https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=C_GngILWNr8
Good evening and happy Sunday, all four of you. Hope that you’re all doing well and you tuned in recently. You would have seen this coming soon. Father Eric has something nice to say about an article in America magazine. For those of you who don’t know, America magazine is a Jesuit publication. It’s got a bit of a reputation for representing the progressive wing of the Catholic Church in America. And so I don’t often read it, but there is a rather interesting, what is it, a news aggregate called NewAdvent.org. And I saw the author before I saw the place of publication. I know that the author had published some insightful pieces before. And so that’s how I ended up reading something from America magazine. The title of the article is, Is the Synod Ignoring the Concerns of Most Catholics in the Pews? The answer is yes. But anyway, and this particular line right here really struck me. Increasingly, I find Catholics both lapsed to practicing listening to Joel Olsteen, Reverend Paula White and other evangelical personalities. As a friend of mine noted, Joel Olsteen will tell you that God does care that you can’t pay your mortgage, that your child is doing drugs, that your spouse is cheating on you, that God really cares about your sufferings. By contrast, I rarely hear in a Catholic comely that God cares about the details of my life. And I thought, wow, that’s interesting. That’s really interesting. I don’t have any attraction whatsoever to Joel Olsteen, Paula White, those sorts of characters. I don’t get the appeal. But if that is, let’s say, the first time you hear that, the first time you hear that the creator of the universe is actually concerned about the details of your life, I could see why you would want to be buying on to that, why you would want that to be a part of your life. And it’s actually, it’s actually, I just realized it like this morning, it’s astonishingly close to the truth. Because by the time, let’s say that you can’t pay your mortgage, your child is doing drugs, your spouse is cheating on you, that you’ve faced some kind of catastrophe, by the time you’ve gotten into the middle of that, you are already confronting the cross. You are already bearing the cross, just like Jesus promised that you would. But I think where they go wrong, where these prosperity gospel teachers are wrong, is in saying that God’s love for you manifests by just taking these crosses away, and that what you have to do is increase your faith by claiming God’s love, God’s faith, claiming the promises that you’ve made. And that’s where they go wrong. And so it’s Joel Olsteen and the prosperity evangelists, they won’t have you drink the whole chalice of suffering. They’ll have you stop halfway. They won’t drink it down to the dregs. But it’s only when you go all the way down, when you go all the way down with Christ to the bottom, that the resurrection can actually manifest itself. And so I just found this an interesting insight. The power of the prosperity gospel is that it acknowledges the cross, but tells you to put it down early. I wish that Pia de Soleni would come hear me preach because I feel like I do nothing but preach on the cross sometimes. But honestly, it comes up all over the place and I can’t stop reading it. So that’s what I see in Scripture and that is what I tend to preach on. So the prosperity gospel acknowledges the cross, and that’s good, but it tells you to put it down early. That’s not so good. So, anyway, that’s what I have. I have something nice to say about an article from the National Catholic Reporter. I have lots of nice things to say about Ted. How are you doing? Oh my goodness, Father. That was great. I love what you were saying. You know, wow, yeah, that was just good. That was really great. It was actually, I mean, there’s a bunch of personal stuff that that was like timely within like three hours of timely that I’m not going to share on the internet. But I saw really appreciated that. But also, like, look, having the humility to recognize that someone like Joel Osteen, who tends to be just this like punching bag, is like that there’s something going on there. Because otherwise, nobody would listen to him. Yeah, yes. This is our one of my favorite Peterson moments is when he’s like, you know, everyone turns up the nose at Harry Potter, because they think there’s nothing there and he’s like, Why is it that like, you know, every child is just like fascinated by Harry Potter? Like, clearly something is going on there. It’s like, does that mean it’s good? Not necessarily. Does that mean there’s something true being said? I mean, almost certainly. Certainly. Almost certainly. And so, look, the way the way I think about I think one way you could say talk about that is what Joel Osteen is saying and those other prosperity gospel preachers are saying is they’re, they’re, they’re preaching shalom. They’re preaching life, right? Life and life abundant. They’re just not raising it to the right level. Right? They just need to go up another level or two. Because if you go and this is this is a lot of what Peugeot was getting at at the Chino conference, actually, which religious snobbery is real. And this is why St. Augustine says that humility is the gateway to all the virtues, which I’ve been on that train for months now and I have no intention of getting off of it. But, um, right, it’s like, though, what’s the what’s okay, so we want life. We do we want life. What’s, what’s the place that we could get to where when your mortgage isn’t paid and your kids are doing drugs and your wife is cheating on you, you still or you’re being dragged through the streets because you’re being cheated on. Because that is like a category of human experience. What’s what’s what’s the place that you need to be in where you can still have life in that. So I really like that, Father, I think because this notion of well, okay, so so this this really ties in with the stuff that I was talking about with Nate and Sherry on Dante yesterday, which is that, you know, I think that’s the thing about this. Right. They’re saying, look, like, you should have a life that is like, that is full of goodness and abundance and, you know, you know, you know, you’re not going to be able to do anything about it. You’re not going to be able to do anything about it. You’re not going to be able to do anything about it. And I think that’s what they’re saying. I think, again, it’s just all too low of a level. Right. I mean, Andrew, the comments says Joel’s thing told me that God wants me to be rich. He does. He does. It’s the kind of richness that doesn’t that doesn’t fade. It’s actually material riches are very they’re transient and dangerous. And so but they’re still good material riches are still a good they’re just transient and dangerous goods. But there are there’s eternal goods that you can turn to that no one can turn to. Yeah. So I want to respond to something that Chad says here. I think they are often seemingly too afraid to have a simple conversation with someone suffering in abundance. They can’t bear to sit with them. And no joke. That was my number one fear in seminary. And I went through my entire time in seminary not knowing how I would do it. And I was a deacon. I was on the trough to ordination and I was doing something that I had done so many things and I was doing something that I found difficult to do. that when I was in seminary, my number one fear was, how do I deal with somebody who’s suffering? And I went through my entire time in seminary not knowing how I would do it. And I was a deacon, I was on the trath to ordination, and we get a pastoral counseling class and they talk about motivational interviewing, open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections and summarizing. Basically just a framework and maybe even a technique for listening to somebody really well and showing them that you’re paying attention to them. And I was like, oh geez, I can do that. And when I’ve been with somebody who’s suffering, I just ask them questions and let them do all the talking. And not only do they walk away, as far as I can tell, comforted and strengthened by that, but I find it actually moves me too. It’s a transformative experience for me too, where I’m actually able to connect with somebody on a real intimate level, sometimes very quickly. So yeah, I guess Joel Olstein just needs to get a pastoral counseling class at the St. Paul Seminary with Mr. Dan Stockman, Masters in Social Work. Because that was really helpful for me, right? There may be a few other steps in the process, Father. Sure, right, because you have to need Deacon Najarian to come up and explain Colossians 1.24 to you. Yeah, Mark, he’s saying that we’re dealing with a flat world, materialism is flattening, compression and reduction. So like, if you’re a materialist, then the only kind of life there is, is life on this earth. So obviously that’s where God’s gonna be blessing you. So Mark, you’re gonna love this in Purgatorio, the people who paid too much attention to earthly matters, like of wealth. So all the punishments in hell are related to the sin. In Purgatory, all the penance, all the Purgatorial suffering is also related to, let’s say, the thing that kept someone from loving God as much as they could have. And so these men, the souls of these men and women, they are, they’re stakes to the ground face down, right? Their arms are tied out and they’re stakes so that they can only look at the ground because they can’t look up at that and they can’t look up at heaven. And so you’re right, this notion of like flat worldview, like they’re literally like, their worldview is compressed to two dimensions because they didn’t look up to spiritual things. They were just concerned with material matters. And so what they get is they don’t get to look up at heaven. They don’t get to look up into the vast volume of reality, right? Because reality is volumetric rather than flat. And so- They just need to look at the dirt because that’s where all of their loves are going to end up someday. Yes. Gonna end up just being dirt. Yes. And you know, that’s the brilliant thing about the Purgatorio is, you know, the penances that people are assigned are designed to elicit desire for heavenly things. Yes, that’s so right. There’s this beautiful cry that Dante, I think Dante makes where he’s just, he’s saying like, you know, he turns from then to the reader and it’s like, you know, are we all gonna be worms that we’re just concerned with the dirt? Or are we gonna look up at the heavens and be entranced by the beauty that the creator has spun out for us? Yeah, I love that, Father. That’s so true, right? Cause you’ve got all of these, you know, they’re all about, there’s this longing, right? There’s this, right, like the proud, they’re carrying these stones on their back because they, well, the Rilke poem that Sherry read in the Dante conversation yesterday, I’ve been going over and over and over. There’s this one particularly wonderful line from it where he says, if you can give me a second, I’ll read it. And what’s wonderful is this, is Sherry’s own translation for the German. She writes this other, like the Poetry Foundation one and then read hers and was like, oh, Sherry, you did a great job translating this from German. Yeah, it says, I am too small in the world and yet not small enough to be in front of you like a thing, dark and clever. The poem is a prayer, but it’s, I am too small in the world and yet not small enough. And that’s, I mean, that’s what the image of the prideful is, right? That they are, they’re too small to carry the world, but they’re not small enough to realize that they shouldn’t. And so it’s like, cause when you’re proud, right? Aquinas would say that it is a defect in your appetites, right? That you are self satisfied, that everything that you have right here is enough. And so you don’t actually have the desire to go out of yourself, right? Because if you have to go out of yourself for something, that means that out there, there’s something that you don’t have already. And how can that be possible? Because everything I need is actually right here already. Yeah. And so that’s actually, that’s a great burden to have to carry the universe on your shoulders like that, of having to be entirely self-sufficient. So it’s like, okay, you want that burden, you’ll have it. And then you just have to walk around Mount Purgatory with that weight on your back until you want it gone badly enough. Oh, it’s so cool. And Dante does this with every single layer of it. So let’s just walk up Mount Purgatory, right? Cause we’re all gonna have to do it anyway. You get to the level of the envious, right? The envious looked at beautiful things with their eyes and they didn’t look at what they should have desired the