The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 418. Hedonism, Taboos, Society, and Deprivation | Ben Shapiro

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speaks with best-selling author, commentator, rapper, and co-founder of The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro. They discuss the postmodern twisting of religious conceptions, the proclivity for hedonism to propagate at the edges of shared ideals, the danger of a society which has no shared ideals, the necessity of deprivation, and the case for a transcendent narrative in regards to long-term societal benefits. Ben Shapiro is the co-founder and Editor Emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the largest conservative podcast in the nation. In addition, he also hosts “Debunked,” “The Search,” and “The Sunday Special.”  - Links - 2024 tour details can be found here https://jordanbpeterson.com/events   Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com/  For Ben Shapiro: On X https://twitter.com/benshapiro?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnQC_G5Xsjhp9fEJKuIcrSw 

Hello everybody. I'm talking today with Ben Shapiro. Ben and I have had occasion to speak privately and publicly a number of times. And he participated in the Exodus seminar that we released last year. We've been able to deepen and extend the dimensions of our conversation as we've progressed. Today, I'm going to talk to him about the counter-enlightenment, the realization across many disciplines that empiricism and rationality are insufficient

processes and modes of conceptualization to orient us in the world. I think that's an established fact now and it's a revolutionary fact. It means that we see the world through a story and so Ben and I are going to talk about just exactly what that means. Not least about the fact that the left in particular, the radical left, has insisted that the fundamental story that the world should be viewed through and is inevitably viewed through is one of power. That leads to the victim-victimizer narrative that characterized Marxism and that now so bitterly characterizes whatever the hell it is that we have in front of us now, this demented pastiche of postmodernism and kind of meta-Marxism that makes everyone either a victim or a victimizer. We talk about that in detail. And so if you're

interested in that, then this is the talk for you. So happy new year, Ben. Hey, thank you. It's good to see you. Yeah, great to see you. Hey, so I thought we would avoid the political, at least to some degree, for the majority of this conversation. I actually have some ideas I want to talk to you about.

And so I'm going to run them by you and then I want your reactions, obviously. So here's the first thing I've been thinking about. So I'm writing this new book called We Who Wrestle With God. And one of its presumptions is that I suppose, and this is something I just talked about with John Verveke too. We've been conceptualizing it, I suppose, as a counter-enlightenment. So here's what I think is going on at the deepest level. So the enlightenment was predicated on the idea

that we could orient ourselves in the world either empirically as a matter of course, with regards to the data at hand or rationally using a priori structures of logic or as a combination of both. But that turns out to be wrong, which is what the postmodernists figured out. And it wasn't just the postmodernists. The AI engineers figured it out at the same time, the cognitive scientists, the affective neuroscientists, people who are studying narrative.

The fundamental problem with the empirical and rational hypotheses start with empirical is that we can't orient ourselves by the data alone because there's an infinite plethora of data, and there's no way of wending our way through the data without prioritizing it in terms of importance. And that can't be done using empiricism per se, or even rationally, because you have to specify a goal, you have to bring in the domain of values. Now, my hypothesis is at the moment, working hypothesis hypothesis is that this structure that we use to prioritize the facts so that we can navigate forward is when described a story. A story is a representation of a hierarchy of attentional priority. Now

the reason this is revolutionary I think is because it puts the story back at the center of the stage. Okay, so I'd like your comments about that first, and then I'll turn to the next part of this. I mean, I think that that's totally true. When you say that you have to have some sort of values framed to determine exactly how you view the data, that's obviously true, because as you say, there's an entire ocean of data out there, and how you prioritize, which data is more important,

is dependent on how you value that data. That's true in everything from abortion to the trolley problem. And anytime you get into some sort of dilemma about what human beings should do, the should is a question of values, and you can have as many facts as you want on the utilitarian after-effects of that. But even the questions of utilitarianism are dependent on questions of values at the end. And that's why utilitarianism as a sort of standalone philosophy tends to fail. And when you say that the the fill in there is story, because story is a representation of values in an easily understandable way.

That is absolutely true. I mean, the fact is that what a story is, is by nature, something that is being told to you. And there's something deeply human about that. When someone tells you a story, you don't tend to question the story in the way a journalist would question a story. When someone says, I'm going to tell you a story now, you listen all the way through to the story with reliance on the storyteller, and that innately is an act of faith. And so when you do that, what you're really saying is that I'm assuming the set of values for the sake of this story, I'm assuming the set of values that undergirds and is embedded in the story, and then we can operate from those premises. And what makes a story good or bad to pretty much everyone

is our innate understanding of the underlying coherence and values that are embedded in the story. Okay, so that touches on a couple of other things that I think have become much more clear recently too. So I was playing with chat GPT yesterday and I have a employee used to be student, who's an expert at large language models. Now, the way that large language models work essentially is that they calculate conditional probabilities and so you could imagine that there's a pretty high conditional probability

that an S will follow an E, for example, if you look at how letters are segregated, a very low probability that X will follow Z. So you can model words based on the statistical likelihood of the juxtaposition of letters, and then you can model word-to-word correspondences, and then word-to-phrase, and phrase-to-sentence, and sentence-to-sentence, and paragraph-to-paragraph. The large language model

AI learning systems derive a picture of the statistical relationship between words at pretty much every level of possible statistical relationship. So it's not just word to word like the old Markov chains. It's word to fourth word and word to fifth word and word to 10th word. And we actually have no idea how deep the models go. The answer is they go deep enough so that the output that they produce is sufficiently indistinguishable from human output so that we find it acceptable as such.

That's really the criteria. But this is very cool, Ben, because when I talked to Sam Harris, one of the things he said to me repeatedly, and he said such things to other people, is that our interpretations of narratives are arbitrary. So he kind of goes postmodern on that front, is that if you're trying to interpret biblical stories, for example, all you're doing is reading into them, right? It's a projection that the story as such has no intrinsic meaning. But I think that this is not only wrong,

but now demonstrated to be wrong because what the AILM systems can do is map out the relationship between words and concepts statistically. So now we have an empirical validation for the Freudian or Jungian notion of symbol. So yesterday, for example, one of the things that I've noted in stories, you see this in Disney movies, for example, is that a character like a witch, which is from a Jungian perspective, a symbol of the negative feminine, that would be associated with nature and chaos and the unknown and darkness and

fecundity. And like there's a web of associated ideas. And you might say, well, those associations are just arbitrary. But now we can say, well, no, they're not, because if you look into the entire linguistic corpus, you can map out the semantic different distance between concepts. And that means that there's going to be clusters of concepts. And a cluster of concepts is no different

than an archetype or a symbol. And so now we have at hand the possibility of an empirical mapping of such things. And we've been playing with these systems. So we've designed systems, for example, that can interpret dreams. So you can type in your dream, and the system will tell you what it means. You might say, well, that interpretation is just arbitrary, and I would say it's not arbitrary at all.

Every image in a dream exists within a framework of meaning. The meaning is something like statistical distance from a web of associated meanings. If you flesh out that web of associated meanings, that's no different than delving more deeply into the substructure of the dream. That's no different than a formal analysis of a text, you know, that a real literary critic whose Mind has been shaped in some ways the same way that an LLM model has been shaped would would So someone with a great corpus of literary knowledge is going to be able to perform the same kind of analysis as an LLM and None of that's arbitrary. Okay, so the reason I'm pointing to all this is twofold. So you tell me what you think about this.

So let's say that we've reached a kind of revolutionary agreement, that the story is primary. So there's an implicit framework of value weights through which you look at the world. That constitutes your character and your ethical presuppositions. If I told a story about how that, if I gave an account of how that pattern made itself manifest in the real world, that would be a story. And I can infer from the story what your weights are, and I can use them to adjust mine. Okay, so let's say that all seems appropriate, and I don't think it's just appropriate. I think this is being absolutely demonstrated in multiple disciplines simultaneously in the last 30 years,

and that it's culminated in the large language model demonstration, which is an unbelievably compelling demonstration. Okay. So let's say now we've agreed that the story is primary. Now, that's what the postmodernists basically concluded in the 1960s. But here's what they did. They said the story is primary, then which was a great observation and a brilliant deduction. But then they said, and the primary story is victim victimizer,

right? And that's a that's a strange twist on the Marxism that most of them were already encapsulated in. Now, I've been criticized for my views on postmodernism, my assumption that it's a form of Marxism. And so here's what I think Marxism and postmodernism share. And here's how I think they're different. And this is a good thing for conservatives to know, because they share the victim-victimizer narrative. And that in itself isn't Marxist. That's a variant of the story of Cain and Abel.

