Open Mic： Preternatural Presents, Structure and Stability, President Peterson, Separate and Relate (3D2jrkiQhbg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3D2jrkiQhbg

Good evening and happy Epiphany Sunday for those of you celebrating that today. Yes, as you can see in our little bar tonight, we’re talking about Prader natural presence. Now, I made a video about this like three years ago. I wasn’t terribly satisfied with the way that the video turned out. I don’t know how people like Pastor Paul are able to just talk into a microphone at a blank screen for hours on end. I do it for about 10 minutes and I’m feeling like I’m going crazy. So I don’t make a whole lot of videos like that. But this is just an idea that I found compelling ever since I learned about it in seminary. And so we’re going to take a look at it here. The name of the video was Adam cold showers, Adam and paradise. And what the idea behind the Prader natural gifts are is how do we explain the narrative in the Book of Genesis, where Adam and Eve are in the garden. They appear to have the gift of immortality. They appear to, you know, having been formed, fully grown out of the dust of the earth, already seem to be able to think and behave and act in the world. So how do we explain this? And the medieval way of explaining this is that in addition to to the natural gifts, you look all the way down at the bottom of that chart there. And following that Eve were given natural gifts, which you could just think of those gifts, which are essentially constitutive of human nature, body and soul. Having those together, combined soul, animated body, that’s what it means to be a human being. If you’re missing one of those, you’re not a complete human being. So obviously, that is down there at the bottom is the natural gifts. The idea behind a Prader natural gift is that it comes from outside of what is essentially constitutive of a human being. It’s not outside the order of nature itself, but it is. It’s outside of what it means to be a human being. So you could be a human being without these gifts. So those four Prader natural gifts, as most medieval theologians would render them, were infused knowledge, integrity, impassibility and immortality. They all start with an I. John Dravecki would love that. The very top is the supernatural gifts. That’s participation in the life of God, participation in the life of grace there. So actually, when you’re baptized, you receive those supernatural gifts of your end. But the Prader natural gifts were lost forever, I guess, when Adam and Eve committed that first sin. It was part of their punishment that these gifts that God had given to them would be taken away. And so we look at the infused knowledge. Where do we get this idea that Adam would have infused knowledge? But we get that from the fact that he is able to name the animals when the Lord brings those animals before him. So obviously, if he has the capacity to name them, he has to be able to know something already. And it’s very interesting the way Thomas Aquinas explains this. He says, not all knowledge. He had infused knowledge of all of reality, but that doesn’t mean he would know every single fact that there is to know. And the example he gives, which I think is very amusing, is he wouldn’t know how many pebbles are at the bottom of some given string. And he didn’t have infused knowledge to that level of reality. He didn’t know all of these individual facts. But what he did know was kind of the basic fundamental principles of reality. And from that, he could participate in the world and give the names to the animals. So this infused knowledge that explains how Adam was able to name the animals. And the second one, integrity, is very interesting. I’ve always found it very interesting. So there was this sense, this gift of integrity gave the soul perfect control over the body. The gift of integrity gave the soul perfect control over the body, such that, oops, I did not mean to do that. That the soul’s influence was able to give that kind of perfect command to the body. So let’s imagine this scenario. So imagine that you’ve just had dinner and somebody brings out a tray of brownies. You’ve had a perfectly balanced dinner. You’ve eaten enough. You know that this is the right amount of food for you to be eating. And that if you have one of these brownies, that’ll just that’ll be the perfect top off there. And the second you put anything chocolate in front of me, I don’t want to just have one. I want to have the entire tray of brownies. So after eating that one brownie, which I know rationally should be enough for me, I want to go for the second brownie. I want to go for the third brownie. I want to go for the fourth and the fifth, you know, until it actually makes me sick. Now, in integrity, if you had that preternatural gift of integrity, your soul would command your body through rationality to say, no, you don’t need that. And then your passions would be like, oh, OK, we got the orders from upstairs. We’re not going to desire the brownie anymore because we can see that it is irrational for us. Which you have to remember is, you know, rationality in English, it’s got this kind of decrepit feeling to it. But ratio in Latin doesn’t just mean knowledge. It could also mean like a measure. It could mean a rule. It means like balance and proportion. So it’s got a much broader semantic range in Latin than it does when it came into English here. Another thing. So let’s say that you and I’m using lots of food examples here because everybody can relate to food. Let’s say that you knew for a fact that eating a salad would be the best nutrition for you at this time. Eating that salad would taste as good as candy because your body would be like, oh, this is rational. Therefore, we’re participating in goodness in an appropriate way. Therefore, this is good. And your and your senses would follow on that. This perfect integrity between the body and soul where the soul has proper command of the rest of the body. And that one, that one missing that one, that makes everything much more interesting. Because now the body is rebellious. The body does not listen to reason and rationality. Body does whatever it wants. So following from that, we have impassibility, passion, as you may know, is commonly translated as suffering into English, something that you undergo. And, you know, you could think that if you understood any kind of pain that you were feeling well enough that it wouldn’t actually cause suffering to you, you’d be like, oh, my body’s giving me feedback about something I’m encountering in the world, and I just need to deal with that rationally. So there would be the sense that while there might be pain in the world, and I don’t think you would ever be able to escape pain entirely, it would not cause that suffering. It would not cause that distress. You would be responding with perfect reason and coming from that immortality. So the Catholic doctrine is that the soul in itself is immortal. The soul possesses immortality in itself. And because of the integrity between the body and soul given by these preternatural gifts, the soul could communicate immortality to the body. And that’s been taken away. So I’ve always found this to be a very compelling image of what perfect humanity would look like, where the entirety of the human person has been subjected to not just logic, like Mr. Spock, but to reason, to proper book balance, to proper proportion and rationality. And I’ve always I’ve always I just really, really love this thing. Let’s take a look here. I’m going to let Ted in, but we’re going to go through some of the comments. Hey, Ted. Hey there. In a flat world, we think everything encompasses everything. Integrity is also order, and that’s related to control. Yep, that’s right. Mark feels the same way about an entire tray of brownies. And Laura suspects somebody would pray to natural integrity wouldn’t have eaten any brownies. And that’s, of course, the goal of eating the brownies to demonstrate acceptance of hospitality, or because they do provide a little bit of nutritional value as long as it’s in proper balance, it doesn’t hurt anything. All right. So what do you think, Ted? Would you have liked those? I just got on. Would I have liked those? The preternatural gifts? Oh, absolutely. Okay. Yes. In fact, I would pretty much give up anything for it. Oh, just a second. Hold on. I got to hop off. Oh, something with the wife and children, I’m sure. Oh, boy. And he kicked me off, too. That’s what happens when your administrators have a life of kids as they get distracted and then kick you off the street. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I wasn’t all that terribly satisfied with that video because I was trying to link it to Wim Hof. And I thought about it like the next day and I’m like, I was stupid. I don’t know if that was the most rational thing I could have done at that point. But yeah, let me know what you think of these preternatural gifts if you think that’s just a bunch of medieval silliness or if you find the idea of that to be compelling. Are you compelled, Lefebvre? Am I compelled? I’m compelled to continue to disagree about eating the entire tray of brownies being irrational. I think it’s required. I think your idea of rationality must be wrong because it’s brownies. You have to eat all the brownies. You have to. No, you don’t. I do. I do. I’ve met the brownies and they won. When I was in seminary in Detroit, the secretary for the vocations office would ask the seminarians to do favors. And we had the two houses, the college and the theology. Whoever had more people sign up to do them, that house would get like six trays of the most outrageous brownies delivered to your lounge. Really? Just, oh my gosh. And that’s why I always go for brownies because it’s just burned into my memory. Nothing’s ever tasted that good since. I bet. A brownie well earned. It was sort of a fall from paradise for me. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, no, I like that outline. That’s really good. You could do a lot with it. See, this is one of the puzzling things to me. It’s like a lot of people in the Peterson sphere try to put maps together and relate things all over the place. And it’s like, I think somebody else already has better maps and better words and better everything. And granted, on my side, it’s kind of like, well, some of that needs translation just because there’s stickiness in the words and the language. But I’m always surprised that there’s not more of a push towards that. Like, I don’t know, guys, we already, you know, like, because people inevitably go to Tarot or Kabbalah or whatever. And like, fair enough, like, I’m familiar with all that stuff for the same reason. That’s what I came into first. But actually, some of the systems that were already out there were better. Mm hmm. We’re supposed to have Josh come in here, but he might be having connection issues. Uh oh. Yeah, it looked like he was here and then now it looks like he’s not. Well, we’ll see if he comes in. Yeah, well, hey, I’ll take the compliment right there. I found our mapping to be pretty satisfying the whole way through. Hey, Josh has made it. There he is. There I am. Did they teach you about the preternatural gifts in RCIA? Um, I think I don’t. I think we kind of brushed over it, but we kind of move fast, a little faster through Genesis. And we also see we doubled up our nights too, because we hopped in midway through RCIA through the year. So we actually did two two nights a week for like, oh, God, it was like four or five months or something like that. Yeah, so, um, and that was so we could get confirmed that Easter. But I think we started classes like the, it was like October, November the year before. But I think we did go over something because I remember like going from my Protestant or Bible teaching from before my childhood. I was trying to see how much of that kind of map, you know, tracked onto what I had been taught because I got taught a lot of stuff. I don’t, I don’t know if you have either one of you ever heard the term Shekinah glory? No, no, it sounds like a band or something. Yeah, yeah, it does. That’s that’s the truth. So, um, I very early in my childhood, I just have to look up where she kind of glory comes from. I’m guessing it’s a Jewish term or something like that. But that was how we were told that they were kind of in their perfect state while on earth. Um, that like they didn’t have they weren’t naked because they were covered in Shekinah glory. Meaning like they had these like glowing bodies and that they were like perfect bodies and that they like they like God gave them perfect bodies. That’s why they live. They were living forever or something like that. Um, because I’ve heard a lot and I’m actually not sure what the Catholic kind of, um, I guess version of how long Adam was in the garden before he fell. Because I mean, because I guess that’s kind of what the like it as far as immortality and stuff like that. Um, you know, I’ve heard both both ways. He was in the garden for a really long time. And I’ve also heard he fell away very quickly, like within like a year. There isn’t any official Catholic doctrine on that. Okay, I didn’t know there was. I think Thomas Aquinas was in the was in the yeah, it took about six hours camp. Yeah, like like real darn quick. I guess didn’t last all that long. Well, and I had heard that that was kind of like the Israelites fall after they go into, you know, like they go out of Egypt and then they like Moses goes up the mountain and he leaves them just for like just a bit. I mean, it can’t be any more than like three days or so. And by the time we back there into full on pagan, you know, the pagan worship again. And it’s like quickly, like real quick, like it does not take long. Um, and I’ve kind of also just I’m having a thought now, but it’s kind of like you could almost probably say it’s a little bit like humans. Like if you ever heard, like if we’re like the average city, if it’s without electricity for like, I think it’s like three days, it goes down really quick. Right. And like when the map nine meals away from absolute anarchism. Yeah, no, I would definitely. Probably a little bit less than some neighborhood. But, um, but yeah, no, I mean, that’s probably a mapping on there a little bit just because it’s it’s, you know, if whatever we like, I mean, whether we want to admit it or not, we kind of do have a little bit of an idol with electricity as our comfort. As long as the light bulbs on, we feel like we’re okay. Um, you know, and that and like we, we take a lot of comfort in electricity, running water and electricity. That is definitely like a comfort to us. That’s probably was akin to fire or something like that back in the day. But anyways, when the lights go out, yeah, we go downhill fast. But with Adam, you’re saying that or and I, the term freighter natural gift, I hadn’t that doesn’t seem to ring a bell from our CIA, but. That’s a very medieval way of doing things. Okay, okay. I I might have mentioned this in our CIA class, but like I was more like, hey, seven sacraments, you know, because. