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I mean, because some of your viewers might be saying, well, why are they spending so much time on postmodernism and other idea practices? The reason why actually it’s important to talk about postmodernism because it’s a fundamental attack on the epistemology of truth. That’s right. And that is something we need to point out. That’s right. Exactly. Right. So I had a very good friend of mine who actually happens to be a clinical psychologist also, just a lovely guy, who once asked me very politely. He said, you know, God, do you mind if I ask you a personal question? I said, go ahead. He said, how come you are such a truth defender and so on? And you’re perfectly happy to criticize all these leftist idea pathogens very much along the lines of how you started our conversation today, Jordan. And yet you’re not as critical of Donald Trump’s attacks on truth. And so let me answer that question here, because in a sense, it was a good one. Right. So Trump attacks specific truth statements. I have the biggest penis. All women have told me that I’m the greatest lover ever. There’s never been a president who is as great as me. I have the biggest audiences at my rallies. Each of these might be demonstrably false and lies, and therefore they are attacks on a particular truth statement. That to me is a lot less problematic. While it is reprehensible, I disagree with any form of line. That is a lot less concerning to me than a group of folks that are devoted to attacking the epistemology of truth. OK, define that and define the epistemology of truth so that we can get down to the bottom. The scientific method is a way of tackling truth. The nomological networks that we spoke about earlier is a way of adjudicating between competing statements as to what is true or not. Those are so the scientific method and all of its offshoots are ways by which we’ve agreed that that’s the epistemology by which we create core knowledge and then build that front. Right. OK, so let’s let’s outline that a little bit. So that’s a really good point. So there are degrees of assault on truth. Yes. And the more fundamental the axiom that you’re assaulting, the more dangerous your assault. Bingo. OK, so the non-postmodernist claim, so maybe this is the Enlightenment claim perhaps, is that there is a reality. I think it’s deeper than that because I think it’s that’s actually grounded in Judeo-Christian Christianity and even and grounded far beyond that, probably grounded in biology itself. But doesn’t matter for the sake of this discussion. There is an objective world. There is a knowable reality. Yes. OK, there’s a knowable reality that multiple people can have access to. There’s a knowable reality, but our biases and limitations intellectually and physiologically make it difficult for us to to know it. It’s complex and we’re limited. There’s a method by which we can overcome that. The method is the nomological method, which you just described, essentially, which is the use of multiple lines of evidence. Yes, lines of evidence derived from multiple sources, multiple people, multiple places across time. That enables us to determine with some certainty what that objective reality is. That enables us to predict and control things for our benefit. Beautiful. OK, and the postmodernists, the postmodern attack is on all of that. Everything. And that’s why now I hope you might agree that it’s not too harsh for me to say they are intellectual terrorists because they put these little bombs of BS that blow up the nomological network that blows up the epistemology of truth. Right. And so you’re making a claim even beyond that, though, in the book, which is and this is the claim that I want to get right to, which is that. They put forward that theory in order to benefit from being theorists. That benefit accrues to them personally as they ratchet themselves up their respective intellectual hierarchies and gain the status and power that goes along with that. And the fact that it does damage to the entire system of knowledge itself is irrelevant. That’s that’s that’s that’s what do you call that damage that you don’t mean when you bomb something? Collateral damage. Collateral damage. Right. So they’re willing to sacrifice the entire game of truth seeking to the promotion of their own individual careers within this. Within the language hierarchy that that that they’ve built. And by the way, you hit on a wonderful segue to another, I think, important point in the book, and that is the distinction between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. Right. The ontological ethics for the viewers who don’t know, if I say it is always wrong to lie, that’s an absolute statement. Right. If I say it is OK to lie, if I’m trying to spare my spouse’s feelings, that’s a consequential statement. Well, it turns out in many cases, the ones who espouse those parasitic idea pathogens are engaging their consequentialist ethical system. Right. Because what they’re saying is, if I murder truth in the service of this more important noble social justice goal, so be it. Right. Whereas if you are an absolutist and deontological. You’re positing an objective reality, even in the domain of ethics. Well, that’s another place where the postmodern effort fails is that it can’t help but refer to things that are outside of the language game. So by relying on consequentialist ethics, and I’d have to say I haven’t been able to think it through to figure out whether I agree with your claim that the postmodernists tend to be consequentialists. It makes sense to me. And I think that their emphasis on hurt feelings is an indication of that. Right. Never. Because there’s no objective reality. You can’t sacrifice people’s feelings or lived experience to any claim about objective reality. But by doing that, they elevate the subjective to the position of ultimate authority. And you know, maybe that’s maybe that’s part of the driving motivation is the the desire to elevate the subjective to omniscience. Whether you’re feeling stressed, anxious or simply seeking a moment of peace and tranquility, the Halo app has something for you. Halo offers an incredible range of guided meditations and prayers that are designed to help you deepen your spirituality and strengthen your connection to God. With Halo, you can explore different themes and types of prayer and meditation, such as gratitude, forgiveness and centering prayer. You can also choose from different lengths of meditation to fit your schedule, whether you have a few minutes or an hour. 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So, for example, when I was a research assistant, when I was a undergrad and a graduate student, I worked on a problem called the two dimensional cutting stock problem. So if you have, for example, rectangles of metal and you get an order to produce 20 X by Y sub sheets within that broader metal, how should I do the cut as to minimize the waste of metal? So operations research is a field that is commonly applied, for example, in business problems where you’re trying to minimize the queue time that consumers wait or maximize profits. Right. So it’s a very, very complicated mathematical field applied mathematics field to solve real world problems. So now let’s apply it to this consequential story. In the old days, the objective function of a university was maximize maximize intellectual growth, maximize human knowledge. Today, it is predicated on the idea that there was knowledge that was genuine. There was a difference between forms of knowledge. Some were better than others. Some were more valid than others. Right. So that’s part of the claim that you can have knowledge at all. Exactly. Whereas now the objective function is minimize hurt feelings, or it might be maximize learning whilst minimizing hurt feelings. Well, you know, I wouldn’t mind that so much if if the claim that feelings were ultimately real was made tangible, because then at least we’d have an ultimate reality that was outside of words. But you can’t say that the world is a construct of words and then say at the same time, but there’s nothing more real than my subjective feelings. Like I have some sympathy for that because I’m not sure that there is anything more real than pain. All things considered, like pain seems really real to me and it’s fundamentally subjective. And I think that a lot of what we consider ethical behavior is an attempt to minimize pain given its fundamental reality. So it’s not like I don’t believe that subjective feelings are real and important, but I’m willing to claim that there is such a thing as real and important and true. And so it’s so it’s it’s logically coherent for me to to to make that claim. It’s the incoherence of the claims that bothers me.