The Collective Unconscious, Christ, and the Covenant | Russell Brand | EP 444

You know, this is a very sort of—and admittedly it's 2,000 years old—but a very sort of a vibrant Call to Arms, an urgent sense that, oh my God, we’re living in an atrophying and dying ideology. We must become alive with Christ; we must change the world. And even the accounts that are given in there are accounts of people jailed and on trial. Now, it sort of feels overtly and literally political.

Hey everybody, I've got a chance today to continue my ongoing conversation with Russell Brand. I want to talk to him today about the collective unconscious and about what it is because I think we now understand what it is. I'm talking to him about sacrifice as the basis of community, about the distinction between authority and power, and logos and power. About the danger of the use of power, about the necessity of the story, about how all that's played out in his own life. About the proclivity of the modern self to identify itself with its whims and desires and passions, and the inevitability that that identification turns into something that closely approximates worship. The idea that something should supplant—has to supplant— that for maturation to take place and for society itself to stabilize and remain productive and abundant.

We talk about the Call to Adventure as a variant of the establishment of a relationship with God. We talk about the burden that Christ left on his followers in the aftermath of his death. All of that. So, if that's what—what would you say winds your clock? Well, this is the discussion for you.

So good to see you, Russell. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today.

It is a great joy to be in your company. Thank you for having me.

So, I want to run some ideas by you, and I want you to tell me how they echo for you personally and also philosophically. So, I think I figured out what the collective unconscious is finally.

Well, I’ve been thinking about these large language models a lot and about what they do because they can obviously mimic human thought at the verbal level quite spectacularly. Now, of course, the woke ideologues have done everything they could to muck them up spectacularly right from the beginning, and we’re going to pay a big price for that. But there’s still something there that’s very, very telling about how we think. So let me lay out the idea, then you tell me what you think about it.

So, what these models do is map the statistical relationship between—you might say markers. Imagine that you can tell the difference between a word like—imagine a word be ‘i n t’ which isn't a word, but it's kind of a plausible non-word. And it's a plausible non-word because the statistical relationship between the letters mimics the likely statistical relationship between letters in a real English word. So it's much more of a word than ‘q n Z T’. Okay, so now there are statistical regularities between letters that enable us to identify words, and then there are statistical regularities between words in phrases that make sense. And then there are statistical regularities between phrases in sentences, and sentences in relationship to one another. And then, say, within paragraphs and then paragraphs in relationship to one another.

And the large language models are trained to map all that. So what that implies, obviously, is something like any given idea is statistically likely to exist in relationship to a certain set of other ideas and not distal ideas. If I throw an idea at you, I’m also throwing a network of associated co-ideas at you at the same time. And then out farther in the penumbra are even more distantly associated ideas. More creative people are going to be able to LEAP from the center to the distal ideas. We already know that from studying creativity. So the large language models map the statistical association between sets of ideas; that's a good way of thinking about it. You could imagine the same thing happens with images.

So, if you bring to mind the image of a witch, you’re much more likely to bring to mind the image of a cauldron and a black cat, for example. Maybe a spider, maybe a pumpkin. So the collective unconscious would be to take a given culture. The collective unconscious would be the statistical association between ideas in so far as that culture has represented the ideas, and that’s mappable mathematically.

And so a symbol would be something like a set of—it's a set of statistically associated concepts, especially image-laden concepts in particular with regards to symbols. So what the collective unconscious seems to be is the system of weights between concepts through which we see the world. And that makes it a real thing. It makes symbols real because a symbol is a network of ideas with a core idea at the center.

So yes, how beautiful! Firstly, I wonder with some of the areas we might—at least it seems to me that I ought address as occurring—are the difference between signifiers that are, of course, according to post-structuralist and to much of the work done by within semiotics, arbitrary and potentially universal natural or at least practical symbols. I wonder, for example, about the idea that there is a type of language that a barn full of chicks will respond to—the silhouette of a bird when it travels above their heads on a wire in one direction. Because when traveling from north to south, the silhouette resembles that of a hawk, but when it travels back along the same trajectory in reverse, they do not respond because it no longer resembles the silhouette of a hawk. A hawk does not travel in that formation.

That is a type of language. There is language within nature—that’s the first thought.

So you’re referring to something… yes, okay, so that adds an additional dimension to the model. So then, you might say that there are co-occurring patterns of regularity with biological significance that exist in some real sense outside the merely conceptual. Those are probably marked in the fundamental analysis by death.

One of the other things I’ve been thinking about is that people ask me questions like, you know, do you think God is real? A question like that always begs the question for me is like, well, what the hell do you mean, real? Like what makes something real? You know, you could say tangibility, although that’s only one dimension of what makes something real. It’s like I think what makes things real in the final analysis is probably death.

In the example you used of the silhouette—which is a very famous example with regard to birds—the silhouette traveling in one direction signifies death reliably, right, over a very long span of evolutionary history. And any creature that didn't respond to that silhouette was at a much more, at a much higher probability of being picked off.

So then one of the things you might note—and this is where the postmodernists got things like dreadfully wrong and where the large language models have drifted into insanity—imagine that there's a statistical relationship between concepts that’s okay. So then you might say, well, what gives that statistical relationship reality? And the postmodern types would say, well, it's just arbitrary cultural construction. But it's not because there are patterns of relationships between events that are part and parcel of the world per se, and some of those need to be accurately mapped by the conceptual system or you die.

And so I would say the ideas that ring most true to us that grip us in this sort of archetypal way are ideas that bear directly on our survival, whether we recognize it or not. They strike a chord within us.

Here’s a good example: we’ll shift sideways for a minute. I’ve started to understand why—so I’m on a tour right now, “We Who Wrestle with God,” and it’s focusing on biblical stories. I’m trying to explain— I’m trying to understand what they mean and then talk about that so other people can understand in so far as I'm able to.

