A Psychological Breakdown of a Rap Song

Hi everybody! So, as you may or may not know, although most people know if they're vaguely awake, um, Bench Perro and Tom McDonald have the number one song in the world at the moment. And it's very comical because it's a rap song. Just the idea of Bencho doing rap hip hop is comical in and of itself. It's even more comical because, you know, he's been a critic of that particular genre. So it's very interesting to watch Ben step out of his presuppositions, let's say, and also his domain of previous competence, although he is a musician.

Anyways, on with the analysis. They call me offensive, controversial. It's only two genders, boys and girls. Okay, well, the first thing we might point out here with regards to the use of language is that Tom does use "genders," and I think that's actually a—what would you say?—that's an interpretive mistake because he should have used "sexes." By using "genders," he fell into the trap that the leftists have laid with regards to language utilization. They're very, very good at what would you say? Occupying the linguistic terrain. There are a variety of temperaments and that's easy to get confused with gender, and that's part of the reason we have the problem we have. "Sexes" would have worked because it's also a two-syllable word, and it's a minor critique. But in some ways it seems "peun," which means minor, but it isn't. It's more important than that because if you let your political opponents gain the linguistic territory, then they win, right? You can't—once you use their words, they win. So that's something for everybody to keep in mind.

You can't cancel my message 'cause I'm the biggest independent rapper in the whole freaking world. CL that I'm racist—y, right? I'm not ashamed because I'm white. If every Caucasian is a bigot, I guess every Muslim's a terrorist, every liberal is right. So, with regards to every Caucasian being a bigot and his claim that then therefore every Muslim is a terrorist and every liberal is right, which is, you know, definitely not correct, especially if you're talking about the progressive mob.

The fundamental problem with the—there are a variety of fundamental problems with the woke algorithm, reductive algorithm, or ideology that Ben and Tom are criticizing. We did research back in 2016 looking at political correct—politically correct authoritarianism. And that was back when psychologists were just starting to analyze left-wing authoritarianism. We found that the best predictors of being a left-wing authoritarian were being not verbally intelligent. That was a walloping predictor; it was the variable most closely associated with intelligence that I had ever seen, including grades. So, if you're not very bright, the woke ideology is very attractive to you. The second best predictor was being female. The third best predictor was having a female temperament. The fourth best predictor was ever having taken a course that had the woke ideology as a portion of it.

Now we are noting all over the world now that men's and women's political beliefs are segregating. And so that's a reflection of the fact that this woke ideology is also a perversion of the basic female ethos. It's the extension of compassion far beyond its relevant domain, and it's an extension as a consequence of pride. So, the women who are doing this—there's men doing it too, especially those that have a more feminine temperament—they're making the claim that their love is so encompassing that everything can be brought into the circle, right? Even the snake. And that's the eternal sin of Eve, by the way.

So, there's a group identification claim. The fundamental claim essentially is the world can be divided into victims and victimizers. The victims are like infants; they're always good, they're always innocent. The victimizers are essentially predators, so you can see the feminine ethos in that. The problem with that is when you start to apply it to groups, you completely demolish the presumption of individual innocence. And there's no difference between the demolition of that presumption and the imposition of a totalitarian state.

So, now you might say there can't be that much information in those few lines, but the whole point of poetry—with its reliance on imagery—is to pack way more information into utterances than you could otherwise manage. And so, a dense poem, which is the use of words to produce images, can have levels of meaning that are almost inexhaustible. That's partly why we remember poetry. And poetic verse, let's say, image-laden poetic verse, will be remembered for centuries because it's literally inexhaustible. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It's like, well, a complex picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words, and words can bring images to mind.

[Music]

Go woke, go broke. You know, it's a nice rhyme, but there's something there too. And what Tom is pointing to is that if you construe yourself as a victim and you have an external locus of control—that's the technical term from the psychology research literature—then you believe that you are nothing but a pawn of circumstances that are beyond your control, and you adopt the guise of powerlessness. Now, if you could gain a moral advantage from that, you know, that's a secondary gain; that's how that would be interpreted from a psychoanalytic perspective. It's doing something that isn't good for you because there's a payoff.

So, if you construe yourself as a victimizer, you only believe you're moved about by external forces. You won't develop a vision of your own, and that will mean that you're anxious and confused because you're being buffered around by the winds of external forces. It'll mean you have no direction in your life, and that makes you hopeless. The combination of those two things will mean that you have no motivation. And the consequence of that—and we know this perfectly well because highly motivated people are much more likely to be economically successful—the consequence of that is that you won't have any money. And then, of course, you'll use that to buttress your claim to victim status. And then you're in a loop. That's the dragon that eats its own tail, by the way. That's a symbol of chaos, and then you're basically in hell.