It's an ancient way of viewing the world through the lens of resentment. And Marxism was a variant of that. Now, the postmodernists dispensed with Marxism, and they did that partly because people like Solzhenitsyn showed how brutal and catastrophic by necessity Marxism became. Now all those French postmodernists, they were steeped in Marxism, they didn't want to give it up. So they kept the victim-victimizer narrative and they turned it into something multi-dimension, right? That would be the intersectional postmodernism where you can be a victim or a victimizer on any dimension of comparison and all of them simultaneously. So it's like a metamarksism. It's like the full flowering of bitter resentment. But

here's the difference. And this is so stunning. It just hit me hard this week. The Marxists insisted that the primary dimension of victim-victimizer, and really the only one worth considering, given their universal human vision, was economic. And the bloody post-modernists put that at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy. So weirdly, although they accepted and propagated the victim-victimizer narrative, they inverted the hierarchy so that,

see, you can think about someone like Claudine Gay. Like, there's no way you can make the case that Claudine Gay was oppressed economically. In fact, economically, coming from a rich family, as she did, she's clearly a victimizer. But that doesn't count because for some incomprehensible reason, maybe, and this is where I would like, particularly like your comments,

the postmodern victim, victimizer types, they abandoned the economic issue. That's why you like poor white people can't be oppressed, even though, like I think the most compelling case you can make for the victim, victimizer narrative is on the grounds of economic inequality. Now, I'm not saying you can make an overwhelmingly powerful case for it even there, but if you were going to make a case, that would be... You've got to give Marx credit for at least identifying that as perhaps the cardinal dimension of potentially tragic inequality. So, okay, so what do you think about that? The prioritization of Marxism, or the victim-victimizer narrative as

the cardinal orienting story of mankind, and then this weird inversion of Marxism that characterizes the radicals that we see today. I mean, I certainly think that there's a lot of support for that idea. There are a lot of philosophers who, for example, have treated Marxism

not as an outgrowth of a capitalist economic theory, but actually as a sort of perverse and twisted outgrowth of a misread of Christianity. Christianity is suggesting that the Meek will inherit the earth, but on an economic level, the Meek aren't inheriting the earth. Therefore, there must be some form of class exploitation that's going on. And so reading Marxism as a weird offshoot of Christianity rather than a weird offshoot of capitalism is sort of one way of seeing that in a misread of Christianity. Nietzsche actually did some of this, right? Nietzsche actually sort of suggested this when he treated Christianity as a perverse version of a victimizer, a victim narrative that replaced the idea of good, strong, and beautiful, and weak,

nasty, and terrible, right? His moral prism was the idea that good, strong, and beautiful, and weak, nasty, and terrible. His moral prism was the idea that just because something is good and strong doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad. And he was creating what I think is a perverse view of Christianity as arguing against that and then creating a victimizer narrative in opposition to that. When you talk about the postmodernist, I think one of the things the postmodernists are doing is, I think almost all postmodernism is a form of projection. And so when they suggest that all narratives are about power dynamics, I think what they are saying is they wish to use their narrative as a power dynamic. Narrative, they understand, is the thing that drives human

beings. And so what they do is they read their own willingness to drive human beings via a narrative like victim victimizer into every narrative So it must be that every narrative is driven by an underlying power Substructure because their narrative they believe is driven by an underlying power Substructure and I think obviously that's wrong and again. I think that that that also comes from a Postmodernism again is sort of a weird perverse offshoot of the Enlightenment, in the sense that if you're talking about an a priori view of the world, which is that everything that you have arrived at in society, everything that pre-exists you is effectively arbitrary or

a version of crammed down power, that there's no validity to the world that you inherit, which is I think one of the premises of some of the changes that came about because of the Enlightenment, but also one of the premises of postmodernism, which is you get to wreck all the systems because you were born into an unfair system driven by perverse views of power. That's the great lie. And so postmodernism has to have its own narrative. I mean, this, of course, is the great kind of meta-failing of postmodernism, is that in its desire to destroy all narratives as forms of power

They have to derive their own narrative in order to do that right postmodernism is self-defeating on the very root intellectual level, but that doesn't mean that it's not effective and Again, I think a lot of this lies a lot of the enlightenment the post a lot of this lies in frankly a perverse misreading of Biblical narratives. So let me touch on that one. Okay, so I just wrote about the parable of the unjust steward. Now, it's very interesting parable. So the story's about this employer, essentially, and he has an employee, a servant, but an employee for all and sense, intents and purposes, and he threatens to fire him for misusing his funds, and the employee goes out to some of his subcontractors and he offers them

this deal where if they pay off a certain proportion of their debts immediately so that he has some money so that he can move forward in good faith, apart from this side deal, with his employer, then everything will be set straight. And so he does that and he generates enough capital to satisfy his master. Now, there's a certain dishonesty in his maneuverings, but Christ says to his followers that the children of darkness,

essentially, are sometimes wiser than the children of light, and that there's some utility in serving Mammon properly, as long as you don't prioritize that over services of what is to the highest. It's a very, very interesting parable. And because as you mentioned, there's a reading of Christianity that has what you might argue is like an anti-materialist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist bent. But I believe that a close reading of the Gospels puts that interpretation completely off to the side. There is an emphasis that those who claim false power will be held to account for that, and that those who are just and good but marginalized will be brought to the center, but that has nothing to do with an essential narrative of fundamental oppression. It's a much deeper idea than that,

that true virtue will be rewarded and false virtue punished, even if the false virtue is associated with material prosperity, that the truth will be revealed. So Christ's point in that particular parable is that the discipline that you can learn, well, managing, let's say money or managing money for someone else, managing material prosperity is a virtue that is first of all, genuinely a virtue

and that can be a precursor virtue to service to the highest possible good, which it should be a subset of anyways, and that it can't just be tossed off casually as all service to material prosperity or life more abundant is because of its materialism or its capitalism to be regarded with extreme suspicion. And it's also not money that's regarded as the primary sin in the Gospels either. It's love of money, and that means the prioritization of money over God. It doesn't mean the pursuit of life more abundant. This is also a place, I think, where the Jewish tradition has got things very right, because my sense is there's a laudable emphasis in the

Jewish tradition on the goodness of a good life, right? The material, present, physical goodness of a good life. And that is different than that spiritualized reading of Christianity that makes everything in the material world like damned and corrupt by definition. Yeah, it's a very weird take on Christianity. The Christianity is all about vows of poverty. I mean, given the development of the Western world as the richest civilization in the history of the world and driven largely by religious Christians. If you look at the generation of American wealth, particularly in the late 19th century, for example, this is all religious men.

John Jay Rockefeller is attending church and dedicating churches. This kind of bizarre notion that Christianity is in direct conflict with capitalism or property rights or anything like that, that's obviously foolish and wrong. But that's why I say, I think that Marxism is a bastardization in many ways of a misread of the Bible. And I think that so many of our problems, because let's be real about this, the Bible shaped the modern world.

And so that means that even the perverse offshoots of the Bible shaped the modern world. And so even the victimizer narratives that we see in the Bible, many of them are deliberately or maybe not deliberately missing the point. And when people look at the Cain versus Abel narrative and they say that what that story is actually about, for example, is Cain being he's vicious and he treats himself as a victim and ables the victimizer and therefore

he kills Abel and therefore he's punished. The reality is what that story is about is him recognizing the sin of that. I think that the Cain-Nabel story what's fascinating about the Cain-Nabel story is everybody misses the end of the Cain-Nabel story. The very end of that story is not just Cain going wandering in the wilderness. It's that he's the first person in the Bible who actually does repentance before God. He says, I've sinned and then God marks him with the mark of

Cain and the mark of Cain is meant to protect him. The mark of Cain is not meant to mark him for murder. He says, I'm going to wander and be an outcast. People are going to kill me and God says, I'm going to give you this mark specifically to protect you because you've repented of the victim victimizer sin. Well, and he also says, he says that the sin that he's committed is more than he can bear. And I believe the reason for that is very much germane to the current political situation

too is that if you associate success of any sort with power, oppression and corruption, and we should say that when success goes wrong, by the way, it does go wrong in the direction of power, right? So that power is a corrupting force, and there is a narrative of power. It's just it's not the fundamental narrative. When Cain tears down his ideal, because his ideal is clearly able,

it's able he wants to be, and he wants the relationship between able and the divine to characterize his life. And then he destroys that completely in a fit of absolute spite and resentment. And that's when he goes to God and says that his punishment is more than he can bear. destroys that completely in a fit of absolute spite and resentment. And that's when he goes to God and says that his punishment is more than he can bear.

And that's because if you do tear down the ideal, like if you identify success with oppression, then, well, all your success instantly becomes nothing but evidence of your evil. Well, you can't imagine, as a psychologist, understanding how reward works. I can't imagine a conceptual scheme more devastating to the function of the natural reward systems than to associate the attainment of a goal with what's most malevolent.

There's nothing worse you can do than that. And, you know, to give the devil is due. So one of the things I've been thinking, tell me what you think about this. I've been writing about this with Jonathan Pazio. We wrote an article for the ARC on this topic. Pazio walked me through one of the images in the book of Revelation.

And the book of Revelation, you see the whore of Babylon on the back of the beast that represents the state, this multi-headed beast. So the multi-headed beast is a degenerate version of the unity of the state. It started to deteriorate, so now it sprouts multiple heads, diversity heads you might say. I mean that in some real way because if the state isn't unified, it's fragmented,

and a fragmented beast has multiple heads, and the heads can fight. So there's the demented state. On top of the demented state on its back is the horror of Babylon. And so the way that we've read that is that when the patriarchal structure deteriorates, so when masculinity itself becomes corrupt,

the corruption of femininity accompanies it, and the destruction of femininity is something like the disinhibition of female sexuality. Maybe it's transformation into a marketable commodity. That's a good way of thinking about it. You can think about that in terms of only fans and online pornography and all of that, that immediate, or even the selling of women in short-term relationships for sexual purposes. Women can sell themselves, just like pimps can sell them. And so there's this correspondence between the patriarchal beast destabilizing and then the feminine destabilizing. Of course, it has to be that way, because one sex can't destabilize without the other.

