541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel

So this question of, you know, is the really progress used to move fast? We stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years. We feel like we are in an apocalyptic age. There is a dimension of science and technology. It has a dark dimension and it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself. Much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities. You can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity, but I think there's something deeper there. It wasn't just the theological metaphysics that drove it. It's something like the Christian anthropology. Okay, so let's delve into this a little bit. So I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Thiel today and Mr. Thiel is probably most famous for the role that he played in establishing PayPal, but he's been a county investor for a very long period of time and we didn't actually talk much about practicalities on the business side. We mostly talked about the nature of cultural transformation because his thought tends in that direction. He's a philosophically inclined person and our discussion really walks through one of Peter's fundamental propositions is that progress in the material world and not the digital world that say has slowed substantively since maybe the 1960s and that there are deep reasons for that. Some of it is apocalyptic fear of the scientific endeavor. Some of it is this hippie-like desire to look inside. Some of it is escape into a world of abstraction and so he outlined his theory of social transformation which is also deeply influenced by a skepticism about what low-level mimetic envy predicated status-games which I think is a very wise target of skepticism. We walked through his thoughts on social and technological transformation over a couple of hundred years concentrating more on the last 60 and also began to flesh out metaphysics that might ameliorate some of that nihilistic pathology and malaise and that enabled us to at least begin a discussion about what metaphysical presuppositions are necessary for a society and a psyche to remain well not only healthy but non-totalitarian and catastrophic. So join us for that. The last time we spoke was by distance at ARC and you said a number of things there that were provocative and one in particular that I wanted to follow up on. It surprised me, although I think I understand why you said it. You're dubious about the rate of progress so to speak that we're making now. You feel you seem to feel I don't want to put words in your mouth that the most innovative times are perhaps behind us or at least temporary so and so I'm curious about. We've seen these revolutionary steps forward in principle on the large language model front in the last year and our gadgetry is becoming much more sophisticated. There's tremendous advancements and robotics and so how do you conceptualize quantifying progress scientific and technological and why are you skeptical about the benefits or the rate? Well, the variations of this that I've talked about for close to two decades at this point and you know the big and of course it's all sorts of very complicated measurement problems so how do we compare progress in AI with let's say lack of progress in dementia research during Alzheimer's and so you know all these different complicated ways of how you wait all these different things but there was a sense that the Western world was in this fast era of scientific technological progress where was advancing on many many different fronts and you know in some ways it started picking up in the Renaissance early enlightenment 17th 18th centuries and then probably in important ways accelerated in the 19th first half of the 20th and and then in some ways I believe it's a slow down over the last 50 or so years maybe 1970 or so is a is an inflection point one could one could cite it doesn't mean it's stopped altogether you know one way of often summarized it is that we've continued to have progress in the world of bits you know computers software internet mobile internet you know maybe crypto now now AI but there's been much less progress in the world of atoms and if we if you think about university setting most of the most of the engineering and scientific subjects had to do more with this physical material world in which we're embedded and I was an undergraduate Stanford in the late 1980s class of '89 and you know it wasn't quite obvious at the time but in retrospect almost anything that was in the world of atoms would have been a bad feel to go into physics chemistry mechanical engineering certainly arrow astro engineering nuclear engineering people already knew was was kind of outlawed and over by by the 1980s you could you could still maybe do electrical engineering which was sort of the atoms that were used for you know semiconductors but it basically the only stem field that was a really going to be a really successful field for people to go into was computer science which was kind of this marginal almost fake feels because I was I would have this riff where you know when you have when people use I'm in favor of science but I skeptical when people use the word science so social science political science climate science are called science by people have an inferiority complex and said deep down no they're not really rigorous scientific fields and and something like this was true of computer science in the original day it was it was people who were too dumb at math to be in mathematics or physics or electrical engineering and they sort of flunked out into computer science and and weirdly this was a field that worked and it had you know a decent amount of impact I don't think it was and then it was a worked on the scale of people building some fantastic companies it there were certainly some important cultural and social transformations that we had as we moved from sort of the industrial age to the the information age I don't know if it's worked that well on let's say a broad economic level of of well-being so even if you measure it in terms of material well-being for people the the millennial generation the US is probably in a lot of ways not not even doing as well as their their baby boomer parents since it's the first time we've had the sort of economic stagnation or even outright outright decline and so and again the naive view would be that you know all this progress somehow translates into a more successful economy it's not the only way to measure things but it's a it's a sort of a it's sort of a straightforward way to measure things and then and then when it doesn't translate it's it's my conclusion is maybe maybe hasn't added up up to as much you know one one of the reasons it's very hard by the way to to have this debate even figure out what's going on is because one of the features of late modernity unlike early modernity is hyper specialization and we have ever narrower group of experts who are experts in their field so the cancer specialist tell us they will cure cancer in five years they've been telling us that for the last 50 and and then the string theorist tell us they're the smartest people in the world and it's very hard to you know evaluate these fields on their own terms which is it's it's it's like Adam Smith had this concept of the pin factory where you had a hundred different people working in a pin factory and you think of late modernity as the pin factory on steroids we're so hyper specialized it's extremely hard to have a picture of the whole and so this question of you know is the really progress is there isn't is there not it's kind of a hard one to get at but I think if you measure in economic terms there's a slow sense if you measure it in this sort of intuitive thing we're okay we'll just look at a bunch of different fields like cancer supersonic aviation you know just all these different ways used to move faster move faster every decade from you know 1500 on it was faster sailing boats and faster railroads faster cars faster planes we stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years so you know that's one dimension and so there's sort of a common sense way that we have stagnation there is a there's an economic way way to measure it and and then there's probably always a political intuition I have on this too which is that perhaps if you have ideas that are taboo that you're not allowed to discuss my shortcut is to suspect they're simply correct and and so the the example