Live Not By Lies | Rod Dreher | EP 268

Remember what um Solzhenitsyn said? “Bless you, prison!” I mean, great imagine he was, he suffered horribly in prison, but he said, “Bless you, prison,” because it brought him to that salvation. It brought him out of himself. And there's no necessary proof that if you undertake to suffer for the truth that you won't pay the final price. The problem is you're going to pay a price for the alternative too, and so will everybody else.

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Hello everyone, I'm here today with Rod Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative. He's a veteran of three decades of magazine and newspaper journalism. Rod has written two previous New York Times bestsellers, The Benedict Option and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, as well as Crunchy Cons and How Dante Can Save Your Life. Today we are posed to discuss his newest book, Live Not by Lies, inspired not least by the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, the book that helped bring down the evil Soviet empire.

Good to meet you, Rod. It's been a long time coming, and I'm looking forward to discussing your book.

Yeah, thank you, Jordan. It has been a long time coming because you, of all people in North America, are an expert on totalitarianism. So I've been very eager to see what your take on the book is and to have a fruitful discussion with you about it.

Yeah, so the title, Live Not by Lies, it's a lovely phrase—a catchy phrase too, for what that's worth. I suppose that indicates some poetic genius. Do you want to talk a little bit about why you picked that title, where it came from, and also what motivated you to write the book?

Sure, well, the title comes from an essay that Alexander Solzhenitsyn sent out to his followers just before the Soviets expelled him in 1974. And in the essay, he told the people who followed him that, look, we can't go out on Red Square and say exactly what we think. We don't have that option in totalitarian Russia. But what we can do is refuse to say what we do not think. This is the power we have to refuse to speak lies or to refuse to assent to lies where they are spoken around us.

And I think that that is a very valuable lesson for us today, living under very different conditions, you know, in the 2020s. But we are living in a time of a different kind of totalitarianism.

And that brings us to why the book—not only why I began to write the book, but the genesis of the book. Around 2015, I received a phone call from a man, a physician at the Mayo Clinic, who said, “Listen, I have to tell somebody this. I have to tell some journalist this.” He said his elderly mother lives with him and his wife there, and she had immigrated to America after she was released from prison in communist Czechoslovakia. She had spent four years in prison there and was tortured for being a Vatican spy. Why did they call her a Vatican spy? Because she refused their order to stop going to church.

Well, the lady came to America, she married, she started a family, but now at the end of her life, she was telling her son, “Son, the things I see happening in America today remind me of what I left behind.”

Well, what was she talking about? She was talking about the fact that people are terrified to say what they really think. She was talking about how people could lose their businesses or lose their jobs simply for having the "wrong opinion.” She was talking about how mobs were generated for ideological reasons to drive people to the margins of society. She was talking about the way language is being falsified in service of an ideological agenda. And she was talking about the way that not only the state but also private institutions are making people think of themselves in terms of group identities, not individual rights, and that all of this seemed to be part of a totalitarian mindset.

Well, I thought, Jordan, that what this old lady said was kind of outrageous. You know, my mother is old. She watches a lot of cable news; she's afraid of things too. But then I began to ask people whenever I would meet them at conferences or when I traveled. If I would find out that they're from the Soviet bloc, they came to the West from the Soviet bloc, I would simply ask them, “Are the things you're seeing happen here in North America consonant with what you left behind?”

Jordan, every single one of them said yes. And if you talked to them long enough, they would be so angry that Americans wouldn't believe them because we just don't think it could happen here. And the more I began to talk to them, the more I began to realize that the cause of this or the basic cause of this is that our idea of totalitarianism depends on the Cold War. It comes from Stalinism, it comes from George Orwell's 1984, in which the all-powerful state forced totalitarian ideology on people by making them afraid and by inflicting pain and terror on them.

But we don’t have that now. We don’t have gulags, we don’t have secret police—yet, anyway. We don’t have breadlines and all the things that we associate with the Soviet Union. So why is this totalitarianism?

Well, I came to understand that this is a softer form and a different form, a form that has more to do with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than with Orwell's 1984. It is a totalitarianism built on comfort and status and well-being, and we can't really see it because we're looking to the past to tell us what totalitarianism is. But these people, these emigrants who lived through it, they sense it. They are our canaries in the coal mine, and we better listen to them.

So I wrote the book to not only talk about what they were seeing happening in our time and place that reminded them of totalitarianism, but also I traveled to Central Europe and to Russia to talk to people who didn't emigrate—people who stayed behind to resist. I wanted to find out from them what should we in the West do to prepare ourselves for what is to come and to live lives of integrity rooted in the truth and rooted in courage.

