Intersectionality, individuality and the hero: a discussion with Jonathan Pageau

On itself, it's, uh, so people are taking it seriously. That's good. It's good. I say that, but you're the one who has to deal with the pain and the pressure. So yeah, well, I'm in a permanent state of being freaked out. So then I woke up this morning with all these ideas that I wanted to talk to you about. All right, okay. So let me pull up the emails that I sent you. Yeah, okay.

So one of the things, did you want to talk for us just to, just to get our idea straight or what? Maybe I can, I also want to comment on some of the things you wrote. Go ahead. One of the things, one of the difficult things, by the way, are you recording this already? Yeah, like, you know, we say after. Well then maybe you should, then maybe you should speak first because that way when I talk about the kind of the questions that I have, especially in regards to the cross. The cross is really complicated. It's a complicated—it's like it's one of its meant to be a mystery.

And so the way it's presented to us, it kind of breaks all the categories in a way, and so— or it unites them together. You can rather see it that way. And so it's difficult to talk about the cross because it's both totally on the inside, you know? It's the center of the world, it's the access of the cosmos, it's all those things, but it's also, you know, at the edge of the world because even in the story, it's brought outside as crucifixion happens outside of the city. It happens on the Mount of the Skull.

And also there's a verse in the songs that says that the just will never hang on a cross, and so I will never hang on a tree. It doesn't say cross, but no, the just will never hang on a tree. And so there's an aporia in the cross, which is that Christ is the just who's hanging on a tree. So that's actually one of the reasons why Jews have never accepted Christ as the Messiah because they can't deal with the absolute paradox of having, you know, the perfect man hanging on a tree.

And so it's like, how does the—but for a Christian, it's really bringing together the extremes, you know? I talked about that before. Well, I think that Christ really isn't the top of the hierarchy but is really the stretching out of the hierarchy from the top to the bottom. Yeah, yeah, okay. So, all right, so we'll get to that. All right, yeah, yeah, because I think that's an interesting way of conceptualizing the potential solution to this problem.

Yeah, okay. So Derrida had this concept of undecidability, right? There were these things that existed on the margins, that didn't fit into a category system, yeah. And we've talked about that before, and that seems to me to be very much associated with the idea that I developed in Maps of Meaning of anomaly. Mm-hm. Yeah, and the anomalous is the monster. And the reason the anomalous is the monster is because there's a very large number of things that won't fit into any category system.

It doesn't matter what the category system is—there's the things inside the category system or the category, and there's the things outside, and there's a multiplicity of things outside. Yes, and so the monster image is an appropriate image to represent that because that monster is a chimera that's made up of parts. Yes, exactly. Okay, and you always have to confront what stands outside the category system.

Yeah, and it looks to me like we use our predator detection and defense systems as the first defense against that, the first reaction against that. Yeah, because it's an archetypal reality that there are things outside the category system. Yeah, but it's actually—and I think that in terms of phenomenology, I would say, I don't know, maybe you can actually— you couldn't eliminate this in terms of evolutionary biology because I'm not an expert in that at all. But it seems that there's both the predatory aspect where it's where the monster, the anomaly is seen as something to defeat, but there's also an aspect which is the desiring aspect.

Yeah, right, right. Well, that's the dragon with the gold. Yes, or the siren. The siren—no, the monster itself. Like, there's something about the siren and about the idea of Lilith, for example, in Jewish mythology. This notion of, like, or the incubus, you know, the idea of the female demon which lures and brings you out of yourself and kind of makes you kind of waste your seed. And in a Christian, in like a religious idea, where it's as if there’s something about the outside of the foreign or the— which elicits a desire to move out towards it.

I think you kind of talk about that when you talk about this notion of the snake that appears, let's say, about amongst a group of chimpanzees. Yeah, yeah, that's the fascination of the unknown, and neurobiologically that's associated with the positive aspect of exploration. Yeah, so that’s, yeah, so yeah, it’s a paradoxical situation because if it's unknown, you want to be afraid of it because it might eat you, but because it contains new information, let’s say, you also want to approach it.

Yeah, and that's really, I think it's important, especially now in our situation, to understand the desiring aspect because it can explain a lot of the strange phenomena that turn around sexuality in terms of all the strange fetishization of sexuality into, you know, sometimes its opposite. You know, like the weird scatological fetishes that people have, and like the strange, like it's as if there's something about the outside or the monstrous or the discarded, which can also, in a certain instance, if people who let themselves go will pull them into a desire relationship with that.

Well, one of the things you do find is that sexual release, like orgasm, is potentiated by novelty. Mm-hmm. So that's a good example of that. Yeah, yeah, and if you kind of go down that route, it can lead you into— there's no limit kind of to where it can lead you, and it can explain, I think it can also explain kind of like now we are in this weird, paradoxical situation in terms of society where since the sixties, people have been telling us, you know, that in emphasizing that aspect, the idea that novelty will increase pleasure, let's say, yeah, bring you further into pleasure.

But then realizing that if you go down that road, now we're kind of realizing, you know, it's like, oh, now we're surrounded by sexual perverts, and we're wondering why we're surrounded by sexual perverts. It’s like, well, maybe you led them down that road, and that road doesn't necessarily lead to just sunshine and rainbows. Like, it leads to very dark places, which include a lot of violence and a lot of an exploration of animosity and a mixture of desire and hatred and all those very strange things that people kind of let themselves fall into.

Yeah, well, you might say that that's in some sense the story of Foucault's life. Yes, exactly. I mean, yeah, we've talked about that before, that if you look at Foucault's—if you look at Foucault's life, he's almost like a microcosm of what's happening today in terms of his—he's like radical exploration of power and sexuality. But also, like, the idea of the constant stranger and the constant anonymity of sexual encounters, I think that for sure, I see him really as someone to look at in terms of understanding, you know, the tone of what's happening today.

