a pathway to psychopathology. And yet no one will stand up and say that. It's, it's, it's, I, I have a habit, which I learned from a late friend who was a journalist, which I've tried to stick with throughout my adult life, have always going to one dangerous country a year. Mm-hmm. And I do it for lots of reasons.

One is just curiosity in the world. Another way to pose is that it is one of, to go back to what we're saying earlier, one of the best ways to actually feel a sense of gratitude about where you're from and what the good things are in your society. only one of the best ways to actually feel a sense of gratitude about where you're from and what the good things are in your society. Unless you've seen a society at war, you don't understand quite how blessed state pieces and how easily what happens to other people could happen to you. But there are other reasons to do it. And what a miracle it is that that isn't happening all the time everywhere. Absolutely.

Because that's the state of nature. That was, yes, absolutely. I mean, that's one of the things that Pink has right on in the blank slate is deaths in tribal societies, pre-modernity, way higher, the violent death, way higher even than the average violent deaths of a European male in the 20th century. So yes, to some extent, this is a natural state, but I also do it just partly because I learn so much about how society is deteriorate. And as a sort of very, very minimal final thing, you always find out something about yourself. It's never the purpose of doing it,

but there is some sort of you found out. Okay, so here's a very interesting clinical finding. It was a revolutionary discovery in the 50s, 50s, that's about right. So the psychoanalysts following Freud would walk people through what they wanted to avoid and they did that autobiographically, right, by going back into the past. And there's some utility in that. The behaviors came along and what they did instead was expose people to what they were afraid of here and now. So for example, if you were afraid of balloons, which is rare, but does happen upon occasion,

a therapist would sit you down, have you relax, run you through a relaxation exercise, maybe show you a picture of a balloon, ask you to imagine it, then put a balloon 15 feet away and then 10 feet away and 8 feet away and then a balloon on your lap. And maybe that takes a number of sessions, and then the fear would disappear. Now, the theory was, the reason the fear disappeared was because you paired the exposure with relaxation. But then it was discovered that you didn't have to pair it with relaxation, and it still worked.

You could be in a hyper state. As long as you're doing it voluntarily. Interest. You have to doing it voluntarily. Interest. You have to do it voluntarily. Interest. Right. Okay, so then the psychoanalysts rejoinder to the behaviorist was, you know, the person isn't really afraid of a balloon or an elevator.

They're really afraid of death. And if you eradicate the specific fear, it will just move low-cal because you're not dealing with the root cause. Okay. Now, that also turned out to be wrong because what happened is if you exposed people to say three things they were afraid of, they would go out voluntarily and expose themselves to all sorts of other things that they were afraid of. So, you didn't make them less afraid. You made them braver, which is very different. And so what you did with exposure therapy was what it was that you transformed people's conceptualization of themselves. You transformed

their conceptualization of themselves from passive victim of malevolent circumstances to active contender with challenge. So maybe I've been doing unwittingly doing this to myself all my life. I remember the first time I was covering a conflict, there were rockets landing, and it was as it actually is, it's quite exhilarating. If you're in a, it isn't if you have no choice to be there, or if you're a walker, I suppose, I think it's famously a problem of the job that you can find it exhilarating.

Well, that's that distinction between voluntary and involuntary too. And Winston Churchill, famous he said, there's no greater feeling than the feeling of being shot at without result. It's an enormously in-ivering thing that you think, you think not today, death, not today. But the first time I was ever in a conflict where there were rockets landing, I, funnily enough, when I got back from the area where it was happening, I got back on the first evening. My immediate instinct was this very strange one to me,

which I thought about a lot afterwards, which was that I thought I could look my grandparents in the face. Now, what I mean by that is that I'm the more my grandparents are long dead by them, but what I meant was they'd all gone through the blitz or the Second World War. Right. And I'd always wondered how an earth you coped with that. And I suddenly sort of thought, oh, I see it's like that. So I would say what you did, okay, so there's a mythological tone to all of the things that you just related. So the first thing you said was that perhaps you had been doing this unwittingly in some

sense your whole life. Well, one of the things that psychologists eventually figured out was that people are unwittingly doing this their whole life, because that's how you learn. The way you learn is by facing an optimized challenge voluntarily, and that pushes you slightly beyond your current limits. Now, that's where meaning emerges, right?