And one of the striking meta-themes of the biblical library is the necessity of sacrifice, right? And so I’ve been trying to understand, first of all, what it means to sacrifice. It means to give up something that’s desirable for something that’s more desirable. It’s something like that. It’s something higher, and it’s higher because it extends over a longer period of time and it includes more people.

So like sacrifice is the basis of community. Well, why? Well, it’s obvious, Russell, as far as I can tell. If you’re in a communal relationship—which is any relationship, obviously—then you're giving something up that’s immediate to you to establish and maintain the relationship, right? So it’s a sacrificial gesture. And once you understand that—once you understand that sacrifice is at the basis of community—the question immediately arises, which is, well, what’s the most effective form of sacrifice?

This biblical story, Old and New Testament together, is actually an examination of sacrifice per se. It’s an attempt to spiral down to the core of what constitutes, well, you might say, the sacrifice that’s maximally effective, maximally acceptable to God. It's something like what sacrifices by necessity at the core of community.

I also don’t think there’s any difference between that and cortical maturation, by the way. I think they’re identical concepts, because as you mature from a hedonistic, power-mad 2-year-old, what happens is that you integrate modes of attention and action that facilitate your longer-term survival, but also your inclusion within more and more complex webs of social community.

That’s all sacrificial. Good God!

Now there's a lot of Jordan Peterson 101. There's a lot of hits running simultaneously here, JP, because we've already touched on the idea of chaos and the necessary inevitable emergence of patterns within chaos. It seems that you are positing to a degree that this chaos is analogous to perhaps the collective unconscious and some of the patterns that are emerging in AI models, even with the biases evident within them, are an indicator of how these patterns emerge within a container.

And I suppose to say a container is to indicate that we’re acknowledging an absolute. We've moved from this idea of a collective unconscious and patterns emerging within chaos into sacrifice, which is obviously another great Jordan Peterson theme.

As you say, perhaps the overarching theme of the Bible—my contribution to this incredible amount of information that you are relaying has to do with where might one's intention carry you—insofar as it seems that in this process of maturation and one’s personal relationship with sacrifice, how that develops and evolves seems to me.

Is when one starts to acknowledge that there is not—when you use the phrase “immediately beneficial”—that when we’re referring to immediacy, we are talking about both spatial and temporal immediacy. We might have to consider that when dealing with the supply, as surely the Bible is, that even these categories are called into question. The most basic and taken-for-granted categories of any temporal creature will have to be challenged.

This perhaps helps me to understand how the ultimate sacrifice, as rendered in the New Testament—and most, I suppose, would regard as the defining Christian image—the image of sacrifice can tackle the complex idea of the pact that is made by the sacrifice of the man God.

Because as I explore and attempt to understand Christianity more deeply, the nature of the trium—the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the nature of this pact is something that I'm mulling over.

And I feel that the reason I can’t reach resolution is because it’s irresolvable. Because I ask that when there is absolute dominion and omnipotence, with whom might a pact be made? And I’m starting to conclude that it must be a kind of Cohen—that, you know, that all is coming from the same source.

Yep, yep, yep.

CU otherwise, how can there be a pact?

Well, I can tell you a story about that, and you tell me what you think about it.

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Well, I can tell you a story about that—and you tell me what you think about it. That’s a very good question because the other thing you’re pointing to, too, which is definitely the case, is that the nature of the relationship between man and God in the biblical stories is covenantal, it’s contractual, and it’s relational, right? So there’s an insistence that it’s all of those. It’s like the relationship you have with a being even though it says explicitly in the biblical stories in the background so to speak that God is beyond all categories of being and non-being. But on top of that is overlaid the insistence that, well, in so far as you’re concerned, it’s still going to be a relationship with something that’s a being or that’s the essence of being itself.

Okay, so why relationship? Well, there are two questions: why relationship and why contract?

Okay, well, let’s think about work first of all and what it means to work. Obviously, work is a sacrificial enterprise because when people say they’re working, what they mean is they’re giving up what they—or something within them—would rather have happen right now if they had their brothers for some longer-term investment.

Right? So then the question is, well, investment in what? Contract with what? And you could say, well, it’s a contract with the community. If I put in—that’s what money is. If I put in time and effort, then I'll get something that I can redeem in the future for something for some specified value. But then that community that you’re contracting with is a community that’s predicated on a certain ethic because otherwise the contract wouldn’t stand.

Like if the deal was, “Well, I can work and I can store something up of value, and then some ravaging mob can just come and take it,” well, that’s going to take the spirit out of my work pretty damn quickly, you know? And that was probably the fate of most people who ever stored anything of value prior to the emergence of something like a complex sacrificial civilization where envy, for example, was regarded as off the table. You couldn't just take something that someone had because you wanted it.

So the notion of work itself is a contract with the future, but the viability of that contract depends on an underlying ethos.

Okay, so now let me tell you a story about what that contract might be conceptualized—can you tell me what you think about this?

So I’ve been studying the story of Abraham. He starts out as Abraham, by the way—A-R-M. So he has a different name, which is actually relevant as the story progresses. So Abraham has privilege in the modern parlance; he’s got rich parents and everything he needs. Everything he needs is right at hand for him. I mean, it begs the question, of course, what is it that you actually need? But what Abram has is kind of like the—he’s either got the materialist paradise at hand; there’s nothing that he doesn't have at hand that whose absence would cause privation.

So I would say he’s a fully satiated infant, and you can think about that as a notion of utopia. It's the notion of utopia that Dovey criticized, by the way. And what happens to Abraham? He’s like 75, and the Spirit of God comes to him—that’s how the story lays itself out—and says, “Look, buddy, you got to get the hell out of your zone of comfort. You have to leave your father’s tent, you have to leave your people, you have to leave everything that’s made you comfortable, and you have to journey out into the world.”

And Abraham agrees to this deal. Okay, so as soon as he agrees that he's going to forego his infantile comfort—even though he's like 70 by this time, so he's a bit of a late bloomer—God offers him a deal; this is the covenant.

And so I think it’s a description of the consequences of the full manifestation of the spirit of adventure. So imagine that there’s a spirit within you that calls you to a more profound level of development. It’s the spirit that you would encourage if you had any sense if you had in your children. If you had children, you’re launching them into the world; you’re saying, “Follow the spirit of adventure.”

Okay, so God offers Abraham a deal. He says, “If you do this and you make the necessary sacrifices, then you’ll live a life that will be a blessing to you and that will happen in a manner that will redound to your reputation. You’ll become known, but in a way that—in the right way—to become known. You’ll become influential and admirable in the proper manner as a consequence of undertaking the adventure. You’ll do that in a way that will establish something permanent—that’s a dynasty—with innumerable descendants because of the pattern that you're establishing. And you’ll do all of that in a way that’s maximally beneficial to everyone else.”

So the case is being made in that story that there’s no difference between the direction that the spirit of adventure orients you and the provision of plenty. Psychologically, socially, and over the longest possible span of time, that’s the covenant.

So the notion would be that—and this is what's portrayed to Abraham—is that there’s no better possible way of conducting yourself psychologically or socially, all things considered, while in this story, than following this voice that calls you out into the world.

Now, when Abram does go into the world, all hell breaks loose, right? He encounters famine and tyranny and war, and that calls on him to become increasingly more than he is. Every time he has a new field of adventure that reveals itself in front of him, he’s called upon to make a sacrifice. He has to change; he has to let go; he has to abandon the parts of him that are no longer appropriate to the new situation. And he does that intensely—so intensely that he’s eventually rewarded with a new name, which is Abraham, instead of Abram.

He becomes a new person; it’s a good way of thinking about it. And then, well, obviously, Abraham is called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice, which is the sacrifice of his son, Isaac. And that’s part and parcel of the notion that everything that you have is to be offered up to the thing that’s highest that pulls you forward.

It’s something—and that’s what God is—that’s part and parcel of the story. It’s a definition of what’s to be put in the highest place—that’s a contract. I got it. I like the mirroring of Abraham’s sacrifice in the Old Testament and the sacrifice of Christ as the apex event in the New Testament—that there is an inversion of that principle.

I enjoy, too, the idea that the endowment of Spirit and the spirit of adventure is the maximal principle of a great father. I enjoy this idea very much as well.

And I was, uh, wondering, Jordan, whilst you were speaking about the values that that may entail—because a little earlier, when you were talking about money being sort of one of the establishing principles for community and the, uh, the way that values can be maintained and community can be maintained—and you said it’s an expression of ethos and a portion of ethos.

I feel that one of the contemporary arguments that, ragged as you often find yourself—significantly and visibly placed on one side of—is the idea that this ethos and these values have become co-opted over time. Now I know you often talk about how, sort of, the conservatism V versus progressivism is a necessary cultural tension.

And you know that many of your detractors and opponents would easily and definitively use the phrase, uh, ‘patriarchy’ to describe the—some of these relationships and what they have culturally owed and what perhaps they would argue we as men are oblivious to some of the components that are packed into that.

What I’ve come to query is the impossibility of the perhaps the equality that it is stated they crave within that framing—I.E., that something that comes from this—forgive the literalism—Genesis would always have to be expressed in this manner. And to create a paradigm that represented a true expression of the divine feminine, it would have to be a different paradigm altogether.

This is interesting to me bearing in mind what you’ve said earlier about AI being a sort of conglomerate, an aggregation that could be mapped onto our understanding of a collective unconscious—I.E. archetypes emerge out of patterns observed over time.

But, um, what fascinates me also—because I feel it might be practical for surely as a—a theology evolves from the Old Testament into the New Testament—is there a sense, without yielding, what territory might be inferred to Islam here?

If we were to continue the trajectory to the insisted final prophet, that what we are offered in Acts, for example, in the immediate era after Christ’s death and resurrection is that the kind of divinity endowed by the second covenant—God’s reversal, inversion, and return on Abraham’s sacrifice—might become, uh, not ubiquitous but at least accessible, accessible to many.

That we will perform greater feats than he, that you, my apostles, will perform greater feats. That as he has sent me as his Apostle, I send you as my Apostles. I read Acts again recently in some easy, accessible, almost slang version of it. In fact, a man who shares your surname—Eugene Peterson’s book, “The Message”—and what I was struck by in this version of Acts was the vivacity, the livid and vitality of the book, and how the sense of urgency of Christianity—that, you know, think of the critiques that are often slung in your direction, conservatism is stale—like, you know, this is a very sort of—and admittedly it’s 200,000 years old—but a very sort of a vibrant Call to Arms, an urgent sense that, oh my God, we’re living in an atrophying and dying ideology. We must become alive with Christ; we must change the world.

And even the accounts that are given in there are accounts of people jailed and on trial—that even though it is biblical, they’re not. It’s very distinct from the Old Testament with its locusts and its deserts and its tribes and its manner; now it sort of feels overtly and literally political.

So what I’m saying is, is that somehow, like between these two sets of books—and I don't know how arbitrary that taxonomy is—Jordan, obviously it must be an area of your expertise by now, having sort of watched the incredible content you’ve generated around it—what is there? Has there been a significant reversal of charge? And what is that charge? How are we endowed with that charge now at the point when you have Richard Dawkins saying, “I am culturally Christian?”

