https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ixc9i1G7eew

We’re going to talk about frogs. That’s right. So yeah, are you okay? So yeah, when we saw, I mean, when I saw the video that you put up, was it two days ago now? Yep. Yeah, two days ago, I couldn’t believe it. Yeah. And the next morning I got an email from my brother who also studies symbolism and is a very smart person. And he said, does Jordan know he’s incarnating Pepe right now? Yeah. Well, the funny thing is, you know, I knew about Pepe, but what it was, I had nothing like that on my mind when I made the video. It never even entered my mind that that was an association. I mean, I was just concentrating on this Kermit thing that had popped up, had probably popped up about two years ago. And the first time someone said that, I thought, huh. So I went and listened to Kermit and I thought, oh yeah, I do have a voice that’s similar to that. See, I can get it lower, but my voice tends to rise up into my, into my, it’s because of tension. So, so this is it. We need to do it like, so we need to do the metaphysics of Pepe. No one has done it yet, I think. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Well, and so, you know, and then, then the strange occurrence of course also, also emerged with regards to the mask that Charles had made me or the hat. Yeah, which it looks like Pepe. I know it even has red lips, which is staggering. It’s absolutely staggering. And so I just about fainted when I, after I posted that and people start, people pointed out the correspondence with Pepe. Really, I just about fainted. It was, and that doesn’t happen very often. I can only remember one other time in my life when I was shocked enough to almost faint. I just thought that was just too much. It was too much to bear. And then thinking about the frog correspondences since then, it has been, well, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s inexplicable and absurd. But so much of this is inexplicable and absurd. I don’t know. I tweeted something yesterday. I looked up Maps of Meaning, my book on, on the Amazon seller lists to see where it was located and it was number eight on, on books that are associated with behaviorism. Yeah. And it was bracketed by two other books, Mazarin Banagy’s book, and she’s the person who invented the IAT that’s been used to ferret out unconscious bias. Oh my goodness. And the other one was a book by Richard Bandler that I think was called Frogs and Princesses. And then to find out about Keck, you know, I didn’t know about Keck. Anyways, it’s, and then today I was thinking, I was watching Nina Paley, who’s an absolute genius and she’s animated the plagues that Moses called down on the Pharaoh. And of course, one of the plagues was the plague of frogs. Yeah. And so. Okay. So the frog, the frog is, is, is a, is a perfect liminal character because the frog, I think you tweeted about this as well, the frog lives both in water and on land. And so it’s like a, it has a monstrous characteristic that it can cross over. It’s one of those things that crosses over between, between worlds. And so you see that, you see that in the stories, like the story of the, of the frog and the princess is a perfect example. And it relates to the Pinocchio story that we talked about earlier. So a princess goes to a pond, she’s playing with her favorite thing, which is this golden ball. And so she drops the ball in the water. That just to mention something, that golden ball is the same thing as the snitch that Harry Potter chases in, in the Quidditch games in Harry Potter. And it’s funny because inside the snitch is actually part of Voldemort’s soul. Right. So, and so that’s part of the soul of evil that’s inside the golden ball. And the golden ball in Harry Potter has wings, which makes it a round chaos. Technically speaking, it’s an alchemical symbol and the round chaos is a mercurial symbol and the spirit mercury is an emissary of the gods. So the gods are speaking to you when any, when anything flickers in front of you and captures your attention. And in the Quidditch game, the person who follows what captures his attention is the seeker and also the person who wins not so much the game, but the meta game. What’s important, I think in this story is that the ball is the most important thing. Right. That’s why it’s golden. It’s like gold. So for her, it’s the idea that it is the most important thing. Yeah. So she gets this ball in the water, it gets lost. So she loses the most important thing. It falls into chaos. Right. So that’s the death of God for all intents and purposes. Or just the idea of, yeah, or just the idea of the loss of innocence or, you know, whatever you think about it in terms of the loss of the most important thing. And so this frog appears and says, you know, I can go get your ball if you’d promise something for me. And so the promise is that she will bring the frog with her into her castle, let the frog eat with her, and then let the frog sleep in her bed. OK, great. So we’ve got those two things, food and sex. We talked about it before as well. So the frog goes down into the water and then brings up the most important thing. And the princess is forced to accept this frog in her. She doesn’t want to, like she’s very annoyed that she has to let the frog into her house, eat from her plate and then finally into her bed. But by doing that, the frog, of course, transforms into a prince. Here you have this idea that we talked about before, where the most important thing goes out into chaos and whatever can