https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Tas2LPWEh4Q
Welcome to the Stoa. The Stoa is a digital campfire where we cohere in dialogue about what matters most at the knife’s edge of what’s happening now. So check-ins. Yeah, I’m excited. Just sort of like a calm excitement. So welcome to the Stoa. I’m Peter Lindberg, the steward of the Stoa. The Stoa is a place for us to cohere and dialogue about what matters most at the knife’s edge of this moment. And today we are lucky to have my buddy Jonathan Peugeot join us at the Stoa. So, Jonathan is a professional artist, writer and public speaker who gives workshops and conferences all around North America. And he carves Eastern Orthodox icons and other traditional Christian images. And he has this excellent YouTube series called The Symbolic World that explores symbols and images that are floating around in our culture. So today, Jonathan is going to talk about the ecstasy of 2020. And he’s going to share his thoughts about what’s happening, the craziness that’s happening in the world. And then we’re going to have a discussion. So anytime Jonathan is talking, if you have a question that comes alive, just write it in the chat box. And when we get to the Q&A portion, I will call on you and you can answer your question to Jonathan. And if you want me to read it on your behalf, because this will be on YouTube, just indicate that in the chat and then I will do so. So that being said, I will unmute you, Jonathan, and hand it over to you. All right. It’s nice to meet everybody. I’m happy to be for the first time on the Stowa. I’ve been hearing a lot of great things and, you know, I’ve been following Peter kind of from afar. I think I was on his podcast a while ago and obviously read some of his writing, as I’m sure most of you have. Very, very astute person. And so I’m happy to kind of be in this little inner clique that he’s developed to talk about meaning and problems with meaning and just the madness of the situation. And so, as everybody as everybody probably saw yesterday, two days ago, actually, two days ago on the 4th of July, Kanye West announced that he was going to run for president of the United States. And it’s just very interesting because in January, I think it was in January, early 2020, I went or late 2019, I forget when Kanye put out his album. I actually started talking about Kanye West quite a bit. I did three videos on him. And it was actually the strange moment where there was a Newsweek article written about my take on Kanye West for some reason. And it just plays in everything nicely plays into what is happening. And my contention for the past few years is that we are in, we’re at the end of something. You know, you can see it how big as big as you want to see it, you know, whether it’s the end of Western civilization, whether it’s the end of one cycle of Western civilization, the end of the Enlightenment, the end, I don’t know, when it for sure there’s some there are many images which are showing us that we’re at the end of something. And the breakdown in meaning the breakdown in unity, the and then also the inversions. The fact that things keep flipping on one side and the other is a sign that we are, you know, can you imagine like a wheel that’s turning. And as it turns, if you can imagine the wheel gets bigger and bigger and bigger or, you know, the bigger it gets at some point the wheel is going to start to wobble, it is going to start to lose its coherence. And that seems to be the point where we’re in. And in the ancient, the ancients had a vision of the world. Every culture had the same vision that where they saw themselves as let’s say a center or an identity of some kind. And then as you moved out from that identity, you had progressively stranger and stranger people, obviously more people who were more appeared stranger to you because they were more different from you. And then as you moved out and out, you reached the monsters, which were, you know, these things that didn’t you had you didn’t have names names for the things that appeared to you as an unknown. And then the further you went, then you reached the edge of the world where you would see what appeared to you as upside down behavior. The Greeks, of course, had the the Amazons were the ultimate example for the Greeks because the Greeks were extremely, let’s say, male dominated. And so they had this image of something at the edge of the world, this tribe at the edge of the world, which was the opposite of them and which was female dominated females. The women were warriors and the men were barely around or barely important in that society. And so that that that type of inversion can play many roles like it doesn’t necessarily have to take on one form. It can take on many forms, but it it has its image in the the vision of the world like this kind of cosmic vision. But it also appears in our society as well in terms of a fringe element of our society. And I’ve used the carnival as the ultimate example where the carnival aesthetic seems to embody mostly this fringe, you know, the idea of turning faster and faster. The notion of the freak show, the note, all these images of the carnival, the clown, the acrobatics, the whole idea of turning and turning and turning. And so the fact that things are so unstable is that’s when we’re starting to see these these elements come into play. Now, the problem with the breakdown is that there are also movements to try to clamp down and those two end up happening at the same time. And the danger that we that we fall into is to want to take one side or the other. We seem to think that we need to decide which side we’re on. Either we’re on the side of those who want to break down the world or on the side of those who want to clamp things down and kind of hold on for dear life, you know, and and create extreme versions of identity and extreme versions of of holding in. And so we’re going to see that it’s going to it’s going to get worse. I just want to warn you, it’s going to get a lot worse. But we’ve started to see this kind of playing out. And 2020. So when I made that video was when I made that video about Kanye West in 2019 or early 2020, I told everybody I said, hold, hold on for 2020 because it’s going to be crazy. But I have to admit that I didn’t expect so much to be happening in so little time. But at the same time, I’m not completely surprised. And so what we’re seeing is we’re seeing this test of identity. Now, people don’t realize how a disease or how the pandemic was a test of identity or was a question of identity. I think maybe people can now start to perceive it as they might have perceived how people’s let’s say even their alignment in terms of what they would do for the pandemic ended up being more on political lines rather than anything else, you know, because the facts are so fluid and they keep coming out from all these directions. People ended up taking taking political lines for medical in with medical medical veneer, let’s say. But the reason why it’s such a question of identity is because there’s an analogy. And it’s a scary analogy. But there is an analogy between the person and the body politic. There’s an analogy between a human being and a society. And so, just like, and you can try to break that analogy down, but it you were made to experience that analogy. And what ended up happening with the pandemic was ended up being a question of walls. It ended up being a question of where