So meaning is the instinct that puts you on the edge of transformation. Yes, so you think I'm going to learn something from this. Yes, you're going to, and you may learn something about the world or where you are in the world, but you may also learn something about yourself or change as a consequence, right? And so the instinct of meaning actually puts you on that, it puts you on the edge of chaos. But the grandfather, so that's the heroic path, by the way, but the grandfather comments extremely interesting to the grandparent because one of the

tropes, mythological trope, is that if you go into the belly of the beast, you can rescue your forefathers from the belly of the beast. That's Pinocchio in the whale. Well, that's what you did in some ways when you think I just wanted to know if I would if I could sort of stand I just always thought that that generation the heroism what they went through right I just thought you know You always have that thing of what would one do in that situation? How would one behave? you know and and even just getting a smallest glimpse of Okay, I think I could hold it together. That that means that you kindled that inside you, the spirit that you saw in your grandparents

that you admired, you kindled inside by that exposure, and you said that brought you to a position of, you know, not fully equivalents, but at least partial equivalents, right? Well, so here's part of what happens. So if you expose yourself to optimize challenge, well, first of all, you gather more information. So these countries you went to a mean you're learning about the countries You're learning about yourself. That's pure information, but here's something else that happens. This is so cool so if you put yourself in a new situation New genes turn on inside you and they activate parts of you that have not yet come alive. Right? Right. No kidding. So then you might say, so there's a maze at

Shart Cathedral. I think it's a shart. And there's an idea in the maze. So you enter one side of the maze. It's about 40 feet across. And then you have to walk every quadrant, northwest, south, and northeast, south and west, every quadrant. And if you've walked every quadrant, you get to the center. The center's also the center of the cross. So that's the place of maximal suffering. But there's an idea there.

And redemption, there's an idea there. And the idea is that if you go absolutely everywhere, every bit of you will turn on, right? And a fair bit of that is, right? Right? Exactly. And, and well, and you know this, we know this is true, and you think, well, how could it be any other way, right? Because, and you know, too, these experiences that you had where you're voluntarily confronting what's dangerous, that changes you in a way that can't be attained by anyone who hasn't had that experience. Right.

If you haven't pushed yourself to your limit, especially I would say with regard to the fear of death, then there's a change that hasn't occurred within you, and I would say it's a fundamental change of maturation. So it's definitely an enormous in-living feeling, I would say. So what do you think was at the core of the in-living element of it? I mean, you said it was partly having cheated death, but that's not all it is, right? Because you also, I had a client who was terrified of death

enough to dose herself with sleeping pills constantly, to be unconscious. And she had a dream. And in her dream, the figure she saw was a dwarf in a forest told her that unless she could learn to work in a slaughterhouse, she wouldn't be able to graduate from university. Wow. And so we talked this dream a stream through and I said well I

don't think I can arrange to have you visit a slaughterhouse she wouldn't meet by the way and she couldn't go into a butcher store. Wow. So I said I don't I can't get you into a slaughterhouse but maybe you could think of something that you could do that would be equivalent. Why don't you think about it for a week. And so she came back and said, I think I'd like to see an embalming. So I called up some fear furniture funeral parlor directors like right then and there. And I said, I have this client who's terrified of death. You guys deal with death all the time. She has this sense that if she came and saw embalming that it might be

helpful to her. And we'd also like to talk to you about how the hell you do this because you faced it every day and Like she can't face it at all and so and they were very very understanding and just said yes And so we went there two weeks later. I'm very squeamish about that sort of thing as well You know about about that kind of gross physicality, let's say and so so it wasn't something that, you know, I would just wrap off as if it was nothing. But my client was absolutely terrified, but it was so interesting. And this is part of the in-lifening element. So we're in the hallway separated from the surgical room, so to speak, where the bombing was taking place, which is a very visceral occurrence, as you all the bodily fluids drain, for example. And for the first, first of all, she went to the funeral apartment. Second, she sat in the hallway. Third, when it's first started,

she was looking to the side, hey, but she'd do this. And then every time she did that, she'd look a little longer. Until finally, she was watching it completely. And then she said, you know, can I go in the room? Can I put my hand on the body? They put her on a glove and she did that, you know, and now what happened to her? And this was so interesting because she had a lot of neurotic concerns and part of them reflected her own sense, have her own weakness. She came out of that knowing that she was a lot of neurotic concerns and part of them reflected her own sense,

her own weakness. She came out of that knowing that she was a lot less weakened than she thought, because she could do it, right? She didn't think she was that sort of creature and it turned out that she was that sort of creature and quite quickly. That's the learning that about yourself.

learning that about yourself, I mean, is so to be encouraged. So to be encouraged. Because the first thing that happens is I'm struck by your example that the first thing that happens is looking away. That's the most natural of instincts. And we all have it. I mean, you'd have to have something slightly wrong not to. But to train yourself to be able to look at the thing that terrifies you, whether it's death or something ugly, it seems to me at any rate that it's one of the things that drives me is that if you look at enough, and as long as you don't tip over into the void, if you look at enough you can get to that place of stillness. There's a metaphor that's always on my mind from the end of Evelyn Wars The Climb and Fall, where a very curious man is an architect in the book and a rather minor figure.