So, uh, I wouldn't recommend that. You know, as a clinical psychologist, which I still am by the way. So, alright, next line. Pro choice. Progressin’? Prot. Okay, now here's something else to understand. So imagine that you're, you know, compassionate in your basic ethos. So you have a more feminine temperament; you're high in agreeableness. Now, but you're also full of pride. And so you want to overclaim the utility of that and bring everything to you, clutch the poisonous serpent to your breast.

Rest, as I pointed out. Okay, so what's the problem with that? Well, this has been modeled very well—um, even computationally we understand this. Make no mistake about that. So imagine you set up a society that's full of agreeable people who do nothing but cooperate. Fine, and they all get along. And that can be extraordinarily productive as long as people keep acting in that reciprocally altruistic manner, which means they treat— you treat someone well, and they treat you well back. That can be extremely productive, and that's actually the basis of a productive society, one of the bases. It's not enough, though, because you need enforcement, and that's why you need men with spines.

And the reason for that is that if you have a whole community of cooperators and you drop one cheater into the mix, one shark, he will eat everything. So what the—you can see this—you see this happening, for example, when Seattle set up its progressive city. It took like two weeks before it was controlled by armed gangs. This exactly the same thing happened in Alberta recently, by the way, with all the tent cities. So, as soon as you have a place of victimized people run by the hyper-compassionate, the bloody thugs move in. And then you better watch yourself.

And if you think that's not—and then, of course, if you're hyper—if you're prideful and hyper-compassionate, you're going to think, “Oh, the poor thugs! They just had it rough when they were children.” You know, and a lot of them did. But I'll tell you something else about that, and that is that there's a lot of people who had it rough as children who don't turn into, like, psychopathic thugs. And you all you hyper-compassionate people who are out there, like, feeling sorry for the criminals, you wait till they show up in your bloody house. You'll be thinking twice about that.

And we've seen no shortage of that on the victimized liberal side. People who get mugged out in the street after they defund the police and short-circuit because, “Oh my God! Look! I got attacked.” It's like, yeah, well, you enabled the psychopaths, and I wouldn't recommend that. So that's what happens: compassion, defund the police, no protection, rule by psychopaths. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that. Where the American flags at? Remember when people would hang those? They've been taken down. They've all been replaced with BLM flags or a rainbow.

Okay, so flag. The flag idea, man, that's a complicated idea. So the idea of a flag is something like the idea of a staff, and a staff—you have a staff if you run a business. And the staff is something you rely on; a staff is something that supports you; a staff is something that moves you forward; a staff is something that helps you find your way. A flag is a staff with a banner. And so the banner is something around which everyone can unite. A flag is a uniting symbol.

Okay, so what's a rainbow flag? Well, let's think about it. It's a flag of division, literally because a rainbow is the division of unity. What's white into a plurality? What's a rainbow? And you can't have a unity of plurality. Well, you can in a world where a man can be a woman. You can have a unity of plurality, and I'll tell you that's the reign of utter chaos. Now, we already pointed out that the reign of utter chaos brings in the psychopath, the true oppressors, the real victimizers. And so this pride flag—what would you say?—waving this proclamation, this preening in the streets, this false moralizing is a way of once again proclaiming to the world that your compassion is so overwhelming and inclusive that you can love the whole world.

You know, and that's fine, except for the snakes. And, you know, you can imagine why women do that because in some ways they want to advertise to men that they're going to be good mothers. You know, and that is what they're doing, even if they don't know it. And then you might ask, “Well, why would men do it?” And I'll tell you what sort of men do that. The sort of men who do that have no masculine utility whatsoever, and so they ape feminine utility. They act like girls. That's a good way of thinking about it. Then they can be a friend—well, hopefully a friend with sexual benefits, right? And so loser men use false compassion pridefully as a way of attracting stupid women. And they're particularly good at doing that if they're psychopathic, and the data on that are very clear because young women, especially naive young women, are much more likely to be sexually victimized by psychopaths and narcissists.

And you might ask, “Well, how will the psychopaths and narcissists close themselves?” And the answer is that they're not going to come out with shark teeth, man, because then you know who they were. They're going to tell you how nice they are, how lovely they are, and how they care for everything in the world. It's like, you better take that with a grain of salt 'cause if you don't, you're going to pay for it. So, we'll get back to that particular motif as we progress.

We ain't selling drugs. We ain't going to overdose. We ain't pushing guns and promoting stripper posts. We won't turn your sons into thugs or your daughters into—okay, sons into thugs and your daughters into hoes. Yeah, that's a great juxtaposition, all of that. So the first thing Tom is doing is singing about hedonism, right? And that's the pursuit of, say, easy sex and materialist markers of localized success.

Right? And so then you might say, “Well, what sort of people pursue short-term mating strategies?” Because that's the technical biological definition. Who are looking for easy sex, one-night stands, and who parade around their shallow materialism? And the answer is—we already talked about these people. We know this. Short-term mating preference is associated with the dark tetrad: narcissism, so that's the desire for unearned social status; malfeasance, so that's the willingness to use manipulation to get what you want; psychopathy, so the worst criminals are psychopaths, by the way. Psychopaths are predatory parasites—that's a bad combination.