So I was just in Eastern Europe talking to people in Romania and Hungary and Albania and Estonia—other Eastern European countries—and it's clear that people there who battled the communists for years, and younger people who know of the history of communist totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, look at the West and think the same way that the emigrants that you described are thinking: that the web of ideas that increasingly possesses, let's say the radical left and is spreading into the culture at large, bears an eerie and uncanny resemblance to the system of ideas that swamped the Soviet states and so much of the world during the Cold War. And the Eastern Europeans are very apprehensive about that, and I would say for good reason.

Um, I also—so that's an interesting commentary on the opinions of people who have actually moved to the West. The people who've lived through this see the same thing happening again. And then on your comment about the top-down versus bottom-up model of totalitarianism, it might have been—I wouldn't say exactly a flaw with Orwell's 1984, because you're hard-pressed to describe that book as flawed in any way. But I think also, because we knew of the Stanford prison experiments, and also we're looking for an easy explanation for what happened in Nazi Germany, that it's comforting for people to believe that a totalitarian state is basically made up of people yearning to be free who are oppressed by a small minority of people willing to use coercion and terror.

And there is a small minority of people willing to use coercion and terror. However, in a true totalitarian state—and this is Solzhenitsyn’s genius— the totalitarian element of that is actually the willingness of every single person, virtually without exception, in the entire society to lie about everything all the time, to absolutely everyone, themselves, their wife or husband, their children, their parents, their siblings, the people they work with.

And so it is, and this is something that reading Solzhenitsyn really convinced me of. Of course, part of the reason I was attracted to your book is the idea that the root to totalitarianism at the individual level is the willingness to knowingly falsify your speech and perception and action—to knowingly do it too, not just to do it by accident, but to know it's wrong and still do it. That's the pathway to hell.

Yeah, you know, Jordan, Czeslaw Milosz, who was a former communist who defected from Poland in the 1950s, wrote an excellent book in the early 50s called The Captive Mind. In it, he tried to describe to the West why people fell for communism. And he said that a lot of people in the West have this false idea that people did it solely because they were coerced. He said, in fact, there is among everybody—it’s part of our human nature—this deep internal longing for harmony and happiness. A lot of these people in Eastern Europe, yeah, they were invaded by the Soviets who occupied them after the war, but a lot of them were exhausted by the war and they thought communism would give them a sense of wholeness.

It would give them a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives. And so they submitted to it. Also, Anne Applebaum, who's a historian of the Iron Curtain, said that most people in this part of the world—because I’m coming to you now from Budapest—most people in this part of the world didn't make a conscious deal with the devil to embrace communism. They were just tired and worn down by constant propaganda and just wanted to have a normal life. And if that meant having to submit to the lies, well, they were willing to do so.

Well, so there's another element of that that's interesting as well. So we could go two directions on that. The first is that under many conditions, the human proclivity to go along with the dictates of the group is actually an admirable proclivity. And so, you know, parents of teenagers often say to their teenagers, “Well, if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?” And the answer to that is actually generally yes. And to make it even more complicated, that’s exactly what teenagers should be doing because they should be substituting integration in the peer group for dependence on the parents.

And so whether or not they fit in is of cardinal importance to a teenager who's developing properly. And so people should go along with the crowd in some sense because that's what it means to be civilized into a broad community. The problem with that is that sometimes the crowd is a mob, and sometimes society has gone off the rails. And so then what do you do? And the answer to some degree is, well, you develop past being a teenager into an autonomous individual who's an autonomous contributor to the group. And then hopefully you have enough, what would you say, moral integrity to stand for what you see and think when you're called upon to do that.

But we don't know the preconditions that allow people to do that. And then on the communist front, I would say—so you talked about people being worn out. There is also that—and this is one of the things that distinguished communism from Nazism, let's say, and made it even maybe more pernicious. The Nazis basically said, “Well, the world is for the Aryans, and the rest of you can go to hell.” And we'll be happy to aid in the flames, let's say. And there's not a universalism associated with that. There's a definite exclusion, and it's pretty bloody obvious.

On the communist front, though—and this is maybe what made it such a powerful substitute, in some sense, for Christianity—there was the notion that what we were working for was the universal brotherhood of man and this intense inclusiveness where everyone could live together peacefully. And so people were also led down the garden path by that presumption and found out that lying in the service of future utopia turns out to be a pathway to hell, just like lying in the service of an exclusionary fascist state.

Right. I—you know, I was sitting in a Russian family's apartment in Moscow when I was in Russia reporting the book. And I'd spent the last three days prior visiting the monument for the dead from political violence and hearing just incredible stories of atrocities and suffering. And I was sitting there my last night in Moscow, having dinner with the family, and I said at the beginning, I just don't understand how anybody could have believed what the Bolsheviks were preaching. The father at the head of the table, these were all Orthodox Christians who were anti-communist, but he said, “You don't want to—you don't know how people did this. Let me tell you.”

