https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=L4ZzSrUroGA
I was giving a talk in Montreal and the subject fell on purity, right? And the idea of purity. And so then all of a sudden I realized like the people in the audience had taken the stance that purity is evil, like purity is bad, right? Because purity is an exclusion. You exclude people, you discriminate, all that stuff. Like shame. Exactly. So acts of purity and so the Nazis wanted purity and all of this is this evil thing. Like a pure race, a pure people, a pure identity, all of this is bad. And so they were like, you know, why do people engage in this? And this lady asked me this question, she said, why do people engage in purity? Like why do they engage in that type of behavior? And I was like, I couldn’t believe this question. I thought the reason why she asked me this question is because she’s not able to think at all levels at the same time, right? She’s not even able to think at two levels at the same time. And so I said, you know, so I said, okay, let’s take a case study. It’s like, let’s say you have guests at your house and they’re staying over for dinner and then they’re hanging out and they’re hanging out and you’re looking at the time and then it’s like, you know, it’s 11 and it’s 1130 and it’s 12 and it’s one o’clock in the morning and the guests are still there. It’s like at some point you are going to ask the guests to leave. And when you ask the guests to leave, you are engaging in an act of purity. You are saying this is my home, this is my house, this is my thing, my family, whatever, like it can be just you, it can be your family. And then you have people who come, you have guests who come. And at some point, it’s great you have this engaged, but at some point they have to go because you need to find your identity again. You need to find, so you’re actually engaging in an act of purity by at some point having your guests go out the door and closing the door, locking your door and then you go to bed. It’s like that is an act of purity and it’s totally fine to do that. But you could have the same, imagine the same situation where someone comes to your door, knocks on the door and wants to just ask you something and you open the window and you scream, you say, get out of here, I’m going to call the cops. Right? And so that’s also an act of purity. It’s just one is normal and one is excessive. Right? It just depends. But you have to be able to think at all levels. And so when you talk about immigration, it’s like people aren’t able to think. And also to understand it, you will have to find some level of purity in terms of immigration. The question is, what is too much? What is normal? What is a normal level of hospitality? What is a normal level of engaging with that which is foreign or that which is new or stranger or the stranger, whatever. Like you need to just find that balance. But if you’re not able to think about it and you just think purity bad, then it’s going to come back. It’s going to come back and you’re going to engage in it in ways that you don’t realize. In the way, like for example, when you see social justice activists engage in extreme acts of purity without even realizing that they’re reproducing the very thing that they hate, the very thing that they’re trying to fight in terms of white privilege or all this stuff that they go at. Yeah. I was just thinking about that because I’m working on the Evergreen documentary and there’s this extended hour of students going off about how much they hate the police. And at the end of this session, they start to, they all start to focus on one man who’s typing on their phone and start accusing him of taking pictures and uploading them to like Brett Bart or something like that. And then you see that they really love to police. They don’t want to be policed. They want it like community policing is them having the power, which doesn’t really shake out because it’s just the will of the mob and whoever can claim the most victimhood and stuff like that. It’s crazy. Well, it’s interesting because it seems like a tactic to pick a group that you can’t, that you would slander yourself to defend. If I started to defend a billionaire, like there’s a built-in incentive not to defend the billionaire. It’s this little hack and the same rhetoric with anti-racism. If you start to criticize anti-racism, that means because you’re racist, right? Like it’s built in and I don’t know if it’s purposely built in or not, but it just works that way to the self-reinforcing system that then leads to, leads down this road of categorical thinking. Yeah. And you have both. You have both sides and that’s the history of the 20th century or the 19th to 20th century. It’s like you have, let’s say the left or on the left, you’ll have the desire to criticize the aristocracy because like you said, on that side, anybody who is above you is fair game, right? And then you have the other side, which is that anybody who is strange, anybody who is an exception and he’s on the margin is fair game. And the thing that’s interesting is that on both sides, you end up dealing with a minority. You’re dealing with a minority of people and so it’s easy to focus on them because we’re the majority, they’re the minority, either the aristocracy or the foreigners or the people who are weird or just different from us. And so we can just like, we can point to them and say it’s their fault that everything is going wrong. It’s the same game. Yeah, you just made me think because there’s that term punching up, which the left allows you to punch up, whereas the right’s more. You punch out, you punch to the out group. And it’s interesting, I’m totally getting woo woo symbolic here, but like the left has a problem with authority on the vertical axis and the right will kind of vilify that, which is the horizontal axis or the outsider in a way. Yeah, and it really is. I always say like this, I’ve been saying this forever, that I think the modern world is a de-incarnation. As we move away from Christianity, we’re actually seeing a de-incarnation and so things are pulling apart in a manner. So for example, like you would that cross, that is how reality exists, right? For those two to come together, right? Or let’s say the inevitability of hierarchy, but that the reason for hierarchy is so that those that are above care for those that are below. Like that, let’s say that’s the Christian answer, let’s say. That’s the Christian description of the world. But if you pull it apart, then it’s like you have just hierarchies that are hierarchies of power, and then you end up having the grumbling of the lower groups who are grumbling against the authority. And so it’s like it’s pulling apart. And then it gets really crazy at some point because at some point that thinking can become very extreme where you, let’s say you actually think that those that are different from you, let’s say the foreigners or the people outside of your country are better than you. That’s the extreme of, let’s say the left versions. And then you have the idea that the people that are different from you or outside of you are parasites. They’re rats, they’re insects, they’re like in the Nazi era or the Tutsi genocide. Those are the extremes that we have to be really careful not to go to because they’re easy to- The magical immigrant. I was just reading a write-up at Evergreen about they talk about the magical outsider. You know, you’re like, okay, really? Okay. It’s just falling into this dialectic, this breaking apart of the world and then coming to see everything in that vision. There’s going to come a point, and I think it’s already there, where people are going to think that robots are better than us, that robots are more human than we are. We’ve already seen narratives like that. We’ve already seen narratives where, I think, what was it? The iRobot, where robot, it’s like the robot that is moral, and we are immoral. It’s the apes, the planet of the apes. That’s a great example. The apes are the good guys, the humans are the bad guys. That is that dangerous narrative of seeing that which is outside as better than the inside. Why is that so dangerous? Because it devalues the inside? Because you’re going to cease to exist. What does it do? What’s the outcome of that? The outcome of that is that you’ll drown. You’ll just drown and you’ll stop. You’ll just cease to exist. Because you can’t, let’s say, how can I say this? It’s like if you, I can give you an example. I can give you an example. I always try to bring it close to home so that you know, so you can see. If you make it too big, then people stop seeing it. You have your house, and then let’s say you have that thinking, where you think that those that are outside of your house are better than you, that they’re magical, that they’re this image of everything. So then, let’s say you see someone who’s in trouble outside and you see a homeless person and you say, well, you should come live in my house, right? Because you’re actually better than me. And you invite them in, and then you invite another one in, and you invite another one. Let’s say you invite 50 because there’s an indefinite amount of them. There’s always more on the outside than there is on the inside. That’s just the nature of reality. Of any identity always has more on the outside. So you’re like, okay, well, let’s just invite everybody who needs something to come live in my house. Well, how long before you cease to exist? How long before your family is just not, doesn’t exist anymore? I would say even before you reach the equal amount of people in the family, like if you, let’s say you’re three people or four people in your family and you have another three people live in your house, your family is going to stop existing. So that’s just reality. It’s like that for, I don’t know, how can I say this? It’s like that for everything.