https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=66y0Zbeqo9s
Andrew Breitbart, who Milo likes to quote, like to say, politics was downstream from culture. And I said, well, culture is downstream from religion. Yeah, exactly. Right. And when Jordan says, and then I didn’t have space in that. And I think Jordan has also given me the language over the last few months to articulate what I think I mean by religion. And I think it’s very close to what he means by it. It’s the stories that we live. And, you know, I’ve been talking about Christianity as a mythology for a while now, because I think it’s not just ritual or creed, right? It’s these embodied stories that you take on and become. And Milo does, right? He’s embodying Francis or Jesus or Kung Fu Panda or David, right? But you live the story. You don’t just believe something abstract about God. You have to incarnate it and take it into the world and perform it. And that Milo goes off into campuses and gives these talks in front of these kids that may or may not want to listen to him. Jordan did the same thing, right? That was so impressive. I’ve watched most of Jordan’s, a lot of Jordan videos in the last few months, too. That first free speech protest on campus and when he couldn’t talk inside, he just went out in the middle of the courtyard and when the kids pulled off his mic, he just says, OK, I’ll talk, right? Jordan clearly understands, like Milo, the importance of being there in body. Your speech is one thing. Academics are great at abstract speech and we write it and stuff and don’t necessarily perform it publicly that much. Both Jordan and Milo are willing to do that, put themselves physically at risk, which they have been. Milo travels with bodyguards. I don’t know whether Jordan does yet and be willing to be there in their bodies. But Jordan also understands that what’s happening to us, what the crisis that we’re living through, and this is very much what I said in my sightings article, is religious. It’s a crisis of what stories are we going to live by? What truths are we going to embody? And when I heard him say that, I was like, this is the one other person I found in academia who seems to understand what I was trying to express about what was going on in our culture. Yeah, I see it. I see it like I like to use the word pattern because the patterns embody themselves in stories, obviously, but also in images, also in rituals, and then also in social structures. The same pattern, let’s say, that’s in the beginning of Genesis and the creation of Adam and Eve and heaven and earth and these opposites that then come together, that’s the same pattern, the same reason, it’s the same structure that makes our society be based on marriage, let’s say. Right. So the story becomes, the story, it’s like there’s an invisible pattern behind the story, then the ritual, then even in music and all these things, and it’s all the same pattern. So I kind of like to see that, I mean, that’s what I’ve been trying to do, is trying to connect those things together and say, the reason why, you know, like let’s say that hierarchy of being that we’re talking about, that’s why we say God is in heaven and that’s why we say that that person is above that other person. No, they’re not physically above that other person. There’s a whole structure of patterns and the same structure that makes us think that God, or makes us say that God is in heaven is the same reason why we talk about a glass ceiling, or like it’s completely infiltrated into our thinking, this idea that something which is more refined than us would be above us. It’s so obvious, it’s like one of the things that we use all the time in language, it’s the most obvious thing ever, but it’s not. It’s an image that we constantly use. The image of hierarchy is an image that is embodied in a language and in stories and all these things. So, yeah, I kind of like to see it as these patterns that just structure the world basically. I think, I mean, for me, that’s how I see myself as a medievalist. My art and everything that I’m doing is trying very hard to live that in a world that is at the margin of that, that’s on the edge of that and is watching those patterns become fragile and dissolve. I mean, there’s hope. There’s a hope that if the patterns are real, they can’t dissolve. It’s just we dissolve if we don’t recognize them. Right. Part of the pattern is that that’s why for the last 20 years of my life, I’ve been trying to understand how the end becomes the beginning. How does that happen? How does something end and then how does it turn into a new beginning? So all these images of monsters and of all that, that’s why I’ve been so focused on that is because I know that the secret is in that question, question of the buffer, like what happens in the buffer zone? How does that turn? So I haven’t completely figured it out yet, but as I watch it happen, it’s helping me to understand it. Right.