bring it back, right? Whatever can bring it back to us can be tamed and can enter into the world. And maybe even turns into the thing of the highest value. Yes, exactly. Well, that’s something for people to really think about marriages, for example. So people are always, and I think this is part of the profound immaturity of our culture, people are always running around waiting to find the person who’s perfect for them. And so one thing you might think is that if you ever found the perfect person, they would run away from you screaming immediately. And so that perfection is something that you have to build within a relationship. And so you accept the other person, so to speak, warts and all, and hope that they do the same to you and swear that you won’t run from each other. And then as a consequence of that, you can engage in a mutual process of transformation that emerges as a consequence of telling the truth and having a truthful relationship. And then as a consequence of that, the transformation can take place. And you might start with a frog, but maybe you end up with a prince. So, yeah. So like we talked about the idea that this is the structure of the world. And so it happens as much on a personal level as it does on a social level, on a bigger, bigger sense. So just a little hint. We talked about before the story of Abraham and the three angels coming and announcing the birth of Abraham’s son. Well, in the story of Sleeping Beauty, that’s exactly what happens. The queen goes to the pond and there, lo and behold, is a talking frog. And the frog is the one who announces to the queen that she will have a child, the most beautiful child in the world. And so again, here is this idea of something coming from chaos. Yeah, well, that’s interesting because, you know, in the diagrams in my book, in Maps of Meaning, one of the diagrams is an egg shape that is the chaos into which things plunge. But chaos is an absolute state in some sense. It’s the state of the unknown as such. And you never see the unknown as such. You always see something that’s partly known and partly unknown. And that’s what the frog is sitting on the edge of the pond. The frog enables you. So the frog is an emissary of chaos, roughly speaking. And you only meet an emissary of chaos. You never meet chaos because it’s like a… It’s nonexistent. It’s non-being. It’s below being, if you will. Right, right. Exactly. And so now this thing, like two things. One is interesting is that Kermit the Frog is the same thing because Kermit is a host. He’s a host on a show. And so what he does is he transitions. He’s the transition between different worlds. So you have an act and then you have this transitional figure which appears and then you have another act. Right. That’s the role that Kermit the Frog plays on The Muppet Show. On his primary… He has… His primary problem is with Miss Peggy who’s a really loud feminist. That’s hilarious. Okay, and now Pepe. So here’s the metaphysics of Pepe. So this is what’s happening in the world right now is that there’s a very strange situation where the people… We’ll call them the right or like the forces of order or the… Let’s say the norm, the people who create the norm for a society. So we’re in a situation where things have been inverted and the people who supposedly in the narrative are the ones who create the norm are being marginalized. They’re being pushed into the margins. And they’re being told, you’re the ones who create the norm and we’re going to push you out into the margin. And so you think that’s why they’ve identified with the frog. That’s why they’ve identified with the frog. Because what happens is there’s a strange inversion that happens, right? The power of inversion and the power of mocking and the power of humor is usually on the side of chaos. It’s usually on the side of the power of the margins. Yeah. Well, I noticed this happening about 20 years ago is all the… The right wing had all the comedians. I thought, what the hell’s going on here? The right wing doesn’t have the comedians. It’s the left that has the comedians. They’re the ones that are poking fun. So I thought the world’s gone very strange that the comedians have become… The right wing has started to express itself in comedy. Yeah. So it’s a sign that there’s this strange inversion that’s happening. And so there’s an interesting like… just a little footnote on this. Like in the Bible there’s a story that talks about this. It’s the story of Elijah. So in the time of Elijah, Israel has been worshipping false gods because of the queen Jezebel, right? And Elijah, who is supposed to be the prophet of the god of those people, has become a marginal figure. And so his name is Elijah the Stranger, which is very odd because he is supposed to be a prophet of God. And his tool is mockery. He mocks the prophets of Baal. And that’s something that you actually don’t see very often in the Bible where the tool to kind of bring back order is through mockery. And so this is what we’re seeing with this Pepe figure is that Pepe is like an inversion machine. Okay? So the people who use Pepe, what they do is they take something like an insult that’s being thrown at them and they flip it around. They flip it around on those that insulted them. Like that’s what you did with the Kermit thing, which is perfect. People are making fun of you because they say you sound like Kermit and you’re saying, okay, I’m going to take this and I’m going to make it into my strength. And that’s what Pepe does. And so a lot of the crazy stuff that’s coming out of