Why You Read Their Eyes First

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This is the only pure thing in this world. Return to Pandora on Disney+. It will be an adventure for the whole family. And watch the Oscar-winning phenomenon at home. This is sick. Avatar Fire and Ash. Now streaming on Disney+. Rated PG-13. All these great bands and here you are tonight. Well, thank you very much for coming. Let me tell you what's going to happen tonight. I'm going to share my thoughts with you for 70 minutes, thereabouts. Then I have. I have a special guest here, Konstantin Kizin, who runs a podcast. Good. Well, you should know about him. Definitely. Crazy Russian from the UK. A real voice of reason for our fellow Westerners in the UK. Konstantin is going to come out on stage and torture me about what I said, I hope. Well, what I'm hoping. Konstantin is a very clear thinker, very witty man. He's got a very sharp mind. He's critically oriented in the best possible way. A good critical mind separates the wheat from the chaff, right? Because to be property critical isn't to hurt or destroy with criticism. It's to separate what's truly valuable from what isn't valuable. So that you have solid ground to stand on. And, you know, one of the things that I've strived to do in my whole academic career is to. Move closer and closer to believing and stating and writing things that I can't move. And you do that yourself by subjecting your own presumptions to critical analysis. You do that so that you think through what you're doing. So that you don't act out your stupid ideas in the world and die. And that's the purpose of thinking, right? Seriously, the purpose of thinking is to have your stupid ideas die instead of you. And that's part of the reason why your enemy can be your best friend. Because if someone can take out something you think, because they can show you how it's erroneous and counterproductive. And then you don't have to go through all the trouble of learning that stupidly in the world. That's a fine gift. And so, I'm hoping that Konstantin. Can stand in for the audience, for the critical and skeptical audience. We're talking about very difficult issues. It's highly likely that I could formulate what I'm stating more clearly and precisely. And so, Konstantin will come out and we'll discuss what was presented tonight. And then we'll turn to the questions that you've kindly delivered and discuss those. And then we'll reintroduce the band and that should do for the evening. And so, that's the plan. And so, away we go. I'm very much looking forward to this. So, the first thing we're going to talk about is. We're going to talk about stories and set the stage. I think we're at a crucial. Inflection point in the world, culturally and philosophically. I think we're on the dawn of a new set of realizations. A new set of realizations that will return us to our fundamentals. I think the reason that we have a culture war raging in the West, why there's so much instability. Is because something new is struggling to be born or reborn. And I want to explain the reason for that first. And the reason is that the Enlightenment view of the world, which has guided our technological and scientific endeavor. Our conceptual endeavor, our philosophical endeavor for a few hundred years. Is. There's something about it that's wrong. Like, deeply wrong. And that. Error is making itself manifest in the scientific community. Because I would say now that scientists themselves from a multitude of different disciplines. Understand that the idea that we see the world as a place of facts. Or that we see the world as rational creatures, or that you can even see the world that way, is wrong. Wrong. And I believe that it's. It's been demonstrated to be wrong. It's. This isn't a matter of mere philosophical opinion anymore. Although it's also that. One example, for example, is that. The newest artificial intelligence systems that we've designed. The large language models that have burst onto the stage in the last year or thereabouts. ChatGPT, the catastrophic Gemini that Google so foolishly launched. Elon Musk's. Grok. These systems are trained like human beings are trained. They have an aim. They have a purpose. They were trained with reward and punishment, so to speak. They're approximations to a target. They see the world through a structure of value that they have absorbed from human beings. To make the world's smartest linguistic machines. We had to inculcate in them a structure of value. Okay. And so. And we produced machines now that can engage in discourse. That can use language in a way that's virtually indistinguishable from the human. And it's going to become radically indistinguishable from the human very, very rapidly. And they're not programmed like lists of rules. They're not programmed like ordinary thinking machines. They're programmed the same way that human beings learn. They're programmed with aim. They have an ethos and an ethic. We can't orient ourselves in the world with the facts. We can't follow the science because science isn't a leader. Science doesn't establish our aims. Our aims are established using mechanisms of perception. Mechanisms of perception and emotion and thought that aren't in themselves scientific. We're aiming at something. Why can't we orient ourselves in the world with the facts? Well, the simplest explanation for that is that there are too many facts. There's as many facts as there are phenomena. More, actually. There's as many facts as there are possible combinations of phenomena. You drown in the facts. When you're confused in your own life and things are chaotic and you're anxious, it's because a plethora of possibilities is making itself manifest in front of you and you don't know which way to turn. You don't have a clear direction. You don't have a clear aim. There's no way of simplifying the world so that you can act in it. We know, for example, that to perceive the world, you have to obliterate from your consciousness almost everything that you could see. Because otherwise, you you're overwhelmed we know even that the hallucinogens who are being studied in with increasing intensity in recent years interfere with your normal perception such that they bring to consciousness a plethora of things that under normal circumstances you ignore and the consequence of that is a influx of a sense of overwhelming significance and meaning but at the same time a kind of paralysis of action because when everything becomes infinitely meaningful there's no straightforward way of moving forward when you're in a restaurant with someone on a first date and you're focusing on the conversation and actions of your date in a sea of competing conversations you zero out everything that you could be attending to in every other table all the competing thoughts in your imagination all the things you could be bringing to mind to zero in with like laser pinpoint accuracy on what it is that your partner in conversation is doing and you do that in the world all the time you make one thing at a time of pinnacle importance and you arrange everything else in the world at every moment that you perceive around that thing that you've made of pinnacle importance that's how you see the world and i don't mean think about the world this is under thought it's more profound it's what you do when you actually see if i decide to do something straightforward like walk from here to the stairs on the stage and i set my aim i don't perceive any of you in consequence because the fact of your existence is irrelevant to my purpose and you're gone none of the facts of the stage that i could attend to are relevant and perceptible anymore except insofar as their pathways or the ways in which i'm moving forward i don't perceive any of you in consequence because i'm not a facilitator or facilitators or obstacles to my journey forward if i'm looking to the stairs i see the chairs but not as places to sit i see them as obstacles that i have to circumvent in order to attain my aim everything that you see in the world makes itself manifest in accordance with your aim and that's a radically revolutionarily different way of conception the world then the notion that you take the facts and you sort them despite their infinite number and calculate your way with the facts rationally forwarding that's not what you do imagine your favorite lecture dial that on one max put that on steroids and then add some cinematic elements to it that's the best way i could describe a peterson academy lecture i went to college because i had to i go to peterson academy because i want to i'm still paying off college from 10 years ago and i'm also still questioning the value that i got out of college in traditional universities a lot of times it's just pretty dry they don't bring the same energy as the professors at peterson academy it is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you if you've been on the fence about this this is the time that thing that's calling to you you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself you have the opportunity to investigate that calling here's a proposition to contemplate it's it's another proposition that has revolutionary significance it'll explain all sorts of things that you know to be true but don't know why they're true the description of the structure through which you see the world is a story That's what a story is. Okay, so now, this explains many things that are otherwise left as mysteries or side effects. I read a book by Steven Pinker once. Pinker's an enlightenment rationalist from Harvard. A good guy, and very smart, and much of what he says is extraordinarily useful. But he believes, for example, that our proclivity to enjoy and tell stories is like a side effect of something more fundamental cognitively. It's the story as entertainment theory. You go to a movie because it's fun. You read a book of fiction to your child because it's fun. It's not core to the, what would you say, it's not a core element of the way that you exist in the world. It's mere entertainment. It misses the point, that theory. Why is it entertaining? Why can you teach children with stories? If you get the story right for a child, you can capture the child's interest, and you can integrate almost any form of learning into the story. And the child will be captivated by that. When children play, pretend play, which they do spontaneously, they spontaneously learn. They spontaneously dramatize the world. They spontaneously make stories out of their roles and their destinies. And that captures them. That forms the basis of their friendships. That's why