Now first of all, those were the only three traits that were studied, but that didn't work out very well because it turned out there was a missing variable, and that was sadism. So if you're a psychopathic narcissist, malfeasant, you also end up wanting to hurt other people for your own pleasure, and those are the people who are engaging in the hedonistic strategy—right? Short-term pleasure. You see this, and they're the ones that'll enslave you. You see this in the Disney movie Pinocchio; it's beautifully portrayed because the little thug Pinocchio falls in with the bad crowd—little thugs led by Lampwick, by the way. And Lampwick is a reference to Lucifer, and Lucifer is the prideful intellect, by the way.

And so, Pinocchio, who's trying to become real, follows Lampwick and the Coachman, who's like Satan himself, to Pleasure Island, where they do things like desecrate classic works of art. We've seen plenty of that lately, and they turn into braying jackasses who are then enslaved by dark forces operating behind the scenes. You remember that? Go watch that—that section of the movie and see if you can figure out what the hell it means.

So, what does it mean? There's something deep here. This thug-ho thing is extremely deep. So I'm going to read you something that you'll find quite interesting here. So this is from The Book of Revelation, and it's quite a shocking, um, a shocking account. This is really a hallucinogenic vision. And so this is the vision in Revelation 17: 1-18. One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, "Come, I will show you the judgment on the great prostitute who sits on many waters." Okay, so the great prostitute is the mother of all prostitutes, right? So it's disinhibited; it's the essence of disinhibited female sexuality. And what does it mean that it sits on many waters?

Well, water in the biblical account is a symbol of chaos. And so the underneath disinhibited female sexuality is chaos itself, right? The chaos that devours everything. "With whom the kings of the earth committed sexual immorality, and Earth's inhabitants were made drunk with the wine of her sexual immorality." Well, we can see the emergence of the of Babylon because that's what that is—Babylon being the great state, by the way. We can see that emergence in the technological transformation of women into what would you say—succubi and incubi? That's a very good way of thinking about it, right? So, sexually attractive apparitions that take everyone's vitality. So that's real fun.

The account continues: "And he carried me away in the power of the spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman—the same woman, the of Babylon—sitting on a scarlet-colored wild beast." So that's blood-colored, essentially. "That was full of blasphemous names and that had seven heads and ten horns." Okay, so this is the Beast of the state. And the multiplicity of heads—that's what occurs when the state no longer has its unity. So you could associate that, for example, with the pride flag, the rainbow idea— the notion that diversity can be a unity. It's the collapse of a unity as a consequence of the death of God into the Beast of the state. Okay, so what rides on the Beast of the state? The idiot hedonism that power-mad tyrants entice you with to turn you into slaves.

Right? Now this hallucinogenic account is an image-laden imaginative description of how societies collapse, as such, so how they collapse in eternity. So the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and she was adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, so she's beautiful and attractive and looks valuable, and that's her cover story. And she had her hand in her hand a golden cup—the same sort of thing—a golden cup is generally the container of the redeeming fluid, let's say, the redeeming liquid, the Water of Life, the blood of Christ. And so this is an inversion of that; it's the golden cup that was full of disgusting things and the unclean things of her sexual immorality. So that's a pretty damn rough image, you might say. And that's what she's offering the world to drink.

"Great on her forehead was written the name, 'A Mystery, a Mystery: Babylon the Great, the Mother of the Prostitutes and of the Disgusting Things of the Earth.'" Okay, well, that's fun. Now, I wrote a whole article about that called "Identity, Individual, and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven." I wrote that for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship with Jonathan Pacho, where we took apart this particular imagery.

So, what happens in the Revelation story is the of Babylon sits on the degenerate Beast of the state, offering everyone hedonic delights allied with power, and the Beast eventually kills the. And so what does that mean? It means the bloody tyrants will offer you everything you want. You can have it right now. Just like the half-wit dimwits in Pinocchio's Treasure Island. But eventually, they will take everything like that from you. And you can see that already—not least in the fact that young people are becoming sexually sated and overflowing in a manner that's actually stopping them from forming relationships, stopping them from getting married, stopping them from being with one another, staying virginal. Like, the end result of hedonism? This is what Tom is pointing to: the end result of that is that nobody ever gets anything pleasurable at all, right? So, I wouldn't recommend that either.

So, let's continue. I don't—if I end, I was put to… okay, so let's think about offense for a minute. Okay, so here's why you have ideas. Now, you have ideas so you can orient yourself in the world in abstraction. Now you might want to think something through before you do it because if the thing you want to do is stupid and you think it through and you understand that you will come to a bitter end if you pursue that course, then you can kill that idea.