Are people starting to recognize that this is not just a remnant ideology; this is a living thing that has been discarded? I listened to that Bishop Baron who you had on your show the other day talking about ethereal angels, and I thought, yes, the religion that I am interested in is not a precursor and a parallel to psychotherapy; it is a precursor and parallel to quantum physics.

Helping me to understand what you mean when you say self—who is this self? What do you mean when you say reality? When you say reality, what are you talking about? And is it possible that reality is something that we conjure here as vessels and conduits of the divine?

If we have the capacity to somehow, in the moment, through practice, disavow the strong gravitational, literally pull of the material and the unconscious ethos with which we are continually inculcated by the insidious nihilistic or, or, albeit glistening culture that attempts to make us all devotees of this new banality.

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Well, when Moses disappears to go find the—to be given the Ten Commandments, he leaves his political arm behind, right? Aaron. So there are two forces that lead the lost across the desert; there’s the prophetic and the political. And Aaron is the political. In that part of the story, the prophetic disappears, and the political falls under the sway of something like the immediacy of hedonism.

So the Israelites immediately turned to worship of the golden calf. And it's something like money. So a calf is obviously in the class of livestock, and livestock is bodies at hand to consume. It’s a form of wealth, obviously. And the golden calf is the first-level representation of that. Abstractly, you might say it’s halfway to money—a golden calf. But it's still materialistic.

Now, when the Israelites start to worship the golden calf and become materialistic, they become concerned with immediate hedonistic self-gratification. Okay? And so then—and it isn’t only that they’re worshiping the golden calf; they’re dancing around naked, drunk. It’s a pride parade. I mean, and I’m dead serious about that. I’m dead serious about that.

The political descends into a pride parade as soon as the prophetic disappears. Well, why? Because everyone falls under the sway of the dominion of their immature instincts. You know, when someone says, “I want what I want right now,” what they’re failing to understand is that they’ve come to a conclusion about what constitutes I, and the I that they’re allowing to be constituted is actually the dominion of their instincts.

They’re reverting to a form of—they’re reverting to the same sort of behavior that characterizes Abraham before his adventure takes place. It’s mere hedonistic immediate gratification. Now, you might say if you were progressive, it’s like, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” And the answer is, well, why don’t you put 42-year-olds out in the forest and see how long they last?

And the answer is—not very long. And the reason for that is because there’s nothing in that realm of instinctual self-gratification that’s going to be able to propagate itself communally over any reasonable amount of time. I mean, that’s why we have communal organization; why we make those sacrifices is because as you mature, you start to understand that mere whim or mere desire, first of all, is a pretty narrow definition of who you are.

Especially because it changes moment to moment, just like gender apparently, right? It’s this shapeshifting. It’s actually an a priori decision about what to worship. Like, if you’re a pagan, for example, and you’re polytheistic, for example, all that it means is that it doesn’t mean you worship nothing. It means that you identify yourself with your instinctual desire. You define ‘I’ as whatever desire rules at the moment. That’s just the kind of possession, and it’s an immature possession.

And it can't work because there’s nothing in it that’s productive—it’s all mouth and need and no action and sacrifice. And so there’s something wrong about it, fundamentally wrong about it. Something fundamental—that's Peter—that's the land of Peter Pan, right? The boy who won’t grow up, who thinks that maturity is nothing but power and corruption—that's represented by Captain Hook.

Now, to give the progressives their due, of course that patriarchal structure that is predicated on sacrifice can become corrupted. Co-opted, gigantic, right? Lumbering, blind, willfully blind. It degenerates in the direction of power always. So this is a good rule of thumb, and you can think about this in the confines of your marriage or even your relationship with yourself, right?

When the proper integrating spirit isn’t at hand and operative, then the relationship degenerates in the direction of power. You start to use compulsion; you start to use force. You know, you exchange angry words with your wife, and you attempt to force her to adopt the point of view that you think is appropriate.

But the fact that that happens continually does not indicate that that’s the basis of the relationship. The “qu”—right? It’s not—is power the basis of the relationship? Well, the progressives obviously say yes. They say there’s nothing other than power—that’s what the bloody postmodernists concluded in the 1970s.

And if it’s not power, what is it? Well, it’s the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice—that's the antithesis of power. That’s clearly the antithesis of power. And then you mentioned just—I’ll just add one thing—because you mentioned this call that you saw in Acts, which is Christ’s insistence that those He leaves behind will do works greater than His.

This is also where I see the insipid element of Protestantism in particular—although not only Protestantism—that says, well, all you have to do is say, “Lord, Lord,” and you’ll be saved. Right? All you have to do is claim belief in the Christ who’s already redeemed us, and then, you know, now you’re in the kingdom of heaven.

And that isn’t what the biblical text indicates. It indicates that those who are left in the aftermath of the Resurrection will be called upon to do greater things than Christ himself, which is a hell of a call given the nature of His sacrifice, right? This is no joke. And what we’re called upon to do is to participate in that process—right fully, or else, like, and seriously, or else.

And I can feel—everybody can feel that nipping at the edges, including people like Richard Dawkins. I may say that when you reach immediately for pride as your example of hedonism, you do yourself no favors in my humble opinion, sir, because you could just as easily use an example of hedonism and indulgence that doesn’t have such overt and explicit connotations when it comes to a particular expression of human sexuality.

That’s just one point. Let me go on for ages if you don’t mind.

Now, I am aware, of course, of—I’ve lived hedonistically; I’ve been a drug addict; I’ve lived indulgently for long periods of time. So I understand the nature of that power and, in practice, how it may as well be a God and how you conceptualize that could be pantheistic. You could see it as Aphrodite or as Venus; you could see yourself as being devoured by Cupid and certainly by Eros and making yourself the subject of such high humors.