children want to play so frenetically, is that they're practicing modeling the world. When you go see a movie, it's not that you want to be entertained. Although it is entertaining. That's not why you're there. It's not for fun. It's not for fun either. That's easy to understand and to see. What's fun about a horror movie? I'm dead serious. It's like. People will be so afraid in a horror movie that they'll cover their eyes. They'll hide behind the chair in front of them. They'll ask themselves afterwards why they even put themselves through it. And yet they'll line up and pay to do it. Well, why would you line up and pay to torture yourself? Well, 'cause you want to know how to deal with what's horrifying. And you want to practice that in a way, if you can, that isn't in itself fatal. You want to expose yourself to the catastrophes of existence so that you're prepared when those catastrophes come along. You want to expose yourself to the predators that lurk everywhere. You want to inure yourself against what's disgusting and contaminating, because you're going to have to deal with it. You want to expose yourself to what's frightening so that you can find the courage within you to deal with what's frightening. And that's part of the instinct to develop and expand your competence. And it's in that expansion of competence and skill that occurs as a consequence of that voluntary exposure that the entertainment is situated. The reason that's entertaining is because it's part of the manner in which you expand yourself. And you can do that in the direction of what's dark and terrible, just as you can in the direction of, say, what's heroic. What do you do when you go to a movie? Well, you, you, you fasten onto a character. And you understand that character the same way that you understand people that you're in conversation with. Now, you might think that the way that you understand people is by you listen to what they say, and you extract out the knowledge that they're delivering to you in terms of facts. And you interpret the facts, and you derive your understanding of the person. Like, none of that's true. That has absolutely nothing to do with how you establish a relationship with someone. And, well, here's some proof. Is that what you do with a dog? Well, obviously not. But you can establish a relationship with a dog. And so, and the relationship you have with the dog, it, it's not the same as the relationship with a person. But a dog's a pack animal. A dog can become a member of the family. You can, you can understand a dog well enough so the dog likes you. Right. And so, whatever you're doing with the dog, it isn't discourse about propositions. Because most of the dogs you own don't talk. So, and it's the same with very young children. And, and. It's the same with an infant. You establish a relationship using mechanisms that aren't propositional. They're not rules, they're not descriptions, they're not facts. That's not how you do it. How do you do it? Where do you look when you talk to someone? You look at their eyes. Why? To see where they're pointing them. Why? So you can see what they're looking at. Why? So you can infer what's important to them. Because we point our eyes at that which is important to us. That's why our eyes look the way they look. Black in the middle, coloured on the ring around that, against a white background. That's an evolved mechanism. I can see your eyes. All of our ancestors whose eyes weren't visible, either got killed, Killed or didn't reproduce. The one thing you want to know about someone. Right away is where the hell their eyes are pointed. And you can do that politely. Which you do by attending to someone. Without too predatory a stare. You do that by attending politely to their face. But not too intensely. And not attending let's say inappropriately to other parts of their body. And they're going to be watching you to see what you do with your eyes. Because the one thing you want to know about someone above all else is. What the hell are they up to? Right? What's their aim? And so when you go to a movie that's what you do. When you watch a character in a role. You see him in a variety of different situations. And you watch how he structures his attention. What he pays attention to. His attention is a costly business. And so people pay attention to what they value. You watch what they attend to. And you watch how they prioritize their actions. And from that you derive an understanding of what's important to them. As soon as you understand what's important to them. You've got their aim. You've figured that character out. This is what you do when you learn to know someone. What's their aim? As soon as you know their aim. You can see the world through their eyes. You can see the same objects they see. And the objects take on the same emotional significance. And when you say I come to understand someone. What you really mean is. Oh I understand their aim. And now I can aim at the same thing. At least in simulation. At least fictionally. And I can come to inhabit the same world of perception and emotion that they inhabit. I can even guess at. How they might act. And to what they might do. And to what they might attend in situations I haven't seen. Because now I know their aim. What's he up to? That's what you're thinking in a murder mystery or in a thriller. What's he up to? What's he up to? What's going to happen next? And so the plot of the fiction is the aim of the character across time. The aim as the character unfolds. And that might involve the transformation of his aims as well. Right? And that would be the transformation of a character in a movie. He aims at one thing and he learns that that aim is off in some manner. And he comes to a bitter and dismal partial end and has to switch course. And you want to see people transform their aims. That's character development. We see the world through a story. The world's objects reveal themselves in relationship to our aim. The landscape of emotion presents itself as markers on a pathway to our aim. The world reveals itself in accordance with our aim. That's how perception works. That's a hell of a thing to learn. Because if the world, for example, appears to you only as thorn-bearing obstacles. Right? If you feel that everything's arrayed against you and there's no pathway forward. If you feel that you're surrounded by foes and obstacles instead of walking the golden pathway accompanied by allies with the world on your side you might ask yourself whether or not your aim is wrong. And so the world lays itself out in accordance with our aim. We go, we produce fiction, we generate fiction. We live in a fictional landscape because we want to get our aim right. We read stories, we watch movies, we go to plays. We talk to each other because we want to get our aim right. We want to find the place we should go and we want to learn how to get there efficiently. And we're compelled by spirit and instinct to establish the aim and follow the path. And to transform ourselves so that our aim becomes ever more precise and efficient. And delivers us a world that's ever more abundant. And beautiful. And that's all a function of aim. Okay, so we live in a story. Well then, as soon as you know that, this is what the postmodernists figured out. By the way, this is why the literary critics have become a dominant force in the culture war. The postmodernists were literary critics. You think, well, there's nothing more irrelevant than a literary critic. Like, who the hell cares what an intellectual thinks about? What a story. I mean, of all the preposterous things to be concerned about, that might top the list. Not if the story is the thing through which you see the world. If the story is the thing you see through which you see the world, there's nothing more powerful than a literary critic, except perhaps an author. And we wouldn't have a culture war right now if the literary critic wasn't far more powerful than anybody had possibly imagined, because the French intellectual literary critics known as the postmodernists have criticized the central story of the West to death. And that's why we have a culture war. And it's no joke. This is foundational. There's no more serious conflict than that. And you all can feel that. That's why you're here. You know that the world is shaking and uncertain in a way that's new. And the reason for that is the story itself is under assault. All right. So let's wander through that a little bit. You see the world through a story. The rationalists or empiricists, even the biologists, they might have an answer to that. They say, okay, fair enough. But the story is biologically determined or socioculturally determined. It's a story of sex. That would be Freud, because for Freud and for Charles Darwin, for that matter, for Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist, to an equal degree. The aim is sex, reproduction. And the story is predicated on that aim, Freud, Darwin, Dawkins. The degenerate element of that is a descent into a kind of hedonism. Because if sex is the story, then why not worship sex? And some dispute that and say, no, the essential story isn't sex. This would be the Marxists. The central story is power. That's the story that the universities tell when they're not telling the story about sex. It's all about power. The essential human aim is power. The main theme is domination, oppression, victimization, exploitation. The central theme of the family is a power dynamic. The central theme of the relationship between men and women is a power dynamic. Marriage itself is a heteronormative, patriarchal establishment of oppression that goes back to the dawn of time. The nuclear family is the same thing. Economic arrangements are nothing but power. Friendships are nothing but power. The landscape of human interaction is a dynamic of power. Or sex. Or both. Or both fighting against one another. Look, these are powerful ideas. Why? Well, obvious. It's obvious. Why? I mean, first of all, without sex, there's no reproduction, and without reproduction, there's no people. And so the Darwinian, Freudian, Richard Dawkins, selfish gene claim is that, well, what could it possibly be other than sex? And the Marxists come running forward and say, how about power? And then the Marxists say, well, obviously it's power because there's radical inequality in the world. There's some who have and some who have not. There's no reason to assume. I assume that property in the final analysis, let's say, isn't a form of theft. And everyone who has established themselves in some manner has only done that by stealing from those who are powerless and who have less everything they have and accruing it to themselves. And that's a credible claim for a variety of reasons. The first most fundamental reason is that a minority of people have all the success on any possible dimension of comparison. It's a very small number of people who are radically attractive. It's a very small number of people who are radically gifted in the visual arts, let's say. It's a radically small percentage of people who are musicians. A tiny percentage of the people have most of the money. A tiny percentage of the people gather most of the attention. It's a Pareto distribution. And that's what Marx pointed onto. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And there's real truth in that. And there's truth in the claim that. People structure their relationships with power and that some people who obtain success do it as a consequence of exploitation and it's equally true that when any human relationship deteriorates it tends to deteriorate in the relationship of power if your marriage starts to become shaky then you begin to exploit each other use force you try to get your way you try to dominate it's the same within any family that's deteriorating into a state of pathologies the same in any organization we've seen huge states deteriorate into the tyrannical use of power if you had to identify a cardinal attribute of mankind powers are reasonable hypothesis but let's think about that for a minute so imagine that well imagine that it's sex that is and should be the complete story of mankind well what does it what does that mean exactly what's a world organized on that basis what is the world they organized on that basis look like well there's nothing more important than sex well how about immediate sexual gratification whenever you want it how about immediate sexual gratification as the archetype of hedonism how about immediate sexual gratification whenever you want it regardless of what anyone else has to say about it because if it's the story and it's the fundamental story then what stops me from gaining access to what I want right now regardless of the cost to anyone else especially if there's nothing beyond that if only the naive believe that there's anything noble about humanity beyond the immediate demand of reproduction then what have you got to say that's moral about sex and why the hell shouldn't everybody just do exactly what they want with whoever they want whenever they want all the time and with power you can make exactly the same argument and classical societies aristocratic societies militaristic and martial societies are predicated on this idea if I can push you around all that indicates is that I should push you around because if you're so weak that I can push you around you have absolutely no ground whatsoever to stand on to oppose me because if you are moral by the traditions of power I wouldn't be able to push you around and so it's very difficult to argue out of that from a rational perspective why doesn't might make right and why isn't it only the weak who claim that that's wrong and why isn't it only that the weak claim that that's wrong not because they're moral but because they're weak that would certainly be a spin-off on the Nietzschean notion that will to power constitutes constitutes the core of man and I would say up until the dawn of judeo-christian ethic let's say power ruled and then we could imagine what sort of world it's like when power rules well we know what that world's like it's like pay attention to the strongest or suffer the consequences well is there something beyond that and that's not mere naivety what's if it isn't power that's the story and if it isn't sex that's the story what's the story for the West the answer that is the library of the Bible that's the story it's the story upon which the West is founded it's the story that has arisen over thousands of years tens of thousands of years for that matter attempting to address the core issue what's the fundamental story it's no mystery to make the claim that the claim of the biblical library of stories as it is a library is that the biblical It's the fundamental story. All right, so, we live in a story. We've identified the competitors, power and sex. What is it that's being expressed in the biblical story? Look, if you go to a movie or read a complex book, you go to a sophisticated movie, a sophisticated play, a Shakespearean play, or you read a sophisticated work of fiction, you see a multi-dimensional characterization, right? A comic book has a hero with one motive. A sophisticated work of fiction has a hero, and perhaps an anti-hero, with complex, multi-dimensional motivations. Whatever characterizes those more realistic people isn't reducible to any single attribute. And in a complicated work of fiction, the author walks you through a multi-dimensional characterization. You see the same person, the hero, aiming upward, the anti-hero, or villain, aiming downward. You see that person portrayed in multiple different situations, and pursuing partial reflections of their ultimate aim. And in consequence of that, you learn to understand and embody that complex of aims. When you see a movie and you watch the hero, you're watching the hero to learn how to act like a hero. When you're watching a movie and you watch the anti-hero or the villain, you're watching the movie to learn how not to fail catastrophically and land in hell, while taking everyone else along with you. Is it reducible to something as simple, as simple as power or sex? Not if it's not a comic book. You need a multi-dimensional characterization. All right, the biblical corpus provides a multi-dimensional characterization of the fundamental aim of man and cosmos. That's the claim of the book. So I'm going to walk you through some of the stories and show you what's being revealed. What's being revealed? What's being revealed is the proper object of worship. Okay, so what does that mean? The proper object of celebration. The aim towards which all sacrifices and work are to be directed. That which should be held in the highest regard. That which should be imitated in ritual and admiration. Okay, so that's the, that's the idea. Admiration in the same way that a small child who hero worships the boy down the street who's the baseball star because that boy portrays a pattern of skill and attention that is the next appropriate developmental step for the hero worshiping child. That's a recreation of the religious impulse. The impulse to look up, admire and imitate. The question being what, to what should we address our attention, upward-looking, admire and imitate? That highest possible object of apprehension and admiration is by definition. God. It's a definition. It's the highest aim that lurks behind all proximal aims. That's a good way of thinking about it. It's the upward aim. It's the upward aim. It's the upward aim. It's the upward aim. At the beginning of things that's not exactly the beginning of time. That's usually how it's read, but it's more complex than that It's not only the beginning of time in the linear sense, but it's the beginning of all things that begin This is what happens every time something begins. This is what happens every time something new makes its entry into the world It's the continual been beginning that continually unfolds that happened and is happening now And it will always happen it's the pattern of The emergence of order out of chaos that makes itself manifest In the form of your life How is the stage set the Spirit of God Hovers over the water over the deep You hear that In the Judeo-Christian tradition God Engenders the world ex nihilo out of nothing. That's not how the story sets itself up. It sets itself up with the Spirit of God Hovering above the waters, but it's not water. That's not the word water is one of the symbolic Images Attempting to make what's being described clear using a sequence of complex metaphors. The word for the water over which the Spirit of God hovers is tohu vabohu or tehom. And it means a lot of things. It means the dragon that lives at the bottom of the deepest well. It means the unplumbable depths of the most abysmal ocean. It means the water that brings forth life. It means the infinite well of possibility itself. It means the confusion that reigns when your world falls apart. It means the unstructured day. That makes itself manifest when you wake up. It means all of that. It means the dragon that the archaic God sliced into pieces and made the world from. It means it's the hydra that Hercules defeats to form the world. It's all of that. So what does that mean? It means that the Spirit of being and becoming. Generates the world from possibility. What does that mean? That's what your consciousness does. That's what you do. See, you think you're surrounded by a world of objects that you manipulate in a robotic fashion. But you're not concerned with the objects that are static. You're concerned with what you can dynamically transform. When you wake up in the morning, what presents itself to you. Is a field of indeterminacy. That your country wouldn't be what it is. Which is the closest approximation to a shining city on the hill. That's been established so far in the travail of mankind. Without that fundamental conception. Right. So then. You might say well is it true? And the answer is. It's not hell. I mean that. Because lots of countries are hell. And they're hell in a way that. Opens up into an abyss. And has the possibility of a deeper abyss. Waiting latent within it. Which will open up with the possibility of a deeper abyss within that. And that's what happens when that fundamental characterization is. Overthrown in a revolutionary manner. Or carelessly abandoned. And we saw that. For all of us who are non-believers. And no longer conceptualize the metaphysical hell as real. We saw the metaphysical hell realized in the 20th century many times. In case anyone. Having abandoned their metaphysical presuppositions. Was so blind that only an object lesson would suffice. Right. Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union under Stalin. The Chinese Communist Party under Mao. If that isn't close enough to hell for you. Then I would say. You should pray that. You aren't introduced to something even worse. For the purposes of convincing you about what's real. In the second. In the second. God. And I. He announces two things, three things, four things, once he creates man. He says, man is to tend the garden. That's his purpose. Why a garden? It's a walled garden, actually, because that's what paradise means. Walled garden. Why a walled garden? Well, a garden is a place of nature, obviously. And walls are a place of culture. And a walled garden is a place of nature, encapsulated in a manageable manner by the walls of culture. That's what your backyard is. It's a yard. It's nature. It has walls. The walls are culture. The walls you could think of as physical entities, as objects. But your lawn has borders if you don't have a fence. And your neighbors know where the borders are. And where are the borders? Well, they're in the imagination of your neighbors. I'm dead serious about that. The walls, it's so funny because you'll see people in the border between Canada. In the United States, they'll get out and they'll step across the border. It's like, as if it's an object of it, as if it's an entity that's there on the ground. And people know that that's magic in some sense, because the grass in Canada is only slightly less healthy than the grass in the United States. Let's say, it's easy to concretize that. But, the idea of a walled-off space in a communal society is a social agreement. You have your domain, your house, your garden, your backyard. That's enough cosmos for you to set right. And perhaps if you're competent enough to do more, you'll expand your garden so that you have more to tend. But you start with a walled garden of some size. And if you tend it properly, then, the promise is that as your competence grows, so will your dominion. Man sent to tend the garden, and to name everything that's in it. This is Adam. What does that mean? Well, it's the logos again. It's a re-representation of the creative spirit of God that makes itself manifest when time begins, and when new things come into being. Our ability to name, our ability to speak, is that in the microcosmic manner. That's what we're capable of doing. That's what the patriarchal spirit does, is name and order the world. And God brings everything to Adam to see what he'll name them. And that's a reflection of the idea that we have a created order, but man has a place in it. And the place is to organize it. And to put everything in its proper place, and to assign it its identity. And that's no different than the prioritization of attention that's part of the story. Name things in relationship to their function. Put things in place in relationship to their significance in the hierarchy of being. Orient them. Orient all named things upward. Sequence, constrain, organize, and order. The manifestation of the patriarchal spirit. What does God decide? That's not good enough. Man lacks a helper. Man needs a helper. Woman's created as a consequence. Because the order that men produce, Because of their limitations, is insufficient, and something has to be introduced to speak for that which is not included. That's the role of woman. That's the biblical role of the woman. It's the biological role of the mother. You know this in your own household. Women bring the concerns of the marginalized to the center. You can think about that politically. It's useful to think about it politically. All established human orders exclude. The exclusion causes pain. The pain of exclusion requires a voice. That's the voice of the Eternal Mother. That's where Genesis 1 ends. Genesis 2 begins, contains the story of Adam and Eve. It's commensurate with the first one. It's a variation on a theme. God creates Adam out of matter, earth, and breath. Spirit. Why? Because that's what human beings are. We're material creatures that are animated. Anima means spirit. What's the spirit? The spirit is the living, organizing principle of the material. And human beings are an amalgam of the living, organizing principle and the material. And that's what's portrayed in the creation of Adam. The combination of matter and spirit. The combination of material and conscious. You can think about it that way if you're more secular minded. We're conscious matter. What's up with that? No one understands that. No materialist understands that. We understand nothing about consciousness. It's as mysterious now as it's been throughout the entire course of our existence. It's never been reduced to material phenomenon. We have no idea what that would even mean. And if we did reduce it to the material, all that would mean was that we. inadvertently elevated the material. We treat each other like we're conscious. We presume from first principles that we're conscious. We can't even distinguish between being itself and being conscious. And so, that's a perfectly reasonable representation of man. Woman is taken from man. From a rib. From the side. As an equal. There's a critique of patriarchal Judeo-Christian narrative from the resentful feminist side that makes the claim that the biblical narrative is, for example, radically patriarchal in its orientation. Dooming women to subjugation. That's a preposterous claim, by the way. It's not only false. It's false in a very particular way. There are falsehoods that are approximations of the truth. There are falsehoods so deep that they're the exact opposite of the truth. And the truth of the matter is that right from the first words, the biblical library is miraculous in its insistence that women, like men, are made in the image of God. That emerges in the first chapter. And that Eve is the equal of Adam in every manner, although complementary and not identical. And our society is riven by conflict so deep that we now doubt both of those propositions. There's no form of confusion more profound than that. Sexually reproducing creatures without nervous systems can tell the difference between male and female. If you can get people to swallow the lie that there's no difference between men and women, there is no lie they won't swallow. Right. So God makes Adam and Eve, each with their own role, and he puts them in the garden to play forever under the watchful eye of their heavenly father. And he tells them they have free reign in the garden with everything delightful that's being created, that's being created, except for one thing. They are not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Man, that's a mystery. I spent a long time trying to crack the micro-narratives in the story of Adam and Eve. And it wasn't until three or four years ago that I think I started to understand that particular fragment of the story. A friend of mine, he is here, Jonathan Paggio. Some of you might have been following him. Jonathan and his brother, Matthew, really helped me crack this. And so we're here. I'm here with Jonathan and a number of my other colleagues and friends right now with The Daily Wire recording another. seminar. We released an Exodus seminar. We're recording a seminar on the Gospels right now. We're about 60% of the way through that. And so, just so you know, that's also forthcoming. God tells human beings. He makes one fundamental rule. Do not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Okay, that's moral knowledge. That should be self-evident. Knowledge of good and evil. That's moral knowledge. Moral knowledge is predicated on the idea that there's an upward path and a downward path, that there are desirable things and that there are undesirable things, and that at the pinnacle of what's desirable is what's heavenly or paradisal, and in the abysmal depths of what's undesirable is the diabolical and the hellish. And that's the moral landscape. That's the landscape of good and evil. That's the fictional landscape. Fictional in the sense of characterization and plot. Fictional in the sense of distilled truth. Not falsehood. Fictional in the sense that the fiction describes the structure through which you see the world. Fiction has the deepest form of truth. What does it mean to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil? When Nietzsche announced the death of God in the late 1800s, he said something that he believed would constitute a pathway forward. He said, We have dispensed with God. We are the greatest murderers who ever lived. We've engaged in a murder so profound that we'll never wash away the blood. How could we possibly conduct ourselves in the aftermath of that murder? You read of Nietzsche as a triumphant anti-Christian. He was a very complicated person. And he knew perfectly well that the dissolution of the Christian metaphysic would produce a cataclysmic consequence. He predicted in the late 1800s that Europe would turn to a radically resentful egalitarian communitarianism that would kill tens of millions of people. Which is exactly what happened. And he saw that coming just as clearly as his Russian counterpart, Fyodor Dostoevsky, saw it. He knew what would rise in the aftermath of the death of God. He knew that resentment and communitarianism would be one temptation. And he tried to formulate an alternative path. He said, We're going to have to create our own values. We're going to have to take it upon ourselves to create the moral landscape. I read that and I understood why he said that. I could see its influence on clinical psychology, for example. The notion of the self-actualized person. The notion that our soul should unfold in the direction that's commensurate with the deepest understanding of our subjective selves. The radical unveiling of subjectivity. Self-definition. I am what I say I am. Which is a radical claim in our society now. A claim of omniscience. Not only am I who I say I am. You better act like I'm who I say I am. That's the claim of the radical subjective. Well, what's wrong with that claim? Well, the psychoanalysts criticized Nietzsche very effectively. They said, Look, how are you going to create your own values when you're not master in your own house? Have you tried telling yourself what to do? How does that work for you? I know you're just your own obedient servant, right? You're so morally pure. You just tell yourself at New Year's that you're going to go to the gym. And you're going to diet. And you're going to be some stellar physiqued lean mean fighting machine by March. And you go once and then you tell yourself lies about why you don't have to go again. And that's the end of that. And if you were capable of creating your own values, you wouldn't be the banner, the tattered banner that blows in the wind of its own whims. The psychoanalysts figured this out very quickly. You're a war of competing whims. And the creature like that's going to have a very difficult time navigating the complex landscape of the ultimate moral pronouncement. Who are you to make a decision about what constitutes good and evil? And that's what God tells men and women. It's like you don't get to create the moral order. You get to dwell within it. You get to align yourself with the pre-existent