Meta-Narcissism and agreeing on evil (1Ai5HHJXyUg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1Ai5HHJXyUg

Young girl dancing to the latest beat Has found new ways to move her feet And the lonely voice of youth cries, What is truth? Young man speaking in the city square Trying to tell somebody that he cares Can you blame the voice of youth for asking, What is truth? Yeah, the ones that you’ll call and love Are gonna be the leaders in a little while When will the lonely voice of youth cry, What is truth? This old world’s wakened to a newborn babe And I solemnly swear it’ll be their way You better help that voice of youth find, What is truth? And the lonely voice of youth cries, What is truth? Alright, welcome everybody. I thought I’d do a post-Christmas stream here. And really what I wanted to cover was Sam Harris’s discussion with Jordan Peterson. And this is not gonna be a normal stream. I don’t really have anything. I have a lot of notes. But they’re not really prepared. So if that’s what you were expecting, expect not. That’s not to say that I’m not gonna prattle on in monologue form, because of course I would. But I wanted to do this at this time slot. European people can come in, right? Give a little bit of variety. I woke up really late this morning for some reason, or rather got out of bed really late. Which is weird, because the day before I woke up at six and started working. So I was hopeful that I could do that, not on the road. But apparently I cannot. So we’ve got our Sam Pell ready to go. We’ve returned from the holidays. We’ve got our most excellent Muppet Cup, which you can buy at shoppedatmarkofwisdom.org. We’ve got these lovely, they’re not Jordan almonds. They’re like lemon cello almonds. They’re quite good. They’re not hard shelled, they’re soft shelled. Thank you, Ethan, for that lovely Christmas gift. I’ve got some tea from Table Rock Tea. This is the winter leaf tea. It’s quite good. It’s gonna steep a little bit more. I think it needs a couple more minutes. Everything’s very last minute. Drawing on the board’s last minute, although I think drawing on the board’s really good. I just noticed my camera is off. There we go. That’s much better. Much better. That’s what happens when you don’t prepare and you’re on the road and you bring all your equipment back and it’s not quite perfect. Well, my stuff’s never perfect, so it doesn’t matter. We’ve got some Christmas cookies, just in case we get hungry. My cousin’s wife makes lovely cookies. We’ve got some delicious cookies here. Hopefully we’ll be diving into those at some point. Look, the thing that made this Peterson-Harris conversation so good, and I listened to it, the first part of it on the road, I finished the last half hour this morning. And then for you, for you my audience, I listened to PVK’s critique. I finished that like 30 minutes ago. PVK’s critique was very good. Missing a bunch of really important stuff in my opinion, which is why I’m gonna do my video anyway. And I love Pastor Paul. He does some great work. But he’s always missing things. And I think the more important thing to focus on with this conversation is what Sam Harris is doing and why it works. Like what is it that he’s actually doing and why does this thing work? Why is he getting away with this? And you can see if you watch PVK, I don’t expect you to have watched it. It just came out, right? But if you watch PVK’s two hour and 16 minute or whatever extravaganza breakdown, you can see Pastor Paul getting more and more angry, which is unfortunate, unfortunate. But it happens, you know? I mean, there’s reasons to get angry at the sort of tomfoolery that we’ll say Sam Harris is engaged in and the passivity on the part of Peterson, which, you know, I do want to cover. Pardon me for a moment. My nose decided to run right when the camera rolled. I apologize on behalf of my nose. And I do. I will. Let me get to some comments here real quick. Take one. It’s good to see you, sir. Happy New Year’s. I’m so glad you’re here, actually. It’s good to have you on here. I hope you get something out of this because I am going to go over what I see as some of the tricks that Harris is playing. And Father Eric, excellent to see you. Nihilism should make you angry. The ni… See, this is part of the issue. The nihilism isn’t there yet. And it’s the yet part that confuses everybody. Like, Sam’s clearly not nihilistic. Yet. However, if you adopt what he’s talking about, you will end up at nihilism. This is where everyone’s confused, including Peterson. I would say including Pastor Paul. I think everyone’s confused about this because we’re flat in the world so much. We’ve reduced everything, compressed everything down so much in time that we’re really just dealing with modernity now. And I hate the term modernity. Right. And I also hate the term meta, which might lead you to ask, well, Muppet Mark, why are you using the term meta in a video if you don’t like the term meta? And this is something that Sally Jo and I came up with talking on the Discord last night, was this idea of meta-narcissism. Sam Harris is a perfect example of a narcissist in the first like 15, 20 minutes of this video. It is the ideal of narcissism. It’s unbelievable, actually. It’s what, what, who talks like that? And that’s hard to see, partly because of Peterson’s framing and his invitation to talk about yourself. But and I worked this through last night with Bruce, my good friend Bruce, who’s excellent. And we were just sort of talking about like, what does this mean? What was the conversation about? What’s wrong with it? Right. So on the one hand, you know, I can’t recommend the video. Right. I can’t recommend that you watch this Peterson, Sam Harris video. And it’s valid to like ask, well, you know, why? Because it’s garbage. And look, if you want to see it, like, obviously, I’ll link it. It’s garbage because it’s the same old stuff from Sam Harris. Peterson doesn’t push back. You’re not actually learning anything new from either of them. And the idea that people can can can sort of see through to the nihilism or whatever is false. And I think it’s what’s bothering everybody. You see the spirit and I would say the good positive spirit that somebody like. And Pastor Paul VanderKlay has. In the fact that he gets upset at listening to Sam Harris, because Sam Harris is not speaking nihilistically. But Pastor Paul understands intuitively. That this will lead to nihilism. And that. Inflames his passions. And they tend in the direction of anger and exasperation to some extent, because he strides out his video, which I should link that to. So I’ll link that. He strides out his video, as he usually does when he talks about Sam Harris, saying half of you like Sam Harris and half of you think I’m too soft on him. Right. Half of you think I’m too hard on him. And, you know, this is why. And this is how. How would I talk about him on being different? I agree with all those points. I think he’s dead on on that. And we all know I don’t agree with Pastor Paul all the time. So I’m not, you know, I’m not being like, oh, Pastor Paul’s my friend. I know him well. I’m being like, no, really, this is. I think he’s got a point when he’s talking about this. He’s dead on. He’s not he’s not possessed or anything. By the way, greetings, Bruce. Good to see you. I’ve already already referenced you. Glad that you’re here. Since we had this conversation, part of this conversation last night. The. Oh, shoot, I’m not going to get Tom. Damn it, Tom. Well, hopefully I’ll still be streaming when you come back, by the way, from dinner with your Vicar. It’s always hard. I was going to do this much earlier, but I didn’t even wake up as early as I wanted to do this for weird reasons. But I’m glad I didn’t because I had to watch P.B.K.’s video on 2X to get it all in and and and add a little flavor. It did add a little flavor. This video is very helpful. You see the passions inflamed in somebody like Pastor Paul when he’s talking about Sam Harris. And why is this meta-narcissism on Sam Harris’s part? This is a bit of a joke, obviously. I mentioned this earlier. I don’t like the word matter. I think this is not my favorite word. The reasons why I hate it are, you know, hopefully clear from this particular video, which I’ll link. But also. One tell, not the only tell and not the best tell, it’s not a perfect tell. One tell for when someone’s a narcissist is when they’re using the word matter. The irony does not escape me. I do love to troll. I do love to troll. So Sam Harris exemplifies this narcissism to a degree I have not previously seen. In the way that he talks about his project. He mentions his project in the beginning. And to be fair, Peterson invites him, hey, what have you been up to? What is it about your life that you’re so positive about sort of thing? He cast this as, look, I’ve got two aspects to my life. One is my blog. One is my app community thing that started out as an app, but is now a community. And I can go ahead and do my podcast thingy, right? Or go ahead and do my app thingy. And I get nothing but positivity back. And getting off of Twitter was the best thing I ever did because on Twitter there’s a lot of toxicity. And it’s like, okay, Sam. So what is it about only positivity that is good? And of course, Sam later on equates goodness and happiness. Explicitly, right? He just, happiness and goodness are the same thing. This isn’t only my observation. When I was driving back down from New England yesterday, I was unfortunately probably bad on me subjectively. I was bad on me subjecting somebody to this conversation. And they were like, he just said happiness and goodness are the same thing. And I’m like, true. I mean, he said other bad things that I think are worse. But yes, he did. That’s why I didn’t finish the last half hour yesterday because I had to stop because the person I was driving with was like, I can’t listen to this anymore. And I said, oh, fair enough. I’m shocked I got past 10 minutes of Sam Harris because usually I can’t. This problem that he has is all about him talking about the benefits to himself of having an audience captured that is never negative towards him. He stated this explicitly in the beginning of this conversation. It’s not that he doesn’t acknowledge those people. It’s that he only acknowledges that those people exist in relation to what they give to him. They do not exist in relation to what he gives to them. This may seem like a very subtle point, but it’s not. This is the difference between a narcissist and somebody who isn’t a narcissist. So one of the things that I hope you have all heard me do, if you’ve heard my live streams, probably heard this once or twice, always very grateful. When people tell me that I have had a positive impact on their life and I always say I hope that that is true because I don’t know. And B, I would like to think that I am genuinely expressing my gratitude at the wonder that positivity can be had from what I’m doing. In other words, I don’t go into this with the presumption that me talking to you on a live stream or doing a video or whatever is actually going to help. Especially because most of the time when I’m talking, I very much understand that people aren’t understanding most of what I’m saying. Fair enough. Like that’s partly my bad, at least. So I’m OK with it. I’m OK with it. When Sam Harris talks about the people and getting rid of all the toxic people. This is a form of narcissism that is sort of beyond the pale for me. And how you speak about people intuitively informs others as to what your attitude towards them is. In other words, the way Sam Harris talks tells you intuitively whether or not he’s a narcissist. Now, can you vocalize that? Probably not. Most people cannot. I’m not sure I can do it for you today, but I will try. This stupid thing I forgot about this, Dopey. There we go. Much better. I will try to explain to you why he’s a narcissist, what things he says that makes him a narcissist. But one of them is he doesn’t mention any good thing that he does for any other person. As near as I can remember. Now, I don’t have a perfect memory, but like that’s how I recall the whole thing. He doesn’t talk about being grateful for the opportunity that he has to help others to be, to use Fr. Erickson’s word, charitable towards others. He doesn’t talk about his interaction with others in any way that isn’t beneficial to him. That’s kind of the definition of narcissism to me. And look, you know, Peterson doesn’t push back and we can we can think about why. I don’t know. Paul VanderKlay seems to believe that Peterson is evaluating Sam Harris in a clinical way, maybe to do something with him or to understand something. That’s a reasonable thesis. I’m not going to challenge that thesis. Could be true. There could be other reasons, right? One of the reasons why I listen to this conversation is because I’m constantly trying to figure out why anybody listens to Sam Harris ever at all about anything. Because the guys make any sense. And I’m like, why is it? And I need to be more charitable there. It’s not that he doesn’t make any sense because Pastor Paul makes this claim towards the end of his video. Like, this is incomprehensible. Doesn’t make any sense. Like, actually, it makes perfect sense. But the question is, why does it make perfect sense? Why is it that at least some, if not all of what Sam Harris is saying makes sense to some number of people? Because I think that’s actually important. Like, I think that’s an important point. And the problem with making sense is that we do the making of the sense, right? We are the agents that are knitting things together. And that’s where the trick comes in. So the trick is that you are engaging with Sam Harris. You’re willing to listen to him. When you’re willing to listen to somebody, that is a form of cooperation. And we like to cooperate. We are creatures that cooperate by default. We have to cooperate to live, basically. It may not seem that way in recent times, right? Post-World War II, for example. But we cooperate. Like, we’re cooperative creatures. Because we know we need to cooperate to survive. We know that at some point. And because of that, we want to meet people halfway. We want to get in there with them. And when they make a statement that is obviously true, we want to give them the benefit of the doubt. So it’s not incoherent. It’s totally coherent. Because we want to believe. And we don’t want to do the hard work. So Sam is giving us an easy solution to a difficult problem. The problem of virality. It’s a difficult problem. So we cooperate with him. We lean in. We meet him halfway. Right? In his lack of definition. And after all, to be fair, which I hate to do with Sam Harris, I really don’t like it. We intuit that he’s saying something important and correct. And that is close. That is close. He is saying something that is important and close to correct. Now, Sam Harris is an excellent example of a few things. Individualism. Materialism. Objective material reality. World view. Excellent example of these things. Also flattened of the world. He oversimplifies things. Materialism is a form of flattening the world, oversimplifying, compressing, reducing. Right? It’s all the same stuff. But Sam is also an excellent example of being the evil you pretend to hate. Or claim to hate. Sam is an excellent example of that. And the reason why he’s an excellent example of that is because he does it right there in this conversation. Again, I can’t recommend the conversation. It’s a horrible conversation. Sam does most of the talking. It may scar your soul to listen to his gobbledygook. And the worst part is if you don’t notice the tricks he’s using, they’re going to have more sway on you. Sam talks a lot about dogma and why that’s bad. And he implies, I think he straight out says dogma doesn’t exist outside of religion. This is obviously false. We know this is false. He indicates that at the same time by referring to the fake news virus scandemic recent. And says, well, we can have arguments about whether or not that was right and whether or not we should have done okay then. So what caused that? Dogma. That’s what caused that. Scientific dogma, but dogma. So unlike John Breveke, who’s realized dogma is not the problem because dogma exists independent of religion, Sam Harris has not realized this. It’s very clear. And Sam makes a number of weird mistakes. He talks a lot about the spirit of science and medicine. Then he says we don’t have that worked out. He’s making a superiority claim while admitting his system isn’t superior. Like it has the same flaws as the religions that he’s complaining about. He talks about more evidence and more argument and better incentives. And he’s just not defining what evidence is. Paul Van der Kley did a wonderful video probably two years ago, two and a half years ago now, about what kind of evidence would it take for you to believe that Jesus rose from the grave? It’s like that’s an excellent question. And he counterbalances in the video, if I’m remembering correctly, with what kind of evidence would it take for you to believe that aliens exist? Fair, totally fair, completely coherent. Good question. What is the standard of evidence? Sam doesn’t tell you. He doesn’t tell you what argument looks like or what argument is good or bad, for example, which is odd, given that we’re talking about good and bad. He just doesn’t define any of these things. He doesn’t define what good incentives are or what bad incentives are. He doesn’t define what incentives would lead to good behavior or bad behavior. He doesn’t define good and bad behavior. He doesn’t define any of that. He just states axiomatically or dogmatically might be another word to use there, that that exists. And I agree it exists. But he’s just stating that it exists. It exists. And we go, oh, yeah, of course it exists because we know it exists. We intuit that it exists. Absolutely. But he’s not talking about where that intuition comes from and why it varies from person to person or differs in Islam versus Christianity, which is his claim, by the way, not mine. That’s his claim. He doesn’t talk about why that differs. He just says it’s there. And so you go, I want to cooperate with this guy. He’s talking about something that I know exists. The fact that neither of us, maybe, or at least one of us, does not have a definition doesn’t even occur to you. Wait a minute. We’re not talking about the same thing because he doesn’t define it. And maybe I have a definition because I’m a Christian or I’m a Muslim. And maybe he doesn’t have a definition because he’s Sam Harris and he just says he has a definition about a bunch of things but never actually defines any of them. That’s part of his trick. That’s part of his lure. That’s part of his attraction. Because when somebody else doesn’t define it for you, you fill in your own definition unconsciously. Unconscious does a lot more work than your conscious does. And then you don’t even notice that you’ve been tricked into agreeing with somebody that you don’t agree with. Or maybe you figure out you don’t agree with them like I would or like Bruce would or many other people. And you don’t know why. Because what he’s saying is not actually incorrect in that way. Because the implications of what he’s saying are true. The inferences of what he’s saying are true. The problem is his Jonathan Pashow used to ask, where are you standing? His standing point? I would say no, it’s starting point. His starting point is starting axioms, which I would say are also dogmas. Axiom and dogma are interchangeable words as you know as I can tell. Your starting dogmas are different. Sam Wilkme doesn’t have dogma. I would say prove it. He would be unable. I already know this. Or you know he can’t prove it. He’s been asked before by the way. He can never prove it. He can just say, but dogma bad because dogma religion and things not religion not dogma. I mean that’s his formula he uses. Obviously he uses more words. He’s very articulate. And that’s part of his enchantment. He is an articulate idiot. He’s not very bright. I know people say he’s bright. People want to say he’s a midwit. Whatever. He’s just not that smart. He hasn’t thought these things through. And fair enough. Thinking these things through is really really hard. Probably takes many more years than Sam’s ever going to put into it. Probably many more years than he has left on this earth. That’s why we use distributed cognition through time to resolve these things. I would argue that that distributed cognition through time to resolve these things is the religious project. People will push back and say there’s a philosophical project in parallel. No there isn’t. That’s a lie. I’m just going to tell you right now it’s a lie. I’m not going to get into that today. Don’t care. This talk is an exemplification of narcissism, individualism, self-reference, arrogance. Objective, material, reality, worldview. And there’s some great stuff in here. It’s hard to pick out some long conversation. One of the things is that Peterson right up front recognizes that meta-narrative doesn’t exist because you cannot draw the line. It’s a point I’ve been making for years. It’s a point of hierarchy ultimately. And let me explain it the way I usually do. And let me know how well this lands for you. So the way I talk about the problem of postmodern meta-narrative and all this nonsense exemplifies I think, I hope, hierarchy. The problem of meta-narrative itself. The problem with the word meta. The problem of narrative, using that term. The problem of the one most important thing above all others. Discernment. The point that I make is let’s suppose you have a meta-narrative. And you remove that meta-narrative. Now meta-nit means after or outside of the conversation before I left with an Orthodox priest friend of mine and basically pointed that out and I said, oh yeah, I’m well aware of meta. This is my least favorite word because people tack it on to things. And they have a point, something that isn’t the thing I’m talking about. It’s after or outside of the word that’s going to come after it. Ironically meta-narrative is outside the narrative. It’s after the narrative. So it’s not the narrative. That sounds like an identification against, doesn’t it? Doesn’t, yes. That’s why I hate the word. It’s one reason. When you remove the meta-narrative, which is the top narrative on the top of the stack of the hierarchy of narratives, the thing you have on top that is left is your meta-narrative. It has been noted by people other than me that one of the tricks postmoderns play is they just keep removing narratives until they get to one that has the conclusions that they like and then they start from there or they stand there. Where are you standing? Where are you starting? What have you done? You’ve removed the top layers to get to some point that services your logical, rational and reasonable conclusions. And you’ve ignored the bottom layers. You are in the middle. That’s middle out thinking. That’s one of the things I’m talking about in my video, middle out thinking. I didn’t get that link. I knew there was another link I wanted. Anyway, navigating patterns, middle out thinking. There’s a video. I have a video for that. Shocker. That’s my description. Peterson goes through a similar sort of description. I think the problem for people who are against dogma is that dogma is not optional. You can’t do without it. The dogma exists in the people because you’ve got to start somewhere. You’ve got to begin the argument. If I’m going to begin the argument, I have to begin it from somewhere. Jefferson. So nice that you are here, sir. Agree with your assessment about dogma. Excellent. I am glad to hear that. Oh, and on X, too. Oh, that’s cool. Tells you little X. That’s awesome. I’m glad X is working. I never know with these things. So Sam Harris lives in this delusional world. It’s postmodern delusion, if you will. Oh, man. I tell you. You think it was cold out or something. It’s not cold in South Carolina. Not today. In this delusional world, he makes all these statements that he thinks aren’t dogmatic, but they are. And he just pretends like dogma only exists in religion. That’s part of his trick. And the postmodern ethos is the thing that allows him to do that. I’m going to start from all dogma exists in religion, and then I’m going to say I’m not dogmatic because I’m not religious. Clever trick. Hard to see. Like, I’m not saying, look, if you listen to this conversation, you didn’t notice Sam Harris’s trick. You’re an idiot. No, no, no, no, no. Sam Harris is very good at what he does. I’m not saying, look, if you listen to this conversation, you didn’t notice Sam Harris’s trick. You’re an idiot. He’s very polished. I think he can’t help but stray into evil. I don’t think it’s optional. One of the things, one of the big things I really didn’t like about the conversation was Peterson seems to agree that we can just move away from evil towards good. For that is my pyramid there. I don’t think there is an opposite to evil. I don’t think the good is the opposite of the evil. I think the good is the unity that defies the evil in some sense. It’s the order that can be brought forth from the chaos to remove enough chaos to continue to order. Which is a really tricky, slippery concept for sure, but I think that’s it. Sam Harris invokes a lot of math. A couple points he uses game theory to describe what he thinks is going on. The interesting thing about math is math is a very reduced map of the world. Game theory in particular is wrong. We know game theory is wrong. Read Nash. Actually read his stuff. Game theory on a decision to go to the store to buy a loaf of bread quickly devolves into calculus. Most people can’t do calculus in their head. So you’re doing calculus in your head to figure out whether to buy a loaf of bread. Okay, so game theory is wrong. Not that it’s not useful, not that you can’t do something with it, but it’s wrong. The map is wrong. It’s not the territory. In a fit of weirdness that I can only actually describe as weirdness because it’s weird, I somehow managed this morning while not getting out of bed to notice this weird video. I don’t even know why I watched it. It’s Mathology is the guy. I actually rather like the guy. But he did this video on the thing called the Schwartz Lantern. And I will post a link to the Schwartz Lantern video. It was an interesting video. The reason why it was an interesting video is because it’s a mathematical formula for fooling you about how big pi is. So pi equals four is a big meme about this or joke about this. So what you do is you draw a circle of size one, diameter of one, and therefore one unit. And then you draw a square for size of one, and therefore ostensibly it’s the same size. It’s perfectly over the circle. And then in order to derive pi, you can just invert the corners infinitely and come up with pi. Now of course when you do that in mathematics, it comes to four. It doesn’t come to pi. The fact that that isn’t obvious in looking at the diagram is the problem with math. I don’t know if anyone’s fooled by this. I really don’t. Because I looked at the diagram and I went, because what you end up with when you take a circle and transcribe a square around it is corners. At the far side of the corner you have a 90 degree angle. On the other side of the corner you have a curve. A curve. And if you look with your eyes, if you observe and you don’t try to do too many numbers about it, you can see that there’s no way that the length of the line that forms the corner isn’t greater than the length of the curve. You can see it. You don’t need to do math to figure this out. It’s no math required. And yet, people are using this as a mean. Math is broken. That’s the rebellion against materialism. That’s the end of materialism. When you use math to try to map the world, there’s a bunch of things that don’t map. That’s true. That’s true. You cannot reduce the world to math. You cannot compress the world to math. You cannot flatten the world to math. That’s the flat world. And I like Jefferson’s comment here. 100% pie is dogma. Yes. Tau is also useful. Exactly. These things are useful. And Father Eric, thank goodness I became a priest. Get away from math. Anything to get away from math. I am so bad at math. It’s comical. And I’m in computers. And yes, I’m in computers because the computers do the math. So I don’t actually have to ever do math. Access to calculators, really. But you can just observe and see that dividing the line that forms the corner is never going to converge on the length of the curve. It will always be too long. I don’t need to do an equation to figure that out. And then of course he does these equations and talks about how you do this with a cylinder and why something that I would have thought was ridiculously obvious and apparently no math people thought of immediately was if you try to do this with a cylinder, that’s what the Schwarz-Lanterns are, if you try to do this with a cylinder, what happens is you use the points to reduce the square reduction is