https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NPqkI5uiBhw
the overlap that you had with Jordan Peterson. You talked earlier about how a lot of your thinking has been attributed to or connected to say Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung or these different thinkers. But the most, the contemporary example is obviously Jordan Peterson. And so I was wondering, on the one hand, we don’t need to rehash how you guys started your relationship, that’s on the internet. But in your opinion, in what ways then, and your initial connection with Jordan, and then today is your opinion of where you’re like, Jordan gets it, he’s right on with this, this is good. And then at what points would you differentiate and say, I don’t think he gets that. What are the most important things there? That’s a good question, but does it make sense? Yeah, yeah, that’s a good question. I think first of all, I need to kind of specify that a lot of people have seen that I’m influenced by Carl Jung, for example, but actually I’m not at all influenced by Carl Jung. I’ve actually barely read any Carl Jung. And also, I guess I got a bad vibe from Carl Jung because of his relationship with Freud, and also because he seems, at least at first, he seems to reduce symbolism to psychological forces. Now, whether or not this is ultimately the case, some people have argued against me and said, yes, maybe at the outset that’s what he said, but ultimately he was moving towards the idea that these psychological structures are also cosmic structures at the same time, right? So I don’t know, because honestly, I haven’t really yet read much Carl Jung, but I have read Joseph Campbell a little bit in my college years, and there were some interesting things in there, I think that the hero’s journey is an interesting way to manifest a pattern that is universal. I think it can’t be limited to the way that he presented it because I think that the pattern, like this U-shaped pattern, you could say, is something which is manifested in everything, right? From breathing to your heartbeat, to then to narrative, and to all kinds of family structures. So I do use Joseph Campbell, or I’m sympathetic to Joseph Campbell a little bit in his hero’s journey, but I feel like we need to be careful not to be limited by him. So in terms of Jordan Peterson, really, he is definitely influenced by Jung, for sure. His symbolism comes from Jung mostly, and I encountered him very randomly in 2015. I heard him on the radio, and I was really interested because he was saying things that no one was saying. He seemed to bring the world back to, he was also influenced by Heidegger, I could tell, so he was bringing the world back to phenomenological perspective, and then he was applying what seemed to be a symbolic worldview using Jung back onto the world. So it was like, even as a scientist understanding cognitive science, we need to come back into our perspective, come back into our body, view the world phenomenologically, and if we do that and we use Carl Jung, then we are gonna be able to understand a lot of stuff, understand how the world lays itself out, but also understand these religious stories that we’ve discounted. And that was a path that I had already embarked on for years by then, and what’s now is being termed something like relevance realization is something that I was talking about back in 2015. Even before that, you can find articles that I wrote in 2012 about the problem of what we can call relevance realization, the problem of emergence and how multiplicity becomes one. And people probably thought you were mad. They’re like, what is this guy talking about? It feels so odd at first, and then it starts mapping onto reality and you’re like, this actually is helpful. Yeah, well, at first I was talking mostly within the Orthodox world, and so I was editing a journal called the Orthodox Art Journal and I was writing on there. And so I was preaching to the choir, as we say. I was talking within the circles of Orthodoxy and my main point was to try to help them see that the patterns that we find in certain saints, like St. Max was the confessor especially, is actually, is not something which is arbitrary. And a lot of people would believe that already. It’s just that I was showing them how it’s not arbitrary, right? I was like, here’s phenomena. This is how phenomena appears to you. These are all these stories that appear to you. And so when I heard Jordan, I thought, wow, there’s some interesting crossover here. And so I wrote him, this is before he was famous. This was when he was a professor at the university. So I wrote him and I sent him a link to a talk that I gave and in that talk, I was talking exactly about this problem of image making or how multiplicity needs to be abstracted or needs to be kind of condensed in order for you to even see it. And so I wrote him and I said, I heard you on the radio and I’m really impressed by what you’re saying. And then he answered me very politely, like thank you for your message and send me a few links of stuff that I could watch. And I thought, that’s very kind of him, this professor to answer me, just random guy writing him. But then about two hours later, he called me. So the phone rings and I pick up and it’s like Jordan Peterson on the line and he says, and I could feel like he’s disturbed because he’s like, where did you get this? Why are you talking about this stuff? And so we realized that we were kind of on this, talking about similar things. And so then we started to collaborate to do things together and this was, I was on his YouTube channel. This was when his first things were kind of blowing up and he was kind of becoming famous. And what I saw was I saw that the way that he talked about reality was going to be a bridge, a bridge for people to rediscover Christianity. Even though at that time I was aware, already aware that that’s not what Jordan necessarily wanted. And