I always give is a professor Bob lawfulness of Stanford physics professor I think around 1998 he gets a Nobel Prize in physics and he suffers from the extreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel Prize he finally has academic freedom and can talk about whatever he would like to talk about and there are all sorts of areas that are very taboo in the sciences I mean question Darwinism or question stem cell research or question you know climate change these are very dangerous areas but he picked one of those even more dangerous than any of those three he believed that most of the scientists so-called scientists were basically stealing money from the government engaging in borderline fraudulent science where or was it was incrementalist not worth much you know his area of special his his area of focus was high temperature superconductivity and he told me at one point there were maybe 50,000 papers written that area and maybe 25 out of 50,000 had actually advanced the science at all and and you know I don't even need to tell you how the and then you know he he started by yeah it was not just the abstract replication crisis he started by talking about naming people yeah that this person stole money and this person is is a fraud and I mean I don't even need to tell you how that movie ended he promptly got defunded his students couldn't get PhDs anymore and so and then my hermeneutic of suspicion is if you have an idea like stagnation in science which immediately gets gets you de-platformed that's an idea we should take very seriously so that's a political intuition I have on this so I have I have a few of these different ideas that we've we've been a lot more stuck it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that there's been zero progress it doesn't mean that um the progress we've had has been uniformly good um it doesn't mean that people's fears about the limited progress we have are unjustified either maybe all these things um are actually part of the explanation for you know for why why the stagnation has happened um now now there's a much harder question um you know and then this have our cultural transformations that one can describe that at least coincided with us and were correlated how causal they were is is always hard to say but uh if we sort of think of you know the Apollo space program as this last great you know technological scientific project there's some sense where July of 1969 where we landed on the moon and uh Woodstock started three weeks later and you know and with benefit of hindsight in some sense that's when progress scientific technological progress stopped and we and the hippies took over the country and uh you can you can describe it in many ways but um in some ways you can describe it as a shift from outer space from exploring the world outside of us to inner space and uh there were sort of all you know all these all these different transformations there was uh there was a uh that you know and I would describe you know yoga meditation um uh I would describe you know psychedelic drugs I would describe um you know I don't know in cells playing video games and basements um you know there were so all this this incredible this um maybe continued atomization the um naval gazing you know uh of identity politics in a way you know you could you could say that uh you know people often lump for example they often lump Marxism and cultural Marxism together in my telling these are these are opposites because Marxism at least was primarily concerned about the outside objective material economic realities and then cultural Marxism was like the shift from Apollo to Woodstock where um you you just went into into the sort of interior world you no longer were we're thinking about this outside world and um and in some ways you you stopped asking these questions about economic growth and basic economic prosperity and um and then that coincided with also with this lack of progress in these things so I I think there were all these kinds of cultural transformations that uh that coincided with with this shift uh you know I I think the people often ask why why the stagnation happened my my standard or you know if you agree with us and of course people can disagree you know how much it happened but if you agree with me that there's been you know a slowing down of progress that you know in some sense the singularity was maybe more in the past than than in the future um uh and then you always have these questions why why did it happen and my cop out answer is always that why questions are over determined and it could be you know it could be sort of a our society became risk averse or too feminized or you could say that uh you could say that um there was too much regulation and Barack received just sort of a libertarian intuition I have um but I I've come to think that one of the the bigger factors that uh it was the sense that um a lot of the science and technology was quite dangerous um it what it had a at least in a military context had a dual use uh character um and you know this was I mean this is already there's already some relentless um acceleration of this stuff in the late 18th 19th centuries you know the polionic wars kernel cult with the revolver Alfred Nobel and by venting dynamite um you know world were one of you know was sort of a break point where you know the sort of naive progressive narrative really got undercut and um and then somehow you can you can say that the sort of baconian science project in some sense ended were ended in a hagelian sense is both culminated and terminated at Los Alamos with the building of of the of of nuclear weapons and then again it doesn't work perfectly but my telling would be that it took maybe a quarter century for uh nuclear weapons to really get internalized by society and then by by the 1970s um you know the energy um you know the energy was you know we don't we don't want to be doing this outside world we're gonna build ever more thermonuclear bombs we want to be um you know piecing out at burning man with psychedelic drugs we want to um we want to um you know or or you or you escape back to nature through environmentalism you know we are you know we want to be in a world not of change but of stasis because the world of change has this apocalyptic dimension changes change for the worse that's the that's the sense that gets you know encapsulate the 1970s and so there's there's a way that the sort of progressive version of science you know we we try to you know we try to push but the pause button on it the the places the places where it's still allowed you can see are the most inert so in a way the world of bits was seen as incredibly inert because you know you're not building bombs you're not building weapons with it and um and then of course even there there's you know some sort of some sort of way in which the ideas on the internet maybe maybe they do translate into reality every now and then you know what happens on twitter or x doesn't always stay there most of the time it stays there so it feels like it's this extremely angry intense conversation but every now and then it still translates to the real world so the the internet you could say was allowed because it was it was it was sort of a safe space it was it was a a place where the sort of violence could be could be could be contained and then um even they're probably not not totally and even their people felt it was like maybe maybe too much but yes the the sort of apocalyptic background of late majority where you know you know every microaggression has the potential to escalate to Armageddon is in the background and I and again I don't I don't like the stagnation and the risk of version and all these responses but there's there's there's a part of it that I think is understandable so it sounds to me now that you've clarified that it sounds to me and correct me if I'm wrong that what you're grappling with is um more of an attempt to account for where we are now and how it's different from let's say the post-war period or maybe even the enlightenment to the post-war period like things have shifted radically and yes it sounds to me like what you're outlining is a what it's an attempt to characterize the nature of that shift perhaps even more than an attempt to deny the idea that there's any progress you you said yourself when you were laying out your argument that it's very difficult to measure progress but it's also undeniable that many many things have shifted and