moral order. You do not take to yourself the right, the presumption to define good and evil themselves. You bow your head to good and you pray for deliverance from evil. And if you violate that, look the hell out. And that's the pronouncement. And so what happens? The circumstances change. The serpent offers Eve the fruit. Why the serpent? Well, the serpent is camouflaged. The serpent is crafty, subtle. The serpent is marginalized. The serpent is the voice of pride. The serpent is Lucifer. That's the metaphysical surrounding of the story that develops over centuries. The notion that the serpent in the Garden of Paradise is Lucifer himself, the spirit of pride. What does that mean? It's prideful presumption that makes you assume that you can define the moral order. What's the prideful presumption of Eve at the beginning of time and forever? I can even clasp the serpent to my breast. It's the careless welcoming in of the monstrous and prideful. Under the guise of the pretension of maternal compassion. And if you can't see that happening in our society, you're blind. And what's the sin of Adam? Well, what do men care about? Women care about, properly, about the helpless infant. It's a powerful feminine virtue. And it can be inverted and made prideful and trumpeted and presumptuous. To infantilize the world and to advertise that compassion as a badge of worth and honor. As a mode of attaining status. What's Adam's sin? What do men care about? Impressing women. Men are ambitious fundamentally to impress women. For better or for worse, what's the prideful pathway and false pathway to establishing a relationship with the too demanding feminine? I've got it. Anything you want, dear. Right, and that's Adam's sin. Eve hearkens to the voice of the serpent and clutches it to her breast. And in spite of the clear injunction from the Divine never to do that. And Adam weakly does exactly that. what the worst part of his wife wants. And so here we are, folks. So what's the consequence of that? Well, the scales fall from their eyes and they notice they're naked. And they're deeply ashamed and they cover up. They become self-conscious. Okay, so when do people become self-conscious? When they make prideful errors. When you overreach and you reveal your inadequacy as a consequence of the mismatch between your pride and your ability. You'll be ashamed. You'll recognize your insufficiency. You'll be aware of yourself as an isolated entity. That's all to become self-conscious. Psychologists have learned over the last 40 years that there's no difference between being conscious of yourself and being miserable. Those are literally the same thing. If you're living a life of other-centered, communally-oriented, hospitable calling, you're not attending to the miseries of your isolated self. If you stay in your bailiwick and you don't put forward your hand presumptuously, you can live in the absence of painful self-consciousness. Pride goes before a fall. We have a month devoted to pride in our culture, right? You know this in your own life. You can ask yourself, and this has been a Christian conundrum since the beginning of time, is your life miserable because misery is baked into the structure of the world? Or is your life miserable because you do stupid things and refuse to learn and bring endless misery on yourself in your presumption? And you know, you might say a little of column A and a little of column B, and fair enough. But you certainly know that the most painful episodes of your life come when you claim falsely to be more than you are. And the core narrative in the Judeo-Christian ethos is that the fall of man into the profane world is a consequence of pride. And that is really something worth thinking about. You know, Adam and Eve are called upon to work in misery as a consequence of their pride. Well, could you work joyfully? If you didn't overreach yourself, if you were aiming upward properly, if you were telling the truth, if you were acting communally, if you were acting in relationship to what was highest, would it be possible that your work would be joyful and bring abundance? Isn't there times in your life when that's happened? Is it the case that you move forward in misery in precise proportion to the potential of your aim? It's worth considering. It's the suspicion that arises at the end of the story that begins history because it's with the prideful fall of Adam and Eve that history begins. Adam and Eve discover they're naked and they hide. And God comes along and says, Adam, where are you? And Adam says, I'm over here. I'm hiding. And God says, well, why are you hiding? It's a foolish thing to do, right? Because Adam is perfectly aware that God can see through bushes. Adam is hiding from God. Is it your pathetic self-consciousness that makes you hide from God? That's a good question. Are you not everything you could be because you're ashamed of who you are? That's what that story indicates. And so God calls Adam on. He says, who told you? Why are you hiding? And Adam says, well, I'm naked. And God says, well, how do you find out that you were naked? How did you find out that you were inadequate? How did you find out that you are shameful? And Adam says, you know that woman you made me? It's her fault. And that's the second sin of Adam. And that's another indication of the non-patriarchal nature of the text. You know, Eve is the first human being to take a bite of the apple, but Adam follows along. And it isn't obvious to me that the follower of sin is in a worse, better moral position than the initiator. And then he compounds his sin, like men do, by blaming the woman. Why is your life so. Well, if you had my wife, man, you'd know. It's like those damn women. It's like, it's a handy excuse for men all the time to say that. And it's not least because men can't tolerate being rejected by women. And women reject them all the time. And the reason women reject them is because they're not all they should be. And so, of course, that makes men painfully self-conscious. And makes them shake their fist at God. It makes them hide. And so, God says. And so, Adam reveals himself in this pathetic manner. It's like he can't even take responsibility for his own misstep. He has to blame the thing that's been granted to him as the highest form of gift. And not only her, but God. Whose fault is it? Well, it's not mine. It's probably women's fault. And if it's not women, it's clearly God. It can't be me. So, what happens? Well, both Adam and Eve are condemned to suffer in their work. And that's how history begins. And that's the situation of fallen. Of the fallen world. And that's the description of the shape of profound fiction that we that we inhabit. And that's only a tiny fraction of the characterization of God and man in the biblical corpus. Thank you very much. All right, so, we'll welcome Constantine onto the stage. He's going to. Thank you. Hey, sir. Thank you. That was great, Jordan. Should we sit? Absolutely. All right. Well, so much to agree on, first of all. Not least, just when you were talking about the foundation of America and how great it is. How could anyone disagree with that? Everyone here has guns. No, but I mean it, actually. And one of the things I was thinking that I really agreed on, I don't want to spend too much time on the stuff that I agree on, but I've had this phrase in my head for a long time now, which is the culture is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And I thought that was very interesting that you mentioned it. But you brought me here to be a contrarian. So it's his fault, not mine, if I offend you, when I offend you. You said we're here partly because the enlightenment doesn't work, is wrong. If the enlightenment is wrong, why are we sitting in an arena of six and a half thousand people with bright lights and all of this created through the light? Through the scientific method and research and all of the stuff that comes out of the enlightenment. How are we here? I don't think the scientific method is wrong. I think the enlightenment is wrong. So I don't know how many of you noticed this, but yesterday, the day before, something like that, Richard Dawkins announced that he was a cultural Christian. Most upvoted question for the Q&A. Okay. Okay. Well, there we go. Well, because Richard Dawkins, who is a genuine scientist, and I think actually a good man, is feeling in his bones that something is up. And what he said essentially was that even though, and it's paradoxical, right? He said, even though I'm happy that formal belief in Christianity in the West is on the decline, I don't think there's a difference between a Christian religion and a Christian religion. I think there's a difference between a Christian religion and a Christian religion. And so that's kind of a backhanded compliment. And then he said, also, he doesn't want the cathedrals to go. He doesn't want the churches to go. He doesn't want Christmas to go. There's a lot of beauty in the culture that he wants to maintain. And so that puts Dr. Dawkins in a difficult position. I don't say this with any delight. If Christianity works in the manner that even makes science possible, which is something that Dr. Dawkins is beginning to understand, what is it about Christianity that works? And how is what works different from what doesn't work? Now, Dr. Dawkins doesn't like to mention this, but one of the things he is doing is contrasting what he believes is the Christian UK with perhaps what the UK might be, if it was fundamentalist Islam. for example. And I'm not criticizing Islam when I say that. I'm criticizing more pointedly fundamentalism. And Dr. Dawkins knows that there's something, regardless of what might be wrong with Christianity, let's say, there's something like seriously wrong with that kind of fundamentalism. And that means he's making a hierarchy of moral order, and he's placing what's Christian above what's fundamentalist. So that's part of that reflection of a moral order. And then he's stuck with the problem. He's like, well, then what is it about Christianity that makes it right? Well, we have to get rid of all the, what? The miracles, the magic, the superstition? Well, how do you separate out that from what's hypothetically good? And why do you even think that's possible? There's no evidence that it's possible. Like, perhaps it's possible, but we haven't done it since the Enlightenment arose, so I don't think we can. So there's that problem. The Enlightenment has run to its end because there are fundamental propositions that it was predicated on that aren't true. Like what? We don't orient ourselves empirically. We