He's at the very end, where it's very whole plot, but at the very end, after all the terrible things have happened to various people and the human comedy of the whole disaster of the novel, one of the main characters sees this architect, there's some serious figure sitting watching this fairground ride. And the fairground ride is one where this thing spins around. And there's a net around the outside and people pay a shilling and they go on, they try to climb up the side and they're flung to the sides all the time. And I think his name is Miss Dr. Sylenus is just watching this. There's all the people and he says how loud they laugh and how they cackle and how they get flung around and how they and they all try to get to the top. And he says occasionally the circus

pays for somebody who knows how to do it to get to the top and sit there. And he says, that's where you want to be because at the top in the center, it's totally still. That's just no centrifugal force there. Okay, so I'm curious about something. You made a comment earlier about the fact that your more natural presumption now is to assume that cowardice will be the order of the days. Okay, so there's something about you that's always struck me.

And like I've met a lot of people over the last six years, particularly. And I've met a lot of people who have remained silent when they shouldn't. And I've met a few people who will speak, but they're rare. You know, I probably met 50 or 100 now who will speak, and you're one of them. And I, and her Zileus, another one, right? And there are these people who, Jonathan Height is another one, right?

They don't remain silent. And so, now, you talked about a pattern through your life of going farther, and going places that challenged you like and you talked about the fact that you have seen cowardice as the order of the day Especially that willingness to stay silent. Okay, you're not one of those people Do you as far as I can tell do you know? Do you know why and does it is it tied into that proclivity? Is it it tied into that proclivity? Is it tied somehow into that proclivity to push? Well, naturally, I don't think myself

particularly brave person. As a lot of people, I know who I do think of as brave, but I've always wanted to make sure I didn't not say what I saw. I mean, that's why it would be so embarrassing, humiliating, self-humiliating. I couldn't live with myself. If I, if I, yeah, but I don't think anybody can live with themselves if they do, if they fail to do that. Um, well, so, so, so the fact that you observe, well, maybe you, it may be that people don't know that so

explicitly. Like, my experience has been that everyone who remains silent when they have something to say pays for it. Oh, right. Well, so somebody said me years ago that they thought that what motivated me with the head of a very, I have a very low tolerance threshold for lies. I just don't like them. I hate being told.

And particularly big, big lies on the sort of, let's all pretend that we now agree to this thing today that we didn't agree to yesterday. I can't do it. I just won't do it. And I suppose one of the things that also motivates me is that is that the people I liked and the people I admire are like that. I mean, I even know Nayan, I've known Nayan for 20 years. And I mean, actually, somebody said something and I think my 40th birthday said, are you aware you've surrounded yourself

with courageous people? And I said, I wasn't actually, but actually it was true that around the time there was some people like Ayan, the friend of mine was very brave in the conflict in Northern Ireland, and other people, you know, academics I know who I like, who I think are, you know, I actually hadn't particularly noticed it, but it's true. Now, there's two lessons I took from that. One is, I just like courageous people. I like people who say what they think, and they're much more fun, of course, and they're much better friends, and you have a much better time, and you actually get somewhere because you don't have to lie to each other and all that sort of thing. You actually get to somewhere in

the discussion. And that's a pretty good idea. The second thing is probably, I thought actually maybe it is deliberate because I probably recognize rightly, I think that if you surround yourself or near courageous people, it's more likely you'll be courageous yourself. So for instance, sometimes people say, well, you said this thing and everyone hates you for it. And I genuinely, I don't care. Now why do I not care?

Because I only care about a small number of people who's opinion I care for. And I don't understand why everyone cares about the appropriate amount of millions. If you have four people, three people who you admire and who you know admire you and you're fine. I don't think it. I, I, I, I, I, so, so let me ask you about that admiration, you know, so I've thought a lot about, about admiration because I think admiration is what it's a manifestation of the religious instinct. Yeah. So, so because to admire someone is, if you admire them enough, you're all struck in their presence. That would be the ultimate manifestation of admiration. And awe is primarily a primary religious

experience. It's the experience of seeing something that's beyond you in a manner that's compelling. And so, and you said you admire people who tell the truth. Yes. And so, what I would, what I'm curious about, if I said to you, is there any difference between that and the religious proclamation, let's say, that the truth will set you free? Right? That's part of the doctrine of the word, right? And I mean, we, I mean, we, we unive had discussions and more and more of them with people like Jonathan Pazzo about what a moral system has to be grounded in. And the humanist types, when we sort of began our conversation today with this, the humanist types think that you can ground morality in something like a system

of facts. And see, I don't think that's true. And I think it's actually technically untrue. I think that we ground morality in something like, God, it's something like the religious instinct. And I am trying to figure that out technically. Like certainly one of the things that Orients who morally is the sense of admiration. Yes. Well, then you might ask yourself, what provokes admiration appropriately and naturally, and we could say, well, courage does.

Courage does. Definitely courage does, right? Sure. Sure, yes, but I think it almost invariably does. Yes, you have to work really hard as we are in our age to discourage people from admiring courage. Right, right. Well, and then you even see among bad guys,

let's say, like if you look at Marfioso movies, I mean, the Marfioso villain types are at least courageous. Yes. Right? Yes. So they have their own system of ethics. And they have their own choices. Yes, yes, yes.