we're not where we were let's say well 10 years ago probably and certainly not 30 years ago well I would say we are broadly progressing more slowly than we were 100 years ago okay we are still progressing in some dimensions there may be still too fast and too scary for people but but the big thing that has shifted vis-a-vis let's say the world of 1913 free world will one is that we feel like we are in an apocalyptic age that there is that you know there is a there is a dimension of science and technology that um you know it has it has a dark dimension and it's you know it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself and you know I don't like Rhett and I don't like the full precautionary principle but you know that her argument that we have just one planet isn't entirely wrong and and so you see the shift in part as a shift from the ethos of progress that yeah but I don't want to I don't want to abstract it too much it is it is actually it's the specific nature of the progress that happened it is we got thermonuclear weapons we yeah right you know we are powerful enough to affect the environment I'm not sure whether you know carbon dioxide is the most important dimension but you know I'm there probably a lot of dimensions where the environment can be impacted in very very radical ways we can probably build very dangerous bio weapons you know maybe that's even what was going on in the Wuhan lab we can um you know there are there are dimensions of AI that are you know um potentially violent and very dangerous and you don't have to necessarily believe the the um all these sort of weird pictures where it's a super intelligence that's somehow completely disembodied and is going to kill every last human being on the planet but there are you know there are natural ways to combine it with weapons technology that that feel unsettling unsettling and just a simple example is that you know we have we have these this this drone technology that's that's like that's going to new form of technologists that's come to the fore in the in the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine and and the um you know it's the and you have a human in the loop but the human can get jammed and so the natural fix is to put AI on the drones and turn these into more autonomous weapon systems and that's you know that seems inevitable that seems like the natural logical thing to do and then um even even I as a you know protect person have to say I find that's somewhat unsettling mm-hmm okay so let me lay these so let me lay these ideas out again and and summarize so one of the threads that you were developing was let we'll do two at the same time one was that the scientific process in terms of physical reality maybe in your view peaked in the 1960s and then you could imagine that there you you kind of outlined two maybe reasons for that one was fear of the apocalypse the consequences of that technology and then escape into various forms of abstraction like so some of those abstractions were psychological abstractions inner journeys but some of it also was escape into digital abstraction and then you also made a case that the avenue for exploration in the digital realm was still open and so maybe we could we could understand this so and then and then in the digital realm and then some ways even even these escape sworn full escape so AI yeah that's a it seems we just about bits not atoms but then if you combine it with a drone you know the AI comes back to the physical world yeah well we can we'll get back to that back to the overlap but so you could imagine that okay so the scientific approach the method produced an explosion of technological consequences many of them were dramatic in the physical world there was kickbacks against that one of the kicksbacks was the apocalyptic element the other was the turn away from spirituality you might say but then there was also the counterposition that always develops in any after ever any revolution is that things get tangled up in red tape in weird ways like the scientific I was just in Uzbekistan you know and they developed a pretty sophisticated industrial economy in the last five years and part of the reason that they could do that was because there was nothing in the way right because Uzbekistan was kind of devoid of impediments to radical entrepreneurship in the aftermath of the communist default now you could imagine that for a good time the scientific method was so powerful that it was producing revolutions non-stop and the legal and bureaucratic frameworks were lagging it and so they caught up quite remarkably by the 1970s and that left the digital space still open and it is kind of a free for all space but the way you're telling the story this is it has too much this timeless eternal character this is just what always happens and the story I want to tell it has more of a one-time and world historical character to it where it is know there were lots of inventions where you know people figure out you know cures for diseases that didn't say okay now we have to take a step back and cure fewer diseases it actually encourages you to double down on that and do even more or you know we have you know we have all these machines that replace humans and in factories and yeah there's some downsides to it and their labor problems with the industrial revolution and there's a lot of pollution but on the whole the good way outweighs the bad and it there was no big regulatory counter movement in victory let me make a count and then then we get to something like thermonuclear weapons and that that that specifically has a very different character it has a really different character yeah probably I don't know by the 1950s and 1960s you know baby boomers get um you know you're a kid you get brought up on Dr. Suss and not on adventure stories and it probably it probably changes childhood education changes the way we form and develop human beings um and and so it yeah and then it and it leads to a a society where you know science and technology no longer have quite have quite of this adventure balance there's there's always sort of an interesting big picture history question of how much uh science and technology you know were they how would they were entangled with christianity in the west and were they sort of they were somehow entangled but was it meant as a complement where you know you you know you're sort of encouraged to understand god's creation and this is sort of a way that it's um you know it's a it's a fulfillment of a furtherance of of this or was it meant to be a substitute where it was an alternate way to build heaven on earth without without requiring god and you know it was a radical radical life extension was sort of an important part of the early modern project of Benjamin Franklin condor say all these people thought that um you could perhaps indefinitely prolong human life and uh and uh and uh and and and so I think early modernity you know it wasn't the only thing a lot of complicated things going on but but a lot of it had had sort of an anti um anti-biblical balance and you could say that um 17th and 18th century scientists you know uh and again this is where I think someone like um um Francis Bacon needs to be interpreted as a hardcore materialist atheist and it is we need to we need to stop religion because it's slowing down this wonderful scientific progress and then I've had this bacon discussion with a number of people lately and they all think no no that's can't be right bacon was just the somewhat heterodox Christian and um because in late modernity where we find ourselves again this complicated describe what's going on culturally but in late modernity um it's the atheist liberals that are anti-science at this point and and so if you think about Holly Richard Dawkins despair yeah you have to think of Richard Dawkins as a representative of early modernity he's like he is like a fossil from before 1789 he's the last of the unlike he's the last he's he's a fossil from before 1789 and uh and Greta is more representative or you know the everything about the Hollywood atheist liberals the movies are all about technology that doesn't work it's scary and um and so to the extent the the way the anti-Christian argument gets made in late modernity is that it's yeah it's God's fault but this time it's God's fault for putting us on this whole dangerous project in the first place and it's like yeah it's like the lines and genesis you shall have dominion over the earth and