do you put the walls? And that was is we’ve been discussing that, you know, you had Donald Trump saying, build the wall. And then you had Justin Trudeau saying, diversity is our strength. It’s like these two opposites. It’s like one is build a wall. The other is no identity, you know, just identity, no identity. This this insane type of rhetoric that we could see coming up on both sides of the political aisle. Well, the pandemic put that right into your body. And it made it it linked the whole meaning crisis into our bodies. And so the question became, where do we put the wall? How hard do we make the wall? And is the wall where is the value of the wall? of the wall, right? And so because you could have said, well, do we close down borders for countries? Do we close down borders hierarchically in terms of we see where the breakouts are and then we shut down walls in different places? Or do we shut down walls all the way down to the individual and we separate everybody from each other? And so that is, if you want to understand a lot of the debate that was happening, that was part of the large debate that was going on. Now, the one that ended up winning seems to have been the one where we separate everybody from each other and we create as little fragmented bits as possible and we shut down everything. Now shutting down everything is interesting because the things we shut down are a lot of the things that people use to, let’s say, to manifest their communal aspect. You know, obviously we shut down meetings, we shut down churches, we shut down stores, we also shut down sports. Sports is a huge deal and it’s bigger than a lot of people think because there’s a certain type of person which really needs to identify, which really need to identify, to have an enemy and to have some kind of fight. And sports is actually a great way to channel that so that you avoid conflict because you give people the possibility of saying, this is my team, I love my team, that other team, we’re gonna beat them, you know. And so it’s a less dangerous way of fun. Obviously you can get out of control, we can see that in England with the hooligans and stuff, but it’s the less dangerous way to funnel identity and conflict than, let’s say, a social conflict. But we took that away, we took that away from everybody. And so everybody was just in their home, separated from each other, completely apart, and then something happened. Now, it could have been other things, but the thing that happened made sense in terms of, obviously, the political narrative that has been prevalent in universities, that has been prevalent in society in general, this idea of a kind of neutral, like a kind of a kind of rule of the margin, you could say. And so we identified someone, we watched him get murdered. And that’s really, when’s the last time you watched someone actually get murdered? We don’t watch people get murdered. We watch it on TV, we watch movies. But most of the time, those images are taken away from us. Like most of the time, we’re not permitted by media or whatever, and for some good reason, to watch someone be killed. But for some reason, this video became extremely available for everybody to watch a man be murdered during eight minutes. And then there was a catharsis explosion. Because what happened in that murder, what happened in that murder is exactly a catharsis. It’s exactly a classical catharsis. Because what we were asked to do, especially the white people, especially the Westerners, were asked to identify with the victim. Like obviously, you want to identify with the victim because you see this man suffer and you’re like, this is unbearable. I can’t stand watching someone be tortured to death and it’s driving you crazy. But then you’re also asked to identify with the killer. And you’re supposed to do that at the same time. You’re supposed to both identify with the person who’s murdered and identify with the killer. And I’ll give you an example of another place where that happens. It’s in the story of Christ. That’s another place where that happens, where you’re supposed to both identify with Christ being killed, but you’re also supposed to identify with those who killed Christ. And so it was exactly a catharsis. And it led to a ecstatic explosion. It led to an ecstasy. And then people rushed into the streets to protest, to commune, to commune in the name of this cathartic moment, to commune in the shadow of this catharsis. And all the images we saw, the chanting, the kneeling, there were some crazier images than that. There were people being whipped. There were people washing the feet of others. There were all these religious expressions of communion in the name of this cathartic moment and in the name of inclusivity, you could say. I don’t know how to name the value. You could call it inclusivity, something like that. And then there was scapegoating. It’s just inevitable. There was scapegoating in the sense, and it’s weird scapegoating because if you look at how the event played through, like if you’re trying to stay cool, it was hard to stay cool during that time. But if you looked at how the event played out, you could see that everybody agreed that this was horrible. Everybody. I don’t think I ever, I don’t think I saw anybody who thought it was not horrible. I mean, I saw that the man was arrested, that the other people were put on, I think they might have been arrested too, I don’t even know. But I know they were for sure fired. And then everybody denounced it. Every conservative, every liberal, every politician at every level denounced it. Then every corporation denounced it. I received emails from every single corporation that exists, you know, denouncing what happened. But for some reason, there was still this idea that we, all of these people, everybody basically, who hated what to see this happen, we’re the resistance. And we’re the resistance to the evil system. And we need to find those that are responsible for the evil system. And because they’re the system, then we can purge them. And we’re totally justified in purging them because we’re the victims. And if we’re the victims and the culprit, then even better reason to now find those who are more responsible than us and purge them from the system. And so it was just a classical scapegoating. And it was a weird scapegoating too, because it was kind of like, it was like, it’s always like this, these weird, these like shadowy figures that we never hear names of. It’s like this evil system with like evil white supremacists that are managing it. But it’s like, who are these people? I mean, I guess Donald Trump is one of the people who is kind of seen as the one to point to. But in general, it was like a very much a kind of weird scapegoating. And so it really did lead to a pseudo religious event. And the final marker of the pseudo religious event is the human sacrifice. The human sacrifice is the clincher, which makes it a religious event. So, and you have to see the human sacrifice within the narrative of the people who are operating the sacrifice. So it’s not even about being objective or whatever. So a certain group of people or people on a certain side or people on this certain side of the political aisle said that you cannot go outside, you’re not allowed to commune, you’re not allowed to get together with others, you’re not allowed to meet. If you do that, you are killing your grandmother, you are killing people if you come together. And then they