Sex, Death, and Storytelling | Andrew Klavan | EP 426

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information.

I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I'm looking forward to this, I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

In my opinion, we're in this moment of great transition. Not only is my generation passing away, but all kinds of world orders are passing away, and a new age is ushering in. We're asked to start with this question: Who are we trying to serve? What is the creature that we're trying to build governments around, that we're trying to build communities around, that we're trying to build avenues of information around? I don't think the question is asked often enough.

What you have is the people at the top trying to solve problems with great big wonderful ideas, and in Davos they're going to have the great reset and so on. Then you have the people on the bottom just saying, "Leave me alone." What do people do right? What do they do wrong? How do we not only control the people, but how do we control the people who control the people?

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Hello everybody! Today, I talk to Mr. Andrew Klavan, who's a compatriot of mine at The Daily Wire, but also much more than that—an author of some 30 books. He started publishing when he was 25. He's a thriller writer, a writer of crime fiction, very much influenced by Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, influenced by Raymond Chandler, who's probably the greatest noir novelist of all time—also the instigator of a number of great movies like The Big Sleep.

We talked a lot about the noir genre and about the motif of the flawed masculine hero, which I suppose is every man that's ever lived, although they vary substantially on the hero front and less substantially on the flawed front.

Anyways, we had a chance to delve into all of that in some depth—into the reality of murder and mayhem, into the difficult balance between the monstrousness that characterizes a good man and his necessary guidance by consciousness, by conscience, by productivity, and generosity—the complex decision-making that a woman has to undergo to evaluate a man who has to be a monster, let's say, to even be good, but also a tame monster so that he's not too terrible in his monstrosity.

We talked a fair bit about religious issues, delving into Mr. Klavan's journey to a Christian faith that paralleled his investigation into the literary domain. So all that and more in the upcoming conversation.

So Mr. Klavan, thank you very much for agreeing to sit down and talk to me today. This will really be the longest extended period of time I think that we've been able to talk to each other directly. You've come on my show a couple of times and we've discussed things, but usually it's pretty brief.

Yeah, yeah, well good! This will give us a chance to get into things more deeply. I thought we would concentrate primarily, I think today, on writing, although we'll branch out from that wherever we happen to go.

So maybe first of all, tell me how many books have you written so far?

I'm afraid there's over 30 of them. I've been at it a long time.

How long have you been at it?

I published my first novel when I think I was about 25 and I'm now like 110 so it's been a long, long haul.

So the first one when you were 25 and there's been 30, are those all fiction?

No, I wrote a memoir of my conversion to Christianity called The Great Good Thing, and recently I wrote a book called The Truth and Beauty, which was about the Romantic right. I'm working on one now, actually.

Ah, what are you working on now?

Now I’m working on a book about why I write about murder and my thoughts about murder and what it means.

Oh yes, human society—murder and mayhem.

Yeah, yeah, well I know a couple of thriller murder mystery writers and I'm a great fan of—I like the genre, actually, especially the noir genre from the 1940s and thereabouts. Raymond Chandler is something else! Man, he's the one who made me a mystery writer.

He is, huh?

Oh yes!

What do you like about Chandler?

Well, the moment I became a mystery writer was the moment in The Big Sleep—it's right at the opening when Philip Marlowe walks in and he sees a knight in shining armor on a stained glass window trying to rescue a woman who's tied to a tree. Philip Marlowe says, "If I lived here, I'd have to climb up there and help him because he's not making any progress." That was the first time I saw a tough guy who had a purpose. He was carrying within him an ideal of chivalry that he wanted to bring into the corrupt world. And that was actually Chandler's idea, right?

I just thought that's who I want to be personally, and that's what I want to write about.

Yeah, right. Well, there's a St. George image lurking in that, and that ties in for me with the Google boys a while back—the engineers. They did an analysis of women's use of pornography, men's too. Well, so males use visual pornography, as everyone in their dog knows, but women prefer literary pornography, and it's very tightly themed, like it's very archetypically themed.

So the typical protagonist is a surgeon, werewolf, vampire, pirate, or billionaire, or some combination—some interesting combination of all of those attributes. And the standard plot is an attractive young woman, all of whose virtues are not well known, so it's like a mousy librarian type, you know, the Hollywood Beauty who takes off her glasses and, you know, exactly that.

She attracts the attention of this more predatory male, let’s say, or at least a male with the capacity to be predatory, entices him into a relationship, and helps him reveal his commitment and his good side. It's Beauty and the Beast, fundamentally, which I really think is the fundamental female archetype—like, there's a heroic archetype that goes along with the feminine as well.

Women also confront the unknown and all of that, but it is certainly the fundamental—it's certainly the female fundamental sexual archetype. And so what that means is perhaps what struck a chord in your soul is that you were enamored, you said, of the image of the tough guy, right?

So that would be equivalent in some sense to a desire from the Jungian perspective of incorporation of the shadow, right? To make yourself into someone who's capable of being stalwart and tough—a James Bond sort of figure. That's a good example in the modern age. But then you found that that should be allied with a purpose, right? That rescuing of the maiden, you know, that goes two ways.

Of course, the maiden gets rescued, but the fact that that dangerous hero rescues the maiden and is therefore attractive to her is also his salvation. And I mean it is the problem that young men have to solve, right? It's the problem of power.

We have strength, we have power, we have a kind of sexual power as well, and you start to think, "Well, you know, if you don't want to be the bad guy." I mean, at some point, every young man realizes that nasty guys get more sex, and they realize that people who push women around can be very successful, and you have to say to yourself: is that who I want to be?

And I very much did not want to be that guy, but I did want to be successful with girls, and I also could perceive just as an actual fact that the world is a corrupt place and it's power that makes it corrupt. Raymond Chandler has that famous wonderful line: "Down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean." And that just rang a bell.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so on that too. The literature shows, so what the psychopaths, the narcissists, the Machiavellians, and even the sadists do, the men, is that the false confidence of the narcissist is a mimicry of competence, and that can be put on very early, and young women are particularly susceptible to that camouflage.

That partly accounts for the differential success of, you know, bad boys, let's say. Now, it's partly because the women are looking for the Beast that can be turned into the Ally, but it's not easy for them to distinguish the Beast who is a Beast right to the bloody core and should be stayed away from, from the potentially redeemable, you know, Philip Marlowe hero.

And then there's another complication too. You know, to say something in favor of the more beastly men is that the other thing a woman doesn't want—and no man really wants to have around either—is a man who's actually weak and unskilled, who pretends to be moral and kind, you know, not only to cozy up to women but also to parade his weakness as moral virtue.

You know, "I'm not the mean guy, I'm not the bad guy." Well, the reason for that is you're too goddamn weak to manage that. And instead of just admitting that forthrightly and doing something about it, you parade it as a moral virtue, you know. And I think that sort of man is actually a lower form of man than the outright bully.