most. And so their eyes are sewn shut with iron thread. Sewn shut. Yeah, right. Because, and what’s so cool too is even though they’re always looking, actually they’re blind, right? Right. And so now here’s the manifestation of their spiritual state, right? And so they have to have their eyes shut until they want to see God badly enough. And then once they actually want to see God badly enough, boom, you get your eyes open, right? You get to the Terrence of the wrathful, right? We’ve all been angry before, right? Are you at your smartest when you’re angry? That’s why you shouldn’t discipline your children when you’re angry, cause you’re not gonna make a good decision under those circumstances. Yeah. That’s like, okay, you’re gonna be blinded in fog. Yeah. Loud, glamorous fog. Smoke, it’s worse. Until you want your head to be cleared enough. It’s worse than that, it’s smoke. It like gets in your nostrils and in your eyes. And like, I mean, this is, Dante is so brilliant, right? Cause when you’re wrathful, you see red and smoke makes your eyes red. That little passage right there, cause he kind of weaves in and out of just exactly how allegorical he is. But Virgil says, like, close your eyes and hold on to me. Right, Virgil is human reason. He was like, close your eyes. Don’t look at the things that might make you angry and hold on to me. And the only way to walk is on this narrow pathway where we’ve got the smoke on one side and the drop off, the sheer drop off on the other. And it’s reason, it’s a reason. It’s his, he submits himself to reason, right? That’s what’s so cool. It’s the humility to submit to reason out of your anger. He’s getting small enough. He’s getting small enough to walk that line. And so when you want that smoke cleared out badly enough, then you can go up the level. Then you get to the ring of sloth, right? People who took rest in the long places. What do they have to do? They have to run around and around and around and around until they finally want to rest in that one who can provide the perfect rest. They go up another level. That’s greed. That’s greed. Is greed the ones who are tied down? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, greed is the ones that are staked down. And you go up to gluttony. They have to sit there and fast with a beautiful fruit in front of them until they’re hungry for the real. And the fountain, the fountain that always evaporates right before it gets to them. Yeah. You can’t drink it. Until they finally desire God enough to go up to the ring of lust. And then they just have to burn until they burn with passion until they finally want what’s really good for them. And now we’ve come to the garden of paradise Bahá’u’lláh, it’s Mark Lefebvre. Yeah. Man, I’m not living up to that. But the snake, the dragon is in the garden. So there you go. There’s a dragon in the garden. And he loses his legs and becomes a snake because he does a bad thing maybe. We don’t know if it’s a dragon. But the thing that struck me there that I wanted to pipe in on was this idea that you said that, I mean, submit to reason, okay. Submit to anything outside yourself. I mean, that’s part of the reason why rationality as such or reason as such is important, right? Because that’s a crack open into humility. And even in the scientific worldview, it’s like, well, look, they’re still submitting to something outside themselves, just something that they think is totally within their control. And I think that’s the great problem with, I’ll say it, even Peterson, but especially guys like Vervecky or Sam Harris or any of these guys, their general thesis, if you listen really carefully to what they’re saying, and you can, it takes some work. But if you listen to what they’re saying, their essential thesis is, I see objective material reality better than you. And if you saw it as well as I did, you’d agree with me. And then they don’t have to use force to have power. They don’t have to use coercion or charisma or convincing or anything, right? They just say, look, man, if you saw it this way, you’d agree with me, which is ridiculously false on so many levels. But that’s what they’re doing. That’s their trick. Well, okay, Mark, I wanna push back on that a little bit because I want you to hone that idea down a little bit more because in some sense, that’s what any teacher comes to you and says, right? To some degree, they say, look, I wanna hear what you’re saying because it’s like, look, when I say, Mark, I disagree with you, it’s because I think that I see reality more clearly than you do in this area. Now, you might be saying that there’s, that it’s the absence of dialogue there, but it strikes me that that’s like, I’m gonna take two steps back and you’ll see where I’m coming at this. So you can imagine that, some people see me as opinionated and that’s fine, but there’s this weird notion that like, that like the things that I say, it’s just because I like, I just wanna throw out what Ted says. It’s like, well, no, I mean, like, I think I’m right because like I thought about it. And now that doesn’t mean there’s degrees of certainty in these things, but it’s not like, generally, I only say things because I think they’re true. That’s what I’m trying to get at. I only say things because I think they’re true. And so like, I expect them to be true or I hope that I’m right. And so I, do you see how that, when you put it that way, it sounds very similar to what you’re saying about these guys. I’m just trying to untangle that distinction or maybe I’m wrong about myself. No, I think, well, I think you’re wrong about yourself. I think you’re not giving yourself enough credit. I think, you know, to some extent, although you’re probably the least offender among them in the world, and I’m not being hyperbolic, you’re stuck in a binary there. And the binary is the following, right? Cause I was stuck in this binary for a while too. I was like, look, you know, I used to tell people, it’s a trick, it’s an easy trick. If you only talk about the things you know really well, you’ll seem really smart. If you never talk about something, you’ll never see the truth. Oh, sure, okay, okay. But, but that’s not true of you or I, because we have this other mode of exploration. And, you know, I’d like to say like, I knew this all along, but like I didn’t recognize it for years, right? It’s only, and it’s only within the past, we’ll say seven, eight years that I’ve been able to articulate it. I read someone like, like Taleb. So I read Nassim Taleb and I go, wow, this guy has a lot of the thoughts and has noticed a lot of things in the world that I also noticed that I’ve never heard anybody else say. And then I watched Peterson, and the same thing happens over again. Peterson, there’s a couple of things Peterson said I never heard anybody else say ever that, well, other than one other person, little things that aren’t so little like, hey, you know, there’s a correlation between the flattening of the salaries in the United States and when women got into the workforce. Nobody ever talked about that, but that happened in the seventies, but it’s right in the numbers, by the way. Like me, I noticed that. And I noticed it honestly, because my mother pointed it out to me years ago, but it’s true. Well, but then Peterson is the only other person I’d ever heard say that. And I’m sure he’s not the only person that said that, but, you know, and Taleb did a lot of the same thing. Just talks about like, you know, we calculate risk, but when you start thinking about how to articulate what that is, it’s like, okay, there’s people you find agreement with, there’s also modes of exploration. And a lot of this is, hey, I’m seeing this from my perspective. I wonder what you think about this, which is a phrase you use all the time, Ted, right? And so you’re not being certain, right? You’re being certain in your perspective, and you’re saying, hey, man, this is what I see, but you know what? I bet you see something different, so why don’t you tell me? And the problem for us is we often just agree and so it’s no fun. But when we do that with other people, sometimes they come up with stuff that we didn’t see. Well, Mark, if you want to hear me disagreeing with people, you should listen to Divine Comedy, because Sherry and Nate were on the, they were on the Universal Salvation Train. And as the one Orthodox Catholic in the room, I was really trying to hold him down a little bit. I heard, I heard. Michelle told me, oh, this is what happened. And I’m like, what? Ted was where? With Nate, really? And Sherry, oh, that must have been, and he says, you have to listen to it. I’m like, all right, I’m on it, because that’s gonna be fascinating. It was a lot of fun. It was, you know, and what’s really cool too. Okay, well, Mark, I love your point then, because look, yeah, well, because that, I mean, I think that that is something like humility, because humility isn’t just the gateway to the moral virtues. I think it’s also the gateway to the intellectual virtues. And what’s fun is, right, so, okay, so here’s a great example of this, right? So we go to Canto IV in the Inferno, it’s in limbo. And Nate and Sherry, like, they’re ready to see stuff about, let’s see, hope for the salvation of the damned. And I’m not, like, that’s not what I’m primed to look for at all. And so they notice this discussion about baptism. There’s like particular mention of baptism. And what happened is, is when they brought that up, there’s this weird little throwaway line. When they walk into the castle where all the great people from the pagan classical era are, there’s a river and then there’s the castle gates. And Dante says, and we walked over the river like it was dry ground. And I thought, and I don’t, I mean, how many times have I read that? 15 times probably, because I read the first part of the Inferno and then drop it in, and sometimes I make it all the way through the comedy. But I thought I’d never gotten it. And then all of a sudden I thought, oh my goodness, it’s because they’re not baptized. They can’t pass through the river because then they’d be baptized. You walk over it. And then I started thinking about it and I realized in the Inferno, there’s four river crossings. Dante never goes in the water. He wakes up, he faints on one side and wakes up on the other. That’s one of them. The second one is he walks over on dry land, like it’s dry land. The third one, he gets ferried over by a boat. And the fourth one, he gets carried, it’s the river of blood of the wrathful and he gets carried over on the back of a centaur. No baptism. When he gets to the top of Mount Purgatory, he walks through two rivers, right? In the water. And I was like, oh my goodness, it all makes sense. This is so wild. And it’s like, how many, and so, so to your point, right? I’m coming at this with Nathan Sherry. I obviously don’t share their, I don’t share their perspective on this, but because I engage with them in that way, all of a sudden it just like unlocked this whole structural thing for me. Right. But there’s two things there. One is the willingness to explore and to ask other people like, hey, what do you think? But the other one, and I think the more important one and the one that gets us in particular, you and I, in the most trouble, is being willing to state your current position. Like, look, I’m willing to tell you where I stand. I’m very sorry if that upsets you, but hey, I think it’s massively unfair to people. Not to, like not telling people things is a crime. It’s a crime that was done to me my whole life. Like, I mean, but, you know, little funny story. So it’s on the Discord in the early days on the Awakening from the Meeting Crisis server and on BOM and that stuff. And one day, the semi Joe, people who know will know the semi Joe. Semi Joe comes to you and says, Mark, Mark, your profile picture. Because I did half camera and half off camera stuff. Your profile picture, you look like an old lady. I’m like, what? And he’s like, well, yeah. And everyone’s kind of talking about it, but no one talks, and it’s been months, months, Ted, months. And I was like, look, it’s a picture. I had just gotten back from Hawaii. I had a fantastic time in Hawaii, blew a ton of money, it was a great time. And it was me in a hat, in a big sun hat, you know, I’m a big, I’m a freaking Hawaii dude. Like, what do you think I’m gonna wear? An Hawaiian shirt. And the profile picture was shrunk down and probably derezzed. I don’t know, I don’t like the software, but it shrunk down. So you couldn’t really tell that it wasn’t in Hawaii. None of these bastards had the nuts to tell me this. None of them, none of them. And anytime, to this day, it doesn’t matter what server I’m on. The number of times when my audio is bad that somebody just tells me, oh, we can’t hear you, or whatever, is like vanishingly small. I wanna