Now, maybe you're kind of fond of that idea and you've invested a lot in it, so there's going to be some goddamn pain when you kill your own stupid ideas, and that'll make you offensive to yourself. Now, maybe you can offer those ideas to other people, you know, and you offer them and you say, "What do you think of this?" And they go after you hard and they kill the idea. Well, of course, that's going to hurt your feelings because it's part of you that's dying.

But it's a stupid part. That doesn't mean there's not going to be any pain associated with it. And so it's often the people who oppose your ideas most dreadfully who are in some sense the force that keeps your stupidity in check. Now that's not always the case, but it's frequently the case. And so what this means, you have to understand, what this means is there's no genuine critical thought without hurt feelings. Do you understand that? No critical thought without hurt feelings.

Okay then, so then you say, "Well, we'll dispense with critical thought because we don't want anybody's feelings to be hurt." Then they wander off a cliff and die, and so that's not a good substitute. We evolve thinking so our stupid thoughts could die instead of us. Now the death of a thought is still something that's associated with a certain degree of emotional dysregulation because the chaos that that thought constrained is released when that thought dies. And the future vision that was associated with that thought disappears as well. And so there's a certain amount of dissolution of hope, but it's better to have your stupid thought die than for you to suffer directly physically or even die.

And so if we institute a rule that critically minded people—so those would be disagreeable people, the same people you rely on, by the way, if you're compassionate to protect you from the, you know, the idiot hedonistic thugs—if you forbid people's ability to speak in a manner that some, especially the prideful victimizers, regard as offensive, that's no different than stopping them from being able to think critically. And, you know, thought has three components: you ask a question, you receive an answer, but then you have to evaluate the answer. And you evaluate the answer with critical thinking, and in so far as you do that, you're going to cause emotional distress; you're going to be offensive.

So now, when Ben—the entire song rotates around the notion of facts and facts versus feelings. Well, feelings can orient you in the world, right? They give us a first-pass, low-resolution, quick, instinct-laden manner of evaluating the world, literally evaluating it, telling the difference between what's good and what's not. But we've allied that with a much more differentiated communication system that enables us to build a representation of something approximating the objective world.

And what we generally do is we refine our emotional commitments with the facts that we gather around us because we could be led astray by our instinct. So, for example, the instinct of a compassionate woman is going to be to feel sorry for, like, everything and everyone. And fair enough, you know, because there's lots of misery in the world, and there are true infants, and there are children that need to be taken care of, and there are old people, and there are sick people. It's like, so I would say to women, it's like, go out and find someone that actually needs to be taken care of. That would take some work. Have a child, for example, instead of inventing victims so that you could pretend to be female.

And so, that's exactly what's going on here. So, alright, continue. You can cry; you can scream; you can riot in the street. Okay, there we go. Alright, so here's another way that feelings can be perverted by the narcissistic. Now, if you cry, that's a distress cry, and you're showing that you're dissolving; you're dissolving in the salt water of tears. And what's dissolving is your adaptive stability, right? You can't handle it; you can't manage. That's why you cry. You're overwhelmed, and the cry signifies that—the tears and the lack of ability to speak because you can't speak when you're really sobbing—it's a distress cry that's sent out to the world to gather attention and resources.

Okay, now, if you're a child and you're crying because you're, I don't know, you have a diaper pin stuck in you, to use an example from like 60 years ago. You know, you're too hot, or you're too cold, and all you can do is lay there. So what do you got? You can cry, you know, and that brings attention to you and then care. And now, attention is a very valuable resource.

Okay, so what does that mean? It means pain cries can be gamed by narcissistic psychopaths; that's what it means. And so we know this because obviously the worst people are going to guise themselves in the highest form of moral virtue. That's the essence of hypocrisy. And so if you're a whiny, crying victim and you attract attention in consequence, well then you're gaming the system that was cobbled together as a consequence of a lengthy evolutionary process to ensure the care of dependent infants. You're mimicking that, you know? And that's a, what would you call that? That's a terrible form of theft. You're taking from the people who are genuinely in need, and you're deflecting all that attention to yourself. And why are you doing that? Well, so that you don't have to bear responsibility for your own life. How's that? So that you can sponge off on someone stupid enough to feel sorry for you, and then you can wave your bloody flag of moral virtue out in the streets instead of, like, going to volunteer in a hospital to take care of sick children, or having a baby, for example, which is where all that superfluous maternal instinct should most genuinely be directed.

We know perfectly well, as I said earlier, that being a woman and being female are the second and third best predictors of being a politically correct authoritarian. Well, how about if we made the hypothesis that that's a perversion of the maternal instinct that isn't being utilized properly by young women between the ages of 18 and 30 who are far more likely to be progressive than any other kind of person? If we're going to, like, have a serious conversation about this, we're always too goddamn cowardly to do that.