Prius, man! Prius! Prius indeed, indeed, indeed.

But this—I saw some things in what you were saying that struck me as important—that when you were saying that, of course, when we default to making the self our deity, the sovereign being, that which is currently charged—whichever instinct is at the wheel, whichever instinct is in the driving seat—that will become sovereign at that moment. If you have no recourse against that, if you have no principle, if you have no path, if you have no da, if you have no Christ, if you have no way of breathing and living God into being, then you will default to the instincts in conjunction with culture.

That, those will be the two poles that will generate patterns as surely as if they were magnets on iron filings. And for there to be any charge at all, there must be polarity.

This refusal of the call, the inability to accept maturation, the inability to throw off infancy and to accept the chalice, to accept the grail, to receive the wound, to know what you must do—there is a tension in this for me in the maintenance of the necessary innocence that Christ Himself insists we must find.

And it seems that when you said, for a moment—and I’d love your take on this as well as all of everything I’m saying—that the self is amorphous—the self is an event; it is not in stasis. The self will be discovered and will evolve in relationship.

Then indeed, we do lend some credence to those who say these two categories of maleness and femaleness—or man and woman—do not suit me.

Now, what—no doubt these ideas, like all ideas, race, distinction, nationality, commerce, have been lent further charge by, I would say, powerful sets that seek to govern and control consciousness itself—that see that as the ultimate terrain that that require for the perpetuation of their control—the continual flinging of rocks into that pool to prevent something glorious coalescing there, some new unity.

And what I would offer is this: that surely the synthesis that we're requiring out of this thesis-antithesis war that we’re plainly still in is the ability to acknowledge that there must be some kind of fluidity, there must be some kind of freedom, there must be some kind of acceptance that tradition cannot become a rod to steer control or prod others—that our religious faith, that our spirituality, that our morality and our ethics must be for the marshalling of our own instincts and designs and desires for power.

And you’re right! And I always love it, Jordan, when you return it to, “How are you behaving in your marriage? How are you behaving in yourself?”

I was thinking about how do I behave in my marriage with my wife? How often do I tend toward power in irritability—leaning arrogantly into whatever sets of abilities I’ll claim for myself in desperation? And God knows I spend significant time there.

But because both you and I tend to—as you laid out earlier in our conversation—move from the micro to the macro, to march gladly out to the penumbra to see what might be found there. It leaves us with a kind of—one, a duty to demonstrate in our conduct that quality of joy and open-heartedness, that quality of good faith.

And I feel that perhaps the next marker of our progression might be when we can say: well, what is it that is of value in these ideas that are emerging out of post-structuralism? The sort of this willingness to cast out even nature, even the body I’m born in, isn’t me.

Nature itself isn’t real. To hell with the sun! To hell with Jesus! To hell, even, with my own chromosomes! Neither the crucifix nor the why are of value in the final analysis.

And because I’ve lived there a while—because I’ve lived continually in indulgence—because I have been so many times humbled, and my humbling continues. Yet what it leaves me with is that there is something—obviously! Obviously there is something in what you have brought into our culture that people were looking for and needed.

And I value it, and I appreciate it. That’s why I apologize when I’m late! You know, “Tidy your room, man! Arrive on time! Stand up straight!”

You know, like, but there’s also something that I am before I was an abhorus—consuming my own self. And now I am more porous, looking for ways to be open to solution.

And, you know, and I feel there is something we have to deliver. I think that there is a—something that we have to deliver. And it’s—I think the time, the fissures and fractures are emerging now. The possibility exists now for even, say, your most vehement and vocal detractors to recognize in you what is what you have brought to the conversation that is true, and for us to recognize what they have been saying that is accurate, that is correct, that is worthy of being heard.

And I would say that sort of if you—what you just casually, maybe out of habit, use pride as the example, then you know—rather than the many heterosexual and normative ways that people are equally indulgent and sort of lost in a drift, and I know those worlds because I’ve lived there, then I think that we’re not affording ourselves a pathway through this that would be beneficial.

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Okay, so I’m going to—you asked really, I think, two fundamental questions there. One had to do with the nature of authority and force, and the other had to do with fluidity. Oh yeah, there was a third one, which is what did the postmodernists bring to the table?

Let's start with that. Well, here’s one thing they got right: we see the world through a story—that’s true. That’s revolutionary, that truth, right?

And I think that science now points extremely strongly in that direction. The AI systems are trained in accordance with that notion; all the great psychologists, perception that I've studied and talked to have concluded the same thing—we see the world through a story!

The description of the structure that we see the world through is a story. And we have to weight our perceptions—that goes back to that collective unconscious idea that we started with—is that we see the literal things; we see our perceptions themselves are a function of that waiting process. They’re a consequence of a narrative process.

And so the postmodernists got that right. And that’s why we have a culture war in part. Because we’re trying to work something out that’s very deep—we see the world through a story.

Is the story one of power and tyranny? Well, the answer to that is to a large degree, unfortunately. But not fundamentally—and that’s where the postmodern lefties go so terribly wrong because their insistence is that the world is a battleground of power.

And there isn’t a more dangerous conclusion than you can possibly draw than that. Now, you still have to give the devil his due. So I’m going to consider briefly the story of Moses.

Okay, you talked about the rod of authority, right? To be used sparingly. Well, Moses is the archetypal leader and the main figure in the Old Testament, arguably speaking, and he has the flaws of the leader—even the prophetic leader—and the flaw is the proclivity to default to power. And he does that quite regularly.

In some of Moses’ actions are the kinds of consequences and motivations that someone like Dawkins would point to and say a God who would produce a motivation that evil is not a God that I’m willing to abide by.