know these things, Dan. I think it’s unfair to tell, not to tell people where you stand because they don’t know how to approach you correctly. Yes, blows from, there’s all these proverbs in the book of Proverbs about how like, don’t trust hugs from an enemy, but blows from a friend you can trust. And there’s this really interesting, my wife, when she was in Bible school, there’s one of her friends there. He was the same, so he was Ukrainian, and he was maybe five years older than most of the students. But he just had that Slavic bluntness. Everyone loved him because they would tell, he would say exactly what he thought, he wasn’t being mean. Like, not the, I’m just being honest. No, like, he actually was like, I think it’s a really bad idea that you’re talking to that person in that way. And it’s like, you’d think, oh, no one wants to talk to him. No, no, no, like flies to vinegar, which is funny because everyone says you’re attracted more flies with honey than vinegar, and that’s actually completely wrong. They all go to the vinegar, and it’s like, yeah. Well, it’s the honesty that people are attracted to because people like truth. Like at the end of the day, right now, now when the truth doesn’t agree with you, you can choose to get upset, but that just means you’re a rebel who wants the world to be what it is in your head, and doesn’t wanna learn. Because you’re not humble. Because you’re not humble. Hey, Andrew, which Andrew are you? Do I know you? New Andrew. New Andrew. I don’t know, there’s… I think I was the first Andrew on the Discord, but there’ve been so many since that no one, I can’t keep track of them. I don’t know who most are. I don’t know who most are. I can tell you that, and you’re not Andrew K either. So we gotta assign you an alphanumeric code so we can keep you straight. You need to change your name, dude, sorry. There’s no, yeah. B? Andrew B, yeah. This one, yeah, I guess. Oh, you would be, would you be this guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Andrew the first. So you’re in, sorry, I’ve seen you on the Bridges of Meeting. You’re in South Korea, right? Yes, yes. Okay. How’s life in South Korea? Ah, it’s not so bad, I guess. Still, I’m still here for a while. Okay. Cool. And so? We’ll see how long it lasts. Yeah. You know, my dad was actually deployed to South Korea a fair bit, and he started hanging out with this Polish missionary priest, and this Polish missionary priest was super hardcore. He had like a very restricted diet, he spent a lot of time in prayer, and my dad was, we’ll say, spiritually immature at that time. And Father Paul would just say to him, “‘Shut up, my brother, you are stupid.‘” Or something like that. You know, in such a way that they knew it was, but it was just like, “‘Yeah, kid, you don’t know what’s going on.‘” This was like 20 years ago. For Mark, you know, for Mark. Yeah, my dad loved him, my dad loved him. They were doing all sorts of stuff together. He started taking his faith a lot more seriously. Things were going well, so. Well, I hang out with an Italian priest every Sunday, so. It’s a very international place. I think kids love that too. I think kids feel really insecure until you tell them, until you tell them like, “‘Hey man, you can’t do that.‘” Like, we don’t do that kind of thing around here. They need boundaries, people need boundaries. Otherwise, they go completely insane. And I was thinking about this while mowing. Yes, I mowed today, it’s very interesting. I was thinking about this while mowing. It’s like, some people will reject their father for whatever reason, right? They’re falling out, it doesn’t really matter, right? But then it’s Papa Peterson for them. And they’re like, well, how interesting. And they like that, right? Because they’re getting something that they know they should have gotten, right? From father, and they’ve transported it to another person to get around whatever problem they’re having with their actual father, usually, right? And the other, so that was a, that was a theme I’ve been sort of circling. The other theme I’ve been circling around that you guys kind of covered, which is this morphing of evangelicals into this more sneaky form. And I think that’s a very interesting theme that I think serves anything. Like, I think you’re better off being upfront with people and bumping up against them, but also, you know, look, it’s important to know that there’s men and women and that they’re different. Like, men are not large women, and women are not tiny men, as Sally Jo would say. Listen, Mark, you’re not gonna hear much argument on the, I’m a steep slope guy at heart, like every day, so. I would never have known if you hadn’t mentioned it. I know, we’re all surprised here. So I wanna ask about, I wanted to jump in a few minutes ago, but I didn’t get to. You were talking about the different levels in Dante’s Inferno, and these things people wanted in life, and it didn’t serve them well, and so now they’re playing out this penance for that. And I’m interested in how do we cultivate our wants? And one big one that I’ve really found on, like, you are the equivalent of people you hang out with. So that’s an easy one. That’s one that I can grab hold of. Oh, okay, yeah, if you are hanging out with people and they all wear blue sneakers, sooner or later, you’re gonna want some frickin’ blue sneakers, and so, or maybe, hey, maybe the blue sneaker people got it together and go get some blue sneakers, be part of that club. But, so that’s one way I’ve seen, but when it comes to those more subtle humors, and like, when it comes to envy, when it comes to success in life, when it comes to actually pursuing God’s will in your life, but not knowing what that looks like at all, how do you cultivate your wants? And that was something that interested me. Yeah, so it depends on what kind of person you are. There are some people that actually find fasting easy. It’s not that big a deal for them to, let’s say, go a day without eating, right? But I’m not actually interested in fasting. I’m interested in, I want to want to eat. Yeah. It’s not about succeeding at it. That’s not the part that I’m interested in, because I actually think if it’s less of a sin to fail at something, but it’s more of a sin to not want it at all. Yeah, yeah. But that’s the bigger trick, right? Because it’s one thing I’m like, oh yeah, I want to fast, then I try every Saint’s Day, but then about 4.30, you know, I just have a saltine and that’s what happens, then I try. You know, that’s, whatever. Like, that’s just being a flat person, but to not even want to. To just, and I see, ooh, because this is the thing I hate the most. I hate apathy the most. And there’s so many people that they don’t even have the hunger to desire to do something like fasting or do something like get out of their comfort zone. And I have many hungers, and I think some of them are good, and some of them are prideful, and I can’t tell, but I know they’re better than apathy. So that’s why I feel like this interest in this cultivating wants, I’m uncertain. So, so there’s, I mean, I’ve been like on a practical level, I think like, well, first of all, like Louis’s argument is, this is what education was. Education was not to give you information, it was to make you have the right tastes. That was what education was for. And he makes that point, like that’s basically what the abolition of man is about, right? And how we’ve just like completely blown it. So, but in response to that, I would say, there’s sort of like two, I feel like there’s two strands to that. One is stories and poetry, right? Because the stories that we tell ourselves, and poetry and stories are deeply interrelated, really inform, and if you’re asking, how do you get someone to desire things when they don’t desire anything, I would give the same response as Chesterton gives, which is to the man who wants nothing, I have nothing to give. It’s like, I don’t know that there’s not an answer to that except prayer for them. But then if you’re like moving somewhere, and you’re like, yeah, this is not in the right direction, that’s one, and then liturgy is another, liturgy and prayer and asceticism. So there’s a old retired professor from Notre Dame, Dr. Fagerberg, he’s got a couple of lectures on, like four or five lectures on asceticism on a very rad trad podcast called Census Fidelium. Which is- Rad trad, yeah. Yes, but his lectures, even if you’re not Catholic, just going and listening to his lectures on asceticism, they’re just awesome. I mean, they’re so, because, well, and he’s also a delight to listen to because he was a lit professor. So we were like, he was like studying his liturgy. And so he’s just, I mean, he’s just so much fun to listen to. Asceticism in the Chronicles of Narnia, that would be the one that I would go to. It’s how this talking overlaps so intensely onto food, because I wasn’t thinking about food when I started. But like in the Eastern tradition or the, I don’t know, the Orthodox, which I looked at until I didn’t. But they have different fasts and they’re continually changing. And then also, you talked about development of taste and think about all of the problems we have with processed food and literally poor tastes, because our taste is ruined. To not be able to appreciate vinegars and whole foods. Because like the first thing that you notice if you cut corn syrup out of your diet is you can taste fruit and vegetables again. Like you just can’t taste them. They taste like nothing and then they taste like something. Like it’s very- But it’s the tuning. And I think that’s, it’s like learning to appreciate wine. Right. Not that you should. And I think this is where we get it wrong. Our cognition is limited. And when we use it in one way, we lose it in another way. And it’s that proper balance that you need. And so that’s what requires education. That’s what education is for, to your point, Ted. The conundrum of when you don’t allow kids to direct interface with the world and then you disrupt their taste. It’s like diabetes, it’s the senses or something. Because if they don’t see, like if you don’t let a kid play out being mean to other kids leads you to never, to not be able to associate with other kids, you know? And you always like, well, he didn’t mean it. I’ll apologize. Everybody had. When you do all that garbage and they don’t see how virtues help them. That’s a consequence. That’s a big, that’s a big, and maybe that’s some of this dulling down because I’ve thought about this a lot is like, how do you get people to want? And like, it’s very scary to raise kids because it’s like, how do you get them to want the right things? And the- Oh, well, children like want them yourself. Well, yeah, yeah. No, and that’s what I’m thinking of it at first, but this is something that you worry about as a parent is like, what if my kids don’t want the right things? And one of the best things you could do that you feel like you can control is just get them around people that want the right things and hope that works. Because at some point, it’s not just you that has power over them. And it shouldn’t be even. No, no, it’s exemplification. But that goes back to, again, I think one of her Vickie’s excellent points. We don’t need to make everybody wiser, but we need more wise men to be exemplars in the world. Yeah, there’s so many things that Sally Jo was saying that were striking me. One is sometime way earlier this year, BBK pulled some little discussion on one of these channels about simulacra. And I don’t know who it was or what, but he was walking through, he walked through this whole process of like, this hypothetical process of like wild strawberries all the way to the Jolly Rancher strawberry slushy at the gas station. I remember that. Oh, it was great. So, okay, so Sally, I mean, I think partially what you’re wanting to know is like, how do you get a kid to recognize that the Notre Dame Cathedral is more beautiful than the McDonald’s playground, even though the McDonald’s playground has more color? Yeah, I mean, it’s easier to talk about it with kids. I really was focusing on it myself, because I really do, like, maybe this is just me being a control freak. I want to control my wants. I want my wants to be better. I want my wants to be in alignment with the kingdom of heaven. And it’s very hard to tell if what is hurting me is, I get the sense, and it’s maybe this is just deranged, being a deranged Baptist. If you’re suffering, you’re not following God’s will correctly. You’re wanting something and you’re burdened with it, then it must be because you’re not following God’s will right. And so then it’s like, if that’s not what it is, and then why do I want it at all if that’s not God’s will? And I get very wrapped up. But it is easier to demonstrate and illustrate it with kids, but I’m kind of talking about it at a much