So, alright, so that's that. I—what? Okay, so Tom asked, "What would Ben do?" Now, this brings us to a discussion of personality. So one of the things that makes this video so compelling and interesting is that Ben and Tom are quite different in personality in a subtle way—although the overt manifestations of that aren't subtle at all. Tom is a crazy-looking bastard, you know, metal teeth, tattooed to the hilt, crazy hairstyle; like, he's quite the monster. Now, I did a study at Harvard 30 years ago, 40 years ago, um, with a colleague of mine. I won't say her name because I don't know if she would be happy about it or not. I mean, we're still friends. But anyways, we didn't publish this study, unfortunately, but this study was done just when piercing and tattooing entered the mainstream, and it was starting to become a fad, a contagious fad.

And so we were interested because we were both personality psychologists and psychopathologists in whether or not that proclivity to tattoo and to pierce was a marker of psychopathology, potential for mental illness or maladjusted personality. Now, we thought it might be because up until that point, all of that had been part of like circus subculture or prison subculture. There was a subculture that was characterized by piercings and tattooing, but they were always outsiders, often The Outsiders who run amusement parks, for example, often carneys or prisoners—so the genuinely marginalized.

Now, what we found was that there was no association between that proclivity and psychopathology, but that it was a marker for the fifth personality dimension: openness, which is essentially openness to experience, is the technical name. It's a combination of imaginative creativity, aesthetic sensibility, an interest in ideas and verbal fluency. And that's where Tom and Ben really split. They're both very, very high in openness because they're very creative people, and that's associated with verbal intelligence. And being able to rap is a marker of verbal intelligence and verbal fluency, which is associated with the ability to articulate. And that, in turn, is associated with a high probability of success in the world.

And so part of the reason that rap artists are attractive is because they're manifesting their intelligence in a creative way, and that's a signal of their general utility. It's a display of their intelligence. Now, Ben and Tom do this in very different ways. So you could imagine that Tom is an imaginative genius, right? He's the same kind of strange character, let's say, as Marilyn Manson and David Bowie, and Mick Jagger, and Russell Brand, for that matter—these extremely showy people who are geniuses of imaginative association, right? And so they're working at the level of the dream; they're in the image domain, and now they can translate that into words to some degree as well.

And that makes them poets. So a poet is an intermediary between the semantic and the linguistic and the imaginative. And then you can imagine that there are experts of creativity, some of them are experts of imagination, and some of them are experts of word. Ben is an absolute bloody master of word, although he's not anywhere near as open on the aesthetic side as Tom. Ben's quite a conservative person now; he's very, very high in conscientiousness, orderliness, dutifulness—that goes along with patriotism, and so forth. He's very high in that. But you know, he's a very conservative-looking person—short haircut, you know, uniform suits essentially—but unbelievably verbal, and so that makes him a rapper.

It's interesting to see him working with Tom because Ben, with his almost purely verbal intellect—although he's interested in music, you know, so it's not a unidimensional guy—but he can ally with Tom to delve into the imaginative realm. And that's what they did with this rap video, which obviously caught the spirit of the times because it's the number one song in the world at the moment, which is like absolutely hilarious beyond conception that Ben Shapiro is now, you know, a star rapper. It's especially comical because he also criticized rap because its excesses offended his conservative temperament.

You know, and there was some utility in that, in so far as it's a culture that promotes the thug-ho juxtaposition and thus the horror of Babylon and the Scarlet Beast, which is not really a very good idea. But you could argue on the open side that he failed to understand the cultural significance of hip hop and rap as a genuine expression of artistic endeavor and creative intelligence. And so, but being somewhat exploratory in his nature, even aesthetically, he decided to go ahead with this rap song and collaborate with Tom.

And they look like people on the opposite end of the universe, and the collaboration produced something that was quite stellar. Now, you can take tremendous liberties with your imagination, right? So, that's what creativity is: tremendous liberties with imagination. You can dream all sorts of insane things. Well, why? Because you don't act them out when you dream; you're literally paralyzed. So, you can't go around and act out your stupid imaginative ideas and die, right? And so, but you experiment like mad.

Now, the problem with that broad experimentation is that a lot of it's going to be noise rather than signal; a lot of it's going to be off the mark. So then you might ask, “Well, how do you see which of your creative ideas—the plentitude of creative ideas that you've produced—are off the mark?” And one answer is you talk to other people and you get their critical feedback. But that's particularly useful when you're doing that with someone like Ben because Ben has a very, very high level of verbal intelligence. Like, it's off the charts, and verbal fluency as well. But he's also quite disagreeable, impolite, and so that means he'll tell you what he bloody well thinks.

And you might say, “Well that's pretty hard on me.” It's like, no, it’s hard on your stupid ideas. Now, if you're desperately identified with your stupid ideas, then that's going to feel to you like a death, you know? And so, you might fight to the death to protect yourself from that happening, but that's not wise because you should subject your ideas to stress tests. So, Tom's radical imagination has allied itself with his admiration for Ben, and I don't just mean within this video; obviously, Tom is an admirer of Ben.