And there's some evidence that other people think this too. You know, because the kind of antisocial bully types, especially in elementary school, aren't unpopular; they're ambivalently popular. Now, what happens is that as their life progresses, if they continue with the bullying attitude, let's say that sort of narcissistic and even callous attitude towards others, it doesn't work well as a long-term strategy.

But the bullies are certainly more popular in elementary school, say, and even in junior high than the bully victims are. I think it goes beyond that. I mean, I think this is why feminism has blown up in women's faces so much.

When you outlaw masculinity, when you call it toxic, when you make people feel bad about their masculinity, only outlaws can be masculine. So if you look at the Golden Age of television, we just passed through—that lasted about 10 years, from about 2000 to 2010, or 15—all of the shows were about bad guys: The Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire—all about guys who really cut the edge.

Fellow Andrew Tate, who is a buffoon and a pimp and just a terrible person, for a period he was immensely popular, especially with teen boys, and he would tell people how to abuse women and how to get them into sex work for your profit.

And I would look at that and I would say, "The guy's a pimp! What are you talking about?" But they would say, "Well, you're not hearing him; you're not really understanding him." But I think I was. I think what they had lost was the idea of St. George. They had lost the idea that your power is a path to virtue; it's not an obstacle to virtue if you use it correctly.

Yeah, well, you know, and to give the devil his due. I mean, the thing about Tate is he is a complex character, because not all of his bravado and posturing is false, because he is a mixed martial arts fighter. He is a genuinely tough guy, and he is also someone who came up from the street.

You could imagine that within his soul, all sorts of different forces contend. And I am not making excuses for him, because I think the electronic pimping aspect in particular is unforgivable—it's absolutely 100% unforgivable. There's no excuse for ever having done that in your life, not even once; and it's not even necessarily the kind of sin that you can recover from—not without like 20 years in serious, hang-your-head repentance.

But he is a complex figure because allied with his bravado is a genuine physical toughness, and it is definitely the case that, as you pointed out, something I warned about years ago is that, you know, if you think that strong men are dangerous, you wait till you see what weak men are capable of.

If you demonize everything that's positive—everything positive that's associated with masculinity—you do drive it into the unconscious; you drive it underground. Then you do get this weird attraction. You know, like another element of that attraction is—who was that? There was a show for a long time about a serial killer who decided...

Yeah, Dexter! Exactly. The same sort of thing, right? And you see the same sort of thing pop up, for example, in 50 Shades of Grey, which is again an archetypal example of the feminine proclivity for a certain kind of structured pornography.

So yeah, okay, so when you started writing, it's so interesting that that image, that stained glass image of St. George, right? Because St. George fights the dragon, which is the real evil. He's like Prince Phillip in Sleeping Beauty. You remember when the evil queen turns into the Dragon?

Prince Phillip fights off the dragon, which is the unknown itself, and then he's able to free Sleeping Beauty. It's exactly the St. George Motif. And the same thing happens in the Harry Potter stories, right? Because Harry goes underground to fight off the dragon of chaos, and that's the Basilisk that turns you to stone—the thing that makes you terrified.

And he frees Virgin Jenny, his best friend's sister, right? And they kind of have a romantic entanglement, and he does that with the help of the Phoenix, in some sense, that helps him be reborn.

And he's reborn partly as a consequence of actually having faced this under-structure of chaos, right? And confronted the mean streets and the darkness that's underneath every society. So that called to you from the Philip Marlowe novels, from Chandler's work.

Oh, it's the moment reading that passage that was the moment I thought, "This is the kind of writing I want to do," and also, "This is the kind of person I want to be." Because one of the problems with storytelling and with mythos is that when it conflicts with reality, you start to have—you start to leave victims behind.

And one of the great scenes in The Big Sleep is when he's playing the detective. He's playing a chess game by himself—a solitary chess game—and he turns over the board and says, "This is not a game for knights." In other words, this mythos that he brought—this ideal that he brought into the world is not fitting with the Los Angeles of the 1950s, which is full of corruption.

And the problem for me, with, if you watch for instance movies that make romantic heroes out of mafiosi, The Sopranos, I mean, you're talking about the attraction of a guy that Tony Soprano is a very attractive person. The Godfather is a very attractive person.

And then you talk to police officers who have actually dealt with those people, and every single one of them, their faces turn scarlet—they just spit rage because they've seen them. They've picked up the bodies. They've picked up the people they've killed and exploited, and they'll tell you, "They're animals! They're not really admirable at all."

And so bringing that masculine energy into the world is a very delicate operation and something that you have to remember as you're doing it—that the people you're dealing with are real and have the same right to life and health and happiness that you have.

See, you know, it's a very complicated enterprise.

Yeah, well, this is also the terribly narrow needle eye that women have to thread, right? Because they have to find a man who's capable of contending with the darkness of the world, which means he has to be able to reflect that darkness in his own soul and his own actions, but he also has to do that while simultaneously being productive and generous.

So that it's an unbelievable tight balance of opposing forces that women are aiming for. It's no wonder they overshoot in either direction, you know? And it's not surprising at all that they have that proclivity to overshoot towards the more negative end when they're young.

That's well documented in the clinical literature, right? You mentioned 50 Shades of Grey. I mean, that's one of the top 10 bestselling series in all of fiction, which is amazing!

Well, it also came up so interesting—it developed its popularity during the Me Too movement. So you saw this height of attack on toxic masculinity at the same time that, in the conscious, so to speak, there was this burgeoning desire among women who were listening to this discussion regarding toxic masculinity to be, you know, taken by a brute, you know?

This billionaire—you see the same damn thing in Ayn Rand's novels as well, you know, with the interplay between Dagny Taggart, I think it is, and is it Hank Rearden? I think so. That she ends up in a kind of semi-rape dance with.

And so the other thing that's very cool about Chandler, and I'm wondering how this impacted you too, is he's an unbelievably good stylist and master of dialogue—that witty, harsh film noir dialogue.

I mean, I don't think anybody ever topped what Chandler did on the gritty novel front, and The Big Sleep is also a great movie.

It is! I mean, that's a great movie! The Long Goodbye is a great novel, and his writing—his writing is unparalleled. I think that that was one of the key things.

Of course, like every young man of my time, I was enamored with Hemingway, but when I got to Chandler, I found something much more beautiful actually on the page.

And there was also something that bothered me about the tough guys. You know, Ernest Hemingway, I think, had a very deep transsexual theme running through his stories. One of his sons became an actual transsexual.

And there was always something that bothered me about his view of sexuality. And I was also bothered by the fact that a lot of tough guys become tough by not caring about the things that I cared about.

So for instance, Casablanca may be my favorite movie. I think it's one of the great movies of all time.

I just watched that this week, man.

Yeah! It's perfect! It's perfect! It's a perfect movie! But there was a point when I started to say to myself, "Well, you know, his girl dumped him, and so he's staying out of World War II." It's kind of—

Right, right, right—bitter about it.