Yeah, yeah, it seems to me to be the case. And it's interesting too because Foucault and Derrida didn't care for each other. No, and you know, Foucault basically regarded Derrida as a trickster— as a wordy trickster—but their ideas fall into alignment with regards to the notion of the excluded, as far as I can tell. Yeah, well, the thing that—the difference I would say with—I find getting that more useful in terms of, you know, I’ve talked about this in my different talks about this notion that what's upside down can be turned back on its head, back on its feet.

And I think that Derrida is more useful to play that game where you can use him and some of his categories to include them in a larger frame, let’s say. So that his ideas are included in a more complete vision of reality. Because he has—like he really shows the real—his way of thinking really shows the real problem of post-modernism. Like, that— you talk about that off, like how is it that there's this contradiction, for example? His philosophy has been described as like the philosophy of hesitation, you know? And that makes total sense because, you know, when you're faced—he has this notion that you're faced, you know? And in this slipping and sliding analysis of the world, where all the—all, you know, reality multiplies itself, is deferred.

You know, that things always point towards the future, so you never know exactly what something is because it keeps changing and it keeps slipping into something else. Right, and so that actually leads to— Which is true things. Yes, exactly. But that actually leads to this hesitation, and if you've ever seen an interview with Derrida, you'll see it in his demeanor. He's constantly hesitating. He's hesitating to speak because he’s always kind of like—he doesn't know. He realizes that he doesn't know the total implications of what he's about to say all the time.

So he's always like—he's like he's constantly cautious and cautious and cautious. And so it seems like that's actually what should be normally derived out of the kind of post-modern idea that meaning cannot be contained. Whereas Foucault, he really used the kind of inverted idea of truth that you have the truth of the marginal, where you can use marginality as a weapon to destroy, let's say, the current order. You think that that's more attributable to Foucault than to Derrida? I think so.

Well, Derrida does it too, but what he does, it's weird because he'll use the marginal to kind of deconstruct the center, let’s say. But then he'll also kind of, in a way, in the same way, he'll also say, he'll also heal, like reverse it, and then annihilate his reversal. So he ends up really in this slippery slope where you don't even know where you're standing. And so in my opinion, that's useful because it helps you to see the actual—kind of in the end, it points back towards logos. It points back towards logos in the sense that we can't—like we talked about, you can't live in a world like that.

Okay, so that's exactly what I want to develop today. Yeah, so okay, so the first thing that I thought of today is that, okay, so we have this issue of undecidability from Derrida's—the thing that doesn't fit in the category. Yeah, okay. Now, and we know that if you have a category, there's way more outside the category than there is inside the category because otherwise, if the category isn't very useful, right? Right.

And so Derrida talks about that as—and I think Foucault too at least alludes to it—is that they kind of make the case that the purpose of the category system is to exclude, and then they make a political case out of that as well. And the thing is, is the purpose of a category is to exclude. It's to exclude an infinite multitude. Yeah, because you can't deal with an infinite multitude. And so you have to simplify the world. You have to categorize the world in order to act on it.

Yeah, so then the ultimate question has to be something like, by what principle do you—or what principle guides your categorization of the world? And that seems to me to point back to the logos in exactly the way that you just described because then I would say the logos is the divine principle of categorization. Something like that. Well, there are actually two ways to do it. I think that I talked about this in Vancouver. It's like there's either—their three possibilities. There's either the logos, there's either absolute dissemination, which is this kind of—the idea that something will just kind of dissolve.

It dissolves into uncertainty, and it's important to understand the result of that. The result of that isn't that it'll just stay in this kind of shaky uncertainty; the result of that is that something else from the outside, which has solidity, is going to run through it. And I think that's something that Derrida didn't account for. You know, for example, I don't think they accounted for Islam, for example. It's like he thought, well, if we're all—if we all—if we're all kind of in the slippery-slide situation without firm identities, then we have no reason to fight, right? That's kind of like—

Yeah, right, that's like the positive infinite number of reasons to fight, yeah. Maybe. Exactly. Maybe we have an infinite number at the fight, but he didn't see like that something on the outside, which has strength, will this then just come right through that, in terrible. Actually, I absolutely—well, he thought he—he was probably Eurocentric in his outlook. Yeah, hilarious. It is. It's really hilarious.

Okay, so, all right, so we talked about undecidability. All right, sort of thing about undecidability that we need to mention, which makes it more complicated, is that undecidability also has to do with time. And so, it has to do—and this is something, actually, that you have in common, I think, with Derrida, which you might read funny to say—but the idea that you—that something, let's say—you talked about that in example—you said like when Ford created the car, yeah, she didn't know what it was because, yeah, that—the totality of what the car represents is manifesting itself in time.

Manifesting itself in like urban landscape, in the way we understand economy, and in a way, it's always the— like the ramifications were so big that you could never know what a car is. That's not—that's what Derrida talks about in terms of the deferral of meaning in time. So there's that you of difference in terms of, um, you know, like that there's categories in that they're defined by their opposites and by their outer categories. But then there's also this idea of time that makes it more complicated too.

Yeah, well, what that means is that what if they depend to some degree on the spatial and temporal context within which you're interpreting it? Yeah, you could see it that way. Yeah, I had a dream about that at one point. I—I don't know if it's a digression—I don't care, I'll tell you anyways. So I dreamt—this is such a strange dream. I dreamt that there was this ball floating above the Atlantic Ocean, and it was just zooming in long, about, you know, six feet above the surface, just cruising along.

And it was so powerful that it was accompanied by four hurricanes, one in each quadrant surrounding the ball. It was a little ball away, and that was the first part of the dream. The second part of the dream was like a view of satellites and a bunch of scientists who were monitoring the hell out of this thing, trying to figure out what it was. The scene was, this thing was trapped in a room. It was like in a Victorian museum case, you know, a wood case with glass.

And it was sitting up there, like suspended in midair inside the case. This—a ball. The same ball. Yeah, this—so they captured it, and so then it was in the room. The room had no doors or windows, and in the room there was the President of the United States and Stephen Hawking. And so that—and then the room was made out of titanium dioxide. I remember that from the dream, which turns out to be the stuff that the hull of the Starship Enterprise is made out of and something like that. Nothing like that?