said, you should come together. Not because you’re not killing people, but because we are subjecting this to a higher value. This is a higher value. Protesting racism is higher. It is the ultimate value under which we are ready to sacrifice all other values underneath it. And we are also willing to sacrifice people. And of course, it wasn’t conscious. No one said we’re doing human sacrifice. But the pattern of human sacrifice was exactly being played out in their own narrative. And so that is why everything looks so weird and so religious, because it played, it followed a very religious pattern. Now, of course, it’s a frightening, it’s a little frightening in terms of pattern, because it’s not clear how it’s going to play out. It’s not clear how the catharsis is completely resolved. I’m not sure how it’s resolved. In the story of Christ, there is a capacity for resolution, right? There’s a capacity for forgiveness. There’s a capacity to come into full communion with each other. I don’t know if in this religious moment, there’s really a capacity for absolution. If there is, I haven’t seen it yet. Like I haven’t seen the capacity for absolution. And so it is a little frightening to watch this happen. And so it’s going to continue. It’s going to continue because this year is way far from being over. There’s still an election. And now you have this fool character, Kanye West, who really does play the role of a fool, who is now tossed in the game. So he’s the real Trump card, way more than Donald Trump. He is way more a Trump card than Trump. And it’s funny because people are saying he’s there just to steal the votes from Biden. But I don’t know. He might be there to steal the votes from Trump. Because he is, who knows? Because people, he’s presenting himself as like a conservative Christian who’s married to Kim Kardashian. I just want you guys to realize how insane the situation is. And so he’s flying under the banner of a conservative Christian. But obviously, you know, I don’t know. He’s doing an album with Dr. Dre and he’s hanging out with Kim Kardashian and he’s married to Kim Kardashian. And so who knows whose votes he’s going to take? I don’t know. But for sure, like there’s going to be some more madness in this year coming along. So I wish I could offer solutions to what we’re seeing. But right now, basically, I can just look and watch with my jaw just fallen. And, and hope for the best. Cool. You ready for some? Yeah, sure. So we already have some questions in the chat box. Just throw your questions for Jonathan. I’m going to warm them up with a few. So if you recall when this whole COVID thing came online, there was this meme that said the virus broke woke. And it was sort of like it was quiet, you know, the woke stuff for a bit. And then just boom, rushed online. It’s like woke broke the virus. And it almost felt like the virus was like a superordinate goal that we could kind of like instrumental like, you know, rally behind together, but then didn’t happen. And I really liked your frame with the higher value thing. And it seems like you’re kind of like, what is it inclusion? But it seems like anti racism is just just one value. And so is that are we rallying behind right now? Or what’s the media and it’s not just anti racism. It’s very important to realize that Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, very quickly put on a very, very large Black Trans Lives Matters. Black Lives Matter, the organization is not just about Black Lives Matter. It is about it is about the diversity, equity inclusion. That’s what it is. And that’s why they made they hurried up to put out a Black Trans Lives Matter because they wanted to signal that it is about inclusion and it is not just about not just about racism. There’s that there’s a there’s a bigger aspect to this thing that is not just is not only captured by racism. Mm hmm. Yes. So what I was gonna say is that is it a positive value like inclusion? Or is it like a negative value? Like, you know, not this like anti racism or something. And you think it’s more of a inclusion positive value that’s that’s being gestured in this ecstasy? Well, it’s inclusion. Inclusion is not a positive value necessarily. It can be positive and it can be negative. It’s like every it’s like everything. Everything in excess is dangerous. And so absolute inclusion. Now, one of the one of the things that I’ve been trying to explain, or help people understand is the role of the margin and what marginality is. And it’s, let’s say the power of the margin, the function of the map margin and the dangers of the margin. Now, one of the dangers with the inclusivity proposition that is being presented is that we want to include everything equally in an equal measure. And so what we want is we want the exception to be equal to the rule. And that doesn’t work. That type of inclusion will break the system. It’ll break everything. Because in order to in order to take something marginal, and try to make it equal to the rule, the only way to do it is to flip to make it upside down. Is to emphasize the margin is to make the margin the rule. It’s the only way to do it. Because it naturally it just it just doesn’t. It’s there are things in the world which are just naturally marginal that are just that are just freaky that are just things that happen once in a while that are that are and and they have a power which is useful in the world like they’re they’re useful for society that we have these that we have the freak shows that we have the things that are that are strange on the on the edges. But if you try to make so here, okay, so let me phrase it in a way let me phrase it in a way that is that is easy to understand but is scary in its implications. And so you have a country, right? And this country has a limit. Right? And then on the outside of that country, then you have everything that is strange, all the strangers, all the foreigners, they’re, they’re in new rebel, and they’re have they have multiple identities, they have an indefinite amount of identities because the outside is always bigger than the inside. And so what happens when you want to make the stranger more important than that which is inside? Or if you want the stranger to be equally included in the inside as the inside, then you it things get loopy very fast. Because you end up having you end up having because the the one who’s inside has a natural has a natural advantage on the inside. Because they’re on the inside, they’re part of the group part of the identity doesn’t matter which which type could be a knitting club, or it could be a soccer club, or it could be a country, or a sadly, it can also be things like a race or things like a religion, it can be all kinds of things. Now, if you want now to include everything, you have to do it in a way to you have to prioritize that which is outside, because that which is inside inside naturally has advantage. So you end up prioritizing that which is outside. And then things get crazy loopy things start because then what is this thing? It’s all gonna fall apart. It’s an it’s inevitably gonna fall apart. I always kind of joke like, if you have a knitting group, and then and then there’s like, you know, I don’t know, like Betty has a friend in her knitting group who comes to the knitting group, but she doesn’t really knit, right? She’s just there to hang out or maybe to talk to others because she likes people. And that’s totally fine. But then what if you, you