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what we were trying to do. You Chris and everything like that. But, you know, some people, it’s amazing what people grab on to when you’re teaching. And as long as it’s true, you know, you don’t mind, but you just kind of throwing stuff out there, especially in an RCA class. And I never knew how it was landing. So I think because of most of I mean, I would say most of the people you’ve probably given in the class to are from a Western Western worldview or a West. They’re from the West in most ways, though. And because of that, like Tom Holland’s book says, we’ve all kind of had this weird inherited version of Christianity that we base pretty much our worldview off of so much so that like even the homosexuals can’t realize that they’re they’re or that they’re doing, you know, I shouldn’t say that. The homosexual movement, the LGBTQ movement is like shutting down, like. Like they’re referencing morals and that it’s like, OK, what you’re saying, like you don’t like me because, you know, the church says what your behavior is a sin. So you’re saying that my behavior of judging you is a sin. Where are you getting that? Like, where are you getting that idea of sin that I’ve broken some moral code? Where are you getting your morals? And that, well, you know, well, I just feel it. And it’s like, OK, no, no, you’ve been you’ve been brainwashed just like everybody else. And no, at least that’s I don’t know. I have a brother that’s a homosexual and very hard to engage with certain topics with him just because it’s like, well, you only think that because, you know, you’re a Christian. It’s like, well, you only think that I’m wrong because you have an inherited sense of morality that you think that I’m stepping on your your freedoms or something like that. It’s like, where are you getting all this? And you only think that breathing is important because oxygen is necessary for survival. It’s like, well, yes, actually. Yeah. Guilty as charged. Yeah. No. So like we all have that kind of sense, you know, sense of of Christian moral values instilled in us from, you know, that we inherit just from being, you know, Americans in a lot of ways. I don’t know. Do you worry about that kind of going away? You know, I don’t because I think that it’s like a lot of things. I think it’s like a story that I think it can get hijacked. I think it can get manipulated. I think it can. But I think it. Yeah, I mean, it’s not inherent. It needs to be taught. But I think I don’t know that that’s the part of the part of our culture that’s really going to go away, per se. The idea like most people, you know, understand the concept of like not sharing. Like that’s a bad monkey thing to do. You’re a bad monkey if you don’t share. And like if you’re if you’re you know, and I always go back to the monkey mind because it’s like you can see certain moral values even inside a monkey, monkeydom that, you know, which is really weird. There’s some really interesting things that map on there about leadership and stuff like, for instance, it’s the drunk monkeys on the beach that are often the leaders. Like the ones that are passed out, like can’t stand up or just like falling over. Those are the leaders. And like apparently a monkey world, like, you know, to be a fall down drunk. I mean, that was great, too. Yeah, I know. I mean, that’s the luxury signal. Luxury. Yeah, if you’re if you’re if you’re so good at what you do, do you have spare time to drink? Oh, then you’re super confident. And that would be people. Yeah, people don’t understand. Elitism is a signal and it’s a signal of excess. Right. Because you go into these things like this is one of the things that always bothers me. Like people people buy on price. And I’m like, wow, people so don’t buy on price. You know, which not to say price isn’t a factor and that some people aren’t limited by price. I’m not buying a Mercedes ever. Right. I’m just never going to buy a Mercedes. Right. Yeah. But also Mercedes is in business. Tell me, especially since Lexus came along, tell me why anybody should buy a Mercedes ever. A Mercedes car isn’t that much better to justify the price. Right. It’s interesting. No, and it’s interesting because I’ll see pretty pragmatic people driving a Mercedes. And I’m like, what is attracting you? Because it’s a signal of excess. Right. And excess is a signal of competence. Yeah. And you should worship competence to some extent. Like those who don’t those people seem to know something. I hope they have more. Yeah. Even Jordan, I think in a lot of I haven’t listened to all of his lectures. I did read it. I listened to his book and I caught most of it. It’s a little bit. But the he was talking about like, I think it was in his spirit of the father lecture. And he was like, it’s it’s it’s it’s there’s a spirit that’s been running through all throughout time of masculinity. And it’s it it looks something like competence, I think is what he said. And so it is like the the that’s what women are attracted to. Also, it’s like something like competence. Right, right. Well, I mean, you don’t have exact mappings for things, right? Despite the science, people tell you, right? In science, you do have exact mapping for things. Unfortunately, science also doesn’t work to map the world. That might be a clue. But you don’t have exact mappings for things. So you kind of have to figure out, well, who knows what they’re doing? Is it the people who have access, who can afford to drink and pass out on the beach? Probably. And you see that, right? Like, well, wealthy people have these weird parties. If you like, like relevant parties, I go to right. Like there was that that whole what was it called, the fire gathering or whatever that was a big disaster, right? Because it turned out to be a scam. But they basically rented an island and a bunch of wealthy people flew in and tried to have this fire event. And and like they do stuff like like I’ve I’ve I’ve been there. I’ve been to these places. So there’s a there’s an island called Cuddy Hunt off of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. And my buddy took me there in his his boat. This is a gorgeous boat. But I mean, you know, he’s not a fancy guy, right? Like, oh, it wasn’t great. I mean, it was awesome boat. It sailed really super fast catamaran. So we go over there and like just the way they do things as wealthy people is so different. And like they know what one of the islands near Cuddy Hunt, because it’s on it’s on an island chain, the Elizabeth Islands, the end of the Elizabeth Islands, one at one of the islands has, you know, a little runway on a plane on it, you know, because that guy’s got a house he owns that whole island. Just their interaction with the world and the things they do and the things, you know, everything on that island is fantastically more expensive than you can imagine. It’s like it’s like being a white Hawaii. Everything’s expensive in Hawaii because it’s an island. These islands aren’t that far away. And there’s no reason for these to be quite that expensive other than all these people have money in excess. And when you have excess money, it doesn’t matter how much you spend. And people who don’t have never had excess money don’t understand that. Right. So they think it’s wasteful. It’s not wasteful. It’s a signal, though. Right. And usually you’re buying convenience. And the fact that you can afford convenience tells people something about your status. And that’s how people are able to kind of get away with this stuff is that that that that signal is is important. Now, it can be faked. That’s and that’s where people write, because, again, it’s not a perfect mapping of success or competence or whatever. Yeah, you’ll find somebody just up to their eyeballs in debt, just trying to keep up with the Joneses around them. And they look the part. But you’re like, yeah, you’re you’re floating on. Right. That happens all the time. And that’s why they do it. Right. They do it to seem more successful or more competent or or better. Higher up some hierarchy somewhere imagined or real than they really are. And and part of that, I think, goes goes back to the beginning of the stream. They’re not accounting for the gifts that they have. Right. They’re just sort of assuming, well, you know, we can buy gifts. We can we can we can buy our way into betterment instead of, you know, appreciating, you know, with gratitude what we have, because because we all return to that. Right. Like when you’re on your deathbed. Yeah. I wonder if the invention of philanthropy was a way of signaling excess, but putting it to more productive use than luxury goods. I don’t I don’t think I mean, I think philanthropy has always been around. It’s just that all philanthropy was done through the church. So all wealthy people just put their wealth into the church. And that and now and now they don’t do that anymore. For me, we bait all day the reasons. Right. Pointless. There’s still enough people doing it for us to still be building churches here in North Dakota. But but not like it was. I’ll admit, not like it was not like it was because it was all the wealth before. Like all excess wealth pretty much went through the church. Well, and even see that as a signal, we say the term virtue signaling, you know, when somebody will say, I am donating, you know, as a politician, I’m going to make sure that we donate this much to this cause, even though, you know, we’ll get rich somehow on the other side of it or something like that. You know that? Well, like not everyone’s that evil. A lot of politicians actually believe that what they do works. Yeah, but they believe that, but they don’t. They’re so deluded because that whole world is a is a complete. Yeah, they’re not deluded. They’re too stupid to be deluded. They act their true believer. No, they really are. I mean, yeah, everyone’s really smart. And the bottom line is most people are not by definition. Most people are below average, right? They’re just saying that they’re not interpreting reality. Like you’re saying you’re using the term stupid. I’m just using the term deluded because it’s, I guess, maybe a little bit less harsh or something. But I don’t think they’re. They’re not. They’re not deluded. It’s not like they have a system in place that validates their beliefs. It’s that they have they haven’t been given a rationality for doing what they do. Right. Yeah. Just been told this is the way it works. And because they can’t work it out, because everyone’s intelligence is limited and their cognitive abilities limit, even if your intelligence is high, if you’re not paying attention to something, it’s easy to be fooled. Right. And so they’re they are true believers that like, well, if you spend more money on schools, you’re going to get smarter people, which has been complete. I mean, obviously, I think some of the obvious ones like AOC chopping up, I don’t know if you saw the little video of her chopping up lemons with her t-shirt on this tax, the rich and stuff like that. And my brother-in-law, who’s like a multimillionaire complaining about how it’s the rich that are ruining that are making the economy do this or that. And I’m like, bro, you’re the rich. Like, I don’t know how to like, but like we talked about before, it’s all about this passing off. So for the rich guy, it’s Bezos and Elon Musk. That is a problem. Right. You always look up above you for the problem in the postmodern world, though, you should, because according to postmoderns, it’s top down power from above power as power as control and control through force or threat of force. Like that’s the worldview. Very, but yet, but they still rebel against them like the rebel against the norms. And in that they fall into the same the same. It’s a really weird, like mimicry they do where they do this. Like, like, I need to have the freedom to express myself, like, you know, sexually and with my clothes and with like, you know, I should be able to. Yeah, I should be able to walk around without my top on. Screw your civilization rules. That’s the individualism. Right. That’s what that is. But think about but think about this, Josh. But think hold on. So you mentioned virtue signaling earlier, and I don’t think very many people realize this. Let’s think about virtue signaling. What is that and why would you have to do it? The only reason you’d have to signal your virtue is because it wasn’t obvious. And maybe the reason why it’s not obvious is because you’re not embedded in a system where your virtue is contrasted clearly. Or where you can probably express it. Yeah. Yeah, you have to mark. Well, and like you were saying earlier, do you worry about this? Like the inherited virtues that we get or the inherited moral values that lead to virtuous living that, you know, are we worried about this going out of our culture? And I guess, yeah, maybe upon talking about it a little bit more, maybe I don’t know if I’m worried, but it just it seems so ingrained in Western culture that if it does go out, it’ll be because we literally lost our story. Like we don’t we don’t remember who we are in any way, shape or form. So it will be something completely different. We won’t be Americans anymore. We’ll be. But it’s not it’s not it’s not our story. We’ve lost our ability to participate in a good story. And see, this is OK. This is where I get into the difference between crisis of faith and meaning crisis. The meaning crisis, people cannot properly participate in any story. And so they just create new ones in an attempt to participate. All the new ones they create are not going to work because like you need distributed cognition through a couple of thousand years, maybe three or four thousand years in order to create a story that you can properly participate in. That might be a hint, by the way. Right. And so the crisis of faith people at least have some chance because they’re aware of some story. Right. And maybe they’ve fallen out of that story or bought into the individualism or whatever. Right. And then they’re trying to virtue signal it doesn’t work. And then they they get re-enchanted through Peterson. Fair enough. Right. And then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, OK. And that looks like the same transformation or whatever. Right. It looks the same. But I don’t I don’t think it is. I think it’s actually a fundamentally different interaction. But that’s why you need virtue signaling, because you’re not participating in a story where your virtue can shine through. Right. And through you, because virtue shines through you. Right. Virtue is way bigger than than than any of us. Even combined, even if we come even with super friends, super friends, you know, you know, like virtue is way bigger. So it shines through you in a way. And it’s like, oh, OK. But in order for it to do that, you have to have right order, right relationship with things. And I think, again, the beginning of the street was really informative because it’s like, where do we start with being rightly ordered? Infuse knowledge, integrity, impassibility and immortality. It’s that simple. I think so. I like I really like that. Oh, I’ve never heard of that before. So I’m like, oh, that’s a really cool outline. It’s an underappreciated aspect of Catholic theology. It’s hidden. And now now we get into my objection. Why is this hidden? Why haven’t I heard of this before? It’s because I’m stupid and we like failing. Why do we post everywhere, Father Eric, everywhere on every street corner? That’s a lot of advertising money that I don’t have, man. No, you don’t need money to do that. If the Christians would just get off their ass, you know, oh, now we have the we have the rich people donating to build the cathedral. The people should be building the cathedral. They’re part time. Like, what the hell? That’s what they used to do. Yeah. Who wasn’t paid for? You didn’t have large sums of money transferring to build cathedrals in the Middle Ages. What the hell? They had a much more efficient system. They had a virtuous populace that knew how to do work with stone and mortar. And and their virtue shined through in their interaction with building the cathedral. However small that may be. Oh, I help. I help to make sure that, you know, I help the cart out that had some of the stones for the cathedral. You don’t need to signal