Yeah, I thought, "Your girl dumps you—you still got to fight World War II!" You know? And so what Raymond Chandler captured was the responsibility that this guy had.

He was not just a tough guy. There were not just moments when he had to break the law and break people's backs and bones, but there were also these moments when he was trying to preserve something that he knew he had inside himself. And that was just really important to me as a kid.

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Right! You see that in The Maltese Falcon too, by the way, which we also just watched—the same sort of thing: this underlying moral commitment of the flawed tough guy.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the attraction—I think a better example for young men at the moment—well, Rogan's a good example. Joe Rogan's a very good example because he's definitely a monster who's got himself under control. But Jocko Willink as well.

Oh yes, of course! Yes! Yeah! Yeah! Because Willink is tough as a boot. He knows perfectly well, and he's told me this repeatedly in our various conversations, that, you know, he could have been quite the criminal, because he's definitely got a—I wouldn't say a bloodthirsty aspect, although that's in there, you know, because he's a disagreeable guy.

He's very competitive, and that disagreeableness and competitiveness goes together.

Hey, I read an interesting study this week, man! This really helped me understand something I've been studying for a long time. So people tend to feel pain as a consequence of the disruption of social relations. It's not anxiety; it's pain.

And so loneliness and grieving, for example, are variants of pain. And if you take a child who's misbehaving and you isolate them, that isolation is a punishment, and it's a punishment because it's associated with pain.

And that can be ameliorated with opiates, by the way. This is very well understood. So part of social bonding is mediated by pain responses. And I read a paper this week that showed that people who are more disagreeable, right—so that would be masculine characteristics—show less activation in their neurological pain systems when watching someone else in pain.

And so that's part of that—the underlying neurology that can lead to a certain callousness, right? A certain lack of care in reference to other people. And then you can also understand it as a necessity for things like, well, hunting would be an example—military service, police. Like anytime you're dealing with something where the threat of physical combat is real, an excess of empathetic responding is likely to be an impediment.

Now, the price you pay for that is that if you do have the wiring that makes you less directly sympathetic in the face of other people's suffering, let's say, you can easily tilt into the antisocial, right?

So this is another precipice that has to be negotiated by men who are wired to be competitive and tough. It's like, well, how do you ally that forthrightness and bluntness—because that's also part of that—with the willingness to be generous and productive?

I think, you know, Jocko told me that the way he learned that was in the military, because he found that the development of high levels of skill in other people, like that mentoring relationship, was so rewarding that that's what oriented him—that was one of the things that oriented him primarily to the good.

You know, you see this to some degree in those stories that you were talking about, even in The Sopranos, like one of the things that makes movie mafiosos admirable is that they actually produce a family around them, right? That's structured. There's a mentoring relationship there.

You even see that in Breaking Bad with Walter White's relationship with Jesse, for example.

Oh absolutely! Breaking Bad is a perfect example of what we're talking about. But again, it's also an example of the breach between storytelling and reality.

I mean we tell our—we think in stories. You deal in psychology. Psychology is a kind of story. Sexual fantasies are a kind of story. And stories are all about physical action. They're all about things—people moving and doing things.

But in real life, I've met many a man who could break me in two physically, who hasn't got a strong moral bone in his body and will cave immediately when he is dominated by a stronger mind.

You yourself, you're not an absolute physical monster, but you're standing up to an entire Canadian government because you have that spine. And one of the tricks for women growing up, I think, is understanding the difference between the kind of strength that turns itself into brutality in a sexual fantasy and the kind of strength that simply stands where it's supposed to stand and will not let the world push it aside.

And then you return to that fact that you're not afraid to be isolated. You're not afraid to walk away from the society because you when the society is wrong. I mean, I think this is one of the terrible things we're dealing with now throughout a society that's lost its mind and lost its way a little bit, is that you have to be willing to be canceled.

You have to be willing to be thrown off social media. You have to be willing to lose your job even in order to simply speak the truth. And that's a kind of strength that I think men exhibit more than women.

And I think that men exhibit it sometimes when if you looked at them, you'd think like, "Huh, that's kind of—he's not a real tough guy; he's not a—I could knock him out." Which is why, you know, you hear the stories of Ben Shapiro being bullied, and you think, like, "Sure! You know, you can be bigger than him; you can hit him." But it's a little hard to have as much integrity as he has to stand and to walk into a riot and make your speech.

Those are the things that actually in the end play out in a civilized society—strength.

Well, that speaks to a higher order virtue than mere absence of empathy or fear, I think. Because it isn't that certainly—like I am very agreeable by temperament, as it turns out. And so conflict really does bother me.

Now, I don't think Ben is particularly disagreeable, but he's certainly more disagreeable than I am and there's an element of him that really likes the conflict. This is obviously not criticism, but the issue there is that there's a kind of commitment to character, and this is probably the apprehension of this, is what attracted you when you saw that or when you were thinking about that stained glass window.

There's a kind of character that's sophisticated beyond mere physical strength—which isn't trivial—that enables people to move forward or to stand their ground despite being afraid, say, and despite being empathic.

You know, and the fact—even though it is very complex—because you said, for example, that that is likely more true of men than women, and that's a tough one. And so we could take that apart a bit.

I mean it's certainly the case that the most woke academic disciplines are female dominated, and it is definitely the case that women are by temperament more agreeable than men. And what that means, I believe, that's primarily a specialization for infant care.

And that means that the proclivity for—because look, an infant is always right when it's in distress, and your moral obligation as the primary caretaker of an infant is to never question its emotional distress, never, and to respond immediately no matter what.

And being able to do that and also simultaneously having the wherewithal to withstand—to understand conflict, especially if it's generated on emotional grounds—that's a very contradictory set of demands. I think that's partly why human beings require two parents, because it's just too much.

Well, it's just too much. I think for one person to take primary responsibility for that intense care that characterizes especially the first year, but particularly the first six months and then also to have the emotional capacity to start to implement necessary disciplinary procedures that, you know, result in some emotional tension no matter how short-term—you need a man and a woman to play those things off one another.

Oh, I think that's definitely true.

Yeah, and also to work out—I mean mercy and justice are in conflict everywhere but in the mind of God. So I think that it takes two people really to bring that together.

Yeah, and it also means you're not just dealing—with all these archetypes and with these fantasies that are stories, and these stories that are fantasies, you have to remember the moral web, and the moral web is a complex thing, you know?

Those things are borderlines that only we can see; they're not railings in the road; they're things that you have to be able to say, "I am going to stay within this borderline and I'm going to be able to define that."

And that's one of the reasons, for instance, that men go out into the world to support their mothers at home, and the mothers don't always know what the men have to do to get that done.

And the men have to make those very difficult decisions: Am I going to take this guff from some guy because I need the money? Am I going to do a job that I shouldn't do? All of those things come into play, and that—again—the complexity is intense, and it definitely takes two people, at least!

At least, yeah, to find their way!