want her to be equal to all the other members of the knitting group, it’s gonna get really complicated. Because then she says, Well, I don’t want to knit. I want to do something else. Like I want to play play bowling or something. So it’s like, Okay, well, once in a while, we’ll have a bowling event, because we want to include you in the group. But then at some point, it’s going to start to break down, you know, anyways, that that’s, that’s the problem of the of the that can be that’s the danger of equal inclusion. It just it just can’t, just can’t work in terms of a system. So we’re gonna pivot to some questions. A lot of good questions popping up. But ask one more. Does Kanye have a chance to win? Yeah, I can’t I can’t say my goodness there anything’s possible right now. Anything is possible. I don’t know what I to be honest, for all my love of Kanye West, like I’ve followed Kanye West since 2000, since his first album 2004, I think, and I love his music. And I think he’s a fascinating person. But I hope he doesn’t win. But anything’s possible at this point. Kim Kardashian, First Lady. Still, I was gonna wait to see who it endorses for 2020. So this whole type, might be easy. Rain, you had a question that’s related to Kanye, actually, maybe we can double click on that one. Yeah, well, I’d be curious. Maybe others are more aware than I am. I don’t spend a lot of time on social media. I haven’t followed Kanye. I just hear indirectly about him. I also didn’t watch your videos. So if there is other interest in the group, I was just curious if you wanted to summarize any of your analysis and just say anything else about what role Kanye is playing and everything that’s happening. So my contention in general about the fool is that the fool is the one who turns things. So the image of the clown is perfect. He’s on a ball, he’s rolling a ball, he’s juggling. And so the fool is the one who turns things. And so when things are going well, what the fool tends to do is to turn things upside down, right? To show the upside down of something. So the king is all pompous and is extremely proud of himself. And so the king will lift up his skirt and will point to the thing that’s hidden, right? He’ll point to the hidden things which are in the shadows, let’s say. And so the clown is always kind of turning things, right? And he’s emphasizing excess, caricature, all of that. Now, the problem is that when the world is upside down, then what’s the role of the clown? When everything is already topsy turvy, what does the clown do? Well, the clown keeps turning. The clown will turn things. And so what I’ve been trying to point out is that when the world is upside down, watch the fools because the fools are the ones who are actually going to turn things right side up, who are going to turn things back towards order. And so I saw that already in Kanye a long time ago. In 2004, he did this song called Jesus Walks, which was a really strange song because it’s a song about street life and hustling and all these things. But then he talks about how Jesus walks with the lowest, basically. So he’s saying, he’s talking about he needs to go do a drug deal and he’s going to leave his mom to do a drug deal. And he says, I hope that Jesus walks with me. And so he’s connecting the highest thing with the lowest, okay? So I’ve been watching him since then. And now he basically became a conservative Christian. He had a conversion experience and he’s now, he’s all pro-family, he’s all about, he’s become super conservative. And he’s not the first one for who that happens. I’ve been watching certain characters in the past few years. One of the examples I give is Gavin McGinnis, who obviously he’s been really, really kind of thrown around in the media. But as a character, he was interesting because he founded Vice News and he was a punk. He was a punk pervert, all this stuff. And all this, at some point, it’s like the whole world became like him. What does a punk do when the whole world is punk rock? And so he actually, he’s like, I can’t stand this. And then he started to point back to the normalcy, got married, had kids, became a Knights of Columbus, started wearing buttoned up shirts. And it’s like, he was just, it’s like, when the world is exceptional, the exceptional points back to the rule. It happens very naturally. And so Kanye, I think that that’s what Kanye is doing. So if you look at his tweet, it’s crazy because he says, we need, I forget the exact wording, but it’s like, we need to follow God and to find our unifying principle or whatever. And that’s why I’m running for president of the United States. That’s Kanye West, who is writing that. Like, you know, the guy, the guy who would dress up in a big teddy bear suit, that guy, that guy is saying we need to go back to God and find our unifying principle. And so that’s what I mean when I talk about the fool, kind of watching the fool at the end, because the fool is the one who’s going to bring back, to bring back order. I mean, whether you agree with the order he brings back or not, that’s not even the point. To watch it as a phenomena is to just see it happen. Like, Kanye West is more conservative than Donald Trump. That’s how weird this world is. Does that help understand a little bit what I was talking about? Do you have any follow up questions, Rain? No, thank you. Jacob, you had a question. Is my mic working? Yeah. Hi, Jonathan. So my question is to do with what, what is the relationship between the current movement and the Christian substrate in the kind of unconscious layer? And just one more piece I want to tack on to this is, you know, if we’re kind of stepping back to like the mid 19th century around like Nietzsche, and if this movement has kind of Marxist foundations, and what’s the relationship between the Marxist foundations and Christianity as well, with Marxism kind of coming out of the same substrate? So any, anything that’s gone, that would be great. What I’ve tried to point to is that the modern world is basically the breakdown of Christianity. And so, I mean, it’s there, historically, that’s what it is, you know, it’s the rise of scientific atheism, the rise of just a basic cultural atheism, you could say, or secularism. And so what happens in that, what happens in that breakdown of Christianity is that Christianity starts to pull apart. And so certain aspects of Christianity start to manifest disorder in a disordered manner. And so there is an aspect of Christianity, which is an attention to the little one, right, attention to the poor, and a desire for a form of, I would say it that way, I would say attention to the poor, attention to the margin, right, Christ goes out, finds the lost sheep. Yeah, there’s all these images in Christianity, obviously, just the Beatitudes are a lot about that. And so that value in itself is good, but it’s dangerous if it’s just taken on its own. It’s very dangerous. And that’s what I think one of the aspects of Marxism is, it’s that it’s a desire for, we know it, it’s a utopian desire, it’s a desire for a certain aspect of utopia. And their vision of utopia is a kind of equality utopia. And then there are other utopias, and we saw them in the 20th century, which are hierarchical utopias. And so those two are what led to World War II, a hierarchical utopia and an egalitarian utopia. And we’re going to see it happen again, because we never dealt with it. And it’s the same movements. It’s just hilarious. It’s not