obviously wrong because it reduces to four. But if you do the correct reduction, which is you do points and then you just make more points of straight lines until they’re not straight lines anymore, they’re points. Points don’t exist. They’re four circles don’t exist. There’s all kinds of wacky things in there. That formula works. It gets you very close to pi. When it’s a cylinder, you have to do points and then you have to divide the cylinder. And of course I went, well, yeah, of course, but you’d have to use the same number of divisions of the cylinder up and down as you use points on the top to transcribe the circle. Why this is intuitive to me, I do not know because I do not understand math at all. I can’t multiply and divide in my head for real. But this was obvious to me and apparently to the mathematicians it wasn’t. And so they came up with this goofy formula where you put spikes on things and if all the spikes are pointing up, then it’s a good approximation. And if the spikes ever cross, then it’s a bad approximation. I don’t know. You can watch the video. It’s a little weird. I’m like, really? I just knew that. I don’t know how I knew it. I intuited it and I can’t do math. It’s not a math problem at some point. Right. There’s an intuition that we have about these things. Also an intuition that we have about good and evil. This is why we listen to Sam Harris. He’s right when he says, well, if there were a button you could push that would make things worse or lesser, that would be bad. Okay. I guess definitionally I have to agree, but did you say anything? I’m serious. Did you actually say anything? Because what you said was you could push a button that would make things worse, then pushing that button would be bad. That’s a self-referencing definition. Which is odd for Sam Harris to say because he says religions are all self-referencing definitions. He also makes another interesting mistake. He talks about, well, look, if you were to say that Jesus Christ is not some manifestation of a supernatural being and he didn’t rise from the dead and all that, then they would push back. It’s like, well, yes, but you’re starting from the middle. The reason why they say these things, because they do have reasons, it turns out the Christians do have reasons for making that statement. You can disagree with those reasons, but it’s not unreasonable. It’s not illogical. It’s not irrational. They have logical starting points, reasonable starting points, and rational points to be made, why they believe that. Sam doesn’t mention any of this, of course. He just says, no, they just start there. They don’t start there. This is one of the points. I hate to mention it. It just bothers me. Ken Ham makes this point of all the people in the world. It’s a wonderful video with him somehow getting random. Why did I watch this? I don’t know. It turned out to be wonderful. Ken Ham makes this point. You have to start with the beginning. Creation. Once you make the creation argument, the rest of the arguments kind of follow. Another funny thing that Sam does in the course of this is at one point, he talks about the resurrection of Japan, and he says, it’s a miracle that Japan was resurrected from the end of the war. He actually uses the terms miracle and resurrection. But then when it’s the resurrection of Jesus, he’s like, well, this is ridiculous, it’s all the laws of biology and science and does it? It’s weird because science is pursuing resurrection constantly. We freeze bodies in the hope that we’ll be able to resurrect them. I don’t know why he thinks that the idea of resurrection is anti-science. It most certainly is not. That’s the first problem. That’s an anti-scientific idea. Boy, that’s so not an anti-scientific idea. I don’t even know how to tell you that you’re wrong. At a certain point, it’s like, you’re so wrong, I couldn’t begin to explain to you how wrong you are. You’re just making crazy talk. And he is making crazy talk. And yeah, you missed it because he’s very articulate and he’s very smooth and he’s got a soothing voice and all this enchantment is going on. And fair enough, like whatever, it’s good. I’m okay with that enchantment. The bad part is what he’s enchanting you into, which is ultimately something that will lead to nihilism. Another interesting point sort of in the conversation, like I said, well, before I go there, let me get back to the button. So he talks about at one point, I think it’s an hour in, something like that. Yeah, it’s an hour and six minutes in or so I get the transcript in front of me. So I know this is a little bit of a mess, more of a mess than normal, we’ll say. That’s always a little bit of a mess. So just everyone gets a little cranky or a little dimmer, right? Less satisfied, less creative, less appreciative of their good fortune, right? And this is by his definition a bad thing, right? But less good in all kinds of ways and a little bit less happy, a little bit less intelligent, a little bit less creative. Okay, that would be a bad thing directionally, right? And we don’t know the ultimate negativity, the ultimate positivity. We don’t know just how good human life could ultimately get without any possible residue of improvement. Now, the problem with the directionality argument is that Sam explicitly claims we don’t need to know the perfect to know good better and worse. That’s actually not true at all. It’s not true scientifically. Look up gauge theory, and Sam Harris obviously hasn’t looked up gauge theory, you would realize immediately that his argument is bankrupt. It’s a bankrupt argument. You have to have a standard to measure by, otherwise directionality is meaningless. It’s interesting that the thing he appeals to is perfection. First of all, very unchristian claim in my opinion. Crazy Christians seem to talk about this crazy concept of original sin, which gets recreated all the time, even by the likes of Brett Weinstein who did this in a video probably about a year ago now, which I just found amusing that he invented original sin in his video because he had to explain something that is scientifically unexplainable without imperfection or original sin. So Sam uses this term perfection and says, well, we don’t need perfection to know better and worse. It’s just technically wrong. Like I don’t know what else to say, technically incorrect, scientifically incorrect, rationally logically reasonably incorrect. Just wrong. Wrong in every possible way that thing can be wrong. You actually have to have a standard to measure by, otherwise directionality cannot exist. The concept of directionality doesn’t work unless you have a thing to measure that directionality against. You need a solid area that you are engaged with to measure goodness and badness relative to one another. There’s no, this is good and this is bad relative to one another by themselves because you don’t know if they’re just both equally bad. There’s no way to tell the difference. So Sam is playing on people’s definition. If you actually took gauge theory seriously. And so it’s all these little mistakes that he’s making and all these little tricks that he’s playing on people not deliberately. I don’t think he’s malicious. I don’t think he’s smart enough to be malicious. Sorry, he’s not that bright. He really isn’t. Some of his arguments are so bereft of intelligence. The idea, one of the things, one of the tricks that he actually plays is that he talks about this stuff in terms of, well obviously there’s a good and obviously there’s an evil and therefore we can know the difference. And it’s like, wait a minute. What is the definition of these things? You’re just stating they exist and fair enough. I agree good and evil exist. But where’s your definition? Because we can’t move away from evil until we can at least define it. And this goes back to the perfection problem. And also again, look, I disagree with Peterson on this too. You can’t get to the good by moving away from evil. And that’s obviously observably fantastically incorrect. It’s just wrong. And they do go down the road of invoking, well look, evil for the Buddhists is basically ignorance and oh, that’s in he says Socrates, it’s in Plato I believe. I don’t think so. I haven’t seen any evidence of that on either side. I don’t know where they’re getting this from. I understand Western Buddhism is not Buddhism and that Westerners routinely and rather predictably misunderstand Buddhist principles to an unbelievable degree. They’ve got that Alan Watts Buddhism in them and Alan Watts didn’t understand Buddhism. Not at all, but not very well. I’ve had many discussions with actual people from Asia who grew up in Asia about these sorts of Western Buddhist concepts. And they’re always like, no, dude, that’s not what Buddhists believe. And India too. They’re all like, I don’t know where you’re getting that from, but it ain’t from the tradition I grew up in. Good hint. It’s a good hint that maybe you’re wrong and you’re misunderstanding something. And that’s why you can melt science with Buddhism because well, it’s not Western religion. So fair enough. And Sam at one point explicitly goes into this. He basically lists all the Western religions and says that’s why these are incompatible with science. But this Eastern stuff is not incompatible with science because I don’t know, equality or something. I mean, it’s very equality doctrine based. Another sort of set of points that Sam makes is he sort of believes that there are different types of truths. So he lists scientific truth as a separate type of truth from spiritual truth. And I was just like, really? Like that’s fascinating. Like how are you going to, you know. And he was talking about things in the spirit of science and the spirit, he used the word spirit, and the spirit of medicine. But then again, he says we don’t have that worked out. It’s like, whoa, you’re using the word spirit, dude. What are you doing? And he says we know it’s possible to make progress. It’s like, but is the progress good? I thought we were talking about good and evil and they spend a remarkably little time talking about the definition of good or the definition of evil or even how you discern the directionality. Because that’s what progress is about. You know, I can’t not do this. I hate bringing this up. Hitler was a progressive. I’m sorry. Read the contemporary literature on Hitler. I have. Hitler was a progressive. So was Mussolini. All the fascists were progressives. Every single one of them. Every single one of them. They were all leftist progressives too. Progressivism is a leftist project by design, by default, by definition. Sorry. They were progressives. The problem of progress is the problem of discernment. Progress towards a bad thing is bad progress. Progress towards a good thing is good progress. We need to know the difference. This goes back to that. Perfection. Maybe you don’t need perfection, but maybe you need an ideal. Are ideals perfect? Maybe. I don’t care. You need an ideal to measure against. How are you going to get that ideal? Science going to hand that to you? Go ahead. Go ahead. You think science is going to give you an ideal? Let me know how. I’ll wait here. I’ve heard this my whole life. I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear one person and I’ve had access to some of the smartest people in the world tell me how that works. And they can’t. Reliably, they can’t. Most of them know better than to even try, which is very mysterious. Oh, so you’re appealing to something and you know you can’t define it. That’s interesting. That’s interesting to know. I better keep note of that in my head for the rest of my life. Yes, I did. I will. I’ll bring it up constantly. Oh, I asked you to do the thing you said you could do and you couldn’t do it. That’s all I needed to know. I don’t need more information. I don’t know how smart you are. I don’t know what papers you’ve written. I don’t know what else you’ve done in your life. I just need to know that on that topic you’ve made a claim that you can’t back up. I’m not even saying you’re wrong because you can’t back it up. Sometimes you’re right about claims you can’t back up because you intuit things. You’re correct about things you intuit sometimes. Not all the time. Intuition is not a solution. And that’s the problem. These claims are made. They’re not made well. They’re just thrown out there. And we want to cooperate. We want to believe those people. They’re not incorrect claims necessarily, but often they are. And Sam Harris can kind of fool you. And so Sam makes a, you know, he’s a good guy. And his progress is good. It has to be done ethically. But he still hasn’t defined ethics. He never defines ethics. He just says it exists. And like, I agree, ethics exists. But I don’t agree with Sam’s idea of ethics at all. I already know this. He can’t define it, so I don’t agree with him. He claims this research of psychedelics has come back to us. Okay. That’s categorically false. If he did a search, he’d realize it was false. You could easily make the argument that there is less research into psychedelics, say, in the 80s and 90s than there was prior to that. Sure. There’s a reason why there’s less research. And so they did a bunch of research, found a bunch of bad stuff, and they said, we should stop doing this research. People are committing suicide. No, really. It’s weird too, because some, not all, some of the same people who talk about MK Ultra and Harvard’s involvement with the CIA and a bunch of people who committed suicide, well, they happen to be on LSD, by the way, that happened to be provided by the CIA. And, no, those are release documents, like, definitely happened that way. We’ll also subsequently go, but really, there’s been no research on LSD. I don’t know what you’re talking about. The reason why you have the paper showing that the CIA did this is because they’re research papers. That was part of the research that was being researched on the drug that you say wasn’t being researched. You’ve got a problem in your head. I don’t know what the problem is. I’m not going to call you crazy, but you’ve got sort of a cognitive dissonance going on there, a formative contradiction. Obviously, there was research. Obviously, the research didn’t go well. Obviously, that’s why the research was kind of turned down a notch or two. Not that it was done away with, it wasn’t done away with. Interestingly, I haven’t surveyed a lot of the modern research, or recent research, I should say. It’s a waste of my time to do so. I have surveyed some of it. I surveyed a lot of the 60s and 70s research. It looks identical to the research they’re doing now in terms of outcome. Nothing’s changed. The outcome’s the same. There’s the materialism. The other part of the materialism is to get into this conversation about what’s the worst guy? Sam’s like, well, Jordan, what’s the worst guy? And Jordan goes, Stalin. Yes. Not my pick. But up on the list. Stalin. Sam goes into this fantasy story, as Sam is prone to do, which most people won’t notice. It’s a fantasy story. Joey says, I know how, but I’m not going to tell you. Joey’s like that. He would do that to me. But more or poorly, Joey says, LSD has lots of positive effects on Bigfoot. Yes. It’s the positive effects we need to focus on. I agree. Sam goes into this fantasy story, and the fantasy story is the following. Well, when Joseph, referring to Joseph Stalin, was a little boy, he wasn’t evil. First of all, prove it. That’s my first problem. You just made an assumption, axiomatic or dare I say dogmatic assumption, about a situation that you don’t have any observations of. Peterson agrees, again, bad on Peterson, in my opinion, for whatever that’s worth. At some point he became evil. Maybe. But who cares? Father Eric. So? Yes. Now, if we could, once we noticed he was evil, go in and change his brain, and this is how Sam Harris is talking, change his neurons, change his brain chemistry to make him not evil, but maybe rejigger his memories or whatever, so he’s still him, but he’s not evil. It’s like what? This is ridiculous levels of materialism. This is absurd materialism. So basically the evil is inside of him, and we just have to remove it or exorcise it, maybe. And then once it’s gone, he won’t be evil anymore, and he’ll be grateful that he’s not evil. And I was like, that’s a bold statement. What a bold assumption. So basically he doesn’t understand that some people derive pleasure and happiness from the suffering of others. It’s not accounted for in his idea. Because maybe you remove the only way they can get happiness. I don’t know. I’m not going to make a claim like that. I’m just saying it’s a possibility. So I’m going to claim the possibility that potential exists. And that’s, to me, amazing. And I think you’re right, Father Eric. Sam Harris, in that way he’s talking, believes that man doesn’t exist, that they are just zombies. Because that’s what he’s describing. He’s describing a zombie that can be programmed like a computer, only using neurons, chemicals, and things like that. Obviously absurd. The problem with a thesis like this is that you’ve tried for decades, actually tried for decades. If you want to be horrified, and I’m not recommending this, I’m telling you do not watch anything like this. I saw years ago on PBS, I’m sure there’s other places out there, I’ve done documentaries on this, the history of the lobotomy. Don’t engage with this. It will terrify you, it will horrify you, and you’ll be in the hospital for the rest of your life. However, if you don’t mind being terrified and horrified about such things, wow. When you just learn how tenuous and corruptible the medical establishment was, and you can go, oh, that was back then. And I would go, fake news virus, scamdemic, anybody? That was back then, huh? I don’t think so. People change that fast. Oh, we’ve evolved since the 1930s, that stuff started, maybe the 20s, I forget. I would say, evolution doesn’t work on that scale, you’re just wrong. You just freaking don’t understand what you’re talking about at that point. Medicine’s advancements have been much overstated. I don’t know, Father Eric, nobody should watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest unless they understand the context of the damage it caused to the universe. I read the book too, which is weird, and watched a movie. People misunderstand the message of that whole thing. They see it as the reason why we shut down mental hospitals, is it Ken Keyes and his reprehensible book and movie caused everybody to think, oh, they’re being horribly mistreated, actually. No. And Metallica has a song about that where they keep him tied, it makes him well, he’s getting better, can’t you tell? Yeah, that’s one of the lines in a Metallica song about being in a sanitarium. So, yeah, it’s a hard thing. They’re hard to deal with. And mental institutions get shut down, and now we have more homeless people. Is that what you wanted, more homeless people? Because that’s how you get more homeless people. These are hard problems to solve. But not for Sam, because he’s just going to use magic that we don’t have in the form of science, and apply it to people to remove things like evil, which is just unbelievable. Yeah, it’s unbelievable. A lot of what Sam talks about, and actually Pastor Paul does an excellent job of talking about this in his video, Sam just goes into this fantasy realm of we. So he starts talking about, we would notice that there was a problem on the order of evil within poor Joseph. And that’s sort of amazing. I mean, Sam puts everything on a couple of things. Psychopathy and sadism, those are psychological materialists. Materialist, like, you hear anybody using psychology, they’re materialist. Materialist explanations for evil. And he’s just trying to explain away the spirit of maliciousness. And the other thing he does is he talks about evil in the abstract. Like, oh, it’s just a thing that you can remove from people through these chemicals. And again, it’s like, well, can you? Is that how that works? I don’t know. And it’s interesting too, because Sam says things like religious ideas have agency, but psychological ideas apparently don’t. Scientific ideas apparently don’t. Fake news virus scamdemic anybody. And the irrationality, illogicality, unreasonableness of what went on during that. Doesn’t matter which side you’re on, if there are sides. Wouldn’t matter. Like, those three things existed on the other side from you. That happened. Right? This isn’t a siding issue. And it’s idea of bad brains. Like, I don’t know where Sam gets it from. But he’s saying we sort of notice that Stalin turned evil at some point. He… Who’s the agent there? Where is, we’ll say, the agent that can be looking at young Stalin and can see the evil and can intervene and do the surgery that, whether it’s physical surgery or chemical surgery, to the brain that Sam outlines? Who’s going to lead this effort? Who’s going to be the authority on when he becomes evil? On how the procedure is done? Where is this entity that Sam is talking about? He just says we. As though it’s a foregone conclusion. And again, this fools a lot of people. Like, let’s be fair, it fools a lot of people. It’s a foregone conclusion that this entity exists. That somehow this is going to manifest itself. What is the agent making that decision? What is the agent doing that operation? What is the agent that is able to do that operation? Like, who has the authority to know the parts of the brain, the chemicals, the neurons, and the memories that are creating the evil that Sam describes? He’s using those terms. Not me. He’s talking about memories and the chemicals and the neurons. Not me. He’s doing that. Who has the knowledge, the power, the ability, all three of those things, to create the conditions where that operation would happen and make the decision of when that operation should happen? And make the judgment of the outcome? Or is it just progress to carve up brains randomly like they did with lobotomies? Lobotomies were very progressive. Not to sidetrack, but I’m going to sidetrack anyway. The reason why the Special Olympics exists is because the Kennedys had their daughter lobotomize, because it went horribly wrong, because lobotomies are basically random changes to your brain based on something that was said to be a surgery, but in fact was more like literally sticking a blender, a hand blender into your nose. Or an ice pick, because they did it with ice picks too. No, really. It’s just terrific. That’s where that came from. The guilt of the Kennedy family over having their daughter lobotomize. Just saying. What was the spirit there? The failure of medicine causes a good thing in the world. Like now a bunch of children who would otherwise not have an opportunity have an opportunity as a whole. That’s the whole history behind that. Because of their guilt over destroying their daughter. That’s that progressive medicine that’s doing that surgery on the brain that Sam’s talking about. But who can do that? Sam doesn’t tell you. He doesn’t talk about that. He doesn’t talk about the agent that notices young Stalin and intervenes. About the agent that can do this miraculous operation. At one point Sam starts talking about how evil people are merely unlucky and they didn’t pick their souls. At least he seems to acknowledge the word soul, but clearly he doesn’t. He doesn’t use the term and ignores the implications of using it. He says Stalin to some extent is just unlucky and that’s why he’s evil. Due to a lack of luck. He doesn’t define luck by the way. He doesn’t define unlucky either. He just posits that they exist. I agree luck and unlucky exist, but I don’t agree that that has anything to do with evil. It’s connected to evil in the same way everything else is. You have a choice. You can be evil or you can be good. Or at least you can try to be good. Maybe that’s the best you can do. This is the level of optimism that annoys me. Sam Harris has probably read the Brothers Karamazov. He didn’t get it. This is something I’ve been pondering quite a bit. I actually talked to Bruce about this last night. I’m beginning to believe that not only is forbidden knowledge an important concept, but that people should probably not read books, certain books, by themselves. I had the… This is my Christmas present last year from Ethan. Thank you, Ethan. You’re awesome. I had the pleasure of not reading this book by myself. I read this book in a book club for the first time. It’s not to say I did not do some of the reading on my own. I’m not saying that. I did not read it by myself. I did not read the whole book first. I read it section at a time based on the section that I needed to know for the book club. I read it the day of the book club. I am beginning to think that that is the smartest decision I have ever made in my entire life. I’m just so grateful I did it that way. I did it that way for lots of reasons that don’t seem to have anything to do with forbidden knowledge or trying to absorb a book too quickly or anything like that, but actually just work out that way. Basically, a lot of people have read The Republic. I’m going to do the Plato’s cave thing at some point. I’m just overwhelmed by events. I read the end of the book, the last book club, so we’re done with The Republic. If you want to see those, Texas wisdom community, I’ll try to get you a link to that. The stunning thing about it is that as bad as the misinterpretation of Plato’s cave is, there is a thing that I think is really interesting. I think we can talk about where Plato, he doesn’t like Homer. He doesn’t like poetry because it’s dangerous and it really moves people. The books are made in that text, in book 10, which is the last book for sure. The end of the book, the last few pages, is a story, a fantasy, told at least secondhand about a man who comes back from seeming death. That’s the end of The Republic. I’m just so blown away still by the fact that no one mentions that. The end of The Republic is the end of the text. The end of the book is the end of the text. No one mentions this. This is just a little bit important. A teeny tiny little bit of text. No one mentions this. This is just a teeny weeny bit, and obviously proves that he doesn’t hate poetry or dislike Homer. In making the argument, he backs off of that argument. He says, Homer is dangerous, but he actually says that. I’m not sure if these people are reading to come to any other conclusion. I can only tell you they seem to have a low reading comprehension level. I don’t know what else to say. That’s not in the text, guys. The opposite is, though. You can understand, because of what comes after them, that he is not saying we have to get rid of Homer. That’s not what he’s saying. Why no one tells you this and pretends it’s the opposite, I can only guess at their motivations. There must be a spirit guiding them. Maybe they’re not smart enough to understand that book. By smart enough, you can’t measure intelligence with IQ. IQ is an excellent measure of stupidity or idiocy. A lot of other things are, too, by the way, but it’s a terrible measure of intelligence. I think that’s because intelligence is a funnel. If you’re not intelligent, you can just do less. You have fewer variables that you can manage. Most unintelligent looks similar, because it is similar. You have to boil the world down to something. It’s the most important thing. You have to understand the limits of the basic tasks. The limits of the basic tasks become clear, and they all look pretty much the same. As you go up and add variables, this works in math. You guys actually don’t understand math? You talk about math, but you don’t understand how dimensionality and scaling work. That is because you have a top end of the funnel situation are less clear. What thing does he understand that he self-referenced and defined goodness in both terms of happiness and lack of badness in terms of hitting a button? I don’t think he’s aware that he did that. I’m not sure Peterson is aware that he did that, because I would have thought Peterson would push back and say, Yeah, but you haven’t actually defined goodness or badness, and you haven’t actually defined the opposite of evil. Tell me how you know the direction of evil from the direction of good. That’s the discernment argument. That’s the discernment argument. That’s evident in that conversation that he did with Jordan Peterson. He cannot discern good from evil. He cannot tell you how to discern good from evil. He doesn’t have a mechanism. He says he does, and he repeats it over and over again. But also he doesn’t actually do the trick, as I like to say. He doesn’t perform the operation that he says he can perform. It’s interesting, because Sam makes some good points in here. One of the points he makes is a point I’ve made many, many times. He says, You can’t look at Islam and put it in terms of economics or politics, because these frames do not work to describe the behavior of Islam. That’s correct. But he assumes the solution is get rid of Islam and you’ll get rid of the behavior, leaving you with a pure nature, science, description of all