https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EHKVqZd9Cq4
Let me read you a quick quote from No Magia, which is Dugan’s book. It’s the terms noose and magia, so war of the mind, but obviously mind in the more broader respect, not what’s in your kind of brain. He says, wars between people, including even the most cruel and bloody are but pale comparisons to the wars of the gods, Titans, giants, elements, demons, and angels. And these in turn are but figures illustrating even more formidable and profound wars unfolding in the mind in the sphere of the noose and its limits in which the mind itself borders the zone of madness. Thus everything is no magia. And just to, you know, he talks about what’s happening now in this idea. He takes eternity very seriously and looking at modernity. Modernity seems like to be this new thing, but it’s nothing new. It’s actually something very ancient and old, almost pre Indo European. And it’s like the Titans, a return of the Titans, he calls it Titanomagia. Right. And it’s like this very ancient force, this very ancient phenomenon is emerging through modern science. And it’s not science in itself, Aristotelian science. There’s something about, you know, the time of Francis Bacon, and that turn that turn towards, you know, modern science, that is really this, and he juxtaposes with the end of the second period, the end of the catacomb, which is this, the withholder, which was Byzantium, right, when Byzantium kind of went away, that withholder from complete access to of the Son of Perdition to the world has been removed. And just after that happened, we’ve had this emergence of modern science, which is essentially a new, you know, it’s spiritual warfare, a fight between the gods and the Titans. And he calls it Gigantomagia, Titanomagia. So I think that’s in line kind of in a general sense, what what’s being discussed here. But maybe we can hone in a little bit and define from a symbolic perspective, and in this context, what the political is. So I think that in terms of the political is something like the intermediary world, that’s the best way to understand it. And that’s where a lot of the battle is happening. And that’s why we tend to think of it as a battle of principalities. It’s, it’s like the aerial battle, you know, you see that in the, in some of the weirder stories regarding St. Peter and St. Paul, right, where you find these stories of them battling with Simon Magus, you know, in the in the aerial domain, so they would have these spiritual battles. I think that that’s, it’s a, that’s probably a good way to understand it. And I, and so, so the political is like, you could see it, the good way to understand it is left and right is actually a really good way to understand it. That is, that it’s the world of opposites. And so what happens is, especially in American politics, you can really see it kind of crystallizing that way is that you can understand that God acts with two hands, right? God has the right hand and the left hand, there’s mercy, and there’s rigor, there are two sides to making this thing move. You know, you have to, you have to extend mercy and rigor for anything to actually exist. And so that’s, that’s the place of the political in terms of social where, you know, you, if you’re too strict, at some point you crystallize, if you’re too flexible, at some point you decompose. And so there’s this, there’s this discussion, constant discussion, right, about the situation and how to adapt the bigger bodies, like these communal bodies, to what’s happening and what’s happening internally. And so it’s always messy, it’s always difficult, it’s always a problem. But when we, if we at least focus on something above it, then hopefully we’re able to kind of navigate without excess. What is it? There’s that one of my favorite quotes from Rumi who says that, you know, the way we do things is we, the hand must open and close subtly like the wings of a butterfly. But if you leave the hand completely closed or if you leave the hand completely open, then you’re paralyzed. And that’s what we see in the political problem today is that it’s a, the left and the right or the open and the closed or whatever, the opposites, instead of being, you know, the two sets of a motor that makes the thing go, they’ve become like two polar opposites that can’t talk to each other anymore. And so we have a kind of frozen situation. And that comes from not seeing, not having anything above you. That’s where it comes from, right? It’s the knowledge of good and evil. It’s with, it’s the fall into opposites without transcendent unity. So I think that’s the way that I see it. And so I think that the danger, the danger is taking up a position, like a radical position in, because you see the chaos of the other side or the solidity of the other side. That’s one of the dangers. The danger is not taking up a position. And then what happens is one side pushes the other, pushes the other, radicalizes itself. Like one of the things we’ve been seeing is that, for example, like in American politics, everything’s moving left. It’s like this weird thing, right? We, this leftward lurch where now someone who has like opinions that were considered absolutely, you know, mil-toast boring, normal opinions just 30, 40 years ago are now called far right or extreme right. And so that’s also another problem. So it’s like, if we do nothing, if we take a position, we risk the, we run the risk of falling into polar opposites. And if we don’t, then we run the risk of being swallowed up by one side. And so it’s, it’s very difficult in terms of, but I think that that’s the way to understand the political. It’s like this intermediary world where the motor’s turning. So it needs the opposites. It needs opposition. It’s just that you have to be careful not to let them, those opposites kind of crystallize into. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. And that’s another thing that kind of came up for me is this intermediary space, right? And the term that was kind of floating around in my mind is, you know, Heidegger, his term being, but in his more originary fundamental ontological sense of being B E Y N G. So quickly he, you know, what happened at the beginning of philosophy, the pre-Socratics, when this question of being dawned on humanity, on the pre-Socratic philosophers, and they started interacting. It was like a revelation, right? And the function and the understanding of being was quickly, this was the fundamental error is said by Heidegger, that being as such quickly became the being of beings as what is, you know, being is just a category that all beings share. And that led to Plato, who instantiated this fundamental error of this, of the forms in a sense, and that the history of Western European philosophy is a degradation from this initial question of being down to Nietzsche, who was the final philosopher. So who ultimately elucidated and articulated this fundamental error. And I think there’s something interesting about Nietzsche writing a book entitled Beyond Good and Evil. It’s like, in a Christian sense, like that was the point, you know, we, of course, we want to go beyond good and evil, but we, you know, we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Of course, you want to get beyond that. So I think there’s something, you know, kind of interesting there to think through. But, yeah, but you’re right. And you’re totally right. But you can see it, if you can see how it plays out in story, it’s that the problem is that once you’ve eaten the fruit, once you enter into the world of opposites, it’s like the game is set, things are going to play out. It’s very difficult to stop to stop it from happening. And so the fruit of that is death. That’s it. You’re right. God told Adam, if you eat the fruit, you’re going to die. It’s like, it’s very, it’s very simple because that’s what opposites end up doing. If they’re taken in desire, you could say. And so the solution of that is to die. That’s the solution. And Jesus is the fulfillment of Adam. Jesus does what God said to Adam. If you eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die. And Christ said, yes. Adam said, no, Adam said, no, it’s not my fault. It’s your fault. It’s this person’s fault. He tried to externalize the causality and then tried to hold on, you know, with the garments of skin and tried to survive. But Christ said, I’m going to eat the fruit and I’m going to die. And that’s how you do it. So it’s like, that’s the difficulty. That’s the difficulty of politics. And it’s a difficulty of politics right now, because there’s a weird Antichrist moment where that tendency is weaponized against those that maybe should use it. That is the idea that Christians should sacrifice themselves, let’s say, for example. And so now there’s like a weaponization of that where it’s like, yes, you should sacrifice yourself, sacrifice yourself and get out of the way. And we’re going to take over. It’s like, you’re a Christian now, shut up and sacrifice yourself and get out of the way. And so it’s like, how, Oh boy, how, what’s going on? It’s hard to know how to act in that situation because you realize that it really is like a devil’s trick. Where, you know, so I don’t know, it’s like even myself, like, I’m not sure how to deal with that problem in terms of politics, which is one of the reasons why I don’t talk about politics so much is because I can see this weird Antichrist victim narrative and this weird Antichrist reversal of this, this tendency of Christians to sacrifice themselves. And I don’t know how to deal with it. Yeah. And I think it’s an important distinction between self sacrifice and imposing self-sacrifice from kind of from without. Of course. Yeah. I think that’s an important distinction to try to kind of flesh out in terms of dealing with this political nature, because it’s not an abstract phenomenon anymore. We see it in our families, in our communities, you know, we kind of see it across the board. So I think it’s, it’s important to talk through these things.