Yeah, yeah, it was something like that. And so the idea was that this intensely powerful thing had been put inside a category system, right? So it was inside a museum display case. And then there was the president there, a sort of representation of social order, and Stephen Hawking—he was a representation of disembodied intellect. Uh-huh. And then there was the room itself, which had impenetrable walls. They were like six feet thick, so it's like we got this thing.

And then I was watching it. It turned into a chrysalis. So, obviously, which is something that can transform, right? Exactly. And then it turned into a meerschaum pipe. It took me about a year to figure that out. It was an allusion to that famous painting by Magritte, right? Yeah, this is not a pipe. This is not a pipe. You know that Foucault FC like quite a bit. Yeah, yeah.

And then it shot out of the room like there was nothing there. Interesting. Yeah, that's a great dream. Wow, it was a great dream, man. And so—and it does allude to this idea that you can't capture the thing in permanently in a category system because it shifts and turns. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so fine. So, we're on board with that. All right, so now the category has to exclude because reality is so complex that you have to categorize it because otherwise you're swamped. Yes, good metaphor for it.

Yeah, and I said something that the postmodern is that I didn't totally see the extent to which that could be. All right, right. Absolutely, I think he put—I think he thought that order was a lot more solid than it was. Yeah, so then I was thinking, okay, so now in with identity politics, you have the politics of the excluded. All right, so you have people excluded because of race, or because of gender, or because of sexual identity, or whatever.

And one of the problems we've seen with that is that the number of excluded keeps multiplying. That's why you get that extension of the letters in the LGBTQ acronym, right? And there doesn't seem to be any limit to that. And the reason for that is there is no limit to the number excluded because it's—the category of excluded is the category of all things that don't fit in the category system, and that's an infinite set, right?

Yeah, okay, so—but then I woke up this morning and I thought, well, we could calculate that mathematically. So, because of I was thinking about the rise of intersectionality, and then because the rise of intersectionality is actually the reoccurrence of the individual within the collective ideas of postmodern neo-Marxism. Because you might say, well, I'm excluded because I'm black, or I'm excluded because I'm a woman, and then someone puts up their hand and says, well, those two categories don't include black woman. They don't include the intersection of the two categories, and that there's no reason that black and woman is more important than black woman.

Okay, so then I thought, all right, so that's fine. So the problem is, is that you start to get smaller and smaller numbers of people as exemplars of the categories that are excluded. And then so then I thought, well, how many categories do you need to add in an intersectional analysis before you're actually down to one in a billion? Because I'm led to, you—you'd have fractionated down to the individual, right? So now it's kind of screwy mathematically because it depends on the gradations of your category system, right?

I mean, I could call you old or young—that'd be binary, right? But I could say, no, no, you're on a scale from 0 to 100. Mm-hmm. So that would give you a point, 0, 1 probability of, there'd be a hundred groups that you could belong to. And so I thought, well, let's just use a hundred as an example because it could be— or it could be ten thousand. It's arbitrary because we could say that, well, I'm 41, and there's advantages and disadvantages that go along with that. But someone else could say, well, I'm 41 and six months, and there's a slightly different set of advantages and disadvantages that go along with that, then.

So, anyways, if you have six categories with a probability of 0.1, then you're one in a billion. So you just need six dimensions of intersectionality before you've fractionated the population down to the level of the individual. Yeah, so that means the individual comes sneaking back into the collective ideas of post-modernism once you hit six intersectional categories as long as that was—I thought that was really—well, it's ridiculously amusing.

So I said this will do the trick. So if you're multiracial, woman who's bisexual, 27 years old, smart, 30th percentile for attractiveness, 10th percentile for familial wealth, and 80th percentile for education, there is—the you're the only one in the world like that. So, okay, so then I was thinking, okay, so now then I was also thinking about this from a scientific perspective. So the reason you assign—if you're gonna do an experiment on two groups, you know, you do something to one group and not to the other group, but to make the control group proper, you have to assign randomly to each group.

And the reason you do random assignment is an infinite number of variables you can't control for, and so you assign randomly so that infinity cancels itself out, and the only difference you're left with is the experimental condition. Uh-huh. And then, but scientists sometimes try to get around that. Like we used to study people who were sons of alcoholics, and they had a multi-generational family history of alcoholism, and then we were trying to figure out what might distinguish them from a normal person, let's say.

So we try to get a control group to contrast them with. So we bring them into the lab, say, and give them alcohol and give the control group alcohol, but the problem was we didn't know what to control for. Because alcoholism goes along with antisocial personality disorder. So do you control for that? Uh-huh. Do you control for education? Do you control for IQ? Do you control for socio-economic status?

Like the answer is you don't know because you don't know how those are associated with the alcoholism. You can't know, and so you guess. And then you do an analysis of covariance, but the problem is is that you don't know what to covary, which is why you need random assignment to groups. It's the only way of solving that problem. Uh-huh. Okay, so the same problem of undecidability in some sense pops up very, very frequently in clinical research, right?

Yeah, the same thing happens if you're trying to figure out schizophrenia. You need a control group. Well, how about siblings—the siblings who don't have schizophrenia? Uh-huh. Well, yeah, except they have a different genotype. You know, it's an—it's an impossible problem to solve fundamentally, which is why you need random assignment to groups because you can't control for all the variables. You can't know in advance what's relevant. Uh-huh.

All right, so then I had this—so I thought that was very funny that the idea of individuality comes back and I never did right with intersectionality. Yeah, it’s just—you just push intersectionality to six dimensions and bang, you're down to the individual. Huh, all right. So then I had this little vision, so I'm gonna tell you the vision. Okay, all right, all right. So imagine a pyramid, like imagine a plane, first, like at a place—a place, a land, but flat, and then imagine a pyramid.

Yeah. And then around the pyramid, some distance from it is a wall. Okay, so think about that just as the basic schema of a walled city. Yeah, okay, now the pyramid is the group that's in there, let’s say, and the value structure that that group orients itself by. Okay, now outside that wall, there's a very large number of other pyramids. And that's basically the postmodern world, I would say. That's kind of the world that Derrida described and Foucault set reasonable.

