https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0Yap2wHiW_8
One of the great failures that we’re experiencing in modern society, obviously is a failure of conversation, that there is a difference between verbal and oral learning and just reading things. And that as we become a society where we don’t talk to each other as much, that one of the things you lose about the narrative is the person who’s telling you the narrative. That when your parents tell you a bedtime story, it’s not just the bedtime story, it’s that your parents is telling you the bedtime story. When you sit around the campfire and you abstract that larger story, it’s the people who you’re talking to, who you trust to be good people, who are telling you their various stories that allow you to abstract that out. And so as literacy has increased over the course of the world, that’s allowed for the spread of knowledge, but it’s also shallowed some of the stories themselves, because you sitting in a room reading the Bible is actually not the same thing as you sitting in a room with people discussing the Bible like we did during the Exodus seminar and getting various points of view and then abstracting out the lesson. And so as we move from a society that engages in conversation and oral learning to a society that’s very much about you and a device in front of you, or you and a book in front of you, or you and a TikTok video in front of you, that isn’t actually enough. That the form of tradition that we need to get back to is a form of oral learning and conversation, a sort of back and forth dialogue that allows us to actually understand the narratives in a powerful way. Otherwise, you do end up with the postmodern dilemma of, I’m sitting there and I’m reading a text that I just discovered, and I’m bringing whatever my prior biases are to that text. You actually do need a teller of the tale in order for you to fully understand what’s going on. Well, you point to a bunch of things there. So one is, okay, so let’s blame some of this on the Protestants and their insistence that the biblical corpus per se is sufficient. Now, one of the huge advantages of that was the promotion of literacy worldwide. So we’re going to give the devil this, too. But it does have the problem, the twofold problem that you just described. The first problem, Jung pointed to this, the first problem is that Protestant tends towards fractionation. And you can see that with the multiplicity of Protestant churches, because if it’s just you and the text, there’s an infinite number of yous. And I think the logical extension of this is the identity claims that the radical types on the hedonic left are now putting forward. I’m the interpreter. I’m the only interpreter. It’s between me and God and no one else. It’s like, well, that’s great, unless you’re deluded, in which case the God that you think you’re following might not be God at all. Now, then you might say, well, how might I determine whether the God that’s calling to me is God or Satan, let’s say? And part of your answer is, you had a twofold answer. One is, well, is the story being told to you by people, actual, embodied people, that you actually respect as a consequence of your knowledge of, let’s say, their ethical conduct? And the other is, well, is there an active and living discussion around such issues that’s conducted by a group of such people? So, you know, one of the things Pagio has helped me with a fair bit is understanding more deeply the role of ritual and congregation in the maintenance of social structure, but also in the transmission of the stories that need to be transmitted. As an academic type and also as someone, let’s say, as an intellectual prone to the temptations of the Luciferian intellect, it’s very enticing for me to think that it can just be me in the text. But the problem with that is that you’re blinded at your blind spots, and you need that additional community to tap you out of your delusional and unconscious, self-serving, atomistic individuality into something more like the universal space. And, you know, talk to Harris, Sam Harris recently, and Sam and I, and I suspect you as well, share a preoccupation with the reality of evil. And part of the reason that Sam beat the drum so hard for objective standards of morality grounded in science, so an attempt to reduce the narrative to the objective, was because he wanted to put a firm foundation under claims that there was a transcendent good. And the only way he could see to do that was through the empirical route. Now, you know, I’ve been looking at Robert Axelrod’s work on the emergence of cooperation in iterated systems. And I think, so I think there actually is a place where the approach that Sam favors can be integrated with the sort of things that you and I and the Exodus participants, for example, have been discussing. So imagine that there’s a landscape of repeated interactions. Let’s say they’re voluntary trades of information, of emotion, of goods. The voluntary part is important. And that across those trades, there’s a pattern. Now, Axelrod showed in his computational simulations that if you and I were trading under certain conditions, the best strategy, the winning strategy in a competition of strategies would be for you and I to cooperate. But if you cheated for me to whack you with proportionate force and then to go back to cooperation, that’s tit for tat. Now, imagine that our lives are characterized by a sequence of repeated trades in multiple dimensions with multiple players in a game of indeterminate length. And that there’s a pattern of interaction that is optimal across that plethora of interactions. I think that the highest order narrative that grips us, so we’d find that compelling, that would be told by the people we admire and that’s in concordance with the biblical narrative is a map of the strategy that works best in repeated interactions with multiple people across the broadest possible span of time. So that’s a place where the empirical and the theological could reach perfect concordance. And well, I think the evidence points in that direction. Yeah, I totally agree with all of that. And I also