And so even though you might not say that that's the most profound set of orienting guidelines, because it's criminal and it's orientation, it's not nothing. And there is a certain amount of courage. And you could also point out, and this is sort of, what would you say at comment on the necessity of of integrating the shadow is that someone who's fourth right enough to be a mafioso at least isn't terrified into dependent neuroticism.

Yes. Right. Right. So there's kind of, there's a hierarchy of virtue. And the fourth right bad guy isn't the lowest entity. That's right. So, so, so there are valid markers for admiration, right? Courage. I think for other hood in some senses also, that's something you also alluded to. You know, you said that you noticed that you had aggregated around you. People who were willing to speak their minds.

And I think the reason for that likely is is that if you speak your mind and you pay the price and you reap the benefits of that, pay the price for that reap the benefits, other people who've done that notice. And you find them and they find you. I mean, that's certainly that's happened as I've risen to notoriety. So, and that's also a huge reward. Yes, absolutely. So, is the opportunity to meet people in different spheres who've done great things. And that's, I mean, that's an enormous benefit of the life I live. And I'm sure the life you live is, is, is, is, Calcubal, you know, a gift of, of, of meeting people who've done extraordinary things. And from a bewildering array of backgrounds, you know, I mean, it's like,

I don't know, I'm our last cycle of people who we know and are friends with, I mean, it's like, I don't know my my last cycle of people who we know and are friends with, I think, but I think there's nothing they have in common other than probably a similar desire to say the truth as they see it to do so in the face of whatever comes their way. And that might be a, you know, me park or it might be And that might be a, the only park or it might be Jonathan Pajor. It might be. Right. There's no, there's no commonality of background experience. And by the way, then that's one of the things I would say is that we're to encourage people

is that in that case, like you can do it too. Yeah, right. And you know, I, I, one of the reasons I'm sort of rather actually optimistic about the next generation coming along in America and in the Western democracies in general is that I think they've, I think the smarter ones, I assure you see this all the time, the smarter ones have all seen through the, the dogma of the day seem through the the dogma of the day, and they don't like it. And although there are these sorts of prims, sensorious, you know, tittle-tattletail people in their 20s and some pathetic people in their 30s and 40s and so on, nevertheless, people coming up in their teens and early 20s now

have seen through those people. They don't like them. They're right not to like them. And so actually, that's why they look to people like Joe Rogan. Right. And they're right to look. They are. They are. Because here's I mean, very successful, very funny, very smart, very tough, very tough, lives the life he wants to live. As you know, if you go to Joe's studio, it's it's pretty much what I say what at the age of about 15 you thought you'd do if you've got some cast yeah yeah yeah and that's that's really great I mean you know and I think that the more that happens the more people see there's a way through the the more we'll have this sort of aggregator okay so so so let me ask you this that you know you said that you can't, for one reason or another, you can't

or you have decided not to abide lies. And so I would ask you, to what degree has the adventure of your life? That's a good way of thinking about it. Being a consequence of exactly that. So I've been sure of that. Well, let me, let me, I've started to understand, you tell me what you think of this. So you can use language two ways.

You can either decide what you want from someone before you talk to them. And then you can craft every word that you utter in order to extract that. That's instrumental use of language. I've talked lots of journalists who do that. For sure. Or you can just sit down and you can say what you think and see what happens.

And those are very, very, now this is what Rogan does in his interviews. He just says, what do you think? And he sees what happens. Now, the advantage to the former strategy is that in principle, you get what you want. But the disadvantages, well, you might have to manipulate people and they'll catch onto that. And the second and more profound disadvantages,

what the hell do you know about what you want? You know, it's not like you're transparent to yourself. And so you might have some bloody scheme that you think you're seeing through. And you might manipulate to get it, but that doesn't mean it'll be good for you're transparent to yourself. Yes. And so you might have some bloody scheme that you think you're seeing through, and you might manipulate to get it. But that doesn't mean it'll be good for you when you get it. And so you could contrast that instead with a different proposition, which is,

and I think this is a correct proposition. And I think it's the, maybe the fundamental religious proposition, possibly, is that whatever happens if you are acting in accordance with the truth is the best thing that could have possibly happened regardless of how it seems to you at the time. And so that's a dubious proposition. But here's one that's not so dubious, I think, although I do think it's true. If you have to let go of the consequences of your words because you're just going to let the cards fall wherever they're going to fall, you get to have an adventure because you

don't know what the hell is going to happen. Absolutely. Absolutely. Why do you think that? Of course, it's the most exciting thing because you'll actually be often on an adventure which is predicated on an idea which I believe to be true, which is that the point of truth is not just a sort of, it's not a game, it's to get you somewhere, you know.