Now he says at the same time that he is a cultural Christian, so the situation is complex, and people are starting to wake up to that fact.

But Moses’ pattern of failure—his Achilles heel—is to use power when he’s called upon to use invitation—and this is actually fatal in the final analysis. So in Numbers, which is where the story of Exodus basically concludes, Moses has shepherded his people through the desert, which is where you end up with when your tyranny crumbles. Right? You end up in the desert, which is why people don’t like to let go of their presuppositions.

Anyway, he’s shepherded through the desert basically for three generations, and they’re on the border of the promised land. The Israelites run yet again out of water, and they prevail upon Moses to intercede with God to provide water.

God tells Moses, there are some rocks nearby; you go tell those rocks to deliver the water. You go speak to those rocks properly, and they’ll deliver the water that will save your people.

And Moses goes to the rocks and he hits the rocks twice—not once, but twice—with his staff. Now this staff—this is the rod of, this is the flag you plant when you establish new territory. This is the Lana, Vine that connects Heaven and Earth. It’s the staff that defeats the staff of the court magicians. It’s the staff that turns into the serpent that eats all the other serpents. This is a major league staff, right?

It’s the authority of Moses, and he uses authority when he’s called upon to use the logos. That’s his sin. And the consequence of that is dire. God abhors—that political arm dies, and Moses is forbidden from entering the promised land.

What’s the rule there? The rule is to the patriarch, let’s say, the rule is do not use force when you could use invitation. Don’t fall prey to that temptation.

Now the left looks at the patriarchy and says nothing but. It’s like, “Wait a minute, guys. Nothing but? That’s a bit too extreme.”

ACC claim, you mean nothing but? It’s like, “Okay, why the hell are your lights on?” You know, look around you! You think all of that’s a consequence of force? Do you?

You think all of that productivity, all of that life more abundant, all of that material wealth—you think that’s a consequence of nothing but force? You think your married mar is nothing but force? You think your family is nothing but force?

You think your community, your friends, all business relationships—that's nothing but power, is it? And why am I supposed to believe that you’re not saying that just to justify your own use of power?

Because that’s how the radicals—that’s how they operate as far as I can tell. It’s like, “Well, the world’s just a battleground of power, and the only thing important is who has the rod.”

And that’s a big problem because no, that’s not a solution, and there’s a lot of self-service in the claim that power rules. It’s very, very dangerous.

Now, if it isn’t power, what is it? Well, it’s the antithesis of power. You know, when Christ is the third temptation that’s offered to Christ when he’s in the desert and he encounters Satan is the—what is the temptation of power?

And so we can derive from that the idea that the pattern of Christ’s life is the antithesis of power. And what you see in that life is the constant refusal to use force no matter what, right? And the Roman soldiers make fun of Him. They say, “Well, if you’re the Son of God, you know, why don’t you come off the cross and lay the landscape to waste?”

Which is, at least in principle, within the purview of possibility. And the answer is, “Well, you’re not allowed.” In the final analysis, you’re not allowed to use force, no matter what; right? Invitation, logos—not force.

And that seems to be tangled into this idea of voluntary self-sacrifice as the antithesis of power.

Perhaps then, Jordan, what we might explore is something that I think I heard E. M. T. Fox describe, was that were we to be invited to save but one soul or entire material empires, we would always choose the soul.

And I suppose also in the Bhagavad Gita, choose Krishna above all the artillery and armory and the world’s greatest weapons available—choose only Krishna, choose always the divine.

That if Christ’s power is not materially practiced and yet indeed we find once more at the center of the discourse that word, that concept, power—the word and concept upon which the postmodernists arrived and you say reductively alighted as conclusive—I wonder, might we consider that where this battlefield ultimately resides is internally?

For surely Christ’s actions indicate that His power is in self-sacrifice and in action and in the refusal to implement force. Clearly, when you describe the benefits—if not glory, the practical application and operation of culture and the legacy of the patriarchy of Western civilization—the institutions, flawed but yet functioning.

It’s clearly reductive to say that that is not but force. I suppose yet they may say the benefits are inadvertent consequences only afforded in the same way—just to use an example off the top of my head—that the eventual end of slavery ultimately delivers a workforce that gives you the idea of progress. But still allows establishment interests to operate quite comfortably.

Once the—well, I don’t think there’s any reason to dispute the reality of the claim that the fundamental landscape—well, I think the fundamental landscape is good and evil, but right on top of that is tyranny and slavery.

Right? So if we go back to the story of the Israelites, if we go back to the Exodus story, you have there the claim that the reality the leader always contends with—always—is the reality of tyranny and slavery at every level. And that’s something like a power dynamic.

But that doesn’t mean that the solution to the problem is that the slaves become the tyrant. In fact, that’s a solution that’s offered to Moses as a possibility. That in fact, the Israelites clamor for it just like they later clamor for a king. The slaves want a king.

Is the slave-tyrant dichotomy played out in the capitalist landscape? Well, obviously. Obviously! I don’t see that there needs to be a dispute about that. As an entry player in the capitalist world, you play out the slave-tyrant dichotomy.

And you might say, well, that means the slaves should overthrow the tyrants, right? But that doesn’t—that doesn’t address the fundamental problem. The problem is, think about it this way: how the hell do you stop being a slave?

Well, a slave to what? Well, we could start—you already described this to some degree—how about you stop being a slave to your own goddamn whims, right? Like, exactly! How is this battle to free yourself from slavery to be undertaken?

Well, we’re going to restructure the entire economic system. It’s like, “Oh, you are? You’re going to do that? You can’t even make your bed! You’re the prisoner of your own whim. You’re a slave to your own desires. There’s nothing to you.”