more deep brain level, because like, yeah, it’d be fun to manipulate it with kids, but that’s not where the beginning of the problem is. The beginning of the problem is with the adults in the room, because I find kids typically like the Notre Dame Cathedral more than the McDonald’s Playhouse, as long as they’re not told to shut up in it. But up until the point of the rules, like if there was the same rules at the McDonald’s Playhouse, I think they’d pick naturedome, but I can’t prove it. That was the opening really, right? And especially this talk about the lack of appreciation of, I don’t wanna call it suffering, I wanna call it struggle, right? The struggle with the cross is what you’re supposed to be able to appreciate and quote see through. I think Ted, you put that pretty well. I’m so looking forward to that talk. That guy really gotta listen to it. Yeah, I mean, and that is the problem. If you associate, and it comes from psychology, unfortunately, which is just the dumbest way to think about the world. If you associate goodness with happiness or pleasure, right? And that’s what you’re supposed to move towards at the same time. That’s three errors, by the way, not two, not one. If you associate goodness with happiness, three errors, then you’re gonna run into this problem of, well, yeah, if you’re suffering or you’re not happy, then you’re doing something wrong. And it’s like, that’s not true at all. I mean, that’s why people are fascinated. I think that’s why Protestants are fascinated with Job. I think that’s exactly why. Well, Job is incredibly vexing, and I mostly get stuck on the fate of Job’s first wife. But, you know, that’s just me. People are vexed, they’re like, really? That’s not that difficult. Job’s wife died? If you rethink Job from the lot of his first wife, it’s a very depressing story. It doesn’t say, right? But it’s like, well, he had those other kids afterwards, and they were grown. The marriage was just revitalized. Look, things were just revitalized. Like, I mean, maybe Job’s first wife and the kids went straight to heaven, they got special accommodations, like, sorry about the suffering, and then they move on. But it just seems like a bummer, Job’s first wife didn’t do nothing, and there she went. And it’s just- But you said, why don’t you curse God and die? That’s probably what happened to her. She cursed God and died. But I mean- Job doesn’t do anything either. If you think Job did something to get it, it’s like, no, that’s the whole point. I just, I don’t know, maybe I’m being a bleeding heart about it. Is this like all of her kids died? I mean, God. It just, it was awful. Anyway, I’m not saying awful things can’t happen in stories. Yeah, but that’s the point. I mean, to some extent. And look, this is when people pull out Heidegger, right? And Heidegger comes up with this cool term called throneness. It’s like, oh, you mean we were born at a certain place in a certain time. That’s the whole communicate. You can go on for days. That’s literally all he’s saying, that you were born at a certain place at a certain time. That’s all he’s saying. It’s still a great term though. I love the term. Throneness is such an awesome term. Maybe, maybe, but like it’s not that deep. The fact that you were born, it’s really not like some mystery thing that people shouldn’t be aware of. Like I’m pretty sure everyone can figure that out by themselves on their own. They don’t need to read Heidegger to figure that one out. But that means that there’s some amount, and again, I want to avoid the word suffering. There’s some amount of struggle because we’re alive. And we should be struggling in our humility to be better than we are. And that’s what people miss. Like you want to get better? You’re going to have to give up something you have now. That’s, you’re already in sacrifice and struggle mode immediately if you want something more than you have now, or even different than you have now. Let’s say it’s not more, let’s say it’s less. Let’s say you want to downsize because the kids are gone or whatever. It’s still a struggle. Like any change is a struggle, and it should be. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And we need to come to terms with that because we’ve been told, no, no, you should be happy. And you should be able to do things, and you should be successful, and you should be doing all this garbage. It’s a bunch of bullshit. It’s all wrong. And I want to talk a little bit because it’s my show. I’m thinking especially of the more advanced stages of the spiritual life. So you’ve got the way of beginners, the way of the proficient, and the way of the perfect. The way of the beginners comes in with this taming of the appetites. You’re spending time in prayer rather than doing whatever you want to do. You’re spending time fasting rather than just indulging your appetites constantly. And you’re giving away your things, almsgiving, rather than just keeping things to yourself. Every single one of those, you are making a sacrifice, and you have to cut against some level of desire. It might not be a strong desire at the time. And so on that level, we’ve got this, like you’re running a program, you’re submitting to some kind of a spiritual regimen in order to strengthen your desires for what is right. Now in the way of the beginners, God tends to give you a lot of encouragement because you’re small and you’re dumb and you don’t know what’s good. So he’s giving you lots of encouragement. It’s like how if you have a child and they make little baby steps, you’re very pleased with the baby steps because that’s actually really good progress for a baby. Whereas if that’s all I could manage, unless I had been injured or sick or something, that would just be like, why are you walking like that, you weirdo? Walk like a man, you know? And then you get to the stage of transition between the way of beginners and the way of the proficient. It’s called the dark night of the senses or the passive purgation of the senses where God begins to withdraw the very obvious encouragements that he’s given you because he doesn’t want you to… It’d be like training a dog and never stopping giving them treats, right? Once the dog is properly trained, you stop giving them the treats and then they just do what’s right because that’s what you’ve been trained to do. Now you’re operating at a higher level because you’re a human being and so you’re incapable of appreciating things on a higher level, don’t worry about it. But it’s called the dark night of the senses. It’s a painful thing to have that taken away from you. But precisely through the suffering that you go through of losing this particular mode of connection with God that you have, it actually purifies your desires and it makes them stronger and better. And so when you actually are encountering suffering and we’ll say it’s not, you know, injustice being inflicted upon you because there’s justice is being inflicted upon you. You have to do, probably have to do something or at least try to do something about that. So, you know, don’t just put up with somebody abusing you basically. But let’s just say it’s just life coming at you. You’ve got just the regular struggles of everyday life. It’s precisely through working through that of sacrificing and striving with the cross that your desires are actually purified. And that stinks to have to say it like that. So if you’re suffering and you’re moving towards something that you have a good enough reason to believe it’s good, that that’s progress right there. A progress on purification of your desires. You shouldn’t imagine that it’s something you can just program, turn it on and off like a hose. You got to treat it like a living thing. And sometimes with our plants, we prune them. This sounds very Catholic as opposed to the evangelical. Just say this prayer and your life will be changed forever in a moment, which is interesting. It makes more sense at least to me. My common sense seems to jive with a little bit better than what I grew up with, which was, you know, I think what somebody was talking about earlier, if it’s not going well, it’s because you’re not properly, I guess, it’s your sort of your fault. You’re not, you don’t want the right things. Well, okay, how do I want the right things then? That turns out to be a process more than you didn’t say the right words at the right time. And- No, I’m not very interested. Oh, sorry. No, I wasn’t meaning to, I don’t know how long I can stay, so I’m being a little pushy. I, that’s a very interesting answer and thank you for that because I kind of know it’s a dumb question, but I think it’s a dumb question lots of people have. And I don’t think a lot of people hear that ideas about the different levels and that initial communication with God might have to be expected to change and that you might not hear. Also like, it’s almost, when you get it reiterated to you enough times, it’s hard to wrap your head around. You can have a spiritual agony and still be walking in the right way. That’s hard to process for me because that is, I’m like, that should be an indicator of wrong way. And then you revert back to comfort and then you don’t get nothing done outside the walls of your church building and you stand around sniffing roses until you die and it’s not the worst thing you could be doing, but I don’t think it’s the best either. So trying to figure that out. Oh, here comes the roses. You’re kind of blurry right now, Margaret. I didn’t mean to have to film the book. I just was, he’s fit already. Here’s the roses. That’s what happens with the comfort. I’m gonna go. You’re gonna get the dog in it to come and save you because they notice. I’m gonna go and parent now, but thanks for having me on and letting me interrupt and stuff. I’ll be watching. Always good to see you, Sally. She’s gone. The dog headed approach with metal. I know, we need some music behind it. It’s not a bad idea to do some music behind it. Yeah, I think when people, I mean, I think people are totally unused to being told things, right? They’re like sort of this morphed evangelicalism, this big tent, everything you do is okay and whatever. It’s all fine. Nonsense. It just reinforces the bad behavior of you should be comfortable. God should make you comfortable. And then that’s why they’re fascinated with Job. God’s not making Job very comfortable here. And this isn’t clear to us why this is happening. And he doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong with it because this is a Protestant to don’t get the story. And I’m like, really? The story is really clear, guys. I don’t know, why is this confusing? Why is this something you’re puzzling over? It’s really clear. It’s a very straightforward story. It’s not a happy story. I might have an okay ending, but it’s only an okay ending. You know, that’s an interesting one. Yeah, I was having some off the internet conversations with another guy with a peer that I met at Chino. And he was- That’s interesting. That’s a good quote. You were not made for comfort, you were made for greatness. Right, you do it. I predict the 16th, man. What an absolute Chad. This notion of like, but Mark, I’m gonna push back on that, like on the ending of Job because there’s this notion, at least in the New Testament, that seems to suggest that somehow the end of Job is better than the beginning. You get that, you know, when our Lord, he tells all these parables that say crazy things like, the father has more delight in the prodigal son who comes back, who has spent half of the family estate on prostitutes and drugs basically, and comes back. He’s like more delighted with that than with a son who’s been hanging out there the whole time. And you can go into why that is, but like, or, you know, he leaves the 99 sheep. I mean, he leaves the 99 sheep and finds one, there’s something crazy going on there. There is. That’s the exploration. But that’s the exploration. So again, there it is right there. I haven’t read the book, so sounds like it’s got some good themes. Right, that’s the exploration. I’d rather have you explore badly than do nothing. Fair, right, and then it’s not about the outcome. It’s not about the, did this go well for you or not? It’s about, did you move? Because life is struggle. And if you’re not struggling, you’re not living. Well, there’s definitely something in all of this about the anti-consequentialist notion. And I’m like, I am on that one really hard. And I actually think that this is why stories are so important and why they fascinate us because we want, so Mark, I think I got this from you, this notion of poetry as moving from one-to-one correspondence to many-to-many correspondence. Love it, it’s great. Thank you, I appreciate that one. We want these simple, we want these forms of simple causality and that’s what consequentialism is fundamentally. It’s not do this thing