behavior, and a way to rule all behaviors. Miracle indeed. Rousseau lives. He’s resurrected Rousseau. If we just live in a state of pure nature, because science controls nature somehow, allegedly, and it does, problem solved. That’s his big argument right there. That’s his big argument. Pastor Paul does an excellent job pointing out, really this is about control of behavior. If you just tell people things, they’ll behave differently. As a pastor, I can tell you that doesn’t work. Well, that certainly doesn’t work. He’s right about that. But it’s not all bad. He makes some weird claims. At one point he makes a claim that we had a different moral compass in 1945. I find this fascinating because he can’t say what the moral compass was then or what it is now. But he says maybe we have to return to the 1945 moral compass to fix the problem of Islam. That doesn’t make any sense, by the way. Also, if he knew any history at all, which apparently he actually doesn’t know any relevant history, the problem of Islam is not entirely. The problem of Islam’s conflict with the West is the problem of World War I. Period. End of statement. Well documented. There’s books on this. I didn’t make it up. I’m not that smart. I didn’t do the research on all of that. I did a bunch of research on it. Not the core research required to write a book, certainly. This is a real problem for Sam. Maybe we have a moral compass and maybe there’s a moral landscape. And Peterson jumps into Sam’s frame, which I think is a deep mistake, and says, well, maybe there’s a moral landscape. A lot of the descriptions Sam uses for moral landscape, he actually, no word of a lie, invokes aliens. Maybe aliens have access to a bigger peak than the peak we have access to. And if we just climb down and climb back up, wait a minute, Sam, climbed down to find a different peak to climb up so we can go higher? Well, that’s interesting symbolism. That’s an interesting visualization. I wonder where I’ve heard that before. I wonder if there’s a framing that you could get somewhere else other than the moral landscape, which he never defines, by the way, that would say something similar. Wouldn’t that be cool? And this is why I don’t think he understands the Brothers Karamazov, because he doesn’t understand that there’s a better way to think about this moral landscape thing that’s a lot older than you are, that consisted of the thoughts of many, many people who are a lot smarter than you’ll ever be. Sam Harris’s metanarcistic world, no such person exists, talks about everything in relation to him and what he gets out of it, not in relation to what he gives away. And that’s the trick. So when I listen to Sam Harris, I hear arrogance dripping off of every word, like the end of every word to me has a drop of arrogance. Why everybody else doesn’t hear this, I don’t know. When Sam Harris talks about these things, he’s making statements that are true but not useful. And that’s part of the problem. Making statements that are intuitively correct, but can’t be scientifically proven. And he’s not accounting for anything about his relationship to the world in terms of what he’s giving away. And lots of people don’t notice that. They don’t notice, oh, he only relates to the world in terms of what he’s getting from the world, not what he’s giving out to the world. That’s the metanarcism. You could argue that’s plain narcissism. I don’t really care. I’m just having fun with the word meta because I hate it. I hate the word meta. It’s a terrible word. It’s an identification against. There’s no such thing as metaphysics. I can prove that. Words end up by a publisher to sell more books. If you fell for it, I feel bad for you. Look, feel free to hop in and discuss this more. I do have more notes. My notes are just a mess. And there’s just so much here. And it’s interesting too because in the Van der Kley conversation, like, Pastor Paul made this point about asymmetry, right? Like somebody will come to him and they’ll say, if you just give a sermon on this, this person will stop doing whatever it is, cheating on their wife, whatever. And Paul’s always like, okay, but there are flaws that you have. And if I gave a sermon on one of your flaws, would you stop having that flaw? And then they stop and they don’t answer because it’s not symmetrical. They realize immediately, oh, if you gave a talk on something that was near and dear to my heart, that wouldn’t change me at all, probably. But I think it would change somebody else if you did it to them. And that’s not true. The world is deeply asymmetrical. Deeply asymmetrical. And yeah, Bruce, I said last night, definition of nature of man issue. Sam never defines anything. He certainly doesn’t define the nature of man. He doesn’t define his terms. And that’s how he gets away with his trick. It’s his smooth talk. It’s his cohesive, coherent story. It’s leaving out a bunch of important details and pretending like they don’t matter. Doesn’t matter if you have a perfect or an ideal to measure against. It doesn’t matter at all to Sam. I was like, I don’t know, dude, I kind of think it matters. I kind of think it matters a lot. I kind of think that’s the only thing that matters in gauge theory. If you knew any gauge theory, you’d probably realize that maybe, maybe not. Maybe he just breathed past it. I don’t know. All right. Now we’ve got some action. Welcome, Bruce. Hey, Mark. Good to see you, sir. How are you doing? Good. Yeah, I love the Sam Harris talks. We’re on the same beat, you and I, when it comes to these Harris engagements. But just what I was saying, there’s so many things to address. I mean, lack of definition, presupposing some objective moral standard, which what is that standard? Let’s just take the example of we’re going to manipulate one’s brain so that their evil stops. It’s a never ending pit of changing because there’s no objective standard as to what evil is. And so it’s behavioral modification. Behaviors change. They’re not fixed. But there’s an objective standard as to what you should and should not do. But they’re not holding to that. This evil standard would move, would change. If you’re in America 20 years ago, the standard is different than today. If you were doing that work, you’d have a never ending set of parameters that you’ll have to account for when doing these brain manipulations. So now in a certain sense, the lobotomy was simpler because there was predictable-ish outcomes of the lobotomy. Yeah, they were different. They manifest different ways because of different personalities. Basically, people became almost vegetables that could walk. And so in this, I would submit that we’ve been doing this sort of behavioral modification brain manipulation via medication for years. Softly, and it’s easier for people to swallow that pill. But I’ve heard this from many people, not just Harris. I tend to wade into the atheist ghettos of the internet from time to time. And that’s usually the answer. It’s sort of like they shoehorn in a solution. So for the Christian, they would say, well, God’s providence will work this out. He has a plan and he’s sovereign over outcomes. I would say that in a futuristic, well, we’ll have the tech to fix this physically. So that’s their sort of get out of jail free card. It’s science of the gaps argument. And that’s the materialism. I mean, this is what I talk about materialism. It’s neurons or chemicals or whatever. And the interesting thing that you kind of bring up, that Harris brought up and didn’t realize is actually it’s a mistake, was time. Young Joseph Stalin, maybe he wasn’t evil when he was born. I don’t know, by the way. I’m not making that claim. I have some bold claim, man. Like you got to have some cojones on you to make that claim. I have no idea. The guy could have been rotten from the beginning. There’s lots of stories of children that just cruel from day one. Like that happens. Or at least from when their body starts to manifest. And there’s lots of stories about that, like young children who torture animals and stuff like that. But all that aside, the problem of time is not accounted for. The reason why the doctor who did lobotomies got away with it was because actually for the first, I think it was a few months, it might have been months, people got better. When you struck the ice pick up their nose or through their eye, that’s what they did, by the way, people got better. Actually the behavior they were seeking to change actually changed. It seems to have worked. And when you don’t account for time, you can say, you could do a weird experiment, Bruce. Well, this should go into imaginary land. I’m not going to talk about anything that actually happened. Of course not. Let’s just suppose you said we could live in a secular world and that secularity were a real thing and we could just remove religion. Because Sam Harris talks about remove Islam and these people don’t behave like child-killing bombers that take their own lives and lives of children in order to get their agenda across. Even though Peterson points out that’s not true because they’re not the only ones that do it. Sam goes, yeah, but it’s worse when they’re religious. And Peterson goes, well, yeah, but you didn’t solve the problem by removing the religion, now did you? And he doesn’t push that issue, which you should. Let’s just suppose you could live in secularity or live in some objective material reality or some kind of scientific frame. What if it took two or three generations of trying to manifest that before you saw the negative side effects? What if it just took time in that timeframe or beyond the timeframe you’re used to? Let’s suppose it’s three generations, which is beyond the lifespan of one person or right at the edges of the lifespan of one person. What would that look like? I don’t know, man. Maybe what we’re going through now? Maybe? We’re not accounting for time. You know, guys, you’re making these changes and you’re not accounting for the time and what happens. And it’s one of the great points that Jonathan Pujol made to John Vervecki about distributed cognition and the fact that there are not egregores. Egregores is a stupid occult word for spirit. By the way, it doesn’t mean anything else. Honest, I’ve looked into it. It really doesn’t. Occultism is actually a thing I have quite a bit of expertise in. It just means spirit. He said, look, the city communicates with you. And Vervecki says, no, it doesn’t. And Pujol says, if you don’t do something, sometimes they send you a letter, right? Or they issue you a fine or something. That letter takes a long time to get to you because it’s a big organization. It takes time to form thoughts and communicate. Fair enough. I think there’s a good way to think about it. And this stumped Vervecki, by the way, completely stumped him. Because Pujol was right and Vervecki was missing something obvious, by the way. But whatever, we all miss obvious things all the time. I know I do. And I missed a bunch of obvious things that, you know, Pastor Paul pointed out in his video that I didn’t see. You know, I mean, I was listening in the car and whatever. I missed a bunch of stuff. I missed up all the time. This should not be a shock. So we’re not accounting for that time. Like, what time does it take to see the manifestation of, I don’t know, the goodness of an organization like the UN or a change to the climate or right? Because it’s weird, too, because they always apply it asymmetrically. They go, well, we’ve been destroying the climate for years, but you know what? In five years we can have it fixed. It’s like, wait a minute, you’re going to back up 50 years of damage in five years? I don’t know. I don’t know. That claim’s already a little wacky to me. I mean, we’re going to back up right now in 12 years. Everything will be back. Are you saying that there’s only 12 years of momentum in the climate change? That doesn’t even make any sense. You know how big the climate is? Holy cats. It’s also odd considering if you listen to these sorts of people, their time is all they really lean on. And they’ll claim, you know, the Earth is billions of years old and given enough time, things will change radically. But now this politicization of climate change is a rapidly, you know, it’s going to change rapidly. The weather patterns, the Earth’s climate will change, you know, if you just give enough money to the right organizations in short time. And this is one of those things that we intuitively understand that we can’t explain to people very easily. Right. One of the reasons why I knew immediately there were shenanigans going on in the fake news virus scamdemic was because people were making a claim of science while simultaneously making a claim of new and novel. If something is new and novel, you don’t have the observations to do the science. It’s just exactly that simple. I’m sorry. If anybody tells you differently, I promise you they are lying. I can promise you that. They may be lying out of their own ignorance or stupidity. I don’t care. I’m a pragmatist. Pragmatists just do not care your quote, your alleged reasons for things. Right. We look at results. Really, alleged reasons are fantasy. And so they have to be lying by definition. Therefore, shenanigans. I’m not saying it’s malicious. I’m not saying it’s not malicious. I’m not saying there isn’t a spirit driving it. I’m not saying there is a spirit driving it. Intuitively, that’s what you’re picking up on. Logically, I can describe it because I’m me and I just happen to have that particular talent for better or for worse. For worse, by the way, for nothing. We’re talking about this with Sally last night. I don’t know if you were there. No, being able to describe something to somebody and having them not understand it is the most frustrating thing ever. Ever in the whole history of the universe. I despise having this ability. It just drives me nuts. No, I can actually explain it to you logically, reasonably and rationally and you’re still not going to believe me. Thanks. Thanks a lot. It’s double the hurt because you fix the thing, they’re not appreciative of it or they don’t understand it. Right. And then you explain the thing and they don’t understand it. And so both things are just a slap in the face. Whereas if you just fix the thing, can’t describe it, they’ll just reap the benefits of the thing that you fixed. Right. Right. But intuitively, we understand that. We have an intuitive understanding of time. That’s why, and there’s a lot of books on the clock and how bad it is and the sort of measurement of time and how we’re out of cycle with the moon and the seasons and all that because of the clock. And there’s something to that for sure. But yeah, we have an intuitive sense of cycle and time. And we’ve kind of destroyed that. And so that intuitive sense is still there. And so you hear the bad things in Sam Harris’s argument without being able to consciously understand, much less articulate, even if you can consciously understand exactly what’s wrong with what he’s saying. And that’s why some people are just bothered by him. Right. Right. And so you’re not going to be able to understand that. You’re not going to be able to understand that. You’re not going to be able to understand that. You’re not going to be able to understand that. And that’s why some people are just bothered by him. Right. Like me, I’m just bothered by him. Now I just happen to be able to rip apart most of his arguments about four seconds because I’m used to them. I’ve heard them for years. He’s not the first, second or third person to make any ridiculous claims. And there were a lot of people at MIT and Northeastern University and Boston University that I used to talk to who would make these idiotic claims long before Sam Harris was the thing. And I’d get into it with them. And that’s how I honed my skills. Like I spent years and years and years talking about this stuff when I was younger. I never suspected that it would still be an issue years on because like, duh. You’re Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. But that’s not how the world works. You’re Matt Damon and you’ve read the books and you can tell them and they’re spending their money on their degree. And now they’re in positions of influence like Sam Harris. Great scene, by the way. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it’s great. Yeah. You like apples? How do you like them? Oh, yeah. And the thing is, like, people who didn’t live there don’t realize that is the most accurate portrayal of Farfair, Cambridge and Boston that you’re ever going to see on screen, man. Especially like that time period. Because they lived, Matt Damon grew up in Cambridge. Like he probably did what I did. I got Harvard Square a lot and talked to these monkeys about all this stuff and like found out like, wow, these guys are just following this wacky pattern. And, you know, it was funny because a couple of years ago in Clubhouse, I got told like you got to stop talking about how bad Harvard University is. Nobody, you know, nobody can resonate with that. And I’m like, how do you like me now? Right. How do you like them apples? How do you like them apples? How’s that working out? You’re not believing me who lived there and talked to those people all I used to go down to Harvard Square six days a week. I would hang out there six days a week. I would walk down there. Oh, yeah. No, it was well, I mean, I learned a lot, man. Like I, I owe a lot to my time in Boston for sure. And being able to have access to the people I had access to and the schools I had access to, I audited courses at Harvard and MIT. Not a lot of them, but like I did, like I understand how this stuff works. I talked to those people. We did meetings with them, you know, parties, all kinds of things like, man, it’s, you know, I don’t even know all the things I learned. Right. Yeah, those those institutions used to have maybe maybe some of them still do. Even though they’re even though they’re largely co-opted, the people that go there are interested in discourse, ideas and getting things, you know, some of them were. They were. Now it doesn’t seem like that. Now, now it is dogma. Right. Which, which is the argument I was making earlier. I posted in the comments. I find it wholly hilarious that someone like Sam Harris would say dogma only exists in religion. Well, wait a second. No dogma. That is true. But you you are in a religion, Sam Harris. I hate to break it to you. Which master are you serving? And you are spouting and adopting the dogma of your religion. Right. Well, if you believe you do not have a religion, one will be provided to you without your knowledge or consent. And somebody somebody on Twitter today said, I quoted you on that recently to somebody. And I’m like, good, you should. Everybody should tell everybody that all the time. Because that’s really the argument. The argument is, is religion optional? And my argument is there’s no effing way that religion is even remotely optional. It is it is something that is older and bigger and smarter by a distributed cognition than we are. That is something like working out the moral landscape, right? The the the things that involve ethics and morality. That’s what religion is. And that if you’re not doing that, you’re in the scientific frame. But the scientific frame does not cross over into the moral frame. It just cannot do that. It was not designed to do that. No one before 1980 even believed that was possible. Like it was explicit that science doesn’t do these things. You know, Einstein, God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Why would he say that? This is one of the greatest scientists of all time. Although I would argue actually ruin science. Different argument, you know, by by most people’s understanding. And there he is talking about God not playing dice with the universe. Well, what’s that about? Well, because back then the ratio of people who believed in God who were physicists and the ratio of people who believed in God who weren’t physicists was actually the same. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody tells you that. Nobody happens to mention that. But that’s actually true. And so it’s like, wait a minute, what’s going on here? Yeah. Well, there was no difference before. So why is there a difference now? Like, why? Why does Sam think he has some mystical, magical, objective material reality to rely on where he can make these absurd claims? And they are absurd claims. Yeah. Peter Jones has this great lecture series that’s called Only Two Religions. It came out in 2012, although I think the book predates it. But the lecture series was produced at least released I think in 2012, which predates the Peterson rise. But he’s talking about the same things Peterson ended up rising to discuss. And basically the breakdown of the culture and relativism and postmodernism. It’s excellent. It’s put up by Ligonier. You know, it’s Christian. I think even just anyone that’s interested in this meaning crisis or this sort of jockeying for religion, we should watch it. It’s long, but you could get some of it just in clips on YouTube. But Peter Jones is a wonderful professor and theologian. But again, what he basically says is now this is the Christian frame. But he’s saying there’s two paths, Christ and not Christ. There’s Christianity and paganism, two religions. And he talks about the rise of paganism again, and that it never really went away. But you just exchange some of the language and the way that it’s used today. But I think that’s absolutely accurate. I think you’re seeing that manifest in the Harris sphere. Whatever to talk about. They are wholly religious and their sentiments are religious. At a certain point, science was. So, for instance, you come to science as a Christian or as a believer, as most people did, to discover creation for what it is and not really make a moral claim. The information is there for those to do with what they will with the claims, not a moral claim, but with the data. At this point, data is almost secondary. And so people are doing a thing where they have a moral claim and then they go find the data to attempt to support their moral claim. It’s cherry picking. Yeah. Well, that’s the age of gnosis is what I’m calling it on Twitter. Right. Is like the knowledge is the highest value. And in fact, Sam Harris actually says this. So VanderKlai has a bunch of clips from Harris talking with Eric Weinstein on Trigonometry. And I haven’t seen that conversation. I’m not going to my two least favorite people to listen to in the whole world. Right. On top of Constantine Kitson, who, you know, doesn’t also doesn’t care about dead babies in the basement. Right. So like, yeah, that’s a three for for me. I’m out. But one of the things they’re actually talking about there is this this whole idea around. Can you remove like the religion from the religious people? Right. They’re they’re they’re sort of talking about that. They’re talking about, well, you know, Islam is a problem because of this, that and the other thing. Right. And you can’t. And that’s where he says like one of the places he says you can’t fit their behavior in the frame of economics or politics. It doesn’t it doesn’t fit, which, you know, is correct. Like Sam’s correct about that. But he’s still not addressing why using children as shields is wrong, for example, or why killing for children to kill a bunch of soldiers is wrong. Like he just doesn’t never addresses those issues. And he never addresses the issues of right and wrong. Like, does it will have a right to exist? Right. Like, OK. You know, he rejects Brett and not Brett. Eric’s Eric’s framing, which I found interesting. Yeah, I just reject your framing. Why? He doesn’t justify it. Right. There’s no justification in any of the things that he’s actually talking about. He never bothers to do the hard work. And I think that’s really the issue. Like, I don’t think that Sam can do the hard work. I don’t think he’s capable of it. And that’s not a knock on him. I don’t think anyone is. And that’s why we have religion, which is best understood as distributed cognition through time of, you know, a tradition that not only brings us knowledge, but also wisdom. Right. Like, there’s no amount of knowledge that’s going to tell you right from wrong. There’s no amount of knowledge that’s going to give you good from bad. It’s just not in the knowledge. And we worship knowledge. I mean, he invokes epistemology as one of his big things. He’s like, well, there’s an epistemological truth to consciousness. And he basically and Pastor Paul points this out. He basically pulls a Rousseau. I think therefore I am. And it’s like, I get your argument, Sam, but also it’s not a new argument. And it’s pretty banal argument. And it was made by many people. Right. Rousseau may be the most famous. Right. But also. You’re not defining consciousness. You’re not defining thinking. You’re not defining am like like. And where did all and even if you do like, let’s suppose you have definitions for all of that, I’ll just grant you definitions for all of that. Where did that come from? Because that’s the question everybody avoid. Like I said before, we could know that poor young Joseph Stalin was evil at a certain became evil at a certain point. And then why he’s evil and then exercise that from his from his brain, right, from his consciousness, from his memories, from his brain chemicals is like, who’s the we in this equation? This is benefit. I know. Who is the we? It’s a good question. It’s himself. It’s not. There isn’t a we. Right. And it’s not that he’s using that term. It’s himself. Right. Right. You know, it makes him feel better or more authoritative. And it also what that technique does, and you’ll see it a lot. People use that a lot in all conversations. They do things like we agree with it. It’s a way to deflect. Right. So you don’t have to take on the argument and it’s full. Right. Who’s doing who’s doing the agreement? We not me. Oh, we. That’s a different letter. That’s a W. That’s an M. And ironically, of course, it’s the W flipped upside down. It’s perfect. Yeah. It’s perfect. Right. I don’t think these things are coincidences somehow. It just seems a little weird to me. Yeah. People I made that comment in the comments earlier. He’s saying we a lot, unless he’s speaking French, he means himself. Exactly. OK. So I really can’t stand that. I don’t like it when people make claims, assertions, and then they use sort of a consensus support for their assertion so they don’t have to take on the take on the critic. Well, I’ll just refer it to the week. Well, it is. It is. You’re right. I think I think the right word here is responsibility. Right. So lack of responsibility for the things you’re saying. Yeah. Things you’re talking about. You’re not claiming to be an authority, but you’re claiming authority. Right. And it’s like, what do you mean? You’re not claiming to be an authority, but you’re also claiming authority. What you’re saying, this is true. Yeah. But you’re saying that it’s the we that makes it true, not not my statement that it’s true. So you’re not taking the responsibility. You’re making an authoritative claim, but claiming that you’re not the authority, that there’s some mystical consensus authority instead. It’s a very clever trick. Like, I get it. It’s very hard to see. I understand that. I don’t blame anybody for being fooled by this charlatan, but he’s a charlatan. At the end of the day, he’s no better than a snake oil salesman from the early 1900s. No better at all. Absolutely. Yes. It goes down easy because there’s so many people in the West, especially in the United States, which is his context. I mean, I’m sure he has worldwide appeal to some extent, but he’s largely United States. People are grinding axes because they’ve grown up in whatever their cultural position. And people want answers, right? They want easy answers to these difficult questions. And look, and this is where Pastor Paul and I have big disagreements to the video. I think it was yesterday, a 13 minute video, which was an excellent video. And I left some comments on it, but I think there are people that don’t have a framework for dealing with these things. Sam Harris comes along, gives him his ridiculous framework. Doesn’t sound ridiculous. It’s very hard to see why it’s ridiculous because these are hard things. Right. Right. And then they glom on to Sam Harris because the religious answer is is too complicated for them and they don’t have access to the language. Mills here says we is me. Nailed it. So there you go. Yeah, you go, Bruce. The scandal of it. The scandal of it is that Harrison Harris has the frame, has the religious frame, and he’s using it in an evil way. And these people are glomming on when maybe they don’t have a frame. I don’t know that he has. I mean, like I said, at one point, he’s actually saying the resurrection Jesus Christ is ridiculous. There’s no way it goes against science, which it’s so absurd. It absolutely does not. That’s the funny part is it doesn’t even do that, dude. You’re just making up stuff. But then he goes, the resurrection