https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CfXpbiHouDA
Alright, so I would say the most sophisticated metaphysical solution to that problem of externalized oppressor narrative is it’s the spiritualization of that. So let me walk through that very carefully and you tell me what you think about it. So there’s this idea, it’s very difficult to know where to start this. So there’s this idea that’s laid out in the story of Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve, that the garden that human beings inhabit is permanently co-inhabited by a serpent. And that serpent is the eternal predator of mankind. You can look at it biologically and you can look at it, for example, as reflecting the fact that mammals and reptiles have been in conflict for 60 million years. And you can look at it as a reflection of the fact that snakes themselves have been the enemies of us and our tree-dwelling ancestors since time immemorial. And you can look at it as a reflection of the fact that human beings are subject to the ravages of predation and that’s particularly true of infants. And so part of our mammalian heritage as well as our spiritual heritage is the fact that we can be prey animals and that we always have to contend with that. Now the question emerges from that and this is a very deep metaphysical question. What is the essence of what’s predatory and then what is the best response to the fact of that essence? And so what happens in the corpus of Christian thought surrounding the story of the serpent in the book of Genesis is that the serpent there becomes assimilated to the figure of Lucifer and Mephistopheles, to the figure of Satan. And Satan, this is Milton’s take in particular, Satan is identified with the serpent. And now what that means is that the image of Satan symbolically is put forward as the most apt representative of the predator. And so here’s how it might go psychologically in terms of depth of insight. So you want to protect your children from actual natural predators and you could throw snakes into that category and wolves and just the animals that would pose a predatory danger. But then that isn’t the only predator and it’s not predator as such. It’s a specific predator, a snake or a bear or a wolf. It’s not the concept of predator or predation as such. And then you might think, well, you need a more global and coherent representation of predator and that’s what a dragon is. A dragon is a meta-predator. It’s a cat, it’s a snake, it’s fire, it’s a predatory bird, all entangled into one image and that’s the image of the predator. And the great mythological stories of the hero confronting the dragon is the human being taking a stance against the predator. But the greatest dragon isn’t merely a dragon. It’s something metaphysical. And so what does that mean? Well, if you’re a mother and you’re protecting your children from snakes and then from predators and then from dragons, you’re also protecting them against the evil in your own house and the evil in your neighbor’s heart and the evil within the breast of your own children. And that starts to become something increasingly metaphysical. And the final transmutation of that idea is that the most profound battle against the predator is the battle that’s undertaken within. With profiling, surveillance and data harvesting, there are lots of things not to like about tech giants. But what can you actually do about it when you rely on so many of their products? Well, the good news is it doesn’t take much for you to take a stand. For less than $7 per month, you can join me and fight back against Big Tech by using ExpressVPN. How do you think Big Tech companies make all their money anyway? 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We shouldn’t look for a convenient place to put Satan. That’s the danger that Renee Girard has pointed to with regards to the idea of scapegoating is we want to offload the moral burden onto those we regard as essentially demonic in their motivation. We want to be on the side of the good by offloading that. We want to do that without doing any of the work. And that’s part of the motivation for using exclusionary language. When the proper attitude is to take on the apocalyptic nightmare of separating the wheat from the chaff inside our own spirits and to clean ourselves, so to speak, so that we’re no longer unwitting agents possessed by that predatory spirit. And that makes it into a psychological process rather than something we have to act out in the world. And my sense at the moment is that we’re all making that decision. We’re either going to undertake this looming transformation as a psychological enterprise, or we’re going to play it out as fate in the world. That was Jung’s diagnosis, by the way, at the end of the Second World War. And so your attempts right now to engage with me to say, well, let’s not use exclusionary language and dump all the moral culpability onto someone else, the Palestinians, for example, because we’re just playing into the hands of those that are engaging in this conspiratorial possession. I think that’s all true. It’s murky and it’s difficult to straighten out, but it’s true.