And the reason for that is because Tom has enough humility to subject his wild imagination to the critical evaluation of the intellect. So, openness to experience bifurcates into interest in ideas and interest in aesthetics. And the really wild creative artist types are high in interest in aesthetics. Women are slightly higher in that, by the way too, whereas—and they're interested in fiction, for example, compared to non-fiction, and they're interested in people rather than things. That all stacks up on that side of the openness equation, whereas the more cutting, cut-and-dried intellectual types like Ben are less elusive in their thought processes and more allied with the forces that criticize thought and hone it rather than generating it in this imaginative sense.

Now, that's a lovely play-off, right? Because you're in a stellar position if you can have a collaboration in your own mind like the one that Tom and Ben established, where you have someone who's wildly creative talking to someone who's wildly critical because then you get a plethora of ideas and you can kill all the stupid ideas off until you're left with just the, like, shining examples of the most brilliant ideas. And then you don't die because you're stupid and imaginative, and everybody benefits from your creativity.

So, anyway, so that's why Tom is turning to Ben, and that's one element of the creative logos turning to the other. So, here's another way of thinking about this. So when God throws Adam and Eve out of paradise, He sets up these cherubim—monsters, monstrous Angels, terrifying—and they are accompanied by this sword that's on fire that turns every which way. So this is a sword that cuts and burns from which you cannot escape, right? That's what it means for it to turn every which way.

And you might say, “Well, why would paradise be barred by a sword like that and by monstrous forms?” And the answer is, well, nothing stupid and weak and useless, you know, in the fundamental sense is allowed to exist in heaven. That's the place where only anything that's perfect can make its entrance. And so that means everything that is unworthy has to be cut and burned away. And so then you can imagine, too, that if you were stacked to the gills with unworthy thoughts and proclivities and imaginative routines, then those cherubs wielding that sword would look to you like the Devil Himself, and your passing through that cutting process would feel like hell.

So critical thinking is a burning and cutting operation, right? It's what gets rid of the Deadwood. And that's partly why we have to allow people to have free speech so that we can have these battles in abstraction so that we don't have to act out our stupid ideas and then have battles in reality, right? Because once we lose the ability to argue abstractly, we revert to fighting, right? Because arguments are abstracted wars. That's what they are—an argument is an abstracted war.

Now, it can be a civilized war in which it's got a game-like aspect, but make no mistake about it: if you remove people's ability to speak freely and engage in verbal conflict—something Ben is absolutely superb at—then you devolve the conflict into action, and you get a chaotic war, right? And we're on the brink of that in multiple ways. So this isn't some mere abstraction that the philosophical or the literary-minded are preoccupied with because they have nothing better to do. Quite the contrary.

Let's just keep it real: facts don't care how you feel, man. If you want my pronouns, I'm the man. I'm the man who don't respect. Look at the stats: I got my money like my pockets are fat. I'm epic. Don't be a w dog, you know? No cap. Okay, so this is like ridiculously funny, and, and Ben is ridiculously funny, and he does it with his straight face. And so he's pointing to something here too, which is that he has a long-term orientation as a conscientious person, right?

So he's willing to sacrifice the hedonistic pleasures of the present to the future. He's got a long-term vision. That's also what makes him not a short-term Mator, not a psychopath, not a narcissist, not a malfeasant, not a sadist. He sacrifices in the present to gather good things in the future. That's one of the things that makes him a reliable husband and a reliable provider for children.

And what he's trying to point out to the people who are listening in his tongue-in-cheek manner and quite comically is that, you know, you can pursue hes and cars and flashy gold and live in the moment like an overgrown three-year-old or even a two-year-old, or you can learn how to make the proper sacrifices and you can grow the hell up and you can have an eye to the longer-term, which is exactly what happens once you start to care for children. And then what—the wealth that is genuine wealth starts to accrue to you. Plus, plus you don't get killed and, you know, gunned down in a gang fight when you're like 22.

So, so all of that's happening in the verses that he's laying out in his, you know, very straight-faced, straight-laced, witty manner. I love his Thug hoodie too; that's like good work, Ben. That's extreme. I saw someone yesterday they called him “little shop”—L shop. I thought that was great; I think everyone should call Ben Shapiro “little shop” for the rest of his life.

Look at the graphs, look at my charts. You're blowing money on strippers and cars; you go into prison, I'm on televisions, no one knows who you are. Okay, so there you know. So the other thing Ben's pointing to there is, well, prison and death— that's not great. That's not a great outcome, you know? And, and then he's also pointing out too something we know to be a fact: so about three to five percent of people have a psychopathic narcissistic tilt that's significant enough to be clinically relevant. So that's, you know, one person out of 20 or 30. What that shows is it's not that—it's not a particularly successful strategy.

You could think about it as a niche strategy, you know? You can survive and propagate to some degree if you're a psychopathic exploiter, but it's not a good strategy partly because people catch on, partly because you can't cooperate with other people because once you screwed them once or twice, so to speak, they're not going to have anything to do with you. How do we know this? So psychopaths betray everyone else, but they also betray their futures.