anymore. You don’t need virtue signaling. And it’s a virtue signal is one of those deep ironies where on the one hand, it’s total BS. On the other hand, it’s a completely accurate description of a problem. Right. Even though it doesn’t it seems like a solution to a problem, but it’s actually a description of a problem. Well, and it’s it’s it’s a. I mean, we all we’ve all seen that. I mean, like, I don’t even need to bring up a movie analogy or a book analogy. I’m sure there’s some character that’ll come to your mind as I say this. But like we all know the false the falsely virtuous villain in the movie, you know, the one that seems like a nice guy, but he’s really just a real scumbag, even though he gives, you know, he’ll he’ll say, I don’t know. Like, I guess I’m kind of thinking of like the sheriff of Nottingham character or something like that, like in the Robin Hood, like, you know, he goes to church and he he gives his arms to the poor and that he’s just this rotten, rotten, horrible dude. And, you know, it’s actually the outlaw that is way more virtuous, you know, and that but and we and we like that story. And we see we I guess because we’ve seen it so many times in history where we’ve seen, you know, a a man in power who we know, you know, we know is just rotten, do these virtuous things and and that. But like you said, I think that in a lot of ways, they are true believers. Like I complained about AOC yesterday, but yeah, when she first got on the scene and like started spouting her kind of a lot of nonsense, I was like, I know this girl’s a true believer. I can I don’t think I can I don’t I’m not like a lip or a mind reader. I don’t I’m not good about reading people or whatever. But yeah, but sometimes I mean, I know, I know when I see a leader because I guess I was a I’m probably more of a follower than I want to admit in some ways. But I know when I’m drawn to somebody, I’m like I’m like, yeah, you believe this hook, light and then think like you like that’s why you’re getting followers is because you’re you you definitely believe that you are virtuous. And I mean, and so, yeah, she’s she’s bought her she’s drank her own Kool-Aid pretty pretty pretty heavily. Well, whatever whatever Kool-Aid she drank, she’s able to transmit it. Well, it’s probably part of her whatever it was. But that’s one aspect of charisma and and charisma is is a component of leadership. It doesn’t it’s not required for leadership. This is where people get confused. They think leadership is charisma. It’s like, no, actually, you know, leaders who aren’t charismatic. That’s actually not hard. Right. And and people get confused. Right. You know, leaders with with terrible voices. Dr. Jordan Peterson, you can you can write all kinds of of of of people that that that can lead, you know, even with those problems. And and because we don’t understand what leadership is, because in some ways, leadership is a really complex issue. I’ve been thinking about this recently, especially with the conversation that’s been happening around the unmentionable is one of the I think probably the key to leadership, the CNA, quote, none that which needs to be there is somebody’s bearing responsibility for a real outcome. Right. And like somebody like somebody’s actually caring. And it’s like, doesn’t matter if they’re charismatic, doesn’t matter if they’re intelligent. Right. It doesn’t matter if they’re virtuous. If you’re leading something, you’re taking the responsibility to make things happen. Right. No, and I like that you’re taking you’re you’re trying to make something specific happen. By the way, that question was brilliant. I was like surprised. I’m like, oh, I didn’t you were surprised. OK. All right. OK. Oh, that was brilliant. Also, also, it worked. Right. You can. What do you guys think? I just the Friday stream. Yeah, I didn’t realize the I didn’t realize the implications of what I just agreed to. Oops. And now I have to answer a question based on that. Oh, it was brilliant. But we’ll we’ll get to it, Josh. OK. Yeah, no, sorry. But but you’re right. The leadership aspect is about being willing to take the responsibility for the results of trying to enact something, whatever those results are. Like because a lot of times people think, oh, that person’s trying to do that. And therefore it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, this is way more complicated. There’s a bigger sacrifice because failure is far more likely. So whatever it is you’re trying to do once you set that T. Lowe’s right, that goal, that purpose in place, the odds that you will achieve it are very, very, very low. And so people don’t want to set the T. Lowe’s. And then when you set the T. Lowe’s, when you say, no, no, no, we’re going to do this, we’re going to make try to make this happen. And then it doesn’t have to be specific. It can be vague. It doesn’t really matter in some sense. Right. But it should be specific enough. And this is where it comes into play. Right. That a leader can lead you there. And you can define a structure that makes that happen. And those are sort of the three components that you need to have a thing and I didn’t even think of it that way, Father Eric. So, yeah, if you want to go into that, that little story, I thought that was great. OK. All right. Hmm. Promise myself I wasn’t going to rant about. And I actually didn’t promise myself. I said it wasn’t going to start there. But now that we’ve gotten there, let’s talk about this thing that I throw up on the board here. TLC rule number one. Shh. Now, where did that come from? That came from me listening to I think it was one of Jacob’s streams. Jacob and I think Hesie was there and a few other folks. Right. And they started talking about this little corner, this and that little corner, that, you know, and and I was just like, Dear Lord, this is boring. Like I did not enjoy listening to that conversation. It just felt self-referential, like it was going nowhere and that there was nothing really for the intellect to grab on to and understand things. And so I’m like, all right. This was about the time that I was thinking about getting my stream going. This is just over a year ago. And I’m like, fine, I’m going to make this little graphic. We’re just going to have this rule because I don’t want to talk about it. You know, and, you know, in conversations with, you know, Mark and other people started to get into the like, OK, why does it why is it such a bad topic for conversation? And I think I don’t know who came up with it first, and it doesn’t really matter. But the idea was like, well, there really isn’t anything there. There isn’t any there there that we could actually talk about with this supposed little quarter of the Internet here. And then Paul, Pastor Paul started talking about it sometime this week, and it started coming up in the live stream. And I’m like, all right, enough of this nonsense. And so I asked a question, I put it in. This was the Friday Q&A. So this just happened a couple of days ago. And I’m like, in order for a thing to exist, it must have a telos, a head and structure. And he’s like, yes, I agree with that. I mean, what are the telos, head and structure of this little corner of the Internet? And the answer he gave. If I believed it, I’d be very happy with right, because he basically said, you know, it’s Christ, you know, but I’m like, that doesn’t work, man. Like you described Christendom roughly, except with no structure, because he just refused the structure, the structure answer entirely. Yeah. And and that was, you know, when I heard that answer, I’m like, yeah, yeah, that didn’t change my mind. So, you know, perhaps perhaps Pastor Paul will have some further time to reflect on this. And then I put out a lot of comments on Pastor Paul’s video from yesterday. And I got a little punchy in the comments section, and I don’t do that very often. So anyway, we’re just going to continue our our little thing, and I don’t really want to talk about this a whole lot more in order to keep my own rules. But, Mark, you sounded like you had something you wanted to say. So. Well, I think the foundation of these things and understanding things is important. Like, you can’t just take random parts and put together put them together in whatever order you think is appropriate. And have a thing like that’s not available to you. And part of the reason why we don’t know that and that’s a very postmodern thing, but like you’re you’re fully in postmodernism when you’re talking like that. People who are talking like that. In recent videos, I’ve watched, you know, you’re fully in spot in sconce in postmodernism at that point. There’s little way for you a way out of that. I would say that attitude is how we got here. Like the problems of today that you see around you that you can you can place in in quote modernity or whatever other framing you want to use. That’s where it comes from. It comes from this idea that you can grab random pieces, put a name to them, and then you have a thing. And when you don’t have an axiomatic starting point, like you talked about in the beginning of the stream, right, when you don’t have that and you don’t have a definition for what is a thing, because it’s an excellent question. It’s a question everyone’s been asking. You know, I’ve heard for Vickie talk about this, right. I’ve heard Peugeot talk about this. Right. Peterson talks about this. Final cause gets you there like that. Right. Well, and you need you need to have a thing. Right. Well, and you need you need you need a story. I’ve heard somebody talk about that recently. Cale’s been talking about that with with Pastor Paul, actually, about that video. I’m not done with it, but it’s it’s actually the first half of the video is terrible. You’re like 35, 40 minutes in. It gets really good. Thingness is important. Like you can’t just slap a name on five items that you like, you know, or or a flotilla or a bunch of people or a bunch of people that know a bunch of things or or like everybody that talks to a certain person or everybody that watches these five channels on the Internet. They’re all of the same type. No, that’s not true. Like like if I if I watch Jordan Peterson and I just disagree with everything and somebody else watches Jordan Peterson and they agree with everything. We don’t have anything in common. You can say we both watched all of Jordan Peterson’s work and maybe that’s true. That’s not in common. If our attitude towards it is opposing like polar opposite, we wouldn’t have anything in common. That’s not true. So you can’t use designations. And I would call these materialist oddly from the people that have been using this terminology. They all seem materialist to me. They keep using these sort of signals or indicators right to to come up with a name or whatever, a random name and try to fit everybody into this bucket. And then they universalize it. And one of the latest trend is to un-universalize it and imply that somewhere there might be a boundary, by the way. But it’s only an implication. And they’ll never draw one. Right. But you don’t have a structure and you can’t have a head if you’re not going to draw a boundary. If you’re not going to have a container. That was that was the only if if if I were to be so bold as to critique, that was the only thing that was missing was although a structure implies a boundary. Right. But that was the only thing that was missing from that question was like, don’t you think you need a boundary and like enforcement of the boundary? Otherwise, you don’t have a thing because it blends into everything else. Right. And that’s that universalism, flattening. That’s all pretty much the same. And tell me, try to universalize something. You flatten it and it spreads out. So you know, you need boundaries to keep a shape, to keep a hierarchy. Right. Any time you flatten the hierarchy, you’re going to you’re going to cause a flood. You’re going to flatten things out. And that’s the only way to get to get rid of that. And that’s part of that’s part of the problem. Just thinking about what things are and how to and how to think about them. I think I think I thought that was I think it’s useful to use the analogy of a human body. Right. Yeah. The only way a human being is able to exist is by existing in a certain space, taking up a certain amount of dimensions, existing in relation with other objects. Which is a boundary, right? And we got the skin, the skin is literally a boundary. Right. And we have to keep certain things out and we let other things in. Otherwise, we die. Right. What is death? Well, death is the separation of the soul from the body. That’s one thing. But, you know, you you don’t have the boundaries anymore. You can just kind of be you just start falling to pieces. Right. You also have a head. Right. Something that’s centrally coordinating, organizing thing. And, you know, if you’re going to be a good human being, you need to have the appropriate telos. And the appropriate telos is giving glory to God and saving souls. So. Yeah, no. And I don’t know. Like, I mean, the. The corner or whatever, like, I don’t know. Like, that’s not really what maybe at an initial I was trying to figure out what the hell or heck everybody was talking about for a long time. And, you know, and like, it’s a very like. I don’t know. It’s all over the place. It doesn’t like, you know, I don’t know. I understand what now I have. If you can’t explain it, that might be because there’s no there there. Right. And like, nobody would admit that it like it’s OK. Like, it’s OK. It is. It’s fine. Look at me. Look at me. I do this every week. Sorry about last week. My Internet literally went out. Right. But I do this every week. I show up on Mark’s Discord and the Bridges of Meeting Discord. I’m participating in. Something with existence that doesn’t have essence. They feel about that. I don’t know. Well, and I think I think that the whole idea of a head and a leader is sort of misunderstood. The way Sally Jo talks about this is it’s just brilliant. Like, she’s really got it because she was in the military. The head of the spear takes the brunt of the force. And so without a leader out front doing whatever that leader does better than everybody else, clearing the brush or whatever it is, the other people cannot do that work. Like it cannot. And that’s what people miss is we’re not equal. Like like Josh had skills that I do not have. Period. We are not equal. Who’s better is like up for discussion. Really depends what you’re doing. Are you? Yeah. Who’s more competent in this particular situation? Yeah. Am I going to be bringing trees down in my yard? No. If we’re doing computers, Mark’s in charge. If we’re cutting trees down, Josh is in charge. And if you’re running a Bible study, I’m in charge. It’s like there’s three leaders. We’re all leaders of different things. That’s OK. And maybe we can’t be in the same group. Like maybe there’s no scenario where I can lead the group because it’s purely a computer thing and Josh is going to care and Father Eric’s going to care at the same time. I’m OK with that. Like I have other groups that I lead where, hey, the computer thing is important. And so we’re all going to follow Mark. Fair enough. That’s fine. I’m happy to do that work. And it’s also people don’t understand it’s a sacrifice to lead. It’s a high cost. It’s a very high cost. And people are like, leaders are in charge. And so they’ve got it going on. And even Pastor Paul talks about this. Like, oh, all these things in my life would have to change for me to start leading pretty much anything, any undefined thing. And boy, my wife wouldn’t be happy and I wouldn’t be able to get together with my kids and I might be on the road more and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that’s