uh and and so so in um set in the 17th and 18th century you know the Christian God was blamed for slowing down the scientific technological project in the 20th and 21st century uh the Christian God gets blamed for starting it authors starting it's speeding up keeping it going uh so it's that the invariant as the Christian God always gets blamed but uh but you know the the fact that it's the exact opposite tells us something um very interesting about how yeah how how this is how this is for now that's interesting well it's you're making the point that two opposite arguments are making that are both directed towards furthering Nietzsche's death of God let's say so then that begs the question well the only the only the only the only poil make is that we're we're again in a we're in a very different place with science and technology than we were in the 17th 18th century 17th 18th century i i don't think people would have said yeah we're gonna make all this progress and then there's going to be a lot of pushback it'll get regulated uh i know it the thought was we'll we'll make a lot of progress and it'll be so good that it will actually then accelerate and it will you know it'll smash religion even more and then we can go even faster and it'll go even better and it's going to have this sort of unraveling accelerating effect and then um and then in the 20th 21st century we we make you know we make the opposite argument as as there are some things this project that have have gone somewhat haywire okay so let's let's pick up on the on the religious thread for a moment i mean i've been trying to understand the relationship between Christian Europe let's say and the dawn of the scientific age for a long time and so let me outline something for you and then i'll turn back to exactly what you said so it seems to me i mean much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities and so there's certainly a trail from Christianity through the monasteries to the universities and so you can you can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity but i think there's something deeper there and so i've tried to make this case with Dawkins for example not least after he called himself a cultural Christian so it seems to me that for science to get going as a motivational project there are some assumptions you have to make that aren't scientific so there are axioms before the game gets going and i think they're faith-based axioms one is that the cosmos is intelligible that it's intelligible to the human mind and that diligent investigation of that intelligibility produces an increment in knowledge both practical both conceptual and practical and that that increment in knowledge is good but then there's a there's maybe a deeper presumption which is that increment in knowledge can be good if the point of the knowledge pursuit remains encapsulated in something like the underlying Christian ethos and then i would say that fractures in a way perhaps fakes a turning point where the reliance on of the scientific endeavor on these metaphysical presuppositions is questioned or like when i presented Dawkins with that argument he just waved his hands over and he said he doesn't have any metaphysical assumptions underlying his brand of science but but and i think that that is what the more radical enlightenment French revolution types thought is that no we've escaped from the underlying religious ethos okay the problem with that is it seems to me and i think this might have to do with a support clip to kick back is that once you unmore yourself from the underlying ethos which is even the ethos that defines what constitutes knowledge and progress itself then the luciferian element of the scientific endeavor can begin to loom extremely large well again let's let's let's start with the you know the early the early modern history and i'm i'm always a sort of hardcore gerardian has this great thinker intellectual sort of some ways christian polymath that i studied under Stanford in the late eighties nineties and influenced me influenced me tremendously and you know i these things are again very complicated intellectual history questions but but certainly one one intuition that that's odd about about um your telling would be that uh you would say that you know we had sort of a law centered monotheistic tradition also in islam also in Judaism and if we if we say there was something about christianity that um where this this really came and was not in the islamic world that you got the the scientific revolution for example um it suggests that maybe maybe wasn't it wasn't just the metaphysics um not just the theological metaphysics that drove it but um but something like the christian anthropology gerard was fond of always saying that uh and people focus too much in the bible on what it tells us about god there must also be something it tells us about about man yeah okay and uh and certainly the gerardian intuitions that one of the you know one of the things is is always that uh you know there's this really big uh problem of violence and um and uh scapegoating in some ways um some sense Judaism and then christianity um it's it's the same story it's the same story of you know sacrifice but it's told not from the point of view of the violent communities uh told from the point of view of the innocent victim and there's there's a certain way where it sets in process this gradual um this dynamic revelation that has that leads to the sort of gradual unraveling and there are and as you stop believing in in scapegoats you're forced to come up with other explanations and um and that that includes science so for example um you can you can ask why did the witchcraft trials come to an end and the atheist scientific explanation is we got science to prove that witchcraft is impossible and um i don't think that's even been proven in 2025 because um we don't know everything maybe it's a lost art that's been lost um maybe um you can go to a you know you can go to a bookstore and buy a book on how to be a witch placebo effect in magic and so but but but then the you know the the the gerardian alternate story of white the witchcraft trials ended were that uh at some point people uh realized that uh the sort of collective scapegoating in some ways was it was like a version of the of of the um death of Christ you know the witches were not absolutely innocent like Christ but they were relatively innocent it was a community that that that went crazy and then you you know and then once you know that the witches are innocent or are relatively innocent then um then you steal yourself and force yourself to find natural explanations you know if you don't think that it was you know i don't know the Jews that poisoned the wells in the middle ages you know eventually devils or or eventually or you know this was during this during the Salem witch trials there were these uh you know these competing sermons on Sundays and you know the initial ones were sort of that uh that um yeah the these women were hadn't made a pact with a double but then the way it got reconstructed because it was right afterwards that the witchcraft trials ended and people sort of realized pretty fast they kind of collectively lost their minds and the the alternate one was know the devil had entered the whole community and it possessed all of Salem and those were the sermons you gave in the aftermath the witchcraft trials and um and then and then in that sort of a context you know um maybe maybe science was also a way a way to to find you know you you can steal yourself to find natural explanations when you were in an archaic you know this thing scapegoating is always an explanation it's a you know this person did this that person did this is that person's fault and when you when you say those explanations won't do maybe you're forced to do uh do uh scientific research so there are all these different threads one can one can stress but i wonder if that was also i think you have to always ask this question um what was what was specific about the the Christian message that that really enabled this you know i mean i think the you know there was there was there was a way the you know there was a way the Jewish context was extremely learned and uh people you know i don't know if you if you compare um the talmudic abilities already in the middle ages to you know understand the bible to read it um you know it was as good or better than you know any anything anything that the the christian