this Pepe thing is part of that. There’s a lot of dark things in the Pepe, you know, like things that like personally I wouldn’t necessarily want to touch. Yeah. Well, I mean, when I first saw the frog, I mean, the Pepe frog, I really recoiled from it. It’s got this kind of underground comic horror associated with it that I really, I really find distasteful. Like sort of viscerally distasteful. Yeah. But I think it’s supposed it’s kind of supposed to do that to you. Yeah. That’s part of the power of those that are using that image. Like it’s right there. If you look at it, it’s right there in the first comic, like the first Pepe comic, you know, you have a it’s very crass. But here’s this frog, right, who goes to the toilet to urinate, but he pulls his pants down to his knees. And so he’s doing something that usually if you pull your pants down to your knees, you’re going to sit and do something else. But then he does that, but he stands. And so here’s this and he shows us his backside, right? So here’s this this strange power of inversion, which actually brings the man to stand back up. And so that’s this double inversion that people who use this this this type of imagery are doing. And so even it’s like, you know, let’s say like the radical left wing are saying, you’re you’re this whatever you’re a white male controlling blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you’re all these things. And the people who use these Pepe comics, they say yes, and they’ll and they reflect that to you. And then the people who accuse them of that completely lose their mind. They completely lose their mind. But the only thing they’re doing is saying you’re saying, let’s say that I’m a racist, this blah, blah, blah. And then they reflect that back to them. They invert it in a way because they’re saying, here you go, I’ll show you what you’re telling me I am. And then and then the you know, the left the radical left wing lose their mind. And so it’s kind of and if you look at those people, like the alt-right people, they have this strange this strange magic, right? Because look at look, if you look at Milo, Milo Yiannopoulos is a perfect example. You know, here is a half Greek, half Jewish, gay Catholic Trump supporting Englishmen from Englishmen in America. And and so nothing talking to the Republicans. Exactly. And so nothing people can throw at him will stick on him. Because he is the frog like he is that marginal figure standing on the side. But he’s he’s he’s like he is that double inversion. And he he’s kind of I know if he’s trying. But what it seems like he’s doing is bringing order back through like this this double flip that’s happening. It’s very odd. It’s a very odd. It’s very strange. It’s very strange time. So anyways, I would just say just just I mean, just be careful. It’s a dangerous place to stand. Yeah, yeah. Yes, I’m trying to be careful. Believe me, I’ve got lots of people that I’m talking to that are helping me formulate my arguments and articulate them properly. And like I’m doing my best to keep my feet on the ground and my my eyes open and and and not to be angry about this, but to be in the chaos, really. And not assume also that that’s a catastrophe, because I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. Yeah, I don’t know if this is the worst thing that ever happened to me or the best thing that ever happened to me. Yeah, I can’t tell. Yeah, and what’s the solution will happen inside the chaos, right? The the the Jonah gets pulled down by the whale down into the depths of the of the of the ocean. And it’s while he’s in the belly of the whale that the solution comes to him. Like race case, it’s he has he has this moment of repentance where he turns he turns around. Repentance is a flipping around. And so that this moment that he brings him into death turns into this baptism where he comes out and he’s you know, and he’s that he’s that he goes into the city. Right. So that’s another part. But but but so that that yeah, the solution is going to come out of this chaos. Yeah. Well, right now it’s still a problem. If it’s a really complex problem, you have to go very far into chaos to find a solution. But there’s always the risk of losing yourself when you’re in chaos. So that’s right. Well, that’s right. I mean, that’s the thing about dragons is that they can eat you. Yeah, they can. That’s that’s that’s why I don’t like the new age ageification of Carl Jung’s thinking. And in part, I think Joseph Campbell was responsible for that, although he did a lot of very good things. I mean, the thing about the thing about confronting the thing that you’re afraid of is that the thing that you’re afraid of is genuinely terrifying and it can actually eat you. And it’s eaten plenty of people before you. And so it’s no joke. And, you know, I mean, during this whole. Let’s call it ride so far, I mean, what? Yeah, what was going to happen, especially in the first couple of weeks, I mean, when I was being called a bigot and a transphobe and all of those things and being pilloried, essentially, at least within the university for my views, it wasn’t obvious at all that there was going to be any there was going to be any way of swimming out of it, let’s say. Yeah, so. But it’s it’s very it’s very disturbing because now you have you basically have these two monsters fighting each other, you know, like you have, let’s say, this Pepe type frog. And you know that Pepe was was declared a hate a hate symbol by the the Anti-Defamation League. You know that. I mean, that’s very frightening. It’s