It's like the search for meaning. You either, you either devolve, I think I said this with you and John them before, you either devolve into the sort of idea that we're meaning seeking creatures, but there's no meaning. Or you say we're meaning seeking creatures. And there's a there's a reason for that. And the reason is it's because we're hoping to get somewhere. So that center that center that I talked about, you say, you hope that's the same as the center of that of the maze. Exactly. You hope that. If you, you know, it sounds like the vessel of Hubble, but I mean, if you tread in truth, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you follow your instinct towards truth, your bound to make some missteps, your bound to get some things wrong as everybody does, but the orientation

of where you're going to is correct. It is correct. And at the end of it, whatever it was you were meant to be in your life is more likely to be what you'll be than if you set off in error and deliberately suppressed what you believed and what you wanted to do in your life. So here's a corollary to that. Also I would say is that if you say what you think, then it's you saying and you thinking, and that means that whatever happens is your life. But if you engage in falsehood, then I think you're the devil's puppet fundamentally. But and the reason I think that is because if you're

engaging in falsehood, then whatever it is that you're saying in thinking, it isn't you by definition, because it's not what you think. And you can tease that out of people, rather like Thittle Dalrymple did with those prisoners. You can tease it out with people. We saw people like Joe are so interesting in comedy, because my late friend, Clive James had his beautiful saying, he wrote somewhere, he said, he said, common sense and humor are the same thing moving at different speeds.

Humor is just common sense dancing. Now, I love this quote. And one of the things that says, just about is a comedian or indeed anyone, any of us who tell a joke, if it's a good joke, irrespective of whether or not it's offensive to some person, people laugh. And the laughter is a recognition that what has happened is real. It's reality dancing. It's reality riffing on itself at a highest. And transcending itself absolutely.

And one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one of the greatest things, one ten good men in Sodom by the way. Absolutely. You'll go there to tell the truth exactly. Exactly. And the fact that it RAs might need to rely on comedians will tell us something about RAs, but nevertheless, if you make somebody laugh about the thing, they recognize it and they laugh quite often. There's a type of person who will then pull back because they've basically admitted that they also recognize this thing to be true because otherwise they wouldn't have found it funny. They wouldn't have been able to laugh

about it because laughter wouldn't be the response to the response of the discuss. Well, it's interesting. They're quite often they laugh and then they have to fame this cuss. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting too there at this point to something like an instinct for the truth because one of the things I was really struck by when I had little kids was how early their sense of humor developed. It's ridiculously early,

like it's there at nine months for sure. If you can coax it out of them, but certainly by the time kids are two, they're doing ridiculously clowny things all the time. And it struck me because it's pre-linguistic even. It's so deep that sense of humor. And I do think it's part of the orientation towards truth. It's the playful orientation towards truth. Well, that's why I quoted my name as earlier, but I mean, he famously said once, the

reason you should be suspicious of people with no sense of humor isn't just that they don't know what's funny, but they don't know what's serious either. And, um, and that, yeah, well, the funniest comedians are the ones that can take the most serious thing and make it funny. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And which is why, and dare to do that. The Monty Python troupe was great at that. Yeah, I mean, that's why everything, you know, so I, so I, so I, so it's also dangerous

to be a comedian and say, because everyone can take it out of context. It was a bar the other day. Um, and pretend that you were doing something he weren't. But in a good faith environment, yes, these are the people who can point to things. We all know to be true. We get to laugh at them and with them. This reveals something very important in our area,

it seems to me, which is the people that you and I spend the certain amount of our lives railing me, which is the people that you and I spend a certain man of our lives railing against, which you get onto some positives, but the railing against is in part because they are sensorious bullies. They want to tell you and me and everyone else what we should find funny, what we should read, what we should say, what we should think, how we should act. read what we should say, what we should think, how we should act. And in my mind, it's an invitation which I decline. But in that case, these people who are so prim, so unfunny, so tediously repressive and everything they do, don't stand a chance in the long run. Yeah.

If 10 comedians can take down a million social justice activists, and I reckon they can, then I'd bet long on the comedians. We're going to move very quickly to the daily wire plus side and I'll ask you both this about the development of that sense of truth. Let me see here. What else I'd like to ask you about? Okay, so let's go back to what we discussed right at the beginning, which is this idea of purpose. So you said that meaning gets you somewhere. Yeah, right? Okay, so that, I think that's exactly right, by the way, I called my first book, Maps of Meaning, because I understood, I came to understand that meaning was actually a navigation guide.

Right. And I actually think that's technically true because meaning manifests itself as the instinct that tells you that you're on the path to the proper goal. Yes, I say that if you even orient yourself by seeing the flares on the path. Yes, I say that it's if you reckon even orient yourself by seeing the flares on the path. Yes, yes, yes. Well, that and that's part of the idea of a calling by the way. It's also part of the fact, and this is an interesting fact that people are beset with their own particularized problems. You know, so I learned in the Exodus seminar that I ran

a while back. You know, when the Israelites are lost in the desert, God appears to them as a pillar of light during the day, and a pillar of darkness during the day and a pillar of light at night. And Jonathan Pazzo made the claim that that was the same idea as the Indian and Indian idea in Taoism and that there's this tension of opposites that guides you. And here's a way of thinking about it, is that you'll find a calling in your life and things will be back into you as opportunities. Now not everything beckons to you as an opportunity, but some things to. And that's the positive side.