Now what's cool about this from a conceptual perspective is that the beast ends up killing the whore. And so here's a reading of that, is that the power mad state will draw you into its clutches with the promises of unbridled hedonism. Right? Says like, you give us the power and will enable you to do whatever you want, right? Which means to fall prey to your short-term hedonic whims. But then the consequence of that of course is that the tyrannical state, once instantiatedated makes any pleasure of any sort whatsoever, not only impossible, but forbidden.

And so, and then one more thing on top of that. So imagine we're in a situation where God has died and so the thing that united us has disintegrated. So now we've fallen into a state of disunion. united us has disintegrated. So now we've fallen into a state of disunion. Then you might ask, well, what powers arise in the aftermath of the dissolution of what's unified? And here's some answers. The goddess or god of nature, the god of power, the god of hedonism, so that would be like motivational whims, short-term motivational whims, and the god of despair, right, of nihilism. So those would be powerful uniting stories that don't unite everything, but that carry a substantive amount of explanatory weight. You know, like Freud, for example,

his explanatory narrative was sex, which is an explanation essentially of hedonism. And the biologists like Richard Dawkins, they fall into that trap as well, identifying even the human impetus to propagate across time with nothing more than the reproductive urge, fundamentally. So anyways, imagine that there's a hierarchy of God, so to speak. You lose the top unifying God, that's the death of God.

Mircea Eliade tracked that as a recurring phenomenon in history, by the way, that paralleled the disintegration of the states upon which, the states that were founded on that unifying vision. So then it collapses into the next highest unifying narratives. Certainly power is one of those. Heednism is one of those.

And then they have an alignment. There's another twist on that too, which is that one of the reasons, one of the things you might ask yourself is why would you want to pursue power? And the answer would be, well, so I can compel other people to do things. Then you might say, well, compel them to do what? And then the answer, that's got to be something like, well, I want them to do what I want them to do. And so that way, power becomes the handmaiden of hedonism. And I think we see that in the modern radical leftist movements as well, because they are

characterized by an unholy union of absolutely licentious hedonism and this insane insistence that power rules everything. And as you pointed out, that also justifies the use of power. I mean, I think that's also the only promise that the left in this context has been able to fulfill. Meaning, the promise of tearing down the existing systems was that it was going to bring about human fulfillment, a kinder, better world, a more accepting and tolerant world, and unbridled hedonism. Well, it turns out that the last of those is the only one that has actually been fulfilled in the modern world, and the others are all lacking. The others are just

not there because you actually need intermediate social institutions built from the ground up in order to actually provide for human fulfillment or human unity or any of these other things. But what you can do is if you wreck all the intermediate institutions and you turn everybody into an atomized individual, you can certainly guarantee them the pursuit of whatever hedonistic pleasure is available. But that's only for a time. I mean, as you mentioned, at a certain point, if there is to be any unifying factor at all, the power is going to have to crush that too.

Because, I mean, and this is what Orwell says in 1984 essentially, is that if the hedonic will exists in opposition to other wills, it cannot be a Rusonian general will. There can't really be a Rusonian general will to just giant hedonic pleasure. Eventually those hedonic pleasures come into conflict with one another. Right, exactly. That's exactly why. Well, there's another reason too. So even technically speaking, the hedonic drives are primordial, sex for example, or aggression. And one of the things that characterizes primordial drives, apart from their power and their multiplicity, which can put them in conflict, as you said, is their short-term nature. So one of the things Pajot has walked through with me is this is a very smart idea too.

So imagine that the unifying structure of the meta-narrative deteriorates and what you get emerging are a variety of states of potential domination by hedonistic whims, emotions and motivations fundamentally. Now they're very short term in their orientation because they want what they want in a single minded way. That's what a cyclops is by the way. They want what they want in a single minded way and they want it bloody well now.

And they want it for the person in question. Now the problem with that is that what I want now for me is not the principle upon which any social relationship can be founded, right? Because if it's for me only now, which is by the way the identity claims of the radical leftists, right? If it's for me now, it's certainly not for my wife, it's certainly not for my children or my parents, it's not for the broader community. Like there's no reciprocal ultra, there's no productive generous reciprocal altruism in atomized individualism. And so then it can't, then it can't survive. So one of the things we are seeing, I talked to Louise Perry about this too, on the sexual revolution front is that

even without government suppression of sexuality, let's say, what we're seeing is a wide-scale abandonment of sexuality, such that this is particularly true in Japan and South Korea. I think it's 30% now of young people in Japan and Korea under the ages of 30 are virgins. We see it now that half of women in the West are unmarried at 30. Half of them won't have children and 90% of them will regret it. We see the wide scale turning to pornography, right? And you could think about that as the ultimate expression of short-term hedonic gratification. But we see the consequence of that and the consequence of that is inability

to perform sexually and the disruption of actual relationships. So I don't even think we'd have to see the state itself turn into a totalitarian beast and eradicate hedonism. I think that the pursuit of short-term desire, which is also by the way, what psychopaths do, right? Like, here's something cool. I looked at the literature, psychological literature, on this in depth recently. So, the, that, that hedonistic mating strategy of

one night stand, let's say, that absolutely characterizes psychopaths. And so, one of the hallmarks of the development of antisocial behavior among adolescents is early and frequent multi-partner sexual involvement. Right? So the short-term mating strategy that characterized hedonism is literally indistinguishable from the dark tetrad orientation, which is manipulative, psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic. They had to widen the normal logical spectrum to include sadism to get all the co-occurring pathologies properly clumped.

And so it's so interesting, A, that this is something women should know. If you're dating a man whose fundamental orientation is short-term sexual gratification, he's either pursuing a psychopathic path of manipulation or you're training him to become that person. One of the things that also is fascinating about all of this is that the amount of sexual boredom in the society is extraordinary. So you have more sexual choice and variety available than literally any time in human history given free license by the state because there are no intermediate social institutions in which sort of informal mechanisms of disapproval

could make themselves felt. And one of the things it turns out psychologically that human beings are turned on by is taboo. And so when you get rid of literally every taboo, then people tend to get bored. And then the you get rid of literally every taboo, then people tend to get bored. And then the question is, there's no novelty. Right. Exactly. Novelty goes away. And particularly men are driven by sexual novelty. It's something that is very deeply ingrained. And the power of what marriage was supposed to be is it takes this short-term hedonic desire. And it's said, because female virtue still existed, that in order for you to obtain this,

you're going to have to sublimate that desire for the building of something greater. I mean, the part of Freud that everybody ignores is the part where Freud actually is in favor of sublimation. It's only later psychologists and philosophers who suggest that sublimation needs to be destroyed and done away with in order to free all forms

of human artistic and material expression. But Freud never says that. Freud says you actually have to sublimate a lot of those short-term hedonic desires to something higher. But again, that gets back to kind of the fundamental premise that you were speaking to, which is there is this narrative of accepted values that we all used to live inside of. And when you destroy that narrative by saying for some reason that it's not true because it's not coming out of your own head. Well, once that happens, we don't hold the common narrative. There are no common narratives.

And if there are no common narratives and everything is then acceptable, then what exactly is the taboo? What, where does the sublimation take place? There is no sublimation and there is no future orientation because what sublimation really there is no future orientation because what sublimation really is is orientation of short-term and favor of long-term. Well and in favor of other people, right, so it's long-term plus

the social. Yeah, well so you can do that, you can think about this technically as well. If there's no uniting narrative, here's the necessary consequences. First of all, there's no higher order superordinate aim. And that means motivation itself on the positive side takes a hit because we experience positive motivation and the impetus to move forward. So that would be curiosity, hope, inspiration, enthusiasm, even aesthetic interest. We experience that only in relationship to an aim. And so if you destroy the ultimate aim, you destroy the structure upon which reward itself is dependent apart from satiation-induced rewards, right? And they produce quiescence,

not movement forward. Okay, so you lose positive emotion. Then you multiply negative emotion. And the reason you do that is because one of the things that constrains your anxiety response, which is actually a calculation of the entropic distance to a given destination, technically, is if you produce a multiplicity of aims, then you increase anxiety proportionately. Now, there's probably some optimization function

so that a choice between three aims is great and a choice between a hundred is devastating. Okay, so that's two things that happens when the unifying overarching theme disappears. But there's a third thing too, which is something you pointed to. So there's a third thing too, which is something you pointed to. So there's a relationship between scarcity and deprivation and value. And so if you are surfighted by

a stimulus, let's say, or a resource, so you're overfed, as soon as you're not hungry, food is of no interest. If you're stuffed, food is nauseating. Now you remember in the Exodus seminar we covered, I don't remember if you were there for this but I think you might have been, there's a situation when the Israelites are out in the desert wandering around like demented slaves and bitching about the fact that they have no tyrant. They start complaining about the fact that they don't have enough to eat. And God sends them like quails until they're literally coming out of their nostrils. Right, yeah. First they complain about the manna, and then, well, they complain they're hungry, and God sends the manna, and then they say, we're tired of the manna, we want meat.

And God says, you're going to have as much meat as you could possibly imagine. Right, right, right. Here come the quails. God actually gets angry, and actually Moses, for the first time, gets angry at the people over their requests at this point. Right. Well, and what happens is because they have an absolute surplus of what they hypothetically find desirable, it becomes disgusting. And this is certainly the danger on the sexual front so

We don't know like we actually don't know how much deprivation is necessary for proper sexual function to make itself manifest right is that you have to and Doesn't take much thought to figure this out It's a rare person who hasn't primed their appetite with hunger before a Thanksgiving feast. You don't want to have a plate of pancakes at five o'clock if you're going to have a Thanksgiving feast at six. And you might say, well, why not? Because more is better.

