https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zaCVXN6ziSw
I do see that, like my original diagnosis when I first started talking about just the evergreen phenomenon on YouTube was that they are trying to take a sociological level of thinking about groups and apply it to the individual and it completely destroys the individual on a variety of levels, beginning with their agency, their responsibility, their self-worth, their self-respect, and then the respect and agency towards other people. It completely ruins the bonds between the particles because it’s looking at… Well they’re trying to swallow and that’s the… So imagine you have a hierarchy and this is what I talked about when the problem of hierarchies is that you can have a hierarchy that tries to swallow its parts, right? It tries to completely consume its parts so that its parts don’t have independent existence, right? And so that is what happens in ideological groups, that’s what happens in the religious sects like cults and stuff where it’s like everything… Or you know when you have like a really charismatic leader and then everybody just gets totally sucked into that person. It’s as if the people that are under him become almost like members of his body, like they’re just extensions of him, right? And so that is extremely dangerous when that happens because the way… One of the things I talk about is love. I tried to explain that love is the balance between unity and multiplicity. So let’s say you have a family and there’s love in that family, there will be enough communion, there’ll be enough to make you a unit, to make you a whole, but the very same process, love would also make you respect the individuality of each person. And so the way to find a way to balance is to always be moving between unity and multiplicity, to always be finding… It’s hard to find the exact… It’s never the same. It moves, but it’s like a dance where you’re dancing and you’re always trying to find the balance between making sure everybody has their own existence and everybody is also aimed towards the same goal or moving towards each other. And that’s communion, that’s love, that’s basically what Christianity is supposed to be, is to have that play. And it happens… So it happens between people, then it happens between… So you have in Christianity, this idea that we’re the body of Christ. And so it’s like Christ is above and we’re the body, and then we are well fitted together through love. We love each other and that makes us join with Christ without losing our individuality. And then all of that, it’s like all of that can be the way that the whole world exists. All of creation, all of reality is always playing between multiplicity and unity in order to find that balance where everything can continue to exist in a cohesive manner. When you have ideological groups, like you said, what happens is they try to impose the higher identity, let’s say the group identity, the race, the gender, whatever, they try to impose it in a manner which is tyrannical all the way down. It’s like everything has to just be a manifestation of this thing that unites us. So if you’re a man, it’s like I’ve identified the things of man and that’s all you are. You’re not Benjamin, you’re not all these other things that you are, you’re not a complex system of different aspects. You’re just a man and I’m going to judge you completely based on that one thing. That destroys the world. The world can’t exist that way. It’s interesting because, and I don’t mean to offend anybody by saying this, but that rigidity of thought, that man category is your full existence. That defines every aspect of your character. But then that doesn’t really work in this system of thought. So they build in this self-ID clause where now you can identify with the other category and nobody can question you. You can just jump entirely into this other category and get all of the strengths and weaknesses of this completely other category. So it’s one way to do a loophole that actually shows how maddening these categories are. But it’s an interesting thing because it also ends up, the same thing happens in that case too, even almost to a higher degree where, especially in these kind of variant, these variant sexual identities, when someone latches on to an identity, even if there’s a thousand, even if there’s like a hundred of them, then it’s almost as if they’re swallowed up by that thing. It ends up being all they talk about, all they live for, their whole identity has been swallowed up by this one thing. Whereas usually, let’s say you or I, it’s like, I, yes, I am a man, but I’m also the father and I also have this job and I also have interests and I also have these things and I’m also a member of a church, I’m a member of this. I have all these aspects of my personality which are dancing together in order to create Jonathan Peugeot. But there’s not one aspect of myself which is completely swallowing me. And I think that that’s a really, it’s a dangerous because it’s really difficult to talk with people to whom that has happened. It’s like if you meet someone that has been completely swallowed up by that one identity, I mean, and it can be anything, it can be race, it can be nation too. You meet someone who is like super nationalistic, it’s as if you can’t, it’s really difficult to talk to them because they’re so, like their visors are on so straight, you know, and then they interpret everything through their thing. It’s like meeting a conspiracy theorist, you know, it’s like they have this one thing and it’s like the whole world has to fit in this one thing and they can’t view other types of relationships. And have you seen people like go through that and then come out the other side and have you seen that kind of breakdown? Yeah, I think it is possible. I think it is possible to not, I think it is possible to be possessed by something and it really is a form of possession, you know. It is possible to be possessed and then to kind of free yourself from this, from possession. And I think, I mean, I think I’ve seen it in the past few years. I’ve seen a lot of that. I think Jordan Peterson has kind of broken down a bunch of doors in that sense where people, some people who were really kind of caught up in an ideology on both sides of the fence have been able to kind of clear the, open their visors up a little bit and be able to see that the world is bigger than your thing. Like that identities, you can’t reduce everything to one identity. It just doesn’t work that way. Or even just a multiplicity of identities. Yeah. How do you, what are some of the steps that you think that could happen or help that process, facilitate that process? Man. The identity idolatry, there’s some sort of complex there. Yeah. Man, I think for sure, for sure, I think that one of the things that can help is contact with other people in the sense that a lot of time these, these like narrow, narrow furrows are dug because you end up in these, you know, where they call them these, these bubbles or whatever, these, these, these ideological bubbles. And so, so, so people aren’t actually meeting others who are different from them and that, that, that just don’t have other identities that are not even, they’re not even in your, on your spectrum. Like, you know, especially it’s so funny because it’s like you meet the really woke types and I, and I always want, like, I wish a lot of the woke types would go and just hang out with just poor people and realize that even it’s so funny because even in terms of racism, you know, I used to be, I actually used to be pretty, I used to be pretty woke myself. Like when I was a teenager, I was the guy who would always like stand up and if someone was making some kind of racial joke, I would always call them out in public. And like, anyways, but then- I was always the guy calling out the guy that’s calling everybody else. Really? There you go. That’s good. When I started meeting like poor people, I realized that they just had another, there’s a completely other way of looking at things, completely other way of, and so you, you go to a poor neighborhood where there’s, you meet a poor white guy who has way more chance to have in his job around him to have people from other races and he’ll have a kind of weird like a kind of weird low level racism to him, you know? It’s in words and it’s kind of like, oh, these guys are like this, these guys are like that and it’s kind of off putting it first. Then when you look at them and you kind of explore their world and realize, okay, yeah, they say that, but then they’ll have lunch with this guy who’s Mexican or this guy who’s from here or whatever. And you know, it’s like if you ask them, it’s like, oh no, it’s not a big deal. Like, he’s not like that, you know? And it’s not thought out, but there’s like an organic reality, which is that even though they can use certain words and they have certain discourse, it tends to, it tends in real life, they actually have more contact with other groups than these like, these like liberal woke elites that have barely any contact with people from other types of people. And so they’re policing their language and they’re policing their thought, but they’re not actually engaging with people that are different from them. And so it’s like, I really prefer some working class guy who once in a while will say some thing that is off putting and kind of racist, but in reality is way more, is actually probably way more, way more possible if he’s going to end up dating a Mexican girl or some Vietnamese girl or whatever, just because in real life, it’s like, you know, it’s like he’s actually in contact with people from other groups. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s kind of the thought that I’ve, at some point, I’ve kind of come to where it’s like, there’s this weird political thing and then there’s just reality. Or it’s like, people are messy, people say stupid things, people don’t think things out, but if they’re just basically good people in the end, it’s not going to, it’s going to play out fine, you know?