and he uses the word resurrection. Well, that’s what I mean by has a frame. Japan is a miracle. And I’m like, then why is the resurrection of Jesus Christ not a miracle? Like, all you’re doing is substituting object Jesus for object Japan, dude. Like at some point you haven’t said anything different. And we’re real close to that point. We’ve got like a one word difference in your statement. Why is one outrageous and one OK with you? It’s stunning to me when I heard that. I’m just like, but you’ve got to be kidding me. Yeah, that’s what I mean, though. He has the frame like he’s using terms resurrection. He’s understanding the difficulty there. You use the word spirit. I’m like, how are you invoking any girl consciousness? And you can’t define consciousness. I have a better definition of spirit than you have of consciousness, buddy. What are you going to do with that? Nobody’s ever going to define that. No, it’s not. No, consciousness is just the scientific word to avoid saying the word soul. That’s really all it is. Exactly. That’s all it is. It’s just the secularization that falls apart immediately, which it presupposes the soul immediately. It presupposes a deity. It presupposes the creation of all of those things. But they’re able to kind of like sidestep, get away and use new terms. But do you see the flattening of the world? Like this is Ken Ham’s actual good point. His solution is retarded. But whatever. He’s got a good point. You flatten the world by starting in the middle at the point of your consciousness, right? At the point of your awareness, at the point of your understanding of your own being. And then nothing came before. It was just always the way it was. And so now you’ve got universality, you’ve got individuality, and you’ve got the materialism because the material is already there. And that’s the middle out thinking. You started in the middle of the story. You’ve ignored creation entirely. You’ve just said, well, creation is hard because it’s outside of us. Because creation is meta-being. Technically, technically, actually, there’s a good usage of the term meta. All the things outside of being are creation, right? In fact, everything outside of being is creation. And so it’s meta-being. That’s what creation is. I love it. I’m so happy. Now I’ve found a use for the word. Finally, that reprehensible word has a positive use. And that’s what people aren’t accounting for because it’s hard. It’s hard to know that you’re not alone and you can’t be alone in some sense. You can’t survive alone, right? Like if these things weren’t here when you were born, like your parents, I don’t know, bear you and raise you, then you wouldn’t exist. And it’s like, well, but I’m an individual. I didn’t need all that. It’s like, I don’t know what to tell you. I mean, I get that Rousseau wrote a story, but also even he knew it was a bullshit story about just leaving babies in the woods and they’d be fine. That’s not how that works. Right. It’s insane. They’ll get eaten by the wolves. I’m sorry. That’s what happens. But it is funny you bring that up because people do this hyper individualism. We can be on our own. Right. I’m not going to go the sort of there’s a collectivism, communistic route of like, hey, you’ve done anything on your own. That I think is missing the mark. But in a certain sense, just the very nature of your birth requiring a human, a woman to birth you disproves that idea that you can be an individual. Well, but the implications, right? The implications of what you’re talking about. That’s what people are avoiding. Right. Because ultimately what everybody’s avoiding is what is the nature of reality and what is my role in it? And the reason why they’re avoiding that, I think I did this wonderful video called what why why have a monastery and and the reason why is because they don’t understand hierarchy and the advantages of being in a hierarchy. There are advantages to understanding that you have a role to play, that your impact matters, that your being that your soul that your existence has a telos and a purpose and has an impact on the world around you and not just the world around you, but also on the people or persons around you. And that that impact is vitally important. And the problem is when we don’t understand hierarchy, we lose the contrast to see. And when we can’t see, we lose discernment. And when we can’t discern the idea that we have to pay attention to good and evil becomes horrific to us. I can’t see good and evil. Like I, you know, who am I to judge if. Palestine is an open air prison. It’s like, well, first of all, that doesn’t make any sense. But we’ll just set that aside and say, that’s a hard problem. Who am I to judge somebody else’s feelings about their gender? It’s like, well, I’m the person that has to put up with you in this world. That’s who I am to judge. All right. I your impression of yourself has an impact on everybody around you. And even people who aren’t immediately known to you. They don’t see themselves when they make those statements. You’re judging the judge or now. Right. Exactly. So what have you done? The same thing that you’re nobody is going around not making value statements and in evaluating. And also nobody is in these cases, nobody’s acknowledging the origin of their desires. They just assume their desires are mustered up out of their own wants. Right. But it’s not. Why do you desire what you desire? Well, and the and the desires are true and that the desires have primacy because you know them. So the age of gnosis again. Right. Right. You know your desires, which you certainly do not, by the way, but whatever. Or at least you almost never understand your desires or know your desires fully. And so that has primacy over everything that I don’t know. Right. Which is yeah, you can’t right. You can’t. It’s a good point. Right. You can’t say who are you to judge because that is a judgment in and of itself. And now we’re we’re saying a judgment is going to happen because judgment is required for action. I have three videos on this. Right. Three live streams on this. Right. One on discernment, one on judgment and one on action. And then we see that the other way around. Right. We see somebody’s action. We infer their judgment and therefore infer their discernment. That’s what we make all the mistakes about how the world works. It must be political. It must be economic. Right. Political and economic frames are wrong, by the way, automatically, just instantly wrong. But we don’t realize when we do it. Right. When they do it. Framing for political. There’s a framing, but it’s not ultimate. It’s it’s it’s not even it’s not even that it’s not ultimate. It’s a very bad map. You can use politics to understand a vote. Because that’s what it’s for. You can’t use politics to understand why somebody did something. Now, you can use they’re trying to get votes to understand some of their behavior, some of the time. But that’s not political framing. That’s vote framing. Right. Right. That’s an assumption on their part about what power is and how to get. Yeah. So that’s why people give the postmodern credit that they don’t deserve any credit. They’re evil. Don’t listen to them. Well, it’s funny. The Islam thing that Harris brings up because Islam only works politically. Actually, it’s a it’s a political system. Islam. It’s right. Right. If you were to remove Islam. Well, first of all, people were already like first Islam didn’t arise out of nothing. Right. A heretical group coming out of Jewish leaders and Christian heretics. But the reason why it takes hold is they make use of politics to do a lot of the work. But that’s that’s kind of the the funny nature of that that claim. Because how are you going to get away from that? This is politics as a frame. It’s it isn’t an ultimate frame, but it’s a it’s it’s unavoidable. Right. People are going to get political in some sense. Well, you can always put something in a political frame, but that’s that’s because you can put anything in any frame. Like you can put you can put you can put high in the math frame of a square. Come up with a Schwartz lantern and realize that that doesn’t work. You can do it, but it doesn’t actually function in the world. And so that’s the fact that you can put something in a frame doesn’t mean it’s useful or good. And that’s where or good like two things, not one thing, two things. Right. It might be useful and bad. Right. It might be not useful and good. That could happen. Right. Or it might be not useful and bad. And so when you start doing the math on the probabilities, the probability that something is useful and good is small. Period. End of statement. And that’s what that’s why it’s hard. I think Peterson and Harris want to talk about let’s go away from evil because we can identify evil. But then, of course, they fail utterly to identify evil. That was a funny conversation. Like, can we agree on evil? And it’s like, I don’t know. You can’t even define evil. Either of you independently, much less agree on it. Like that would be a step further. Right. So Peterson doesn’t define evil in that talk at all. They don’t define it. And the closest they come is Harris asks Peterson, like, who’s, you know, if you had to pick one person to be evil, who would it be? And he says, Stalin. And like, fair enough. Like, I’m I’m mostly there. Like I said, he’s not my top pick. I might pick Mao. Yeah. Right. But whatever. I don’t like I don’t actually believe there’s a hierarchy of evil in that sense. Yeah. Which is not to say I don’t believe there isn’t more evil and less evil. Because I do. But like, I don’t believe in a hierarchy of evil. I think that’s a suspect idea. I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just saying I got questions about this. I mean, it’s it’s somewhat a consequence to play the numbers game. Really? I mean, that’s kind of what they’re doing. Right. Right. Yeah. Let’s play the numbers game. Yeah. I don’t like to play that game. Well, that’s Sam Harris moral math. That’s what I call it. Sure. And and that’s the problem is that moral math is a dangerous game. Absolutely. And and you can’t you shouldn’t go down that road because once it’s 40 babies and the other side crosses 41 babies, you’re screwed. And and there’s a bigger problem because it’s like, well, OK, let’s suppose that’s true. Like, let’s let’s suppose we can play that game. We can play the how many babies game. Well, how many humans, how many adults, how many adults equals one baby? Because because you have to do that now. You have no choice. And it’s like, well, now that’s so now if we kill 100 people, does that equal one baby? And then we kill 400 people, does that equal 40 babies? Like, what are you doing at what age? Are 10 year olds, 16 year olds? I wasn’t even going to go there. Right. And then there’s the other problem of what’s a baby. Right. It was a person. And what’s the where’s the value of a person? Well, I think that that was what I liked about your statement. You know, I think Father Eric gets into this, too. Like these guys cannot define humanity like they don’t know what a person is. And so they can’t they don’t know what man is. They don’t know what evil is. They don’t. But the thing is, if you can’t define a person, the idea of morality is not happening. They first have to define a person. You can’t define a person. You can’t define their nature. Both of those problems. Both of those problems. Yeah. Anyway, Mark, it’s been awesome talking to you. I love talking to you. It’s great. So I got to get rolling now. All right, Bruce. Well, it’s a pleasure. I’m glad you jumped on. Thank you so much. See you. Oh, I love Bruce. Bruce is great. We had a long convo last night about all this. He wanted to know if it was worth watching the watching the two hours and 16 minutes or whatever it is of Peterson and Harris. Somebody else wants to jump in. Links pinned in on Navigating Patterns YouTube channel. Feel free to jump in on on StreamYard here and give me your thoughts or questions or whatever. I just there’s so much in this talk. I have so many notes of like three pages of notes. I couldn’t possibly go through them all. But, you know, in that way, it was a rich conversation. But in other ways, it was a terrible conversation. And it’s interesting, too, because there’s a lot of there’s a lot of sort of interesting conversations out there in the Peterson sphere, as I like to call it. We’re not stuck in some corner. Nobody puts baby in a corner. We’re in the Peterson sphere and. A lot of these conversations aren’t dealing with what Peterson struggling with explicitly because. A lot of these conversations are already explicitly Christian in nature. And because they’re already explicitly Christian in nature, they they they don’t need. The. They don’t need to have these moral discussions. The morality is already assumed or at least. Assumed closely enough. That they don’t need to get into that will say the details of it right. And. And that means that, you know, the stuff that Peterson sort of. Struggling with is stuff that would be taken for granted by, say, Pastor Paul VanderKlay or hopefully Father Eric or something. They just don’t have that requirement of engaging with this stuff in that way, because they already have a solution to some extent. And. You know, it makes sense, but at some point, everyone’s talking past everyone else. Right. And if you want to see. A good conversation. The convivium talks are out. I went to the convivium retreat. Which is what we think it really was not a conference that Ted put on in Arkansas. It was wonderful. Jess was there. Jess is a job expert. Wonderful person. If you haven’t heard just talk, you should hear Jess talk. This is a great talk. Feel free to engage with that. I think in a way it’s relevant because. When you talk about poetry. And this sort of comes up, Ted brings it up in this talk. You’re talking about. What emotions, what desires drive a person. And it’s that poetic engagement is what I call it with or poetic way of informing the world. That is so important to. Understand. The world. And one of the things I’ve been toying with is the missing piece is really. And again, this is at the end of the Republic in order to understand the world. You need a story. And a story is a poetic way of informing the world. Not only so that the world makes sense is cohesive and coherent to you. But also that you fit in the world. Now that doesn’t mean that you are a character in every story you hear. I’m not saying that saying that. Your relationship to that story. Is something that you understand. So, for example, if you engage with some mythic poem about the siege of Troy. Maybe you realize you’re not one of the heroes that goes to Troy. And you don’t have to be because some people stay home and take care of the home front. Right. So you can relate to it that way. Even though you’re not in it per se. Right. You’re not in the action. We’ll say there’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. Like the reason why they go to Troy to some extent is to protect the homeland. Right. And it’s vitally important from my perspective that we understand that there is a poetic way of informing the world. And that that is the way that we understand things like ethics and morality. That that story is the way that we relate to the world. And that we have to relate to the world. And that it’s not arbitrary. And that people are not just the same. It’s not arbitrary. And that people are supposed to be able to engage in a cooperation with one another through time. In a way that advances people. And we are not able to work that out for ourselves by ourselves on our own. We need a distributed cognition through time that has many ways to relate to it in order to do that. Some of those ways might be iconography. Some of those ways might be tradition. Some of those ways might be liturgy, which are not the same thing, but are all connected perhaps. Some of those ways might be by having common texts. I don’t know what the most read book in the world is necessarily, but I have it on good authority that we do know what it is. And there might be a reason for that. And so even if you’re an age of gnosis, knowledge is the highest value, knowledge is going to save the world. If everybody knew what I knew, they’d believe what I believe sort of a thing. Well, you really have one way to go with that either. So like I get the argument, but also your argument. So what common knowledge can we all adhere to? William Brant, Spartan’s good, Athenian’s bad. Boy, that’s backwards. No, I mean, look, the difference between Athens and Sparta is just to show there’s different modes of cooperation. And they have different cost benefit tradeoffs, right? Everything is a tradeoff. William Trojan War equals Vietnam. I don’t think so. Herodotus East versus West. I don’t know. I don’t like these binaries, man. I think there’s always a third way, a third way of understanding, a third way of engaging. And yeah, hello says this live stream is fire. Thank you. And what happened to the guest? Bruce had to go. He’s got like a family and stuff. I don’t know why. Sounds terrible to me, but some people have these things, these family things, obligations. Tom and my bloke in England there is off having dinner with his vicar or something. Crazy people. What’s more important than this? William Brant, Sea People’s ahoy matey. The Sea People’s mystery is a good one. Yeah. When we when Sam Harris deigns to speak about morality and then clearly shows his ignorance on the subject and many people don’t notice, it does bother people who do notice or people who intuitively have a sense that what he’s saying is bunk. So I think that’s important to address and I don’t think anybody’s really addressing that, we’ll say properly. And that’s the problem is that a lot of people either have a sense that he’s right because it’s an easy answer. That’s my opinion. I can’t necessarily prove that right or that he’s wrong because they don’t know why. It doesn’t feel right to them. Or Pastor Paul, like, well, he says this and obviously that’s not true. And he makes some interesting points. I don’t think he makes his case very well. Don’t think he’s very good at making his case. So William Brant, I often can’t catch you live. I know that’s why I did this sort of mid afternoon or early afternoon live stream for people who can’t catch me live, especially our European viewers. Hopefully I have a few of those. Maybe the definition of gnosis would be helpful for sifting the different kinds of knowing. Well, I don’t think anything’s helpful for sifting the different kinds of knowing. So there is a video. Of course, I have a video on this on types of knowing. I think there’s really actually only two types of knowing. I have my reasons for that. You’ll have to watch that video. But basically, at the end of the day, what I think is important is what somebody like John Vervecki is describing is very clearly in my mind information. He’s not describing knowledge at all. I don’t think we store knowledge in our memory. I think that’s foolish. Obviously, knowledge changes over time, and therefore it’s not a matter of memory. If you want to see my Knowledge Engine video, it’s right here. I’ll post a link. Of course, I won’t spell knowledge right because I’m typing too fast. Look, there’s a usefulness in understanding in the age of gnosis where knowledge, epistemology, is your highest value. And Sam Harris states this explicitly. Oh, we can use epistemology and consciousness to solve these problems. Of course, he doesn’t do the trick again, but he just states that axiomatically. Who’s going to make the claim that the knowledge is correct or true? He skips over the truth claim. He skips over the idea of epistemology or knowledge entirely and just states that it exists. This is obviously correct. Epistemology is a thing. You haven’t said anything, though. Like, stating that epistemology is a thing, you’re not really saying much there. Like, okay, we can know. Knowledge has existence. Fantastic. What is the quality of that knowledge? If I know 40 babies were killed or if I don’t know 40 babies are killed, is that good or bad? These are not straightforward questions to answer. I could argue either way on that, something like that, anything like that, in fact. People don’t account for that. Because they’re not accounting for goodness. They’re saying we can know good by knowing the opposite of evil. Evil doesn’t have an opposite. It doesn’t have an opposite. There might be many things that counteract evil. I don’t know. But it doesn’t have an opposite. There’s no single thing that you can point to that says this counteracts evil. We also can’t define the worst evil. This is a trick Sam Harris uses all the time. We can know the worst evil. No, you can’t. I know for a fact, mathematically provable, by the way, which is just ironic, that you can’t actually define the worst evil. It’s not possible. It’s the problem of infinity. You can always add one worst thing and make it more evil. And so you can’t define the worst evil. And so his system doesn’t work the way he describes it. And again, some people will notice that and most people will not notice that. They slide right past the fact that his definition doesn’t make any sense because it’s wrong. It’s just wrong. And nobody wants to believe somebody else is wrong, especially not somebody who appears as articulate as Sam Harris. But a lot of what he says is just factually incorrect. His whole idea of moral landscape is stupid. It’s just dumb. It doesn’t make any sense. These peaks. Who’s measuring these peaks? How do you know one peak is higher than another? What? How far do you have to descend? Is every descent worth it? Is descent the only way to get up to another peak? Like, I got questions. Right. Like, I understand the analogy here. I understand that it’s a metaphor or whatever. But also sounds like a myth. The myth of the moral landscape. Now, I’m a fan of myth. I don’t have a problem with this. I’m sure Sam would like just freak out if you said that to him because he doesn’t seem to be a fan of myth. Like, a myth is something that’s not true. Yeah, the moral landscape isn’t true either, dude. I don’t want to tell you. It’s a ridiculous formulation. And I think a lot of this comes from this Plato’s cave misunderstanding. Nobody understands Plato’s cave. I don’t know why, but like, I don’t know what book they read. Hello. Evil is putting anything above God. Maybe. That might be one form. There might be other forms. Joey, poetic knowing. Well, originally it was the poetic form of knowing. But we revise it to poetic way of informing. It leads to one of two types of knowledge, by the way. That’s what the slide says anyway. I’m sticking to it. I got to do more slides. We’ve got more models that I could do slides on. But doing slides is hard just to let you know. And I think that’s part of the problem again is that Sam Harris gives you an easy answer to something. It is very hard. And it’s hard because morality is wrapped up in everything we do by definition. And so we really need an easy answer because, man, thinking about something in terms of everything we do is exhausting. Just considering that we’d have to think about something in terms of everything we do is exhausting. And that’s why I think there’s shortcuts for that. And maybe those shortcuts are basically what we’ll say a well put together religion gives you. And I will highlight Joey’s comment. Plato’s cave would have been pretty sweet if it had a PS5 and Wi-Fi. That could be true. Fire shadows are just so low res. Joey is the best materialist that I’ve ever met. And I mean that dead seriously by far. That is all true. And no one accounts for that. I’m talking about Plato’s silly cave. They don’t account for the Wi-Fi and low res shadows. You think they would. They’re all wrapped up in scientific accuracy and precision. And yet shadows are low res. And ironically, that is kind of the point that’s made by Plato’s cave, which is just funny. I’ll get that video out someday, I promise. It just takes a lot of research and holidays and lawsuits. There’s all kinds of things going on over here. Scrambling to find income is nuts, nuts things. I think it’s really hard for us to understand the attraction or repulsion of Sam Harris. Because basically, at the end of the day, Sam doesn’t know what’s moving him. And he doesn’t know what’s moving others. And he needs to know so that he can control it. And that’s the point that Pastor Paul made excellently in his video that I pasted earlier. And so he needs that level of control to do away with something that he perceives as evil. And it’s easy to miss that in the conversation Peterson has with Harris, that they do not resolve good and evil or an agreement on what evil is. They don’t seem to resolve that. It’s surprising to me that that is the title. I don’t think they’re agreeing on evil, other than to say Joseph Stalin. What is it? And this is the question that’s left unanswered by Sam Harris’ little story about being able to manipulate brain chemistry and neurons and memories. This is what’s missing. When did he become evil? Because it’s a good question. That’s a much harder question to answer from my limited understanding of the history than when did Hitler become evil. Because that’s actually a really interesting question. Because in the beginning Hitler saved Germany. Germany wasn’t going to be a country. It wasn’t going to exist anymore. For all intents and purposes, and I mean this technically, Hitler pulled off a miracle in saving Germany from the evils, and they were evils, of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. That actually happened. You can go look all this up. I did. You can. It’s not hard. It’s painful. It’s somewhat horrific. I mean you hear why Woodrow Wilson quit the League of Nations, which was basically over that. You hear the unfair treatment of Germany in the treaty negotiations and how Woodrow Wilson and others tried to help Germany, and France was intransigent in their enacting of punishment. You hear some of the numbers thrown around, like $3 trillion, which is a hell of a lot of wealth, more than Germany could ever have had, or so it would seem. Then you see the miracle of a country going from one that no one believes is going to be around in five years to the most technologically advanced country on the planet. Germany became so technologically advanced that we are still living off the legacy of German technology to this day. I would argue, except for maybe the transistor, and only maybe, because I don’t actually know all the history on that, we haven’t surpassed any of the technological innovations of German ingenuity from that time. You can say, oh, they ramped it up to make war. Yeah, maybe. But also, it’s important to know that that happened. It’s understandable why there was a spirit of following along with Hitler and his diabolical plans. It’s important to know that there was a time when he did much good in the world, and that we are still benefiting from that good that manifested as the result of his rise to power, in a time when no one thought Germany was going to survive. I think even Churchill wrote about this. Germany wasn’t going to be around in five years at all as a country. It was just going to cease to exist. They didn’t have enough food, like actually enough food. And so to save them from that, from the jaws of destruction in that way, pretty impressive. You can get on the cover of Time magazine for nothing. You can get on the cover of Time magazine for being evil. So the question is, when did he stray into being evil, doing bad things, going from saving a country to destroying a people? And are those two things intertwined in some way that we can’t appreciate or understand? I don’t know. For my part, I still think that’s unfolding. Like, I don’t think we understand the American Civil War because it’s too far back in some sense, but also because the unfolding of those events hasn’t occurred yet. So I don’t think World War I and World War II have unfolded yet either. I think they’re still unfolding. And I know that the anadromist, Bern Power, in his How We Got Here series, which is an excellent series, although it’s really long, it’s really long, he talks about sort of the 60s as a response to the trauma of World War II, right, which still hasn’t worked out. I’m more or less on board with some of that, but I think that all of the results of even World War II and even World War I haven’t worked out yet. And you can look around in the U.S. today and say, well, the Civil War really hasn’t resolved either. Yeah, the U.S. Civil War probably hasn’t resolved either. I talked to Southerners who are still like, well, you know, we had all the military academies, and that’s why we had better military capability, which is technically correct. And I think there’s a great deal of confusion over that war and why it was fought and what it meant. And we fought this over slavery is obviously not correct enough to be useful, understanding that war. And the real question is, how are these things still affecting us? Because