And the answer is no. The right amount is better. And the right amount involves a certain amount of deprivation. And I think that's, I read this interesting article yesterday showing that women are more likely to lose romantic interest as a relationship progresses than men. I don't think that's surprising. They're higher in trait neuroticism, so they're more likely to experience negative emotion. And then women are have more, their response to sexuality

is more multi-dimensional than men because the risks are higher. In any case, one of the ways around that is for men and women in a marriage to stay apart from each other for periods of these researchers looked at eight hours. If you get some distance, the desire reemerges. And then you were talking about novelty. And so this is pretty interesting too. So you said men will chase novelty in a sexual relationship. Well, I think part of what is incumbent on

married individuals is to figure out how to keep that novelty alive, right? So that means that each of them have to be transforming. And I think the best way to do that is in relationship to a spiritual pursuit. And then I think women also want novelty, but the novelty they're looking for in men is probably more multi-dimensional and performative, right? Because women are hypergamous and they, they like men who are above them in the hierarchy of status, let's say, or ability, likely ability. And I think what women want are novel displays of hypergamous capacity, and that that is the novelty orientation for women in relationship to sexuality.

Well, one of the things that's actually fascinating about this is that, biblically speaking, right, I mean, not to get into abstruse Jewish law, but this is actually right in the Bible. Forget about the abstruse Jewish law. Right in the Bible, one of the mandates is that for a period of at least one week out of every month, married couples are not supposed to have sex. This is like right in the Bible. And so one of the purposes of that, presumably, would be to create the scarcity and the novelty that you're talking about.

Because if you're married, then obviously there's tremendous availability of sex. Contra every single weird public opinion out there, married people tend to have sex significantly more than single people. And it is not particularly close. But theoretically, the scarcity goes away, the novelty goes away, and then so does the romance. And so the Bible literally says... Well, that's a danger, anyways. That's a danger. Right. And so the Bible literally says, like one week out of the month, minimum your toes. You can't do anything during this particular week.

And I think that, again, there's a good rationalistic and there's a good way. I shouldn't say rationalistic because there's a reason for it, but it's something that inherited, inherited wisdom over time is sort of the message of the Bible. And I think that that's not knowing why you do the thing, but you do the thing and then it works is in some ways much of what we're talking about because that's the story of what works is the story, right? That's what we're really talking about at the end of the day. Yeah, what works? What works all things considered over the longest possible span of time and

situation. Yeah, so with regards to narratives, so you imagine that each person's life is a narrative, right, when described. Now there's a competition between, there's a competition for validity between those narratives and here's what we do. So Marcea Eliade tracked this with regard to the development of religious narratives. So you imagine, it's easy to understand and it's very much like a large language model derivation by the way. You can imagine that there's a bunch of natives sitting around a campfire talking about like

the 10 people they admire the most. Okay, so now what that points to is that there's a commonality across those people, and the commonality is commonality of what constitutes what is admirable. Now, you can imagine another person, a young person maybe sitting there listening to these accounts, right? But, and then you ask him later what the discussion was, and he doesn't tell you all 10 stories. He gives you an amalgamated composite

of what constitutes the admirable hero as a consequence of deriving the central point from the amalgamation of 10 stories. Now, this is exactly what young boys do when they play the role of father in a pretend playbout. They don't actually imitate directly through one-to-one corresponding mimicry, the actions of their father. They watch their father in multiple situations and abstract out the commonalities that make

him a father. So we abstract out the commonalities of admirability across a set of compelling stories. Those stories echo to us because they attract our interest, right? So that's the correspondence between the archetype and the soul. That's a good way of thinking about it. Then you can imagine that as the hero stories aggregate and increase in sophistication, that their transcendent nature starts to make itself

more and more manifest because you get a pattern that's been applicable across many generations and situations. And so this is also the answer to the problem of pathological consensus. You know, like it's a conservative dictum that you should do by and large what other people do. But obviously that goes to stray in times like when they were possessed by idolatry and ideological idiocy. Nazi Germany, Maoist China, Stalinist Soviet Union, and all modern universities, let's say. So then you might say, well, we still need the consensus. And what has worked and what we've observed to work

is a consensus. What do we do if that goes astray? And the answer is, well, we also have the consensus that's developed across time. And the consensus that's developed across time is instantiated in our traditional narratives. So they're an anchor that can be used to resist movement, let's say, in a pathological direction

when the consensus itself goes wrong. That's what it looks like to me. And I think that's associated with the vertical axis of Mount Sinai symbolically, as well as the horizontal axis that really does constitute something like a consensus. So, Jordan, I wonder what you think about this proposition that's occurring to me while you're talking, horizontal axis that really does constitute something like a consensus. So Jordan, I wonder what you think about this proposition that's occurring to me while you're

talking, which is that one of the great failures that we're experiencing in modern society obviously is a failure of conversation, that there's a difference between verbal and oral learning and just reading things. And that as we become a society where we don't talk to each other as much, that one of the things you lose about the narrative is the person who's telling you the narrative. That when your parent tells you a bedtime story,

it's not just the bedtime story, it's that your parents is telling you the bedtime story. When you sit around the campfire and you abstract that larger story, it's the people who you're talking to, who you trust to be good people who are telling you their various stories that allow you to abstract that out. And so as literacy has increased over the course of the world, that's allowed for the spread of knowledge, but it's also

shallowed some of the stories themselves. Because you sitting in a room, reading the Bible, is actually not the same thing as you sitting in a room with people discussing the Bible like we did during the Exodus seminar and getting various points of view and then abstracting out the lesson. And so as we move from a society that engages in conversation and oral learning to a society that's very much about you and advice in front of you or you and a book in front of you or you in a TikTok video in front of you, that that isn't actually enough. That the form of tradition that we need to get back to

is a form of oral learning and conversation, a sort of back and forth dialogue that allows us to actually understand the narratives in a powerful way. Otherwise, you do end up with the postmodern dilemma of, I'm sitting there and I'm reading a text that I just discovered and I'm bringing whatever my prior biases are to that text.

You actually do need a teller of the tale in order for you to fully understand what's going on with the tale. Well, you point to a bunch of things there. So one is, okay, so let's blame some of this on the Protestants and their insistence that the biblical corpus per se is sufficient. Now, one of the huge advantages of that was the promotion of literacy worldwide. So we're going to give the devil this too, but it does have the problem, the twofold problem that you just described. The first problem Jung pointed to this, the first problem is that Protestant tends towards fractionation. And you can see that with the multiplicity of Protestant churches, because if it's just you and the text,

there's an infinite number of yous. And I think the logical extension of this is the identity claims that the radical types on the hedonic laughter now putting forward, right? I'm the interpreter. I'm the only interpreter, right? It's between me and God and no one else. It's like, well, that's great unless you're deluded, in which case the God that you think you're following might not be God at all. Now then you might say, well, how might I determine whether the God that's calling to me is God or Satan,

let's say, and part of your answer is, you had a twofold answer. One is, well, is the story being told to you by people, actual embodied people, that you actually respect as a consequence of your knowledge of, let's say, their ethical conduct? And the other is, well, is there an active and living discussion around such issues that's conducted by a group of such people? So one of the things Pajot has helped me with a fair bit is understanding more deeply

the role of ritual and congregation in the maintenance of social structure, but also in the transmission of the stories that need to be transmitted as an academic type. And also as someone, let's say, as an intellectual prone to the temptations of the Luciferian intellect, it's very enticing for me to think

that it can just be me in the text. But the problem with that is that you're blindest at your blindest spots, and you need that additional community to tap you out of your delusional and unconscious self-serving, atomistic individuality into something more like the universal space. Talk to Harris recently. And Sam and I suspect you as well share a preoccupation with the reality of evil.

And part of the reason that Sam beat the drum so hard for objective standards of morality grounded in science, so an attempt to reduce the narrative to the objective, was because he wanted to put a firm foundation under claims that there was a transcendent good. And the only way he could see to do that was through the empirical route. Now, you know, I've been looking at Robert Axelrod's work on the emergence of cooperation in iterated systems. And I think, so I think there actually is a place

where the approach that Sam favors can be integrated with the sort of things that you and I and the Exodus participants, for example, have been discussing. So, imagine that there's a landscape of repeated interactions. Let's say they're voluntary trades of information, of emotion, of goods, the voluntary part's important, and that across those trades there's a pattern. Now Axelrod showed in his computational simulations that if you and I were trading under certain conditions,

the best strategy, the winning strategy, and a competition of strategies would be for you and I to cooperate. But if you cheated for me to whack you with proportionate force and then to go back to cooperation, that's tit for tat. Now imagine that our lives are characterized by a sequence of repeated trades in multiple dimensions with multiple players in a game of indeterminate length, and that there's a pattern of interaction

that is optimal across that plethora of interactions. I think that the highest order narrative that grips us, so we'd find that compelling, that would be told by the people we admire, and that's in concordance with the biblical narrative is a map of the strategy that works best in repeated interactions with multiple people across the broadest possible span of time. So that's a place where the empirical and theological could reach perfect concordance and well, I I think the evidence points in that direction.