a sacrifice. Peterson’s like on the road all the time right now. And maybe that’s good for him and maybe that’s fine. I don’t know. It’s still a sacrifice though, because man, I like being at home and not having to leave the house sometimes. Not all the time. Yeah, I’ve had a couple of guys that I’ve trained to take over. I was leaving a tree company and I was trying to see who was going to be the next kind of foreman and who was going to try. We, you know, you could go by, you know, well, this guy has this much experience and maybe this. And I was telling my boss, I was like, man, I was like, you’re looking for the guy that could sacrifice. I was like, you’re looking for that guy. And I said, I was like, that’s your leader. The one that’s going to actually answer his phone on his weekend. I was like, no, which one is that? We came up, we both kind of looked at each other and we’re like, well, that’s Bearclaw. And it was, you know, he didn’t have as much experience as the other guy. He was a bit bigger. He didn’t climb as fast or anything like that. And I said, I think so too. Before I left, I told Bearclaw, I was like, I was like, it’s, I was like, it’s, it’s all your responsibility. I said, everybody out here, all the equipment is all your responsibility. If it goes to hell today, I was like, that’s on you. And I was like, this isn’t, and I was like, and you don’t sit in your truck and you don’t do paperwork when there’s dangerous work being performed. I was like, you do that on the way to the job and you let somebody else drive. I was like, you know, and I was like, can you sit in the back and you do your paperwork then? I was like, you don’t get to take lunch because you need to be sort of, you might need to make phone calls during that time. I was like, so you see lunch on the run. And I was like, and I was just describing to him how much this job actually sucks. But it was like, but well, and I was like, but I was like, the thing is, is that you’re doing this because you have the older brother mentality. And he understood that because he had a younger brother that was, he always just said he was on the spectrum, but I suspected there was other things going on with him. But, you know, and he understood how to take responsibility for somebody because he had been an older brother and he had a dad that was, you know, even though as flawed as he was, knew how to take responsibility for his son. He’s like, yeah, when I flipped the car and put it in a ditch one day, it didn’t matter the fact that, you know, my dad was sitting at home or, you know, and didn’t want to deal with his, you know, drunk son, you know, and he’s like, no, he came down to the sheriff’s office, picked me up, you know, talked to the sheriff’s office. So he knew how to take responsibility in, you know, in situations where everybody wants to be like, hands off, I didn’t do it. And I mean, he could pick up the ball and run with it, you know, and even though you, you know, if you pick up the ball and run with it, you’re risking losing the game. You know, you’re risking, you know what I mean? You know, to be participatory, there’s a risk, you know, and things like that. Even, yeah, even the military, like you were saying, when I was, I spent a short time in basic and they told it, they were doing urban mount training, military operations in an urban environment. They were teaching us how to go door to door and stuff. And they said, yeah, when you’re trying to figure out who should go through the door first, you want to select the most experienced guy. And I said, and they said, well, what if we’re all kind of around the same experience? Because somebody that wanted to be a leader spoke up and asked that question. He said, he said, whoever survived the last encounter, because whatever worked there, he figured it out. He’s like, and because he’s like, you never know what’s on the other side of the door. It’s totally unpredictable. But somehow this guy survived and that means he should go first this time. So he’s like, he kind of becomes a victim of his own step and ends up taking on more risk because, you know, he’s doing the, he’s doing the most risky job over and over again. It’s almost as if one to more is given more will be expected. Oh yeah. Almost. Almost as if. Somebody, somebody should have written that down in a book somewhere a couple thousand years ago and passed it down. That would have been a really hand. Well, and the thing is with responsibility, I think we’re dealing with a couple of generations of people who haven’t been trained how to be responsible and aren’t aware of what responsibility is. And I think you’re looking up and you’re seeing the wrong things. Yeah. Right. You don’t look up. I mean, you use this example all the time, Mark, like people look to Elon Musk and he’s like, oh, he’s super intelligent. Right. And then you say, no, Elon Musk slept under his desk at work until he became really successful. And it’s like, okay, yeah, you got to look up and see that. And actually I don’t want to do that. And I don’t think all the billions are actually worth that. So that’s what attracted me. Yeah, that’s what attracts me to Elon Musk is like a worker. And that is, as I look at it, I was like, no, I would fall. Like if he’s willing to put in that much effort, I want to see what he’s building. Like, you know what I mean? Like I want to, I want to, you know, I, and I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to put them on the pedestal, but I could see his work ethic and that’s impressive. And I mean, even in the, I guess, you know, coming from a Protestant background and again, my father found Calvinism a little bit later, but it mapped onto his, or it, you know, went onto his life really well. And I mean, in my family, we’ve always been workers. That’s just something we did. You know, you have to be working. It’s like, you know, it was just something that got pushed, you know, homeschooled with, you know, four boys and that. And, you know, we all got ourselves into different trades and things like that. And that sometimes we’re out of work. That wasn’t so fun, but, you know, but, you know, it was just what’s expected that you have to be a hard worker, you know, and that you have to, oh, now a lot of times I think that my family kind of gets stuck there and they’re not very entrepreneurial. They’re not, they don’t recognize that they’re, you know, you don’t have to make somebody else rich. You can start your own company, you know, and things like that. I wish, I wish that was different, but, you know, as far as work ethic and that. But can you like a part of the, like most businesses fail just like 95%. It’s, you know, I’ve started a bunch of businesses. Almost all of them fail except one. So, you know, and that one wasn’t super successful. Not that, not that I’ve made a lot of money. I certainly did. Most of it gets stolen from me, but like I made a lot of money and that’s the other problem. Like if you’re living in a world where you make a lot of money and someone steals it all, what good is that? Like, aren’t you better off being under the protection of having a steady job and right, because man, that, you know, that becomes different later on. A lot of people are noticing, hey, you start doing like a lot of people talk, oh, you do the consulting gig, right? But then when you can’t do that anymore, you have no pension. You probably have no retirement plan. Like, and so you may have made more money back then, right? But going forward, you’re not going to make any more. And there’s other people who, you know, they were in the school system for 20 years and that was a horrible job and they were quote underpaid, which is usually a lie. But some places that’s true. Most places that’s not, right? But then they keep getting income for the rest of their lives. So they’re retired. They’re still getting income. It’s a good trade off. Yeah, no, it’s a good trade off. Yeah, no. And I mean, like I said, I guess, I guess it’s wanting to take or I guess as a Christian too, I think, you know, that there may, maybe this is a wrong view I have of God and maybe, you know, you guys can tell me, but like, I feel you’re freer to do what you need to do if you take responsibility for yourself. Like, you know, for instance, like the government takes a huge amount out of your check before you ever get it. So you have to put in your 40 hours just so you can make the amount that you were, you know, that, you know, you were hired at or whatever, you know, and so you have that, you have that wage or whatever. But if you’re willing to take responsibility for yourself and pay your own taxes, you know, and do your own taxes, then you can kind of build your life around a business. You know, the truck you bought isn’t a luxury item. It’s a work expense now and things like that. But you have to take, you have to be willing to stick your neck out and take responsibility for yourself. And able, and able, like there are people who can’t balance a checkbook. They’re never going to do that, Josh. Like, and fair enough. And the thing is, like, you have to look at it backwards too. The government gives you an awful lot too. Like you get a lot of employment protections by participating in that way. And so your taxes aren’t going to nothing now. And this is a fair critique. It’s a critique that I have in particular because I’ve got real reasons to have this critique way beyond most people. The government’s no longer upholding their end of the bargain and people are saying taxes theft and taxes only theft. If the government isn’t giving you some protections or something for it, right? And so when the government reduces, we’ll say your tax money to a scheme to move money around in an economic system. Taxes theft. That is technically true, right? But when the government is using your tax money to protect you from bad things, say at exorbitant cost, right? So when the government’s willing to go ahead and prosecute identity fraud themselves, right? Then it’s a good deal to pay a lot of money for that. Because if you try to fight identity fraud yourself, it’s unbelievable. It’s a million dollars, right? That’s why the insurance on identity theft is a million dollars because it actually costs about a million dollars to fix identity theft. Of course, if you’re the government. And look, if you’re poor, it’s different, right? Like if you’re not making $100,000ayear,i{t}^{\prime }sprobablynotgoingtocostyouamilliondollarstofixyouridentitytheft.Butforalotofpeoplewhoaremaking$100,000 a year and maybe their standard of living is not that high, right? Like if I were making $100,000ayearrightnowinMassachusetts,mystandardoflivingwould{n}^{\prime }tbeanywherenearashighasitishere.Likei{t}^{\prime }snotevenachallenge,right?Likethingsaresoexpensiveupthere.Everything,gas,food,everythin{g}^{\prime }svastlymoreexpensiveupthere.Thatwould{n}^{\prime }tbeasbigadeal.Itstillcostsamilliondollarstofixidentitytheft,though.IfIhadgottenidentitytheftwhenIwasmaking$120,000 a year in Massachusetts, I’d have been over with, done, finished. That would have destroyed my life. Because to fix that, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because the government isn’t doing that work. Maybe they should be. And in the past, it was less of an issue because they made the credit card companies do that work. Thanks, Bill Clinton. And now they’re no longer liable for a lot of that, even though they’re responsible for most of it. And so that’s one of the problems is that when we don’t realize, maybe we don’t have the foundation that Father Eric outlined in the beginning of his dream, right? We don’t realize there are certain places we’re starting from that we can build a virtuous framework from, right? Or a framework for understanding where we’re from. And we don’t have this relationship of subservience to the things that are bigger than us. I just see so much freedom getting taken away from the individual, from the family, from the citizens in the argument of security. The meaning that you need us. Like you said, I understand cybersecurity, the security issue of identity theft. You’re not buying security from the government. You’re not buying security from the government. But I’ll tell you one thing that you absolutely buy from the government with your taxes. Justice. Very explicitly justice. In other words, the government and the government shouldn’t try to protect you. Like that’s not what the government’s role is. Accepting explicitly in war, right? The government’s role is to provide justice. It’s to make things equal in a sense. Not to make people equal, not to give equal outcomes, but to equalize things. So equalize the playing field, equal opportunity, right? But they’re not providing that because they become a money moving scheme, which is technically theft. Like again, these people who are saying taxation is theft have a point. It wasn’t always theft though. And that’s important to remember because we can go back. Everybody says we can’t go back. Hey, that’s not true. That’s just a flat out lie. And you look in the history, things go back all the time, right? And lots of things go back, right? That’s just wrong. But also when you don’t go back and you strayed the path, what happens to you? You fall off a cliff. And so you sure as hell better be able to go back and you better do it. And yeah, you can’t do it perfectly. So you’re going to lose some good things. But also that’s too freaking bad. Like that’s the world we live in. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good and you will receive his approval. For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid. For he does not bear the sword in vain. He is a servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. So Mark is basically just laying out a biblical vision of justice at the Bible that he’s never read. But that’s weird. Honestly, that doesn’t need to be in the Bible. It’s good that it’s in the Bible. We’ll take it. But it’s like, yeah, guys, come on. This is yeah. Yeah. And you should be more concerned. Everybody, everybody. I don’t mean to single you out, Josh. Everybody should be more concerned with the corruption of structures rather than the structures themselves. Structure is good. You need structure to survive. You personally, physically, in order for you to, we’ll say, express your individuality, whatever. I don’t like any of those frames. But whatever. I’ll see the frame to you. In order for you to be a good individual, you need a structure to manifest that. You actually can’t build one by yourself that doesn’t even make any sense. Those are monks that live in the woods or in a cave and never interact with anybody. And they can’t do anything. Well, no, that was what attracted me to the Catholic Church is because I could see how unstructured the Bible churches were that I was participating in. That there was this guy that would get up and talk for about two and a half hours. And even though he was a very learned man and a lot of what he was saying, I was like, I could just tell. I’ve seen a lot of churches around my area spread up and then close. Spread up and then close. And I think Paul talks about that. Like he was talking about living stones, possibly not being on the, on the, yeah, being around this coming year or something like that. And that was one thing that attracted me to the Catholic Church is I was like, this has been in existence for a really long time. Things that have been in existence for a really long time, tend to stay in existence for a really long time. And all the churches that I had gone to, the one I was baptized in, it now goes under a different name, completely different leadership, completely different, you know, a lot of different theology and things like that. And I could just see that generation to generation that they just do, the product system does just not have the legs that, yeah, Catholicism has. And so I started attending some masses and I liked how the priests were his vestments. I was like, you know, I get it. I see the hierarchy. I can see that, you know, you have a job. Like you were put here by a higher, you know, by a governing body. And that, and you were installed in this location. And I don’t know, not to sidetrack us too much, but that’s one thing. I don’t know, this week I’ve been thinking about with Paul on the Friday stream and then looking at my own local father, Father Suci. And he just looking at the differences, if there are, and it would be interesting to hear your opinion on this, Father, but it, I think that there’s a lot of difference between a priest and a pastor. Like Paul described himself as a professional community builder. And I was like, so like you, you understand the corporate structure. And so you can just, you’re just going around building that everywhere, like using that to build. It’s like somebody who learned how to, you know, build a house. And so they just go around building, you know, houses, you know what I mean? And it’s like out of possibly inferior materials and that, and it’s just like, it, you know, yeah, you understand how to get the nest going and get the boards up and get the roof on and flap it together. And then you’re down the road and, you know, come back and yep, it clapped, you know, it imploded or whatever in that. And it just, because to me, a priest is not like, I know that the word gets used interchangeably, but I see the difference between my priest and, you know, and what Paul’s doing. I just, I just want to point to the key of it. And the key of the Catholic priesthood, the sacramental priesthood is that I’m a mediator. I’m a mediator of God, right? So my humanity is supposed to be a bridge between God and man. And I think at some point, I don’t remember where, I don’t remember how it was, Pastor Paul explicitly said, I’m not a mediator like that. Not the way that a Catholic priest is. And so, you know, I think that’s part of the reason why the church for centuries celebrated mass ad orientum, right? And it had this, as this continual dynamic of the priest facing the altar, of sacrifice, and then turning around and, you know, bringing the blessings to the people, right? Being that going between, going back and forth. But you notice they don’t really have that structure in most Protestant services. I say most old school Lutherans, which, hey, Lutheran churches have been around for a while, so like pay attention to that. They actually become that more traditional style of worship there. They also have bishops and priests and provincial gatherings. Well, Martin Luther mapped it. I mean, Alvin, you know, they mapped the Christian church. I mean, like even, like I was never like, it got a lot of it got washed out when you’re not, I mean, in the Lutheran church and that, like, I guess in the Protestant circles I ran around and they kind of looked down on Lutherans just as much as they did the Catholics on that. And it was like, you know, because my dad was just solar scriptural all the way, it’s like, no, you know, but I guess, I guess just what I’m saying is like even like what Paul was saying, you know, like, oh, I’d actually like to go to like a more, I think like a biblical church, lots of, you know, updated singing of hymns and a more robust worship service and, and this kind of thing. Yeah. And he was like, and I was kind of like listening to him and I was like, it doesn’t matter what you want. I thought we were all kind of on the same page about that. Like, it does not matter what you want. Like it’s like that part of the work, you know, this isn’t, and I even say it like, you know, I made the note, like when I was explaining Catholic mass to my parents and I was like, no, it’s totally different, Ma, Dad. I was like, like, they’re not single serving cups. Like we all drink from the same cup. I was like, it’s communal. It’s like, I’m right there. I’m in a, I’m moving in the same direction. We all go the same way. You know, I’m going to the left, I’m going to the right, but we all, we all follow this procession and we all do the same things in the practices. And I was like, and I knew this worked because this is what they did to us in basic. It is that you all are going to dress the same way. We’re going to cut all of your hair the same way. You’re all going to sing the same song. You’re all going to address me the same way. I will not play favorites. And if I do, it’s only to select that a leader who’s going to accept all the responsibility for what you do wrong. So, you know, and it was like, I knew that this, this, this, that yes, you can build a body out of this, a fighting body, and it becomes very, very effective. Like, you know, it’s, it, and you, but it was, and I mean, even the infantry graduation, there’s, there’s a part that they don’t really ever show on video. It’s not part of the, the, the ceremonies that you see videotaped or anything like that. It’s the only one that they participate in after. But every, and I, and I didn’t get to participate in, I was out of basic by this point. I was just a helper. I got really sick and basic. It sucked. I was 17. I should have gotten in much later. But it, anyways, they like, they all there’s at night, you all go on this really long, really brutal rock march, and then you end up on a hill, sand hill. And then there’s a giant flag and there’s a ceremony that takes place and everybody dipped their cup in this really gnarly juice that does not Kool-Aid. I don’t know what the heck it is, but it’s super thick and it’s supposed to represent blood. I’m pretty sure. And it’s like, you know, and so there’s this real, there’s this real ceremony that goes on. And even like when you get your jump wings, they press the, you know, the pin into your chest, you know, and stuff like that. And so there’s these, there’s these, there’s these even like little bits of pain and little bits of humiliation and things like that, that you go through to be part of the group. And it ties you together like, you know, tighter than a drum, you know, and that, and I could see, obviously I’m not saying that those things exist inside the Catholic church. I’m just saying that I could see that this works, you know, that this structure works. And just because you can copy it and, you know, Ikea it, you know, to where you’ve taken something, you know, some really beautiful piece of furniture, and then, you know, you have an inferior product that you have to assemble yourself, you know, that you’re like, you know, like, oh, they’re the same thing. Well, yes, they’re both chairs, but this one is beautiful. That one was not an Ikea, you know. Like, at least to me, that seems like, you know, this little corner and a lot of these communities that all sprout up and that it’s like, they’re not, you know, like a lot of them want to worship together or have like a communion together or something like that. They’re not one thing, right? They don’t, they don’t want to be one thing, which is fine. And you’ll notice too, Joshua, it’s really weird, right? Because a lot of the Protestants will say, oh, the problem is theology. It’s like, okay, dude, what Protestant church has maintained any semblance of a coherent theology through time? None of them. Like, it’s not even remote. You can go back to Luther all you want, but like Luther would not agree with you. You can go back to Calvin all you want. You would not agree with what you’re doing now. I’m sorry. You’ve changed so many times that you don’t have a consistent theology. So if your belief is this is all about theology and you’re maintaining like a Protestant denomination or whatever, I got news for you. You know, unconsciously, consciously, whatever, you know you’re in the wrong place. You’re doing the wrong thing. You have to be. If it’s a theological argument, the Protestants have to lose because they don’t maintain a coherent theology through time. It just, it doesn’t stick together and stay together and keep going. And it is what it is, right? Yeah. Well, it’s, I mean, like we’re using words interchangeably that like, oh, you know, like calling Paul Pope or why can’t Paul be Pope and stuff like this. And it’s like, okay, well, like, let’s not use, you know what I mean? These are not even close to the same thing. But Josh, the idea of mediation. What is a priest? He’s a mediator for the structure, for the interaction with the church, right? And a pastor is not. Yeah, flocks need somebody to lead them or whatever or shepherd them. Sure, absolutely. But you also need a mediator into the structure. And that means you need a structure, right? And that alone calls into question, sola scriptura. And this goes back to some, what I was saying earlier, like there’s things that you can’t do. There’s things that I can’t do. There’s things that Father can’t do. And they’re not necessarily the same things, although some of them might be, right? But there’s lots of them. And so we need structure to help us with that. And that’s fine, right? So we’re not all out there trying to build our own boats or trying to start our own YouTube channels or trying to run communities or trying to come up with practices, right? We need something to have in common or to have something in common. It’s not, it seems like a simple statement, but like, you’ve got to think about it that way. Again, is everybody listening to Jordan Peterson actually on board with what Jordan Peterson says or half the people listening going, everything Jordan Peterson says is complete garbage. And I’m taking notes and figuring out why, because I know people that do that. So some of the people listening to Jordan Peterson are not on board with anything that I believe because of that one thing. No, I had listened to Father Josiah Tenenbaum. I can’t remember the YouTube series or his book. I can’t remember, but it was, and I kind of, I was listening to it at work. I caught most of it, but not all of it. But Josiah Tenenbaum’s Rock and Sand, his book. And then Paul, I think even referenced that, or he was talking about, are you building on sand or are you building on rock? And I was like, I see what you’re saying, Paul, but it seems like whatever you’re doing is very sandy, very unstructured, very adrift, very like, almost like you’re, I mean, he’s having fun with it, I guess. I don’t know. He’s explicitly said many times over that the reason he has his YouTube channel is that he could think out loud and get feedback from people. Which I guess if that’s how you want to use YouTube, that great. Turns out there’s a big market for that, or at least a much bigger market than he anticipated. That’s fine. But yeah, that’s what he says he’s doing there. He’s trying to sort his thoughts out publicly. Yeah, except that I think that his thoughts have validity because of his civilizational position as a pastor. He’s naturally going to be a guy six foot tall and looks like Santa Claus and has a very fatherly way about him. And he laughs at everything like Santa Claus and everything like that. There’s the charismatic part of it and things like that. I don’t know how many of the pop, he was talking about hierarchy, Chad getting in early and Grimm being in early and all these who’s who and stuff like that. I was honestly wondering, I was like, I wonder how many of these dudes have really good relationships with their dads or even know their dad or had a dad? Because that was one thing I noticed is being as a foreman on a crew is like a lot of the dudes that I could actually get ahold of and kind of get them to listen to me in that, I would ask them eventually, how was life growing up or whatever? We’d have that conversation and be like, Dad was never there or whatever. I was like, yeah, you just never had another older guy in your life that was competent to show you like a thing, to show you how to do something. Well, or you’re not used to submission. And you’re not used to the value of submission. What you’re saying is dead on Josh, but there’s more than one thing, there’s submission, there’s exemplification, right? There’s the idea, like the very idea that you should listen to somebody else. I’ve met many, many very troubled young men who do not understand, no, you should actually listen to other people. Like they actually don’t. They’ve been admitted to me, Oh, no, I don’t listen to other people. I’m like, how are you getting along in the world? And they are. I listen to dropouts who make their own rules. No, that’s where I realized. But that’s part of the problem, right? You don’t see all of these sort of missing pieces in general. Like you don’t notice, oh, a good relationship with your father affords you, it’s probably a dozen things. I couldn’t list them all, right? Like there’s all these things that are afforded. And when you don’t understand structure and hierarchy as such and the reason for it, when you don’t see, we’ll say a good positive reason for hierarchy, you just want to get rid of it. And we don’t see certain things like, okay, maybe the first people are at the top of the status priority, whatever, except that that can’t be true. Like who is the first person to do a podcast? I actually know who it was, and they’re still doing podcasts, but almost no one’s. They’re not bigger than Joe Rogan. Why not? Because that doesn’t work. What about all the people that were in early and dropped out for whatever reason, right? And so, but what about the people who were in earlier and are still in and aren’t big? Like that doesn’t work. It doesn’t map well enough. You can’t go, oh, you’re in early, so you have a high status. That’s not true. No, and talking about, yeah, and talking about people to listen to, listen, I mean, that’s exactly what, why I, I, I, what, I mean, I’m probably addicted to YouTube or something like that at this point. But the whole reason I started listening to so much Peterson was because I reached a point in my life where I was like, okay, I, I got a skill. I, you know, but everything else fell apart in the process, my marriage, you know, my relationship to drinking, you know, which used to be a fun hobby, but it just got terribly out of control, you know, and then it was like, you know, just all these sorts of things. And, and, and then, and I never heard anybody of any authority, any authority, and he wasn’t a priest, Jordan’s not a priest or a pastor or whatever. He was a clinical psychologist that was going over the Cain and Abel story. And he told it in a way that I had never heard. And I had sat through probably over hundreds of hours of sermons and that, and I had never heard anybody approach it this way. And I was like, this is different. I need to pay attention to this. He knows something about something that I don’t. And, and I mean, yes, his sharp dress is, you know, you know, nice. Somebody was doing his hair because he went from looking like a ratty professor in his YouTube videos, looking like GQ, you know, man of the year up there or something like that. But, you know, and I’m sure his daughter had helped him with that. But, and the spotlight was just on him and the whole crowd was dark and there was these, yeah, there was some tricks there. But it was also that he, he, yeah, I mean, he just played that, that, that, I guess that part of a, of a, of a positive form of masculinity so well that he was hard as a guy in his early thirties not to listen to. Like, it was like, you look like a guy who knows what’s up and I’m going to listen to you until you prove me otherwise. And at every turn, everything he said, I mean, I got, I never wanted to be married again. I