funny, but it’s hilarious. Because you go online and look for Antifa images from the 1920s in Germany, you’d be surprised that that’s one of the things that led to where Germany ended up was the very same questions that we’re dealing with now. And people are really struggling because there’s a desire for a secular utopia. And so the idea in a religious context is that if the highest thing is the highest thing, so I say it’s like I said, the highest thing is the infinite. Or the highest thing is being, or the highest thing is love, right? Being, love, infinite. Then it’s not a value in terms of morality. It’s something beyond the value in terms of morality. Morality will flow out of it. But it’s not an absolute, it’s not a value. And so what we’re seeing now is exactly that. And so there is definitely, the BLM is definitely Marxist, like the founders are Marxist, their desires are extremely Marxist in their formulations. And they’re using, I don’t know how conscious it is, but they’re definitely using kind of religious imagery to get people on board and to get people excited about their project. And so I don’t, but there is no happy ending to that story. Like there is no happy ending to what BLM is asking for. It can’t end well. So relatedly, Amy, you had a question. Yeah, hi, Jonathan. Sorry, it’s a thunderstorm here. I hope it’s easy to hear me. Yeah, I can hear you. I had a question about the kind of what I’ve been noticing about this kind of, there’s a relationship I see between text and image in this pseudo-religious moment. And I was wondering if you thought that it connected to the past and that there seems to be a dual call for iconoclasm to destroy images and form statues and also to worship certain new texts. The book White Fragility is like the bestselling book in the United States right now. So I want to get some happy thoughts about that. Yeah. Well, one of the, when I talk about the end of something, one of the images of the end is iconoclasm. That is when something breaks down, you want to break down the memory of it because the image I often give is if you buy a house and when you move into the house, you find that people have left pictures of their family there. The first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to remove the pictures of the people’s family so that you can settle in. Now that has normal implications, but it also has very dark implications if you play it out in terms of social questions. Now, one of the things that’s happening now, it’s not that we’re, it’s not like a switch of house, but it’s actually people who are trying to break down the identity of the family, break down the identity of those that have held the house until now. And so when you see iconoclasm, it’s definitely a, it’s a transition. It’s a transition towards other statues. It’s a transition for you to put then other ideals up there for people to venerate. So, and some of the stuff that they’re pulling down maybe should be pulled down. It’s possible. Like there’s some, you know, there’s some dark stuff in the US South, maybe, I don’t know. You know, it’s not, it’s not my thing. I’m Canadian, I’m French Canadian. I have other markers. You know, there are people, there are, like there are people here, there’s Curie Labelle here in Canada, and there are statues of him. And there are some dark aspects to his story. But to be honest, I don’t think it would be a good idea to pull down his statue because he did found, you know, large swaths of the North here. But there are dark aspects. And so one of the, the way that I framed it too is the idea of hiding the nakedness of your father. And so in the world of all identities are, no identity is perfect. All identities are broken because they’re not, they’re not, let’s say they’re not God, right? And so all identities have a brokenness to them. And so in order, in order for them to hold together, one of the things you have to do is you have to hide their nakedness. And I take that from the story in the Bible where Noah, the father, the new father, right? So there’s a flood, everything’s destroyed. Now there’s Noah. He’s gonna be the father of everybody else, right? The whole world is gonna be, is gonna be related to Noah. And then he gets drunk and he passes out naked in his tent. And one of his sons sees him naked and makes fun of him because he’s naked. And then he’s cursed because of that. Now his other sons go in and they hide his nakedness. They cover his nakedness, okay? So you have to understand it as in order to preserve an identity, you have to, to a certain extent, hide the nakedness of your father. The, the problem is always knowing when is it too much? Like when are you hiding too much? But everybody does it, right? Imagine you have a basketball team and your star player has some negative aspects to them. Well you don’t want to be publicly telling everybody about the bad habits of your star basketball player because you won’t, you don’t want your basketball team to be dismantled and you don’t want to lose. And it’s the same for any team, any church, any school, any group. And so we need to hide the nakedness of our father. But at some point, and so at some point you have to stop if it’s too much, right? Because we saw too much of it, like all the priests abusing children and then people covering up for them, all the coaches abusing children, all that kind of stuff is when you do it too much. Now the problem is that if you hide the nakedness of your father, it’s still there. The scandal is hidden but it’s still there. And at some point and in the end it’s going to appear. It’s going to show itself. The system is going to play itself out. The weakness of the system that you hid at the beginning is going to be its downfall at the end. And it’s going to be what your enemies use to destroy it. And it’s just inevitable. It’s just going to happen that way. And so America has sins in its origin. It has the hidden sins. And the hidden sin is that that which they declared, which is equality, fraternity, freedom, in their founding they hid a sin. Which is that it wasn’t true for everything. That they in saying that, they also hid their own sins. And now they’re coming out. And they have been coming out. But it’s hard to avoid that happening at some point. Now I don’t know when it’s supposed to happen. But it’s hard for that to not happen. And we have to be careful not to point fingers. Because this, what I’m telling you, is true of every system. And it’s true of every family. And it’s true of every any organization has hidden sins. It’s just part of a system. Okay so we have a lot of questions. We’re not going to get to all of them. But we’ve got Dominic, you got a question. Thanks. Hi Jonathan. Can you point us to stories in anticipation of the inclusion or exclusion of those who don’t choose the side of either the breakdown or the clampdown? If I can find those that don’t choose either or? It usually ends up in the stories usually don’t look, they don’t look very pretty. They don’t end up in a So okay I’ll give you, I’ll give you an example where both sides are shown next to each other. Okay so it’s in the story of Exodus. In the story of Exodus the Israelites leave Egypt. And when they leave Egypt they gather all the rabble with them. So it’s basically, you can imagine that as these Israelite slaves are being freed and are leaving Israel, a bunch of people are like well I’m getting in on this. And so they like gathered a whole bunch