scholastics we're doing um but somehow it uh it it it never really got a part of society to orient in this other way so again it's it's you know it's obviously complicated history well so one of the things you pointed out there that's very interesting is that Christianity the rise of Christianity destroyed the pagan world and that's a great mystery but one of the epistemological consequences of that was the notion that deities weren't widespread that that idea had to disappear you know the Romans had gods for their archways right so there was an idea that there were invisible spirits so to speak that we're operating behind the scenes that were could easily be interpreted as causal mechanisms but you can imagine then i'm also trying to integrate this with what i learned from young you can imagine that as the world's desaccharized at the pagan level and the kinds of interpretations that you just described are no longer tenable right there are these invisible agencies some of the personalities that are operating that isn't working anymore that gets all aggregated into a monotheistic deity and the magic gets pulled out of the world see young young also pointed out that as the christian revolution transpired the alchemical mythology started to become widespread and that there was a idea that developed that there were mysteries lurking in the material world that had redemptive capacity and so you could imagine that as the spirits are taken out of the world the suspicion you already said this the suspicion that there are other causal forces at work starts to make itself manifest in at least the imaginations of people who are on the cutting edge and so i wonder if that's uh is that a inevitable consequence of the victory of christianity over the pagan world because it gets desaccharized merely because everything that's divine gets united into a single figure i think it's somewhere in carl marks where he says that you know all social criticism starts with criticism of religion and and then the the christian adendum i would always say was that mark jesus christ was the first person to actually do that really and started that whole process where you know you can think so much of it was you know calling into question the social institutions the religious institutions you know in a way deconstructing them you know what you know quite and and there's there's something about this that is um you know i think is true i i think i think there is something about it that has an unraveling character um and i don't think you can go back we can't go back to these these pagan institutions once that once they have been deconstructed and you know maybe maybe the gods get recharacterized as demons or psychosocial phenomena or yeah or unconscious manifestations but you know that's that doesn't sound like you know the way you really brings us back you know into into the the way it would have been you know understood by you know the average the average person ancient greece or something like that um but but yeah i think um you know what there's a one one of the other you know dimensions that sure sure i mean jurard it was sort of this combination of literature and anthropology but also there was always a psychological dimension to to jurard and that the psychological intuition in in jurard is um that there's something about um human beings being imitative that's that's very deep very important very under explored and it is um it is that uh that uh you know you have um you have something like uh it's it's it's it's something like i believe it's an Aristotle man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation yeah it's a huge it's a huge difference between us and other and then and then you could say this is like you know and of course Darwinism says our closest relatives are the apes and the apes they ape they imitate and so we differ from the apes and being more ape like than the apes if you sort of combine the Aristotelian and the um Darwinian one that's that's kind of a very very strange thing in a way and then the problem you know the the good thing about imitation is this is how culture gets transmitted this is how you learn language without you know without imitation you know um you know nothing like the sort of cultural edifice that we have would work and then um and then the thing that's dangerous is not just on a representational level it's not just on the level of ideas that people imitate it's also on the level of desires of things they want and when everybody wants the same thing this be you know this this becomes this you know incredibly you know incredibly violent thing and then um and then in rewards understanding the the point of you know or image or point of a lot of the um laws divine laws in in these archaic societies was to you know in some sense stop imitation okay don't prevent imitation to um you know um you will you the job you do will be the same job your father did your your father's a baker you will be a baker and this creates you know a guild system where you don't have this sort of free market competition between everybody and and it all it all goes everybody's at everybody else's throats and then somehow you know what what's happened in late modernity in Gerard and then is that as um as these institutions have unraveled there has again been this freedom to imitate like we did before we had any anything cultural at all before we had invented you know when the apes hadn't yet invented religion or um you know these these sacred structures that somehow channeled the violence and then and so in late modernity it's again the amesis is is you know it it's what makes our society dynamic um but there are no there are no natural barriers and that's that's also you know we can give it an apocalyptic dimension or you know this again there are ways it doesn't it doesn't fully spiral into thermonuclear war all the time but or hasn't yet but you know it has this it has this super open ended dimension where um it can go in all these different ways you know um there's probably again you know we're throwing out a lot of different ideas here um there probably is you know some some some something about um the loss of the transcendent where um you know if you have a transcend some some transcendent reference you're not in a medic competition so yeah okay I want to return to that and so um and so one of the you know one of the intuitions Gerard always had on the 10 commandments is that the most important were the first and last on the list the first commandment you know you should only worship one god it's one god above you that's that's who you worship the the 10th commandment is one about you know not coveting the things that belong to your neighbor neighbor not being too your neighbor's ox white or you know this this whole set of things and it's basically when you you know when you stop looking up you start looking around and when you look around too much it's it's not a it's not a wisdom of crowds it's a madness of crowds and it's and then right that is that's the envy issue and then that that is sort of where again you know it's we're not even talking about what to do about this but this is just sort of a well kind of looking up as a as as a description okay I would say uh there is something about late modernity a society that's not dominated by supernatural being that's sort of you know it's it's atheist the liberal atheist society we live in is one where people look around a great deal it's it's a lot of very unhealthy status competition games that end up driving it um you know I um and that's that that that that that would be sort of a asiaradian description of this yeah world where mimesis is far more out of control than ever before don't think we can go back um but there are all these ways it's you know it's frustrating unsatisfactory you know it it may have a maybe apocalyptic but that's yeah that's a way to again understand this history and it's it's in some ways you know downstream of Christianity it's downstream of these things being revealed um in some ways it's it's the opposite to it you know because one of the questions you know if you asked your hard you know you have this theory about mimesis and there are all these bad forms of mimesis we have the wrong role models and you you know you and then isn't isn't it just okay you should be less mimetic yeah no then uh and then of course you know that's this is just the nature you can maybe choose your role model you choose Christ but um you can't choose