never wanted to have a girl, like, I didn’t even really want a serious relationship again after my divorce. I thought I was done with kids this year or two years ago. I met a girl. It’s the story doesn’t, it’s not always that we met on Tinder, but like, you know, you know, where, yeah, no, it, you know, yeah. I mean, that’s where I was and that’s where she was. And now we, you know, this year we had a kid, you know, we wanted to get married this year, but it’s a little bit more involved in the Catholic church than, than we initially thought. So we’re having to go through the whole, because we’re both divorced and things like that. But, you know, and I started my own business, it’s going how it’s going. I don’t know how that’s going to turn out, but all these things were directly attributed to, or not directly attributed. Yeah. I would say it was heavily, I was doing what Peterson said to do. And then I did what Pazoo said to do, get to church. Cause I was like, okay, I’m finally getting a little bit of what Pazoo says to do. But then I was like, you know, okay, well, what does he say to do next? Like, what do I do next? Cause I was just on YouTube listening to hours and hours of lectures. And then he was like, go to church. And I was like, okay. And that’s when I met Father Susai and that’s when I met, you know, my local Catholic community and everything like that. And all of it happened super quick, but, and it’s still, you know, I’m still in the process of it, but all of it was on the encouragement of Jordan Peterson, because, you know, I, because you’re right. I should listen to people that are smarter than me and YouTube, you know, I can, for a cheap amount of money to YouTube premium, I can have intellectuals in my head, you know, for a long period of time. Now, some of that hasn’t been all that positive, but, you know, probably not attention to other things as much. You can’t listen to everybody and you shouldn’t. And there’s a lot of people that will tell you bad things, not necessarily maliciously, because again, everyone’s limited and some people are stupid and stupid. There’s a big problem. I didn’t even, I didn’t even understand that I was just informed of the other day. There’s all these people on TikTok doing American Sign Language incorrectly, and they don’t know they’re doing it incorrectly, but they’re teaching American Sign Language. And they’re not, they’re not consistent, right? It’s very Protestant, right? The way this person’s teaching it wrong is different from the way this person is teaching it wrong. It just spreads everything out. It causes a flood. Now you’ve got a flood of ASL teachers, right? Almost none of whom are actually deaf. And so they’ve never had to rely on it. And so your experience is different when you’re not deaf, right? Because it’s not your primary mode of communication, right? It’s not something you had to do for a long time. It’s not something you rely on. And so that- I would say if you had a deaf family member, you might be able to get to the level of a deaf person because you do have to rely on it. And maybe you can do it without that, but maybe it takes five years and you can’t do it in six months. And maybe, you know, somebody gave you a business model of teaching ASL online as a way to get coaching, to teach ASL in person. And that’s a niche market. So I’m using all bunch of terms from things that are out there, by the way, right? Like right now, things I’m reading, right? And maybe that’s a good way to make money. Maybe. But maybe also causes a flood of ASL teachers teaching bad ASL, right? And maybe the market can’t handle that. So most of those people that try that are going to fail in their small business attempt, right? And so you see how all of this is kind of tied together. And it’s interesting though, I do want to go back to this, Josh. One thing you said is Jordan Peterson doesn’t sound like any preacher that you’ve ever heard, right? Because VanderKlay thinks he’s a preacher. And I’m like, he is not a preacher. No, no, no. And he does, no, because he’s working it out. I mean, if he is, he’s doing something that I’ve never seen, you know, to where like every most preachers and pastors that I know have like a three point, three, especially like Baptist, there’s like a three point on the projector screen. We’re going to go to these three points. And then we’re going to, you know, then it’s off to lunch, you know, and it’s like it’s worked out. It’s rehearsed. It’s everything like that. But I mean, you can see, I mean, the whole fluttering of Jordan’s fingers and his, you know, pacing up and down the thing while he’s doing lectures, he’s working things out in real time sometimes, you know, and that, you know, and he’ll spontaneously be like, this just came to me, you know, and I think he’s authentic in that he may have been an idea he mulled over, but it was, you know, when he’s actually under the lights and he has his, you know, his like, like he’s even said that what I consider myself to do is what the closest thing I can relate to myself to is a stand up comedian because it’s a lot of it’s improv, you know, and I’m, and I’m, he’s, I’m only looking at, I’ll often look at just one person in the crowd, you know, and that, and so like, no, as far as I know, as far as I know, I would never do. And that’s why I don’t really agree with some of Paul’s assertions about, and I know he’s probably watched more Peterson than I have, but I don’t really agree with a lot of times what he describes what Peterson’s doing or that, you know, he’s a, he’s a, you know, YouTube preach, you know, or yeah, you just, they just try to relate him too much to a preacher. And I’m like, no, no, he’s not Billy Graham. Like he’s not, that’s not, that’s not what he’s doing. Right. Not at all. You know, no. And, and, and yeah, and even, and even, we’ll say somebody like Billy Graham carried a lot of interaction with, like he was the president’s pastor, right. And stuff like that. And, and he had a lot of, of ends in the political sphere. And so you, like, you can draw those lines, but it’s not there. And, and the important part is, and Peterson not only had a good relationship with his father, but he, he worked his way up a hierarchical structure in academia. Like that’s actually significant. He knows how to submit and you can sit there and you can talk and, and I, I have it on, on perfect authority that this is true. He was always trying to be famous, fair. I don’t particularly care. Like his message is good. I think, oh, you’re trying to be famous by getting out your message. Well, if that message is good, then I’m, I, I’m for you. The fact you’re trying to be famous isn’t bad if you’re not bad. And I don’t understand. Well, no. People use these, these ways of thinking and it’s like, wow, why, why would you reduce it to that? Someone’s got to get famous. It can’t be no one. Well, no. If it is a hidden goal of, because I, I saw a quote from, I haven’t seen it too often, but I, there was a picture of him participating at something when he was in like high school or it might even been earlier that he looked really young, like childish young. And it was the quote was, and he had his arms folded and he said, I won’t stop until I’m prime minister. And that, or I think it said that. And so like, if he does have, you know, these, you know, like, cause I mean, you could be like, oh, he’s playing 3d chess, man. He’s like, you know, he, he’s going to get popular and then he’s going to do the political thing. And, you know, like, you know, yeah, I guess you could say that, or he could say that he has a goal. He’s going to face whatever dragons he, or he thinks that’s the goal and he’s going to face whatever dragons he needs to, no matter how scary it is to get the gold. And it seems like he’s, he’s taken some swings and making some major nicks and, you know, facing some things. Cause like, and maybe he is, but maybe he also realizes that if you’re in politics, you’re kind of constrained in a way that if you’re just an advisor to politicians, you’re absolutely not constrained. And that’s actually a way better position to be in. And it’s weird that people believe in politics. Right. Right. Well, if you want your influence to remain untainted, you don’t want to be in a formal office, period. End of statement, right? Because you top down power from above doesn’t work. You can put mask mandates at the federal level all day long, and it’s going to cause a lot of damage if you do. So please don’t. But ultimately it’s going to get reversed, just like prohibition did, because it’s, it can’t be that way. You can’t just remake the world the way you, the way you want. And it’s weird that people believe that you become popular and then you become, you know, then you gain political power. Because actually, if you look, it’s almost always the other way around. Like nobody knew who Obama was until he ran for office. That he ran for office because everybody knew who he was. That didn’t happen in that direction at all. It happened exactly the opposite. And that’s always something. When it happens, sometimes it does happen the other way. It’s always very odd, right? Like think about Governor Ventura in Minnesota, right? Jesse the body Ventura, right? As governor. It’s like, this is, you know, and it’s like, imagine if Dwayne the Rock Johnson ran for, you know, governor. Be like, well, imagine, imagine if we had somebody who was popular all along and maybe mentioned presidential aspirations and then actually became president. And that was shocking to people. Like a recent president that we might’ve had. So why would you be shocked by that if you also believe that popularity leads to getting elected? Obviously it can’t. Like you’re just being weird about the whole thing. Somebody told you a bunch of things that you bought into. And this is the problem. Why did you buy into those things? Because you have to be submitted to something. And if you believe you aren’t, because you think you’re an individual or something crazy like that, that means you’re being manipulated. And the person manipulating you is you. Then you don’t realize what forces are controlling your thoughts anymore because you don’t have a proper relationship to hierarchy as such. And when you don’t have a proper relationship to hierarchy and submission, and you are submitted because you don’t, that’s not optional, you’re definitely submitted. You’re submitted to the weather, right? You’re submitted to whoever built your house. You’re submitted to whoever keeps your electricity going, right? You’re submitted to all kinds of things. Submitted to the damn internet right now. Like the internet doesn’t work. We can’t do this, right? If you don’t understand that, you can’t tell good submission from bad submission. You won’t know when you’re under the influence of something that has given you a bad idea. You won’t have any concept of that. Is it equivalent to listen to your local preacher and Jordan Peterson? Is one better than the other? Probably one’s better than the other. I can’t tell you which, right? But definitely they’re not the same. So probably one’s better than the other. Is it better to listen to the government or not? Well, that kind of depends on the thing. How do you know? You know because you have a healthy relationship with the hierarchy and you can’t say that’s anti-Christian. I mean, certainly somebody kind of knew the rules and broke them on purpose and then submitted, right? And that’s sort of what led to the whole problem or the whole solution. That would be a better way to think about it, right? Like still listened, still broke the rules because they were bad rules, still submitted though, right? Like, oh, I’m going to break the rules, but I’m going to submit. Okay, why? Oh, because that’s actually important. The most important thing is that submission because it highlights good versus bad. And without that, if you keep pretending like you’re not submitted or ignoring your submission or trying to not submit, all you’re doing is destroying your ability to tell good from bad. And then how many snakes are in the pit? You won’t see the snakes in the garden. And maybe, you know, maybe there are a lot of snakes, you know, maybe people are gumming up the works on purpose. Maybe every time you try to rally around a flag, the person you think that is helping you that sounds like they’re there to help you is actually screwing up everything and making sure that you don’t rally around the flag. Maybe it’d be hard to tell if you don’t have a healthy relationship with a very large hierarchy and all hierarchies have some corruption, but that’s good because then you can see corruption as such. It’s not a bad thing. It’s something to check against. Like, you can check it against this because this is sacred. This has been around forever. This is the thing that we can compare. How do you know if a part is bad? You only know if a part is bad by looking at the whole and looking at the parts relationship to the whole. Otherwise, you can’t even make that determination. It doesn’t make any sense. Well, and you need a real thing, a sense of authenticity. I mean, if you’re going to show gold to somebody, you need to, I mean, iron, what is it, iron pyrite or something like that, a little gold. It’s like, don’t try to tell somebody that this is gold because you’re going to give them a totally wrong sense because one of the biggest things that strikes you about gold right away is how heavy it is. And that’s one of the biggest indicators. This is like, this thing is weighty. It’s solid and it’s dense. I don’t know. What is authenticity, Josh? How can you determine authenticity without, let’s say, a telos, a head, and a structure? Otherwise, authenticity doesn’t mean anything. You said authenticity all day long, but if, you know, authentic to what? That’s the telos. Authentic to how? That’s the structure. What are they doing? That’s the leadership. That’s the thing that’s driving it forward. You can’t determine authenticity without those three things. Well, no, and I’ll be interested to hear what your thoughts are on this because, like, I mean, like, okay, so a lot of people, when they find out that I’m a Hopi Native American, they’re like, whoa, you know, because anybody who knows a little bit about Native Americans will often hear the Hopi and about all their religious practices and their prophecies. And, you know, and that, and they’re almost so saddened to realize that I was not raised traditionally. And, like, I lose all my Native American authenticity. And, like, I’ve often told people, like, yeah, I feel like a broken Indian. Like, I’m just the wrong, like, you know, somebody will meet me, and they’ll be like, you know, be like, yeah, dude, I’m probably whiter than you are. Like, you know, it’s like, I am, I am so, like, in Native American culture, they call you an apple. It’s like you’re red on the outside, but you’re white on the inside. Belisana. And that is a Navajo word for it. And so, yeah, it’s just, yeah, no, and so you’re, you’re, there’s this form of authentic, authentic Native that you’re looking for. And, and I feel like my, my girlfriend or, you know, fiance, she, she grew up on the, the Dulcey reservation, the Hickory Apache reservation, and they had like powwows in the town. That was the first powwow I’d ever gone to, you know, and like, I felt out of places, you know, some of the, some of the, the tourists that came by to see a real authentic powwow, you know, everybody, you know, that, and I mean, and there was a, there is a sense of authenticity about it in the Native, you know, people try to keep their ceremony and try to keep, you know, the traditions alive and that. But how do you judge that? How do you judge that when you haven’t