Yeah, I totally agree with all of that. And I also think that when you talk about, you know, the fact that these narratives have to be told to you by people that you trust, that people who you consider to be virtuous and all the rest of this, I think that even people who don't advocate for that understand it innately, which is why attacks on the church, for example, are never attacks on the Bible. Those are not effective attacks. There's sort of attacks that you see from Richard Dawkins, for example, about the text of the Bible. That never has any impact on people who are truly religious because truly religious people exist within the context of religious communities. The most damaging thing to any institution is an attack on the people who comprise the institution and make the rules as

non-virtuous and violative of the fundamental principles of that institution. This is why the attacks that have been most damaging to the Catholic Church have nothing to do with Catholic doctrine and everything to do with the activities inside the Catholic Church surrounding, for example, cover-ups of child molestation. It's why attacks on any institution are going to be the most telling based on taking people who you previously thought were virtuous advocates for the system and bringing them low and tearing them down. And I think that one of the things that we've seen whole- Well, that's also, okay, so that's also why. So in the Gospel texts, Christ's fundamental enemies in the earthly world, so to speak, so excluding transcendent evil are the Pharisees, the scribes, and the lawyers.

So I've been going through those stories in depth. And so the Pharisees are moral hypocrites. They're the people. See, this is another way that we can sort these disputes out with people like Dawkins and Harris. Because what they do is they identify the religious enterprise with the totalitarian proclivity. But that speaks a lack of differentiated judgment because this is where I think that Arrow hits its mark the worst totalitarian hypocrites use

the religious enterprise as the most effective disguise for their psychopathic maneuverings and So and I think the separation of church and state is a protection against that So like and we know this clinically to some degree, because if I'm a narcissist, a psychopathic narcissist, I'm going to claim victim status and milk the compassionate for all their worth, being relatively callous myself and unfeeling in the presence of other people's pain,

perfectly willing to manipulate that. And then I'm also going to proclaim exactly as the Pharisees do in the gospel text, I'm going to proclaim my moral virtue to elevate my standing in the community. I'm going to pray in public like the protesters do, and I'm going to take the best seats in the synagogue by parading around my moral virtue. And so that ties into what you're saying, because the most effective way of demolishing the traditional proprieties, the traditional endeavor, is to claim to embody them while using God's name in vain,

while pretending moral virtue, oriented towards the highest, I'm saving the planet. Well, really in reality, doing nothing but pursuing your own evil agenda. And so we could be wise enough to see the wolves in sheep's clothing, to see the totalitarian's like the Iranian fundamentalists

who use the religious enterprise to justify their own self-serving behavior and then bring, they milk it and they discredit it simultaneously. So that's like a truly malevolent act, right? It's only for you, plus it discredits what is holy. And that's praying in public. And there's tremendous amount of the gospel text devoted to insisting that that's a cardinal ill, and that's the same thing as using God's name in vain,

the Third Commandment of Moses, right? And I think it's one of the cardinal sins of our time is to parade your moral virtue around in the name of what's holiest when all you're doing is elevating your own moral status. I mean, I certainly think that that's the case, and I also think that we have to be careful on the other side not to fall into the easy use of the charge of hypocrisy to destroy the principle.

Because you can see that exact same attack being wildly misused. You can see everyone is sinful. And so the idea is that if I can discredit an idea by attacking the advocates of the idea as sinful Well, then you can basically destroy any ideology that way. It's why religious people for example Very often say oh war held to a higher standard. Well, I mean to be fair you should be held to a higher standard You do proclaim to be religious, but it's also very easy to destroy entire swaths of ideology based on this and Using using human beings inherent fallenness and inherent sinfulness in order to discredit, you know, and you see

this literally with every ideology, right? Capitalism is bad because Bernie made off. Okay, so I got a good story about that for you. So you remember in the story of Noah, so Noah shepherds his family and the human race for that, through the return of the pre-cosmogonic chaos, right? The waters come back, God floods everything, returning it to the state that preceded creation and brings up a new civilization. And Noah is to thank for that. Now, he goes out after he lands because it's been a harrowing trip. Let's say, plants have in yard and proceeds to get rip-roaring drunk. And so that's a human failing.

And Noah's only characterized in that text is wise in his generations, right? He's not a saint, he's not the savior. He's a good man, but a man, so he has faults. Now, here's what happens. This is so cool. So he drinks like three gallons of wine and passes out, and he's stark naked. I think his robes are lifted up over his body, and he's laying there in his

tent exposed and naked. And his son, Ham, comes along and has a pretty good laugh about how stupid his father is, which is a pretty damn ungrateful thing to do and foolish because it would be of great accomplishment of him to be half the man that his father was. So anyways, he laughs at Noah and then he gets his brothers and he says, hey, the old man's drunk out of his mind. Why don't we go? And he's all sprawled out. Let's go over there, and we can all join in a good laugh. And his other sons know his other sons take a blanket, and they back into the tent, and they cover Noah. Okay. And so they show him respect despite his flaws. Now, the way that story ends is that in tradition is that slaves are the descendants of Ham. And so the moral of the story is that if you're foolish enough to dispense with your wise traditions,

because you can point to flaws that inherit to men better than you, far better than you, let's say Thomas Jefferson, for example, that you are walking a pathway that will turn you and your descendants into the slaves of people who have proper respect for tradition. And that seems to me to be, well, like that's spot on, that's dead on. It nails the pride, because Canada is unbelievably appalling in this regard. Our politicians will apologize even for imagined historical wrongs, even if they show no sign whatsoever of being anywhere near as wise as the people who hypothetically committed those wrongs just so they can parade their moral virtue in comparison to the great men of the past. And one of the things too that is worth thinking about in that regard is there's almost nothing more cowardly than attacking the dead, because even more than the unborn,

they can't defend themselves. Right? So, well, and it's very difficult to read into that attempt to demoralize and devalue the past. You can't read into that the attempt on the part of the people who are doing the criticism to be better people. You can read into that their willingness to condemn and make contemptuous to redound to their unearned moral virtue. And that defines the universities now, you know, all these bloody literary critics who are above the people whose works they depend on and criticize, all these art critics who have perverted the museums with their

commentary on the hypothetical sins of the artists. That's exactly what they're doing. It's very amusing to consider that, you know, their destiny, their destiny is going to be indistinguishable from that of slaves. I mean, one of the things that you're talking about here again gets back to that victim-victimizer narrative. The more successful you were as a human being dead or alive, the more you are then targeted for your failings because your success must be a sign of your oppression. And that's really most of what we're watching right now is the coalition of the supposedly marginalized who are coming together to destroy the thing that they hate in common, not because

they have anything in common themselves, but because they believe that the reason they're marginalized is out of some sort of unfairness or pure power dynamic As opposed to the fact that in a free society the people who very often end up marginalized are the people Who don't abide by the common rules of the society and in a working society those rules are good I mean every rule is good, but it means that a lot of rules are pretty damn good Look look and it's also the case that good. Look, look, and it's also the case that the intersectionalists basically make this claim, even though they don't notice. Like, we could each find dimensions along which we were marginalized,

and maybe still are for that matter. I mean, within every human being there are going to be dimensions of lesser attainment and greater attainment. And so there's some dimension along which we are comparative victims. Right? And I mean, it's certainly the case as well, and the intersectionalists have this right to some degree, is you do run across people from time to time who appear to have very little going for them across very many dimensions, right? And their lives are genuinely difficult and hard. Now, I've met many people like that in my clinical practice. And I've also observed, and this is another error

in the determinism that's characteristic of the victim-victimizer narrative and the Marxist and materialist approach to the world, you would expect that people who were marginalized on many dimensions simultaneously might harbor a certain amount of bitterness and resentment as a consequence of that and a certain amount of justified hatred for the status quo. But my experience as a clinician is being that people who have been bitterly tormented are, they may be more likely to collapse altogether, but they also seem to be, me to be more likely, to have the opportunity to derive an absolutely stellar character out of their misadventures, the opportunity to derive an absolutely stellar character out of their misadventures, right? To conclude from everything that they have been subject to that taking on a role of the

bully themselves, for example, if they were from an abusing family, is the wrong conclusion to derive from that example. And we know that this is true even mathematically because if all abusers abused it would take no time for every family to be characterized by abuse. So what you see in the clinical literature is that people marginalized by abuse, let's say genuine abuse. If you look at an abuser, someone who abuses their kids, they're statistically much more likely to have been abused as kids. But if you take the population of everyone abused in childhood, only a small proportion of them become abusers.

Again, when you talk about the marginalized and the ability to rise up from that, it seems to me that very often the people who legitimately experienced the hardship in life, as you say, the preconditions to success are sometimes there specifically because once the conditions for their marginalization are removed, if given the opportunity, they can succeed. What we're seeing in society is the self-intervention.

It's people who are self-marginalizing, people who don't actually have any reason to claim marginalization or very little to claim marginalization, who don't have tons of obstacles. And then when they are unsuccessful, it is significantly easier to suggest that it must be some external force that is marginalizing me.

This is how you follow the conspiracism, is by suggesting like, well, you've had Everett, you see this in Claudine Gay's essay in know, the essay in the New York Times where she's a victim of circumstance and she's been victimized by everybody. No one's had more opportunity in life than Claudine Gay, but it would be much harder for her because she's had all these, those opportunities to say, okay, well, the reason I'm failing is because of marginalization. And if I weren't marginalized, I would do X, Y, and Z. She can't really say that because she wasn't presented with the marginalization. When it comes to people being bullied

and people who are being mistreated, I think one of the great lies that we're told is that the reason bullying has to stop is because if you are bullied, you are thus much more likely to be destroyed as a human being. I find that many of the most successful people I know, again, is anecdotal.

