https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bC2YiUo-eoc
This is the thing that disturbs me so much about these superhero movies is really when you take away the traits that make us human death and sex, Eros and Thanatos, you’ve taken away the meaning of being human as well. And you leave us with virtually nothing. And some of these transhumanists also become death worshipers because what they talk about is it’ll be great when human beings are gone. It’s time for these meat sacks to get out of here and leave everything to AI. There are people who believe that AI is more important than we are. And for me, it’s always the question of like, why? What consciousness does AI have? What is precious about AI? We’re the ones who are precious precisely because we die, precisely because this moment and this internal life that I lead and that you have to assume I lead because you lead one too. That’s where all of the meaning exists. And the fact of your life is so urgent and sacred. Well, right, right. Well, the relationship between urgency and the sacred is definitely, it’s a very close relationship. And if you have infinite time, the question that immediately arises is then why anything now? Right. And I think that’s actually in some ways you might say even that that’s one of the curses of plenitude and wealth, even especially if it’s unearned. It’s like, well, how much urgency does there have to be to drive you forward in a meaningful fashion? You can think about this in terms, for example, of the effects of pornography. You know, we know that young people are much less likely to couple than they were. This is particularly pronounced in places like Japan and South Korea, where I think it’s about one third of the young people there under 30 are virginal. And one of the questions you might ask yourself is, well, how much is the fractious but necessary long term relationship making between men and women driven by sexual urgency and scarcity? Right. And you see the same thing. If you’re reasonably well off financially, the same conundrum emerges with regards to your children, which is, well, how do you provide them with optimal deprivation? Given that you could provide everything for them, in which case you become something like the, you know, the infinite mother that destroys their souls by providing them with so much care that there’s absolutely no reason for them to ever get up and do anything. That’s that’s what I think this whole moment in history is about. I mean, we do seem to be on the verge of solving so many problems. And yet you solve the problem that the solution is is in some ways the problem and the idea of choice and the vastness of our choices and the lessening of the consequences of our choices actually threatens to strip us of the human being for whom those choices are made. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that’s why the the actual, you know, we have to return to those actual Aristotelian questions of who we are, what we are. It’s a weird thing to be talking about in this moment when it seems like we’re going to travel into space, we’re going to travel into inner space, we can clone people, we can make people live forever. But to me, it’s the urgent question. And it’s why the it’s why the ancients matter more than ever in this hyper modern moment. It really is. We really are reaching a branch in the road. I think everybody can feel it coming. And it’s it’s dispiriting to hear our leaders talking in these old fashioned terms about what they’re going to do and how they’re going to solve our problems for us without really taking into account who we are and their the responsibility of leaders to our happiness and to make our happiness possible and to make it possible for us to find our happiness, which we can only do on our own. This is this is something I think that makes it so important that we look upon the least of us with compassion. You know, this is why you look upon the least of us with compassion, because they’re us. Because in the end, if we can’t figure that out, we can’t figure ourselves out. It really is. It is amazing that people who are somewhat older than this generation recently, I heard somebody after the October 7 attacks on Israel, I heard a Columbia student, a woman celebrating the slaughter in Israel and quoting Chairman Mao. And I thought Chairman Mao was the worst mass murderer in human history. I don’t think anyone has ever racked up the body count that Chairman Mao has racked up and the ignorance that that entails and the ignorance that entails spreads out to an ignorance of Shakespeare, of Plato, of the Bible. You have to be totally ignorant in order to be quoting Chairman Mao as if he mattered morally. And so I think that we’ve come to this moment when futurism makes it seem as if all of the wisdom that was piled up behind us is meaningless. What did they know? They didn’t even know whether the sun goes around the earth or vice versa. When in fact, they knew all the things that mattered because they were dealing with life at a much more basic level. And without that basic understanding, the future is going to be a disaster. Financial experts thought we were in the clear. While these experts anticipated rate cuts, inflation in the United States is still a significant economic concern. Think about it. The US is in the hole by $34 trillion and yet we keep printing money which pushes the prices you pay every day even higher. So you can bury your head in the sand or you can do something about it. Diversify a portion of your savings into gold with Birch Gold Group. Gold is your hedge against inflation and Birch Gold makes it easy to own. They’ll help you convert your existing IRA or 401k into a tax sheltered IRA in gold and you won’t pay a penny out of pocket. Make gold part of your savings strategy and buy it from Birch Gold. They’ve been the exclusive gold partner of the Daily Wire for over seven years now, literally helping thousands of our listeners and they can help you too. Make gold part of your savings strategy and buy it from Birch Gold. They’ve been the exclusive gold partner of the Daily Wire for over seven years now, literally helping thousands of our listeners and they can help you too. Text Jordan to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold. Then talk to a precious metal specialist about protecting your savings from persistent inflation with gold. Text Jordan to 989898 now. So there’s a scene in the story of Noah that’s apropos in that regard. So Noah is presented as a man wise in his generations, right? So which means that for a man of his time and place, he was properly morally oriented, which is all that can be required, expected, even in the best possible cases. The best possible case of any of us with like vanishingly few exceptions. So he’s a good man and he attends to the warnings of his conscience and he shepherds his family and the human race for that matter through a complete bloody apocalyptic catastrophe comes out on the other side. Which in some ways is what every single one of our successful ancestors did, right? To manage to negotiate through life with all its vicissitudes and leave progeny behind and leave behind the progeny who actually survived. It’s so unlikely. So all of our ancestors are Noah to some degree. Now, after he washes up on shore and the flood recedes, he plants a vineyard and proceeds to get rip roaring drunk on the on the consequences, right? Once it’s all brewed up and he’s lying in his tent, nakedness fully exposed and his son Ham comes along and has a pretty good time poking fun at the old man. And then he decides to get his brothers in on the joke and he invites them to come and have a gander. And instead of acting in a manner that’s derisive toward their father, they back into the tent and they cover him up with a blanket. And so and then, but this is where the story gets serious because the tradition that surrounds that story is quite clear. The descendants of Ham are slaves, right? And so what that means, as far as I’m concerned, and I think this is dead right and it’s relevant to what you were saying, is that you adopt a pose of moral superiority, derisive moral superiority to the past at your immense peril. Because if you’re foolish enough to presume that, for example, in your stunning ignorance and moral superiority, the Chairman Mao is a model, the probability that you’re going to end up as a slave is 100%. You’re already a slave to the ideology. I have to tell you a wonderful story from my Hollywood days because they made the Noah story into a movie with Russell Crowe, a big epic movie. And they completely changed God’s motive being Hollywood. They completely changed God’s motive for destroying the world from sinfulness to being not environmental enough so that they weren’t being green enough. But according to the producers, what the evangelicals complained about was that they showed Noah getting drunk. The Hollywood producers were left explaining to the religious Christians that no, that was actually scriptural. That was actually in the Bible. So piety of any kind is actually a way of blinding ourselves to what human beings are in both their decency and their wickedness. I actually think that this, I believe, you know, there’s always been, especially in the, once the age of science begins, there’s always been this idea that you can find a single governing motivation for behavior. So you have Floyd with the horse and power and alienation. But I think one motivation that we completely forget about is the motivation to appear virtuous to oneself and others. And I think that the knowledge of our brokenness, the knowledge of what we really are is just intolerable to so many people. And it’s that that I think causes you to have both the pious Christian who couldn’t care less about the person next to him and the guy in Davos who thinks he’s going to, it’s fine for him to make the decision. Yeah, OK, well, you you you put your finger on something absolutely crucial there, I think.