Yeah, yeah! You talked about the interplay of mercy and justice. You know, I think that's a good definition of conscience. The conscience is the voice that signifies the interplay between mercy and justice, and you see this in characters like Philip Marlowe, right?

Because they're obviously meeting out justice constantly, and that's part of the attractiveness of their character, especially when it's devoted toward defending the femme fatale from some evil persecutor.

But they're always laden with mercy, and it is as a consequence of following the dictates of their conscience. And certainly Marlowe is a very conscience-ridden creature.

Yes, yes! So as is Sam Spade, for that matter.

Yeah! And even James Bond, on the more comic book end of things, you know? You were talking too about characters like Breaking Bad, the guy in Breaking Bad, Walter White, and in The Sopranos; you know, and it’s also been in recent years where we had the rise of the Marvel Universe, and Tony Stark is another good example of that sort of thing.

Because you know that guy is so hyper-masculine that he’s damn near fascist. And it was so interesting to see, first of all, that Iron Man was the Marvel character who rose to preeminence in the movie fictional universe because that certainly wasn't the case in the comic book world. He was kind of a minor superhero.

But Tony Stark had those same attributes of, you know, this sort of hyper-masculine—almost narcissistic masculine element—and it was also very interesting that he ended up allied in some profound way with the Hulk, right? That they played off each other; and that Stark was the person who was also able to control and deal with and channel the Hulk in the most effective possible manner.

It was very interesting to watch all that unfold.

You know, well the whole culture was spiraling off in the hyper-feminine direction!

Well, I think that the superhero is really an interesting genre. It has always bothered me because it seems to be storytelling without sex and death in it, which means it's storytelling in some sense without human nature in it.

And what disturbs me about that is I see this across all genres. One of the things—one of my absolute hobby horses is women beating men up in stories. Every movie, there's a woman who's going to punch a guy, and he goes rolling ass over tea kettle out the door, which is not what happens when a woman punches a man.

Her hand breaks, and then he beats the crap out of her! And that's a dangerous thing! But it's also saying something about our attitude to our humanity, or turning away from humanity as possibly hyper-humanity through technology approaches.

I mean, I think when I was young, you watched stories that were largely about the past. You watched war movies and cowboy movies, and the science fiction that we had was very rare, but it was also kind of a projection of the past into the future.

So even when you dealt with monsters that were very human, they were Dracula, the werewolf and all that, whereas now we're watching movies and telling stories that seem to look forward into an inhuman future.

And what bothers me about that is—because I think it's actually true—is that without sex and death, or beyond sex and death, there's still going to be a moral web, and we're still going to have to negotiate it.

And yet the immediate punishments for immorality—the fleshly results of immorality—are not going to exist anymore. Just like with, for instance, birth control; you can treat your body like a pin cushion and not get pregnant and maybe solve your syphilis problem.

And yet the moral web is still in place; you will destroy yourself by simply treating yourself disrespect.

Well, let's walk down that road a little bit. I mean, I think at a deep level, part of what you see—the part of the reason that you see the sorts of things that you're describing, which is women occupying the more masculine heroic role, taken to the extreme in, say, these superhero movies where women are regularly beating the hell out of men, which, as you said, virtually never happens in real life.

And this sort of ties into some of the things that The Daily Wire has been doing, for example, with their documentary: What Is a Woman? You know, it's easy for that to be a satirical question and that was a satirical documentary, but there’s actually something really fundamental going on at the base of that.

Because the truth of the matter is that with the introduction of the birth control pill, the question "What is a woman?" actually became immediately paramount, and now that's been unfolding for multiple generations because the obvious distinction—the most obvious distinction between men and women prior to the pill was the ease with which one of them could get pregnant, and it was impossible for one of them and very easy for the other, and that turned out to be a walloping difference and perhaps the cardinal difference.

I mean the biological definition of female is literally that sex that gives up most in the process of sexual reproduction, that devotes the most resources. You see that even in the relationship between the sperm and the egg; I think the egg has 10 million times the resources of a single sperm in terms of what it's donating to the gamete.

It's something like that. And so—and that's echoed at every level of the dichotomy between masculine and feminine.

So what is a woman? A woman is the human sex that devotes most to the problems of reproduction. So that's a good definition!

Now, you upend that with the pill, right? Because all of a sudden that difference is ameliorated to some substantial degree. Now your point is that doesn't change the underlying moral landscape as well.

It changes it somewhat, right? Because the immediate consequences for—fornication, let's say, to use an archaic term for sleeping around—the immediate consequences are clearly ameliorated.

And that leaves us to wonder, well, you know, the whole 1960s was an experiment in some ways. It's like, all right, sex has now become consequence-free, or so we thought. Well then why isn't it, why not have an endless orgiastic party?

And that's actually a real question, because the reason to do it is clear, and the reasons not to do it have become murky. Well, AIDS put paid to that demented dream quite rapidly, but then there were more subtle things, right?

And one of the subtle things is, well okay, why isn't a woman—why can't a woman just replace a man entirely? And how do we discover the limits to that? You know, now I see some limits emerging.

And you know, I mean, we now know, for example, that half of 30-year-old women now don't have a child—half of them.

It's more than half actually. Half of them will never have a child, and 90% of them will regret that.

And so even if we push—even if we erase in our 20s the difference between men and women, as the difference is erased in childhood, because boys and girls are quite similar compared to, say, teenage boys and teenage girls, even if we equilibrate men and women in their 20s, that certainly doesn't mean we equilibrate them in their 30s.

I think it's an open question whether if you remove the immediate physical consequences of a bad act, it ceases to be a bad act. I think that this is the key question that we're facing right now. You know in The Truth and Beauty, I write a chapter on Frankenstein, in which I make the argument that Frankenstein, the dude—Frankenstein who creates this monster—has not violated, as Mary Shelley did, he has not violated God's prerogative; he's violated a woman's prerogative.

He's created a being, which we all do—anyone who has a child has created a living being. But he creates it without a mother. And if you read Frankenstein in that way, you begin to see that science has been trying to solve the problem of women and the fact that they create a consequence, a deep consequence to our chief physical pleasure—they've been trying to solve that problem since science existed.

And really, since imagination existed. I mean, prostitution in some ways is a way of trying to solve that problem as well. And I believe that the attacks on men now are not really attacks on men; what I think they are is trying to clear men out of the way so that women can cease being women and can actually become men as well.

Because what women do is they raise this question: Are we purely physical beings? If you can remove the physical consequences of a bad act, does it cease to be bad? Is there something within us—and obviously I'm a Christian and I believe there is— is there something within us that is damaged by immoral action?

Well, okay, the evidence seems to be that there is actually!

Well, actually the evidence on with regard to that is clear. So let me lay it out this way: the clinical evidence is clear, okay? So let's go down deep into the biological for a minute to sort that out. So there's two fundamental strategies of reproduction among sexually reproducing creatures. There's the zero parental investment strategy and there's the profound parental investment strategy on the two ends.