Many of the most successful people I know are viciously bullied as children. And in fact, use that as fuel to fire them to greater success because the idea was, okay, I do have to work twice as hard. I do have to, but if I do that, then I am going to succeed. I think in other words, there's a difference

between labeling the entire system unfair and labeling the situation which you live unfair. Those are two very different things. If the entire system is unfair, there's no way to fight against it. If the situation which you currently are is unfair, the way to fight against that is to move beyond that particular situation. I think you would be hard pressed to find a man or woman who hadn't been bullied. You know, I'm thinking about a friend of mine

who was a pretty tough kid. He ended up going off to work in the Riggs when he was about nine and he was a tough kid. I think he got kicked out of school when he was in grade nine. I mean, I was grade 10. I think he got kicked out of school, if I remember correctly,

because he body-checked the very well-built and strong gym teacher in a hockey game and then challenged him to a fight. So this was a tough kid. This gym teacher could do an iron cross, by the way. Like, it was a major feat for this 16-year-old kid to stand up to him. I'm not justifying it, I'm just pointing it out. But I also remember him in grade six being chased and pounded daily by the bullies who were in grade eight. You know, I mean, most boys, I don't know any, I can't remember any of my childhood friends who weren't subjected to some degree of sustained bullying. Because even if you're the toughest kid in your class, you're not the toughest kid, there's no 12 year old or virtually none

who's tougher than like the 15 year olds. That just doesn't happen. And then you might say, well, what about women? It's like, have you watched women? They may not be getting into physical altercations, although that's not as rare as we think it is, but the probability that any given woman has been unmercifully bullied by some pack of mean girls

for some prolonged period of time is virtually certain. That could happen within a family as a consequence of sibling rivalry, or it can happen in the broader social sphere. And, you know, I've been reading about the Christmas stories. Again, I've been writing about the hospitals, which is why I'm bringing them up. But, you know, you see in the birth of Christ,

the same threatened beginnings as you see in the birth of Moses, right? So Christ is born in the lowliest of places. And worse than that, he's subject to severe murderous persecution by the state authorities. Now Moses is threatened in the same way. He's born to Jewish slaves, and the Pharaoh determines that all the firstborns are going to be killed.

Now, you might ask, well, why are these two great heroes presented as victims? And the answer is, well, the vulnerability that enables us to weave a victim-victimizer narrative around our own lives is built into every life. Like, everyone starts out unbelievably vulnerable and subject to the depredations of nature, chaos, and the depredations of social order. And we all have to contend with that. And one conclusion to draw from that is that the world is dominated by power. The proper story is oppressor and oppressed. And the appropriate response is the kind of bitter resentment that characterized Cain. And another response is power corrupts and the world is full of unfortunate vulnerability,

but our job is to act as moral agents, to not make a bad situation worse and to strive strive toward the good. And it's also the claim that our reliable traditions were founded on the latter proposition and not on the basis of power. And I also think, so I looked into the anthropological literature on the tradition of the elder. So most societies have elders. Now if the Marxists were correct, the elders would be the rich people who had power and they would have been using their socioeconomic status as a kind of cudgel to dominate the positions of authority. That isn't what happens in the anthropological literature. The elders are, I think, the easiest way to characterize them. They're people who have a lengthy, publicly observable, and genuine history of honesty, productivity,

and generosity, and they've derived a wisdom from that. And the reason they're elders is because people go to them voluntarily to ask them for their advice. Right? Well, that has nothing to do with power. Quite the contrary, quite the contrary. And you have to be a real bloody cynic to look at a functional society like the United States and say, oh, that's all power.

It's like, no, some of it is power. And when it corrupts, it corrupts in the direction of power, just like a marriage might, if husband and wife start to play tyrant to one another. But that doesn't mean that that's the bloody fundamental story upon which the whole thing was founded. That's exactly. Obviously, we're in agreement on that.

I mean, I think that the attempt to do away with traditional wisdom, particularly the form of the elderly, has also, you wisdom, particularly the form of the elderly, has also had some pretty dire after-effects, not just in terms of loss of wisdom, but in terms of we ourselves. We want one of the purposes of a community, like a traditional social community. The elders in that society provided what you're talking about, the wisdom and the knowledge and the advice. And in return, the people who were younger basically supported them. I mean, that was the economic deal.

You supported your parents. And one of the reasons that people had kids is because they knew that in their old age, they would have to be supported by their children. But their responsibilities were not alleviated. The grandparents had a major role to play in kinship networks. It's not as though they just sort of dropped off and lived in the back room and watched TV all day. They actually had a role to play in child care, in child's rearing and advice to parents and all the rest of this sort of stuff. And then gradually,

as we saw the encroachment of an ever larger state that basically took away the responsibility of parents to grandparents, what you saw as the marginalization of the elderly. It didn't make the elderly more valuable. it made them significantly less valuable. The fact that you as a child were supposed to support your parents meant that you also made demands of your parents, like I need your advice on something, I wanna know what's going on.

Being able to just ship grandma off to an old age home or shuffle her onto social security and then let her spend her waning years watching soap operas. It's been devastating for not only the elderly in the United States who have largely been marginalized, but to younger generations who really need the wisdom of the elderly in order to continue to function. We've broken the chain of transmission and we have done that through, I think, economic methods. And one of the great untold stories that I think some of the nationalist conservatives have right is that economic conditions have broken

down many of the social relationships that were not primarily economic, but had economic benefits to them that have now been removed by the state. And I think where the Nationalist conservatives are wrong is they attribute that to capitalism, whereas I think that it's much more state interventionism in these particular areas alleviating burdens of responsibility. But one of the things that at root is that we tend to think in Western society of responsibility as burden, when in fact responsibility for the vast majority of people across time is actually a form of freedom.

Responsibility. Meaning and freedom. Yes. I mean, it's why as you become older, you as a person want more responsibility. You don't just want the ability to go out on a Saturday night. You also want the responsibility that comes along with that because every duty, every, every freedom is going to come along with a certain level of additional responsibility. If you want to use that freedom, freedom wisely, it's why, you know, when you see small children, I watch my own kids, right? They're nine, seven, three and seven months.

When I watch them, the thing that they play at is not actually like cruising around in the car. What they tend to play at is the role play of responsibility. It's why small girls play at being mom, right? They take dolls and they play at being mom. It's why young boys will play at building. I think that's an actual social function that they are playing at very often.

And that's something that kids aspire to. And then we as adults are like, well, I can't believe my kids want to, they can't wait to become adults, look at all the responsibilities I have. But remember back to when you were a kid, that was a cool thing. Responsibility was a cool thing. And I mean, I still think as an adult that responsibility is a cool thing. The coolest thing that I do is the stuff that I'm responsible for, whether it's my kids and my wife and my household or whether it's my kids and my wife and my household

Or whether it's the employees of my company like that the more responsibility you have The I think frankly the cooler your life is because those things don't hem you down. They define you without that What what exactly well we could say volunteer? Responsibility voluntarily undertaken and accepted. Yes. I don't think there's any difference between that and meaning. Now if it's forced on you, that's a different story. But we also know from the biblical corpus as well that there's a tremendous emphasis

by God, let's say, on objecting strenuously to excessive use of force, never use force if it's not justified. And it's justified in the most constrained of circumstances. Moses is bitterly punished for using force, even at the end of his life. So, you know, here's something too with regards to your observation on the elderly, older people. You know, Jonathan Hyde has written a fair bit about the coddling of the American mind, and we see the infantilization of

children and young adults and even adults themselves increasingly characterizing educational institutions, say. But maybe part of that is a consequence of the breakdown of intergenerational transmission of knowledge with regards to child rearing, because one of the things I've noticed with my kids is that they had the model of our family for disciplinary practices, and they know those models. But I've watched, and it's often useful for them to have the example of the responsive Tammy and I to the misbehavior of our grandchildren to bolster my children in their conviction that intervening to discipline them so that they're socially desirable is acceptable. So imagine this Ben. So the fundamental drive

behind infant care is service to the infant, self-sacrificing service to the infant. And the rule is if the infant manifests any displays of distress that your primary moral obligation is to alleviate that. And that's 100% true for the first eight months, let's say. Okay, so the default feminine proclivity is the amelioration of emotional distress. Immediate amelioration of emotional distress, immediate amelioration of emotional distress. Now, that becomes problematic when there's a conflict between short-term emotional distress and long-term thriving. And you might say that the role of wisdom is

to know when to step in, to allow short-term emotional distress to be tolerated or even encouraged, if the benefit is an incremented long-term adaptation. How older people are wise enough to know, well, you know, your kid wants that toy in the grocery store right now and is willing to have a fit about it, but if you give in to his tantrum and reward it, you're going to produce a child who other children can't stand

because he'll play in that infantile manner whenever he's in a social circumstance. Now you can model that with new parents and say, look, here's how you regulate the child's emotional distress. And you can say, and you wanna do that so your child's well socialized so that everyone will like him or her so they can engage in productive reciprocal interactions. But I don't think you can do that with just advice. I think you have to model it.