not to be a medic that's by the way that's the iron rand answer where in um you know atlas shrugged the the bad people are all the people who imitate they're the second handers they're the people who don't know what they want just copy everybody else and then the really great people are the unmoved movers they're like Aristotelian gods they're not influenced by anybody and it's all from within but they're united by the same ethos across the you know but but entrepreneurs there's a there's a there's a guardian critique of iron rand would be people like that don't exist we are we all are grow up deeply in a social context there's a development to human developmental part to human biology you know iron rand doesn't like to talk about children because children are you know incredibly imitative and for you know both good and bad this is just this is just this is just the way we are but um let's say yes jorard's answer is never that you could get rid of amesis or anything like this um yeah more even that some kind of psychological approach would be you know that you talk about your mimetic stuff with your therapist that that might make it worse right because you you'd focus on it even more and then you'd conclude you know as as in so much therapy you um you know it's it gets marketed as self transformation and it crashes out of self acceptance and then you probably just conclude i'm just a really mimetic person degenerates into self-worship and to self-accept self-acceptance let's say yeah or maybe i wish it stopped there um it doesn't and but um and then i think i think jorard's answer would still be something like you you could just you should just go to church okay so so let me pull apart i'd like to talk to you about sacrifice and then again about imitation i'm going to start with imitation so the psychologist that i know best who is most conversant with the ideas that you put forward is Jean Piaget and Piaget prioritized imitation as much as jorard but Piaget's view didn't concentrate so much on the violent aspect of it he didn't concentrate so much on how imitation would go wrong the way i believe it was sort of this somewhat optimistic uh you know just positive societies progressing through imitation yeah well he wasn't concerned precisely i would say with notions of progress from an economic perspective like Piaget's notion was that it's very much like jorards you know it's is that but the way that we organize ourselves socially and and psychologically is through imitation and so Piaget concentrated for example on games and so his counter to jorard but without invalidating jorard's point by the way is that but he was he was before jorard right or yes he was yes definitely yes and so Piaget's point was that we actually organize ourselves into social hierarchies with imitation yes we we when children for example when they're three or four so for example you can't do this till your three yes this is out works developmentally if a little boy asks a little girl to play house she has to agree and then what they do is they reciprocally imitate one another in relationship to a goal okay now so the goal in that situation is to abstract and model the domestic environment but then there's a higher order principle that regulates that which is that in order for it to be play both of them have to be voluntarily in accordance with the aim and they have to be learning dynamically yes okay so now your point I think was that so now imagine a world where there's an indefinite number of these imitate imitation predicated games because there is an indefinite number of them now what you what I think happened in the religious framework particularly in the Christian framework that that multitude of games each of which is potentially a little tower of babble is organized up underneath a higher order principle now you said that Gerard's answer was you you implied aim up but you also implied go back to church now see there's there let me just finish one thought so imagine that there are metagames under which imitative games could be organized okay one metagame would be power another metagame might be hedonistic self gratification the Christian metagame is voluntary self-sacrifice right that's a radical that's a radical reshifting of the metagame territory and I think it is irreplaceable and and I think it has to be embodied and not propositionalized so the the pagan world the Roman world the Greek world there they were essentially predicated on power and hedonism right if I could then I had a right to and if I could impose force on you then I was the better man and that was inverted in Christianity but it was inverted in a way I think that matches maturation I mean your point seemed to be that the imitative capacity can go dreadfully wrong if the games degenerate into envious status competitions and the other point I think was that they will degenerate into envious status competition competitions unless they're oriented towards something transcendent so then the question would be what would that transcendent orientation be well um let me see I this is many different threads here but I would say uh Gerard's yeah Gerard would reference people like Piaget and said that you know they underestimated imitation massively they whitewash it it's you know if you ignore this all important they'll run away by ones dimension and things like this yeah well Piaget was not a psychopathologist right he was a study of normative development yeah yeah and then and then I think Gerard intuition was much more that you know in some sense the so-called normal case is the less important one and it's the it's the extreme case it's where you know it's it's the madness of crowds you know that's that's an extremely important case uh fair enough it's not and you know and you see he also was he would have been like Malcolm Gladwell in the wisdom of crowds the crowds are wise because they imitate each other and this is how a lot of stuff works right but he did he did bind it by the necessity of voluntary play right that's an important structure the all these ways was still within some some structure but but you could you could always say this is this is a basic difference between enlightenment rationalism and biblical revelation is you know um you know in in in in the Bible the crowd is always wrong the crowd is always crazy it is mad it's you know the Tower of Babels in part it's it's the unanimity it's the unanimity it's um and um and and enlightenment rationality it's always you know democracy is good the more people vote for something the more rational it is although you know at some point you get 99.99 percent of the people vote for something and you're in North Korea and so yeah and so you know it's this very important question when do you go from wisdom of crowds to uh to the madness of crowds and i think yeah that's a very important question there's a jaradian and i would say christian intuition is that it happens much sooner and in a much more representative way than than then then you have to then then you you think and the you know uh and this is yeah um and so and so um so that's that's that's sort of one one dimension i don't i don't know if i would um i would anchor it as much on sacrifice though as the as the the key feature i mean and again this is one of the places where jorard argued that it it's christianity was and jorard's telling is anti sacrificial it is um it is a move away from sacrifice you know and all these theories about um the substitutionary atonement of christ's death but even if even if we go with a certain traditional deal on the way from the sacrifice of it is twice uh well it is it is christ's death is supposed to be the last one he christ made the sacrifice so we do not have to make it and um and uh and and then yet you can say it is the sacrifice of others versus the sacrifice of self you could say that but but you could say uh the the way jorard would put the stress would be that um you refused it's it's not there was some virtue in christ sacrificing himself he's not like some i don't know some some and light some sort of silly hero saying you know please let the lions come and eat me up or something like that you know giving some sort of dramatic announcement it's said christ's death gothsemane you know it's still praying please let this cup be taken away from me it is so it is it's not you know um this is um this is you know a wonderful necessary thing to do at all it's it's it's quite the opposite uh but um you