If you did manage the revolution, the monsters you release would take you out so fast that you wouldn’t have time to think, and it wouldn’t be pleasant. We’ve seen that time and time again.

Like the solution to the slave-tyrant dichotomy isn’t political revolution. You see that reflected again in the passion story. The mob that’s upset with Christ is upset, at least in part, because He refuses to play the role of political revolutionary.

And so because that’s not the way out of the slave-tyrant dichotomy, the way out is to stop being a bloody slave. Now how?

Well, I think that's partly the pathway of maturation, isn’t it? Is that it’s voluntary service to a higher good; it’s something like that. This is what this is what God tells Moses to tell the tyrant and the Israelites.

And we always get this wrong; we always forget the second half of this. So this is a civil rights story: Moses tells the tyrant, “Let my people go!” You know, that’s Martin Luther King. But that’s not what he says; he says it ten times just in case you didn’t catch it the first time. He says, “Let my people go so they may worship me in my—” in the desert.

And that means to establish a particular kind of relationship outside the tyranny in the wilderness. That, well, it speaks of the responsibility of each person to take on the existential burden of existence, the burden of existence voluntarily.

Right? To become a locus of authority and responsibility themselves. Because otherwise they abdicate that responsibility to the tyrant. And that’s not fundamentally a political problem. It has political ramifications, but, you know, like your decision to become a father—that’s not a political decision.

And your ability to be a good father is also—that’s not a political choice; it’s something far deeper than that. You, to the degree that you’re a good father—which is an abstract role, hence the name “father”—you’re going to be a conduit for the spirit of your ancestors.

That’s a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it. You’re going to let the spirit of the father pour through you and occupy you, right? And that’s a form of worship and subordination. It’s not power.

I love it! I love that often in my wife she—we have a young son, as you know—and I see flashes of the archetype. I see how she is governed by what I suppose Richard Dawkins would call natural processes. But I see beyond that! I see the light that shines!

I see behind the behavior, behind the biology. I feel the resonance that she is rolling with the spirit of the ancestors—that she is not just their mother, but she is the mother! How could any woman sacrifice so much?

How could any woman continue to provide so unquestioningly and so diligently? I’m struck by several things. It’s plain that there is a negotiation.

And it seems to me that what you’re saying is that the error of this new progressive postmodern sort of Marxist use your sort of language, that you would use—even if I would sort of query that language—there’s a negotiation.

And that negotiation, of course, must involve power. I’m struck that what Moses carries out politically against a sort of another king, an alternative king in the pharaoh—and as the head of a tribe, Christ carries out as an emissary, alone, in the desert.

There are parallels. The desert is a parallel. The adversarial nature of the combat—there is a parallel there!

But these distinctions, I suppose there must be information given that we are operating on the assumption that this is operating—that this is your term as a library and sort of as a progressive discourse that’s deliberately trying to induce a state.

And perhaps it's the states that we’re describing, quite simply, in the—you know, the father, the mother, a role that may be useful to us.

And what I feel is—funnily enough, I feel like there is a—you know I feel a hero? Yes, yes, yes! To be worthy of the term.

And what I feel like is important now—certainly what feels important to me—is what is it that I am to revive? How is it that I will continue to incline towards this ancestral greatness? What is the duty, and how might the power of logos impact reality differently than force?

And it’s extraordinary.

So, okay, so let me ask you—let me ask you that specifically. You’re quite the wizard of words now, and so you have that as a gift.

Now you’ve detailed out your subjugation to the land of whim, let’s say. And now you have this podcast; you have a public presence. You’ve been vouchsafe—that this is your podcast. I’m in your podcast right now. This is your podcast—so now we’re getting some.

When it becomes an absolute amorphous podcast where the father and son don’t even know because the spirit is so abundant and all-immersive that we don’t even know who’s Moses, who’s the pharaoh, who’s Jesus, who’s the serpent—now we’re getting somewhere, baby!

Well, it seems to me that the simplest place for people to start with regard to finding their pathway forward is to be very careful with their words. And I want to know something personal from you.

It’s like I believe that what you’re doing on your podcast is attempting to find your way forward carefully. You’re investigating and exploring, and that’s the answer to the question about amorphic identity.

It’s like the people who push forward the notion that identity is fluid—that’s the case if you’re progressing forward in exploration and trying to expand your domain of responsibility, let’s say.

It’s not true if what you’re doing to be fluid in your identity is the abandonment of all responsibility whatsoever, right? So—and those can look very—they can look casually very similar.

Now, I want to know from you. It’s like, what is it that you’re doing with your words when you’re doing what you should be doing? And what’s the consequence?

What’s been the consequence of that for you and for your reputation? And what would you say is for your dynasty and for everyone else? It’s the same Abrahamic question.

If you use your words properly, I mean, first of all, do you? If you do, why? When you do, what happens? How do you know when you deviate from that? And what do you think your responsibility is in that regard?

Thank you. The prayer of Jabez—I think in Chronicles, too—oh, that you would bless me indeed and enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me, that you would keep me from evil.

I feel that with words, I—that’s a good one.

I feel like with words, I’m trying to generate community. I’m trying to use language to create common unity—to instantiate and realize an inherent and already existing connection. And that we live individually and collectively in a super state of potentiality, that is our—he has no hands but ours—but we are here to formulate his kingdom.

That as we have already referenced that we are his apostles—that this is our duty now for the experientially, how that is—as you have kindly suggested—it is indeed a gift and therefore requires no effort.

It requires only acceptance and a receptive state. When I’m in this receptive state, the communication is effortless. I’m almost not a participant.

It seems to me that the polarity is precisely as you have described that I am both carried, I am a vessel for and a vehicle upon my instincts. The flow of my instincts are that we had the senses are that we had the instruments to observe the patterns that might be about us. The endocrinal streams that may yet flow and where they carry me and with what tellos and with what purpose in mind.