Mm-hm. I don’t, yeah, I mean, could continue her example, I think. Okay, I think that for sure that Derrida would say—would say something like—we talked about the problem of the contain, even the contained space. You know, the idea of the wall and the pyramid? Like, he would—he would have—he would have a problem. You would have a problem with that structure itself. Like for him, that would be—it wouldn't be a solid structure. Right, no, it would have been flow with Tanya. Right? That's okay, we'll get to that. That's okay, fine.

It's no problem to say that is the problem, right? Okay, so you added another dimension to it. The problem is there's an inside and a wall and an outside. That's problem number one. The outside excludes. We could call that problem number two. Problem number three is that the center will not hold. Right, right, and that's the same problem, as far as I'm concerned, as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Yeah, okay, okay, good, good.

So let’s say that really is the problem. I mean fundamentally, yeah. Usually, if you go back to the Garden of Eden, you find the problem somehow. Okay, okay, so now imagine that outside the wall, all those pyramids fragment. And they fragment down to the level of individual people, so they decompose to the level of individual people. Yeah, because that's how much variability there actually is, right? Because those groups were artificial constructions, right?

And so you can fragment them down to the individual. Okay, so now the question is, you want to let some of those people into the enclosed. Okay, now, next part of the vision. The pyramid grows a cross on top of it. Mm-hmm. Now it's a church, and it's the center. And the cross represents whatever the ordering principle of that Center is. Uh-huh, okay, so then I would say—and you're going to add to this because you did at the beginning of the talk already—the cross is the center point of the world.

It's the axis of the world, so it's the world tree. It's also the place of suffering, and it's the place of suffering accepted voluntarily and transcendent. Huh, it's all of those things. Yeah, okay. And so that cross is also a symbol of the hero, and the hero is the person who confronts chaos and gains something of value from it. So that's voluntary, and the hero is also the person who recasts the archaic structure of the structure when it's necessary. Uh-huh, right.

And so you see those hero themes developed quite regularly across any reasonable historical span of time. So that's the Redeemer, that's the messiah, right? It's that makes order out of chaos and then takes order when it's too rigid. Yeah, and breaks it apart and recasts it. Yeah, you see that in the story of King David. You see that actually really well, like very, very well. He breaks—like he acts as a fool and as someone who is actually a kind of thief trickster figure while the tyrant is in power.

And then when that tyrant falls, then he comes in and creates a new centralized order by bringing the ark to Jerusalem. So he has that whole arc in his story. Okay, good version. Okay, okay, good! I'll keep that in mind for when I get to that story in my biblical lectures. All right, so now you have to open the door on the wall, and the question is who do you let in? So here's the idea. Okay, so you need to have a center, and the center has to hold because things are too complex without a center and a category system.

And then the question is, let’s say that your category system has to exist in accordance with the process that creates it and revitalizes it because otherwise it can't maintain its—to build on across time—it degenerates into chaos, or it rigidifies into too much order. Right, okay. So the only people that you let into this—the inside the wall are those who agree to live by the rules ethic and the ethic that's symbolized by the cross.

Yeah, that's two things. That's the willingness to abide by a certain level of social organization, but it's more importantly—it’s also the ability to transcend that and to participate in the process but by which chaos is confronted and voluntarily confronted and reordered, and also to participate in the process by which order is broken when it's too rigid and brought back. That's the death and resurrection essentially.

Yeah, so those are the only people that you can let inside the structure without posing—without them posing a fatal threat to the structure itself. And then if the walls fall, then the infinite multitudes stream in, and we're done. No, I mean, we say it ceases to exist. It's like you just cease to exist. That's all, you know? That's all it is, right? Well, you'd also say that that's—that's the problem that's being fought about in some sense with regards to the border issue in Europe.

Yeah, do we have a right to have a border? Right. And then I was thinking today about a store, like just take your typical grocery store and you say, well, it's a category system. Only those with money are allowed to bring food out of this place, right? And you might say, well, that's—that's a terrible imposition of capitalist patriarchy on—and an unfair imposition of capitalist patriarchy.

So you throw the doors open and you say, everybody come and take what they want. Yeah, and that works really well until the store is empty, and then that's the end of that. Yeah, because if everyone can do anything they want whenever they want, then it’s complete and utter chaos. Yeah, it’s nobody—and then what happens is—what happens, you know? Because I've lived in a place that is absolute and utter chaos, and chaos cannot sustain itself.

So usually what happens is the rise of a warlord or tyrant, the rise of someone who will by sheer force, by sheer physical force impose their will on others because the others will be—will have nothing to unite them. And so it's not—it's not true that, you know, a lot of—you know, you meet anarchists, you know, and people who think that there's such a thing as like, you know, there's just kind of free anarchy where everybody is equal and everybody, you know, can do whatever they want.

That doesn't, because in that anarchy comes a tyrant, inevitably. Right? There’s no stopping it. Right, into anarchy comes a tyrant. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And that's the—that's—and then the problem with that is that the fundamental organizing principle, the tyrant is tyranny, yeah? Pure power, pure power and pure—also—personality cult. Like that’s—that’s that person instead of being an ideal unto which we serve, you know, or our mythic figure or a divine figure.

It becomes a guy, you know? It becomes—it becomes Hitler or it becomes, you know, it becomes Napoleon or it becomes Stalin or it becomes whatever. Like it's the—it’s that person. Everything is embodied in their personality. Like I always say, like I always have this image of a functional system as is the person who in some manner is able to— at least symbolically step down from their power, right?

They always say that, yeah, George Washington what made him so great is that he stopped being president. Right, created the impetus for the system to work. And in the same—in the Roman Empire, like Augustus, you know, people will say that he didn’t really do it, but when Augustus became Emperor, he stepped into the city as a citizen and he gave away all his power. And by giving away all his power, in a strange way, he actually became the most powerful person in Rome but his power was not a legal power.