That would be the light, let's say, in the darkness. On the native side, there's going to be things that aggregate around you as your problems. Right. And there are things to bug you. And God only knows why those things bug you, because there's a trillion things that could, but some things really grip you and won't let you go, right? And you could think about the interaction between opportunity and problem as something like calling, right? And then the truthful grappling with that produces that not only a sense of meaning, because you're taking your responsibilities seriously and taking advantage of your opportunities, but it also propels you down the appropriate developmental path, because if you take on the problems

that be set you, that are yours, you'll develop, and if you take on the problems that be set you that are yours, you'll develop, and if you exploit the opportunities that present themselves, you'll develop as well. Yeah, I am, I mean, drive is something a fascist makes me because there's a sort of presumption is it that he'd either have it or they don't. And you know, that is the case to some degree. I mean, it's certainly, there's certainly very driven people, and there are also some reasons we know why some people are driven from an early age and why that might be.

But I mean, we're struck by this lack of talking about vocation in our era. I don't know if it's because people are embarrassed about it, some people undoubtedly are, or whether it's just that we don't particularly encourage it, it's probably a combination of all of these things plus a sort of sense that there's no particular meaning. So why bother? You know, everything's been shown to be flawed. So Paul ambition is pathological and destructive. Yes. And there's different ways of passing it. But I've always been struck by something Alan Bloom said in one of the early parts of the closing of the American mind. He said, and he said, even then the 80s, it concerned him that he said, we know what a, we know what a beautiful body would be like. We don't know any longer,

know what a beautiful soul would be like. And although that's a rather high way of saying it. I would say we don't know what a we haven't agreed what a meaningful life would be really and I once asked a sociologist friend about this I said what do you think in your life has been the biggest change and he said I think the biggest change in my life is that if you were a man who provided for your family and your dependence whatever your job you were a man of decon that's and that isn't the case anymore. You can work very hard for people who are your dependence

or someone else's dependence, but you're the mug. So there's a lot of sort of demoralization around that, I think. And I'm very keen that we, without saying being moralistic, we rectify the demoralization. Well, you know, we did a series of studies on vision development. I built this program with some colleagues of mine to help people develop a vision. And the first part of the exercise is that you contemplate yourself five years in the future. And then you adopt an attitude of appropriate respect for yourself. So you try to put yourself, people don't necessarily want the best for themselves or think

they deserve it. And so it's useful to entice people into giving themselves the benefit of the doubt for a moment and letting them contemplate the notion that it might be okay if they were successful. And then the next part of the exercise is, well, right for 15 minutes about what you could have and who you would be, if you could have what you needed

if you were treating yourself properly and if you were the person you wanna be, just write it down, just get it out. And then we have them do the reverse, which is imagine that your idiocy took up your hand and that you created your own particularized hell out of your stupidity. What would that look like?

Or now you've got poles, right? It's like not there, that would be better. Then we have them break the positive vision down into seven sub-e friendships career, etc. And say just make a plan. Yeah, right. So we gave this to college students in three different campuses 50% decrease in drawpoke. This was with a 90 minute exercise Particularly effective for young minority men who had poor academic backgrounds. Wow. Yeah, no kidding. And a 35% increment in grade point average.

Wow. Yeah, yeah. Well, so that's part of that conjuring up a vision. And we're trying to do that. You know this because you're involved in this art project in the UK. We're trying to do that on a more international scale, even though there's perils to that. And that's partly, well, how could we formulate a vision of the future that was positive and invitational instead of fear-based and what's serving the demented interests of power mongers? How about that? Yeah, or the one I dislike the most, which is

I think you and I have thought about it before. When the last time Roger Scrooidon appeared in public, we did discussion together, just a few months before he died. We got talking about this strange way in which the era wishes you just to be harmless, to come in and out and not be noticed. Yeah. Which is so. Profile. Yes, if all ambition is pathological, then harmless is the only thing that all you're doing

is emitting carbon. If it weren't for you, the mobs and trees would be getting on just fine. You just pull everyone's teeth out and wrap them up in Styrofoam and set them in a corner and the planet would get along just fine. Exactly. Human beings are the problem. In fact, we're the poins. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, you know, Douglas, that's probably a good, that's a good, that's

probably a good place to end. Oh, there was one other thing we were going to talk about. This is relevant to vocation as well. Barry Weiss invited you to contribute to her new enterprise. And you decided to do that in a particular way. You're already writing columns. And so you weren't particularly interested in doing more of that, having been doing enough of it. What are you doing with Perry? It was a brilliant idea of hers. She wanted me to do a column for free press.