don't orient ourselves rationally. We orient ourselves in the narrative world. And we don't yet. We don't yet really understand what that means. Like, let me give you an example of that, okay? So, Sigmund Freud believed that the reason your dreams were mysterious was because your dreams were delivering to you messages about your desires that you didn't want to become conscious of, and that the dream was symbolizing them to hide what was repressed, but, well, offering it, you might argue, in small doses. And that accounted for the mystery of dreams. Why are dreams so mysterious? Well, Freud's answer was, well, because the dream disguises unpleasant truths from the dreamer so that he can maintain his slumber. Carl Jung came along and said, no. No. The dream is the universe within which philosophy situations. You dream about what you do not yet understand. The dream is the mediator between what is still mysterious, so mysterious you might not even know that it exists, and what you concretely can contend with. Jung's correct. We know enough now about how the hemispheres of the brain function. We know enough about how the dream functions. We know enough about the relationship between the imagination and our ability to speak to say that the dream is still mysterious. We know enough about the relationship between the imagination and our ability to speak to say that what we understand is nested in a dream. The dream is mysterious. The dream isn't the same world as the graspable, describable world. Christianity is the dream within which the West is embedded. And there are elements of it that we can't understand, partly because we have to situate ourselves in relationship to what's ultimately mysterious. And that means that the dream is not the same world as the graspable, describable world. And that means that the dream shades into the miraculous and mysterious. And there's no way around that. Because we need that buffer, at least because we need that buffer. It's also because things that are true that we cannot understand from our current frame of reference appear as miraculous within that frame of reference. Now, that doesn't mean I know how to contend we're doing this gospel seminar now. I don't know how to contend with the plethora of miraculousness. I don't know how to contend with the plethora of miraculous healing stories. I don't know how to contend with the story of the quelling of the waves on the Sea of Galilee. But I know that we live in a story. And I know that the story mediates between the finite and the infinite. And I know that we can't dispense with the story, not without opening ourselves up to invasion by any number of catastrophic competing stories. And that is what's happening. In the West, as far as I'm concerned. Not least the story of power, or the story of hedonism, or the story of paganism. The story of nature worship. We moved very quickly from worship of the transcendent spirit beyond nature to worship of nature itself. That's what the environmentalist movement is. And you know this. The Irish want to sacrifice 200,000 cows to change the weather. And they want to change the weather. And that is truly a re-emergence of that pagan spirituality. And a whole different aim. We put nature above all else. Well, where do we put man? What's our birth rate? Way below replacement. We know where we put man. There's too many of us. In relationship to what? Nature. So, how is the Enlightenment? How is the Enlightenment? Well, man does not live by bread alone. You know, the technological enterprise offers material abundance and more power to it. But as an end in itself, as a moral ethos in itself, it's unsustainable. It produces nothing but towers of Babel. And it produces people who can't master their own tools. And we're in that situation. Do you think it's possible that it's the material abundance that's the problem? I wouldn't say it's the problem. The cause of the problem. No, I don't think so. I think it's a fundamental symptom. Let me tell you a story. This is very cool. This took me 40 years. To figure out. And I can tell you in three minutes. So that's a good deal for you. You remember, I like the movie Pinocchio a lot. I've talked about it a lot. I would do a whole series on Pinocchio if Disney hadn't crookedly re-established copyright control over it. By bribing public officials. You remember something? There's a variety of very strange things happen in Pinocchio. But one of the strangest is that Geppetto ends up in a whale. And that's never explained. It's like Geppetto makes Pinocchio. He's the benevolent father and Pinocchio leaves and Geppetto goes and looks for him. And fair enough. And then he ends up in a whale at the bottom of the ocean. And no one just walks out of the theater thinking, you know, what the hell, what's going on here? They think, oh yeah, well, of course he's in a whale. And then of course, Pinocchio goes to the bottom of the abyss like Jonah to find his father who's living in. A gigantic carcass. Right. There's an ancient story the Mesopotamians told called the Enuma Elish. And in the Enuma Elish, the world is constituted by Tiamat, who's a feminine dragon. From her name, Tiamat, comes Tohu Vabohu and Tehom. That possibility that God makes order out of at the beginning of time. She's the feminine dragon that represents God. She's the feminine dragon that represents nature and possibility. And she has a husband, Apsu, who's the patriarchy. Matriarchy and patriarchy, yin and yang. It's the age-old story. They unite and they give rise to the first world. The deities of the first world start pursuing their own aims and they get noisy and prideful. They kill Apsu and they live on his corpse. That's what we're doing. Geppetto is in the corpse of a carcass. Why? Wealth is a carcass. Wealth is a storehouse of value. Wealth can be traded for food. The past is the carcass of a whale. Harvard is a whale carcass. Harvard is a whale carcass inhabited by unconscious people who are living on the storehouse of past value. Right. Right. Right. Absolutely. Without replenishing it. Right. It's the parasite problem, fundamentally. And it is a problem with wealth because the problem with wealth is like this is the problem Abraham has. Abraham has a wealthy father and he doesn't launch his life until he's 70. And the reason for that is because he doesn't have to. He can exist unconsciously in the carcass of his ancestors. Right. That's what we're doing in the West. And we've been building. We've been building these storehouses of value since World War II. We're so rich. And now we have the pathologies of the wealthy. And one of the pathologies of the wealthy is prideful ingratitude. And that's what the universities specialize in. That's what they train their students to have. You know, prideful presumption. And the universities open the door to the non-productive scavengers. Starting in the 1960s. And they took over over a 40-year period. I watched it happen. And. much of what's happening downstream is a consequence of that. And this is an age-old story, like the Mesopotamian story. That's the oldest story we have. It's like 3,500 years old, something like that. And in its oral form, way older. People knew a long time ago that if you are stupid enough to kill the spirit of your fathers, you die. What happens in the Mesopotamian story is the Tiamat, whose chaos itself comes back, just like God in the story of Noah, it's exactly the same idea. She comes back and says, I'm going to take you all out. Well, you brought me here to disagree with you, and I'm struggling here, because I agree with everything you're saying. I'm tricky that way. Well, it's much easier to see as an outsider like me, having come from the Soviet Union, to see a civilization essentially forgetting how it got there. I feel like we're kind of a cargo cult, in a way. Right. But the obvious question then is, how do you put the toothpaste pack in the tube? Which I think is where we are. Now, you're here talking about Christianity being the dream in which we're all embedded. But there is what I call the generation of Dawkins, the children of Dawkins, is what I call my generation. And that conversation became fundamentally about one thing, I think, which is, are the metaphors that you. laid out so beautifully true? That's what that discussion is about. And it's very difficult to convince people like me. You know, if you have to believe that my suit is red in order for everything to turn out correct, you still won't, because it's not red. Right? Does that make sense? Of course, of course, of course. Okay, so. What's your prescription? You had two questions, so I'll address them in order. Okay, so I'm going to tell you the rest of the Mesopotamian myth. Okay. So you know what happens in the Pinocchio story, right? Pinocchio, by the time Pinocchio gets to rescue his father, he's a braying jackass who is enticed into slavery by hedonists. And also by neurotic hedonists, because if you remember the story, the reason he ends up on Pleasure Island is because the criminals convince him that he's too sick and neurotic and victimized to become real. So then he goes to Pleasure Island with all the delinquents, and they throw rocks through the masterpieces of Western civilization, and they turn into braying drunken donkeys while the slavers prepare to sell them to the coal mines. And Pinocchio escapes with some of his voice intact, and he goes to the bottom of the ocean to rescue Geppetto. Okay, so that's the first part of the. cure. You go into the depths. to find your lost father. Into the depths. Now, what's in the depths for Pinocchio? A fire-breathing dragon, right? You remember the whale has fire in it, and when it comes up to the surface, it breathes fire. It's a dragon. It's the dragon that has the treasure. The treasure is not only the father who's rescued, but the discovery of the true pathway that restores Pinocchio, restores his voice, restores the true voice to Pinocchio, and transforms him into what he could be. And that's the courage to confront the unconscious abyss. And that's what the psychoanalysts were calling for, especially Jung, is the courage to confront the unconscious abyss. Auschwitz, the darkness itself. And that's the pathway to the light. There's no difference between that and the idea of the crucifixion. The ultimate confrontation with death and mortality and malevolence, and the revelation of eternal life in consequence. The Mesopotamians. Tiamat reemerges, the dragon of chaos, to destroy everything, because the ungrateful inhabitants of her husband's corpse have enraged the structure of being so profoundly that