So fish and mosquitoes, by and large, are on the zero investment end. What they invest is sperm and egg, and that's pretty much it. And the way those organisms manage that is they produce tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies of themselves and leave them to their own devices. Almost all of them perish, but almost isn't the same as all, and if you produce 100,000 offspring and only one survives, you're successful in replication.

Okay, on exactly the other end of the spectrum are human beings, because our offspring have the longest dependency period by a long margin, even compared to our immediate primate cousins. And that's partly a consequence of our rapid or comparatively massive cortical expansion and the need for extensive socialization—we're a high-investment species, okay?

Now, let's look within the realm of human attitudes towards reproduction. There's a distribution; there are those who engage like mosquitoes in short-term mating strategies, and there are those who engage preferentially in long-term pair-bonded mating strategies, okay?

Now we could ask ourselves, what are the personality characteristics that go along with that? Well, the clinical literature and the personality literature are clear here: here are the predictors of short-term mating strategy preference—early onset criminality, familial history of antisocial behavior, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism, right?

And it's worse than that! Not only do those predict the proclivity and preference for short-term mating—one-night stands, let's say, sex only for pleasure in the absence of a relationship—it's also the case that practicing that produces those personality characteristics.

And you can see why, because if the goal is that you're going to subordinate all things, including the possibility of any relationship whatsoever to mere sexual pleasure, you're now using the other person as an object for pleasure, but you're also using yourself.

You're also training yourself in a form of psychopathy. And so I don't even think this is debatable— I think the evidence for this is like I've known for 35 years that one of the best predictors of criminal proclivity among teenagers is early and frequent sexual experience. That's been known forever! Forever!

No one debates it in the criminology domain, and the same is exactly true in personality with regards to these dark, you know, sadism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. So for all the women who are listening—men too, for that matter—if you're out with a guy and his orientation is, you know, "Let's get it on, babe, it's a one-night stand," there's no more reliable marker of his untameable primordial malevolent beastliness than that, right?

And there's not a debate about that. And it brings us back to where we started, in a way. I mean this is the conundrum we're faced with in this scientific moment: can you solve the problems of being a human being without solving human beings—without getting rid of human beings themselves?

Because all of the things that we admire are very basic and yet, in a civilized society, have to be maintained in a civilized way. And so this, to me, is the essential question we're looking at. You know, we talk about what is a woman, which is an excellent question, but what is a human being?

And what exactly—we can't even begin, in my opinion, we're in this moment of great transition. Not only is my generation passing away, but all kinds of world orders are passing away.

And a new age is ushering in, and we have to start with this question: Who are we trying to serve? What is the creature that we're trying to build governments around, that we're trying to build communications around, that we're trying to build avenues of information around?

I don't think the question is asked often enough. What you have is the people at the top trying to solve problems with great big, wonderful ideas; in Davos they're going to have the great reset, and so on; and then you—the people on the bottom are just saying leave me alone.

And let me do what I want to do. And obviously somewhere between those people is the idea that that kind of American Founders started out with, is what are people; what do they do right? What do they do wrong? And how do we not only control the people, but how do we control the people who control the people?

And I think we're back to those questions again. And I fear that the—not the scientific worldview, but the scientistic worldview blinds us to certain things that people are, and that may be ineffable.

I think everything has a physical analog, but it doesn't mean that that's its cause. And you see this in—for instance, when we drug people for depression and they feel happier, are they happier?

And I think a lot of them are not, as shown by the fact that we now have a medicine for depression and yet depression is spreading. When you have a medicine for polio, polio goes down. When you have a medicine for depression, it spreads.

And I think that's because we're not actually treating the depression. I think most psychologists now agree with that.

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Well, you know, one of the things that we're skirting around in some sense is the question of what limitations—the question of what defines a man or a woman or a human being is actually a question in some sense of boundaries and defining limitations, right?

Right! Now one of the ideas I've been wrestling with recently is that death makes things real, you know? Because one fundamental philosophical question is, well, what does it mean for something to be real? And it seems to me that the hallmark of the real is death, is the finitude of existence.

Something can be so real that if you encounter it, it kills you. And then if that's true, if mortal limitation defines reality, it makes us—let's walk through that—is something that threatens you with death serious?

Well, yes! Right! Right! Now, it might not be the most serious reality because I think you could make a case that something that threatens your soul is more real than something that threatens your life.

And I think if people understood that distinction, they would sacrifice their life to save their soul. So that's something we could talk about. But in any case, the logic of the argument depends on accepting the proposition that what we take most seriously is what we regard as most real.

And certainly those things that threaten us with death we regard as most serious and therefore are those things that help us define what is real. I don't know if we transcended our mortal vulnerability, which is the dream of the transhumanists.

It seems to me that we would instead of solving the problem of mortality, I think we would substitute a kind of soulless existence for life itself. It's something like that, you know? Because you might say, well, if you now can't be killed, if you're now an immortal creature—which in principle is the aim of all of our striving to overcome our illnesses and our subjection to weakness—are you—is there anything in you that's now human?

Yeah, I think this is absolutely true, and that death not only makes things real; it actually gives us meaning. You know, the poet John Keats said that life was the veil of soul making.

And I think that the reason it's the veil of soul making is that death gives everything all meaning. I think it comes from death—even the moment of love, the fact that it's precious, the fact that it passes, the fact that every moment passes is what gives it such urgency and importance.

And one of the arguments I've heard against Christianity—against the Christian idea of eternity—is that where will the meaning come from? I think that's a solvable issue, obviously, but still, here now we are dealing.

It is death that gives our life meaning, and it is death in which we find the meaning of life! There would be no purpose, I believe, if we had no death. If we actually eradicated that, we'd get something like the end of the time machine, where those people are sitting around, you know, doing absolutely nothing and just kind of floating downstream, right?

And it looks like paradise, but in fact, it's hell! And I think that that is—this is the thing that disturbs me so much about these superhero movies, is really when you take away the traits that make us human—death and sex—Eros and Thanatos.

You've taken away the meaning of being human as well, and you leave us with virtually nothing. And some of these transhumanists also become death worshippers because what they talk about is, "It'll be great when human beings are gone."

It's time for these meat sacks to get out of here and leave everything to AI. There are people who believe that AI is more important than we are, and for me, it's always the question of why?

What consciousness does AI have? What is it—what is precious about AI? We're the ones who are precisely because we die, precisely because this moment—and this internal life that I lead and that you have to assume I lead because you lead one too—that's where all of the meaning exists.

And the fact of your life is so urgent and sacred.

Well, right, right! Well, the relationship between urgency and the sacred is definitely—it’s a very close relationship. And if you have infinite time, the question that immediately arises is then why anything now, right?

And I think that's actually, in some ways, you might say even that that's one of the curses of plentitude and wealth, especially if it's unearned. It's like, well, how much urgency does there have to be to drive you forward in a meaningful fashion?