And I said, well, I'm sort of columned up. I write about three or four columns a week. And on various issues of the day. And she said, well, I want you to write about something else. And I particularly, and I said, well, look, I've always tried to have a deal with my editors. I write about something I love for every piece about something or someone I hate. And actually, the equilibrium has never been quite right on that. There's much more news coverage in the things that annoy you.

But nevertheless, I do try to write about things I love and it was Barry's ideas She said well look whenever I'm on a stage with you You always sort of seem to have things you can pluck out of the air quotes, you know from things Why don't you just explain why you got them in your head and where they're from and why you think they're worth having that? and So we came up with this idea is and every week I write a column about a poem I have by heart. Sometimes it's a long-ish poem, sometimes it's a few lines. And really it's about why it's up there. How much poetry do you know by heart? Well, I'm doing 50 poems for this year,

for this year, ranging from... Well, I mean, it's mainly within what you'd think of as the classical canon, Western, Western, Western, Western, Western. Why did you start doing that? Well, there's several reasons. One is, if there's something I read, which hits me in the solar plexus, I wanted up there.

Yeah. That's a very strong, I think, oh, I need that. Do you know why you need it? Well, then there's that, the answer to that is, and I actually addressed this in one of the opening columns. There were several people who made a great impression on me when I was growing up. One was a sermon I heard from Terry Waiter,

who was a captive in Lebanon in the 80s, because he was taken hostage after being the chemistry of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I heard it give a sermon as a schoolboy, where he talked about when he was changed to a Bayroot radiator for about five years. Right. He, one of the things that made Right. One of the things that made bearable was that he had four quartets by T.S. Eliot in his head. And he recited the opening, time present and time past, both perhaps contained in time future. And he did that whole opening, which culminates in that great footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take

through the door we never opened into the Rose Garden. And when he, there was something immediately struck me, immediately he went back to my room and got my Elliott off the the shelf and finally understood Elliott. Or began to understand Elliott for the first time. But the other thing was or began to understand it for the first time. But the other thing was, and I wrote this recently in a column about an extraordinary Russian woman who should be better known called Tatyana Gnadyj.

Now, she was a woman, I tell the story in the piece, and I've only seen it in one other English version. She was a woman who was a studied English literature in St. Petersburg in the 1930s and 40s. In the height of the terrors, she was actually denounced at her university because one of her forebears had translated, I think it was, of it, into Russian. And she was very proud of this forebear, but somebody denounced her as having noble lineage, of course. Oh yes, so she was very proud of this forbear, but somebody announced her as having noble lineage, of course. Oh yes, so she was announced and thrown out of the university.

She was eventually allowed back in, and to cut a long story short, but it's an amazing story. She ended up after she was at the siege of St. Peter's Burg, her house was burned down and her mother was killed. In about 1944 or so, she handed herself into authorities. She'd got it into her head that wanting to go to England constituted activity against the state. That was how bad it was, the sense that you were doing wrong.

It's like trying to leave California. She handed herself in and she was given the straight away 10 years in the Gouillag. And on the night she was at the holding prison, she was told by the God, you know, there are books in the prison before you're taken to Gouillag. And you could, you know, and she said, shut up, I'm working. And he said, what are you working on? She said, I'm translating Don Dune of Lord Byron in my head. Now the poem is 17,000 words more, 17,000 lines lot. And he said, okay, I'll give you a piece of paper in a pen, and I'll come back in the morning. And when he came back in the morning, she had translated into Russia all of the canto in which Don Duneumosco. And he laughed, uproariously, the brilliance of this translation, the humor or the biolage. He had exactly done inverse in Russian in the same rhyme scheme that the very complicated

rhyme scheme that Byron uses in English original. So he said, if I keep giving you paper, you can think you can finish it, she said, yes, it took her two years and she was in a cell on her own and they gave her the paper. At the end, the guard allowed three copies to be typed up and gave her one then sent her to Goulag for the next eight years. She completed her sentence. And when she came out of the Goulag, she heard her pile of papers and she went to a friend's house and there was an apartment and five people were living in the room and she joined them papers and she went to a friend's house and there was an apartment and five people were living in the room and she joined them and she sank of the gulag by all accounts as did her manuscoed but she then typed it up again with the revision she'd made in the gulag. It was subsequently

published and it is still to this day the standard translation of Byron in the Russian language. Some people, man. And some people. Yeah. And it was actually put on stage with a massive hit within her lifetime. So she went from... She had a heart attack on the first night, which she fortunately survived. But I tell this story and I told it after the one on Byron, on June, because it's always been my belief, and to me it's an insight that's not original but I've got it from various people which is what you have up here the bastards can never take. They can... How much of that? So I have a friend in Canada Rex Murphy who knows who's extremely aridite and literate and charismatic and maybe Canada's most remarkable journalist. The sort of person that CBC actually produced, because he was a CBC production, so to speak,