think that when you talk about the fact that these narratives have to be told to you by people that you trust, that people who you consider to be virtuous and all the rest of this, I think that even people who don’t advocate for that understand it innately, which is why attacks on the church, for example, are never attacks on the Bible. Those are not effective attacks. The sort of attacks that you see from Richard Dawkins, for example, about the text of the Bible, that never has any impact on people who are truly religious because truly religious people exist within the context of religious communities. The most damaging thing to any institution is an attack on the people who comprise the institution and make the rules as non-virtuous and violative of the fundamental principles of that institution. This is why the attacks that have been most damaging to the Catholic Church have nothing to do with Catholic doctrine and everything to do with the activities inside the Catholic Church surrounding, for example, cover-ups of child molestation. It’s why attacks on any institution are going to be the most telling based on taking people who you previously thought were virtuous advocates for the system and bringing them low and tearing them down. And I think that one of the things that we’ve seen wholesale… Well, that’s also, okay, so that’s also why. So in the Gospel texts, Christ’s fundamental enemies in the earthly world, so to speak, so excluding transcendent evil, are the Pharisees, the scribes, and the lawyers. So I’ve been going through those stories in depth. And so the Pharisees are moral hypocrites. They’re the people… See, this is another way that we can sort these disputes out with people like Dawkins and Harris. Because what they do is they identify the religious enterprise with the totalitarian proclivity. But that bespeaks a lack of differentiated judgment because this is where I think the arrow hits its mark. The worst totalitarian hypocrites use the religious enterprise as the most effective disguise for their psychopathic maneuverings. And so, and I think the separation of church and state is a protection against that. And we know this clinically to some degree, because if I’m a narcissist, a psychopathic narcissist, I’m going to claim victim status and milk the compassionate for all their worth, being relatively callous myself and unfeeling in the presence of other people’s pain, perfectly willing to manipulate that. And then I’m also going to proclaim exactly as the Pharisees do in the Gospel text, I’m going to proclaim my moral virtue to elevate my standing in the community. I’m going to pray in public like the protesters do, and I’m going to take the best seats in the synagogue, right, by parading around my moral virtue. And so that ties into what you’re saying, because the most effective way of demolishing the traditional proprieties, the traditional endeavor, is to claim to embody them while using God’s name in vain, while pretending moral virtue, oriented towards the highest. I’m saving the planet, while really in reality doing nothing but pursuing your own evil agenda. And so we could be wise enough to see the wolves in sheep’s clothing, to see the totalitarians, like the Iranian fundamentalists who use the religious enterprise to justify their own self-serving behavior, and then bring, they milk it and they discredit it simultaneously. So that’s like a truly malevolent act, right? It’s only for you, plus it discredits what is holy. And that’s praying in public, and there’s a tremendous amount of the Gospel text devoted to insisting that that’s a cardinal ill. And that’s the same thing as using God’s name in vain, the third commandment of Moses, right? And I think it’s one of the cardinal sins of our time, to parade your moral virtue around in the name of what’s holiest, when all you’re doing is elevating your own moral status. I mean, I certainly think that that’s the case. And I also think that we have to be careful on the other side not to fall into the easy use of the charge of hypocrisy to destroy the principle, because you can see that exact same attack being wildly misused. You can see everyone is sinful. And so the idea is that if I can discredit an idea by attacking the advocates of the idea as sinful, well, then you can basically destroy any ideology that way. It’s why religious people, for example, very often say, oh, we’re held to a higher standard. Well, I mean, to be fair, you should be held to a higher standard. You do proclaim to be religious. But it’s also very easy to destroy entire swaths of ideology based on this. And you see this literally with every ideology. Capitalism is bad because Bernie Madoff exists. OK, so I got a good story about that for you. So you remember in the story of Noah. So Noah shepherds his family and the human race, for that matter, through the return of the pre-cosmogonic chaos. The waters come back. God floods everything. Returning it to the state that preceded creation and brings up a new civilization. And Noah is to thank for that. Now, he goes out after he lands because it’s been a harrowing trip. Let’s say plants a vineyard and proceeds to get rip-roaring drunk. And so that’s a human failing. And Noah is only characterized in that text as wise in his generations. Right. He’s not a saint. He’s not the Savior. He’s a good man. But a man. So he has faults. Now, here’s what happens. This is so cool. So he drinks like three gallons of wine and passes out and he’s stark naked. I think his like robes are lifted up over his body and he’s laying there in his tent exposed and naked. And his son, Ham, comes along and has a pretty good laugh about how stupid his father is, which is a pretty damn ungrateful thing to do. And foolish because Ham would be, it would be a great accomplishment of Ham to be half the man that his father was. So anyways, he laughs at Noah and then he gets his brothers and he says, you know, hey, the old man’s, you know, drunk out of his mind. Why don’t we go and he’s all sprawled out. Let’s go over there and we can all join in a good laugh. And his other sons, Noah’s other sons, take up the responsibility of the