and somehow good things will come out. No, I immediately see where the result, the thing that seems to be the immediate result from the action is the consequence. And so one of the reasons that I am fascinated by The Lord of the Rings is that Tolkien has written some narrative causality into that story that is so shockingly complex, shockingly complex so that you get the stuff that happens in The Hobbit that 40 years later at the end of The Lord of the Rings, something’s happening. And I think part of the reason that we love that is because we can’t, we don’t get the story. Here’s not the story of Ted’s life. I get to see and I get to make choices. I get to see how my decisions, no. It’s not like you’re playing a video game and it’s like, oh, plus one for good. Yes, it’s not like that at all. And so you can’t, so I think an antidote to consequentialist morality is actually reading stories because they give you the capacity to have the faith that doing what is right is right and that causes and effects are actually generally very hidden. Most effects are very hidden. But there’s another solution to that Ted. The solution is vertical causality where let’s suppose you have a very complex story where it was fully consequentialist. And I think this is Job. Job is consequentialism. The consequences aren’t material. And when the consequences aren’t material, that’s that nonlinear, non-discreet, right? It’s all up there in the ethereal. Those are the consequences of that. Well, there’s two ways. I think there’s two ways you can be appropriately consequentialist. One is vertically and the other one is eschatologically. So you look up or you look to the end. Because what do stories do? Stories give you a mini eschaton. The book of Revelation, if you call it a story, it’s because it had something like the end of, there’s some revelation at the end. That’s why we call it a story because it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And those are meaningfully related to each other. And Tolkien even, again, Tolkien plays with this. There’s this, I think one of the best parts in the trilogy is when Sam and Frodo are talking on their, they’ve made it through Mordor, right? All this is the beginning. It’s sort of the beginning of their stage of the return of the king. And Frodo has the little glass, the phial that has, that Galeadro gave him. And you’re like, oh, it like all of a sudden comes out and has this beautiful moment where they use it to overcome the darkness of this horrible spider monster, right, Mark? Monsters, it’s always spiders, spiders and snakes. So you’re like, oh, you have this moment of satisfaction that like this thing connected, right? And you see Galeadro’s wisdom and giving it to him. But then Sam says, wait a minute, the light in there comes from the Silmaril that Arendelle has, which is the morning star, right? She, Galeadro puts the light of the Silmaril in the phial. And so it’s the, and then if you’ve read the Silmarillion, all of a sudden it’s like, the whole thing blows out like this, then you realize, and Sam says, do any of the stories ever really end? And Frodo says, no, some people just, we just enter them and leave, right? And so it’s, so there’s a sense in which we, we read these little stories so that we can have the faith that there’s this enormous story. And that’s what I mean. You can be, eschatologically, I’m a full consequentialist. Absolutely. I believe that every single thing we do has some outcome. And, but you can’t necessarily see it. And so, and in fact, no, it’s not even that you can’t necessarily see it. It’s actually impossible to see it until everything is over. You actually can’t know what anything truly means. It goes past you. It goes past you. Yes. It goes past you in every possible conceivable way. So not just past you in time, but past other people, right? Cause there’s stuff out there that, so years ago I went to this interview and one of the guys, he was like the VP, I got to interview with him and he said, oh, it’s this year you worked for this company, MFS. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I worked there. I had worked there like five years previous or something. And, oh no, I’m sorry. I had worked there 10 years previous. And he said, when I left five years ago, your procedure was still being used. And I was like, what? I didn’t write any like groundbreaking procedure. I mean, I wrote procedures when I was there, but, and I only signed one of them. So I actually knew which one it was. And it was like, really? That was kind of a minor one, but okay. I’m glad to know that, you know, it’s something I put in place. And unfortunately I didn’t get that job. It was a cool job. But that impact, like I had no expectation that writing some stupid computer procedure for doing some upgrades would still be in use that long after I was, I was a contractor. I wasn’t even supposed to be there very, like a three month contract, you know? Three months you leave, you don’t expect for years people to be using your stuff over and over again. But that had happened. And I had no idea. And who knows how many people benefited from me developing that procedure. I went a lot of way. You don’t know. Well, this is the universal history thing too, right? The whole project of universal history is to tie as much of this together as you can. And that’s Dante and Virgil going and seeing Caesar, Julius Caesar and seeing Aristotle and seeing Homer and Electra and all the Latin and Greek heroes. Now, here’s the weird part. Here’s the part where it gets weird. You’re like, oh yeah, Dante looked back and saw he was connected to them. It’s like, yeah. And then me and Nate Heil and Sherry all get on a video call together and talk about it. And all of a sudden, 2023 is tied into that same story. And the things that Julius Caesar did and Dante did are still echoing right now to this day. And this conversation is one more part of it. It’s like, woo! They don’t know. And they don’t know how many lives. But universal history is all about finding commonality again. All about bringing us back in common. So you can say, well, it’s not true. It’s like, well, except that it’s bringing us back together. And in us coming back together, truth emerges. Because we’re too stupid to find it on our own. That’s why postmodernism is a civilization ending mind virus. And this happens. Good reason to read old books. Attaboy, Andrew. Absolutely. I think this dynamic of, we’ll say, sowing a seed and reaping 100 or 60 or 30-fold, that doesn’t just happen with the Julius Caesars and the Homers and the Virgils either. It happens on every level of society on multiple time spans. So it’s like, you could just be kind to somebody someday. Yeah, yeah. Who knows what that’s gonna do? You don’t have any idea. Just giving them five minutes of kind attention. You’ve got no idea where that’s gonna go. But it might be that they go home and then they show kindness to two other people. And then you just got this big old, you don’t know. This is why you always have to keep your lamp filled with oil and burning. Because you do not know when the Lord is gonna visit you. You do not know when he’s going to need you to say an encouraging word to somebody. If you want life to be an adventure, I really think that just like this, like this is, and this is the thing, because there’s, right, Father, I love that. Because, right, there’s the Julius Caesars. But then it’s like, even on the day-to-day level, the way that the world holds together is just people that we, none of us see, who just get up and they hold things together for another day. That’s actually how civilization persists. It’s not leaders. You could have the best leaders in the world, and if people didn’t get up and just do what they were supposed to do, all gone. Over in five days, seriously. Five days and most people are dead without the common, without just like the decent bird-view of most people. Well, and you know that because the leaders change all the time. And yet things still keep running. You didn’t think about that, did you? It’s one of the things that Peterson points out, although maybe he doesn’t do a deep enough job of it, that really grabs people like, oh, there’s guys out there making sure the electricity is still going. There’s guys out there making sure the sewers don’t get clogged. There’s guys out there making sure the water is pumped. There’s, right, and you know, not for everybody, I’m on a well. You know, I don’t, whatever. Most people are out there with the electricity and they’re working hard and you know, there’s all kinds of these people paving the roads. There’s people cutting down the verge around the roads that I can see out my driveway. I don’t die when I try to pull out, you know, cause it’s a, it could happen. People go pretty fast on my street. You were against de-bathification in Iraq is what you’re saying. The Bush administration decided to like get rid of all the bath party officials who were, you know, keeping the electricity on in Baghdad back in 2003 and everything descended into chaos for a decade after. Yeah, it doesn’t actually work. Well, yeah. Did we come rushing in and actually fix it or did we come rushing in and fail to make it work and what that really, the cattle, it’s on and on and on. I mean, cause- It sounds like you’re saying that the average Joe is more important than whoever the latest. The average Joe can keep things running. The leaders can only destroy things. Yeah, exactly. That’s the wrong way to think about it. And this is where we go wrong on this. It’s the scaling problem. It’s not the average Joe versus the leader. That’s never what it is. It’s the fact that there are lots of average Joes in very few leaders. Yeah. Right, it’s the scaling problem. It’s the fact that it’s not you as an individual is more important than the president. That’s definitely not true in any sense. It’s the fact that multiple people like you doing what you do is way more important than who the leader is, which is a very different statement that we in recent times don’t seem to, the Gnosticism, because we’re individualistic, we tend to put everything back down into, that means me and them. No, that’s a statement of the importance of people that do what you do or at your stratum of society versus the importance of the guy at the top or the five people at the layer down from the top, whatever scale you wanna look at. That the scale matter, I mean, this is why Verbeckis distributed cognition, when he talks about that, very important to understand. Why is it that the smartest, literally the smartest people, although they’re not there now, in search, in the whole world, can’t prevent people from destroying the search algorithm. That’s because there’s a lot more not as bright people working on it and that intelligence is greater than the top 10 minds of the world, in all cases for all things. There’s the universalism, in all cases for all things, the large number of less intelligent people, this is this, and this goes back to Peterson and the Yacht Pancreps and the chimps and all that, right? Yeah, you can look, you don’t understand the world if you think one tyrannical chimp can rule forever. Like you don’t understand that no, two chimps can take out one, I don’t care how strong he is, and it’s because you’ve thought of it as a binary, you thought of it as one chimp versus tyrannical chimp. But that’s not, isn’t that, that doesn’t exist anywhere, wherever you have a tyrannical chimp, you have a bunch of chimps below him, and man, if two or three of them get together, that top chimp’s gone. And why didn’t we know this? But we’ve lost that understanding, that idea that scale matters and the number of people matters, and that yeah, when you have a lot of drones or NPCs or however you wanna derange them or classify them or whatever, or degrade them, they’re actually more important because there’s more of them and the strength of those people doing that thing is much greater than the strength of the guy at the top telling you to wear a mask, and everybody going, now we’re not doing it, dude, didn’t happen. Yeah, I mean, honestly, like the work of the church would ground to a halt if women ever decided they didn’t wanna be a part of it. Yeah. That might have happened at some point. Yeah, or like the secretaries, if all the secretaries, sorry, excuse me, excuse me, my bad, my bad, administrative assistants, if they all decided they didn’t wanna be a part of an organization, that organization’s not gonna function anymore. Done, completely done. Absolutely won’t. Yeah, it’s like the meek will inherit the earth or something. That’s really good. I should write that down. I know, someone should have said that before. Somebody should write that. You know what? Somebody should have written that down years ago and passed it on. Yeah, maybe so. Mark, you