frightening that this is how far it’s gone, how much it’s like, you know, all of a sudden they see they can see the monster on the other side, but they don’t see the monster on their side. You know, and and the LGBTQ, etc, etc. I mean that is itself a liminal form. Well, look at what’s happening with it. It’s the same thing that that happened with the gender-neutral pronouns as soon as you blew the binary apart. There was an endless multiplication of potential identities. That was the chaos manifesting itself and the ever-expanding letters that go along with LBGT is an exact example of exactly the same thing. It’s like, well, we’re marginalized. Well, we’re marginalized, too. Well, we’re marginalized, too. And how about us? We’re also marginalized and it’s like and I guess that’s also partly because each person has at least one element of them is that seriously marginalized and marginalized in some manner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the rain and it’s interesting like the rainbow is is actually a perfect symbol because a rainbow is actually is is just a It’s it’s a fluid thing it is a fluid thing a rainbow is not six colors a rainbow is a spectrum of colors There’s an there’s it is chaos itself. It’s the division of order into an indefinite amount of things, right? So we we we typify a rainbow into six colors, but but it’s actually just the spectrum of color, right? Right. And so it is indefinitely it can be separated indefinitely, right? No limit to how much it can be separate and it seems to me that that’s actually the problem with the identity legislation It’s like well Like imagine that like an identity is a very important thing, right? An identity is something you have but it’s also something that you and I play out So you have to negotiate your identity with the rest of the social world It’s like a game in some sense, but identity also has to have a function Like and this is also why the late legislation is so pernicious because it just says well your identity is whatever you want it to be It’s like well, no, it’s not because you have to live with other people It’s like it’s like saying you can play whatever game you want to play. It’s like well you can’t because You got to get people to play with that’s right. We’re playing together and you can say well you have to play my game Well, I can tell you toddlers on the on the school ground who say you have to play my game. They just get shunned Yeah, and then a game itself has to be playable That’s the other thing is that there there there are playable and non playable games And one of the things that Piaget pointed out the developmental psychologist Piaget pointed out about a game Is that one of the hallmarks of an acceptable game is that people want to play it voluntarily? And that’s another part of the legislation that’s so pernicious It’s like okay you have a game and it’s a game that you’ve chosen subjectively because that’s what it says in the legislation and When when you come near me you have to play my game Whether you want to or not Yeah, and then the with a problem with that too is that well where does that stop and the answer is it stops with? indefinite multiplication So the whole point of society is to enforce a game That’s somewhat arbitrary that everyone can more or less play they sacrifice parts of themselves to play it, but It beats the total chaos of of the war against of all against all for example That’s the Hobbesian right nightmare right and life nasty brutish and short This is a complement to the discussion of the metaphysics of Pepe the Frog that I had with dr. Jordan Peterson There are strange transformations happening in our world and hopefully understanding them will prevent the worst from taking shape as I discussed with dr. Peterson The Frog is a type of hybridity as an amphibian it exists in two worlds at the same time So it becomes an image of the margin Another possible aspect of the margin and the monster as we encounter it is to be a shapeshifter Shapeshift shifting like hybridity is the sign of the place where categories fall apart on the edge In the case of shape shifting this correct characteristic is presented mostly as a power of the margin It’s the power of fluidity like a trickster taking on several forms to operate his mischief To fully understand how peppy the frog operates We need to understand how shape shifting occurs and how it gives power to those who wield it You see pepe has become a meme Possibly the most used meme of all times his image is floating on the internet And it can be produced by anyone in the world And so there are thousands and thousands of images of Pepe Ranging from a glorified emoji to the most horrifying scatological images you can imagine Because Pepe has become this chaotic fluid shape shifting thing He ends up acting like a mirror in the same way water acts as a mirror And the way that works Is that because there are so many images of Pepe when people look into that huge chaos of images They can’t encompass it all of it. They have to mentally order it and in ordering it They do that using their own mental patterns That is they project their thinking into this chaos And as they force the chaos to take shape It becomes an image of their own ideas maybe their own ideological possession and So one of the things that has been happening Is that some people on the right what what some groups are calling the alt-right or whatever? Have been using this effect to act as a mirror against the social justice warrior types It even went so far that the SJWs finally