You can think about this in terms, for example, of the effects of pornography. You know we know that young people are much less likely to couple than they were. This is particularly pronounced in places like Japan and South Korea, where I think it's about one-third of the young people there under 30 are virginal.

And one of the questions you might ask yourself is, well, how much is the fractious but necessary long-term relationship making between men and women driven by what? By sexual urgency and scarcity, right?

And you see the same thing if you're reasonably well off financially, the same can emerge with regards to your children which is, well, how do you provide them with optimal deprivation, given that you could provide everything for them? In which case, you become something like the infinite mother that destroys their souls by providing them with so much care that there's absolutely no reason for them to ever get up and do anything.

That's what I think this whole moment in history is about. I mean, we do seem to be on the verge of solving so many problems—and yet, you solve the problem. The solution is, in some ways, the problem!

And the idea of choice and the vastness of our choices, and the lessening of the consequences of our choices actually threatens to strip us of the human being for whom those choices are made.

And so exactly, yeah! And I think that's why the actual—we have to return to those actual Aristotelian questions of who we are, what we are.

It's a weird thing to be talking about in this moment when it seems like we're going to travel into space; we're going to travel into inner space; we can clone people; we can make people live forever. But to me, it's the urgent question!

And it's why the Ancients matter more than ever in this hyper-modern moment. It really is! We really are reaching a branch in the road, I think. Everybody can feel it coming, and it's dispiriting to hear our leaders talking in these old-fashioned terms about what they're going to do, and how they're going to solve our problems for us without really taking into account who we are—and their responsibility as leaders to our happiness and to make our happiness possible, and to make it possible for us to find our happiness, which we can only do on our own!

This is something I think that makes it so important that we look upon the least of us with compassion. You know, this is why you look upon the least of us with compassion because they’re us, because in the end, if we can't figure that out, we can't figure ourselves out.

It really is! It is amazing that people who are somewhat older than this generation—I recently heard somebody after the October 7th attacks on Israel. I heard a Columbia student, a woman, celebrating the slaughter in Israel and quoting Chairman Mao.

And I thought, Chairman Mao was the worst mass murderer in human history! I don't think anyone has ever racked up the body count that Chairman Mao has racked up, and the ignorance that that entails—and the ignorance that entails spreads out to an ignorance of Shakespeare, of Plato, of the Bible.

You have to be totally ignorant in order to be quoting Chairman Mao as if he mattered morally.

And so I think that we've come to this moment when futurism makes it seem as if all of the wisdom that was piled up behind us is meaningless.

What did they know? They didn't even know whether the Sun goes around the earth or vice versa! When in fact they knew all the things that mattered because they were dealing with life at a much more basic level, and without that basic understanding, the future is going to be a disaster.

So there is a scene in the story of Noah that's apropos in that regard. So Noah is presented as a man wise in his generations, right? So which means that for a man of his time and place, he was properly morally oriented—which is all that can be required, expected even, in the best possible case of any of us with, like, vanishingly few exceptions.

So he's a good man, and he attends to the warnings of his conscience, and he shepherds his family and the human race for that matter through a complete bloody cataclysmic catastrophe, comes out on the other side—which in some ways is what every single one of our successful ancestors did, right? To manage to negotiate through life with all its vicissitudes and leave progeny behind and leave behind the progeny who actually survived.

It's so unlikely! So all of our ancestors are Noah to some degree.

Now, after he washes up on shore and the flood recedes, he plants a vineyard and proceeds to get rip-roaring drunk on the consequences, right?

Now, once it's all brewed up, he's lying in his tent, nakedness fully exposed, and his son Ham comes along and has a pretty good time poking fun at the old man, right? And then he decides to get his brothers in on the joke, and he invites them to come and have a gander.

And instead of acting in a manner that's derisive toward their father, they back into the tent and they cover him up with a blanket. But this is where the story gets serious because the tradition that surrounds that story is quite clear: the descendants of Ham are slaves, right?

And so what that means, as far as I'm concerned—and I think this is dead right and it's relevant to what you were saying—is that you adopt a pose of moral superiority, derisive moral superiority to the past at your immense peril, because if you're foolish enough to presume that, for example, in your stunning ignorance and moral superiority the Chairman Mao is a model, the probability that you're going to end up as a slave is 100%.

You're already a slave to the ideology, you know? It's only by—I have to tell you a wonderful story from my Hollywood days because they made the Noah story into a movie with Russell Crowe—a big epic movie—and they completely changed God's motive, being Hollywood. They completely changed God's motive for destroying the world from sinfulness to being not environmental enough so that they weren't being enough.

So figures, according to the producers, what the evangelicals complained about was that they showed Noah getting drunk, and the poor Hollywood producers were left explaining to the religious Christians that, no, that was actually scriptural—that was actually in the Bible!

So piety of any kind is actually a way of blinding ourselves to what human beings are—in both their decency and their wickedness.

I actually think this—I believe, you know, there's always been—especially once the age of science begins, there's always been this idea that you can find a single governing motivation for human behavior. So you have Freud with power and alienation, but I think one motivation that we completely forget about is the motivation to appear virtuous to oneself and others.

And I think that the knowledge of our brokenness, the knowledge of what we really are is just intolerable to so many people. And it's that that I think causes you to have both the pious Christian who couldn't care less about the person next to him, and the guy in Davos who thinks he’s going to—it's fine for him to make the decision.

Okay, well, you put your finger on something absolutely crucial there, I think. So one of the things I've been exploring really in depth, especially in the last month, is the intersection between a biblical injunction and a gospel injunction.

So the biblical injunction is do not use the lord's name in vain. Now people think that means don't swear, and that isn't what it means, right? It isn't what it means. It might mean that in some peripheral sense because it is a warning against the careless use of God's name.

But what it really means is do not claim moral virtue, especially of the highest sort, for acts that are clearly self-serving. Now, there's no more self-serving act than one that's narcissistic, and by definition, narcissism is the core of self-serving, okay?

So a narcissistic act is one that elevates my moral virtue falsely, okay? So now then imagine the worst extent of that sin is for me to claim that my narcissistic motivations are actually done in the name of what's highest, and that would be God in the case of the totalitarian religious zealot, and it would be compassion in the case of the modern left-leaning atheist who, you know, has basically made the goddess of mercy his or her unconscious God.

So now I can claim false moral virtue, and I can elevate my social status and my self-regard without commensurate effort especially, and I can circumvent all the problems you just described, which is actually contending with the depth of my genuine misalignment and sin.

Now, that's echoed in the Gospels like Christ goes after the Pharisees in particular as hypocrites. And so they're the religious types that you just described—the ones that parade their moral virtue.

They're the same as the bloody modern protesters too, but the false butter won't melt in their mouth evangelical types and the zealots in the Islamic world—they're all of the same type. They take this unearned moral virtue, they acolytes of God, and they use that.

Christ accuses their praying in the marketplace, which is no different than protesting, to elevate their social status so that they have good reputation among men, which he also warns about.