and would have produced more of, had they actually done their job, and instead of even setting themselves at odds against him, which they eventually did, he has knowledge of a vast corpus of poetry, and it's evident in the manner in which he speaks, because he has that lilt and cadence and rhythm that's part and parcel. Well, and you're very, very well spoken. How much of that do you think, can you tell how much of

that is a consequence of having internalized it's probably that and in my case the great good fortune of being brought up with the King James Bible and the book of Common Prayer right which if you have them in your head and you recite them every Sunday gives you a pretty good idea of how to cadence the English language right right so that's an extension of the same thing in some real sense yeah but I do I do think that I think that, and I don't know, as I say, I got it from various people when I was growing up, but I think the sense that you have to furnish your mental furniture and you have to furnish that well

with the best things because you might need it someday. Yeah, it's more like a tool house than furnishing. Absolutely. You'll need it any day, but there might be a day you really need it someday. Yeah, it's more like a tool house than furnishing. Absolutely. You'll need it any day, but there might be a day you really need it. So far, I've managed not to be changed to any radiator for years on end, but I like to think that I could try to get by. Right, but you also do get by with these tools that you have at your disposal. Oh, absolutely.

This is one of the things that's really struck me about how badly we educate young men because it's harder to get young men interested in literary issues than young women. But if you tell a young man, well, you want to be successful or not, they'll usually say, well, yeah, I'd rather be successful. It's like, well, you know, you could hypothetically do that by being a manipulative bully, which doesn't really work very well and is counterproductive and will turn your life and everyone around you with a dear life into hell. So I wouldn't recommend that. Or you could master a few things, one of which might be language since you think in it.

And since everything you plan, you'll plan using language and everything you communicate about and and bring people on board with will be linguistically mediated. Absolutely. But the other thing is is that if you choose right and you read right, you read well, that also will guide you in your life. I mean, in a few weeks time, I'm doing, a poem of mine, which is by Concenting Kavaffee, the 20th century Greek poet, his most famous poem, Ithaca, which is really a description of course, like our great hero, setting out to Al of Ithaca, but

Kavaffee just describes in his beautiful poem really what an ideal life would look like. And he says towards the end, he says, and if it could give you the marvelous journey. Right. And okay, so we could, we could sum up with that in some ways. You know, we started this conversation talking about purpose and we delved along the way into the domains of courage and truth and then into beauty and language. And I would say those are all manifestations. You could think of those all as manifestations of the word, right? They're manifestations of the divine word. That's a good way of thinking about it too.

And it's very useful to know that there isn't anything more powerful or meaningful than that, right? And you said that's been your experience in your life, right? Is that there isn't a better pathway than to think and speak in truth. You have the most amazing possible adventures doing that. And you meet the highest possible caliber of people. And weird and unexpected things happen to you all the time, and they're often magical. And then there's also an element of that. And that's especially true on the poetic front that's allied with beauty. And that's a good deal because why not add to truth and courage, beauty? And that one of the things that's a number of the great poets notice Keats, perhaps most famously, but Rilka in the his famous poem on the torso, an antique

torso, he says that the poem, that the bust, the beautiful antique bust, the torso is telling him something. If you remember, Rilka is trying to work out what it is. And and and and and and tell you exactly. And the and what the and this is my belief is, is it's a beautiful thing. It's not just beautiful. It's telling you something. And what the what the antique torso says to Rilka is, you must change your life. Right.

Right. Right. That's Rilka. Yeah. That's Rilka. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's right. That's real. Yeah. That's real. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's, well, that's why people are terrified of beauty too. Yeah. Because, you know, and you might say, you're terrified of beauty in proportion to the distance your life is from what's beautiful. Absolutely. Because it's a judge, right? It's an ultimate judge. It's like,

and for it to say nothing about you is this, it's, it's, it's, it's a judge, right? It's an ultimate judge. It's like, and for it to say nothing about you is this it's It's it's a terrible judge. That's why that Roger used to say the great the great thing of modern The modern selfie culture was Isn't this work of art lucky enough to be in this photo with me? Yeah, of course. Yeah, exactly the wrong way about. And I lucky to be standing in front of this beautiful thing. Right. Well, that's that's the proper attitude of gratitude as well. Yeah. All right, Mr. Murray. Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening and walking with us through these complicated and hopefully promising domains. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. We

seem to get a little farther with each conversation, and that's always useful. I'm going to switch over to the daily wire plus side and talk to Douglas a little bit more about biographical issues and about the manner in which his calling, you might say, made itself manifest. I'm very curious about that. And so if you're inclined to join us there, do so. Otherwise, thank you very much for your time and attention. And to the day that we're a plus for making this possible.

And for you sitting down and talking to me today, it's always much appreciated the film crew here in New York. To all the policemen and firemen who had their sirens going, pretty much through the entire podcast, which is one of the things that makes New York so exciting. And apart from that, until next time, good to see you all. Thanks Douglas. Thank you.

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