this goes back to the issue we were talking about earlier with Bruce with time. Thinking that you as somebody who was born in the past, like 50 or 60 or 70 years or whatever, is going to work out with your fellow smart people. Morality, which is something that has to by definition have existed since persons, however you define that, it doesn’t matter how far back you go in some sense, is crazy talk. And it’s not not crazy talk. It is exactly crazy talk. These sorts of things, you’re not the first, second, third, fourth, fifth person to come up with this or to come up with the idea that you’re going to resolve it. I might point to some famous attempts, if I were so bold, to resolve things like virtues and values, which is what my channel is ostensibly pointing to. Justice, for example, might be a good thing that people have been trying to resolve for a very, very, very long time. The idea that you are smarter than Plato and are going to do it by yourself or even with a group of your smart friends, no matter how smart they may be, I’ve got my doubts. And that’s a problem. That’s a problem. I think we have a lot of that going around where things like justice, things like goodness, things like evil are being presumed because we have Hitler, we have Stalin, we have somebody misgendering to point at and say, see, I have resolved evil. Evil is that because I said so. Only they don’t, to Bruce’s excellent point, say I said so. They say we said so. And in that way, they are not taking responsibility, but claiming authority. They’re making that authoritative claim, but pretending they didn’t make it. And I think that’s dangerous. I think it’s negative. I think that some people have an intuitive sense that that’s bad and wrong, and so they don’t like Sam Harris. I don’t like Sam Harris. But describing it to other people or showing through gnosis, through knowledge, that that is the case is another thing entirely. And it’s non-trivial to be able to do that, be able to show people, no, no, no, Sam Harris didn’t give you an answer because he really didn’t. And even Jordan Peterson, maybe he’s doing it strategically. I don’t know. I’m not going to make a claim either way. But maybe Jordan Peterson is not seeing the failings of Sam Harris to address the issues and answer the questions that he’s been asked. It’s possible that he doesn’t see it. It’s possible that it’s strategic. I don’t know. I don’t particularly care. I care what people who are watching it see and experience, because that’s where the rubber meets the road. Are other people aware of what’s going on? And is the proper behavior to push back or just expose it? These are good questions. These are questions I struggle with. Like, you push back on Sam Harris? Obviously I do. Or do you just let him be foolish and see who figures it out? I think it’s irresponsible to do the latter and that you should do the former. That’s why I’m doing this stream, right? Among other reasons. I just wanted to do a stream. It just happened to be that this all came up at the same time. And boy, this is good fodder for a stream. But it’s important, vitally important, I would say, to address these things. And I think that… Josh, he never does. Maybe Peterson never does. You think Peterson sees it. Oh, fair. I mean, he might. They get stuck when they bring it up. Look, I would argue this is not hard to get stuck on. You didn’t define it, Sam. Why don’t you try again? There’s no stuckness there. Just call him out. You won’t call him out. And I’m very big on calling out evil, even if you do it poorly. I’m very big on calling out bad behavior in general, not just evil. Like, wrong behavior. Not all wrong behavior, not all the time. Discernment. That’s why every problem for me is discernment. In fact, the idea of a problem is discernment. You can discern a problem where there is no problem. That’s easy to do. People do it all the time. I deal with people constantly who just bring me stuff and say like this. And I’m like, okay. And? And they’re like, what’s the problem? And I’m like, actually, that doesn’t sound like a problem to me. It might become a problem. It’s not a problem now. So maybe chill out about it until it becomes a problem. That happens all the time. We all do that, too. It’s not…whatever. That’s why we need each other. We need each other to give us contrast, to help us see better. Is this a real problem or a made-up problem? I don’t know. It’s a good question. And that’s the issue. It’s like… What discernment do we need and how do we get discernment? Contrast to see, humility to open up to the fact that maybe there’s more there than we’re seeing now. Right? An engagement with others as valuable. Not valuable to me, but valuable outside of me. Because they add stuff to me. They give me things. Things that don’t necessarily make me happy. I have vicious arguments sometimes. Vicious. And then it’s lovely. Like, obviously, we’re still friends. And some of the things I say to him, maybe he shouldn’t be my friend anymore. I don’t know. And the same with Pastor Paul VanderKlay. I mean, Pastor Paul says some things. Like, he says, I don’t like cooperative processing. I like opponent processing. Really? Why would you even? To me, it’s like, why? Why do you want to be in opposition instead of cooperation? That makes no sense to me. We’re cooperative creatures. Right? And that leads to too much tolerance. Which tolerance is a problem, in my opinion. Like, you want a problem? Tolerance. It’s hard to know how much tolerance would be right if tolerance were ever right. And I’m not sure tolerance is ever correct. I think that people need to draw lines. I had a lovely discussion with an Orthodox priest, a friend of mine that had been helping me out with some problems every once in a while. Occasionally, I go visit their church. Lovely little church. And I was sort of positing, like, well, forgiveness, I do that for me. If I forgive you, that doesn’t help you at all. At all. Forgiveness, so I don’t let you live rent-free in my mind. It doesn’t affect your punishment, your consequence, or how I’m going to treat you in the future. At all. Except it might make me treat you better going forward, because I’m not resentful about the fact that something bad happened that maybe you shouldn’t have done. But it doesn’t mean that I’m going to forgive you in the sense of, well, you don’t have to pay for your bad behavior. That’s not how I roll. Maybe that’s how you roll. That’s not how I roll. I’m not a tolerance guy. I’m a, you did the thing, you take responsibility, you accept the consequences. And if you don’t accept the consequences, the consequences are still coming and they’ll be worse. That’s sort of how I see things. This is how I see the world unfolding. Joey, the appropriate level of tolerance needs to fall within a very strict tolerances. Yes, it does. Very materialist answer. And that’s the problem of Sam Harris, is that you’re tolerating him not answering the question. You’re not pushing back. That’s tolerance. I’m not a fan. I think, no, you push back on people, even when you’re wrong. Sometimes you’re wrong. You’re not going to know that you’re wrong if you don’t push back. So really by not pushing back, you’re hurting yourself. You’re hurting your own sense making by not pushing back. So one of the reasons why I get along so well with Manuel, because Manuel will just tell me, you’re wrong. Sometimes when he says that, he’s absolutely correct. I was absolutely wrong. And if I don’t have somebody push back, I won’t know that. I weaken myself. And you weaken others with your tolerance. You weaken yourself and others with your tolerance. And I’m not saying no tolerance, although I do lean in that direction myself, because your actions have consequences. There are hard limits to the world. And when you don’t take responsibility for those consequences, they just build up and they get worse. And I think Peterson’s right. I mean, he tweeted this out recently and Candice Owens apparently doesn’t understand it. You don’t get away with anything ever. You just don’t. What does that mean? Good question. What does that mean? I think it means something about tolerance. That’s what I think it means. You can’t just accept everything. You can’t let Sam Harris and your intuitive idea that Sam Harris might be wrong go. You can’t just forego that and say, you know what, it’s OK. You need to push back. You need to say, hey, you said you could do this. Let me see you do it. That’s all. I’m not saying you can’t. I’m saying I want to see it. The fact is, the fact is that the extent of my belief is limited by your actions or inactions. In this case, if you can’t do the trick, you can’t do the trick. All right. Look, I’m going over two and a half hours. Only Bruce hopped in, but that’s OK. I hope I hope everybody had a good Christmas. I’m back from New England, so hopefully I’ll be recording some videos. Oh, Josh is here. Well, we’ll let Josh in first. Josh, what do you got to say? Oh, I just I was going to hop on earlier, but we got busy. Why didn’t you? Yeah, exactly. No, the. Sam Harris. Yeah, the Sam Harris conversation. It seemed to you that Jordan was being quiet like like you’re talking. He wasn’t pushing back on anything. I think that might have been because their first convo, the one that was that was or Brett. Yeah, Brett Weinstein did. It was I think it was like two, three years ago. Brett Weinstein did the moderating between the two was like a debate. They’re four part series there. Yeah, they’re debates. Yeah. Yeah, he got they got really, really tied down and bogged down with the whole like evil, you know, good versus evil thing. And can we define this? And Sam, just like a lot of people, you know, like I guess I was guilty of it, too, until I listened to the book Dominion. Like, yeah, Sam just inherits all these values and morals and virtues and everything like that. And then and then doesn’t but has no qualification for him, like has no no like he doesn’t he doesn’t admit that. Yeah. I mean, and I’ve talked to guys like that are big fans of him. And I’m like, where are you getting this good? Like, where are you getting this hierarchy of moral values that you that you’re referencing? And they’re like, oh, you just know it when you see it. And it’s like, well, or like, like, you just know good when you see it. And so that tells me right there that they’re living in a matrix. They’re they’re definitely living in a matrix because they don’t they’re not. They have no idea about the origins of these values that they that they just inherited and they’re that they don’t understand. But the other thing was that I think that’s why Jordan wasn’t pushing back on him. And then but, yeah, no, I picked up on the same thing that Sam was just continually. Referencing good. Yeah, that’s interesting, Josh. It’s an interesting way to think about it, right. They’re living in a matrix. They’re living in an illusion. Right. And so that’s why they think we live in a simulation because they know unconsciously that they’re living in a simulation. And that’s the moral relativism. Like, well, I know it when I see it sort of thing, which is, you know, it’s also deeply correct. Like, this is the problem. Like, this is why people resonate with his argument. He makes a statement like if you could press a button that made everyone less that that put more badness in the world, you know, or lessen goodness, that would be bad. It’s like, well, yes, but that’s a self-defining thing, like self-referencing, which is again later on. He rails against that with religion. I’m like, you’re using the same formula, dude. Like, actually, only your formula is way worse. Like their formula is at least open-ended. Yours is a closed loop system. Like, what are you talking about? But people have an intuitive sense that what Sam is saying is correct because it’s not exactly wrong. No, it’s not wrong. It’s just that he’s jumping in in this day and age and saying like, you know, like I said, you know, I was just talking to my friend of my brother’s over the holidays. And, you know, we were talking about the economy and how he was like, it’s just rich people are, you know, that’s why everything is so expensive is because rich people and greed. And I was like, no, no, like doesn’t have anything to do with the underlying value of an inflated dollar. Like that doesn’t have it. Because I asked him, I was like, well, what about the price of a Coke? Like, why does Coke get more expensive? Why do we just automatically like, you know, when your grandmother’s like, Coke used to only be a nickel or a dime or whatever. And I’m like, why is it getting more expensive? The processes are automated. The sources of the materials should be, you know, way easier to get a hold of with trucking and shipping, you know. And so like why? And I understand that greed is a part of it, but there’s an underlying technical reason as to why that Coke is getting more and more expensive. And like, this is what I feel like what Sam’s doing is he’s like, oh, yeah, it’s greed. It’s greed. Yeah. You know, in a, you know, in a way. But there’s a factor, right? He’s picking one factor and he’s using that as a universal to explain everything, even when it’s not a factor. Like greed is actually not a factor right now. We’re living in the U.S. in particular. We’re living in it. This is the least greedy country around. But by far, like far and away, there’s way more charity in the U.S. than there is in any other country. There isn’t even a number of that. Nobody knows this. Way more charity, way more philanthropy. All the all the all the libraries were built by one of the richest men in the world at the time. Right. Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie. Right. And so like, you know, we just don’t appreciate what we have. And we want an easy answer. Well, greed is an easy answer because it’s not me because I’m not I’m not wealthy. Right. And so it’s not me. So I was all right. Good criteria for an answer. I’m not to blame. That’s excellent. No responsibility. Right. Yeah. It’s somebody who has something that I don’t. I’m pretty resentful of them because I don’t have that. And why shouldn’t I? I don’t understand. I’m maybe I’m as smart as Elon Musk. Whatever. Whatever people come up with in their head. People will be this. I’m smarter than Elon Musk. I’m like, well, I’ll grant you that you might be. But like fine. But you won’t sleep under your desk. So maybe you can’t be Elon Musk because you won’t sleep on your desk. Right. You can’t land rockets backwards. Like he was the only one ever pulled back. Like done for the rest of his life after that. Right. But I mean, you know, it’s also an answer where you’re subject to it. Right. And so, you know, you don’t there’s nothing you can do in essence. And so in order to fix it, someone else needs to fix it. Well, yeah, it’s out. It’s like, well, I don’t know what to put my finger on. So I’m going to put it on this thing because this isn’t like that. That’ll be I can complain about it. I can get shitty about it, but I can’t. But I’m not going to do anything. I don’t have any obligation to do anything about it. But it’s the dual responsibility. I’m not responsible for being in the situation that I’m in. And I’m not responsible for fixing it either. In other words, I didn’t get myself here and I can’t get myself out of here. And so you people are obligated. Right. To get me out of this because it’s not my fault at all. And there’s nothing I can do about it. So it’s the responsibility on both ends. I’m not responsible for how I got here. I’m not responsible for getting myself out because I can’t get myself out because it’s greed and it’s wealthy people. It’s like, well, that’s an interesting formulation. You’ve just absolved yourself of all responsibility on both sides because responsibility is not a one way thing. Right. And this is that meta-narcissism I opened with. Sam Harris doesn’t talk about whether they exist or not. I’m not arguing that he doesn’t help anybody. I’m not making that argument. He doesn’t talk about whether or not he helps anybody. He just says, all of these sycophants that I have, he doesn’t use that word, obviously, make me happy. And my life is so much better now that I don’t have anybody pushing back on my bad ideas. And I’m like, really, Captain Obvious, is this something you came to as a result of getting off of Twitter? Oh, you’re so intelligent. I could have told you that without you getting off of Twitter. Like, I had that knowledge to give you. I’m sure everybody else did, too, by the way. This is not like some great revelation that you’ve come to. It’s like I cut candy out of my diet and I lost a bunch of weight or something or sweets or something like that. It was like, yeah, you’re a genius already. That’s not obvious info. No. And then, like, but he also did this weird, like, kind of like you were saying, like, in the conversation, he has this. Yeah, I don’t know. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me because I don’t particularly like the guy or whatever, how he goes about things and that. And it’s not like I have a side. I like Jordan Peterson, obviously, but it’s just that he like I got off Twitter. I’m so much better. But then he was just like going on about like how Twitter has such a detrimental effect on Elon. And I was like, yeah, I was like, I really don’t know that you’re one qualified to make that, you know, especially because he said we used to be somewhat close friends. And now we’re not. And I’m like, well, Sam, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the whole country is in a divide right now. And you’re kind of opposed on the opposition side of Elon in a lot of ways. Well, you know, he’s not wanting to particularly talk to you, you know. But it’s way more fundamental than that, Josh. The thing that people don’t notice is that he made the statement that Elon’s basically gone off the rails. And doesn’t give any examples at all. Not one. But the more important thing is, boy, Sam, you seem to have lost a lot of friends that you used to have. Isn’t that interesting? Maybe and this is where I’m going to pull off the Peterson. Maybe if it’s all women, it’s not all women. It’s you. Maybe if you’re losing a bunch of friends, it’s not the friends. It’s you. Right. This is the moment where you go. What if I’m the bad guy? Like, at least consider for a moment that that might be the case. I did want to point this out. So Joey has generously offered. If people want to understand Sam Harris better, they can reach out to me. I haven’t listened to him in years, but can still run a near perfect simulation of him. So take Joey up on that offer. If you want to Sam Harris hasn’t changed at all in years. The only thing that’s changed is and I do see an evolution of sorts. I can invoke that term in his in his articulation because now he has been and I think this is some of the frustration that came out in Vanderklae’s video. Two hours. Paul, come on. Come on. You could have critiqued this in 15 minutes, buddy. I’ll give you I can’t watch all of Paul. I love Paul, but I can’t keep up with the video. So I had to watch it at 2x. So I had it done in time for the whole thing. Yeah. But you hear his frustration and his frustration is around this whole thing of you’re using religious terms like resurrection and spirit and, you know, all of these terms that we would normally use. And you’re just skirting around the real issue. And you’re just you know, he says some of that, but you can hear it, especially at the end of his video. He really actually gets angry. And it’s rare that Pastor Vanderklae gets angry, but you could hear him get angry and that. And I was pleased by that. I’m like, you should get angry. You should be angry at Sam and you should call him out for his bad behavior. And this is where I this is where I depart from most of the crazy Christians call out bad behavior. Say, no, that’s wrong. Even if you’re wrong about that, call it out. Right. Because otherwise you won’t be able to test your ideas. Right. And other people won’t know. I’m sure Sam believes in his heart of hearts or brain of brains or whatever nonsense he aspires to that he defined evil. And I’m worried that Peterson thinks that they agreed on evil. I didn’t hear. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t think that he does. I think Jordan knows that they don’t agree. But he is not. He knows that if he tries to win the like he’s like trying to win a chess match without winning or something like that, like he there’s a slam. You know, he could slam dunk, you know, Sam with a couple of things, but it always gets bogged down into these really, you know, like the back and forth that just takes forever to get through. And it’s like it’s, you know, it’s like doing a math on longhand or something like that. It’s like we could get into this, but it’s going to go. We know where this goes. Like, let’s be let’s be fair to Sam Harris. He’s trying to work out ideas that he’s never thought out before. And that is abundantly clear in this talk. It’s abundantly clear. There’s no way he’s that dense. Like, he’s not. No, no, it’s not that he’s that dense. He’s never thought of it. He just thinks that he has. He thinks he has an answer. And people do this to me all the time. They think they have an answer. And I’m like, hey, cool, man. I believe you. What’s the answer? And then they will, because they’ve never thought of it. They just don’t know that they’ve never thought of it. And that becomes clear. One of the things that’s great about this conversation is because Peterson doesn’t interrupt him or help him at all. At all. Sam struggles to get his point across. Sam knows when he’s talking that he is not being clear. And so he keeps talking. It’s a good tell. You know you’re not being clear when you when you keep talking. It’s not always true. He’s rambling. Right. Well, it’s not he’s not even rambling. But he realizes that he can’t make his point to himself. Right. Not even to Peterson, to himself. And maybe that’s part of Peterson’s tactic is no feedback because you don’t give somebody feedback. They will keep talking because people like to fill the silence. And I think that’s important. I did. I did want to address this real quick. William Branch Park. Only you can do PVK at 2X. Not true, sir. I take longer than PVK to listen to PVK. There are lots of people who told PVK they listen to him on 2X. I’ve heard them before in comments and stuff. Vanderklaas called them out. I have only done it. This is probably my second time listening to PVK at 2X. I generally do not listen to people at 2X because when you listen at normal speed, you get the nuance of the tone and the language, which is something I’m not good at necessarily expressing, but I’m good at hearing for whatever reason. And so that’s actually important signaling for me. And so there’s a detriment to me listening, although his anger actually came out at the end, even at 2X. It was clear he was frosted mad. And poor Paul, I don’t like that he gets upset like that. But I’m glad that he did. And I think it’s actually really important. It’s very good for us to see what we’re missing. One of the things we’re missing is a signal in society is how to be mad at one another without that breaking the conversation. And I’ve actually discussed this, I think, with Bruce and with Manuel and a few other people. Maybe that would be a good thing to do, is to go out and show people arguing viciously and not throwing ad hominem attacks or anything, although maybe. And then making up and moving along and to show that that’s even possible, because now people believe that it’s possible. I don’t think that we’re playing the same game. If you’re talking about, it depends on, I guess, who’s in opposition. I mean, if we’re talking about the Jordan Peterson camp versus Sam Harris camp, I’ve interacted with people that are pretty big fans of Sam Harris. And tried to talk with them. We’re not playing the same game. It’s akin to a boxer and a jujitsu guy trying to spar. But not changing up their styles or adapting to it. But literally, no, I stand up. Well, I start out on the ground. So it’s like, well, I can’t even go there because that’s how my heart works. You know what I mean? And so they’re not, they’re like, they literally don’t, we’re not having the same conversation. And because we don’t agree about the origins of things. So like Sam was talking about Stalin and, you know, like, pick your bad guy, your worst man ever or whatever. And he was like saying, you know, if we’d got to baby Stalin, you know, would we have been able to change him or whatever? And it was like, I guess like, and the reason I don’t, these questions have been asked and we know where these ideas go. Like, I mean, it was like you were talking about earlier, like a lobotomies and that. And I don’t know, like this whole scenario that he was proposing or whatever, the hypothetical, like it was, it’s been sorted out pretty well. I mean, from various angles and a lot of artwork. What’s that? Oh, how do you know? How do you overlook a movie like Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, which they distinctly did? Like it was a terrible movie. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, the horrible stuff in there. But it was it. If I’m remembering the movie correctly, it was quite a while back, but it was exactly about this question that you have this horrible, horrible individual. And they like, you know, pry his eyes open and drop LSD into it and make him want to. Josh, no, look, I read this book. I’m telling you right now, actually. Every single person who’s ever told me anything about that book has made massively incorrect statements about it. Like in contradiction to what’s actually written in the text. Obviously, translations aside, we had four translations going and I’m arguing with people about the cave thing. I’m like, no, that’s not what this says at all. It’s not that it’s not what it says at all. It’s contradicting what you’re saying completely. Like actual contradiction. Like, what are you guys talking about? And I would argue that, you know, you’re right. In a sense, people are talking past one another because they’re not even using the same language. We’re using the same language, but it’s not based in the same or like the word. Like, OK, so your example of the cave. Like, OK, like I’ve heard I heard about the cave and I watched YouTube videos on it now immediately to me when I when I read it and understood what the concept was of the people He was like. You know I was like. Nobody, nobody, nobody leaves the nobody gets unchanged ever in the book. Plato says it’s not possible. It’s not possible for you to be unchanged. It’s a hypothetical. No one goes to the light ever at all. It’s not a cave. it’s a den and there is a cave used but it’s not there which is interesting, right? The statement of the cave is to exemplify different stratums of society or classes. That’s actually the point. And he says someone from a higher class talking to someone from a lower class even though they might be more correct about something is going to be jeered at which is sort of like the statement which I don’t know I heard it was in this famous book that everyone’s read that a prophet is never welcomed in his own home. It’s a very very similar statement, right? Because the prophet speaking some truth that nobody wants to hear or nobody likes, right? This is the same statement as the cave analogy actually. But the cave analogy is not about that. It’s about the fact that there are different classes in society and that you have to physically actually take away the highest class, the philosophers, the true philosophers, not the sophists like Sam Harris was a sophist. You have to take them away from their moving towards goodness explicitly and Glaucon actually says no you can’t do that. That’s mean. I think you can’t do that. That’s bad for them. And Chakrutish corrects him again and says we’re doing this for the good of the city. And then when you take them down they have to go all the way to the lowest parts of the city which are equivalent to but we’re already out of the cave parable by the way long since out of the cave parable equivalent to the people seeing the images on the wall and then they have to tell those people this and this and this are wrong at your layer of visibility in the city. And then those people are going to be upset whether they make the changes or not they’re going to be upset at the philosophers and that has to happen. It’s a double whammy though. They’re being pulled away from going towards goodness and they’re being jeered at for their good behavior. That’s life. That’s what it is. Sam Harris even if he’s read the republic didn’t understand it clearly because to your point these issues have been dealt with over and over and over but I would argue, I’m going to do videos on this, that our cognition has been pointed away from those issues and towards other things and our brains are full. Like we’re just full. We can’t deal with morality because we have too much science in our brains. We’re too busy memorizing why planes fly which is totally effing irrelevant to your life. Almost certainly unless you’re a freaking mechanic or a pilot how planes fly has no bearing on your existence. Understanding the concept of lift is cute and nice and I do kind of understand it and actually sort of know some of the lift formulas whatever but I can’t use that at all for anything ever. It’s like the old argument why learn algebra if I’m never going to use it. That’s actually a good argument because having algebra in your head if you’re never going to use it is taking up space that could be used by something else. Maybe discernment of morals and ethics and so when I say we’re not actually using the same language this is the argument I’m having with have been having with pastor Paul for years. You don’t understand what Peterson’s doing because your frame is religious and you’re putting him in that frame and saying he’s a preacher saying that he’s doing a revival like Billy Graham saying that he’s moralizing when in fact none of that is actually happening. There’s something different going on something really important to understand by the way if you want to reach the people he’s reaching. How can I say that? It’s observably evident that he’s able to reach people when other people aren’t. That’s not that hard. It’s evident that that’s happening and so if you think he’s Billy Graham well and you try to do what Billy Graham does and it doesn’t work well you’re wrong. It’s not that hard. You’re not able to reach his audience for a reason and that reason is you don’t understand even though you can use Paul Van Anderklees a genius. He’s super smart. He can use all the Peterson framework just fine. Does he? I would argue he doesn’t but whatever we could have an argument about that for sure. Maybe I’m wrong but he’s not getting my point about what Peterson’s actually doing. We’re using the same language but we’re not actually using the same language. I was describing this to Bruce last night actually. I was saying I can tell that people don’t understand my point when I start talking about the, I’ll just use the word, injustice of me being able to decide whether or not to take a religion course in Catholic junior high school. This is a failure at multiple levels. A, the state never should have forced the schools to not teach religion if they were a religious school. That doesn’t make any sense. B, my parents never should have allowed that to happen and C, the school never should have complied with the order. They should have said sure and then ignored it. I’m sorry. They should have just ignored what the state said. The state never would have found out anyway. There was very little harm to them. I mean theoretically there could have been a lawsuit later on but whatever. They should have taken that bullet quite honestly because I could not have been and still am not I would say equipped to make that kind of a decision for myself. Period. End of statement. As a junior high student I should not have been burdened with thinking about do I take an ethics course or do I learn the Bible? Like I shouldn’t, that shouldn’t have been a factor. It shouldn’t have been an option to me and when I explained to people that that happened to me and then I further explained that well yeah we get to the end of the ethics course and my vice principal says who does Aslan remind you of and I go what are you talking about you lunatic? Because I did. I was like I don’t what are you saying? What do you mean who does he remind me of? It’s a lion in a fantasy novel and people do not understand that is a nuclear weapon of understanding. That should be an explosion of horror in the minds of any Christian that that could happen. You’re telling me you grew up in a world where you knew so little about the Christian story. I grew up in New England. I grew up in the U.S. in a Catholic family. You know so little about the story that’s central to the Bible to the belief to Christianity that you didn’t see the parallel between the lion and the guy. Yes that is not a failure of discernment on my part. I can discern better than anybody. I discern really well. I discern too well. Details are my thing. I have way more ability to discern details than almost anybody I’ve ever met in my life. That was not the issue. The issue was I didn’t know the story. I couldn’t draw the parallel. Growing up in this Christian nation, what does that do for dominion? It says that yes Tom Holland’s dominion’s point may be correct but you’re so far away from the story that you can’t make the connection anymore. If there are people like that and I’m not the only one obviously. This was a state law and it wasn’t only Massachusetts although I think they were the first. I might have that wrong. I never researched it. I don’t remember. Then there’s bunches of people like that. Those are the meaning crisis crowd. That’s not the only meaning crisis crowd but those are definitely meaning crisis people. They’re in a lot of trouble and they’re in trouble that church can’t fix because church is going to use the metaphors and the symbolism that they have to communicate with those people. Whether they use different words or not is not even relevant because we’re not talking about words anymore. We’re talking about actual concepts in your head. Things that you understand. One of the things that this conversation highlighted is that Sam Harris does not actually understand the concepts he’s invoking. He is using not just words that he doesn’t understand because he used spirit. He doesn’t understand spirit. He used evil. He doesn’t understand evil. He’s using the concept of evil. He doesn’t have a concept of evil. He doesn’t actually have one. He has a symbol of evil. Maybe it’s Stalin. Maybe it’s Hitler. Whatever. Maybe it’s Islam. That seems to be his big evil. He has a stand in, a symbol. It’s not really a symbol. An idol for evil. He has the idol of evil. Materialists have idols. They don’t actually have icons. They don’t engage with symbolism. They can’t. That’s part of the problem. We’re not all materialists, but many. They can’t. You get fooled into thinking, well, he’s obviously referencing an icon of evil in Islam. Maybe. I mean, that’s a bold statement. Or Hitler. Sure. Absolutely. I think we can all agree on that one. Or Stalin. Absolutely. But he doesn’t actually have what’s behind that. He doesn’t have the abstraction behind the idol. It’s just the idol. Islam. It’s explicit. If we remove Islam, those people won’t do suicide bombings. He said that. I mean, he didn’t say exactly. He basically said that. That’s- Well, no. I remember. That’s been his shtick for a long time. I remember when he first started coming on the scene. I mean, this was 2009 or earlier. Maybe it was like 2007 or something like that. I saw him on a TED Talk. It was always that the religion makes the people do the thing. If we get rid of the religion, the people will buy their- I don’t know where he gets this. That people are just going to get better. It was like they’re infected with a mind virus. It’s the psychotechnology. You’ve been infected. All we have to do is give you the anti-mind virus vaccine or whatever. Then you’ll go back to normal. Right. No, it’s baked in, bro. It’s baked in. It’s part of our nature. That is what the assertion inside of Genesis is that we have a nature and it’s evil. Right. That we are not. I don’t know how to bring somebody around to that. Yes, I would love to live in a world where my nine-year-old daughter wasn’t going to learn lying. I would love to live in that world. She wasn’t going to learn how to lie to me. I caught her in a lie when she was five. Right there, I knew. I was like, well, we’re at this stage. It wasn’t heartbreaking for me because I expected it. It wasn’t like, oh my gosh, no, she’s going to be a terrible person. She’s going to be a liar. No, I know that if she continues it, it’ll become a habit and it’ll become a crutch to get yourself out of problems. I told her, I was like, you felt your heart get fast, didn’t you? You didn’t know what to do. Then you reached for something, didn’t you? Instead of reaching for the truth because that was going to be hard, you did the skit and you went for the lie. I said, and I caught you this time, but I said, you’ll get away with things. You’ll figure it out. You’ll figure out how to become a very good liar. It will become a sickness that you become infected with. Me and Sam agree on these things. It’s just that he seems to think that we can sterilize the world. He’s looking at a symptom and saying it’s the cause. It’s like, no, no, no, these are symptomatic. So when Father Eric says he doesn’t know what a human is, that I think is what he’s referring to intuitively is that Sam doesn’t understand that human nature exists and that that is the cause of all the things. That is the cause of the things he’s talking about. Human nature is what causes Islam to have suicide bombings and choose to bomb kids and soldiers rather than not be able to bomb soldiers. It’s human nature doing that. That’s not the religion. The religion explains it, or at least they’re using religion to explain it, even though I believe the religion doesn’t explain it. But that’s the difference is that he doesn’t want the responsibility to be on the humans because solving problems with humans, other humans, is very hard. And it also has implications for you. What if you were the type of person that could do what Stalin did? What if you were the type of person that would use children as human shields? What if you were that type of person that would be a suicide bomber but for the right cause? And I think that was part of the point that Peterson was trying to make. And I think that Harris, of course, resisted it because everything he did with Stalin was just unlucky, Josh. He was just unlucky. Yeah. Well, I mean, he did it. Peterson started to do that with the Auschwitz Guard. He said, what about the Auschwitz Guard that liked his job? And so, you know, I mean, that, you know, and I tell people this all the time. I go like, there was every, I know for, you’re going to really tell me that all, like, because everybody will say, yeah, Nazis are evil. And it’s like, okay, well, pump breaks. Let’s pull that open real quick. Because, you know, on first glance, you’re like, yeah, Nazis are evil, you know, it’s easy to say. But then you’re like, pump breaks and be like, okay, was everybody inside Nazi Germany that was supporting the swastika evil? No, they were average people. And I mean, and there was a there was a cult that just like and Sam has said that, you know, that there’s certain things that are death cults. And I mean, that was, you know, essentially, what that was. And so it was like, you know, and like, Peterson says, and I don’t understand how Sam can listen to Peterson make these rock solid arguments about it, like for these, these conclusions about, about the Oh, what the heck? He said, it was a leap. Oh, I lost for those where I was going with that. Oh, that you. Oh, shoot. No, like, I lost it. I can’t, I can’t think of what I was gonna say there. But it was that the the not every that not everybody’s evil, you know, and that they they got infected that this was swirling around them. And they participated in it. And and that then I don’t know if I lost you or not, Mark. Are you still in here? I just had to go for a minute. So I’ll talk to myself a little bit. No, no, you’re sorry about that. Oh, there you go. There you are. There you are. No, there was a I was going to bring up one of right before you skipped out there, I was going to bring up Jordan. And he made a a argument about everybody, you know, what you’re referencing that what if you were the what if you were the guard or something like that? And yeah, no. And he’s done that before. And I don’t understand how Sam can listen to that and be like, Oh, no, yeah, it’s still just, you know, it’s all religion. It’s all the religious fault, you know, and that and he and just go on and on with it and keep it going. Like, I mean, that he just is in denial about that there is a lot of evil that has been done without any religious, you know, that in the in God bless Ness, you know, that, you know, it was that, you know, we’re gonna we’re gonna Oh, that’s what I was gonna say that the the bridge or that that Jordan draws is the utopia thing is that like, as soon as you have the idea of a utopia, the first thing you’re going to think is, who do I got to get rid of to have my utopia? Because the mess I’m in right now is not utopia. So there must be something that I can subtract from this situation to have my utopia. And I mean, and then Hitler was just unabashedly, you know, that was his conclusion. Yeah, we can have it, we can have our, our, oh, the Uber man, and, you know, we can have, you know, he was using each other’s Uber man, and we can have the, we can have all this stuff, we just gotta get rid of everybody that’s making us weak, you know, and, and that it was like, yeah, and so, but I don’t know how Sam can listen to that. And then go right out the door and be like, yeah, it’s all religion. How are you? How are you like, not connecting the dots that that’s not that’s not that’s not again, I don’t think he can Josh, I think that people are making assumptions about how intelligence works and what it means and cognition is limited. And like, there’s lots of things I just can’t understand. Like, there’s a ton of stuff I don’t know, I can’t understand any of this stuff. Like, I’ve met people. I’ve met mechanics, who, you know, I listened to a car and I go, oh, yeah, that’s this. And they’re like, what do you mean? And I’m like, you’ve been a mechanic for 30 years, like, you didn’t hear that. And they didn’t. Fair enough. Like, okay, I did. I knew what it was. And I was right. And it happens. Like, I do. Everyone has different skills. Right? Like, there’s tons of stuff you can tell me about trees that I don’t know anything about. Tons and tons. Yeah, you with computers. Yeah, I mean, like, I use them every day. I’ve got zero idea how they work. Don’t know how to code. You know, I was interested in at one point learned, you know, like, took like, I don’t know, 20 minutes out of my day one time and realized that that was going to be a much more much more in depth endeavor to try to figure out how to code. I thought it was going to be but but no, it just was Sam and that I just don’t know. Because he represents such a large amount of people that think like he does. And I see it inside of the Christian church, you know, the mostly the Protestant Christian church, I think, is right for it. Because it does it again denies its historical roots. You know, as far as you know, because they’re like, Oh, yeah, like, I talked to my dad about this. And it was I was raised Protestant. You know, it’s like, I before Martin Luther is like, I don’t know how I never thought of the fact of like, how did the how did like Christianity get to today? Because I knew I you go back to the Reformation, and you’re like, Oh, yeah, no, no need to go back any farther. You know, that’s part of the compression of time. Time began when Luther split from the church or time when this person took Luther’s ideas or time began when I became conscious of myself. That’s the birth of consciousness, right? Time began when when some guy raised from the dead, right? Time began when right? It’s all this time began when stuff. And I did I didn’t want to catch up Joey’s gets some good comments. Sam is trying to express that human nature is channeled by beliefs. Maybe I think that that Sam Harris is trying to get around the responsibility that humans have for making the world the way it is. Because that would mean he was complicit. And again, the fact that he’s like, Well, Elon Musk, and I were kind of friends, and now we’re not, is just remarkably ignorant of the fact that he lost a bunch of friends over the same issue. He’s just not taking responsibility for maybe your bad ideas are the reason why Elon Musk and a bunch of other people don’t talk to you anymore, dude. Like, it could be. It could be, right? And then Joey Sam’s real error in his materialism is that he operates it while trying to still believe in the soul. I don’t know that that’s fair. I mean, I think that he can’t get around the soul. He can’t get around spirit. He ended up using the word spirit. And that’s the problem is, and this was this was part of PVK’s critique was, Yeah, Sam, you’re still using the same words we use. And he did use resurrection and spirit and miracle. And I was just like, Wow, I’ve never. So again, it’s a progression for Sam Harris. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him use those words that often in that way that explicitly before. On the other hand, it betrays the fact that he doesn’t have any answers here. He’s really grasping its trots. And he says he can do the trick, but he’s reaching what I call the end of materialism. PVK calls it the recession of modernity, which I just think is a bad frame. See my video I posted earlier on modernity and why it’s a bad term. Right. And so you run into these problems. And then there’s like, what are you going to do? And then you default back to this religious language, roughly speaking, or the spiritual language. But but also, I think this is important. Joey says, Joe Topia excludes all people, including Joe. And that’s why Joe Topia is perfect, because it just excludes all the people. Something I talk about all the time. Like, if you just get the people to stop people, you won’t have these problems. Yeah, right. If we’d all stop peopleing everything, be fine. And then you wonder where degrowth and the WEF comes from. And I’m like, well, they know how to implement utopia. You get rid of all the people. And then utopia emerges, because Rousseau was right. And the perfect state of nature is perfect and good and ideal. Okay. Also, Rousseau was an idiot. But you know, whatever, I guess, if you believe him. There’s this weird thing we do and we forget to like, I’m half Native American. So I got a lot of Native American family in that. And then I got a brother that is pretty left leaning and liberal and that we got into talking about the Native Americans. And he was just like, he looked at me really skeptical when I was like, yeah, the Comanches, you know, they had an entire culture based on rating. And he was like, he was like, wait, no glitch in the matrix. That doesn’t fit with my narrative about the Native Americans all living in harmony. And I was like, yeah, I mean, I’m hoping Native Americans. And so like, we, it’s a very religious, you know, group. And, and so, you know, it was like, I understand where he’s coming from. But it’s like, there wasn’t any control. So like, whenever Braves wanted to get together and decide to, you know, break wild and go, you know, raid somebody, you know, around here, you know, where I live in Cortez, Colorado, we have the Ute reservations and they weren’t obvious. I had nowhere near what the Comanches were as far as, you know, levels of violence. I don’t know. I’ve heard, you know, both sides of that story too. But it was just that you can see what this world with this continent, you know, was similar, you know, like, and it was like, in the Comanches gained a huge amount of power based off, you know, because of a horse, you know, when the Spanish, you know, I didn’t know any of this either. I mean, I got, you know, a little bit more wise too. I had heard about some of this stuff, but I didn’t know much about the history, but S.E. Gwyn did that book, Empire of the Summer Moon. And it was, it was really eye-opening. I mean, he went into Quanah Parker and like, you know, and yeah, a lot of people are like, yeah, Quanah Parker was an awesome leader, the last of the Comanche chief, all this kind of stuff, but he was a Comanche and he did Comanche things. And so there’s a really good chance that he, though showed virtuous leadership skills and these types of things, he took hostages, he killed, you know, and raided and, you know, and everything like that and everything that goes along with that, you know. And so like, you’re I don’t know, and I don’t understand how Sam can, and people of that, you know, like my brother in that can learn these things and then just be like, yeah, but people are good. Just leave them alone. I think they have to, like they really have to, because otherwise they’d be responsible for their own behavior. And then it would be a Peterson everything you do matters situation. And I, but I wanted to point out here’s, here’s Pastor Paul VanderKlaay calling me an anti-natalist. I mean, he hasn’t scandalized me more since he said I was an atheist on that video. And I tell you, and here’s hello, stop peopling people. Yes. See, that’s it. That’s it. William Branch. Yes, the natives are great, but are human. Well, it’s interesting too, like that whole tale is ridiculous, right? Everybody leaves out the first two or three colony attempts in the new world. They got slaughtered by the natives and they were on land that wasn’t occupied. And then interestingly, the reason why Plymouth works is, and the Plymouth story is really weird and funny, right? And you’ve got Miles Standish, who’s a complete jerk. It’s like one of the worst people ever is Miles Standish. And it is a whole forest named after him and stuff in Plymouth, Massachusetts. They go through the Cape and they basically, maybe by accident, raid a bunch of wealthy people, because wealth is always on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, wealthy people’s winter stores. But then they end up in Plymouth. And the reason why the Indians are nice to them is because the Indians are like, there was a village here and it got wiped out by smallpox long before you guys came. And so we need people here because we need people. And so it’s like, well, they took the land. No, no, they were invited in. And that’s why Thanksgiving happened, because the natives were like, no, we need you to survive because we need people here. Like they knew we need people. And then the funny part is that there’s a town up here called Fort Mill, South Carolina. It’s right on the border. It’s right outside of Charlotte. Charlotte’s 10 miles from the border. It’s right south of Charlotte. And I was looking there. It’s a little expensive, so I didn’t buy a house there. I bought a house down here in Columbia. But right in the center of town, it says Fort Mill exists because so-and-so, and I forget the guy’s name. I apologize if you haven’t come up with these things, but not today, helped the Indians fight the other Indian tribe. And so they gave him all this land. Everyone acts like they didn’t have land ownership. And they had contracts and constitutions, guys. Like they actually had contracts. If you don’t have land ownership, contracts can’t exist. Contracts make no sense without ownership. Of course, the Indians have ownerships on the East Coast. And they were fighting each other constantly. And that’s why they gave this guy the land, because he helped them fight off their enemy tribe, for better or for worse. I don’t know who was right or who was wrong or who was good or who was evil in that situation. I’m not going to pretend that I could know. But it’s interesting that everybody does the Rousseauian nature is perfect in its perfect form thing, because I don’t know where you’re getting this from. But I do think it is them wanting to get out of their own responsibility. Because as I pointed out earlier with Bruce, it’s responsibility on both sides. It’s responsibility for the results of your action, but it’s also responsibility for how you’re situated in the world. Like if you’re poor, some of that might be your fault. I’m not saying it is. It might not be. But it might be. And maybe you don’t want responsibility for that either. And that’s a big problem for people. It’s a huge, huge problem. It’s insane. Here’s Ethan. I remember reading a brief history of Pyramid Lake Nevada before the white people came. It was just occupied by one tribe until another came and wiped them out completely, continuously, over and over. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a big problem. Well, even like the history of… William Branch. Natives like the guns of the settlers, used the settlers as military allies. And then Paul Hatton enslaved their neighbors. Yeah. Well, there was a lot of slavery in the Indian culture. Yeah. Cherokee had slaves and things like that. There’s a famous picture of that woman that has a face tattoo, like spikes. And people would be like, oh, look, they accepted her as one of their own. No, that’s the mark of the slave. Right. Or you get into my area. Here we got Mesa Verde. That’s a national park. It’s right near my town. And there’s these timbers that are… Actually, I’m sorry. I’m referencing Chaco Canyon, which is in New Mexico. It’s a little further away. But there’s these timbers that came from a long ways away. Ponderosa timbers. And Ponderosas aren’t very popular down there. And they came over from, I believe it was from Pagosa. And so the assertion was, oh, look at the massive cooperation that these people undertook to get these… Well, upon further, a little bit more research and actually listening to the stories from the Dene, the Navajo, and that about what the Anasazi were and what they did. And I don’t exactly know for sure, but basically the way it’s kind of, it seems like they had figured out how to make contracts that basically put you in slavery. And that the Navajo had said that, because there was the word for the Anasazi, it was told to me growing up that it was ancient enemy. It meant ancient enemy. But he’s like, that’s not exactly a great translation. He’s like, it’s more like trickster, old trickster, like somebody you can make a bad deal with. Like you need to be aware of these people. They have a way of making deals. And now we know that it seems like the Anasazi, which are an off that had abided with the Hopi or an offshoot from the Hopi, I can’t, it gets murky on that. But it seems like a lot of them came up from the South, even when they’re tied to other tribes in South America. And most likely run off their own land by another group or whatever. And then we have tribes like the Navajo that we think they may have been migrated here, but they can talk to another tribe. They’re down here in the Southwest, but they can talk to another tribe that’s up there by Canada. And they had no idea that those languages were very, very similar. It was two guys talking on a ham radio. And all of a sudden they realized they could understand each other. And it was like, yeah. And so like, so people just get pushed all over the place. So this whole idea that the religion is making the people worse is like, I don’t know. Like, I mean, we’ve gone over it a thousand times, but it’s just like- It’s religion. And then what’s worse? And like that, see, that’s still the problem. It’s like, okay, Sam, fine. What’s worse? What’s evil and what’s good? And of course he always defines good. And so does Peterson as, you know, not evil. It’s like, that’s not sufficient. And it’s an identification against. And again, you can’t define evil. Like, go ahead and try. Go ahead. Like, I dare you to find the worst evil. Go ahead. Try it. I’ve had this conversation. I had one conversation for six hours with one person about this. Six hours. And they finally gave up and decided, oh, I can’t define the worst evil after all. No, you can’t. If you can’t do it in six hours, like you can’t do it. Like, I’m sorry. Like, it’s not going to happen. I was thinking of this earlier when we were talking about dictators, Hitler and Mao and everything like that. So when you were talking about it earlier in the stream and something that maybe the reason it’s hard to put your finger on it is because it’s something that manifests when the right, when the environment for it becomes right. Like, I’ve recently got very, not recently, but over the last couple of years, I got, I started doing a deep dive. I got interested in Bitcoin. And as such, you ended up doing deep dives on the economy, the history of money and how the money’s inflating and da da da da da. Went down that rabbit hole on YouTube. But it was, it’s like, something that came out in a Bitcoin conversation was the guy said, you can’t have a 20 year, like an infinite war, a 20 year engagement war without money that you can print. He’s like, you’ll run out of money. And like even Shun Tzu in the art of warfare talks about the price of what it takes to run a campaign. I think for like a week or a month. And I would almost, I think I did it one time to see how much in silver that would be. And then, you know, using today’s current silver value. It’s quite a, it’s in a very, it campaigns are very, very expensive, you know, and we proved that to ourselves with Afghanistan and Iraq, you know, and that, but, but you know, 20 year engagement in Afghanistan and even prior to that being present in the country. And, and it’s like that, I just didn’t understand that infinite war is not possible without infinite money. Like I’d