It's like—there was something about his capacity to not be the tyrant which would stabilize the Empire and made him very powerful, but in a—in a strange—in a very kind of strange ways different. Right? So, like a legitimate ruler has to be bound by proper sovereign authority, exact. Not if he gave himself to the—to the Senate and said, I'm at your service, and so it made him very powerful.

But he also kind of bound his power through in the Senate, right? Right. Well, you see that emerging as early as Mesopotamia where Marduk or where the Emperor had to act out his embodiment of Marduk in the New Year festival, and Marduk was the god-hero who went out and confronted the dragon of chaos and made the world. And so the reason that the Emperor had—it's not sovereignty legitimacy. The reason they have never had legitimacy is because he was acting out an archetypal pattern that transcended his own personality.

Then the question is, well, what's that archetypal pattern? And the answer to that is that's the hero who recasts the tyrannical state and who confronts chaos. So the structure—that the answer to the problem of how you maintain a structure in the flow of time is that you make the structure itself subordinate to the principle by which the structure is generated. And that means that the sovereign needs to be responsible to the word, essentially. That's—that's how I would think about it from a Judeo-Christian perspective.

Now, and that's above everything, yeah, and it's the thing that does the categorization initially. That's when God creates the world because of the word, and when Adam names the animals and all of that, and then so—but also maintains that across time because it does slip and slide. Yeah, so you know it—Derrida didn’t really see—we've been talking about a post-post-modernism, right? And about a logo-centrism, and we've been kind of laughing about that too because of its reference to Derrida's fellow-go-centrism.

But it's funny too, you know, because if you look at Hindu representations of the center, they're not fellow-go-centric. The phallus is embodied in its—the Lingam and the Yoni. Now, the phallus is conjoined with the Yoni. It's a—it’s a masculine-feminine duality that's at the center. It's not just the masculine, right? And so the idea that that center is necessarily fellow-go-centric is also wrong, right?

But it—you know, the thing is that, okay, this is gonna get explicit, I guess, but but it is, is fellow-go-centric. You know, that even if you imagine the phallus inside the—inside the—the woman, the woman—the phallus is the center and woman envelops the center, right? The phallic center. You know, but I think that what I've been trying to get to—and I think what we've all been trying to get to, what you’ve been trying to get to too—is to be able to speak of logo-centrism as in the proper manner.

That is to understand that to say logo-centrism means that we also understand like the—the power of the—the out—the power of the frame, let’s say. So the image I have of the logo-centrism is really there’s an image of the mother of God of Mary with our hands up like this, and in her center, there’s a circle, and out of her body’s coming the Christ child. And inside that—that—that circle you see the stars as if it's like the entire cosmos, right?

Which is the frame for the logos to manifest itself in and so, yeah, yeah, that in those open virgin's to that 14th century where Mary is holding a globe. I think generally speaking—and then she opens up, and inside you have God the Father, and he's holding Christ on the cross, and it's a—it’s a—it’s a similar sort of—notion, right? And so I think that if we understand it that way, there's like an implicit in the notion of the logo-centrism, there's an implicit kind of secret mention of the power of the feminine in that very term if we understand it fully as the—the need for this kind of—the kind of chaotic outside or the chaotic potentiality which frames the manifestation of the logos.

And to understand that those two things need each other. Like the—you know, the logos doesn’t manifest himself without a question, right? There has to be a question for there to be an answer, and the question is a frame for the answer. It's like, definitely. Okay, that's really important. That’s like super important, and it shows how powerful the feminine is because it actually acts as the—the category—I could say the frame in which the answer is given.

Okay, okay, so let's develop that for a min. So, um, let me see—oh, yes! So, okay, so you said the frame is determined by the question that's answered? Yeah, that's asked. Yes, good, good, perfect. So this is where I've been butting heads with Sam Harris and where you butted heads with Weinstein in Vancouver, right?

Okay, so because the question is, okay, so you have to have a category system. Now, Harris basically claims that you can derive the category system from the—from the facts, right? But the objection to that is there's an infinite number of facts, and they don't tell you what to do with them. Yeah, okay, so I would say instead that you derive the category system from your aims because categories are there to help you fulfill your goals. That's—that’s how category systems work. Yeah, that’s why I think of them as pragmatic.

Yeah, okay. So now the question is, given that your— your category system includes and excludes and defines the world, what should be the aim of the category system? And so I think that's what the Sermon on the Mount talks about because it basically says, well, you should aim at the highest possible good. You should aim at union with God, whatever that might mean. That you aim at the highest possible good with—fully—fully right, fully right down to the bottom of your soul if you can manage it so that you're not broken and bent up and twisted in a bunch of different sub-personalities.

So you try to unify yourself as a force for the highest good, and you do that in large part by deciding that being is worthwhile, right? So you pledge allegiance to—to the concept of being so you're not like Cain. And then you speak truth in the service of that being, and then that— from that your category system flows. And so that's another reason that pyramid with the Cross is the center of the category system, yeah? Because then you get a category system that includes what it should include if the goal is the establishment of the kingdom of God, let’s say.

Yeah, which is the highest of possible goals and excludes what it should exclude. Yeah, one of the things too that kind of differentiates—that's a Christian ontology or like a Christian—Christian cosmology—is that we have this idea that there is an intimate relationship also between, let’s say, the highest and the lowest. There's a—there's something, which unites them together completely so that even beyond, let’s say, there's this capacity to move outside. How can I say this?

To unite things together. And so there's this idea, let’s say, like—you know, for example, there's an idea like the idea of a normal, of a Christian family, let’s say, that you know, the father is the head of the household, you know? Like this idea that people hate today, but there's this really the sense that the head or that, nor the—the king or the chief exists for the—for the benefit of those that are below, that are the lowest, right? That’s continually insisted upon in the Old Testament.

Yeah, because the prophets always come up and say to the king, you're not attending sufficiently to the widows and the orphans. Yeah, and that means that you've become corrupt. Yeah, so in a way, you can kind of see the hierarchy moving up in the sense of things looking up towards, you know, into the hierarchy. But then there's also a really important man in which the hierarchy moves down. And so the idea is that the top of the hierarchy exists for the bottom of the hierarchy. It's like—and so that—the top of the hierarchy exists in a really important way as a sacrificial existence.