And so there's this terrible sin, and it's opposition to that sin that gets Christ crucified, right? Because it's the Pharisees he really makes enemies of, and he says to them, "They worship the dogma of men as if it's the commandments of God", and that they are the same people that would have killed the prophets whose words they purport to worship.

They're vicious criticisms being put forward by Christ. He makes terrible enemies out of the Pharisees, but what he is calling out is exactly what we see at Davos.

It's exactly that presumption that mere ideological purity and the claim to serve a higher power—"I'm saving the planet"—is sufficient to pass for genuine moral effort of hoisting your own goddamn cross as it turns out in a more fundamental sense, right? It's a substitute for true moral effort.

That's true, and it brings us back to the idea about sometimes solving the problem is the problem. One of the wonderful things about the Enlightenment is it gave us all these systems that marshal human flaws for the good of all.

So you have capitalism, which is a wonderful economic system, and you have democratic republics which elevate people to power ostensibly on merit and some kind of connection to the people.

But they don't eliminate the fact that the love of money is the root of all evil and power corrupts. So you now have is you—what you now have is people who no longer have to confront the parasitical nature of their wealth because they can say, "Oh well, I created jobs, I created wealth, I spread the wealth."

But they’re still corrupted in soul because they fall in love with money, which is a form of idolatry, and it does eat people away.

And you have people who are in power, whether through wealth or through election, who can say, "Well, I'm not—it’s not like Henry V thinking all this is a ceremony—I actually have been elevated by the people or by election, or I created Amazon.com, or I did something like that."

And yet that power is still corrupting. So as we solve the problems, we still haven't eliminated the fact that the human being is a broken system; it's a contradictory system—a system that actually is aiming—what was it Wilde said? "I think who said we're all standing in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars."

And I think that that idea that we forget that we're standing in the gutter because now we can actually say, you know, Tolstoy, you know, found God, and he realized, "Oh my God, I'm a parasite! I'm living on the backs of the serfs!" But now you don't have to say that anymore.

And people—this is why I despise Ayn Rand, by the way. This is why I just can't stand this elevation of power and wealth to a state of virtue—it's simply not. It is power and wealth, and sometimes it's deserved, and sometimes it's used correctly by people who have virtue, but it's not the virtue itself, and it can be incredibly destructive to the human soul.

Yeah, well, the reason that I've stayed as firmly as I've been able to in the psychological domain is because I've—I don't believe that systemic alteration strikes to the core of the problem.

I've always—I've been concerned, I would say my fundamental intellectual interest, it's not only intellectual—existential interest—is the issue of evil.

And I'm not really that interested in systemic evil, partly because I'm much more interested in actual individual motivation, because I want to know—see, I wanted to know how I could be an Auschwitz prison guard. But more than that I wanted to know how I could be an Auschwitz prison guard and enjoy it.

And if you don't think that you are that person, you don't know much about people. Now that doesn't mean that there are some people—there are some people who would be tilted more in the direction of the temptations and pleasures that being an Auschwitz guard would provide, right?

There are some people who are more temperamentally protected against that particular sinful route. You know, they’d be much more likely to turn into a devouring mother, for example, and infantilize everyone.

But I was still very curious about how you erect barriers in your own soul to the blandishments of those who would provide for you an avenue to that kind of sadistic misuse of power.

And you might say I’d never do that, and I’d say, no, the opportunity for you to do that just hasn't presented itself—and that might be because of your own inability, not your moral virtue.

You've just never managed to elevate yourself to a place where you have power over anyone else, and that's not a virtue; that's that weak man that we were talking about at the beginning of the discussion.

And that's also what this can segue us into the next part of this conversation. Maybe that's actually also what got me interested in theological ideas, you know? Because I became convinced that the fundamental issues that beset us are psychological, but that the fundamental psychological issues are indistinguishable from the theological.

And so I think the battle against evil—and I do believe in the reality of evil—the battle against evil is fundamentally fought in the soul.

And so now you have had a long journey towards a relatively elaborate faith, and it's not the faith that you were born into, right? So do you want to walk us through that a bit?

And I'd like to know, what were the steps? How did this come about? I'd also like to know how it dovetailed with your fiction writing in particular, because I think of the theological as meta-fiction, you know?

It created actual problems in how to write natural fiction. For a while I wandered into fantasy writing because it was the only way I could express the new level of reality that I was seeing—but ultimately, I found that very unsatisfying because I feel that God is God of the real world.

I feel, you know, he's not a fantasy God, he's not God of Candyland, he's God of this world. Since I was baptized at the age of 49, it's kind of a long story, so I don't want to go into...

That's okay! That's okay. We'll lay it out because I am very curious about it. I think it would be helpful for the listeners.

So when I was in college, the first wave of the postmodernists were coming in, and we were starting to hear about relativism and the conjunction of language with meaning and all of these things.

And I guess I was 19 years old and I read Crime and Punishment.

And when was this? What year was that?

See, if 19, I would—It would have been ’73.

Okay, so now I'm situated in time. You read Crime and Punishment—oh, that'll do the trick!

Yeah, exactly! And you know, here's the scene of a man who con—and you know, DFI was writing before, but he actually, DFI I believe, was an actual prophet and he actually prophesied what N was going to say. He saw those ideas coming.

And so, you have this scene in a novel where a man takes an axe—not just to the pawnbroker who is bedeviling him, but to her sister. He kills, in just a scene of incredible innocence and evil, kills a woman who can't think straight and just looking at him with this blank look, and I thought, you know—there is no way this is not an evil act!

And I—that's the point! There is no construct that you can have, and this to me is the only leap of faith I ever took. The only leap of faith I ever took in my journey to Christianity was saying that there is something that is evil, and therefore something that is good or not evil, whether or not every single person in the world thinks so.

And whether or not you can convince yourself, it remains evil. And that means that our mind is linked to a level of meaning above the natural, which is what I mean when I say supernatural.

I don't mean like magical things happening; I mean transcendent, yes, and it transcends the natural and the physical.

And so for that to be true—first of all, that moment when that murder happens in that book inoculated me to the blandishments of postmodernity.

So when I read, if you read the mad scene in Hamlet, Hamlet goes through and walks through all of the ideas in postmodernity. He says, "Well, I'm reading!" "What are you reading?" "I'm just reading words, words, words."

As if the words were disjointed from meaning. He says nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. The only thing about that is Shakespeare, the great, was saying—showing to you that Hamlet is pretending to be mad.

He knows that the things that he's saying are mad, but the professors who were coming into my university didn't know it. They actually thought what they were saying was sanity.

And I think what Shakespeare was saying was they really did know, but they were saying it anyway because the logic was following that way, so that for other darker motivations.

Right? Because it allows for a complete abdication of responsibility and a descent into responsibilist hedonism that comes along with it. There's no way around that.