never made that, I never made that link. And so he, if you can print your own money and you can inflate your own money, then you can have infinite war. But it, and so the tools for evil to exist have to be like, like, like being able to print your own money, you know. And so like, there’s certain things that have to be in place. It’s almost like having a maybe, but like you still, you still actually have to have a definition. I mean, Joey brings up a good point. Sam repeatedly does make the claims that some religions are objectively more or less evil relative to others. The problem is that relativism doesn’t work. I think gauge theory, look up gauge theory, gauge theory is pretty clear about this. You can’t measure things relative to nothing. And you can’t measure two things relative to one another and make a claim about them outside of that relative frame. The problem is if you say, this is good and this is bad, you can’t prove it. You can’t prove which is the bad thing and which is the good thing. You can just say they’re different. And that’s where the problem comes in. The claim doesn’t hold because you need what they, what they, what Sam said in the talk was you need a perfect, right? He said, you don’t need a perfect. I’m like, no, you actually, you do, you need an ideal. Gauge theory says you have to have a standard that you use to then measure the relative thing. But that means you have to stand somewhere or start somewhere in order to make the relative claim. You can’t make a relative claim without making an absolute claim first. It doesn’t work. You can’t claim that this is good and this is evil simply in relation to each other. Yeah. And I think with Sam, he’s saying that like we can, we can sub out the, the, the, like the ideal is arbitrary. You just have to pick one or something like that. I think is what he’s saying. And, and, and like, cause like, okay. So when I was doing construction, I remember with my dad, we were laying out, we were laying out something on the floor and he said, well, we have to start from somewhere. It was a remodel. And I remember he’s like, we don’t know what’s square right now. And so he’s like, he just snapped the line and everything on the, on the house was measured off that line. That was the standard, you know what I mean? And he, and I said, well, like, how did you, how did you find that line or whatever? He said it’s arbitrary, but it’s what we’re going to base everything off of. And so like, you know, and so I feel like that’s what Sam’s doing in that he’s like, well, you know, as long as I, you know, got a line, then, you know, it’s fine. But it’s like, it doesn’t really work. Like you said, that it’s not going to work because you have to have a perfect, it can’t, you know, but that’s the objective material reality. I’m going to pause at objective material reality. I’m going to claim I didn’t do it. It’s a we thing. So I didn’t do it. And then I’m going to say, therefore, this must be evil. I was like, all right, you didn’t take responsibility for the fact that you drew that line. And maybe arbitrarily, right? For all you can tell. And now you’ve done that, you need to take responsibility for it. And you don’t have a proof for it, because that’s what religion resolves effectively is the proof. There’s no proof. You need faith. And it’s the whole point of faith. Faith is like, faith is what you use when proof breaks down and proof breaks down at the point of ought. What things ought to be. Well, it’s very hard to make the case that actually you ought to never kill children in service of your religion. Like, that’s a really hard thing to actually prove. I would all like to believe that. I get that. I certainly believe that that’s the case. But proving it’s a whole different story, especially when you’re in a situation that some people who do do that claim to be in. Like, if their claims are correct, maybe the fact that they’re willing to kill children is the correct answer to their solution to their situation. I don’t know. And you kind of see this, right? You kind of get a sense for this. It’s like, well, why would you have children work the mines, for example? Well, because you have too many of them. And you can’t actually feed them all anyway. And so if you lose a few, it’s actually beneficial to society. Like, I’ve heard those arguments, and some of them are really convincing. I’m not saying they’re right. I don’t think they’re correct. But there is an argument to be made, and it’s really hard to counter. I’m not saying it can’t be countered, but maybe it can’t be countered. And Sam doesn’t account for any of this, because again, it’s very clear to me, especially in that particular conversation, that he actually hasn’t thought this through. He just literally has never thought about it before, and he’s being asked to articulate it for the first time. And that’s why he’s going on and on and on, and not able to make his point. And he seems to know that. Like, on some level, the fact that he can’t, and that’s why I believe this is evil. He never does that. Why not? I do that all the time. And you can criticize me on the other side and say, well, you don’t have to prove it. Fair enough. But I don’t care, because I’m lying and stand on it. Yeah, I think he’ll eventually have to come face to face with it. I was also thinking of something, a lot of my insights as far as what I’m understanding, or what I’m capable of understanding now have come from the fact that I am a father. And with Sam, I don’t know how old his child is, because I know he had a child, but I don’t think two. Yeah, there we go. So some of these, yeah, two daughters. And do you know how old they are, by chance? I don’t. Joey might be able to seem like the Sam Harris expert. But it just, I’m wondering if he’s going to have to eventually come face to face with some of these things. And maybe that’s, like Jordan says, there’s a lot of things that you can, you can reach under certain understandings about, you know, sacrifice, you know, these types of things, but there, it is, baked into the process of being a parent. And so he’s like, it’s, that maybe, well, you know, maybe Sam has a big turnaround when he, you know, an aha moment when he gets a certain point in the relationship with his children. I don’t know. But I would say that that could be a possibility for him. Maybe, maybe I’m skeptical about this claim. I mean, I know a lot of parents who are just, they’re just not raising their children correctly. And they’re not taking responsibility. But like, when you live in a, in a, in a civilization that’s as many layers into the matrix as we are right now, like I’m talking to you on a screen and we’re like, you know, you know what I mean? You know, you can see what I’m saying. And so we’re really kind of outsourcing our, I mean, with the, I think, yeah, Paul did a thing on set, the TV, and like the TV is raising our kids, you know, like that, and the tablet and the, and the, you know, and all that that entails and everything like that. So I would, I would say that we’ve, we’ve offloaded a lot of what it means to be a parent to these other, to do these other things, technologies and whatnot. And so I think that’s like you’re saying, you know, like, well, I know a lot of parents that are, you know, they don’t, they don’t have these, you know, these boxers. Again, Josh, like, again, part of the point of my story of my upbringing is to tell you that happened long before technology, long before you’re blaming technology for something that happened long before the internet happened before these things. My parents already didn’t take responsibility for the most important decision already. And I was like, I was in junior high, I was not equipped, I am still not equipped to make a decision at that level, not equipped, not equipped, not ready, not able, no, it should not have been an option to me to carry that burden. And, and look, I mean, I think it comes out of things like Dr. Spock, which is psychology from the 1960s, if I remember correctly, on raising children, right, I think it comes out of BF Skinner, I think it comes from more from the psychological because the psychological is purely material. And Sam, that’s another thing I say, I’m just great job of exemplifying that psychological frame is purely a materialistic frame. Purely materialistic, even though it talks about non material things, it is, oh, well, really, these psychological ways like depression is really just a lack of serotonin or whatever, or too much, whatever, too little, whatever chemical in your brain, right. And that’s that, that way of talking about the world is that materialist way, as though those materials are the things that are causing your desires, your spirit, your activities, your emotions is wrong. It’s just wrong. It’s been proven wrong over and over and over again. And we’re still hanging on to it. Let’s say it’s not useful. Let’s say you can’t do anything with psychology. And I think that Jordan hangs his hat on that a lot. And he should, that’s his profession. He used it. It’s worked really well. Although if you listen closely, he kind of admits, well, the things that have worked best in my practice for the people who need the most help have been moral discussions, not psychological tools and discussions. And people kind of miss that in what he’s saying. Like he admits himself, consciously or not, that no, no, no, the PTSD people, they need a moral way of engaging all the psychology and psychological tricks in the world aren’t fixing them. And not all maybe the chemicals show great promise, which they don’t, by the way, but whatever, we’ll set that aside. Never talks about the downside. That’s a tell. Somebody never talks about the downside, the negative of something, you’re very suspicious. Yeah. Well, psychology has a downside too, right? Like there’s all these implanted memories and things that happen where people have reported, you know, this happened to me as a child when of course it didn’t. And I think that’s the thing. You know, this happened to me as a child when of course it didn’t. And psychology is not this great, wonderful tool for goodness in the world. It can do very, very huge amounts of damage to people, even adults, because we’re not individuals. We’re still dependent upon others, as Pastor Paul likes to say, we also have such sanity. Well, that has big implications for psychology. Hmm. Yeah. No, I, it’s a, I don’t know, it just like, like we’ve been talking for a while now, and it, you know, just seeing the problem, but not knowing how to, I don’t know, at least that’s where I’m at, is that I can see what’s going on. And I can see my friends and my family, you know, certain parts of my family that are, that are in this way of thinking. And it’s like, in your, your, am I wrong that the, that the conclusion of the cave is the guy just gets up and walks out? Isn’t that right? Or the, that you- No, nobody ever leaves the cave. No, no, so he never, the, the observer never leaves the cave. Oh, okay. Nope. Nobody ever leaves the cave. Nobody ever leaves, nobody can leave the cave. No. Not the people making the shadows or the people chained in, born into bondage, right? Nobody leaves the cave, ever. That never happens. It’s, it’s explicit, it’s explicit that it cannot happen. It’s not that it never happens, explicit that that is not an option. It, there’s no individualism in the cave. It is an anti-individualistic metaphor, completely. Like, the purpose of the parable, and that’s only the start, like that, that’s, it’s the first part of the book, actually. Right, that’s actually the first part of the book. And then from there, he changes, like there’s water, there’s light, there’s all kinds of things. Those aren’t in the, it’s a den in my book, it’s not a cave. Those aren’t in the den. Those are outside of the den. What’s going on in the den never changes, though. And what’s going on inside of the den never changes either, actually. Right, they’re just different stratums or classes of society, and that’s the way a city is. You know, and the fact that they interact and have to interact, you know, is a whole different thing. And like the materialism does lead to, you know, weird things, like as Ethan’s pointing out, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was mentally ill. Or Stalin wasn’t evil, he was unlucky, as Sam Harris said in that talk. And I was just like, what? And, you know, mental illness replaced evil, right? Or drugs. He was just on drugs, and that’s why he made the decisions that he made. I’ve heard that one too, Ethan. Like, you know, there’s all sorts of ways in which the materialism explains everything. And yet, when you examine it, it doesn’t explain anything. No, no, it doesn’t. Well, and like, I guess the reason for my motivation for trying to figure some of this stuff out is I can see that we’re coming up on an interesting time in our country. And, I mean, there were always, it seems that the US is always being, you know, put side by side with Rome or saying that we’re following the same trend as Rome and things like this. But I got into, before I made my roundabout way to Catholicism, I got into stoicism, and, you know, started, you know, reading Aurelius’ meditation, and just became interested in Aurelius, you know, and he was known as, you know, one of the, I think it’s like one of the five good emperors or something like that. And it didn’t, it shocked me, it literally shocked me when I found out that it was under him that Justin Martyr was put to death, you know, and I was like, how did a philosopher kill a philosopher? Like, how did that happen? I was like, I was thinking like, Marcus, how did you not see this? Like, how did you not see that he’s saying what you’ve been writing in your, we always have to remember, meditation was a personal diary, it wasn’t meant to be, he never, I don’t think he ever meant for anybody to find it or anything like that. Yeah. And that, but it was like, Marcus, how, how, how did that happen? You know, like that this, because we can read Justin’s work, you know, some of his works in that were like, you know, solid and everything. And you know, like, how? You know what I mean? And it’s like, looking back in that, and that’s what I’m worried about happening again, is that well-intentioned people will commit atrocities. And because of their lack of understanding of the nature of human, or the nature of evil, and the nature and what good it, you know, that’s what I’m worried about, I guess, I could say is that we have such a population of people in this country that don’t understand the nature of humans. And like you’re saying, they can’t see it, they literally can’t see it. And so it’s like, how long can that trend continue before we commit an atrocity? And we already, in a lot of ways, we already have, you know, at least in my opinion, is part of the abortion epidemic, you know. Or worse yet, let atrocities be committed. Because you can look at the Hamas Palestine Israel situation and say, how do we let that happen? Right? Like, how do we let however you want to blame, kill the babies? It’s a valid question. I don’t know. It’s a useful question. I know that it’s a valid question. How do we let that happen? And that’s what I point to, I’ve said this over and over again. The problem that I have with Sam Harris is that he’s not capable of being a good person. He’s not capable of avoiding evil, because he doesn’t have a definition of evil, and he doesn’t have a definition of good. So he can’t move towards the good because there’s no definition of good. I don’t care what else you say, if you don’t have a definition of good, then you can’t move towards the good. Except by accident, and like accidents happen, whatever, you could get lucky. I agree with that. Right. But the odds of you getting lucky are very low. But you’re more likely to stray towards evil, because there’s way more evil in the world than there is good, or there’s way more potential for evil in the world than there is potential for good. And I think that’s what people miss. And I think that’s what Sam Harris is missing. That’s why I think he’s dangerous. Like, I think Sam Harris is dangerous because he gives people the impression that you can just know the worst evil, which is garbage, utter garbage. You try to do that, you’ll quickly realize you can’t. Right. And then it’s sufficient to just move away from whatever that would be, and you’re good. Goodness emerges. It’s an emergence is good argument. Goodness will emerge from moving away from evil. When I talk about emergence is good, it’s right there in Sam Harris’s argument. It’s garbage. It’s obviously wrong. It cannot work, except by accident, and accidents happen. But still, is that how you want to run your society? Because to your point, in the meantime, you’re going to lose a lot of people because a lot of bad things are going to happen in how long before you become the Nazi guard, to Peterson’s point. And the worst part about it is that you’re not going to know it while it’s happening. You’re going to be completely unaware of these things. And like I said, that’s my, I mean, to bring it to, because we’re not just having a conversation about, you know, like, why we’re picking on Sam Harris and just having a, you know, pick on Sam Harris party. It’s that he is a, in a lot of ways, a canary in a coal mine and being like, oh, like, you, you think, you know, you’re a representative of a large, large group of people and getting larger by the day. Right. That, that think like them. And, and we, it’s just, it’s, it’s dangerously scary to see that when we forget, because what do you think about this as kind of a definition for evil? It’s the, like, the, the, the degree of evil is the degree to which the, the good is absent from it. And, but do you, but, but again, I realize I didn’t qualify what, what good was there, but like, it would be like black and white. The black is, is the becomes blacker with the more white comes out of it. Does that make sense? Like, you know, or darkness, it’s like, it’s the absence of light, you know, that it gets darker, the more light is suffocated out or is, is drawn out of that situation, that environment. And, and so like, and it’s kind of like night, like, you know, as, as Twilight comes on, it’s like, well, when did it turn into night? And it was like, it faded, like, you know, so evil, evil is a, is a fade. It’s a, it’s, yeah. No, I agree with that. I mean, it is a fade. It is a, you know, there’s always that argument about, you know, when, when, when should they have intervened with Nazi Germany? Was it when Hitler invaded Poland? That’s the famous argument, like, right? This is the argument against Chamberlain, like, dude, come on, he invaded Poland. Like, you should have, you should have been on our side by that point. And it’s like, no, they weren’t. And the part of the story that nobody tells is that, boy, there were a lot of anti-Jewish people in the United States, well after Hitler invaded Poland, guys, well after famous politicians, presidents, all kinds of antisemitism going on in the United States. And, yeah, nobody ever talks about that, not just the United States. I mean, England, obviously, right? The whole thing about, we can’t let him become king because he likes Hitler and, you know, we’re no one Hitler, fair enough. But also like, wow, like, this was everywhere. It was all over Europe, but all over the US, it was everywhere. And nobody sort of sees that. And that’s a problem. But, and I kind of like, I kind of like what Ethan’s saying here. Evil might simply be anti. Yeah. Right. Just be anti, right? It’s like anti-being. I think anti-being is probably the ultimate evil, ultimately. Right. It’s a no-being. That’s evil. Antinatalism? Yeah, that’s definitely evil in my book. You know, it’s something that’s, when you’re railing against things, against order, when you’re rebelling, when you’re opposing all the time, right? That’s not good. Goodness is an ordering of something. And Ethan keeps adding, anti-creation, sure. Yeah. There’s a lot of antis that you can go through. And all of that rebellion, all of that anti, all that identification against is, yeah, probably evil. I mean, it certainly isn’t good. And which is not to say that, you know, there’s nothing good about rebellion or nothing good about identifying against, because there might be, although I’m not going to make that claim because I don’t think it can be made, you know, I could be wrong about that. And fair enough. But at a certain point, you’ve got to ask yourself, like, wow, am I really just tearing things down? Because you’re not building things. And again, yeah, you have to do some destruction to do some construction, but what are you destroying? That’s Chester’s fence argument, roughly speaking. Yeah. Well, now you’re knocking, throwing things out that you’re, you know, and Sam knows that too. Like he talks about, like, I want that, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard him talk about the baby, like throwing it out with the bath water. And he’s like, I want that baby, hold on to the baby, you know, and that, because he understands value, but he wants to get rid of it. But he doesn’t, Josh, because he doesn’t care about knowing who has dead babies in their basement, explicitly. And he doubled down on that and he tripled down on that. And like, I get it. Like, that’s your belief. I understand that. Also, you’re evil, but like, I get it. Like, you’re, at least you’re honest about being evil. And I respect your honesty, but you’re still evil. And I’m still a no on evil. Like call me crazy. Still a no on the evil. No. Yeah, no, it’ll be interesting to see kind of where, where this, where, yeah, because I guess we’ll, we’ll, we’ll find out what happens when people forget what evil looks, you know, looks like. And I mean, maybe that’s- We already have, Josh, we’re past that point. No, we are. I mean, there’s plenty of anti-natalism going on. There’s plenty of people trying to justify things like abortion. There’s plenty of people out there saying we need degrowth. We need, you know, we need fewer people. There’s plenty of people out there saying that. And no one’s pushing back. And that’s, that’s the, that’s when you know, it’s when the good men do nothing. That’s where the problem is. Yeah. No, and that’s kind of, I guess, where, where I’m at these days is that I, I have, I listen to, you know, guys like yourself and, and, you know, I try to keep up with Paul as much as I can and just, you know, just drinking, but it’s like drinking from a fire hose. You learn, you’re becoming aware of all these things. And then you got major things that come up on your radar, like Israel and Palestine. And you’re like, okay, well, what do I do with that? And then like you’re, you’re bombarded, you’re overloaded and. Far away. Yeah. Well, and that’s the thing. You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t pay attention to it. That’s what I tell people. Like you, because you can’t, right? And, and, and actually I brought this up on Twitter and it got picked up by somebody, which actually was the intended audience. The number of groups killing other groups’ babies in Africa and Asia and other countries is not zero. And so to pick out Israel and Palestine as the group, it’s already a problem. And, and I think that’s, you know, really the, you know, the issue, the issue for me. And I like what Ethan says here, Nazis proposing something new or rebelling against something. Well, they’re rebelling against something by proposing something quote new that they created by themselves in the moment and rewrote history or tried to rewrite history to justify pretty good sign. You’re doing something wrong when you’re tearing down statues or destroying history, because history, history is the signal of success from the past, which is not to say all historical things were successful, right? But it is the signal of past success. And so when you’re destroying history, you’re destroying the thing that tells you about success over time, explicitly. That’s what it is. And therefore you can be sure those people are evil. No problem there. It’s not to say that everybody criticizing history is necessarily evil, although it’s something to watch out for immediately. Yeah. Criticizing something historical. Are they evil? First question I ask, are they evil? Because they might be. I’m always on the lookout for that because I’m still a no on evil, Josh. I’m still a no on evil. Like, well, it’s important because I don’t think enough people are. They’re certainly not taking a stand. They’re not saying, no, I’m a no on this stuff. I’m a no on degrowth. I’m a no on the WEF. You’ll own nothing and be happy. I’m a no on Israel and Palestine and Hamas. Like I’m a no on all three of them. Like I’m just a no on these things. I’m a no on war. I’m a no on killing people. I’m a no on continuing the Ukraine battle, even though it’s a pointless battle and always was. They had already lost a long time ago. Like I’m a no on all these. I’m still a no. That one drove me nuts because it was like out of every, I mean, immediately there were Christians on the left and on the right that were supporting that war. And it was like, you guys understand that the soul, like everybody prays in battle, right? Everybody knows that, that you get scared when the bullets in the shells start flying. And they’re praying to the same God. Those are both Eastern Orthodox countries. And so like it was so, and I was like, you guys know. It’s better than that. So my Orthodox priest friend tells me, this is last Tuesday, a week ago, eight, eight, eight, nine days ago, something like that, nine days ago. He tells me, oh, so the Ukraine church drew up all the documents and said, we’re separated from the Russian church officially, right? And then the Ukrainian government or some group within Ukraine came along and said, oh, well, that’s not good enough because the Russian church didn’t change their paperwork to say they’re separated from you. And therefore we’re going to take over. So this already happened. It was crazy how fast that happened. And what he said, but here’s what’s interesting. Here’s where the top down power from above power, power as control through force or threat of force. That’s the postmodern narrative breaks down. Before that, the churches were full, right? Because we’re in a war. Everyone’s praying. Good, good stuff. Since they took over, there’s pictures of the oldest church in Ukraine or something like that, the most revered church. I think he said it was the oldest. My memory’s a little fuzzy on that pre-holidays. It’s almost empty. Six priests and one woman kneeling. Normally it would be so full you couldn’t fit all the people in it. Now no one’s going. That’s the biggest feast of the year. No one showed up because you can’t just replace the top and expect it to work because the world doesn’t work that way. On the one hand, that’s good news. You can’t just put evil people in charge of the church and expect that it’s going to work because the parishioners won’t parishion. They won’t go. They won’t give you their time, energy and attention anymore. And therefore, because that’s actual power, see my videos on all this, that’s actual power. You don’t have it. So you can be in charge, but you cannot have the power. You can take over the structure, but the structure can have no power. And now you’re screwed because you didn’t do what you thought you were doing. That’s good news. It doesn’t just work top-down power from above. It’s not how the world works, thankfully. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst, by the way. But it’s not how it is. No. And we were, I don’t know, when that whole conflict kicked off. I’m trying to keep track of when people hop on and off bandwaggings because I’m like, that’s a good indicator of how long the pattern is going to take to play out. You guys basically picked football teams and were like, yeah, we’re pro this or we’re pro that. I don’t know if you remember, but at the beginning, Putin made the statement that Ukraine is full of Nazis. And everybody’s like, what is he talking about? That is just absurd. And then you find out that at the time, one third of the Ukrainian military was as-of. It’s like, that’s a Nazi regime. The guy that just gave a medal of honor type recipient, I think it was over in Canada or something like that, he had to wear sleeves because he had Nazi tattoos on his arms. He had to wear like tattoo cover-ups. And that’s why you don’t see pictures of the Ukrainian army very often. Because actually they’re all wearing swastikas. What is going on? And we give them 70 billion dollars. And more. More’s on the way. And so that’s why I said, because you asked, how do we know when we stray? I’m like, we already strayed, dude. I see what you’re saying there. Well, and people don’t understand. When did the Ukraine war start? Does anybody know? But as far as like- It started in 2014. It started in 2014. I don’t understand what you guys are doing. What do you- why is it important? Now it started in 2014. Really? You guys, the latest fashion thing for you with the wars. And that’s a big meme joke now. Oh, Ukraine can’t get any money because now we got to give to Israel for their fashionable war. Yeah, there’s some truth to that, man. It’s a problem. But Sam Harris isn’t going to be able to resolve that for us. No, and now it’s a business too that these countries are going heavily in debt, trying to buy enough bullets and everything like that. And those debts will be paid. As though that’s going to work. Just by the numbers, it’s not going to work. The math doesn’t even work. I don’t know what you guys think. The math doesn’t work. Yeah. No, it’s bleak. And I try not to get, just be like, ah, it’s all screwed up anyways. And I’m just going to go over here and play Xbox because why not? Or something like that, or not be involved. I don’t know. Because these conversations, I understand what you’re saying about don’t pay attention. It’s so far away from you. Don’t pay attention to it. And I agree with that because I had a similar one about climate change. And somebody was like, the ice caps are melting and the polar bears are running out of habitat. And I was like, you ever seen a polar bear? And I was like, outside of the zoo? Have you ever seen a polar bear? And he goes, no. And I said, your life ain’t going to change one bit. It’s the thought that, oh, we’re going to lose something. And it’s like, the environment changed. And things happen. The climate has been changing for 4.6 billion years, approximately. And most of that time, we haven’t been around to change it. So it obviously changes without us. And those changes were way worse than any changes that have happened since we’ve been on the planet. Nobody talks about that. Well, no. And the other thing is, I remember when climate change started becoming a big topic, it seems like it was around, it had been going on for a while since Al Gore did his thing about a convenient truth. And there were all these dystopian pictures of desert landscapes and all that. It’s all going to burn up. And we’re going to get so hot. We’re going to fry and all this kind of stuff. And when I started my work in tree work, one day I was like, plants eat carbon. And they make themselves out of it. Shouldn’t more carbon theoretically get for plants? Just to be in my very homeschool brain, connecting dots. And so I started asking people about it. Much of the green industry is very, very liberal types. I asked some people about that and they said, well, yeah, actually, even in greenhouses, they’ll pump carbon dioxide in there to increase growth and things like that. And I was like, I don’t understand then. I don’t get how this is going to work. And then Jordan Peterson, luckily, he has a big enough platform. He got into the climate change thing. And he’s like, the planet’s greener now. We know this because of satellite imaging. It was a big number too, like 13% or something like that. And you would think that that would be obvious, but it’s not. And it’s like, it is obvious to us. You can’t track everything, Josh. You can’t track everything. And everyone’s trying to track everything. This is that aginosis stuff I tweet about. Everyone’s trying to know everything and track everything and keep track of Israel and Palestine and Ukraine and all this nonsense stuff that they have no impact on. But it’s not that you have zero impact. It’s just the way you impact it has more to do with how you live your life locally than it does with any protest or giving money or anything else. The way you live your life impacts that way more. But as you’re paying attention to those things and wanting to directly affect them, instead of indirectly affecting them by making the world a better place locally, you use up your time, energy and attention in a way that increases evil and decreases goodness. And that’s what people don’t realize. You want to increase goodness, you have to put structures in place, local structures, that are good. The more local good structures we have, the more structures we’ll have globally that are good. How do you know the goodness? Well, the goodness emanates down from above. The emergence is you interacting with the goodness emanating down from above. That’s how you know it’s good. And people don’t like that answer because they don’t like emanation. They want pure emergence, which is control. Everything that emerges is controlled by humans. It’s important to know that, but also it doesn’t solve a problem. You really have to know the good. And the good is the thing that’s above you by definition. Yeah. No, and there’s even, I mean, you would expect Christians to have some more nuanced thoughts on this kind of stuff, but I was raised in a Protestant church and I can tell you, a large, large group of the Protestant, a large portion of the Protestants think the world’s screwed. It’s all going to fall down. It’s all going to burn down. We just have to hold out and really hope that we’re in a good place and the Lord is going to come back. And then, and that’s like, and I’ve said before, I was like, that view of revelation leads straight to nihilism because you’re like, I don’t know about you guys, but like when I think that the world’s going to end that or like that the world in, in that it’s just all screwed up and it’s just, it’s just a throw away. This, this world’s a wash. It’s like, it’s all, it’s, it’s, it’s over, I guess those care of it, right? It’s going to get taken care of. Yeah. And, and, and it’s really an attitude and it comes from an improper understanding of revelation, I think. And, and, you know, and that like apocalypses have been happening all over the world for a long time, you know? And I mean, that, what I was talking about with Mesa Verde, you know, that in my opinion, that was an apocalypse. It was a cultural end. It was, you know, that were the entire civilization collapsed. And it’s really strange. There’s some very natural behaviors that start emerging like cannibalism, you know, and inficide, and sacrifice, human sacrifice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s patterns that emerge. I’m going to be doing a video with Adam soon about echoes of the past, which are like the patterns that keep sort of re-emerging over time because we do history videos. So it’s like, yeah, that those patterns are really important because you see them over and over again. And maybe the, you know, Gervaiki has a point when he talks about perennial problems, which he doesn’t describe problems, he describes patterns, right? Because things he’s talking about don’t have solutions, so they can’t be problems, right? But maybe as a point, but my counter argument is that’s what religion is. It is the way that you deal with perennial patterns, how you approach them, how you interface with them. And the dogma, which I don’t think is optional, Sam Harris, at all, I think the dogma is required. If you need a starting point. Everybody’s starting point can be different, maybe has to be different, because we’re all different. Otherwise evolutionary theory fails. Incidentally, right, if equality is true, evolution doesn’t work, it’s wrong. All of evolution is wrong. Everything about evolution is wrong if equality is true. We’re not equal. It’s not going to happen, right? And so what does that mean? It means that we need to be careful, right, which dogmas we employ where, right? And we need to move past them, because dogma in the Catholic tradition, maybe you know this, right, is those are lanterns along a path. They’re things you move past. They’re not things you get stuck on. And maybe some people are going to be stuck on certain dogmas, because they don’t have the cognitive capacity to do anything else. And I don’t think people account for that. Dogma is required. We have a very old video, Manuel and I, and we were talking to a friend of ours from Australia, not Jesse, a different friend in Australia about this. But basically the problem of dogma, the problem of creed and credo and all that, and it’s on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube channel. And there’s three videos or a playlist about the first ones about that. The other two are expansions. We were just talking about Vervicki’s work generally. Expansions on that theme. And you know, it’s important that people realize that dogma is not optional. Axiomatic thinking is not optional. These things are going to happen. And that’s part of the issue is that you can’t just get rid of something like dogma and say we solved the problem, because you didn’t solve a problem. Or you can’t get rid of the thing you think is causing the dogmatism. There’s dogma in science. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re not solving a problem, and you’re not getting rid of dogma. So the question is, what do you do about it, and how do you deal with it? And maybe you personally as an individual can’t deal with it. Maybe you need a community. Maybe you need a church. Maybe you need a set of religious texts and traditions and icons to allow you to interface with these perennial patterns in a way that makes things better or more towards the good rather than evil. Which is what the great dictators of the 20th century did, is they interfaced with those perennial patterns in a way that they were trying to control them. And maybe they met with some success for some period of time. But ultimately, the cost of that control was a bunch of evil, which is nonbeing, which is killing a bunch of people. It certainly looks that way to me. I mean… …with your… No, and I don’t know. Like you said, there’s these echoes that show up, and there’s these things that just keep on emerging, the patterns that just keep on playing out, playing out, playing out. And I mean, even understanding abortion as child sacrifice, that you’re going to sacrifice your child so that you can have a better future. It’s the same thing that people were doing for some Babylonian gods like Malek and things like… Or was that a Babylonian god? I think it was. All the sins in the newest forms. It’s just that they’re… Now, I think that sometimes you can recognize some things, because I’m pretty sure most Americans would say cannibalism is a hard path. That’s not a good thing, or that’s an evil thing. So if we can’t recognize something like what’s happening around us, at least we could use those types of things as a signal to be like, oh, we’ve definitely lost our way. We’re cool with this now. I don’t know how far down the adrenochrome rabbit hole you’ve ever gone or anything like that, but there’s some weird stuff out there that people seem to be very okay with and seem very comfortable with. I haven’t gone down the stem cell research too far, but mainly because I didn’t want to have nightmares because I was like, if I find out that this is legit, that they’re using aborted babies for this, and that we’re reducing humans to our material being things, it’s like, well, yep, cannibalism is not far away now. And it’s essentially what you’re doing. Yeah, because when I eat somebody, what am I doing? I’m extending my life by ingesting somebody else. And so it’s not a hard leap to see, but I’ll keep an eye out for that Echoes video. Echoes of the past is going to be the theme. I want to address Tom’s question here. Does Dogma give you a starting point? Yeah, Tom, you are a dinner. You can’t have a life, Tom. Come on. You have a life, then you miss my live streams. Yeah, I mean, Dogma’s are starting points. They’re the same as axioms. I use those two words interchangeably for a reason because they’re the same freaking concept. And Sam Harris doesn’t realize this. Yeah, you can get stuck on an axiom for sure. I mean, I think there’s a core axiom you can always go after. Right. I like to say, look, there’s two ways you can go in the world. You can go with emergence is good, or you can go with being is good. They’re exclusive, by the way. I think that if you go with being is good, you can derive everything else from that, and you will end up at roughly a Christian worldview. Whether you want to say it’s neoplatonic or whatever, because you think neoplatonism is a thing, even though it absolutely cannot be. That’s fine, because then you end up with, well, neoplatonism in Christianity, stole a lot from neoplatonism. Whatever, dude. You’re just describing Platonism, but it’s fine. It’s cool. Yeah, also, yeah, yeah, it doesn’t matter if you use, quote, your ancient Greek philosophy or your Christ story or whatever, the derivation leads to the same place. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that weird? So Plato or the Bible, they both seem to say the same thing, ultimately. Huh, it’s almost like they’re both talking about the truth or something. And then I want to, Nicaro, it’s good to see you, my friend. I’m struggling with what you said on worrying with things happening too far away. To try to understand the symbolic patterns emerging in those events is a bad thing. Look, can you understand the symbolic events? And why does it matter? Let’s suppose the end of the world is unfolding. You have two options at that point. One is pay attention to the symbolic unfolding to try and predict it or control it or whatever. Making a prediction without trying to control it is foolish. Why would you predict something without at least making a bet on it, which is a form of control. I’m getting something out of my prediction. Or you can do what you should do anyway, irrespective of whether or not the world is actually unfolding towards evil. And maybe because you’re doing the good in your local community, then maybe that will push back the evil and stop the pattern. Because the problem with patterns, and I’m going to talk about this when we do Echoes of the Past, hopefully with Adam soon, I’m going to talk about this. The problem with patterns is that whether or not you notice the patterns does not tell you when they begin and end. It doesn’t. You might be able to see the beginning after it happens, fair enough, but also that’s hindsight. What you can’t see when it’s happening or before it happens is the end. And so you will keep looking, but you will not know that until the end. And that time, energy, and attention will be wasted, wasted, because you won’t be doing something better, which is the good. It’s not to say you can’t ever pay any attention to anything going on around you that you can’t affect directly. It’s to say you certainly can’t worry, and you should limit the amount of time, energy, and attention you’re paying to those things. Because ultimately, you’re paying to those things. Because ultimately, the only effect you can have is your local effect anyway. And also the signals you send out about things like not picking a side. Is it Hamas, Palestine, or Israel? I’m not for any of them. I’m for the good, and the true, and the beautiful. Yeah. What do you think about, like I recently started playing chess. I’m not good at it at all. But recognizing the patterns could possibly allow a person to position themselves better for what’s coming down the way. For instance, with myself, I realized that a long time ago, when stuff started, specifically COVID and stuff like that, and even before that, with the whole Trump thing, and the riots that were going on, and yada, yada, yada. But I started realizing, I was like, something’s happening to the country. I live in a very small town, and during the Black Lives Matter protests, we had ACAB end up on our local police station. And I was like, how the heck did that happen? I was like, those groups aren’t even around here. And then some stuff started reaching out towards me, even though it wasn’t around me. And so I realized that I was right for being in the wrong spot, because one thing that I started realizing was, okay, well, if history repeats, and if we have a major economic downturn, or something like that, the depression or something. Not everybody, the depression wasn’t horrible for certain people. I read a documentary about a logging camp that was up in, I think it was like Wyoming, it was in Wyoming or Montana, I can’t remember, a tie and buck company. And they survived the depression out there, and in these small logging communities that were in the middle of nowhere. Lots of people survived. Yeah. Well, then that’s the thing, because they minded their local business. And they didn’t. The problem is, by the time you see a, quote, change in the country, it’s already happened. Yeah, because then you wouldn’t be aware of it. But that’s what I was saying. Yeah, you can pay attention to the patterns, but all you’re going to see is after they’ve happened. That’s really not as helpful as you might wish that it was. And that’s the issue. And I want to address a few comments here. Ethan, speaking of interfacing evil and babies, today remembers the slaughter of 14,000 infants ordered by Herod. Ethan, I think he missed one. Joey says, you can hold together a world that is falling apart. Oh, you cannot hold together a world that is falling apart. You will only be holding onto the part that is falling, and you will fall with it. Right, because the world is bigger than you. Right. No, that’s a good one. All right, Tom, can you elaborate on why those two axiomatic options, being as good versus emergence as good? I can kind of elaborate on it. I mean, this is one of those limits that you reach. I think that if you listen to John Vervecki or even Jordan Peterson, or even maybe others, others who maybe pretend to be religious or think they’re religious, you will hear emergence is good talk all over the place. And that is in stark contrast to being as good. Even though it’s in stark contrast, it’s very hard for people to notice. Same reason why there’s a bunch of followers for Sam Harris. Like, I don’t understand how anybody listens to Sam Harris, especially now, and doesn’t understand that he’s full of it. I just don’t get it. Like, he obviously can’t answer the question. It’s obvious that he can’t answer the question. Why are you listening to him? He can’t answer an easy question. Like, what is evil is an easy question. I’m not saying that the answer is easy, but not having an answer is an indication that you have a problem, a big problem. You should be able to come up with things very easily, whether you can justify them or not. Right? And that’s part of this answer to you, is that I cannot justify that those are the only two axiomatic options or the best. All I can say is that being as good derives a bunch of stuff, and emergence as good doesn’t. And so that’s a good hint that maybe one is reciprocally opening or continuing forever, and maybe the other one isn’t. Maybe it’s parasitic, or it’s closed off, or it’s reciprocally narrowing, if you want to use fancy, viki words, which I’m prone to do. So that would be my justification, Tom, which is not a justification. I sort of understand that, but I’ll apologize, but that’s the best I’m prepared to do today. Maybe I’ll do a video on that. Hey, Caro, do you have any insights on accelerationism? Sure, absolutely. I found people trying to accelerate the emergence of patterns. It’s obviously a terrible idea. Have you heard of it? Yes, of course. Look, we live in the age of gnosis. I tweet about this all the time. We live in the age of gnosis. Why do I use that framing? And I do have to do an article on it. Someday I will. It’s just, yeah, articles are beyond the pale for my mental capacity at the moment with everything going on. The age of gnosis wants an answer. They want the knowledge of the end, an answer. An eschaton would be the Christian framing, I believe, although I might be misusing that because the hell do I know. They want an answer, and so they just want it to be over so that they don’t live in uncertainty. So it’s all acceleration is. I don’t want to live in uncertainty. I want to live in a world where I know what to do. Fair enough. Wouldn’t we all like that? That’s kind of part of domicide. That’s actually the way John Verbecki describes domicide in The Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series. It should be called Awakening to the Meaning Crisis, by the way. That’s how he describes domicide. I don’t know where I fit in. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I don’t understand where my home is. That’s why I’m in domicide. Fair enough. Accelerationism, in theory, would solve that problem by resolving the pattern, and then you would know what to do. You didn’t know when it started, but you knew when it ended. I think it all started in 2014, by the way. I’m going to do a video on that. And then Tom. What about that, Tom? Examples of emergence is good talk. Sure, absolutely. Look, all I’m going to do is I’m going to go around and I’m going to get people to talk to one another in a conversation, sort of like street epistemology or something, and that’s going to be good. Really? Is that going to be good? Is conversation by itself good? No, it’s not. I’ve made the argument before, and I can prove it, and it’s provable mathematically, by the way, which I find odd that nobody sees this. Conversation can only create more divisiveness. The more you talk, the more details come out, the worse things get. What you need to do is sit down and eat with somebody. Or sit and listen to somebody’s perspective. That’s better than conversation. I didn’t give any talks at the convivium retreat. I wasn’t invited to. I’m glad I wasn’t invited to. I wouldn’t have been prepared to. And yet, I had wonderful conversations while I was there. But mostly I was there to sit and listen to other people’s perspectives on poetry and on the Psalms and on all these things that I don’t think I know enough about. You can sit there and listen to the convivium talks. I pasted one of them in the comments. It’s on the Golden Echo. Dr. Jim also has convivium talks. You should listen to those. They’re quite good. You can understand that things will emerge from a conversation, but most of them won’t be good because the more we talk about things and the less we just participate together, the more we’ll find we have differences because detail is infinite. And so the more you go into detail, the more problems you’re going to find with somebody else’s detail. That’s just how it works. It’s just inevitable because there’s too many options. That’s the combinatorial explosion. That’s the bad side. So you can say things like, well, I’m just going to go around and open a bunch of churches and that’s going to be good because all these churches are going to emerge. Emergence is not good. It’s not the same thing. Things are going to emerge whether you do them or not. See, that’s the real problem. You think you doing emergence is good because you’ve done something. It makes you feel good to have done something. But even without you, things will emerge. The problem for you is that what you do matters and therefore what you need to do in emergence is make sure it’s pointed towards the good. And either ignore or avoid emergencies that aren’t pointed towards the good. That’s what needs to happen. And that’s what’s really hard because that requires discernment. I’ve done a live stream on discernment. I wish I had that link. I’ve done one on judgment and I’ve done one on action. The three go together. You should watch them all. They’re all great. Watch all my live streams. Awesome. I assure you I’m not biased or anything. I put a lot of time into these things mostly. That’s the issue is that we don’t like discernment. Discernment is really hard. And that’s the problem. I like what Joey said here. Conversation is not the same as debate. No, it’s not. I mean, debate is a certain format but we also don’t know what debate is anymore. There’s a debate between destiny, I think it was, and some Christian guy I don’t remember the name of. It wasn’t a debate because they didn’t make an argument to stand on. You’ve got to make a positive case. You can’t use straw men. You can’t. And then you defend your case. You can’t just, oh two people talked so it must be a debate. No. No. Debates have a format. And you can less strictly enforce the format and still have a good debate. But you can’t just call any conversation between two people who are on opposing sides a debate because it’s not. You could start a conversation and it goes into a debate mode. Absolutely. And there’s a difference between starting a debate, having a formal debate with a moderator and having it well moderated, and just having a conversation where debate emerges. I think those are different things fundamentally. And I think we’re confused and we misuse the language all the time. And I think that’s part of Sam Harris’s trick, is that he misuses the language all the time and convinces you because you want to cooperate with him and you should want to cooperate with him and with everybody else. You give him the benefit of the doubt, meet him halfway. And you don’t notice that he’s not meeting you halfway because he’s a meta-narcissist. I got to get going, Mark. What do you got for closing comments? It’s always a pleasure to have you. It’s good to talk to you. I’m unsure of what’s going to happen, but conversations like this, they, I guess, ease anxiety a little bit because it’s like I hear, I have thoughts, but nobody to confirm them with or things like that. And I’m really glad that guys like you are willing to have a two hour long conversation and stuff like that. Because I don’t get it anywhere else. I really don’t. Colorado is becoming increasingly more liberal. They just kicked Trump off the ballot. It was an interesting move by Colorado. I was like, what in the heck are you guys doing, man? Are you trying to start the war? What’s up? I was like, you saw what people did when they thought that the last election had been tampered with and now you’re blatantly, I don’t know. And like you said, these things are far away from me that I have no control over. But it’s just like, it’s like, well, that seems about right. That’s right on schedule. And like you said, once you see the pattern, by the time you see the pattern, it’s like, I guess it’s like a vehicle, by the time you recognize the make and model, it’s, yeah. But no, I just need to keep having conversations and squaring my mind to some of this stuff so that if I do have an opportunity, because they do arise occasionally to where I can actually have a productive conversation with somebody, like you said, sit down with a meal and eat, or just happen to strike up a conversation at the local park or something like that. I have my thoughts in order and conversations like this really do help. They really do. Because I mean, I don’t understand a lot of this stuff. I came in, for me, getting to this little corner of the internet or whatever, talking about the Jordan and everything, it all came at a particular time in my life when I was ingesting a lot of information rapidly. And so like walking in on a conversation midway and you got everything from, not making up words, but making up words. But I mean, they’re good words, don’t get me wrong. But like, and then trying to understand them. And some people can just use them so fluidly. I’m just like, wait, what are you talking about? Like, are we talking about the same thing? We’re not talking about the same thing. It’s a good trick too, right? Emerging new words. And then, yeah. I’m glad that’s helpful to you, Josh. I’m glad that we’re able to do this. It really is. It really is. So I hope you keep on doing what you’re doing, man. If I can offer you anything, that encouragement that streams like yours and even Paul and all of everybody that’s kind of banging around this little area and that they’re necessary. Well, you just don’t get this anywhere else. This is existing in a very, very interesting time in my life that I came across all this stuff. And it’s been good. Well, thanks, man. It’s good to see you. Have a great day and happy new year. Hey, you too, brother. Hey, dude. Adios. Yeah. So it’s dinner time for me. I’ve been going for four and a half hours. And Ethan’s got a good question here. Where the hell are Adam and Manuel? You finally do a stream during your wake window and they don’t show up. I know. It’s terrible. Icaro, do you think the presumption of thinking one can pick and emerge a pattern instrumentality of emergence is an asthma or taboo? It’s narcissism, right? It’s sophistry. It’s arrogance and madness. We’re all muppets. And we just think we can do things that we can’t. And look, I hope everybody had good holidays. I hope everybody is a happy new year. I’m going to do more stuff. Hopefully. I got some hurdles to get around here in January. Hopefully in January. Hopefully it’s over in January. And then we can hopefully get more productive and get more stuff out and leave comments. Let me know what you want to see, what you like, what you didn’t like. Right? I’m still, I got tons of videos to do. I don’t know if I’ll do any of them, but you know, they’re on the list. Let me know what you like, what you don’t like. Probably going to do another Friday stream at some point, probably next year. But hey, everybody have a happy new year. Hope you had a good Christmas and I’ll talk to you soon. Enjoy.