And so the highest thing is—is there—the highest road is the one that sacrifices itself for those that are. Yeah, think about that—you can think about that practically as the willingness of a father to care for an infant. Yeah, right? Now, so because the infant's obviously the—and of course the infant also has that potential, which is why the infant is made sacred as well in that symbolic realm.

So the high is deserving—the lowest is the infant, let’s say, because it's most helpless. But the infant is also the future of the hierarchy. Yeah, and so the—I mean, I think that that really in a—we've talked about this before slightly—is that the notion that the Christian hero, you know, is slightly—is actually slightly different from the pagan hero, for example.

So the knight—let's say in Western Christianity, the knight would be the—the archetypal image of the Christian hero, which is the notion of an aristocrat, a warrior, you know, a soldier whose purpose is not to—it is not only to gain honor on himself, but in a way he gains honor on himself by sacrificing himself for those who can’t do it. And so his honor is based on the fact that he's willing to fight for the—for the widow, for the orphan, for those that don’t have the strength to fight for themselves.

And so obviously in reality, that doesn’t always play out. I mean, but—but the ideal is there. The ideal is real, and it's—it's the basis of all our—all our hero movies, all our hero stories always had this idea of the hero is the person who's willing to use their strength and their power to the defense of the weak, yeah? To sacrifice themselves for the—for the weak, which is very different from the pagan hero.

Like a—you know, a killer's weakness, weakness was contemptible under those circumstances, sitting in his tent, and he's moping and whining because we've taken away his sex slave. And he won’t go back to fight until it affects him personally, you know? But he’s actually not—he doesn’t care that much about helping, you know, the Greeks and their cause. He’s really doing that—doing things for his own honor, and so he’s perfectly heroic in sitting in his tent, and moping and not going back into battle, you know, because his honor has been attained.

Whereas in Christianity, you know, in stories like—like if you see Sir Gawain and— you read, um, the—the knight in a cart, for example, that idea of Lancelot who is willing to be seen as a criminal as a—you know, as the worst kind of person in order to save the damsel in distress, you know? He's willing to sacrifice all his honor in order to help that—that person who is in danger. So it's a really—it’s a very different way of seeing the world.

Okay, well, I don't know what to say after the whole thing, but it's a—the idea of the cross absolutely—I’m not—I’m not suggesting at all that that was not relevant to what we've been discussing. It's dead relevant. I really like the idea. I know we've talked about the fact that, you know, I've been conceptualizing Christ as the—not as the apex of the hierarchy, symbolically speaking, but the apex to such a degree that it actually detaches itself from the hierarchy.

Sort of like Horus, the bird—the Osprey, or what the hell is he? A falcon in Egyptian symbolism, right? He's the thing that flies above everything that can see or—the Egyptian I. And your correction was that it's not exact. Once you're detached, in some sense you're not at the top anymore, you're everywhere, right? Spread throughout the entire structure which—yeah, which is a very good way of looking at it, right?

The story of Christ is, in historian, in his symbolism, you see that he's at the top of the dome, let’s say, where he's really, exactly what you’re saying, this kind of did this kind of detached top of the hierarchy. But then he also stretches all the way down into death, into Hades, into chaos. And the cross is the other side where, you know, he is—he's outside of the city being killed by his friends, by the—you know, he’s the outcast, he's all of those things. And so he unites the two extremes of the hierarchy together and fills the hierarchy with—well, a neat little idea that he transcends death.

Again, I'm just gonna take this from a psychological perspective because the theological waters are getting too deep for me here. Well, they are because I don't understand that exactly. I'm really trying to work it out, but I don't understand it well enough yet. But the idea that Christ descends into hell and rescues people from hell and death, that can be read quite straightforwardly psychologically.

Because the car, the idea of erecting a category structure that isn't predicated on the hero is that everyone will be in hell and die. Mm-hmm. So I mean, that's what happened in the Soviet Union as far as I'm concerned. And so those hell stories are real enough as far as I'm concerned. But that doesn't speak to their potential transcendent reality now as a whole different issue.

I mean, here’s something else that’s been—that's been bugging me, and I'm just starting to think this through. You know, I do think that there's this idea that if you're in the right place at the right time that everything comes together and loads up. You know, and I was wondering, you know, how the story, like the story of Christ is told in many, many ways, like from the cosmic to the microcosmic, right?

So—and one of the macrocosmic stories is the relationship between the astrological speculations and Christ himself. And so there are 12 constellations, like there are 12 disciples and, huh, the Sun is Christ essentially. Yeah, and that story really works. It even maps onto the calendar properly, right? And so then you think, well, that's—because people have one interpretation of that is that that's because people have retold the story at each level of analysis.

But another possible reason for that is that it's synchronous in some sense, and then it is the fact that everything comes together around that central axis in a—in a in a real way, yeah? And that the story can't help but be represented at multiple levels of reality simultaneously because that's what the story is. That—then that—I mean, it's like that—that’s exactly what it’s about. The whole—the whole thing is about this—this this lining up of everything, you know, like of everything.

Yes. Okay, it's hard to see—that it's so—it's hard to see the fullness of that when you look at it. It always kind of jars you because it's so, you know, the story of Christ. I always tell people like if you pay attention to it, it'll constantly be knocking you down because it seems—even at a first glance sometimes it seems like it’s contradictory because Christ is all these things. Like, you know, he's—the teacher, he's the king, he's the shepherd, you know, he's the outcast, he's the—the technician, you know, he's the artist.

He's—and so it’s like how is it that a story can accompany—and the more you look in the story, the way he's a fisherman, you know, he’s into all these things. How did all these things can fit in one story? It's easy to glance over because it's so short. You read a gospel, you kind of go through it, but then if you really look at all the—the aspects and you understand the traditional categories, let’s say, that in a normal world, the—let’s say, the shepherd and the agriculturalists usually are not the same person, but in Christ, they’re the same person.