could say it is the refusal to sacrifice others that characterize as christ and well definitely that and we're not willing we're not willing you know you're not willing to resort to violence you're not willing just power you won't aren't willing to call down all the angels from heaven to stop the crucifixion and so um and so it's the refute it's it's a refusal to sacrifice others but um and then and then yeah maybe in some context you have to lay down your life your friends are there the things like that that happened but but i think it's it's it's it's much more you know the anti the anti sacrificial intuition and it has already in you know a number of the Old Testament prophets and it's Joseo where it's you know God desires mercy and not sacrifice you know you know it's so so it's you know and and then this is you know these are sort of in a way in a way you can think of the Old Testament law as a sacrificial set of laws as they centered on the temple and we have this sort of elaborate set of of sacrifices and then you know in some sense Christ replaces it with you know love the Lord your God with your heart and mind and love your neighbor as yourself and and then the intention to the moment and then we we could say we could say it's and then you know he says he's not getting rid of the Old Testament law yeah not not but but if you just feel like if you do those two things you don't need any of the Old Testament law anymore you can okay so okay so let's tell them you need you need bacon poor right right right and which was a really really bad thing to do under the Old Testament law okay so let's delve into this a little bit i want to make this psychological and sociological as well as theological so it strikes me that the rat one of the radical characteristics of human beings we talked about imitation that's certainly one another radical characteristic is the willingness and ability to make sacrifices so let me define that for a minute and and then we can see how it goes astray as well so the more immature you are the more your attention and behaviors under the dominion of biological systems that have narrow short term gratification as their focus that could be rage it could be hunger could be temperature regulation a two-year-old is a collection of unruly competing short term motivations it takes 18 years for the cortex to develop and you could think if the cortex is an inhibitory structure so that's kind of a Freudian model or you could think about it as an integrative structure and that's a better model part of P.S.A.'s model is useful in that regard because we integrate within the confines of imitative games but there's more to it than that so as you become more mature this kind of a definition of maturity you focus more on the tomorrow and next month next year so your temporal span of apprehension increases and you regulate your behavior in the present in relationship to the future that's a sacrificial move because you're sacrificing immediate gratification for the stability of the future and then there's another something let me push back on just that description is it a sacrificial move or is it a rational move because there's there's some way in which I think it's both it's a rational once you can see the future right it's but it's it's it's sort of very um it's to the extent it's rational it may not be that sacrificial you know you say you save money in order to buy a house but I don't imagine and but I don't think you believe that people can regulate that with mere rationality like it has to be deeper I would say part of that regulation of short term impulse that's so limbically driven mere rationality won't do the trick and the rationality itself would have to be encapsulated within a concept of what actually constitutes rationality so because like I could ask you what's worth sacrificing your short term pleasure for now the pleasure speaks for itself right there has to be something that you're giving that up for when you work for example that you regard as worthwhile and it isn't also clear to me that that's a purely rational move now there's one more sacrificial element it's like as you mature it becomes less and less about what the motivated sub components of you of you want now and more about how you find harmony and competition and cooperation in social groups so for example one of the things children have to learn between two and three to be social is to take turns and that's also a sacrifice because this the default is it's always my turn that's what it is like for non-social animal tricks I mean man I um this is where I want to push back a little bit because where I don't I don't think you tell a two or three year old this in the language of sacrifice and um no you probably act you know you're the mute it's it's it's if you don't take turns there's something that happens and you won't have friends and or the kids the other kids tell the kids that yeah there's some there's some very pretty fast immediate consequences to yeah and um and again you don't say it's rational but but it is um it's it's sort of uh you you learn to do these things and then the place where I'm uncomfortable with using the sort of language of sacrifice is that um that the the evidence-based non-rational part of it if that's all we have left you know I I wonder whether those are the sacrifices that uh that we should make uh for example I'm gonna give lots of examples but um um you know there you know there's always a question about you know what should be done about academia they're not you know all all the conservative academics are being expelled it's so hard to do this right here and and there's sort of a there's a version of a debate I've had with a lot of um right-of-center people over the last 20 years where it's well we just you know we we need to just train more people with PhDs and they we need and then they have to keep trying to sneak into the system have to smell break in yeah and um and I there's sort of a lot of reasons to think it's hard to do or might not work um but um but uh the way I push back on it is it strikes me as an irrational kind of sacrifice and so from the point of view of a young person who is going to be a right-wing academic with a PhD and will be completely unemployable um that's not a that's not a rational sacrifice they made it's a very foolish choice that perhaps this language of sacrifice confused confused things and um and then fair non-sacrificial move you know is roughly like what you yourself did with you know the University of Toronto or you you were where it's at some point I am not putting up with these silly sacrifices they're making me make an academia I'm not sacrificing my mind or I'm not you know I'm not playing by all their silly rules and um and I think that was the correct thing to do now but again I would describe it as as the anti-sacrificial move the sacrificial move would be you know you have a tailored position there and you might be unhappy about it but you know for the greater good you have to stay there okay so so I there were things I wasn't willing to sacrifice to stay there there's no doubt about that but I would also say that and and and and I think those were irrational things that you should not have sacrificed and I think no I think I think you made totally the right decision but I would also I would describe it as the way I would describe it and maybe maybe this just shows how the language of sacrifice is confusing but but I would I would describe it as um you refused to make the sacrifices that were demanded of you because they were silly irrational crazies in relation to what see that's the issue because I think that's true but in relation to things that again it maybe can't be fully rationally defined but in relation to some of the alternatives you could do in in relation to um you know maybe even maybe even if something as stupid as what you found hedonically enjoyable right it's using again it did you find it enjoyable sitting on silly faculty committees as a tenured professor or did you find it boring and and it wasn't fun the boredom wasn't fun and it's not the only reason to leave it's it's not maybe it's not a sufficient reason but but and from my perspective it's it's a good partial reason so I was there were probably a lot of things like this that added up I was unwilling to sacrifice my tongue and so what sacrifice was my job and my clinical career so I could keep my tongue but there's a Christian element to that too because