https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=M8Tb32YkOvg
I think that we have accepted the, to me, we’ve accepted the revolutionary ideal. Like we’ve accepted that culture is opposite. Let’s say that true culture is oppositional. That, you know, the artist is an oppositional figure, that all culture is there to oppose. And, you know, the rock, rock and roll, punk rock, aesthetic, all of that is what we’ve accepted. And so we all understand the world. I mean, it’s not just, it’s not recent, you know, it’s Marxism. It’s even before Marx, you know, this idea of this kind of radical dialectic, we’ve accepted the idea that the world works through opposition. And so because of that, what happens is people will flip, like people can actually flip from one to the other. They don’t even realize, but they still are always inhabiting this kind of oppositional mode. And especially, and democracy is part of that, creates that issue too, because you end up, inevitably end up having two parties. And then you have, it’s in the US, it’s like such a picture perfect image. It’s like, it is country just split 50-50 right down the middle. It’s almost like a, it’s like, it’s almost like a cosmic image, where if you set up two opposites, well, that’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to sit up in the middle and people are going to take one side. If you’re going to take the other, even sometimes the sides aren’t even coherent in themselves. Like if you look at the positions that all the Republicans hold, they’re not actually totally coherent. And the Democrats are not totally coherent, but they just swallow one side and the other. And then it’s just, we have to fight. So I mean, it’s a very dangerous, it’s definitely a very dangerous way. The ancient way was dangerous too, in a different way, because usually coherence would be on the inside and the opposition would be on the outside. So you have the Roman Empire, and if you’re Roman, and if you’re an actual Roman citizen, you’re right in the center. And if you’re kind of peripheral to the Roman citizens, then you’re a little further out. And then, you know, then you have people that are a little further out. And then finally you have the barbarians that we’re fighting and that we’re trying to fight off. And so there’s a, the coherence sets itself up in a hierarchy and the opposition happens towards the outside. And so that has a very dangerous, it has a dangerous aspect because you end up dehumanizing those that are outside. But now with democracy and a kind of dialectical thinking, what we’ve ended up creating is the enemy within. So it’s like inside your thing, you set up an opposition. And so then your enemy is your neighbor. And so, man, that is, that is a, it seems like that’s a dangerous place to stand, especially if it ramps up. If it, you know, if it stays at the low level, just discussion, it’s not a big deal. But as we’re watching it ramp up, yeah, it’s a frightening. What I was wondering was if there’s a way to imagine, what else? I mean, in real time right now. Besides a king, David, or a queen. In the sense, I mean, I joke, I joke, but I think that the idea of having characters or, or of having characters that transcend the political, I think that that’s the key. So I say a king or queen, yeah, it can be that. And it has been in the past, not that that’s not problematic, but it can be saints too. It can be holy people that, that are, that stand above the fray. There was a time, for example, in the US where someone like Billy Graham, for all the criticism that I could, you know, I’m not a particular fan of Billy Graham, but someone like Billy Graham actually stood above politics. And he would meet with, with presidents on both sides and he represented a kind of father figure for the nation. And everybody could agree that Billy Graham’s a good guy, you know, even if I don’t agree with him. And so it feels like the current state, let’s say, and maybe like in America, maybe one of the things that actually played that role for a little while was, was kind of entertainment. I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s once again, it’s a debased version, but you know, you had these, let’s say the talk show host of, of the Johnny Carson talk show host type where he was speaking to everybody and everybody could tune into Johnny Carson and could watch Johnny Carson. And there was no politics. There was no, there was no polarization in the, in the talk show. It doesn’t mean that people didn’t have their polarized views, but it just wasn’t there. And so now it’s weird because now even in entertainment, things have polarized really strongly in terms of mostly left on the left. But now we’re seeing, you know, with, with, with certain movements, like alternative media and comics gate and all this stuff, we’re seeing this, this other side, which is, which is coming about and is all is, is getting, let’s say it’s getting bigger. One of the places that the Romans tried to find, let’s say togetherness was in their entertainment. So, I mean, the circus for all its horribleness was a way, I mean, because also it was violent entertainment, just like our entertainment is violent, was a way for Romans to, to be together, right? It would, to, to, to experience the same catharsis at the same time. And so it was, you know, as the Romans became less religious, you know, especially after, after Augustus and things started to kind of fragment there at that, at that time, it seems like the circus was a place for them to, to, to come together. But it’s a fra, I think it’s a fragile, you know, the idea of finding yourself in entertainment. It’s, it’s, it can last a little while, but I don’t think it’s strong enough. The golden age is actually always the death knell of a civilization. What has happened is, is that it’s closed, it’s optimized, it’s become progressive and its vitality is being exchanged for its, for a hypertrification of the things that it identifies as success. So it gets a whole lot of, you know, in this case gold, but it actually is losing vitality, losing meaningfulness, losing connectedness, losing religion in the deep sense. And yeah, I think that’s probably, there’s a map in there, which is to say that almost at the, at the moment, if you, if you shifted