been born into that structure? How do you know how authentic it is? And see, that was for me, that was for me, like, there was, there, like, I would go down to, like, I would go down to old O’Reilly, the, there’s three Mesa’s in the Hopi reservation. And my Mesa, the one my family’s from, which I say I’m from, but I like, I mean, we went out there for family visits and that, but like, I don’t speak, I always had a hard time telling which, which is one of the ladies was that, like, am I related to you? Are you my auntie? Because like, in the Native way, everybody’s your auntie, and like, everybody’s your uncle, and everybody is, so like, I could never tell, it was really, really strange to go down there and things like that. And, and yeah, as far as like authentic, like, that was one of the things, like, why I don’t know that there really are, like, authentic, like, because it got, it’s kind of like how Jonathan talks about, like, paganism, and how, like, he’s like, every neo pagan right now is just dragging around some dead body of an old god that used to exist. And it’s like, because it’s like, that’s all gone, like, we have no tie to that. And unfortunately, like, fortunately, or unfortunately, I don’t, I mean, I don’t know how people want to say, you know, what’s happening in Native American culture, because most of it’s on TikTok right now. It’s huge, like huge, like amounts of Native American influencers. And that’s what they do on the red, they sit around and look at their phones all day, and or TV and things like that. But anyways, it’s just like, it’s the authentic, the authenticity of those is like, so gone. It’s just like, you know, whatever you guys are practicing in that, like, or whatever got handed down, I have no relation to that. And I wouldn’t be able to tell you if you’re making it all up, because like, I don’t know, some shaman from down in the Amazon or some medicine, you know what I mean? And they’ll be like, Oh, yeah, medicine man bless this. And I’ll be like, I guess, yeah, man. You know, how much do you charge you for that? And, you know, it just, so that’s why for structure, like, I couldn’t go back to my Native American roots for religious, religious purposes, or anything like that. I really lacking. And like, you know, some people will be like, you know, in the Protestant circle, just say, Well, I wasn’t being fed or something like that, or I didn’t feel like I was eating. And they’ll say, Well, you’re just not trying hard enough, or you’re just not participating enough, you know, or something like that. I was like, No, there’s a real spiritual nourishment, you get out of liturgy and out of participating in Eucharist, that you don’t get anywhere else. And I mean, there’s a real magic to that. And I mean, in my opinion, and I use the word magic, because it’s like, I don’t. Yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of psychological reasons why everything’s working. And like we described before the structure of how, you know, practices and things like that. But you just can’t swap those out interchangeably. You can’t just be like, Oh, yeah, look, we did this, this and this. And now it’s authentic. Got the stamp on it, you know, but as far as how do you judge authenticity, I don’t know that I could really put that into words. What are your thoughts? Like, what were you driving at? Well, again, I think I think the key is what Father Eric asked on the Friday live stream, right, which was what is the thing, and you have to define the thing with the telos, and with the head and with the structure before you can even talk about authenticity. Like otherwise, you cannot determine authenticity as such. And then part of authenticity is as having a contrast, whether you’re contrasting say, let’s say, let’s be silly, right? What is a group of 30 people here doing a thing, and we know what the thing is, let’s just assume that we know what the thing is, and there’s a group of 30 people here doing a thing. That’s some contrast, but we really want is contrast up that vertical causality contrast, where you’ve got a big tall structure, where you can determine authenticity, either in relation to the structure or within the structure, because that’s what structure allows you to do. Right, again, you can tell a good priest from a bad priest partly because of that existence of that structure. And so you can say structure’s bad, and it’s tyrannical all day long, but also it affords you all of these things that otherwise you don’t have access to. And that’s super important. You sit there and talk about authenticity. How are you measuring authenticity? How are you saying some of these people with YouTube channels, they’ve got something authentic to say, or they’re being authentic, and some of them are in short, because a lot of people talk about, well, Jordan Peterson used to be authentic, but now he’s not. Jordan Peterson’s the exact same as he was. He’s talking about different things in some cases, but he’s talking about them in the same way, but because they’re different things, he’s not necessarily using the same language because you can’t, but he’s not any less authentic today than he was back when he started. Zero percent. Welcome back, Ted. We’re glad to have you. Hey, guys. Yeah, sorry, that was a dramatic exit earlier. Well, you shouldn’t have booted the guy who started this stream, but yeah. Poor father. Yeah, I know. This is my episode. It didn’t end the stream. I know. That was God’s grace right there. That would have been a real faux pas right there. I love how it’s now back on. That’s happened before, by the way. You think, OK, I’m done, and you just go up to end stream rather than leave studio. Yeah. Big red button. They’re both red. Yeah. Hey, father, what was the cold shower part of your slide about? Yeah, that was some kind of. So this slide here comes from a video I made like three years ago. OK, I’m even using the same color scheme that PVK was. I was just trying it out. And it was something with Wim Hof and controlling your body temperature with your breathing exercises and that being kind of like integrity. But like I said, I wasn’t terribly satisfied with how that went. I’m not taking it down because taking it down is for losers, but I’m not terribly happy with it. No, I know I got all excited. I started well because of Wim Hof. I downloaded his app. I think I’m still paying for it. I haven’t done the breathing exercises in forever. I got up to four minutes, though, and with his breathing exercises, holding my breath for four minutes. Yeah, no, right, right. I thought I was like, there’s no way I just did that. Then I set a timer and I was like, I’m like, holy crap, I really did. I tried to record it a few times, but it was difficult. But I want to do it again. But no. And then I saw the cold showers and I take on the days that I work, I take about a three minute cold, like turn the water all the way on cold in the shower. And yeah, I got excited because I was like, I was like, hoping maybe you’d do that or two or something. I thought I met another cold shower guy. I mean, I do it for penance on Wednesdays and Fridays. So. Oh, cool. Yeah, I did Exodus 90 back in the day. That’s one of the things that stuck with me was the cold showers on Wednesdays and Fridays. Very cool. I missed the first one. Did you were you talking about the connection between integrity and eschesis? No, no, we didn’t get there. I just I just went over the Prater natural gifts, which I think are really cool. And we never talk about them. Well, this is. Yes. So there’d be there’s a little joke about Prater natural gifts right there in the beginning, which actually explains the ending of the book. But I’m not going to spoil it for you. Yeah. Yeah. This is my second time through. You know, it’s interesting. So this is the first time I read this book. I had just read The Name of the Rose by Humberto Eco, which like, he basically just shreds his entire story in the last 15 pages and says, you know, there’s no narrative. Nothing means anything. All the patterns and meaning you’re seeing are all just like fragments of your imagination that we should all accept that the universe is this meaningless waste of nothingness and that the best thing that can happen for you is to for your consciousness to disappear so that you no longer struggle for, you know, water in a dry land. And I was I was really cheesed off because I had loved the story up until that point. And so then when I went from that to Canticle for Leibowitz, there’s some superficial similarities. And I just like, I didn’t trust the story until the very end, because I didn’t know if he was going to pull a name of the rose on me. And in my opinion, the end of Canticle for Leibowitz is basically the opposite of the name of the of the name of the rose. And so getting to come back and actually take trust the narrator, like trust that he’s not making a mockery of what he’s talking about. It’s really nice. It’s a lot more fun the second time through. And that’s and that trust is important. And I think the postmodern ethos destroys it. And I like that Cale Zeldin and Pastor Paul were talking about trust. The first first part of the video is terrible. I mean, I like the last half. The last half is fantastic because they are getting into story and the role of story. I think they’ve got some of that a little bit off, of course. But, you know, it’s hard stuff because people haven’t been talking about it. They’ve been talking about the individualism that and the individual freedom that the postmodern ethos gives you, which is we just do whatever we want, whenever we want, whatever we want, with the world back together any way we want, because it doesn’t matter. Right. Or not because it doesn’t matter. They just but that’s what that would mean. Right. If you can do that, then nihilism is also true. And no, being is good. And therefore, nihilism is false. And I don’t think we recognize how much that’s wrecked society, because we are constantly rebelling against everything, the government, the idea of structure institutions. And we just want to tear them down instead of revivifying them, which is one of the things Peterson talks about that I don’t hear, say, preachers talk about, which is revivification, which is super important. We’ve got to keep putting our time, energy and attention back into the things that are important so that we keep them going. I mean, like that’s literally obvious if you look at a house, right? You know, what happens when someone stops putting living in a house, like within four years, the roof is caved in. But then if you persist in a house, even badly built buildings can last for 500 years or more, because people keep persisting and then no, it you know, that’s interesting. I remember at one point, when I was sort of at like peak, Peter did Peterson digestion, like I was listening to someone, someone in like a q&a section, like, why do you always put the postmoderns and the Marxists together? Don’t you realize that Marxism and postmodernism are saying the exact opposite thing? And his response was basically, I’m not making any claim that they’re the same, I’m just telling you that like people who are postmodernists almost always end up as Marxists for some reason. And Mark, when you’re just saying all that, I think something clicked with me, and I’m guessing I’ve probably heard this for some miles because yeah, anyway, I’m sure I didn’t come up with this, but realizing like, okay, if you’re going to take the world apart. And what Paul is, I think what Paul is trying to get at this week is the notion that you have to put it together some ways that you can even like, talk to another person. Right? If I think this is what what kills almost talking about the underneath from what I could tell is that like, we need some sort of shared semantic space so that we can do anything together. Mark, this is your intimacy crisis, right? If you don’t have shared meaning, then you can’t relate. Like, it’s just, it’s just that basic. You can’t relate if you don’t have shared meaning. Even when you don’t speak the same language, like people’s, there’s still a tremendous amount of shared meanings with being human, like hand gestures, eyes, food, all this stuff. Where you grew up. Yeah. Great. Okay. So if you’re going to take the world apart, and you are making the claim that the way that it’s reassembled is arbitrary, you have to reassemble it some way in order to operate together to not either just like run into each other or kill each other or whatever. Then who gets to decide how things are put back together? It’s the people with the most power, bing bang boom, it’s Marxism. Right. But you, but you, right. But the point is you don’t and you can’t. The only way we can be together is not by drawing things up from the bottom, because there’s too many things, and we don’t all have the same bottom because we’re not standing in the same place. But we can all look at the same star above. And it’s what Peterson talks about, right? I mean, I don’t think he takes emanations seriously enough, but at least he gets you in that general direction. And that I think is what everyone’s missing. And you can’t do what they actually did in the conversation. It’s going to be absolutely nuts. Swap underneath and on top. You cannot do that. No. On top is fundamentally and importantly, and the most importantly different from what’s underneath. Like there’s no corollary between on top of the- Absolutely. Whatsoever. Yes. Because the design- Final cut matters. The design of the car in the engineer’s head is what makes what’s underneath the hood possible. Exactly. Now, if you haven’t met the engineer, you can then pop the hood of the car and come to an understanding about what the car is for. And in that sense, you’re getting something from underneath. But what your understanding is not the underneath, what you’re standing is the above by looking at what’s underneath. Right. You think you’re getting it from the underneath because you think you’re over it, but actually the engine, the idea of an engine and the fact of an engine that has a T-Los, which is to drive a car, right? And that has other knock-on effects, right? That you learn when you get an electric car and then figure out that you can’t defrost your windows. Right. So there’s all kinds of knock-on effects. That idea emanated down upon you. It manifested underneath you. Totally. Manifestation is underneath you. Sure. Absolutely. It’s also all around you. Manifestation can be higher than you. That’s a cathedral, a house, whatever. Right. But manifestation is technically underneath you. I get that. But if that’s what you think the world is, that’s because of your limited perspective about the world. Right. Because the world emanates down upon you. Right. That’s what happens. Okay. So because there’s something in what Mark and Kayla, I think, are trying to get at. So I’m thinking about, to go back to poetry, I’m thinking about in, I think in the second of the four quartets, when Elliot, he has that scene where there’s all of these country people dancing. It’s the quartet about Earth. Right. And so it’s all about these cycles of life. And it’s talking about basically embodied, peasant wisdom, which as a phenomena is totally a thing. And so Mark, I don’t know if this is what they’re trying to get at with the underneath, but there is this sense in which you can have in the human hierarchy, you can have people who are way up, operated way up here, and they miss things that people who are down here who don’t have a global view are getting. They’re getting it from the ground. And so, and you see that that’s like what’s going on with fairy stories too. Right. It’s going on with fairy stories. It’s going on with like cultural