of mixed people and who knows like who they were. But just a bunch of people. And so they come into the desert and then the Israelites complained that they don’t have what they need. They complained, they complained. And then at some point they complained too much. It doesn’t matter for what. The idea is that they complained too much. And it says in Scripture that it’s the mixed multitude that complained too much. And you can understand why that would happen. Because if you’re, if you don’t feel like this is yours, like if you don’t feel you’re part of a group, then you have, it’s easier to complain. Because you’re not covered by the advantages of the group as much. You have less cover from the advantages. So it’s easier for you to complain. And it’s more, it’s normal that you’ll be the one who complains the longest, who complains the most. Right? And then in Scripture what happens is God ends up giving them what they complain about, but he purges the edge of the camp. And so there’s a purge, like a fire that burns the edge of the camp. Okay. That’s some scary stuff, man. I told you it’s scary stuff. Now right after that story, like the chapter right after that story, there’s a balance to it. Which is that Moses is married to an Ethiopian. Which like in, let’s say in ancient thinking, the Ethiopian was like the ultimate foreigner. Right? We don’t even know exactly who, what actual people they were referring to. But it was like referring to those people really that live like on the edge of the world. Like they’re so far, we don’t know exactly, like they’re very far. And so he was married to an Ethiopian woman. And the idea is that she was dark, like she was dark skinned. You can see it in the story that she was dark skinned because Moses’s sister complains about the fact that he’s married to a foreigner and married to an Ethiopian. And then because of that, she gets a disease, which is that she becomes too white. Her skin becomes white like snow. And because she becomes white like snow, she has to be excluded from the group. And she has to be cast out of the camp because of that. So you can see the two problems. Like you could call it an excess of mixture and an excess of purity. And those two things happening, you know, one after the other and almost being like a call upon each other. Because you can imagine that after the mixed multitude problem, the reason why Miriam was complaining was because what we just had this mixed multitude problem. Now, Moses is married to a stranger. So it’s like one led to the other. And I would say that in terms of what’s going on right now, we need to be attentive to that especially because things don’t ever go just in one direction. They’re going to go in one direction and then they’re going to snap back. Like when Hitler was elected in Germany, they were on the verge of a communist revolution. It didn’t just happen like it didn’t just happen when everything was fine. It’s like you pull the pendulum here, it gets pulled in the other way. And it’s hard to know which way is going to win. Like it could have been the other way. Maybe Hitler could have failed in his coup. And then the communists could have taken over and Germany could have ended up, you know, sending people to the gulag. Like who knows? But that’s the problem is that one calls the other. So I hope that story is at least one example of those two extremes kind of appearing in the story. Maybe Gray, you had a question that we could to piggyback on this one. Yeah, hi, Jonathan. Thanks so much for being here. My question was about I, I, I don’t know what your perception is, but my perception is that most people in secular society don’t really understand secular society to be like broken up, buttered down Christian commitments. And I was just wondering if you think that that sort of ignorance is like exacerbating the sort of dangers that these pseudo religious events pose for us all. Yeah, I totally think so. I think that that are are the fact that we despise history. And we don’t know about history is really a call for all of this to to keep getting worse because we don’t understand what’s happening. Everybody is moving from one side to the other. And nobody nobody knows what’s going on. And so it’s not so it ends up having a being a caricature of liturgical events, a caricature of liturgical feasts, a caricature of, of like the ancient celebrations that people used to have, but no one knows what’s happening. And so the idea the idea is that these patterns like that, this is why like, for example, like I’ll call out someone like Steven Pinker, which is that people are saying people are saying, Oh, look at these, these, you can see it people, some of the kind of atheist type, they look at these events, and they’re like, Oh, here again is a horrible manifestation of our religious tendency, you know, and so they decry it, they’re like, Oh, this is horrible that we shouldn’t. This is just another example of this kind of horrible stuff. But the problem is that it’s not going to go away because you say that, you know, those patterns are in you, those patterns are part of you. They’re like the example I always use is you can complain that people sleep because they’re not productive, but they’re still going to sleep. You can say if you didn’t sleep, you would be more productive, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still gonna happen. The question is, how does it happen? Does it happen half-hazardly and chaotically and we end up scapegoating and sacrificing people and and like beating people in the street? Or do we have a ordered version, which is what religion offers, which is what you know, which is what Christianity offered, but other religions offer that as well. Give a place to funnel all those desires into a kind of dance where instead of actually killing each other, we’re dancing together. Thanks so much. Okay, Aaron Rodgerson, you had a question? I feel like that question was just kind of answered, but you, hi Jonathan, you mentioned sports have sort of a healthy way of channeling tribalism in a way. I was saying, does religion in some sense have the same effect and did religion evolve to combat chaos? And are we returning to a pre-religious time of collapse and chaos in some ways? Well, I think religion, what religion does is more complicated than that. It’s not about combating chaos. It’s about integrating it all together. And so one of the things that I talk about, it’s like Christianity, for example, like Christianity is a religion where we look at someone who is nailed to a cross. What the hell? I mean, it’s not a just about bringing order. It’s about integrating the whole thing, right? It’s about integrating the entire thing, death to all the bad stuff, too. How do we integrate the whole thing? How do we bring it all together? And as much the order and the light as the death and the darkness, we have to be able to kind of bring it all together or else it’s going to appear in other ways. Now, this is why the people who try to combat the chaos, let’s say the enlightenment, that’s why they have a shadow. That’s why they have, as Pinker says, that counter enlightenment. It’s just so hilarious as if you can avoid it, like as if you could have just the enlightenment and not have the counter enlightenment. That’s just not how it works. That’s not how systems work. And so the counter enlightenment just gets stronger until it explodes. And then we have insanity and we have crazy