haven’t read that book. Yeah, it’s a good one. Now you’re making a claim that I can’t validate independently. Oh my goodness. I’d have to go to my bookshelf and open the damn thing and thumb through it. There’s some great stuff in there. And then with which translation? See, that’s not even a translation. That’s easy. Venerable Dewey. All right, I’m gonna head out. You guys, this was nice to listen to. I’m gonna go be productive today. Yeah, thanks for dropping in. Enjoy tomorrow. Your productivity is valuable to the whole world. Take care, nice to meet you, Andrew. Yeah, you too. No matter what you do, man. And maybe that statement in the beginning, Father Eric, is really your struggle matters to God. Yes. Maybe that’s even a better message. Well, that’s gotta be it. Well, because, look, because you can’t, you actually can’t fix people’s struggles. People are gonna struggle. I mean, that- When you’re not supposed to. Well, I mean, this is the thing that, I mean, I’ve done this exercise so many times in my head. It’s like, you think about what are the things that we generally look at that make people’s lives better? Like, on a really high level, access to information, access to relationships, access to energy, like power, work, access to food. And you’re like, okay, just gonna run through those four real quick from like 200 years ago. It’s like access to food. With what I can buy, like 400 times above the average, the global average, okay, access to relationships. Oh my goodness. Theoretically, like two billion people I could be in touch with. So was that like on the scale of tens to hundreds of millions times more, depending on where I lived. Energy, not quite as much, maybe a thousand times more. If I had a cow versus like the fact that I’m tapped into the electrical grid. Well, I mean, how much power could I buy? I could buy so much electricity. I could buy so much electricity and gas, right? Like I could buy a gas tanker. It’s like, that’s more energy than a village uses in five years. And then information, it’s like, dude, come on. How’s it even close? You’re talking about scales of billions. And yet like, am I even 10 times qualitatively better off than people were 200 years ago? We’re not talking like a million times or a hundred thousand. It’s like, am I 10 times better off? It’s like, absolutely not. It’s like, okay, we’re just not gonna solve that. We’re not gonna get to the everyone’s happy because they have enough. Like that’s just like, if you want a piece of empirical evidence that’s been established, like it doesn’t get any better than that. That like, we’re not gonna solve people being discontented with just getting them more stuff. It just isn’t gonna happen. And so we’re gonna struggle. And it’s like, I don’t know. It just feels so weird to me. I’m like, the last 200 years have been the most splendid and astonishing demonstration of this fact. And yet we’re all like, like when I read tech news and I read these startups and they’re like, yeah, you should have less friction in your, finding a rental car. I’m like, where’s this should coming from? That it should, you shouldn’t have to work to get a rental car. And so like, people are dumping millions of dollars in the startup or whatever it is. It’s like, there’s this bizarre, I mean, that’s, you wanna talk about like undergirding notions of our civilization and is that like your life should be without friction. There should be no friction in your life at any point. And it’s like, first of all. Well, and that’s other people wanting you to mind read them so they don’t have to do any work. Yeah, well, I mean, what we, actually what we want is we want AI bot, we want AI that can mind read us by using our data signature so that- Explicit, it’s explicit. It’s absolutely explicit. No one’s hiding this. This is 100% the goal is, is that I will be able to have synthetic relationships that reduce all emotional and relational friction down to zero because they will, because look, because this is where it’s weird because I will know, I will be known, right? That’s like, dude, it’s like- I will be known, right? Yeah, I will be known and then I’ll no longer suffer. Like that’s the promise that’s held out by this stuff. And what’s, and to go back to Sally Jo’s point, right? The problem is, the problem is, is that if you don’t have friction, your appetites will eat you. They will, there ain’t no way around it. Either you order your appetites or they will eat you. And the only way to order your appetites is for friction. Like this is why rich people’s children went crazy. All the time across history, very few of them are put together. It’s like, they’re always alcoholic or philanderers or whatever. It’s like, and now we’re all the children of rich people, at least in the West. All the children of rich people. And like, it just doesn’t go well unless, and it’s like the success, like even if you look back historically and you look at like the successful lineages of rulers, it’s because they made their kids work really dang hard, even though they’re the son of the king. It’s like, yeah, you know what? You’re gonna get your butt kicked. You’re gonna learn how to fight and you’re gonna learn how to wear armor and you’re gonna learn how to ride a horse and you’re gonna go out on the front lines because you’re gonna know that you’re mortal. Like those are the princes that like held a king to be. Right. Well, and even in recent times, if you’re a trust fund baby, yes you are. Well, and it’s the trust of Christendom that you’ve been. Dang Mark, that’ll preach, let’s go. Yeah, it’s the trust of Christendom that you’ve plundered and wasted with your wayward fantasies. But that ties back into what you were saying before, Tad, about rationality being outside of yourself is some way to help orient. It’s not sufficient, unfortunately, right? But it’s one way to help orient, but even to use that, you need more humility than we have today. And that’s really where the problem comes in. And I often tell people, look, when people say they want freedom right now, just think about this. Say, is what they’re saying that they want freedom, the freedom from constraint and consequence. Because I think in all cases, that’s what they are actually saying. And I think if you listen, you’ll hear that. No, no, no, I want freedom from constraint and consequence. That’s what they want freedom from. And then why? Well, because to your point, they’ve been brought up in the rich household from the trust of Christendom, and they just have never had any friction. Did you, this is probably two years back, but one of the Peterson podcast episodes that just totally stuck in my head was, he had this conversation with a British psychologist who worked in the London hospital and the prison system, or something like, this guy’s, he’s doing psychotherapy with people who are having a really rough time. And they were talking about, they were talking about what, not getting married, basically. The idea that you could just have these open relationships and you don’t need to get married and just go for it. And they traced this line from, it got really popular with these upper middle class and upper class people in society who are the children of stable families. And so then they’re going off and having these romantic relationships and children are being born from it, or they have the money to buy contraceptives and the forethought to use contraceptives because they don’t wanna have children. And it works out fine, because they’ve got all this stability and they’ve got all these resources and they’ve got all these people around them that are acting appropriately. And then that gets portrayed in television shows because it’s glitzy and glamorous. And then the people at the bottom of society start doing it and like, the guy’s point, the psychologist’s point was like, it’s just hell. It’s just hell. And he spends about 30 minutes to an hour describing exactly all of the twisted ways that femininity and masculinity come out when you do this. And it’s terrible. He’s like, basically the women are all abused and they have a bunch of children they can’t support. And the men are also jealous that they’re really violent to each other and that male aggression is spiked to the max and temperance and prudence are nowhere rewarded. And so there’s this, I mean, that’s the thing. It’s like, when you’re safe and you’re protecting your brother, these resources, you feel like it’s okay to not be disciplined, to not order your appetites, et cetera, et cetera. You work your way out a little bit of that and then all of a sudden, and so this is why consequentialism sucks because- It was okay. Because it was okay because you can run a couple of generations like that and you’re like, you might get two generations where they’re like, they’re looking at it like, hey, we’ve been, nothing bad’s happened to Zolbin Gray so far. Yep. Well, and that’s because again, we don’t understand scale. I mean, this is, this egregore thing, it’s really important. So when you hear, like when you heard the Vervecky and Peugeot talk about this concept of higher order consciousness, basically, and Vervecky kind of foolishly actually, I was shocked. He said, the city doesn’t talk back to you. And Peugeot’s like, dude, the city can send you a letter. And like, it really stumped John because he was like, oh, the city does talk, of course the city talks back to me. Have you ever gone to town hall, John, and done anything at all or dealt with, I don’t know, getting mysterious parking tickets on your car when you were legally parked and then having that car stolen from you by the city, by the way, this might be a personal story. And then having to try to get it back from these bastards who basically broke the rules. Like they- Hey, leave their mothers out of this, all right? No. That’s right. Out of life. Yeah. I will not. No, or, you know, don’t move your lawn for long enough in the summer and the city will start talking to you about it. Right, and that’s the thing, the city does talk back. But the thing that people don’t realize is that, yes, the form of communication takes longer. As you scale up across generations, the effects of the things you did, say in the 60s or in the 50s or as a result of the Protestant rebellion begin to take hold in the world. It just takes a long time and it takes a lot longer than you think because to your point about consequentialism, it’s not immediate. It’s not this discrete linear relationship. I do this and this happens. It’s not that anymore. We have a whole side of our brain that deals with that. That’s good. And we need that. Absolutely, 100%. And that’s the realm of logic, reason and rationality. Okay, but you know what? That’s not half the world. Most of the world and the most important part is the rest of it, which is maybe faith, love and hope or something like that. I don’t know. I haven’t thought enough about it. Wisdom. Not theologian. Maybe. Well, wisdom’s wrapped up in that, right? Because when knowledge fails you and it has failed us, like let’s, we have all the knowledge of the world actually or as close to it as you could possibly even conceive of yet everything’s worse. This is the part people miss and yet everything is not the same. It’s actually, and we know this, we blame Facebook, we blame Google, we blame YouTube, we blame all these things, right? And you know, somewhat correctly, now people are like at the edge of knowledge or gnosis. Maybe they’re seeing the limits of the age of gnosis, which I think is better framing, see my Twitter feed. And then all of a sudden, wisdom is the answer and I don’t disagree, but nobody has a good definition of wisdom in my opinion. And that’s sort of stuff I’m working on, definition of wisdom. All right, so my podcast, Ted. I’m thinking about our inability to comprehend spiritual effects in the world, especially at scale and in time. And I’m thinking, well, how would a good and loving God communicate that to you? And what I think that good and loving God has to say is that if you have sex before marriage, you’re going to hell. Now, maybe you’ll have time to repent, but if you like roll those dice enough, even if we strip all of the supernatural out of it, we strip all of the last things out of it, and we just look at that from a purely naturalistic frame, we should actually be able to say that if you have sex before marriage, somebody’s going to hell. Yeah. But the other side of that though, I think the other side’s more significant. And what it would look like, we’ll say in the way Peterson talks about it, in Jungian terms is synchronicity. Right? I don’t know about this. The things that come up that are just strange, like, well, wow, why did this happen? Why did these two events coincide and form something that I didn’t expect that was wonderful? Right, because you get to have the positive