tradition. That’s that sort of, to the degree that we’re going to talk about underneath it being so, where does that come from? Is that, or is it reflecting the meaning that’s coming from above? I think that’s like what the, yeah. Right. Well, again, it’s not a proper recognition of limits as such. You are a limited creature. You cannot understand that that is above you properly. That’s why you might need a distributed cognition through time that’s much smarter than you to help you do that. And you might need a mediator for that. I would call that a priest, by the way. There might be other mediators, but certainly that’s one method of mediation. Another method of mediation might be a monk, but we don’t need monasteries anymore. So we need Corey to help us. Right. And so, but once you understand that, that all the affectations around you can be seen by you as beneath you is a problem, not a proper relation to the world. The proper relation to the world, the proper relation to the world is through a mediator that mediates your interaction with something way above you, far bigger than you. Right. And that’s why, you know, look, you can say whatever you want. I use Father Eric, because he lets me, as an advisor. Right. I do. He’s not the only advisor that I have in that realm. There’s an Orthodox priest down the street that I go see, too. Right. Because there’s a bunch of things I can’t work out. They’re mostly really personal things to me, but also some other things. Like occasionally I have concepts that I’m like, hey, what does the priest think about this thing? Right. But when we don’t recognize that, we inevitably fall into the emergence is good category. Whether or not we start from being as good, this emergence, this underneath talk is all emergence talk. And there is emergence. Emergence is not optional though. And some emergence is going to end up good, but most of it’s going to end up bad and evil. Right. And a lot of emergence is full of snakes. Right. And if you don’t recognize that, your community is going to have snakes in it. That’s a little hint, by the way. And lots of them. That’s also a little hint. It’s not one snake. Whereas if you have a good community that recognizes emanation, where you have a telos and you have a structure and you have a leader, those snakes are going to be clearer to you and you’ll have a way to kick them out, which is very, very important. Look, Mark, the thing to even say emanation is good, and you’re frankly like, just to be honest, you’re the only person that hears phrase it that way. But to say emanation is there emergence is good is to sneak something above everything in because emergence things from a below can’t judge themselves. Right. Right. So how do you judge if what happened is good? I mean, they’re sneaking it in. That’s the problem. Sure. Look, it in and it should be highlighted. Yeah. You’re right. They don’t realize they’re doing that either. Most of them. Well, yeah, to say emergence is good. I mean, this is the whole craziness of like the sort of meta narrative of evolution of evolutionary progress. It’s like descent with select descent with modification. There is no telos embedded in that. So your capacity to make judgments about good or progress or anything like that have to come from outside of that. I am going to take your emanation thing, though, because it’s the day after epiphany. And I wanted to share from the homily yesterday, which is fascinating, because, you know, for those who don’t know epiphany celebrating the coming of the Magi to adore the child of Christ, and they which like, we’re like, oh, yeah, the wise men and like, no, they were like, astrologer sorcerers from the east. But one of the things that our priest said, which I thought was fascinating, is he compared it to the shepherds who are visited by the angels at the nativity. And he was pointing out that, that, right, because you’d think like the shepherds are way less sophisticated than the Magi. But his point is the shepherds are Jewish shepherds. And so they had had the Jewish revelation. And so they could be spoken to through spiritual means, right. So even though they’re like lowly shepherds, they’re able to be spoken to directly through spiritual means, right. So they have an intelligent being that comes to them and brings a direct message of the birth of the Savior. The Magi don’t. What calls them forth is also something from heaven, but instead of being a spiritual thing is a physical thing. It’s a star. And so there’s a sort of like correspondence between the physical and the spiritual realm, which obviously should take place. And there’s, there’s a sense of this, like, the nativity of Christ is like call that of salvation that’s so great that it like operates on every level of reality. And to anyone who’s listening, whether they’re, you know, Jewish shepherds, or whether they’re, you know, astrologers from the east, like that, that thing is going to shine forth for them. If they look in the right direction. Well, the seeds get cast far and wide. I mean, there’s even the scripture about the, some were cast, you know, in the, in the road and got trampled underfoot, some were cast here, some were cast there. Some, and some found favorable ground, others didn’t. But during the harvest, you got all good, all good plants, you know, and they were, Father, I’m butchering that. Where’s that at? As far as the casting of the seeds? Are you mixing up parables there? It’s easy to do. I mean, you’ve got the parable, the path, some of the seed falls on the rocky soil. Some of the seed grows up in thorns, some of the seed falls on good soil. You only get the harvest from the seed that falls on the good soil. And then you’ve also got, yeah, sorry, sorry. You’ve also got the seed, that’s the good soil on good soil. And then the enemy comes through and sows weeds that are actually identical to wheat. If you just look at them and you don’t look at them carefully, with discernment, which is something we lose in our English translations, but the peasants that Jesus was preaching to understand this. So there’s something about peasant wisdom there. And then they have to separate that at harvest time, the weeds from the wheat. Yeah. So which one of those were you going for? Yeah, sorry. No, I was just, you know, he was talking about emergence being good or is it bad or things sprouting up just randomly and things like this. But it, it, it. Like, okay, so like John the Baptist was out in the wilderness calling, like he was out, he was emerging. People didn’t like that because he was out there preaching like a, something that the, or am I still here? Yeah. Something that challenged the hierarchy at the time. And that, and they were seen as bad and that was seen as a bad emergence. But then it was, I mean, he was actually preaching the right thing. I mean, am I, yeah, I’m here, but it’s not my thought. You could think of the parable of the weeds and the wheat, right? And specifically the word that Jesus uses in Greek is for a type of weed that looks at all. Am I still here? You froze. Yeah. Okay. In order to, in order to tell the, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a weed that looks at awful lot like wheat. So in order to tell the difference, you have to practice discernment. You have to know the difference between wheat that you should be eating and weeds that are toxic to you. And you have to figure out how to get those out. Well, like what Mark was saying, you have to have a check. You have to know authentic wheat. You have to know authentic, you have to have a, a know, know what an authentic wheat looks like in order to check it against the wheat. Right. It has to be defined. And also I want to, I want to sort of bolster what Ted was saying earlier. There’s things that people at the top of the hierarchy know that people at the bottom don’t and not just knowledge, but also ways of seeing that they have, but the opposite is also true. Right. Like the, and, and this is all the way in the Republic by Plato. It’s all the way there. Right. The philosophers can come to the bottom of the city and make recommendations that they will be hated for. They will be hated for. Right. But also the people will make those, at least some of those recommendations will follow them. Right. But the philosophers also can’t make the things that the people down there make. And, and, and that, and that necessarily also means some of the philosopher recommendations are going to be wrong because they don’t understand the system very well, because they’re not doing the work. And this is that level of imperfection that everybody wants to get rid of. Like, yeah, you should listen to the people above you and the people above you should listen to the people below them. Right. Like, absolutely. And that is an imperfect system and it totally sucks. And it’s completely full of all kinds of problems, but you also don’t have a real choice. Like that’s going to manifest. The question is, does it manifest correctly? And the answer is the way we can know that the way we can know authentic, new, authentic suggestions, authentic advice, maybe it’s not correct advice because authenticity and correctness are not the same thing. They’re different words for a reason. Maybe the way we know that is by discerning proper structure and hierarchy by understanding thinginess. Because if somebody tells you that there’s some sort of thing, right, that is a random gender, maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it’s not a thing and the way you know is because it doesn’t have a telos. Right. What’s the purpose and what’s the final cause of this random gender that you came up with yesterday? Because now there’s 160 in New York City. I don’t know. There used to be two. That was easier. They each had a telos, by the way. Maybe they don’t have a head. Like what’s the head of your gender? Me. I’m the head of my gender. Other people are the head of their gender. Right. And what’s the structure? Well, you know, like you can just look and see the structural differences, right? I mean, close on even. You can kind of tell for the most part man from woman and that doesn’t exist in these other made up genders. It’s not there. And you need that discernment to know if something’s authentic. And so you have to have those three components. That’s why I thought it was just, you know, I hate to harp on it, Father Rick. That was brilliant. That question was brilliant. I just, wow, that was great. Wish I had thought of that. That was a really good question to ask. Because it wouldn’t have occurred to me that everyone doesn’t know that thing this requires those, you know, that has those three aspects that have to be defined in order for thingness to manifest. Yeah. So it’s something’s going to be a thing. I don’t know. This might not be exhaustive. I came up with it at the moment, but it needs to have a telos, right? If it’s going to be something, it needs to have a head that can either be a literal, like physical head, central nervous system, or it could just be a spiritual principle at the center that gives you coherence. It has to have a discernible structure. Minimally. Mark suggested boundaries, you know, and he also said it was applied by structure. We could add that in there because it is an important part of the structure. Well, I think Paul said something or yeah, I think it was on that same stream talking about the edge or the other video that there. Yeah. He was talking about the edge. Like I’m trying to find the edge because things have edges, things, you know, they can’t find it and they can’t find it and it’s been five years and they can’t find it. That should be a hint. Well, I mean, this goes back to the notion, the interesting notion of community, right? Which is that it at least etymologically comes out of having something that has walls, not to be bound together in unity. And there’s the, yeah, I don’t, it strikes me that you can go back at least to the early like turn of the century and you’ve got the sort of like the sort of spiritualist movement that’s kind of rising up against sort of the materialist modernity stuff and this sense of expansion and removing boundaries is like people like totally got on board with. And in Paralandra, right, there’s that horrifying monologue that the scientist Weston gives in Paralandra by Lewis before he is possessed by the literal devil where the whole idea is like breaking down division and unity and bringing everything together in this unity. It’s like you really have to be specific about how things are united. Otherwise things stop existing, right? For instance, as acids are very good at uniting things in a homogeneous mixture, right? It’s like, that’s what they do. They dissolve bonds so that everything there is the same, you know, and it’s like, okay, we don’t want that kind of solution to the problem of difference. It’s like, and so, yeah, I mean, it’s like, the answer is not a surprising one. It’s hierarchy and charity. Like that’s how you resolve that problem. I like that formula, that solution, right? Because it works at a chemical level. That’s clever, Ted. I like that. That’s really good. That the acid solution to equality is not the right solution. Yeah. Well, it’s all the same. To push it even further, I mean, you have these weird things about like, even life persists by its capacity to maintain borders between things, right? If you let, on a chemical level, if you let every all of the diffusion occur, then you’re dead. Like one of the ways to talk biochemically about biological death is when you no longer have diffusion gradients in an organism. The cells rupture. Yeah. Yeah, your cells rupture. And so it’s like, if you can’t maintain separation between ions, concentrations of the molecules, chemicals and molecules, and ions where you want them, that’s death. And it’s that capacity to maintain that hierarchical structure in your body. And you’re, you know, you’ve, well, you’ve got that top down, you’ve got that top down thing working. I mean, this is one of the, this is one of the weird things that like led me on, in the direction of a lot of like the stuff I’ve been thinking about for the last seven or eight years is when I finally read a paper by Stephen Talbot on teleological life. And I know I talked about this a bunch on my first conversation with Karen Wong on her channel, but I mean, it’s exactly that. I mean, Father Eric’s notion of like, a thing needs to have a telos to exist. You realize that like, biologists literally cannot talk about living or any kind of organism, even biochemicals really, without invoking teleology, which is like over, if you want to talk about it, like as an identity, and therefore something you can relate to, and therefore something you can talk about, it has to have a purpose. And you do that by separating it from other things in some meaningful way. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t relate. That’s the other weird thing. The other thing to note is that separation does not mean you can’t relate. In fact, separation is necessary for relationship. And so this whole idea of let’s break down these barriers, let’s get everyone together. Let’s, you know, know, you know, everyone needs to be in the same bathroom kind of thing. It’s like, no, that will break down relationships very quickly. Oh, speaking of breaking down, I made this stream go on 12 minutes longer than it ordinarily does. Out of my grace to you. So Teo, Teo got to be an observer today. It’s a ridiculous time of night in London right now. So I’m going to go ahead and end the stream here. Thanks for coming on. God bless you all. Remember to keep your head, keep your eyes fixed on the purpose, and don’t fall to pieces. God bless you all. Thanks, Father. Thank you.