at the center of the way that your society is maintaining its integrity as a coherent culture is living in the domain of media, you were already dead. Yeah, for sure. It may not, the body may not hit the ground for a little while. That’s right. Depending on how big you are and what’s going on, but death has already set in. Yeah. No, I, I totally agree. Maybe that’s one of the things that I struggle with in terms of Jordan and in terms of Brett and in terms of Brett Weinstein and all these people is that maybe that’s why also I’m the, the explicit Christian in this whole thing is that I don’t see how his things stack, how this stacks up, you know, and I’m really struggling to see how it stacks up because one of the things that let’s say Jordan talks about is the individual. And I understand he says it and he doesn’t do it in a kind of individualist sense. He talks about taking responsibility, you know, take responsibility for, for, for, for things and being an active agent in the world, fixing the things around your community and everything. And, but it has to, it still has to stack up. It has to stack up to a higher degree. It’s like, if you do that, let’s say you, you fix your family and you do that, then there, those families also have to come together and then those families have to come together. There has to be, it has to, has to go up higher. It has to come together in a higher sense. And so that’s why I’m always invoking, I try to invoke, let’s say the medieval village as an image of a, of an actual village, of an actual town, which has a, a hierarchy in the very architecture of the town where you have the highest point of the town is the church steeple. It’s usually at the center of the town. The town gets built around this church. That’s the place. That’s our, that’s it. Like that’s the highest point. That’s what we all look towards. We know that that’s what binds us together. And so we go there to be bound to, to experience a common identity. And then we go back into our homes and we reproduce that identity in our families. And then we reproduce that in ourselves. Now I’m going top down. I know everybody’s trying to go bottom up. That’s fine. I, I don’t have a problem with the bottom up, but I, but I also think it’s important to some to describe it coming top, top down. So, and I think that, so that, what that ends up looking like to a certain extent is identity. You can’t get away from it. And so the desire to, so it’s like, how, how can we deal with that? How can we deal with the reality of identities as this stacks up and not ignore it, but then also not create the danger of the extreme, let’s say rigid identity that we saw in, in 20th century nationalism. And so, but there, but there has to be, it has to stack up towards identity. You can’t, you can’t just be a bunch of individuals and then have what the state like have just this anonymous, what is post-national state country, like Justin Trudeau said about Canada. What do you mean when you say identity? Well, well, one, like you, I mean, it can be all kind of clans, like really like clans, like, like exactly, like religious identities, like saying, I’m a Christian saying I’m a Canadian saying I’m a French Canadian that I share a common history, a common, you know, a common identity with other people, all these identities, they, they, they, they, they are inevitable in, in how the world stacks up. And so I feel like no one, at least like in this IDW group, everybody wants to avoid identity because they’re saying, you know, it has the sovereignty of the individual, everything identity is dangerous, identity is dangerous. It’s like, you can’t, if it stacks up, you can’t avoid it. So we need to find a balance. We need to talk about how we can find a way to balance these identities without, because that’s what, let’s say like, that’s the biggest criticism coming from the extreme right for people like Jordan Peterson. They’re saying you’re ignoring identity. You’re pretending like it doesn’t exist when it obviously it’s going to exist. It’s going to happen, but then they go way too far and they’re like, okay, so now we’re going to be, what is it like, you know, it’s like the white race and all this, all these, to me, that’s a bogus identity, but there are real identities in terms of cultural identities and yeah, all that. You know, I talked a little bit before about the problem the modern world has in terms of oppositional thinking that we’ve set our reality in terms of opposition. And I think that once I realized that, or once I realized that one of the problems is this oppositional attitude. And so once I kind of got that, I realized, okay, so I don’t need to see my place in history as oppositional. I don’t need to see myself as having to get rid of that which is before. Rather, I need to shine as much light as I can on that which was before. Make it bright. Make it alive. And so to me, the solution, because we are all from, I mean, we all share a similar history. All the people here that are talking, we’re all European descent. We’re all, you know, our ancestors, we’re all, at least our ancestors, we’re all Christians, probably not that far behind. And so, you know, maybe one generation, maybe maximum two generations behind. And so to me, the solution is to reconnect or to recohere, to remember all of these things is what I want. And I don’t want, and I want to, like I said, make that which we had as bright as possible so that it’s alive today, so that it can carry us, so that it can give us a sense of place, a sense of a place in the continuity of time and place in space and a place in terms of our communities. And I know it’s not easy because the fragmentation is so strong in our community, but I don’t, in terms of the scaling up that I talked about before, that’s the only thing I see. I see all the other types of movements and kind of EO religious movements and these kind of pseudo religious or kind of quasi religious movements. I see them as participating in the breakdown in terms of the higher. Maybe they can afford something in terms of individual’s own realization, but they’re participating in the general breakdown. So that’s my, you know, it’s a tall, I know that it’s not, it’s maybe idealistic, but that is at least the road that I’ve kind of got myself on.