I mean, I totally agree with that. My wife and I are very close with my parents and also with her parents. And one of the rules in the household is that, you know, my parents discipline my kids. When my kids are doing something wrong, I actually want them to discipline my kids. By the way, I don't actually think this is relegated to grandparents. I think that elders in the community and other parents we know who have older kids, I think it's actually quite incumbent on society. We have this weird thing in the United States actually that is not usual in some other societies. In other societies, when it comes to children acting up in public, for example, it's actually pretty much expected that somebody is willing to discipline the kid, whether it is the parent or not the parent. You see this in a lot of other societies,

and it actually makes, I think, for better child bearing and rearing because it's considered sort of a social responsibility that if some kid is violating the rules. Yeah, exactly. Then there will be someone there to say the thing. In the United States, because we're very autonomous and we're very autonomy oriented, the idea is that if you say a word to my child, I'm gonna be super duper angry at you and very, very upset about that. But I don't actually think that that's right.

And it's certainly not true in, for example, my own religious community. If we're over at somebody's house, and what we're constantly interacting obviously with people in my immediate religious community, it's a very tight-knit community. And if we're over at somebody's house and my kid does something wrong,

I want somebody to discipline my kid. And in the context of generations, I mean, what you're talking about, what basically the elderly are, is they are the living tradition. Right? In fact, in the Jewish community, you're supposed to stand up for an elderly person and a Torah scholar the same way. And when they enter the room, theoretically, you're supposed to actually stand up in respect to that person. Why? Well, because my parents have already seen the outgrowth of either doing it right or doing it wrong when I was a kid, right? I only have the immediate

knowledge of how old my kids are, right? I know how to raise a nine-year-old. I don't know how to raise a 16-year-old. I don't have a 16-year-old. I know how to raise my three-year-old to be nine. I know how to raise my seven-year-old to be nine. I don't know how to raise my three year old to be nine. I know how to raise my seven year old to be nine. I don't know how to raise my nine year old to be 16. And so, that's where my parents really are effective because they've done it four times. So they know how to raise a nine year old to be 16 and how not to raise a nine year old to be 16. And so again, the marginalization of the elderly,

largely for economic reasons, the removal of the elderly from the home, for example, which again is strange, because American homes have grown. We've actually, I mean, one of the great lies of modern American economics is that people are somehow living worse now than they were in 1980, which is not true. And one of the things that we have is more living room. And one of the things that theoretically we could do is have our parents live with us more often if our parents can't afford to live on on their own. And I think

that would actually be of great benefit. The lack of intergenerational dialogue is truly bad. By the way, it's working in both directions. People who are 40 aren't having kids, and also their parents aren't with them. And so they're just kind of there. And you want to talk about prolonged adolescence. Not having kids and not having parents is the definition, I think, of prolonged adolescence. Well, the other downside of that too is that one thing you can be certain of is that you're going to get old. And so there is really no difference. There is no difference between how we treat the elderly and how we will be treated.

Like those are the same thing. And that should give everyone pause. Really, like that should get everyone pause. You know, because we tend, even the fact that we have a conception, a category like the elderly in some ways is absurd because, well, it's a category that will include everyone. So how we treat the elderly is no different than how we treat ourselves. And the logical corollary to that is, well, we should treat the elderly like we want to be treated because Well, that's coming down the pipelines and a lot bloody faster than you think too. So

you know, it's it's obviously complicated because Well, because life is complicated. So there's really no sense in even in going into that But it's definitely something that's that's that's that's much worth consideration Yeah, so let's turn from that for a minute. I'm curious about what it is that's occupying you intellectually these days. What problems are you trying to solve? And I'm also curious about how that might tangle into the Daily Wires stated ambition to expand their offerings both conceptually

and on the popular front beyond the realm of the immediate political. So what is it that you're trying to think through? What are you working on? I mean, so I'm working on a bunch of projects. Some obviously political. I just went down to the southern border to observe what's happening there, which is a full scale disaster area. And, you know, foreign policy related, you know, my thoughts very much these days are about where the hotspots in the world, you know, where, if there were to be a larger war, where is that likely to break out?

What are the trigger events likely to be there? The thing that occupies me, I think most of the time, these days, is what are the principles that a society must pursue in order for it to maintain peace, health of its citizens, mental of its citizens, the possibility of fulfillment of its citizens. I think that's the same stuff that occupies us all the time. And that manifests in a variety of contexts. But to me, one of the things that I'm seeing us talking about this with a friend a little bit earlier is that in the political realm, which is where I spend most of my time, there's this bizarre situation

where so much disillusionment has set in with politics. Normally disillusionment sets in with politics because we feel that politics is broken with principle. We say we have these certain principles and our politicians just aren't meeting with our principles. In the same way we were talking about religious hypocrisy earlier, that we have a set of things that we want from our politicians, we're not getting them. And so we're very upset with that. And so in the name of principle, we have to change our politics. But one of the things that I think happened is we're so disillusioned with

politics that we've also actually become disillusioned with principles. And so I'm not sure where the potential unification is going to come from. Do we need to focus more on the principles or more on the politics? Because there's great fragmentation on both sides of the political aisle right now over principle itself.

I think that, and this is in keeping with what we've been discussing in this interview. And I think it's in keeping with what we've been trying to do with this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Endeavour is that I think we're in a moment of crisis, which is also why concentrated on the counter enlightenment, you know, we're at a time where fractionation and disagreement is so profound that we have to go

underneath the principles to what's genuinely sacred and sort that out again. I think that's partly why I think, one of the things I've noticed, Ben, you tell me if this has been the case for you, but especially in the last year, it's become increasingly difficult to do a podcast with a political figure of any stature that gets any views.

You know, there's sporadic exceptions to that rule, but I did one with DeSantis, you know, and he's certainly a top 10 political figure, I would say worldwide, certainly in the U.S. and he did a credible job, you know, but the view count was not great, not great. And certainly the lesser political figures in terms of general popularity that I've interviewed, Mike Pence, for example, and Chris Christie and others, they're performing dismal. We also saw at the art conference

that people who spoke about first principles had videos that went viral when we released them on YouTube and anybody who spoke politically just nothing. Like it didn't matter what their reputation was, man, it didn't even really matter what the quality of speech was. If they weren't addressing even what was under first principles, there was no interest. I totally agree with that. I mean, I'm seeing that myself, which is kind of an astonishing thing because it fundamentally presupposes that our institutions are not the issue. It fundamentally presupposes it. We're all focused on in politics, how do you fix the institutions? How do you change the balance of power? How do you change the structures? But what you're saying and what I think we're all saying is that it's a much more severe problem than that.

The institutions are sitting at the very top and the institutions are meant to do things like counterbalance interest against interest in the United States. But what if there's not even a broad-scale recognition of what interests are? What if the fundamental terms of the debate have so radically changed that we can't even decide what we're debating on anymore? And that's also what it feels like. It feels like we don't even know very often sort of the rubric that the people we're talking with are working under because the fundamental terms of commonality, the language itself, is just not there. It's just gone. And so you really have to- Well, you remember that's what happens in the Tower of Babel.

Yes. Right? So this is a tower built to a false God and the consequence of that is that nobody can talk to anybody anymore. The language is fragment and that is exactly the situation we're in now. I mean, I think the best indication of that is that we have conversations about what constitutes a woman, right? Exactly. And that's that's that's so insane. I actually don't think

that there's any place to go on the insanity front past that. When you lose that commonality, when you lose the commonality of sexual identification, everything else is completely up for grabs. Yeah, I mean, I think that's totally true. Listen, I think it's gone to, we have no commonality on what it means to be a human being anymore. And so, you know, and those lines are actually being blurred more sophisticated fashion by AI

than you have with the sexual binary. But it's really, you know, but at the same time, what's made it so difficult is that, you know, you want to have these conversations with people, but there's an entire punishment structure that has now been attached to the conversations themselves. And so having a conversation with somebody who's perceived as being quote unquote of the other side, even if that's not rooted in principle, because you can't name what the other side is based on principle anymore, because principles

politically don't really matter. But there is a punishment structure that does exist with finding too much common ground with somebody who may oppose you. Yeah, well, the Democrats, the Democrats are particularly possessed by that terror. You know, I have tried for years to get leading Democrats who will happily talk to me privately to come on my podcast. And it's been six years that I've been trying to do that. And with very, very few exceptions, the response has been essentially, not that they're not interested, but that they're terrified that they'll be pecked to death.

Now, and now the terrible consequence of that is in part, that not only have those conversations not occurred, and I would conduct them in good faith, and I offer all my guests like editing rights over the outcome or the right even to scrap the whole interview. And that's a genuine offer. No one's ever taken me up on either of those by the way.

But now I think the moment for that kind of, I actually think the moment for that kind of political dialogue has probably passed because my sense is now that even if I got leading Democrats with maybe a tiny number of exceptions on my podcast, no one would watch them. Right. Now, I think that's right. And so that...

I think that's totally right. And so the question becomes, what kind of conversations are productive at this point? And so what you're seeing is that in that vacuum, in the vacuum where the conversation doesn't have, we can't have that council of people sitting around the fire and talking about virtue because nobody has a common concept of virtue, you see figures who are arising, again across the political aisle, who just use extremely charged and motivous language. And that extremely charged and motivous language goes directly to the root of how people feel without any sort of virtuous substructure.