declared Pepe a hate symbol The Anti-Defamation League said that Pepe was a hate symbol. I mean this frog this cartoon frog It was so ridiculous that the ADL finally scaled back some of the language they use I mean, of course, it was politically motivated. But how could such a silly thing happen? well Well Certain images of Pepe a few of them in the thousands and thousands of images available had racist themes and So there was a Hitler Pepe and a KKK Pepe a scheming Jew African stereotypes using racist slurs cliche Mexicans All of these examples were floating with the other thousands and thousands of Pepe images online But when the social justice warriors looked in this mirror this pond of Pepe images All they could see were the ones that reflected back to them their own ideology Or rather like a mirror an inversion the dark shadow of their ideology Of course immediately the accusation came Pepe is a racist symbol He’s a hate image and the irony is very big because first of all no one controls this image No one has any control over it Pepe is everything and anything and nothing at the same time By declaring publicly that he’s a hate symbol the SJWs are pointing to their own absurdity and This to the delight of those that use this image But hiding in this is an even larger irony If you look at the images that they pulled out as being racist images There’s this strange contradiction in them You see on one side. There’s Hitler Pepe and KKK Pepe and there’s a Trump Pepe Well on the other side, there’s the scheming Jew the African American and the Mexican This means that Pepe is at the same time the archetypal oppressor Seen from the side of the victim All the while being the archetypal scapegoat seen from the side of the oppressor That is Pepe is both sides of racism at the same time When the SJWs look at that Automatically without even thinking Automatically without even thinking they organize it through the ideology And it exposes their program because they automatically decide that when Pepe is Hitler or KKK or Trump Pepe is identifying with those people But when he’s a scheming Jew or a Mexican Pepe is mocking and criticizing those people Why is such an absurd image of Hitler as a cartoon frog not seen from the side of the victim Seen as mocking Hitler in fact All the SJWs are seeing is a reflection of themselves of their nightmare of their shadow The rather pathological desire we’ve seen in the past few months to accuse everyone of being Hitler or neo-nazi or a white nationalist Is an expression of their secret desire The desire to be confirmed through an encounter with their projected other And it’s funny because the discourse of otherness has been an ideological tool of the left since the 1960s and Now we’re at a time when it has come back to haunt them So by using this strategy The people have been wielding this Pepe image Have taken advantage of the power of chaos Taking advantage of what happens when the frog jumps into the pond and goes down to the bottom to find the golden ball As I explained in my interview with dr. Peterson about the story of the princess and the frog But the frog can’t stay in the water forever That’s the most important thing At some point you have to finish the story To finish the story the frog has to get the golden ball And one could say that the golden ball is actually the Sun which will come up for the new day The frog has to get the golden ball and bring it back to the surface of the water It must carry the most important thing Carry the seed of the new world to the princess so that it can grow If that doesn’t happen there is no telling what else can come out of the water If the frog stays there for too long It will be eaten or it will call some darker monster Because there are other things down there beside the golden ball and the frog can tempt the Leviathan to devour it And it’s not as if this is impossible As the frog swims in the darkness The social justice warrior is still peering into the mirror and calling forth its shadow We’ve already seen some intimations that this game people are playing might raise something more than a new day Might raise the very monster the social justice warriors hope to encounter So as the frog swims in the water how how can it do that? How can it recognize the golden ball that is at the bottom of the pond? Because it’s actually not easy to distinguish things when we’re covered in darkness And the answer to this is in what happens in the story The frog is the golden ball And the answer to this is in what happens in the story The frog has to get out of the water and become a prince the frog has to become something else and Bringing up the golden ball is the same thing as the transformation of the frog into a prince One cannot happen without the other And so as dr. Peterson is often suggested in his lectures The way to do it is to sort ourselves out Is to go into our own self to find the golden ball that is hidden in the darkness To go down and find the most important thing of Western civilization And dr. Peterson has suggested the most important thing of Western civilization is the logos This truth it is the word We have seen how noise has been the chaos used to drown the word What I’m going to talk about is freedom of speech and I want to tell you a few things about freedom I’ve been thinking about this very carefully I’ve been thinking about this very carefully over the last two weeks You And so we must find the word For it is the Sun that rises after darkness The word is the thing that comes out of death and lives again