and the negative side. Yeah, I… Synchronicity is an album by the police. Also. I think, I mean, Father Eric, what you were saying is like, thinking back to early Jordan Peterson, that’s what he was saying about what the Bible was saying. Very much in line with exactly that. If you can’t believe in a supernatural, if you can’t believe in a supernatural hell and a supernatural heaven, at least realize that this is still, like it’s still true. Which… It still works. It works on all these different levels. Okay, so Mark, I’ve got it. And Father Eric, there’s a Catholic professor named Dr. John Kudabek I’ve met several times. He’s just a wonderful man. And he’s like, you made me like, oh, like you’re a philosopher. Like you’re actually a philosopher. Like when you listen to him talk, he’s just like, he’s not like a teacher. He’s a philosopher, and you think, I mean, and he’s not, he mostly his philosophy is of the home, of the household, right? So he’s not concerned with like grand systems, but like he is like a man with a tremendous amount of wisdom that he brings. And so he’s done this with his various words, like leisure, the way he brings forward leisure, it’s just like what leisure is. Anyway, but he had a definition of wisdom. So he, well, this is actually really interesting. He says that the fundamental work project of the human household is the cultivation of wisdom. That is the primary work of a household, is the cultivation of wisdom. So then he offers a definition of wisdom, and he offered a definition of wisdom in that talk, which is, let me see if I can get this right. It is to see the highest principles and know how they relate to the particulars. I liked that. I was like, man, really good. That’s exactly it. I mean, that’s exactly how people use it. Yeah, to see the highest principles and to see how they relate to the particulars, I was like, yeah. I would add in the moment because the problem with, Yeah, that’s what I mean. Right, but that’s always the problem. See, in the age of gnosis frame, they’ll compress it or flatten it or reduce it, right? And they’ll go, oh, okay, the particulars, and they’ll turn that into an abstract, like the principles and say, okay, so there’s a correspondence there. So there’s a formula that you can apply. And it’s like, no, no. The whole point is, for example, knowing which Bible verse to reference based on your struggle. There you go. That would require wisdom. That’s the temptation of the wilderness. That’s our Lord’s temptation of the wilderness. It’s like, look, you can’t, if you want to know how critical that is, recognize that Satan quotes scripture. I was like, now you get the problem. Satan quotes scripture to tempt Jesus Christ. Our Lord Jesus Christ. It’s like, now you’ve seen the problem. It’s like, let’s work on wisdom because it’s not just enough. You can even go to the holy scriptures. And here it is. And if you misapply it, it’s like. If you misapply it, right. Well, and it is. It’s right application. Yes, right. And look, the one thing that I remember from my philosophy class, besides my zany Bostonian professor who I loved and was like one of the weirdest men I’ve ever met. It’s always good to have the zany Bostonian around. Oh, it’s just fantastic. At one point, he actually tried to light a student’s hand on fire. It was when we were, I can’t remember which of the early enlightenment philosophers was talking about the difference between different kinds of perceptions. He’s like, yeah, there’s the light and the heat. And he’s trying to stick this lighter, lit lighter under a kid’s hand. And the kid’s like, what are you doing? At any rate, the one other thing I remember from that was we went through whichever of Plato’s works it is dealing primarily with what is wisdom. And in the end, the answer was something like wisdom is the gods telling you what’s right to do in each moment. And I was like, oh, yeah, no, that makes sense. And for Vickie brought this up too at Chino and it was wonderful. He’s like, we’re always trying to condense wisdom down into rules and it never works. Right. And Elliot wrote about this too, right? He’s where’s the wisdom we’ve lost in knowledge. Where’s the knowledge we’ve lost in information, right? It’s that same cry. You can’t, they’re not equivalents. You’re doing completely different things. What you just need to do is build a big enough neural network. Right, go! Call her tower, Ed. Call her tower. You need, it just needs to be higher. Yeah, just a little bit more and we can jump that. We can go from quantitative to qualitative. We’ll do it. Just give me one more chat. Just give me one more neural net. I just need one more. Just give me a little bit more information and a little bit of time to try. I promise, I promise this time I’ll actually build the utopia. It’s gonna work this time. I’ll form you a few more petaflops. Just a couple more petaflops and we’ll be good. Oh goodness. Yeah, no, it’s exactly, I mean it’s exactly that. That is, that’s the thing. Like that’s the whole project. And yeah, but the wonderful thing is is that like when people are wise, right? This is the, this whole like anti-consequentialist notion that I’m trying to get out is like, the wonderful thing about that is you can be wise, act wisely your whole life and not see any outcome from it and also just not worry about it. Right, because if you did that, you did more good than you can understand. Like there you go. Just be wise, pursue wisdom and leave. You don’t have to see anything come from it. I mean, you can just look back at good things that have happened in your life and see just how little the seed was that made that happen. Yeah. So 100%, a reason, a reason that I am a priest today and so far have been founding it to be a very lovely and enjoyable way to serve God, even with its crosses is the fact that when we lived in Norway, Father Rolf assigned Father Radar to retrain the altar servers and Father Radar had us do very reverent eye liturgy as much as we could manage. It’s like that kind of exemplification that made a big impact on 10-year-old Eric, right? Being up there, just, I love the smoke, man. They got the sensor going every week. I love the smoke. I thought that was the best thing in the world. I’d never seen it before. It’s like Father Radar is like, we’re gonna do it. Father Rolf, he was just like, yeah, that’s fine. I’ll do it. That’s cool. And now I’m a priest, right? And like, golly, how many absolutions have I done already releasing people from their sins? How many times have I been able to offer the Eucharist already? And it’s like, maybe I’ve already inspired a 10-year-old lad with vocation to the priesthood that’ll flower in another 20 years. I don’t know. And Father Radar look at me and say, oh yeah, oh yeah. We do instance every Sunday. That kid right there is gonna become a priest because I’ve done all the calculations and he matches up everything exactly. I have calculated this now. Because he didn’t have an AI, so we know that didn’t. Oh, that’s right, yeah. They just didn’t have enough petaflops. Oh my God. They were still on the Pentium 3 processor in those days. They couldn’t have possibly been wise. Oh my goodness. Yeah. It’s just easier that way. Well, okay, so this is a thing that’s come up with a friend of mine a lot recently. And what’s interesting is apparently the sermon at his church, the homily at his church today was exactly this. I think that we’ve been doing this project, this actually ties in with so much of the stuff we’ve been talking about. The modern project notion is that life should not be hard and so it ends up being incredibly complicated. Like if you want to avoid things being hard, things necessarily end up getting incredibly complicated. And so there’s this like, I think that life in terms of wisdom in some sense, wisdom is a lot more simple and a lot more difficult than people are ready to accept. Like I think that’s what I’ve been trying to, I’ve been wrestling with. Yeah, so and actually that really helps me. And actually that really helps me understand the mind boggling complexity of the world today. Because most of that complexity is the outgrowth of trying to deal with hard things. So if you want to get around, right? I mean, like it’s, well, look, I mean, a really simple example of this is if we were willing to accept the hardship of people dying from autonomous vehicles, we would have had that, we had that problem solved like 20 years ago. We could have dealt with the hardship of people dying because of autonomous vehicles and everyone could have had an autonomous car 20 years ago, but we won’t. And then what do you end up doing? You end up having to get that 0.9 out. It’s like 0.99, 0.9999, you know? And it’s like, how much more complicated does it get every time you try to chalk it, take an order of magnitude out of there? And it’s like, I don’t know if you are. And that’s one of the themes in the Matrix movies. Yeah. The second Matrix movie. It’s explicit. Yeah, you’re the remainder of an unbalanced equation. Right. You’re the remainder of an unbalanced equation. That’s who the one is, technically. According to the second Matrix movie, that Neo is the remainder of an unbalanced equation. That’s all he is. You’re special because you can’t, oh yeah, oh dude. If Jesse and I ever get around to doing the Matrix, break down what we wanna do. Oh yeah, you’re gonna be blown away by all the weirdness in that. Especially in the trilogy overall, you really need the trilogy. People don’t like two and three. Actually, I think it’s a crime to watch just the first one. The first movie is full of philosophical questions. And the second movie has less than half as many, but they’re deeper. And the third movie has less than half as many as the second, but they’re way deeper. It’s all wrong, but that’s a different problem. The way they resolve everything is completely backwards. The messages they’re telling you are not what you think. And yeah. But it is that, you’re right. When you’re running away from struggle, just to tie it back to what we were saying earlier, when you’re running away from struggle or suffering, I like struggle better. I’m gonna struggle with you guys about this. You complexify the world and you get more struggle at the end. And you don’t see it coming. Yeah, yeah. And that’s Dante. You don’t see how flattening the world now is gonna make the world real flat for you for eternity later. And you get tied down to it. So I’m gonna try and come up with an example for this. Let’s say that, but I don’t have enough technical skill for it. But let’s say in the kitchen, if you got really good with a knife, you could do all sorts of things. Yeah. Or you could buy 30 different kitchen gadgets to get exactly the cuts that you need. And so you decide you’re gonna go for the 30 different kitchen gadgets, but they’re constantly breaking. They aren’t working properly. They don’t provide as quality of a product. And your kitchen is all cluttered up. And I’m imagining there’s a computer programming analogy in there that if I knew more about, it’s like being able to code something really well in C versus- It’s AI. iPhone. No, right now in AI, the bottom line is you can ask it to write you even a script. It’s very good at writing scripts actually. AI is great for scripting work. Not good for any kind of programming. It’s really good at scripting. Like, build me a program that does a simple set of things that’s basically sequential. It’s very good at that. However, if that reaches a certain level of complexity, I’ve done a lot of research on this guys, a lot, hundreds of hours at this point, unfortunately for me. If it reaches a certain level of complexity, the time it takes you to fix it is actually longer than it would take you to write it from scratch. That’s already an AI, right? You’ve already got a case in AI. It’s already there. You’ve already got a case in AI where to make it useful, you need a model and then you need a Lang chain. And then you need, right? So you already need like seven or eight really hard to configure tools. And then you need to tune those tools. And then you can crank out something that’s really efficient, right? But to get to that efficiency point, it’s already at the point where it takes too much work. And it’s so bad now, the thing that I struggled with all day today was, I was like, hey, I’m trying to get these AI, I’m trying to get a downloadable AI that’s not online to work locally. And I have all this hardware. And one of my machines is down. I’m like, wow, I’ve got this super laptop. The laptop can do it. So I downloaded three different pieces of software. They’re supposed to run on Windows 11, download a model and allow you to train it. None of them were able to, they have like, which model do you want? You hit the download button. None of them were able to do the