That's why the Marquise de Sade is also a standard bearer of the Enlightenment rationalists, and he knew that. I mean, the thing that's so remarkable about Crime and Punishment, you pointed to one of the things, you know—and it was certainly my investigations into what had happened in Nazi Germany and in the worst places even, the horrors that were perpetrated. If you can read about those and you can imagine human beings doing that and you don't regard that as evil, I don't want to be anywhere near you!

That should wake you up!

Yeah!

Oh God! If that doesn't wake you up, and I think this is so interesting that you had a very similar experience, I think Sam Harris had a very similar experience by the way too, because he's been obsessed by the issue of evil as well.

Like, evil is something so palpable that if you face it then you will become—either become convinced of its reality or there is no hope for you!

That's right! That's right! Once that happened with Crime and Punishment for you, that's so interesting. It did! Because of my milieu.

Because I was a secular Jew in coastal cities—in the artistic world that was a novelist, I was dealing with sophisticated people. The idea of believing in God unironically, or even beyond the Jungian—"Well, you can't tell whether this is a delivered meaning or a real meaning." That idea was absolutely closed to me; I couldn't reach it.

And so I spent many years struggling with the postmodernist, and my novels—the themes of my novels are, how could you tell what was real? I'm writing thrillers, but there were thrillers about the nature of reality—the inability of theory to contain reality.

And so I was struggling with that, and I was beginning to realize that you simply could not get to moral reality without some idea of an ultimate good, and that that ultimate good had to be a personal good, because there is no good without choice, without consciousness, without morality.

So I was beginning to understand, maybe without relationship!

Relationship! Well, it's so interesting because one of the things that happens in the Old Testament, it's this weird insistence that our fundamental relationship with reality must and should be covenantal.

It's actually a relationship that's best construed—well, and then you think, "Okay, let's think about that for a minute." Okay, so what's a human being? Well, a human being is a personality!

Now, if a personality can function in the world, like a personality exists in relationship, that's like the definition of a personality.

And so if it's our personality that enables us to survive, to exist, then in what possible manner is our relationship with the world not covenantal in the final analysis?

I can't see a way out of that! And so that means there's a personal element to it—that's a—that's relationship! Like it's not like we stand as dead objects in relationship to a set of dead facts. That's not how it works!

You know, this is why to me if there's such a thing as the most profound moment in all of literature, it's Moses confronting the burning bush! Because he's confronting what's a symbol of the creation and destruction of the world!

Things are born and they die; they grow and they're consumed, but they never end! And it says to him, "I am! I am!" It says that this is a person speaking to him!

The fact that that is happening—yes! And the fact that it's happening between a consciousness—Moses's and this object which is the universe essentially, in small—makes it impossible to know whether it's in that relationship that it becomes "I am," which is kind of what Jung, I think, was talking about, the uncertainty of that.

But also, but it also sort of says more in an Aquinas point of view that if you accept this on faith, you will then contain it; it will then become part of what you see.

Well, there’s more in the Moses story than that too, which is absolutely crucial. You know, because up to that point, Moses is an escape from Egypt; he's essentially a wanted criminal.

And he's a shepherd. Now he's doing alright as a shepherd, and he's made a good relationship with his father-in-law and he's got a couple of wives—like he's got a normal life. But then he has that encounter with the ground of being, right, that beckons to him, and he pursues it deeply.

And then the voice of being itself speaks to him. But then the next thing happens—that’s when God charges him with the responsibility and the ability to stand up against tyranny and to oppose slavery, right?

So now all of a sudden, because Moses has made that connection with being itself, he now becomes the person who can genuinely lead. And then he says God—he says to God, "It's like, well, you're charging me with this and this is revealed to me, but I don’t even know how to speak!"

And God says, "Yeah, that’s your problem, buddy!"

And that's so interesting, because Moses has some impediment in his ability to communicate, but he still is charged with the moral obligation, like your superhero characters or like Philip Marlowe, like your heroes, to stand up against tyranny and to oppose slavery.

And you know, it's an open question for all of us, especially if we're concerned with authoritarianism or hedonism for that matter—like, what is it that transforms us into the sort of person who has the moral fortitude to stand up against that?

And it is something like the establishment of a relationship with the ground of being itself, if you have that burning inside you!

Nothing is more frightening than losing that relationship!

Nothing! Yep!

And it also gives you the idea that because you can communicate with it, you can become like unto it; you can move into that image of God within you—that is your essential personality that we all know we've fallen short of!

Right, right! What happened to me, and this is kind of interesting because it goes back to the Marquise de Sade, is I came to a point where the logic of God became unavoidable.

But on almost the same moment—and maybe for similar reasons, though I think they were much more deeply personal and connected to my past—I had a crack up!

I went nuts! And I found a psychiatrist who was recognized as one of the greats. And what I now consider to be a literal miracle, he cured me!

I went from being a suicidal, delusional, hypercritical, paralyzed human being to being one of the more joyful people I know! It was insane! I mean, this transformation was entire and insane!

I always—when was this? When was this? I was about 28 when I cracked, and by the time I was 30, I was on the way back. By the time I was 32, I was fine!

So what happened? What were the pressures of the descent like?

And what would the—I’m sorry, say?

Yeah, what caused the descent? What caused the breakup?

I mean, I was in—I had a child. My wife and I had a child. I was absolutely, as I am to this day, madly in love with my wife. And that was one of the things that kept me alive.

And we had a child, and I couldn't make a living doing what I wanted to do. I knew I had a genuine talent for what I wanted to do.

And I was absolutely a complete failure! I published a book—it had sold no copies! I had nowhere to go! I was just getting my writing, which was based on the tough guy writers, was crystal clear, painfully clear—had become impenetrable! Even I didn't know what I was saying!

So I was unable to make a living; I was unable to proceed in my profession, and I just broke! And I had all kinds of psychological problems!

And getting to the place where I could act in the world! And here was the interesting thing: I mean, the guy who cured me was a—I would call him a Neuran.

Freud was an atheist! And so I began to feel that up until then, the pro—the question of God—I was kind of, you know, I was agnostic. How can you possibly know?

And how can you, you know, why would you have faith? You—you—why can't you just go in uncertainty? The burden of uncertainty had a certain nobility to me.

But at this point, I thought, well, maybe I should become an atheist! And so I started to read atheist philosophers, and one of them was the Marquis de Sade.

And he was the only atheist philosopher—to this day, maybe Foucault; he was the only atheist philosopher who made sense to me.

Everybody else I thought, you know, you cannot maintain a moral stance and be an—you can be a moral person and be an atheist, because you're basically—what N said, you're living in the shadow of a dead God.

Absolutely! But you can't make—you can't be more consistent!

Yeah, yeah! Well, the thing is, Freud had figured that out—for God’s sake—figuratively speaking he had figured that out in a profound sense. You know, it’s very weird!

Well then, you come into this place where you start to see the complexity—that the human experience that you’ve been living in has been predicated on Christian ideas that you didn’t even know you