Upon these, with my rod, I try to impose, Jordan, yes, an ancestral inheritance of some value. And the battleground for me, the battleground for me is the inculcation of this ego.

It was very, very well done by the culture. The raw material of the appetites was—they did good work with this clay.

So easy, if you feel a continual lack, as one might if you have not yet been shown a path to God—so easy to worship their herd of golden calves that they lay before you. And all of the bounties that are on offer.

It seems to me that it isn’t—and this is from what I have learned from other alcoholics and addicts that walk the path ahead of me—that its analysis ultimately—that what addiction represents is a spiritual problem, is a spiritual quandary. And even embedded in the idioms like “get off my face, lose myself, get smashed” is the idea that what the actual impulse is—and indeed think how significant the word craving is within addiction—is a move towards a pulling some force, some source, some calling, some clarion call, some harbinger awaiting some personal rapture.

The problem is, of course, living as we do in this context that ultimately offers you as the end goal—through materialist and rational analysis—that you might become just this type of a person in this type of a society.

Something important is lost, and those things are explicit in the texts that undergird 12-step practice and philosophy. It is plain that they are talking primarily about—and I’ve said to you before, but I’ll say again—that Jung was a key influence on the founders of that movement along—curiously—along with first-century Christianity.

That what they are not saying, you know, “Give up drink and give up drugs.” They are saying, “Give up self. Give up self. Give up self.” There are phrases like “abandon yourself to God completely.”

Like after they get past the, it’s not going very well, is it? All of this drinking and drug use—and even indicated in the earliest literature for these groups is the idea that there will be behavioral expressions; that there will be sexual behaviors; there will be promiscuity, etc.

And God alone—and if you maybe even just take that as one thread and consider what the 70 years since this piece of folk philosophy was, or you’re in the world of pornography—something that was once, of course, available but somewhat abstract and now is normalized, immersive, immediately available.

It seems that the environment is encroaching, and this reminds me of something sort of important I want to say—the reason the prodigal son is important is because, like, if someone’s telling you you don’t want to be doing any of that, and it seems that it’s born in puruan and an inability, an inability to attract mates—well, what’s the value of that testimony?

But someone that’s come back from there and says, “Well give it a try, but it didn’t work very well for me.” It is, I think, a more powerful testimony to deliver.

At least it seems to me that that certainly is the testimony that that has affected me more. But what is difficult to avoid, I feel, Jordan, is the sense that not only is there this, you know—and you is something you touched upon earlier, you said, no, it’s not only force, you know—and I sort of offered you that perhaps the benevolence that this force has issued but could be—and this is, of course, reductive—an inadvertent side effect of the tyranny.

And please be aware that I am apprised of the fact that the forms of tyranny that are emerging now, apparently in opposition to these old-school, not-to-be-repeated—let’s face it—militaristic, demagogic, populist strongman forms of tyranny that we’re being continually warned of are far more terrifying—the Kafkaesque bureaucratic banalized invisible dreadful.

We’re here to help! I’m afraid your inquiry can’t be heard! This is diabolical. Huxley’s hell terrifies me even more than Orwell’s, although plainly we’re in some amalgam with beautiful gilding from Kafka. In the sort of unknowable qual—where is the judge? What is the trial?

Who’s doing all this stuff? And it seems to me that there must be even if we are to say it’s about power— even if we are asking, “Is it an internal struggle? Is it my power over my instincts and the expression of those instincts in conjunction with culture that I might call self over time?”

There seems to be some other agent there. Doesn’t indeed seem to be a serpent there? Do indeed appear to be fallen angels? There do indeed appear to be ulterior forces at work.

For I am struck that when I was an emblem of this culture in my hedonism, I was glorified and made much of. And when I say there is something else we must move towards God, this is when the culture comes alive.

This is when the spotlight shines. This is when the knock at the door comes. This is when forces are marshaled. It seems to me that something—someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.

All right, sir, look, I’m going to—I’m going to close on that. You know, we’ll obviously continue this conversation.

How could—when? How could it ever end?

Yeah, yeah. How’s your son?

He’s doing so marvelously well! He’s doing—I mean, it’s just beautiful. He—like what it’s done to the family dynamic, this child. Again, I mean, to see my wife mother him so beautifully—to reaffirm my connection with my two daughters—to experience the, you know, bloody hell, man!

Like I tell you, to see your son on a slab with what appeared to be, they might as well have been sort of Mayan priests, these giant anesthetists, before they carve open his thorax with the happy intention, of course, of saving his life.

It feels biblical indeed to be confronted with that—to, oh, it gave me moments to a mother weeping for her child—the hopelessness, the despair. And of course, this was within the tundra. This was within the tundra of what amount to lies.

And my God, Jordan, my God! You know the—I mean, this might give you an indication why someone might go scurrying somewhat keenly towards Jesus!

Hey, I got a book for you! Read “The Sacred and the Profane” by Eliade.

Yes, sir! He was a big influence on Campbell, too, and Eliade is a real genius. He’s a real genius. Very short book—punching as hell. Deadly book. He’s got about six or seven that are very much worth reading, but that’s probably top of the list, “The Sacred and the Profane,” sir.

Next time we talk, we can talk about it, all right? That’ll be good!

Right, man. Hey, I love you. Nice talking to you, Russell. My love to Tammy.

Yes, sir. My love to Tammy and to your children. And thank you.

All right, sir. To everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. To the Daily Wire Plus people for making this possible, that’s much appreciated. To the film crew here today in Tulsa, Oklahoma—that’s where we are. Thanks for your help, Russell. We’ll talk soon.

Thanks for chatting today.