manifestation. So yeah, so I think religion offers more than just order. It offers an integration. But it can be tribalistic, too. Like, no doubt. I don’t want to pretend that it’s not. And it can have tribal, it can become tribal and it can have extremely, it can be dangerous. Of course it can. But it’s all about choosing which one is the least going to destroy everything. Thank you. All right. So I’m going to read this on Stephen’s behalf. How could the absolution play out in a culture that seems to believe that no one is redeemable? Cancel culture. What are the alternatives? I don’t think that it can work. I don’t think it’s going to work. I’m really… Look, I hate to say this, but the only way for it to work is scapegoating. That’s it. That’s the way for it to work. And it seems like we’re already, we’re seeing a lot of that, but it can escalate, seriously escalate into the two minutes of hate. I mean, that’s the only way out of it. Because the only way for the white liberal to get out of their, let’s say, guilt is to find someone who’s more guilty than them and then turn around and scream at them. There’s no other way. And so that will pile up. If you watch the cultural revolution stuff, like the Maoist stuff, you want to see where this goes. It’s insane. You’ll have people be dragged out into public and publicly humiliated, publicly… I mean, I don’t know how far it can go in North America, but it’s scary stuff. And what’s the alternative? The alternative is confession. The alternative is sacramentality. The alternative is real community. That’s the alternative. One of the roles that, let’s say, for example, I’m Orthodox, that’s one of the roles that confession plays. A confession is a way to acquire absolution, but it involves accepting a form of hierarchy. So we’re almost at the top of the hour. Can I sneak in one more question? Yeah, I’m totally fine. I’m having fun, so it’s fine. Cool, cool, cool. So yeah, on the Orthodox piece, let’s see if I can jam in two questions here. So one question is, what do you think of our buddy John’s religion without a religion? A religion that’s not a religion, however he phrases it. And then the other one, because I’m baptized as an Orthodox Christian, and then you were talking about this reversal with guys like Gavin McInnis or doing the 360 and kind of like Roush. We were talking about that at the pick-up bar. That was a wild one. He joined our religion. And then, and there’s just, I don’t know this phenomenon, the ortho bros, you ever heard of these? Yeah. And then that’s just rising up. Yeah. So what’s the John, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that. And what is your thoughts on the Orthodox Christianity and the role that it could play in this sort of like ecstasy? Yeah. The ecstasy, man. Well, I think, obviously I don’t agree. I don’t agree with the religion that’s not a religion. I think that there are certain aspects of humanity which are inevitable. And if you don’t take them into account because you don’t like them, they’re just going to come back. It doesn’t matter. You can’t avoid it. You can try, but they’re going to come back. And so, and so I understand John’s fear, like his fear of narrative, for example, like I understand his fear of narrative because it can be exclusionary, because it does create identity and it creates exclusion. So I understand his fear, but there is no way around it. There’s no way around it. It’s going to come back. And so, so for example, so like John, John talks about how he doesn’t want narrative, but he does have a narrative, right? He spent 30 hours in his podcast giving us the narrative of his religion without a religion, which is the narrative of the, the breakdown of Christianity and the, the, the rise of the enlightenment and now reaching the end and now like kind of a post enlightenment world. So there is, there is a, a, a narrative and there’s something of the Tower of Babel in what he’s trying to do, which is the desire to create a tower that includes everything that doesn’t have, that doesn’t have an outside. And it just, it’s just not possible. Now the idea is to find a way to, it’s to find a way to have an outside or to have a margin, which has a role and which you can encounter and that you can engage with rather than just try to not have one or not have a narrative or just be the margin or just be, it’s like, you need to have the whole, you need to have the whole thing. So I don’t think, I don’t think, I don’t think that it can work. I mean, can it work individually like to help people out? Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, I’m sure John has helped a lot of people and I’ve seen a lot of people really feel like he’s helped them through the meaning crisis and everything. And so, so like, I, I’d say anything that helps people get out of it is great. I think it’s wonderful. So I agree, but I, I think that, I think that as a, let’s say as a movement or as a kind of social thing, let’s say it this way, let’s say it in evolutionary terms, if you have something which is too general, something which is specific is going to come like a needle, it’s going to burst your thing and that’s it. And that’s the same. So, so if you don’t want to have a narrative and you create this, this kind of amorphous, like a emergent thing without a narrative, then those that have a narrative are going to come in and they’re going to slash you to pieces and they’re going to take over your territory and it’s just going to happen. Yeah. So as for orthodoxy, what role can orthodoxy play? I think like for me, I can just talk for myself. Look guys, I can just talk for myself. Like I feel like, I felt like, I feel like Western Christianity lost the plot at some point that they lost the higher aspects, the mystical aspects. They lost the, the, the, the, the kind of system of, of traditional, of sacred language. They lost, they kind of lost it. And so, as our own system breaks down, so I talk about this idea of the, of the foreign or the mixed, the mixed multitude or the thing on the margin. So you actually need that stuff. You need a little bit of it, especially when the system is exhausted, you actually have to go outside and get some fuel from the outside. And so my sense is that orthodoxy is sufficiently strange, but not too strange in order to, to revivify some aspect of the West, you know? And so I think that it has a lot to offer and it has a lot to, a lot to offer people who, who want to be Catholic or want even want to remain Protestant or whatever. I think that it can have a lot to offer because it has enough strangeness that it doesn’t feel like the evil system that you want to fight. And it has, it has like that, it has the, the, the appeal of the Orient, you know, that kind of, that kind of cliche of like the golden turban wearing, you know, like that imagery that you saw, you know, pop up in the romanticism of like the East full of treasures. It has enough of that. But it also has enough connection that it’s not completely odd. Like it’s not completely off. You’re not just being an idiosyncrasy in society, you know, that’s one of the things that I struggle with kind of the, I call the California Buddhist is that it’s so idiosyncratic to be a Buddhist in, in, in America that, I mean, you can do it. It’s got, it might help you, but it’s, it’s your, you’re still fragmenting the thing. You’re still participating in the fragmentation by doing that. So that’s what I think, that’s one of the things I think Orthodoxy can offer. I don’t know if that makes sense. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. It’s a very, very beautiful religion. If you look into it, just experience it, go to church, check it out. Do you think it’s on the rise too? Cause I noticed more people are talking about it on the website. Oh, it seems like it’s hard because it’s, it’s hard because we’re all in our bubble, but for sure in my perception, I’ve had a lot of people interested and you know, interested in the mysticism, Christian just interested in Christian mysticism, reading the church fathers. I think that like, I think that some of the key saints, some of the key thoughts in Orthodoxy offers really good solutions to the problems. Like I really think St. Maximus, the confessor offers one of the best solutions to the problem of, of emergence of the, of the relationship between consciousness and phenomena or the relationship between meaning and you know, what kind of, uh, John Dravici talks about the problems of relevance realization. I think that, uh, St. Maximus offers the most integrated solution, both bottom up and top down approach at the same time. So from the top you have name identity, which kind of comes down and acts as an authority. But from the bottom, you also have the notion of the coming together of the elements. So it’s like, the joining, the fitting together in love happening at the bottom. And then also the naming the head, this image of the top. So it’s not just top down, but it’s also not just a kind of puzzling emergence where it’s like, okay, you use that word, but I don’t know what you’re like, how does it come together? You need those two to happen at the same time. So we’re past the hour. Do you want to sneak in one more question or should we end here? It’s up to you guys. I’m good if you still have attention. Yeah. So there’s, there’s a good question. So we’ll ask this one. I wanted to read it on his behalf as well. Jordan Peterson. And I’m curious to get your download on your thoughts on how Jordan’s doing. If you watched his recent video with his daughter. So with points by Jordan Peterson and yourself, do you believe that the role of symbols and myths could be recognized and integrated in science? As we know it today, does science have room or does the boundaries of science have to be broken to accommodate symbols and myths? So, okay. The way that myth and religious imagery is going to be integrated into science is through the science of the human being. It’s through looking back at the human being and not ignoring the experience of consciousness, right? And as we look back on consciousness, as we try to use consciousness to look back on it, then all of a sudden, I think that that’s the way that these, that science can see the, it won’t be scientific, right? But it can see the reason for these stories and these patterns and the, and these myths, and also understand that science itself is always submitted to purpose. There’s always a reason why you do things. And once you, when you ask what that reason is, that’s when you start to see these stories come back in. And so it’s not in the D it’s not in the analysis. It’s not in the thing, but it’s the reason why you analyze, which is subject to, to mythological storytelling. Right. It’s all like, give you an example, right? So, so, so, right. It’s all like, give you an example, right? So we developed the atom bomb, but we just develop an atom bomb. We didn’t just develop an atom bomb. We were in a war and we had these enemies and there was a race who was going to get the atom bomb first. And so finally the Americans took some of the enemy scientists, brought them to themselves and then created this atom bomb so that they could defeat the last remnants of the war and win the war. Without that story, there’s no atom bomb. There is none. Why would you make an atom bomb? You’d have to be pretty insane to make an atom bomb, to be honest. You need that narrative in order to, to, to justify the research. And so that it, so I gave you an extreme example, but it’s like that for everything. We always have a reason to study things. Yeah, that’s really, really well put. So I think we’ll end it here. Do you have any closing thoughts for us at the end of the session? For us at the Stowa? Well, thanks. I, I, I just happy to see people try to figure things out and to, to ask the hard questions and to also be willing to talk about things without just letting ourselves be polarized, try to see both sides, try to understand at least the reason why the two sides appear, let’s say in debates. And so, um, and so I appreciate it and I wish you all the best. Do you have any thoughts on Stoicism actually? Cause you know, a lot of people say they’re like proto Christians. I’m not sure if you have any thoughts. My thought on Stoicism is that Stoicism only works if it’s integrated into Christianity, uh, for the same reason as what I’m talking about in terms of the religion without a religion. I think Stoicism offers great practice, great advice, great moral, uh, teaching, but because it never offered a narrative, that I think that it just, it couldn’t win. And that’s why I didn’t win. And I think that once Stoicism became integrated within the Christian story, then that’s when it actually took on its best fruits. That’s when, and that’s why when people look at early Christian saints and they say, well, that’s just a Stoic. I’m like, yeah, I don’t mind that. I don’t have a problem with that. Because, but it’s, it he’s a Stoic because this is integrated into also a Catholic story and a social story and a, and a communion, a reason to commune. And that’s what makes, that’s what made the Stoic, that’s what made Stoicism flower in the Christian age. So that’s what I think of Stoicism. Right, right. Cool. So thank you so much, my friend, for visiting the Stoa. We hope to have you back. So I’ll make a few announcements on upcoming events. We have like tons, so just go to the website, thestoa.ca, but there’s two tonight that I will mention. One is steal the culture with John Vervecky and Akira the Dawn that is at 7 PM Eastern time. So John, like when his first appearance at the Stoa, he mentioned something like, we got to steal the culture from the people who have been abusing us for so long. And then it was like such a cool line. I sent this to Akira, and then he made like a dance song out of it. And so we’re going to preview that at the Stoa and John and Akira are going to have a talk and then we’re going to have a talk together, again, some dialogs, which should be fun. And then our boy Tyson has an event tonight in our wisdom gym. I think Tyson is here. So if you can unmute yourself, Tyson, you can kind of plug that. Sure. Thanks, Peter. Thank you, Jonathan. Yeah. The event is blowing with unknowingness that is at 8 30 Eastern time. It’s a very playful and musical experience where we practice deepening our relationship with uncertainty through freestyle rap and spoken word. And I’d love to see as many of you as possible there. It’s a lot of fun for me. I’m sure Jonathan is going to join us on the freestyle tonight and give us a show some bars, hot bars. Okay. So the Stoa is based off a gift economy. We view it as a gift for all of us to use in this time of need. If you’re inspired to provide a gift to the Stoa, you can go to the Stoa.ca slash gift. Yeah. So thank you so much, everyone. Thank you. Thanks again, Jonathan. Okay. Boom.