that’s important to understand. I just wrote an essay for Bishop Baron’s publication, Word on Fire and I talk about this, but there’s a moment in the first time I went, the second time I went to his house and spent a few days at his house, when I was leaving, this is when everything was blowing up and he was becoming famous. And I looked at him and I said, I said Jordan, you’re gonna bring back Christianity. And he paused and he looked at me and then he answered, well, I hope I can help people understand the psychological significance of these Bible stories. And so right there, you get, if you wanna understand the difference between Jordan and I, it’s right there. Like it’s right in that one of those first encounters where we kind of express the difference between what both him and I were looking for. And so I think that I still maintain that a lot of the things Jordan is saying is he’s acting as a kind of outer figure, like a king. He’s acting like, I forget the name of the Persian king now, it’s horrible. Anyway, he’s acting like this outer figure that it’s pointing back from the outside and saying, hey, this is interesting. Like there’s some interesting stuff in there. And so he’s like a liminal figure in that sense. Now, one of the things that I didn’t really think of, and it’s a reality, is that at first, he wasn’t famous when I met him, he was barely famous. So I thought, wow, this is gonna be great because he’s going to convince atheists that religion isn’t stupid. He’s gonna be able to convince, and it worked. Like the aggressive stance of the new atheist is gone. They can’t sustain it anymore. So even people like Sam Harris, even these really type of aggressive atheists, all of a sudden, they’ve had to tone down their language. Well, you look at, Peter Bergozian wrote a book called A Guide to Creating Atheists, and it was essentially an apologetic slash street evangelism for creating atheists. And he’s speaking at Christian and politically conservative events now. It’s like, that is maddening. That’s like, yeah. So I think that it worked. I think that he actually did what he was gonna do. But what I didn’t count on is that he becomes so famous, like so world famous, that as a liminal figure, he might also be acting the other way. And I saw that as well, and I have to be honest. I saw that as well. I saw people who were Christian, who kind of embraced a more secular Christianity, a kind of weird secular Christianity because of his influence. So that’s the reality. And I love the man. I think that, I don’t think he’s pretending. I think he’s sincere. But I have to be happy for the good things, and I have to not agree with the bad things that are happening because of his presence. And I believe that without the fullness of the story, that a kind of secular version of Christianity is not gonna hold. Just not gonna hold. And it’s not enough. I believe we need the fullness of the story and the fullness of participation for us to be able to continue. And so I would say that my main, so one of the things that, this article that I wrote for Bishop Aaron, I basically talk about how we can notice all these patterns in stories, and I do it, right? I make videos about movies, and I interpret movies showing how the pattern that is in scripture is really a cosmic pattern that can be found in all stories from all time, and that you can find it in movies, in comic books, in video games, and all in popular, and also in politics, and in all these stories that are appearing around us. And it’s good to do that. It’s good to show people that that’s it, but it can never be a substitute for participatory stories. It can never be a substitute for seeing the Christian story as your story, as you being a character in that story. You can read Harry Potter and think that it shows us some pattern of reality, but you can’t be in a Harry Potter novel. You can’t be in Marvel Avengers, right? And so we have to be careful not to let that, not to confuse that, and to be able to recapture our participatory patterns rather than just the kind of outer, this kind of, but one of the things though that I, if you were talking about ways that Jordan and I disagree, is that one of the ways we totally agree is the idea that the solution is to become a saint. Like he doesn’t say it that way, but he says clean your room and fit your life. I believe that that is a solution. I believe that becoming just, repenting, that is the solution to the social problem. So on that, we totally agree. Now what we don’t agree on is I believe then it is inevitable that that will scale up. And so we can’t avoid higher identities. Okay. Right, and so you can’t avoid having group identities, group narratives, and then it scales up. And so Jordan tends to always want to pull away and wants to emphasize radical individualism, but I think that that’s not possible. It’s not possible and it’s not wanted because we have the sense in Christianity that we are meant to be the best hand you can be, but that you also need to be well-fitted with all the other members of the body and moving towards unity in Christ. So we need higher level beings. We need group identities. So the problem is that, so that’s what I, if you hear that, listen to the first talk I gave with Jordan, which was about logos, I right away bring that up. I right away say, yes, if we bring back logos, if we bring back these notions, we’re going to have identity and it’s going to scale up. Now the question is, how do we do it? If we are aware of it, then we can avoid as much as possible the pitfalls that also come with group identity and the dangers that come with it. But if we can’t just totally discard it because what’s gonna happen is that those that do have group identity, if we just focus on the radical individual, then those that do have a group identity are gonna ram into us like pudding. Because that is also, that is a real power. Having a group identity is a real power.