download part of that process, zero out of three. And I was like, what world am I living in when you literally can’t download a file? And that’s literally all they’re doing. They’re downloading a file. I know where they’re downloading it from. I could download it manually. But now, because I’m running that program with that framework, I can’t download it manually because if I do it, the program doesn’t know that I did it. It doesn’t have that information. So I can’t even fix it easily because we’ve complexified things so much that even though I know exactly what it’s doing and how to do it manually, that won’t fix the program anymore. And I’m just like, oh, this is a horrible situation. Oh man. This is what happens when you’ve got dumb tools that are almost, it’s the sorcerer’s apprentice. Yeah. You can’t get the brooms to stop bringing up the buckets of water. Well, this is really interesting too because now I’m thinking about like vehicle, like mechanical work, right? On vehicles, right? Cars now, objectively, they run better. Like it takes longer before they break down. But like you go try to fix like a Toyota RAV4 plug-in hybrid. No. Like you can’t even get in, like you lift the hood up and it’s like, wow, okay. Versus like I’m a numbskull. And back when I had a 1985 F250, I replaced the starter on that thing. I replaced all sorts of other stuff on it because it’s big and it’s dumb and it breaks frequently, but I can just get in there and like, and so the notion of like, we’ve got to make a car that never breaks. It’s like, well, it’s gonna break. And then when it breaks, it’s like, no, you can’t fix it. I can’t fix it. We gotta go take it to this tech. And it’s like, so there’s this weird, there’s this weird, it’s that same thing going on over and over and over. And I’m worried that like civilization is doing this completely. Oh yeah. Oh no, it is. And it’s worse than that with cars. Cars is something I know pretty well too actually. Right now, if you go in with a scan tool, a very sophisticated scan tools now, the ODB system that they use is amazing, right? The problem is that it often misreports because it turns out that a bad oxygen sensor can be caused by a bunch of other things and show up as a bad oxygen sensor. So you can’t look at the tool, swap the oxygen sensor and have any, you know, expectation of success. And you actually just have to have experience in trying to fix these things to know whether or not once again, oxygen sensor, even though the computer tells you it’s definitely the oxygen sensor. Yeah. That’s not necessarily true. There can be a small hole just before the oxygen sensor, that’ll throw the oxygen sensor off. And unless you know on that car model that they made a particularly bad exhaust or it was under stress or something in cracks form, you won’t know that on that model, when it says oxygen sensor, it never means oxygen sensor. Which is wisdom, Mark. If you have the wisdom to fix the car, then you can do it. But if you don’t have the wisdom, but if you don’t have the wisdom. When I think by and large wisdom is experiential, you know, Verveki would go to the part that’s during knowledge. I think that’s a bad frame, but it’s experiential. The Aquinas actually links Sapiensia with Sapere, which means to taste. Yeah. I got you both to hum at the same time. That was cool. Yeah. Well, in Spanish still, while they’re expanding, Spanish still has that as a child of Latin, saber is to know and to taste, which is like weird. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of eating. That’s a form of knowledge, experience. Yes. Well, but there’s, yeah, there’s this, okay, I would add to wisdom primarily being experiential. In that case, actually, I would say that good narrative is like a form of experience. Because narrative can cultivate wisdom in a way that nothing else can, I think. The Spanish have two nos. Yes, it does. Yeah. It has saber and conocer. We actually had a, I think what I was running, we had a long conversation about this one, one live stream this summer. Yeah. Is there some interesting stuff in there? But I think narrative in particular, right? And this is why, this is why I like my, you know, my video on the types of knowledge, where there’s actually only two, but long story. Right, see that video on navigating patterns. Because what we’re really talking about is the difference between understanding the discrete linear connections versus difference of understanding the more poetic connections, which are multivariate and multi-connected and interconnected, right? Where, you know, don’t pull on that, you don’t know what it’s attached to, right? Actually matters. See me and Father Eric and Dr. Jim presenting in Arkansas in November. So link in the description. Yes, yes, link in the description. You hosers, you come out and you listen to us talk if you like this. Because it’ll be better in real life. Oh yeah. Because of the experience, you know, we can’t experience each other quite properly over this, over this, these feeble connecting devices. We’re so flattened. This is the flat, this is the flat world right here. This is the flattening of Marc Lefebvre. Look at how flat he is. Well, Father Eric, you could speak to it directly. Difference between hanging out with me in person and having out with me online. You can speak to that being different for sure. It absolutely is. It absolutely is. And you saw that at, you know, at the conference in DC because Nate, who I had never met before in person, obviously walked right up to me. First time, didn’t even say hi. He walked up to me and said, I understand you. I get you now. I didn’t even talk to him yet. That’s amazing. In person thing. Marc, you’re pretty simple. You’re just a left-handed monster of the Peterson sphere. Maybe. It’s just all left-handed. It’s just all left-handed. I want a sweet title like that. I’m trying not to be jealous over here, Marc. Okay, I gotta hang out with you more and then I’ll come up with something. This is interesting. I wonder if lack of functionality can be related to the meaning crisis. I would say, absolutely! Because functionality is about final cause. Functionality is final cause. And if you want to resolve the meaning crisis, you must have final causes. So I would say it is actually, it can be stated even more precisely. The functionality of humans, forgetting what the functionality of humans is, is the root of the meaning crisis. If you can figure out what humans are for, you’ve solved the meaning crisis. Ted, who created you? Who created me? God created me. Why did God create you? Oh, hold on. To serve him and enjoy him in this life and the next. To know God. To love him. Love him. And to serve him in this life so that we can be with him forever and the next. Okay, I totally compressed that. Thank you. Yeah, you gotta know him first. But that is, you know, the quote end of modernity, which I hate. The end of materiality is the meaning crisis. The meaning crisis is realizing the material frame you’ve been using for your life is insufficient and doesn’t explain any of the things that you need explained in order to live. Yeah, yeah, yes. And then, which another way of translating that, Mark, is to say that we have all woken up to the insufficiency of only having two forms of causality and we realize there’s two other kinds. Yeah, or having one form of causality that is wrapped up into definitions. That’s right, yeah, yeah. So that’s actually a really great thing. And I think that I would actually propose that part of the reason that sort of in the thick of the material technical world that function, everyone’s all about function, is because it ends up being the basically downgraded fake final cause. That’s all you have. All you have is function. Yeah, when you compress final cause, you get function. When you compress this multivariate equation, you get discrete, you know, single variant linear connections. And look, science is excellent at that. But, and I’ve actually said this before, I think that we are at the end of science. Like literally all the low-hanging fruit is gone and science just because it’s all multivariate from here on out or almost all multivariate from here on out, that science is all done. Like it’s just not gonna be doing the stuff it was doing before. Mark, you ready to like feel weird? This is what Owen Barfield was writing about. Just like, that’s his whole thing. His whole thing is like, we’re done with the science one-to-one and the only way forward is poetry. Yeah. And imagination. That’s what he said, he’s right. Yeah. Yeah, it’s like, I was, it was some other conversation. Oh, I think it was, I think it was, we haven’t, I don’t think Paul’s posted it yet, but we, Father Eric and Dr. Jim and I and Paul. Tomorrow, tomorrow that conversation. Going up tomorrow. Yeah. It was, I mean, the whole thing in the back of my head after that conversation was like, oh my goodness, Barfield is right. And it’s happening right now. Final participate, like we’re watching final participation unfold in front of, if anyone’s read Saving the Appearances, final participation is like, like we’re actually like watching it. Everyone wake up to the fact that, oh my goodness. So let me, let me see if I know enough Barfield one-to-one to maybe get our six viewers in on this. The world and humanity starts off with naive participation where you just, there’s the world and here it all is and it’s all beautiful and I’m just acting and everything just kind of flows intuitively without us having to explain it. And then materialism starts creeping in in like the eighth century in the West, in case you guys thinking it’s all wrapped up with todayness. And we start disconnecting spirit from matter. We start disconnecting final causality and formal causality from the world. And we start breaking things up into small pieces instead of seeing the entire whole together. And so remind me what that stage is called. He calls it idolatry. Idolatry, oh. Yeah. Woof. Ouch. Yeah. And then, but then, you know, it’s like that fever can only burn for so long and we return to final participation but it’s no longer naive. That’s exactly it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That’s Barfield 101 for you. You’re all experts now. That’s what I mean. What’s so fun is that you go and then you pick up Barfield and you’re like, oh, what am I reading? What language was this? This was written in English? What? Always. What’s so funny is, and I was talking about this with Sherry at some point, just we’re having a conversation. This isn’t anymore in particular, but I mean, Barfield loved, like he dearly loved poetry. He was not a poetic man. When you read his, like his writing is so dry. He like adores poetry. He probably thinks too highly of poetry. And then you read it and you’re like, yeah, man, like, it’s just funny. He just writes like a lawyer. He was a lawyer, like professionally, he was a lawyer. And he just writes like he’s writing legal briefs. And it’s such an irony. It’s really, I don’t know. I love it. It’s like, he is, what is, like a lactose intolerant cheese maker. That’s basically, he’s like, he’s like, there’s a thing and he can’t have it. And he wants it and he loves it, but it just won’t come out of him. Well, that’s why he had to read it because it wasn’t gonna come out of him. Yeah, that’s actually a great, that’s actually a great point. Yeah, I’ve worked, I’ve also dabbled in his book, Poetic Diction. And there’s some interesting stuff, these really interesting stuff he’s got in there too. He was brilliant. He was weird, weird and brilliant and underrated. Sherry, I hope you hear this at some point and hear me. She thinks I’m too hard on Barfield most of the time. Yeah, well, gentlemen, this has been wonderful. Yeah. Yeah, I got like two hours of Ted tonight. That’s two thumbs up. Yeah, it was great work. Well, it’s been nice. I had absolutely crazy work for like two and a half weeks. And then I’m in this like gap between, and it’s gonna get crazy again because my next job is work until the rains come because it’s in the bottoms. And like most of the area I’m working in is actually a lake for half of the year. And so when the machine gets out there on like Monday or Tuesday, it’s like no stopping until the rains come. So when I can jump in and get it, I really want to. So. All righty, Mark, any final thoughts? No, I mean, this is two weeks in a row of awesome open mic that I have to tell everybody to watch. Appreciate the shout out on Friday. Ted, you get another one, don’t worry. Yeah, okay. Well, is that father? Any closing thoughts? Oh, yeah, be wise. And as much as God grants you the grace, see your sufferings and struggles as his grace. All righty, I will end here with a quote from St. Pius of Pialtrecina. Pray, hope, and don’t worry. I love Father Pius. And God bless you all, good night.