devastation is the most likely outcome. The inhabitants of Apsu panic and marshal their forces to confront chaos. They send out one hero after another, and they all fail. While that's happening, new beings are born. And one of them is qualitatively different. This is the birth of the hero. This is the god of Mesopotamia, whose name was Marduk. Marduk has eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words. That's the logos, in nascent form. Magic words. Words of truth. Words of truth. And the eyes are the same as the eye of Horus, the Egyptian eye that sees everything. What's the antidote to unconsciousness? Pay attention. What do you pay attention to? Everything you don't want to pay attention to. So Marduk goes out, Marduk tells all the other inhabitants of the dead corpse, he says, "Look, I'll go out and I'll attend to and deal with chaos." Tiamat. The chaos you brought upon yourself with your unconscious presumption. But here's the deal: I'm at the pinnacle. This is the emergence of a kind of monotheism. What's at the pinnacle? Magic truth and vision. And the Mesopotamians figured that out. So how is that concretized? The magic words of truth and the vision that enables you to forthrightly confront chaos and malevolence itself, the darkest elements of possibility, and to make the orderly world as a consequence. And that's exactly what Marduk does. He goes out with a net, he encloses chaos in the net, that's understanding, as a consequence of confrontation. He cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world. And that's the eternal medication for the death of God. It's happened - Mertje Eliade mapped this out in his magisterial works on the history of religion. We think the death of God has happened in 1850. It's happened many times. Repeatedly. It's the same pattern all the time. Which is why the Mesopotamians had it nailed, like, thousands of years ago. And the medicine is always the same. Here's another example. In Numbers, Moses is leading the lost Israelites through the desert. They're a long ways on their journey by this time. They're almost at the promised land. They've been wandering around lost for a long time. And they're still pining for the tyranny, and whining, and irresponsible. They're still slavish. They still wish they had a king. They're whiny and terrible, and they run out of water, and they're not really listening to Moses, but they're starting to die of thirst, and worse. And they're complaining about this bitterly, and God has had enough of them by this time, and he sends poisonous snakes in to bite them. And the meaning of that story is that you might be lost, and things are miserable, and you're irresponsible, and you think it's pretty dismal, and that you get to shake your fist at God. But if you keep being stupid, worse things will happen to you without end. And so, God sends some poisonous snakes. And so the Israelites, that's enough for them. The thirst and the lostness is enough. The snakes are too much. They go to Moses with some degree of humility, and they say, "Do you want to ask? We hear you've got a pipeline to God. Do you want to ask him to call off the snakes?" And Moses says, "I'm not very happy with you people, and I'd just as soon leave you, like, die and be poisoned in the desert, but I'll see what I can do." So he goes and has a chat with God. And God says, "Yeah, I don't think I'll call off the snakes. But what I'll do instead is, I'm going to ask you to do something. I want you to cast a bronze serpent. Take all the bronze that you have and make a serpent out of it, and put it on a stake, and like, make a statue out of it, and put it somewhere where the Israelites can all see it. And if they go and actually look at it, then they'll be immune from the poison." Okay. So that symbol, that stake with the snake around it, that's the same symbol that Asclepius, who's the Greek god of healing, that's the same symbol that represents Asclepius. It's the same symbol that your physicians use to signify their operation. And there's a principle there, which is that a little poison voluntarily incorporated will increase your resilience. That's what a vaccine does when liars haven't made them. So. So the Israelites go look at the snake on the bronze staff, which is also Moses' staff, by the way, which is also the staff that transforms itself into serpents, and that transforms itself into the serpent that eats all the serpents of the Pharaoh's magicians. All of that that's symbolically locked together. And what's the idea? Confront what you're terrified by that poisons you and prevail. In the Gospels, Christ says to his followers that unless he's lifted up like the serpent in the desert, that men will be redeemed if he is lifted up like the serpent in the desert. That's what Christianity was. And so this is a way of thinking about it. The serpent on the stake is a symbol of what's dangerous and poisonous. And what's dangerous and poisonous is an example of the danger and poison of life. The danger of life is the brute reality of mortality, our vulnerability, our naked vulnerability, and the poison is malevolence. And so a serpent is threat and poison. You're to confront threat and poison. The crucifix is a meta serpent. It's everything about life that's catastrophic and everything about life that's poisonous in one symbol. And the West realized in this dreamlike fashion that we're to look upon that, we're to look upon the world, we're to imitate the pattern of that confrontation, which is a sacrificial pattern, and we're to regard that as the center of the community, which is why the cross is at the center of the church, and the church is at the center of the town, and the town is at the center of the state. It's all predicated on the idea of the ultimate sacrificial offering of voluntary acceptance of the mortal and poisonous preconditions of life, right? And that's the cure. That's the cure. And that's always been the case, right? So I want to bring a couple of audience questions in while we have time. And actually, on this very point about Richard Dawkins and whether cultural Christianity, quote-unquote, can be the solution. Can it? Can you have practice without belief? We were at, Constantine and I were in a conference in London, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, ARC, which we put together as a distributed responsibility alternative to the global internationalists, the doomsaying prophets of the future, who offer tyranny as a offering to the gods of nature and as false security. And Ayaan Hirsi Ali, came to the conference, and she spoke very eloquently about her recent conversion to Christianity from Islam, which has made her a marked woman yet again. She's a very brave woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And she said, a flower can live for a time when you cut it off from its roots, but only for a time. We're living on borrowed time. It's the same idea with regard to the corpse, let's say, of Apsu, or the whale carcass. There's a spirit that gives rise to that plenitude, right? And it is something like the spirit of communal self-sacrifice. It's something like that. Now, okay, so that's one story. Now, Douglas Murray said something interesting to me, too, that was very surprising, because Murray has come to the cultural Christian conclusion, despite also being a follower of Dawkins, like Ayaan was. He said, I realized something. If you take the magic and the miracles away, Christianity degenerates into wokeism. And so, now, it's not like I understand that. I'm not claiming that. But it has something to do with this issue of the dream. It's like the narrative of our culture has to mediate between us and the infinite. And that means it has to shade into the miraculous. Now, you might say, well, what does that mean in reality? Is that just a metaphor? Which is kind of the question you asked earlier. You're suit isn't red, it's green. And how can we predicate our culture on a lie? Well, I hashed this out with Jonathan Paggio, and he said something which I thought was brilliant. He said, look, if the pattern that you're identifying is that deep, and it's crucial to the maintenance of the integration of the psyche and of culture itself, how can it not actually be reflective of the structure of reality itself? And, you know, I've had a proclivity to view the mythological stories, let's say, as symbolic. And that's a valid reading. But the question that Paggio posed is a very trenchant question. It's like, at what point is something so highly functional and universally applicable that you have to allow that even though you don't understand it, it's reflective of the deepest structure of reality itself? And I'll put a twist on that. I tried to get Richard Dawkins to talk to me for a couple of years. Now, he eventually did. And we're going to talk again publicly, I hope. We're arranging that at the moment. The first thing he said, he's a very disagreeable guy, like very educated Englishmen. Those are dangerous people, man. They'll cut you. into ribbons politely, and be quite gleeful about it. And they're very good at it. Better than anyone else in the world, I would say. And he, first of all, he said, I don't think I'd have enough patience to talk to you. You've said a lot of preposterous things. And I don't know why the hell you want to talk to me anyways. But maybe it has something to do with this. And he sent me a paper that he wrote like 30 years ago. And I thought, you know exactly why I want to talk to you. So he sent me this paper where he made the claim that, and it was a paper I'd read, and that it actually had some influence on me, that a living organism has to be a microcosm of its environment. So what that means, for example, imagine an alien scientist came to Earth and took a bird up to its lab, and took the bird apart. Well, what could it learn about the Earth? Well, it could learn the chemical makeup of the atmosphere by studying the bird's blood. It could derive a tremendous amount of knowledge about the whole history of life on Earth by analyzing the DNA. It could infer the density of the atmosphere by the ratio of the area of the bird's wings to the mass of the bird. It would know something about the temperature that the Earth, that characterizes the Earth, and could infer something about the Sun. It would be able to derive knowledge of the gravitational field. The bird is a model of its environment, and When Hawkins went further, he said, "No animal that isn't a model of its environment can survive. We're a microcosm. A creature is a microcosm of its environment." That's a medieval conception of the relationship between