And that's why they end up in prison. And you might say, “Well, they're doing this to gain attention.” And Ben's point is, “Well, whatever attention you gain is going to be pretty damn fleeting, you know? It's not going to last. And plus, it's not real—it's based completely, it's based on a tissue of malfeasance and manipulative lies. It's not a good strategy.”

Now, it's complicated because a lot of these tough guys who use these short-term mating strategies and power, you know, they are in some ways more courageous than the absolutely useless weasels who do nothing but remain dependent for their entire life. And that's partly what it accounts for the attraction of the shadow, you know? Shadow figures, dark figures, dark heroes, anti-heroes in movies and so on, you know—the ability to integrate that aggression is a developmental milestone.

You know, a boy who's too dependent has to integrate his aggression so that he can push his mother away, even aggressively, and move into the world, right? So the aggression has its place; you can't—you can't dispense with it. You can't, like, surgically excise toxic masculinity or the testicles that give rise to it, which we seem to be doing to a radical degree in our society. It has to be integrated—it's everything in its right place, right? Everything's in its proper order; everything properly subdued and set where it's supposed to be in the proper heavenly hierarchy. That's Adam's job, by the way.

That's the job that God gives him in the Garden of Eden, right? To name everything, to speak properly, and to put everything in its proper place. And that's what Tom and Ben are trying to do in this video, you know, in this artistic way. And that is what everyone who's listening to it is trying to do, even if they don't know it, okay?

Parents, nikki-tak some notes. I just did this for fun. All my people, download this. Let's get a Billboard number one. I don't care if I offend you; I was put here to upset you. You can cry, you can scream, you can ride in the street. You defunded the police; now there's no one to protect you.

Out by you, I ask myself what—let's just keep it real. Facts don't care how you feel. Okay, so let's look at that for a minute. I'm the man who don't respect you. Okay, so imagine women have this problem with men, right? Because they, they have to evaluate men to see—to distinguish the genuine providers, the genuinely productive and generous men—and hopefully, a man with a spine—from the psychopathic narcissists who act like that but aren't the real thing, right?

And we know that younger women have a more difficult time with that than older women because they don't have the experience. Now, men have an analogous problem, which is how to differentiate between the women who pretend to be compassionate and caring and therefore productive and generous, and who do that to elevate their femininity and their moral status, and women who would actually commit, let's say, to a long-term relationship and to the care of actually dependent people, which is very hard. It's very hard to care for infants; it's very hard to care for sick old people, right? And that's a lot more difficult than parading around your compassion like a false flag.

And so when Tom says that he's the man who—I'm the man who don't respect you, what he means by that is that he has developed the perspicacity, the acuity of vision, to distinguish between people who are truly compassionate—and so that would be the genuine mothers of the world or those with a genuine and maternal impulse—and those who are just parading this false flag to look good for their friends and for anybody who's foolish enough to be entranced by their claim.

So, alright, let's [Music] continue. VI, I'm be the man—oh yes, so I'm going to be the man. So what is Tom saying? It's like, well, he's being called upon to be a compassionate ally, and he has enough sanity to distinguish between false and true compassion.

And he's decided that even if he has to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he's going to be a tough guy and he's going to say what the hell he has to say and let the—and let the chips fall where they're going to fall. Now, I would say also for you men that are listening, that's also something that makes men truly attractive to women who are actually discerning, right? That capacity to stand up against the mob, the psychopaths, and to differentiate between genuine and false compassion.

And you really need to do that as a father; you know, you learn this when you have little kids— is that you have a finite amount of energy, and you want to devote it to the care of those who are truly in need. That'll be your parents at some point; it'll be your wife at some point, you as well, because everybody gets sick and old. But even more importantly, it's your children. You don't want to waste that energy on the false cries of the—what would you call them? The falsely oppressed? And we're being called upon to do that nonstop—that’s really right at the core of the culture wars and all that's being pointed to in this video.

That's why it's a number one video, you know? It's not just—it’s a joke, you know, but it's a joke that hits the target. A joke doesn't become that popular unless it hits the target. You—you just try to get attention.

Being triggered, all you have—you mad, you mad, you mad! You blame everybody else for every problem you can? Yeah, okay. So, there Tom talks about being triggered and getting attention that way. So that's that false cry. And then he moves into the next part of this song, which is a discussion of madness, let's say. “You mad?” Okay, well, there “mad” has two meanings, right? You're angry and bitter and resentful, like Cain, who ends up killing his idol, his ideal, Abel.

So you're mad, you're angry, you're bitter, and resentful. Bitterness and resentment, man—those poison your soul. That plus arrogance and deceit, and you're definitely in hell. And then “mad” is also insane. And if you pursue these short-term strategies of hedonism and power and chaotic divisiveness, there's no difference between that and insanity. So the madness goes two ways, and of course, as you descend into madness, you're going to become more angry and destructive. And then you get another vicious circle going, so yeah, that's not good.