father. And they back into the tent and they cover Noah. Okay. And so they show him respect despite his flaws. Now, the way that story ends is that in tradition is that slaves are the descendants of Ham. And so the moral of the story is that if you’re foolish enough to dispense with your wise tradition, because you can point to flaws that inherit to men better than you, far better than you, let’s say Thomas Jefferson, for example, that you are walking a pathway that will turn you and your descendants into the slaves of people who have proper respect for tradition. And that seems to me to be, well, like that’s spot on. That’s dead on. It nails the pride because Canada is unbelievably appalling in this regard. Our politicians will apologize even for imagined historical wrongs, even if they show no sign whatsoever of being anywhere near as wise as the people who hypothetically committed those wrongs, just so they can parade their moral virtue in comparison to the moral of the story. And one of the things, too, that is worth thinking about in that regard is there’s almost nothing more cowardly than attacking the dead because even more than the unborn, they can’t defend themselves. Right. So, well, and it’s very difficult to read into that attempt to demoralize and devalue the past. You can’t read into that the attempt on the part of the people who are doing the criticism to be better people. You can read into that their willingness to condemn and make contemptuous to redound to their unearned moral virtue. And that defines the universities now, you know, all these bloody literary critics who are above the people whose works they depend on and criticize. All these art critics who have perverted the museums with their commentary on the hypothetical sins of the artists. That’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s very amusing to consider that, you know, their destiny, their destiny is going to be indistinguishable from that of slaves. I mean, one of the things that you’re talking about here, again, gets back to that victim victimizer narrative. The more successful you were as a human being dead or alive, the more successful you were as a human being. The more you are then targeted for your for your failings because your success must be a sign of your oppression. And then that’s that’s really most of what we’re watching right now is the coalition of the supposedly marginalized who are coming together to destroy the thing that they hate in common, not because they have anything in common themselves, but because they believe that the reason they’re marginalized is out of some sort of unfairness or pure power dynamic. As opposed to the fact that in a free society, the people who very often end up marginalized are the people who don’t abide by the common rules of the society. And in a working society, those rules are good. Doesn’t mean every rule is good. Using the Internet without ExpressVPN is like leaving your keys in your car while you run into the gas station for a snack. On most occasions, you’re probably fine. But what if you come back to see someone driving off with your car? Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels or airports, any hacker on the same network can gain access to your personal data. It doesn’t take much technical knowledge to hack somebody. Just some cheap hardware is needed. Hackers can make up to a thousand dollars per person selling personal info on the dark web. I love how ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between my device and the Internet so that hackers can’t steal my sensitive data. It’d take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN’s encryption. All you need to do is fire up the app and click one button to get protected. Plus, it works on all devices such as phones, laptops, tablets and more. So you can stay secure on the go. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordanyt. That’s E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash jordanyt. And you can get an extra three months free. Look, Ben, it’s also the case that the intersectionalists basically make this claim even though they don’t notice. Like, we could each find dimensions along which we were marginalized. And maybe still are for that matter. I mean, within every human being, there are going to be dimensions of lesser attainment and greater attainment. And so there’s some dimension along which we are comparative victims. And I mean, it’s certainly the case as well. And the intersectionalists have this right to some degree is you do run across people from time to time who appear to have very little going for them across very many dimensions. Right. And their lives are genuinely difficult and hard. Now, I’ve met many people like that in my clinical practice. And I’ve also observed, and this is another error in the determinism that’s characteristic of the victim-victimizer narrative and the Marxist and materialist approach to the world. You would expect that people who were marginalized on many dimensions simultaneously might harbor a certain amount of bitterness and resentment as a consequence of that and a certain amount of justified hatred for the status quo. But my experience as a clinician has been that people who have been bitterly tormented are, they may be more likely to collapse altogether. But they also seem to be me to be more likely to have the opportunity to derive an absolutely stellar character out of their misadventures. Right. To conclude from everything that they have been subject to that taking on a role of the bully themselves, for example, if they were from an abused, an abusing family is the wrong conclusion to derive from that example. And we know that this is true even mathematically because if all abusers abused, it would take no time for every family to be characterized by abuse. So what you see in the clinical literature is that people marginalized by abuse, let’s say genuine abuse, if you look at an abuser, someone who abuses their kids, they’re statistically much more likely to have been abused as kids. But if you take the population of everyone abused in childhood, only a small proportion of them become abusers. .