man and God. It's like, we're a microcosm of the cosmic structure. And at the highest level of organization, the highest level of human organization, we're a personality. Do we live in relationship to the spirit of the cosmos? That's the biblical claim. I think it's correct. I think reality itself is founded on sacrifice. Do I know what that means? Not completely. I do understand what it means that the integrated psyche and the community are founded on sacrifice. I think I can make that argument completely coherently. When you mature, you give up your hedonistic short-term whim for the future. That's the sacrifice. When you become communal, you give up your self-centeredness for others. And so the community and this integrity of the spirit are predicated on complex sacrifice. What does that mean about reality? The answer to that is, it depends on what you mean by reality. Right? See, most people who say, "Is the religious worldview true?" assume axiomatically that the rationalist, rationalist, empiricist, materialist worldview is true. See, I don't think it's true. I think you can't help but bring the nature of reality itself into question when you ask that question. This is why I don't like people asking me if I believe in God. It's like, not on your terms. We don't mean the same thing. I mean something in my belief, such as it is, that's radically different. So, there's no difference between asking the question, "Is the religious worldview true?" and, "Is the religious worldview true?" And asking the question, "Is the religious real?" and asking the question, "Well, what do you mean by a reality that's not religious?" So, they're equally mysterious. And I would say a reality that's not religious can't maintain itself. It can't. It's missing something crucial. It's missing meaning. That's a problem. It's like, not only is it a problem, it's possible that it's the problem. This is why Christ says you can't live by bread alone. And that's part of the problem with the technological enlightenment. It's like, here's all the bread you need. Yeah? For what? What? For what? To pursue my hedonistic whim? Like, for what? this is a crucial question, people in abundance will commit suicide without an answer to that question right so the technological enterprise is insufficient that doesn't mean it's unnecessary or unworthy it just means that it has to be put in its proper place in its proper position in the hierarchy that's how it looks to me i have so many questions but we'll have to save them for next time because we're together for a few shows uh i want to ask you we're wrestling some very difficult questions tonight i want to finish maybe with the most difficult one this is from jonas who says my wife and i took your personality test i'm 0.1 neuroticism she's 99 any advice on navigating this difference in personality well the first thing i would say as a clinician is that i would find out if your if your wife is suffering from an anxiety disorder or depression like i would first of all find out if there's something physical that's troubling her because that's a high enough level so neuroticism is sensitivity to negative emotion right there's five cardinal personality dimensions sensitivity to positive emotion that's extroversion sensitivity to negative emotion that's neuroticism agreeableness which is really a maternal care dimension it's people orientation rather than thing orientation and i think that's a really good question and i think that's a really good orientation as well um agreeable people are empathetic and compassionate and disagreeable people are blunt and competitive and there's quite a sex difference there by the way conscientiousness is dutifulness and orderliness and industriousness and openness is breadth of idea and aesthetic interest it's creativity that's a good way of thinking about it if you're at the 99th percentile for neuroticism you're more sensitive to negative emotion than 99 people out of 100 that's sensitive enough to raise the question are you depressed or do you have an anxiety disorder and that raises the question first is are you ill in some way because people suffer from depression and anxiety for all sorts of reasons and some of them are linked to behavior and attitude but a lot of them are linked to behavior and attitude but a lot of them are linked to physical health and so especially if your wife has a proclivity for depression which means she becomes hopeless that's the absence of positive emotion she suffers a surfite of pain and anxiety you might want to see if something can be done about that if it's merely a matter of variability and temperament i would say the way that you help people who are very sensitive to negative emotion become more resilient is to help them establish an aim because that stabilizes them so she could do my future authoring program at selfauthoring.com that helps people establish an aim and then once she decides her aim there will be things that get in her way that she's afraid of that'll be the negative emotion and you want to work out routines to have her practice exposing yourself to the things she's afraid of that's what you do too if you have a timid child you know so maybe you take a timid child to the playground and they want to hover around your feet because they're afraid to go make friends you say well look kid today we'll just go to the playground and you can watch the other kids tomorrow we'll go to the 20 feet away and you can you can just watch from there and The day after that you can do this progressively you go and stand near the kids and the day after that you go say hello to one kid You know when you with someone who's very sensitive to negative emotion you can find the border of their fear and Then you want them to put you want them to put themselves voluntarily on the border of their fear until they're habituated until they Understand that nothing terrible is going to happen, and then you want them to take a step forward, and if you do that carefully you can take anyone who's very afraid of virtually anything and you can Make them more robust, and it's it's the clinical application of the Marduk principle fundamentally is find out what the person's afraid of Break it into manageable challenges Expose them to the manageable challenge one so you could ask your wife Is there Something that you'd really want to do that you're afraid of doing and haven't done because of the fear You know list ten things like that Okay now list them in order of fear With number one being the thing I'm most afraid of a number ten being the thing. I'm least afraid of okay now take number ten and break that into steps and then have her take the steps and just do that as a Routine as a practice this is what? You can do to like in your own life if you're afraid of things It's like we'll cut the thing you're afraid of down to size how much do you cut it down until you're willing to advance? That's the rule you just break it down until you'll do it wherever that is no matter how pathetic that is Let's say you have to accept that and if you do that You'll face it you'll master it and then you can take on the next task and people get it's exactly what God tells us The Israelites to do in the deserts like you look at what? Frightens you and throws you into chaos you look at it voluntarily every school of clinical therapeutic endeavor since the dawn of the 20th century has converged on the understanding that voluntary exposure to what Stops you as you move forward is curative So you can use that as a treatment for negative emotion. It's well documented among timid children This is why it's so dangerous to have an overprotective parent Because the overprotective parent stops the child from transforming you have to say Out to the edge there kid you know and I can only get within five feet It's okay five feet good get four and a half feet away then get three feet away, right? dance on the edge of the abyss and that's a terrible thing for a mother to tell her child to do but all the good mothers do that Even with their terrified children, it's even more important for them you know and there's a kind of harshness about that, but It's a harshness that prepares them to not die when they leave so So that's the answer to that question There you go, I thought that was going to be a light-hearted question Jordan what a pleasure has been tonight I just thought I would maybe Emphasize one thing that you said before we go before we bring Kelly's heroes back on to send us off with a bang which is We've had this conversation about religion and God and so on But actually I think irrespective of where people are on those issues two of the most powerful things that I thought you said tonight was a reminder that a Perception is projection What we see is a function of what we project into the world what we expect to see and the second one is we wake Up every day with the opportunity to reorder the world and I thought that's a very powerful couple of things to take away Thank you, sir. Good to have you aboard man. Thank you. All right, everyone Thank you very much It's a pleasure talking to you all much appreciated I Love your city, by the way, good work. Yep All right So we'll bring the band back on and they'll take you out rocking Good night, everybody Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club saving up to 25% off grocery store prices beef jerky Microwave meals laundry pods even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids and with BJ's gas she gets there for less They call me the road warrior. This is your home road warrior mom home of the save join for just $20 at BJ's comm slash Mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only BJ's home of the save Show button here football is finally back and prize picks is going crazy with the deals to start the season giving out promos Every day in September on prize picks you can make all the picks you want all in the same app and now prize picks is available Nationwide, so what are you waiting for lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks what you want? Download the app today and use code Spotify to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup prize picks run your game Hi there. I am fully charged and here to tell you Toy Story 5 is now on Disney Plus It's been too long cowboy What a buzz and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch You said it Jesse So save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home And the best part it's perfect for the whole family Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5 now streaming on Disney Plus rated PG We'll be right back.