He’s able—but he's slower as he fishes. Exactly. But he's also the fisherman, yeah, and he’s so he’s the stumbling stone, but he’s also the capstone. So he stretches it—like we talk about this idea of stretching out the entire hierarchy. So he’s—he's like he—he's the stone that doesn’t fit. So here’s—yeah, right, exactly, that—the builder rejected.

Yeah, okay, so one of the things I've come to understand about tyrannies is that if you have a terror—terror-analytical person at the top, the tyranny isn’t just at the top; the tyranny is mirrored like the entire hierarchy, right? It’s like—like a—what are those 3D holographs? It’s like there are hologram—it’s like a hologram; every part is a reflection of the whole.

And so I wonder if that's analogous, if you have a pyramid, say, with the principle of the divine hero at the top, then what happens is that's reflected at every single level of the hierarchy. Yes, like it would be with the tyranny, right? Yeah, it should be, except that, yeah, except that the—the—yeah, the tyranny will be just that—that kind of up-down, you know, light that shines down and kind of puts everything in place.

And then when it reaches the things that it doesn't—that it can't absorb, it'll just—it'll completely cut them off. You know, like it’ll kill them, it’ll burn them off, you know? It’ll just destroy them. Whereas there’s something about Christianity or like a traditional hierarchy which is a stretching out in—so you could imagine, right? Let’s say, in terms of all of Christianity, it isn’t—I think there really is—a place, let’s say, for—at least in the world, there’s a plate until the Last Judgement, let’s say.

Until the Last Judgement, there’s a place for that buffer to be there and to be slowly assimilated, right? And so it’s not—it doesn’t—it doesn’t totally shut itself off. There’s a—there’s a—there’s room. There’s a gate, you know, like you said, and there’s always people that can come through the gate and that are always kind of entering and slowly being signified, assimilated, but not just assimilated but also transforming it.

Yes. What it’s going to be into what it’s going to become, but it's—not—it’s not a radical process. It’s like this organic transformation, let’s say. Well that’s a huge part of what we’re arguing about right now in a culture, which is how is it that you handle the integration, let’s say? And the answer isn’t no integration, no, because what that does is rigidify the structure.

Yeah, because if you—if you close it off completely, you also rigidify it inside. Yeah. And so what that means is the chaos is gonna break forth inside. So, because you can’t get rid of the chaos. Now, now you know one of the things we talked about—so it's out, for example, with the idea of gay marriage. So now there’s the excluded are included, and then the question is, well, what is then the responsibility of the included? And the responsibility of the included is to not break the structure of the system that included them.

Yeah, you know, that's a really good way of seeing that because that’s— and that’s actually probably the best way of understanding it in terms of how it works itself out in real life. It's like, you know, if you come in—if you come in as, you know, an assimilated margin, you know, as a margin wants to participate in—in a country or in an identity or in a group or whatever it is, like in a club, like your responsibility is, like you said, is to not break what makes that something.

Thank you. You know, if you want to—if you want to be, you know, if you want to join a—I don't know—a baseball group and you're in a baseball team, and you come into the team and you— and you all of a sudden expect everybody to— to play basket—to play basketball, it's like, well, then why? Like, what does it—doesn't—you’re going to destroy the class. I can destroy the club itself exactly. No—do you think that’s a very simple way?

Yes, well, we talked about that a little bit with the Abrahamic stories, if I remember correctly, because there was the problem in the Abrahamic stories of how to deal with the marginal. And so I can’t—unfortunately, I can’t recreate that on-the-fly husband Pat like you. It had to do with hospitality behavior. Yeah, right. So the rule is, I show you hospitality, but that's my rule, my obligation. But your obligation is not to do not to make passes at my wife and disrupt my household.

Yeah, right. And then—and then a relationship builds with the stranger, and then—and then slowly the stranger becomes a friend, you know? And maybe you—then maybe the stranger marries your daughter at some point, right? It’s like, you know, there’s that—there’s like the possibility of creating a relationship which will integrate the two identities together, but it’s a gradual process and one which has to be done, you know, with mutual respect and—

Yeah, that’s right. Well, you know, the proper spirit, well, I would say that would be the spirit of the logos because the logos is also the thing that goes outside boundaries. Like so let’s say you have a person from Group A here and a person from Group B here, and then they decided to communicate. Both of them have to go outside their group and meet in—in the junction between the two groups is a different place, and they have to make peace.

But they make peace there under the guise of themselves as individuals, exploratory individuals, and then maybe the groups can integrate as a consequence of that, right? And they then knowing apart and without fighting, and something appears, like something will manifest itself as whatever is holding, you know, the two groups together, the two families or the two people.

And so that logos will—with the coming together, let’s say—let’s say two families, you know? And then they— then people in the two families intermarry, and so there's something that unites them too, you know? And it’s—the coming together that that logos will appear and will hold the relationships in that lace, that marriage, is a recreation of that masculine-feminine.

Yeah, and that's—that’s associated sometimes with the—androgyny of Christ and sometimes with—there's an old idea, and I can't remember where it comes from—that Adam before Eve was, not for Didache, right? Yeah, more androgynous. Androgynous, right? And that Christ as the second Adam recreates that androgyny in the proper manner.

Yeah, no, I think so. I think there's some use—find it in some of the Church Fathers where they'll say things like just to help you to understand and understand it, they'll say things that like that God separated Adam and Eve, Adam into two in view of the fall, right? In the sense that it wasn’t the fall, but it was the idea that it had to—it has to do with the idea of living outside the garden, let's say, and having then to come back together.

And that coming back together in—in terms of sexual union and in terms of procreation then becomes a little microcosm of what was in the garden, let's say, right? And so—and that’s why also, you know, like, you know, Adam—I wonder if that’s actually—I wonder to what degree that’s actually, let’s say, I wouldn't say neurophysiological, true, but I'm gonna say something like that because it seems to me—and I made allegiance to this when we did that talk about logos.

Men, people maybe thought that it wasn't the most appropriate thing to say, but sexual union produces this—this brief union in paradise. Yeah. I think if that’s the—that's the highest—that’s the highest point of sexuality. And that’s why sexuality is used as an image for the union of the soul with God, and it’s used as an image of the union of the Church with Christ because the idea that the union of the masculine and the feminine is a glimpse of eternity.

