https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ubOPl_ZMTNU
And one of the first things we talked about was zombies. Because you were having… it was an existential question for you. It wasn’t just a theoretical question. Yeah, exactly. I wonder how common of a thing that is. Obviously, it’s present in the common imagination because there’s lots of zombie movies and books and so on. But basically, if I think back about this period of my life, while I was studying abstractly nihilism and materialism during the day in my studies, I would spend all night long exploring the same topics symbolically, having zombie nightmares. So for literally all night, every night for about a year, I had zombie nightmares. It again sounds worse than it is. Like actually, what ended up happening after a while is I sort of figured out what was going on. Initially, if you just wake up every time you have such a nightmare, you’ll never sleep. So at some point, I sort of understood that it was just like… just yet another zombie nightmare. So even if I would get eaten or so on, I wouldn’t actually wake up. I knew that I would just start another dream, but it never stopped. So like this endless cycle of zombie nightmares. But I ended up getting rid of my zombie problem, in part thanks to you and John Verbecky. It was really a series of steps. First, in my studies, I was looking at specifically arguments against materialism and trying to find alternative ways of framing the world. At that stage specifically, I had seen enough arguments against materialism in philosophy that I could drop materialism and adopt pedpsychism at the time. I felt that was a nice easy bridge. What I should say is as soon as I did that, the zombie nightmares started to go away. Like they were cut down, I don’t know, 50, 90%. To a good extent, they started to go away. I still had them, but it was less frequent. Next step was diving into a little bit of classical metaphysics, especially with regards to virtue ethics. If there isn’t just matter in the world, if people aren’t just particles following blind laws, is there also some kind of good and evil that we can talk about? It’s not immediate. Just because you’re not a materialist doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily have an ontology that allows you to speak about good and evil. But through classical philosophy, I was able to find good arguments for that. Things you can find in Plato and Aristotle, but also new arguments coming from cognitive science. Some of the things that John Breveke and Jordan and you talk about, these kinds of ideas were able to destroy my moral relativism. Immediately when that happened, my zombie nightmares were again cut down by 50 or 60 or 90%. At that point, I was starting to have way less zombie nightmares. I still had some, but it was very manageable. I honestly thought it would just stay like this forever. Because I was supporting you on Patreon, we had these regular chats and we became friends. At some point, I asked you, what would you do? If you were in my position where you were having a zombie nightmare right now, like you’re the main character in a zombie story, let’s see, what do you do? What’s the solution? How can I get out of this? And we ended up working through it together. Do you remember what the solution was? You don’t remember? Yeah, I remember what it was. Actually, we also further improved it, I think, two, three years ago on the French podcast. But the initial solution was, it took us a few iterations to figure something out. The basic idea we came up with was to do what Jesus would do. You’ve talked about this on your channel before, zombies are a parody of the Christian resurrection. They’re really a parody of the Christian worldview, and specifically the Christian apocalypse. Because zombies come back to life, but they don’t have this glorious body. They just have this decaying body. They are all together, but rather than being in communion, they just follow their impulses in the same direction. They look, let’s say, unique and special, but it’s only superficial. Really, the only, like, all want to eat is the same thing. They eat brains because it’s the last remnant of meaning in a materialistic universe. Like, they’re trying to destroy, like, the only thing that doesn’t fit quite right in the materialistic worldview, like, even if they try to deny it. Anyways, there’s all these parallels between zombies and Christianity, where zombies are trying to basically destroy the ancient meaning systems. And there’s also the key, I think, in Jesus’s story against this again, to trample down death by death. So Jesus, even today, like, in the Eucharist, he lets us eat him, but doing that, he actually eats us, the same way that he let us kill him 2,000 years ago, in a way that would bring us into his story to make us saints. So, like, there’s this key inside of Christ’s story, and we could go deeper into many details. Like, what we do, especially during the Eucharistic liturgy, is the exact antidote to the meaning crisis and the zombie crisis, because zombies, like, they just grow. They can’t make sounds, but we sing when we’re in the church. Zombies just, like, jumble up to eat stuff and destroy stuff, thinking only about themselves. But we’re in church, we’re praying for one another, we’re being thankful towards the same thing, rather than just consuming everything for ourselves. So there’s all these parallels you can make to see how Christianity is specifically participating in liturgies, liturgy is the solution to the zombie problem. And what we came up with was, okay, then what you would need to do is, like, somehow let yourself be eaten by zombies. Like, you would have to do something, like, spiritual, like, pray or, like, find some way in your zombie universe to become a saint, and then you let yourself be eaten by zombies to save even the zombies. And when we worked through that, then my nightmares disappeared. I never had one since then. The only times I add some after, when I would explicitly be trying to write about my experiences for others, but I never had this again for myself, the dreams just went away. Yeah, and what’s crazy about that is that we kind of, we did came up with this, like, a story, almost like a narrative about the idea of a saint like that, that lets himself be eaten, and then wakes up truly, let’s say, resurrects truly, doesn’t come back as a zombie, but comes back as a kind of glorious being in the zombie story. And it’s weird because it seems like that’s a story that should exist, like, somebody should write it, you know, that the idea, because I don’t think that exists, the idea of a zombie that wakes up from its state and retrieves, you know, a kind of, even a better level of consciousness that they had before. So, you know, it’s out there, folks, whoever does it, you know, if you don’t do it, I’ll at some point, I’ll write it myself, just because that story has to exist. Yeah, I think the closest I’ve seen is Wormbodies. It was made into a movie, but there was also a book from a few years ago, but the zombie doesn’t come back to a glorious body, let’s say, it comes back to the, like, same kind of existence. And there’s, like, interesting, I think, I’d say facets of the Christian story you can see in that movie, and especially in the book, like, in the book, there’s almost a baptism scene. At some point, the zombie, like, he’s starting to wake up, basically, out of love for one girl, because he hates the brains of his boyfriend. But, like, he ends up, like, slowly, like, developing feelings towards that girl, and he saves her, spends time with her, and, like, through this attraction, he becomes more and more human. But at some point, he has to make, like, a kind of confession, and there’s a kind of baptism scene, like, in front of a church, when it’s raining, and he’s washing his mouth from blood, because he just ate someone, like, but he didn’t want to, anyway, like, there’s this progression, and the zombie, ultimately, spoiler alert, shut this down if you don’t want to read the book or watch the film. But at the end, the zombie comes back to normal human life by sacrificing himself for that girl. So, like, he has to basically, like, wrap himself around her as they’re getting shot, and he has to, like, drop in, like, a building, I think, and, like, he’s thinking he’s gonna die doing that, but he eventually, like, drops in a pool, so, again, there’s this water baptism thing, and then when he comes back, like, he sees that he’s bleeding, so he’s become human again. So, like, you can see glamors, I think, in popular culture of this solution, but, as you said, I don’t think anyone has come up with the full narrative arc so far. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, that’s part of what’s coming over the hill, let’s say, on storytelling, you know, it seems like it’s a perfect story to tell. So, basically, that is kind of what healed you, but that also kind of, that involved going back to church, it involved getting married, and, like, your whole life changed, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah.