https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=x2iTe-oX7hQ
I’ve been trying for a long time now to stop swearing. And I think I, and my listeners who are familiar with the show will forgive me for bringing this up again, but I think I’ve got a decent argument against swearing. But if it’s not good, I want to know. And if it is good, I’d like you to help me understand it better. Would that be okay? Sure, go ahead. Because I do think it ties into what we’re talking about here, right? And here it is. Okay, when you observe humans, you see that when they engage in behaviors that are like unto the beasts, they ritualize them or elevate them to set that action apart or to distinguish themselves from the beasts. So we defecate and urinate. We nourish ourselves with food. We copulate, right? And interestingly, most swear words are associated with those things in addition to religion. It might have to do something, I think, with the places we find ourselves the most vulnerable. I’m not sure about that. But when humans get together to eat, they don’t just eat in any kind of way. A hot dog is something you hold in your hand, but even then there’s certain rules. You don’t just eat like an animal. You don’t do that. When you have sex, we would think someone was beastly if they were having sex in the street. We might light candles. We might set the mood to elevate this action. If you were at my house, Jonathan, and you saw my son just taking a dump in the backyard and saw me encouraging it, this isn’t good. You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t, yes, you have to dump, but you shouldn’t dump in the way animals dump, right? So the whole point is that there’s certain rituals or things that we use to elevate those activities when we share those activities with the beasts. Okay, to tear down those activities is to become more beast-like, and that’s not good. And the argument is that when we swear, we’re doing orally, we’re kind of tearing down those structures and rituals and elevations orally. And so I really shouldn’t be saying things like shit and ass and sexual things. Because I’m, yeah, well, you get my point. What do you think of that? Well, I think it’s a good beginning. I think that you need to be able, you should be able to account for, so how about this? Let me give you my theory about swearing. Please. And then tell me how it fits with yours, let’s say. Uh-huh. And so, the, there’s a, in our world, we have the public sphere. Like it’s similar to what you’re saying. Like there’s a world of the public, which is reasonable, and which is coherent, right, and is communal, okay? And so, then from that world, there are things that are set apart. Again, exactly the way that you’re talking about, okay? And so there are things that are set apart from the communion. Some things are set apart above as being sacred, okay? And that’s because they are beyond the communion, and they also, but they bind the communion together, okay? And there are some things which are set aside below, you could say, and they are the scandals, right? The things that will break down our communion out of a scandal, let’s say, okay? And so, there’s two types of hiddenness. You could say that there’s a, the world is hidden in garments of skin, right, after the fall. We are covered in garments of skin. And there’s two types of nakedness. There’s the nakedness of glory, you could say, in the garden, and then there’s the nakedness of shame at the bottom, which is the nakedness of Noah, drunk in his tent, you could say. So if you think of the story of Genesis as starting as naked in the garden and ending as naked in your tent in a drunken manner that you need to be covered, okay? So those are the two extremes, let’s say, of setting aside. Now, what happens when we swear is we are trying to express something which is outside of the system of meaning, because this part in the middle is the coherent communal system of meaning. But sometimes we have experiences which is violence or like when you stub your toe or you get super angry, and you don’t find a word within the system of meaning to express what you’re dealing with. So what you’ll do is you will go into the cast out, like into the cast away, and bring it into the system of meaning to express the disjunction. You’re basically expressing disjunction, expressing like, this makes no sense. I can’t express it. And so I need to go into the hidden part. I need to bring out the hidden part into public to express the disjunction. So that’s why it’s all fecal, it’s all sexual, it’s all that. Now, what we do when we use religious words is that we’re confusing the top and the bottom. We’re confusing the sacred with the dark outside. And we’re taking religious things and we’re pulling them into this darker aspect. But they’re related. That’s why both of them tend to be used in swearing. Because we want to reach outside of the system of meaning in order to express something which is beyond expression. So we’ll reach up and we’ll reach down and we’ll mix them together. And so we create this thing. But what it does, I mean, obviously, the reason why we shouldn’t swear, especially not use the religious words, is exactly because we’re desacralizing. We’re participating in desacralization when we’re doing that. We’re basically taking pearls and throwing them in the mud. We’re taking the highest thing and we’re confounding it with the lowest thing. And so that’s why we shouldn’t do that. The reason why it’s a dangerous thing to bring out the bottom things up is also because this stuff at the bottom, all the dark stuff, if you bring it into public, like you said, it’s destroying the world. Like it literally will destroy the world. Like if you shit in, like if you take a crap on the kitchen table, you will destroy your reality. Your reality will not hold together if you start doing things like that. So as you do it orally, like the way you said, you’re bringing this chaos, you’re kind of like, you’re basically like pulling this chaos up into the world and you’re kind of participating in its destructuring. Now the most mysterious thing, the craziest thing, this is the thing that will blow your mind, is that Jesus Christ manifests those two at the same time, all the time. He’s constantly doing that, but he does it in a way that doesn’t destroy the world. He’s basically reaching up and down at the same time. And so he’s humiliated, he’s beaten, he’s treated like a criminal, he goes down into the bottom of death, but he’s at the same time, he’s the king, he’s the holy and the holy of holies, he’s up in the secret place in the holy temple. So when he dies, he goes down outside of the world, down and into the holy of holies at the same time, which is just crazy. So Christ, like Christ smashes it all, like if you want to understand, but at least in our world, like in our world, you really definitely want to be careful because when you swear from above, you’re both ways, you’re participating in destroying the world or destructuring the world. But at least we can understand why that happens. It’s not arbitrary at all. That is so powerful. I’m gonna think about that for the next three weeks. Thank you, brother. Thank you. Now, but when we use sexual language, aren’t we in a sense bringing the higher thing down also? Because we’re degrading this sacred act. No, because think about it. The word, the sexual words we use are never the proper words. They’re always the dirty version of the word. Yeah, that’s right. We don’t say, oh, copulate. Like we don’t say that, right? We say, we use the bad word. Yeah, exactly. We use the dark kind of illegitimate words in order to bring that. So we’re always reaching down when we’re doing that. We’re kind of going into the dirty part of sexuality and wanting to manifest it in the world. But in so doing, we’re degrading the beauty of the sexual act. Of course, we are. Yeah, definitely. But I see what you mean. You are, yeah, you’re reaching down into the bottom and wow, that’s really interesting. And then what’s kind of sad is when you become the sort of person that doesn’t even consciously drag things from the bottom up, you’re just, it’s just part of your language is you’re blaspheming and speaking closely. But think about people who swear all the time. Yeah, I’m thinking of them. If you know some people like that, you’ll realize that it’s actually, it manifests a general pattern. Oh, it manifests a disjunction. It doesn’t it? Like it’s prophetic of their own. Exactly, of their own state, of their own spiritual state, of their own, the way that they encounter the world, the way that also they might be someone who, let’s say, tends to damage relationships, tends to not be careful of others, tends to, you know, all of that will be part of why someone will be completely lost to swearing. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that with me.