It's guess it's cool to be the victim. Well, if that's all you've got, you know, when Tom said he's not going to be the victim. And that, you know, one of the things that you learn in the story of Job, for example. So Job is terribly tortured by God, terribly. He loses everything and becomes extremely ill, and he refuses to play victim as a matter of faith. It's a proclamation. Everybody has a reason to construe themselves as a victim. Life is very, very difficult and unfair. Things happen to people all the time.

So, do you play the victim? Well, playing the victim is the eternal pathway to hell fundamentally, especially when you then start to identify the victimizer. Because if you're a victim and you're innocent, then the victimizer is the perpetrator, and the ultimate perpetrator is nothing else, conceptually, than Satan himself. And so once you've placed Satan himself in the midst of a group—let's say the Jews—then there's absolutely nothing that bars your action. And so then, you can have all that resentment and anger and madness; it finds its target. You wonder why the Nazis went after the Jews? It's the eternal story.

You put Satan himself, right, the victimizer in the midst of an ethnic group, which is, like, the definition of racism. And you play this game that all the virtues are on the side of the poor innocent victims as if they're innocent babies, and they're not. And all the perpetration is on the side of the victimizers.

And then you can add another twist to that. Isn't it so lovely that if you're unsuccessful, you can identify the successful with the victimizers? Because then you can attribute your failure to your own moral virtue. What a good deal for you if you really want to be insane and angry. And then it's pretty hard on the people who've been successful, isn't it? Because now you've identified them with evil itself.

Now, if you take the most successful people in your culture—and I mean the most genuinely productive and generous—and you start to identify them with evil itself, how the hell long do you think your culture is going to last? Think about that. Because it's not that many people who are hyper-productive and generous, and if you take them out, you're done.

And if you don't believe that, you go read about what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and see what you conclude, or in Maoist China, and you'll see exactly how that plays out. And you might think if you're a bitter, resentful, angry, mad, sad victim, “Well, it's worth it because the whole goddamn system is so corrupt it should be burned, just burned to the ground.” It's like, fair enough, you know, but you'll be one of the people who's thrown by your carnivorous allies onto the fire first, along with everyone you love, and I wouldn't recommend that.

[Music]

I never—I ain't—I don't care if I offend you; I was put here to say you. You can cry, you can scream, you can ride in the streets. You defunded the police; now there's no one to protect you. I hope I offend you. I ask myself, what would Ben do? Let's just keep it real. Facts don't care how you feel, man. If you want my pronouns, I'm the man. I'm the man who don't respect you.

Okay, so there's one other thing I'll point to, and we'll draw this to a close. Let's just keep it real. The postmodern ethos that's allied with neo-Marxism, this insistence in a victimizer-victim dichotomy, is also allied with a philosophical claim. And the philosophical claim is that meaning itself is only cultural and that it's also only instantiated in language.

And if you accept that, well then you can play the game of assuming that gender, for example, is nothing but a cultural construct and that people can be anything they say they are because you're making the claim that the world's reality is instantiated entirely in the semantic or the linguistic. It's the ultimate pretension of the Luciferian intellect.

It's a good way of thinking about it. When Tom says, "Let's just keep it real," what he's pointing to is the existence of levels of reality underneath the purely linguistic. And so one of those would be, as the bloody postmodern whining nihilists have it themselves, is, well, there's a reality in the emotional sphere, right? There's the reality of feelings.

Now, they're not the only reality, obviously. Obviously, there's the reality of material fact; there's the reality of transpersonal value; there's a lot of different transcendent realities. And hypothetically—this is the monotheistic claim, hypothetically—all of those transcendent realities unite in a single superordinate reality. And if that's not the case, then we're bound to divisiveness.

So, alright, so let's sum this up. You have a collaboration between two types of creator in this video who are analyzing, using poetic imagery, the core elements of the culture war that's engulfed us way down below the political, right at the level of the sacred, and they're using a blend of humor and creative imagery to lay out the conceptual territory.

And they're using music and rhythm to help people attune themselves to the argument and allying that with a high degree of wit and a satirical intent. And so it's very masterfully done. And Ben, you know, I think in particular Ben is to be commanded here for allowing himself to enter the domain of the absurd. Now, he's got an absurdist side; it's interesting to see because he's a very straight-laced person and a very conservative person, not least as a consequence of being an orthodox Jew.

But he has this absurdist capability that allows him to capitalize on the entertaining side of things, and so that's very interesting to see manifested in this. So, anyways, you never know what's going on beneath the surface, do you? Right? There's endless depths to everything, that's for sure. Everything is a burning bush, right? Everything's a gateway to the sacred if you pay attention to it enough.

And that's definitely the case with cultural productions of this sort, especially when they strike a chord. And so that's why I thought it might be worth running through an analysis of this preposterous piece of artistic production. Thanks very much for your time and [Music] attention. [Music]