It’s a glimpse of paradise. Well, and I'm not sure— that’s just an idea, yeah, I can’t think that that’s—that's our—and it actually happens. Yeah, I think that it actually happens. Yeah. And that’s why also I think that in—in Christianity, the idea of taking that lightly, right, it’s very dangerous. The idea of uniting yourself with—with all kinds of people, it’s very dangerous because when you unite yourself with someone, you're actually creating a very powerful spiritual unity, you know?

And then if you kind of wander that, and yet shallow, then you don’t have your heart. Yeah, you’re devaluing it. Yeah, and it also—you rip you apart because you leave a part of yourself with that other person, and they ripped apart. So you had what makes your sin that you might say, it makes you cynical. Yeah, which I would say I think that sleeping with a hundred women would leave you cynical for sure. I don't see how it wouldn't.

I don't see how it goes. Yes, yes. Yeah, well that's—that's the question. No, I think that’s a very good way of thinking about that. Yeah, so we would at least leave you in a position of, you know, like the person who only eats caviar, let's say, who doesn't understand how precious things are, you know? And to not understand how precious things are is to devalue them, right?

If you—well, if that's the highest thing that you're devaluing, then you end up like Cain with Abel, like he kills Abel, his highest ideal, and then he says the punishment is more than he can bear. So if you take what actually is the highest value and devalue it, then you're left without hope. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, that’s why—that's why, I mean, I don't know, but it's like the people that I've known in my life who who sleep around a lot, they tend to have a kind of nihilistic tendency, let's say, a blase tendency like to not—

How well things can be discarded? Yeah, yeah, and that—and that moment of union, let’s say, is also pretty much devalued to just brief pleasure. Yeah, that's the only way that it's conceptualized, you know? When it is the case too that if you look at early miscue 'ti in teenagers, it’s associated with antisocial behavior. Hmm, yeah.

It's a strong predictor or strong correlative antisocial behavior. Interesting, yeah. Now I'm not saying there's a causal relationship there, but I am saying it's part of the same constellation, right? That's quite clear. Hmm. So yeah, all right, well that's probably enough of that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, well that was good, man. I was thinking about these things when I woke up this morning, you know, like for about an hour.

I mean, they were just flash like crazy. Yeah, you’ve got that excited look on you. I can—I can tend to discern it now. Yeah, well, it's too much, you know? It's too much. This sort of thing really is just so—it’s like Christ. I'd like to get up in the morning and think about raking the backyard or something like that. Yeah, so oh well, that was really good, Jonathan. You think that—you think that way—no, you think that's good?

Like, you think that we got to what we wanted? We have? Yeah, no, if you want, like, think about it. I mean, I mean because we had a whole bunch of things that we said we wanted to talk about. Yeah, I mean maybe we could make it like whatever, every two months or every month or something. Well, I'm sure that I'll have—the way my mind is working right now, I'm sure that I'll have some ideas that you'll be the right person to talk to about, so.

Yeah, well, like I said, I'm—here’s see, you're one of these weird intersectional people, eh? You’re a Greek Orthodox, wrote French Canadian, icon, Carla knows a lot about post-modernism. It’s like, I think there's probably exactly one of you in the world. Fifty sure. I'm sure that's why, I think that is why, like, I've always been a marginal person; that's why I understand it so well.

But I think that the key—the key to my situation right now is that I—I kind of saw it, but now I also see how it can serve the center, let's say, and so that's my job in life. I think that's pretty much I think what I'm supposed to be, right? Well that’s a good way of ending because the postmodern claim—the postmodern era's claim is that the center should serve the margin now, but the counterclaim is the margin should serve the center now, and both those claims are right.

Yeah, and that’s also related with that idea that you already described of the image of Christ as the perfect man saturating the entire hierarchy. Yeah, no, I agree. And the first will be the last, and the last will be the first. There’s something about that in Christianity which is absolutely true that there’s even something at—there’s even something weird that happens at the end or at the bottom where there’s a mere reflection between the bottom and the top where like the lowest thing would be the fool, for example, and the highest thing would be the holy fool.

And so there is this strange completion that happens in the whole thing, but it's really a very—it becomes very mystical at that point. It's hard to describe in straight categories, but well, I think Marlowe's kind of an example of that. Well, I'm asking myself—I've been asking myself that for months, you know? I did that interview with Dr. Rachel Fulton Browne about Yad Milo.

Yeah, and by the way, she really would like to talk to you anyways. So the thing I'm wondering about him is that in the—in the holy fool, usually there's a lot of self-depreciation, and so St. Francis, you know, he would go out into the public space and strip naked, you know, and he would he would pass for—for a beggar and all those things. And so I think that that might be a requirement for the holy fool.

Is that the—the humor is not only against the people around them, but also it turns back on themselves constantly. And so that's what makes them the holy fool, is that you can't criticize them because as much as they're criticizing the rulers, they're—the structure of the order, it turns back on them, and then they act as the lowest of the low. So there's—that's what is—is able to hold them—to hold them in that high place.

So something to think about. Okay, all right. All right, well, I'm gonna cut the front of this off maybe a little bit. Yeah, that's my post-it. So, all right, cool. All right, good luck with everything. Yeah, I've got another lecture tonight. Oh, the end of Jacob's Ladder? Yeah, yeah. So now I have to go prepare that.

So wait, let me think about Jacob's Ladder two seconds. Did you ever watch that talk on—on Moses and the ascent of my talk I gave on the—on—uh, it's called the life of Moses, like St. Gregory—St. Gregory of Nyssa on the life of Moses? You should watch that if you have time. You should—what, it's like 45 minutes, and it's really about the ascent of the mountain, and you sent up the holy ladder.

Mhm. Would you email that to me? Yeah, I’ll send you something. I'm completely out of brain house, and I’ll send you the link right now. I think I think that might be helpful for you for your talk tonight. Can get some rest. Okay, see ya. All right, bye-bye.