https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RD00BKtYC0k
Part of the reason that my lectures, I would say, have been successful, to the degree that they have been, is because people find them encouraging. And that actually seems to work, like it seems to be positive. Because it isn’t necessarily… It seems to be good news. Well, it seems to be. I mean, it isn’t necessarily the case that that would be the case, you know, because it could have been that I would have said encouraging things to people. There’s more to you than meets the eye, and you’re capable of more than you’re demanding of yourself. And, you know, if you took on your responsibility and faced the things that you’re trying to avoid, that your life would be richer and better for you and for everyone around you. And the result of that could have been that thousands of people would come to me and say, you know, I gave that a pretty good shot, and your advice is really awful, and everything is… Well, seriously, like, I took on that responsibility, it just bloody crushed me, and I’m way worse off than I was before, and everything’s gone to hell around me, and like, thanks a lot, buddy. And that… It’s not like that’s a completely incomprehensible possibility, but that doesn’t seem to be what happens, as what generally happens is that young people, in particular, but not only, come to me and say, look, I’ve been trying to take on more responsibility and to face the things I’ve been avoiding, and everything is way better. It’s like, okay, well, hmm, isn’t that something? Maybe I’m something. Well, then you ask yourself, well, what’s the limit of that? Because that’s the religious question, fundamentally, is, well, if you took on all the responsibility you could take on, and you faced everything that you needed to face, what would you be like? Who would you be? And how would the world transform around you? And, well, if the partial answer is, well, if I do that a little bit, things get a fair bit better, then the next question might be, well, what if you did that completely? And I don’t think that’s possible in some sense, right? It’s like, you know, perfection is a horizon that always recedes, but it isn’t obvious to me what the upper limit of that is, and certainly we do see people, I mean, saints, let’s say. Yeah, that’s what you say, it’s a Mother of Christ, it’s a Francis of his easy. Who kind of push the limit, and they, miraculous things happen around them, and maybe in the literal sense, and if not in the literal sense, close enough, you know, for all intents and purposes, and so that’s heartening. I mean, I… tear myself apart about this in many ways, because I think, perhaps it’s possible to take on too much responsibility, and to crush yourself as a consequence. Maybe that’s a sin of pride, who knows, it’s certainly possible, but my experience so far has been that, when you see people bear their suffering nobly, there’s nothing in that but good. That’s something, and then when you see people take on more responsibility, and decide that they’re going to aim up, and… confront their suffering honestly and forthrightly, that their lives get better, and the lives of people around them get better too. And so, that’s very strange as well, because it also means that the pathway to less suffering, is through suffering. Right? And that’s kind of… That would be hopeful, if the world was constituted that way, it’s like, well, they’re suffering, how do you make it worse? Run away! How do you make it better? Confront it, yeah, but it’s suffering, it’s like, yeah, but it’s there, there it is, it’s right there, it’s a precondition for existence, or something like that, and it’s like you have something important to do as well, and you confront it, and that’s the pathway to transcending it. Probably. It’s rough. Maybe we wish it would be different, and maybe we don’t too. Yeah, when I was reflecting on parts of your chapter, one of the things I was reflecting on, in light of also the snake, right, I think a good suggestion is not to have a conversation with the serpent, all things being equal, but he ultimately, they believe the lie, right? And I think isn’t one of the greatest lies of the culture, of the evil one, I would say, and I find it really interesting, you use the word the adversary in Satan, which from a psychologist and a scientist, this morning you said, yeah, you meant that, that there is an evil, there is a personification of evil. If you read, if you read anything about Auschwitz, about the Nazi death camps, about what happened in the Soviet Union, if you read that sort of thing seriously, or if you read about people who’ve done, like I read a lot of books about the worst serial killers, and I mean, that’s quite the competition, and to be the worst serial killer, which people do compete for, by the way, it’s not like the high school shooters don’t know about the reputations of all the other high school shooters, it’s not like they don’t try to outdo them, because they certainly do, and they do it consciously. I mean, if you read those accounts, and you don’t walk away with the notion that evil exists, and that the notion of an adversary is like as real as it gets, then you just haven’t read very carefully. But how do your peers deal with that when you say that? They don’t. You know, I mean, psychologists generally don’t, some clinical psychologists talk about evil, but non-clinicians tend not to, and that’s because they’re just never, they just aren’t confronted by it. You are if you’re a clinician. I mean, you see things in families that are so terrible that they’re inexpressible, and multi-generational often, you know, and the only language that you can really fit that sort of thing in is a religious language. It’s, that’s the only language that’s serious enough, and you know, people, I don’t know, the idea of evil is taboo idea, scientifically. It’s like, have it your way. You know, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn claimed was that the Nuremberg judgments were the most significant ethical event of the 20th century, or at least among them, because the Nuremberg judgment was that some things are wrong, right? You don’t get the excuse, I was following orders. You don’t get the excuse, that’s how my culture looks at it. You don’t get any excuses. That’s what a crime against humanity is. It’s like, do you believe in crimes against humanity? The answer is either yes or no, because those are the two answers, and if it’s no, it’s then, okay, you have the world where that’s the belief, and see how that goes, and I’ll have the world where I think that there are things that are evil, and we’ll see how that goes. And because you’re going to not condemn the imposition of pointless suffering on people for the sake of the suffering, that’s not wrong in some fundamental and transcendental sense. I mean, you can say no, you know, say, I don’t believe in evil. Okay, but that has its consequences, and one of the consequences is you can’t condemn evil. That’s a problem, you know, or maybe not, but it’s not like a world where you don’t condemn evil. It isn’t like there aren’t consequences to that decision, you know, and I also think that there’s no good where there’s no evil. Right? And so, if you dispense with the idea of evil, don’t you simultaneously dispense with the idea of good? I mean, because if something doesn’t exist, how does its opposite exist? And if evil doesn’t exist, then how does good exist? Because in some sense, those two things are, they’re integrally linked in their reality. One of them only can’t exist, right? That isn’t how things work. If there wasn’t something that wasn’t good, there couldn’t be good. Maybe that’s the reason there’s evil, you know, metaphysically speaking, because you might ask yourself, well, why would God make a world that’s characterized by evil? And the answer is, well, maybe evil can exist as a possibility, but not a reality. It could. If we did things right, evil could exist as a possibility, but not a reality.