the Christian insistence is that the truth oriented word establishes the order that's good and so but but it I don't think we can escape the sacrificial language because I had to give on my job both of them I had three because I had a private business but but but but but but again I I don't want to make this too aggrandizing to you but but I think what you're doing is far better far more important now I'm sure I'm not happy about it so if if if you if you would sacrifice your job and you were completely unemployable and had no economic prospects um you know you could describe it as sacrificing your job so you could express yourself but if nobody's listening to you that might that might be a pretty irrational thing to do again I and so it was I think it was a yeah it's it's it's rational for you to focus on reaching a much larger audience for you to do all these things and and I think I think those were good decisions you didn't let you didn't let um let's say um the moralizing left-wing people in academia academia get to you you didn't let their value system control you their value system is that you know there's nothing more important than academia this is the this is the world that really matters this is this is where you have to fight the battles you said no you you didn't let that morality control you so I would yeah I would I would describe it as Christian or maybe Nietzschean but anti-sacrificial what you did in a very good way yeah yeah well I understand I understand what you say then then the metal layer would be this this is where um maybe just the language of sacrifice is is is often more confusing than helpful well I think it it also to some degree it it stems it likely stems from your saturation in the gerardian view because you're you can correct me again if I'm wrong you're likely and especially given what you said about Christ's sacrifice making further sacrifices in some ways unnecessary your view is is is going to be to concentrate it seems to me on the more pathological end of the sacrificial process and like I think that the terminology can be confusing because I would say what I gained was far greater than what I lost now that doesn't mean that what I lost was nothing because it wasn't nothing and it took a fair bit of reconstruction to make things work and so you could say well if you gain more than you lose is that truly a sacrifice now the biblical stories are replete with paradoxes like that because the most intense one obviously is what happens with Abraham and Isaac because God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his son and Abraham is willing to do so but the consequence of that is that he gets his son back right and so that that that points the ambiguity of what I want to push back on all of these things so you know I'm yes I I I will confess to being an unreconstructed gerardian and there were probably ways Gerard modified his views more than I have and so he probably towards the end of his life was more open to sacrifice and I stick with the Gerard of the 70s and 80s who is more categorically skeptical of it um you know I think let me let me do an alternate cut on on on on on one one one one story and there's a one of these Bible stories and I always think when needs to interpret the Old Testament through the New Testament this is sort of the it this is sort of again a Christian bias I have that it doesn't fully make sense on its own you need to interpret it through in the light of the new and so there's there's a passage in the New Testament I might get the verb I don't know the verse memorized but it's it's basically where Christ says one must have faith like a child and then there's it's again you can think it's like an abstract thing but maybe it's maybe it's again we should always think more concretely and the concrete question I would have is is there a faith of a child that's being highlighted as um especially noteworthy and worthy of um emulation and I think there is in fact one child whose faith gets described in the Old Testament um and we never seem to talk about it um and it's Isaac because um as they're as they're going up the mountain you know Abraham tells Isaac this fictional story you know maybe God will provide something else and you know that's that's that's what might happen and then Isaac just believes that Isaac believe Abraham believes he has to make sacrifice that's that's the that's the that's the delusional faith of an adult who's read too much Kirchgaard or something and um and um Isaac's is the true Christian faith that uh God will figure out a way where um where the sacrifice does need to happen God is not a violent God the violence doesn't come from God he's a loving God and there's a way to do this without sacrifice and I'm I'm always yeah what I find so odd about the the Abraham Isaac's story is that um we've written endless amounts has been written on the faith of Abraham or Abraham has seen as the iconic person with faith and it's it's again linked to a certain conception of sacrifice and uh and yet we have the line in the New Testament where Christ tells us to look at the faith of a child um maybe you can come up with a better example I think the concrete one is Isaac and um and it is interesting and it it's not written from his perspective the end we get we get enough of Isaac's perspective implicitly in the story but it's all the reviews all the when we talk about you know whose faith should we emulate yeah the theologians the philosophers they always tell us you need to emulate the faith of of Abraham um the way I understand Christ uh I understand him to be telling me to emulate the faith of Isaac which I think is is is is very different and maybe maybe also very different on this on this question of sacrifice there's always our questions how an interpreter it's uh the the Christian account I I believe in the physical resurrection of Christ both as an event that happened historically but it also is a promise um and in some sense uh you know um following Christ there may be all sorts of bad things that happen to you but um it's a rational trade for saving your soul and for having eternal life and so if you if you think of it in the context of saving your soul and eternal life uh you know we can call that a sacrifice but it has a very different character right that's why he said which yolk is light yeah which is a weird thing to say when it's an invitation in the cross but but you have to you know the non-sacrificial way I would say it is yeah if if you believe in a literal you know eternal life that's that's one sort of thing if you think these are just some sort of Julian archetype story then you end up with much more of um sacrifice cross sacrifice as uh as uh as uh as a really high value but that's that's why I I would always interpret uh the orthodox Christian message as as very anti-sacrificial very non-sacrificial and you know maybe I don't like the word rational but um just uh you're you're making a good choice a wise choice okay okay got it got it okay so I'm going to stop us here and so this is what we're going to do on the daily wire side all you watching and listening no we do an extra half an hour I want to continue our conversation about the faith of a child but I also want to ask you why you think if you think it's true that you are temperamentally inclined to focus on the dark side and I'd like to know what the consequence of that has been because that's something we actually share in common you know unlike Piaget I'm a psychopathologist yes yes it was a developmental psychologist yes I've always been interested in the extreme case and so I'd like to talk to you about this faith issue that you just described I'd like to talk to you a bit more about Christianity and I'd like to talk to you about what it is you think that it is about you that's focused you on that on the more apocalyptic and dark edge of things so all right so everybody who's watching and listening well this part of the conversation has come to a halt and thank you for everybody here in Scottsdale for making this possible and the daily wire we're going to continue for another half an hour on the daily wire side with the topics that I just described thank you very much for coming to see me today and to talk we obviously just barely just started yeah yeah but it's a good start and we've got another half an hour and maybe some time in the future so thank you all so much thanks very much appreciate thanks everybody for your time and attention