And so it's, I'm making this statement. The only reason you would disagree with this statement is because you're an evil person who's a child molester. I'm not kidding. I mean, this is literally the level of discourse in so much of the sort of the cultural sphere. And so how do you even, how do you build on that? And to me, what that says is that, maybe the time for large scale,

broad scope, 30,000 foot building is ending. And what we actually need to do is go back to the campfire. Meaning that make people privy to the campfire. But one of the things that you've been doing a lot, Jordan, with things like the Accident Series or the Genes or some of the other things you're doing is giving people access to that campfire of people who they see as virtuous, that they can actually have that sort of conversation be in dialogue with that. But a lot of that's going to have to take place on the small scale.

And social media radically opposes the small scale. It's a scalable enterprise in which the person with the most hits is rewarded. I'm not sure there's going to be a substitute in the future for in-person events and meetings with people that are going to allow them to find, again, the little platoons of society that have been broken up are gonna have to be rebuilt. Well, I think that that's partly why my tours have been popular because it's a mystery in some ways, right? Because much of what I say, you can get your fill of whatever I have to say online. Now, I do say new things in my public appearances,

but I don't think that people fundamentally come there for the new things. That's like a bonus. The reason they come there is to find a community, right? To do something collective, exactly, to engage in a collective celebration and gathering. And so, and it does seem to me too, that especially as the ability to produce fake videos propagates,

and we're going to be increasingly unwilling to separate the wheat from the chaff in the virtual world, that the value of in-person meetings is going to increase. And with regards to the shallowness of the political dialogue. You know, I've been following this Bill Ackman, Chris Ruffo, Claudine Gay, Harvard episode, Ackman as you know, is a billionaire who is now a Democrat political activist, taking a somewhat conservative tack.

And I've been watching that, him working at least side by side with Christopher Rufo. And I'm not displeased about the outcome. But when I'm watching that, I keep thinking, well, it's good that Mr. Ackman has noticed the corruption of Harvard. But he's just, it's the wrong level of analysis because the corruption that made Claudine Gaia reality and then even more profoundly made the spectacle in DC where the UPAN, MIT and Harvard presidents

made absolutely dreadful, preposterous parody fools of themselves. That's reflective of a conflict that's almost unimaginably deep. And dispensing with Claudine Gay, will have virtually no impact on that. I mean, I totally agree with that. I will say that that Ackman himself has become an anti-DEI activist, which means that he is engaging at a level

that I frankly didn't expect him to engage at, or many other people in this particular battle. But yeah, I mean, I think that the problems in American society runs so deep, and in Western society runs so deep, that the only way to fight them is the hard thing that nobody wants to do. The easiest thing to do in politics is to speak into camera and distribute it on YouTube

to a million people. You can do that. That's not super hard to do. The hard thing to do is to raise a good family. The hard thing to do is to join a religious community. The hard thing to do is to actually build again those structures that we all took for granted for literally dozens of generations over time that have been completely eviscerated and destroyed.

That's so hard to do and so intimidating to do that it almost feels useless while you're doing it because the scale of the problem is so large that it feels like when you're piling a pebble atop a wall and then this tsunami is coming, what are you doing? But the answer is that, again, it's going to take a lot of pebbles to actually build that wall. Well, it's also the case too that that in some ways, even within the scope of your own argument, is an illusion. Like if it turns out that the stability of the West is predicated on the sanctity of

marriage and the stability of the family, then what that genuinely means is that there is nothing more important than you can do, that you can do despite surface appearances, than to be faithful to your wife and to raise your family properly. And that any temptation you have on ideological grounds to downplay the significance of that, you know, what's one family in a sea of two billion families? That's the quick nihilistic response. That's all delusion. And that you may, that the idea that what you're doing is pointless because it's just you against the mass, let's say. That's also,

that's the voice of the devil himself, so to speak, proclaiming the nihilistic uselessness of your mortal life. It could easily be, and I do believe this, I believe this for many decades, is that there is literally nothing more important or effective than you can do then to get your moral house in order and then to build those subsidiary organizations around yourself that are predicated on that foundation, that all other pathways forward in the absence of that lead nowhere. Yeah, and I mean, I think that that's exactly right.

I think one of the predicates to conservatism or frankly, to just basic human responsibility is the acknowledgement that it's very, anything that's worth building has to be built from the ground up. And if you try to impose it from the top down, it not only tends to fail, it tends to fragment everything. That if you want one of the things that you see in the temptation of politics, I think one of the reasons why interviews with politicians don't work anymore is because the temptation of politics is fundamentally a lie and people

understand it, which is, okay, if you put a bunch of weight at the top of the system, but there's nothing at the bottom of that pyramid, all these societal substructures have been destroyed, it's just going to collapse. And we keep arguing over who should put the pressure at the top of the system. But any pressure at the top of the system is just going to essentially create larger cracks in the foundation. We have to rebuild. And the rebuilding process is so long and so hard. And as you say, it's easy to fall prey to nihilism in that.

But the reality is that societies are filled with people over time. Society is filled with graveyards, filled with people whose names you don't know. And you'll never know. We know a few names from any generation. One of the intimidating things about being in the public eye is that we all tend to think of ourselves as quote unquote having a legacy. How many names do you know from 1810? Anyone, even the most knowledgeable people, how many names do you know? A couple hundred names from 1810, how many people were alive in 1810? A lot. Hundreds of millions of people were alive in 1810. I mean, the reality is that the vast majority of human beings over the course of time won't

have a quote unquote legacy except for the part that they played in the building of the social fabric that is going to be passed down generation to generation, in which we just accept with literally our mother's milk as we're born into that society. So you can either be a part of that social fabric or it cannot be a part of that social fabric and hand something down That's good to your kids or hand something that's that's worthless down to your children And so again, I think that the fundamental battle and you're seeing it It's it's true in every area of life

And it's it's frustrating to have to fight these battles because again, I feel like I grew up in an arena I think we all feel like this actually if you're above a certain, meaning like if you're above 30, right? I'm not, I'm not all that old. I'm turning 40 right now. You know, like if you're above a certain age, you remember when basic truths were just taken for granted, it is good to have a mother and a father in the home. It is a positive good to have children. It's not a matter of apathy as to whether people have kids. People should have kids. It is good to have kids. It is good to have multiple kids. These were all things that everybody when I was growing up, it is good to see people as individual human beings and not as members of races.

These were all things that we took from... And now we're having to re-argue first principles. And I think that one of the things that I've found, and that's frustrating to me on a personal level because, again, I spend my life arguing these principles on a day-to-day basis, is that in reality, some of those arguments are going to be won and some of those arguments are going to be lost. But the real effect that I'm going to have on the world is what my four kids end up doing. That's actually what the real effect that I'm going to have on society, that's true for nearly everyone on planet Earth.

I may be able to have a slightly outsized effect and just the fact that I can convince some people that they should do the things that I think are worthwhile in life, get married, have kids. Maybe there'll be a few thousand people over the course of my career who do better things with their life because they listen to my show. But in reality, the most long-lasting thing that you can do is not the rational. It's actually the, it's the things that we do and we don't know why. Now one of the things that I think, you know, the rationalists have gotten totally wrong

and there's a lot of good psychological and biological evidence that you know way better than I do, is that we tend to come up with rationalizations post hoc. There's plenty of evidence to this effect that if you literally, the study that I'm thinking of is one where effectively speaking, you are prodded to move your limbs in a particular way and then you are asked about why you moved your limbs in that particular, and you will make up an excuse. You will actually try to justify why this thing happened, and you weren't just like physically, you know, forced to do the thing. That is, the reality of human life is that most of the things that we do are not driven by us rationalizing the things that we do. We're rationalizing activities that have been promulgated and made second nature to

us and sometimes first nature to us over time. And you wreck those fences, you wreck that whole system at your own peril, and that's what we have done. And so rebuilding that is not a matter of a day. It's not a matter of a week or a month or a year. It's a matter of centuries. When you shatter a stained glass window, it took you a moment to shatter the stained glass window. It may take years to rebuild that

stained glass window. That's the part that's intimidating and very difficult. And the way the stained glass window is actually rebuilt is not even by drawing the schematic of the stained glass window, which is, I think, something you and I both try to do daily. Somebody's actually going to have to go out, find the sand, make the glass, color the glass, create all of those structures and that's the hard part. Well that's a good place to end, Ben, and it's a good time to end. Most of you watching will know that I'll follow this with another half an hour on the daily wireless side and I'm going to walk Ben through

some autobiographical material which I'm looking forward to. Yeah, well thank you for talking to me today and for helping me explore these ideas a bit further. We're going to do a Gospel seminar. You and I have discussed this and your possible participation in that. Just for everybody watching and listening who knows about the Exodus seminar, we're going to do the same thing with the Gospels the first week of April with many of the same, many of the usual criminals, you might say. And so you might, I hope some of you are interested in that. I'm certainly interested in that. It's going to be very,

I learned a tremendous amount in that Exodus seminar, and I'm hoping to that the same thing will happen when we reconvene. And I'm very happy with the Daily Wire for facilitating that and also for all the success we had with the Exodus seminar which that's gone extraordinarily well. And I think it speaks that fact which is a very unlikely fact that that did happen, that it went well and that it was popular and received also speaks to exactly what we were discussing today, which is this widespread cultural hunger for a proper discussion of

really the sacred, what's even underneath first principles. And so it's very useful to be engaged in yet another conversation that pushes that along. So anyways, we'll turn over to the Daily Wire Plus side for everyone who's watching and listening. You could join us there. And to you, Ben, thank you for talking to me today and to everybody here in Toronto for making this possible on the film crew there. All right, Ben, good talking to you.

Thanks so much. Music