And then he goes on this long discourse about 300 years of Russian history, about incredible exploitation and cruelty by the czars, by the ruling class, even by the church. And he said, by the time you got to the end of the 19th century, when people began to lose faith in the established order, people were ready to believe anything that gave them a sense of relief.

Then the father ended by saying, “Look, I'm not saying the Bolsheviks were right. They were evil. But you can see where they came from.” And I think putting it going forward to our own time, when you live in a situation as we do today in the West, where people are radically atomized, there's this deep disrespect and casting over of hierarchies and institutions. When you have people who want to transgress for the sake of transgression and so on and so forth, all of these are points that Hannah Arendt said were precursors to totalitarianism.

Well, it's no wonder that otherwise intelligent people are willing to accept insane ideological ideas because they think somehow they're convinced that this is going to bring about a better world.

Well, it's also the case, I think, that we all bear the burden of, in some sense, original sin in relationship to the atrocities of the past, and the left has been very good at weaponizing this. And so when we're accused in our Western privilege of unjustly benefiting from the conditions of our birth, there's some truth in that. And there's some truth in the claim that those unjust conditions were purchased, to some not small degree, at the cost of the blood of others.

And so then that produces a moral conundrum in people, which is, well, I know that I've been thrown into this world with arbitrary benefits. Now, arbitrary burdens as well, and that's important to remember—arbitrary benefits. I'm healthy, I'm reasonably wealthy, I'm of a race that's had some advantages, let's say. I'm born in the United States, etc. And it could have been otherwise. And look at all these poor people who are struggling with nothing. And how much of that was purchased at the price of slavery and atrocity.

And those are all extremely good questions, and I've been trying to think through that more recently to help people defend themselves against accusations put forward about such things by the radical resentful who will manipulate it. The way that you atone for the unequal distribution of talents is to accept that you have some responsibility to make the best possible use of the advantages that have been granted to you.

And so I think the only way that people can defend themselves against the accusations of unfair and atrocious privilege thrown at them by the utopian resentful types is by striving to live a life that's as moral as paying for their privilege demands. And there's an ethical element to that that's deep, right? Deep enough to really be regarded in some sense as religious.

Right. To whom much is given, much is expected. Exactly that, yes.

And, you know, as I was listening to you talk, I was thinking about my late father, who was born in deep rural poverty in South Louisiana in the Great Depression. This was a man who didn't have indoor plumbing in his house until he installed it as a senior in high school in the early 1950s. But he was able to benefit from the GI Bill after the war, and he was the first in his family to go to college, and he built a middle-class existence and sent his kids to college, and so on and so forth.

Well, when I was reading Russian history about the kulaks, the prosperous peasants, and how Stalin and Lenin singled them out for extermination, I think a people like my dad—those who knew what you could do through hard work and self-discipline and using your talents in the right way— that's why Stalin had to get rid of the kulaks because they stood as living disproves of the Bolshevik ideology, which is the only way anybody gets ahead is by cheating.

Yeah, well, the story of the kulak should send a chill down the heart—chill into the heart of anybody who has any dignity, discipline, and sense. As I really threw myself in imagination into the kulak world, thinking about the little town that I grew up in. My parents were very much of the same sort of people that you describe your father as. So imagine that in a little town, there's a smattering of people who are climbing their way towards a reasonably prosperous upper working-class or middle-class existence, right?

And they're doing that because they work bloody hard, they're disciplined and dedicated. And maybe they get enough capital to hire someone to help them house clean and maybe to hire a couple of hired hands. That would have been the farm at that time. And let's say they're the first people in town to do that, and everyone else who's striving away mightily to attain the same end admires their efforts.

But there's a small coterie of Machiavellian psychopaths on the fringe who are jealous as hell of them and who are primed and ready to regard their attainments as theft. And then a swarm of intellectual Bolsheviks ride into town and say, “Hey, you know, anybody who has more than you is an exploiter and a thief. And the moral thing to do is to take what they have. And if not kill them and rape them, then at least ship them somewhere where they can't do any more harm.”

And then you ask, well, to whom does that message appeal? And you might say, well, to egalitarian utopians. But how about no? How about to the Machiavellian fringe psychopaths who've been waiting for an excuse to rob and pillage, and now have been provided with it by the convenient doctrines of idiot intellectuals?

And then imagine yourself in a town like that where those insane, vicious, cruel, resentful bullies now have the weapons, the upper hand and the moral authority of the government. And that was dekulakization.

Yep, yep. That's true. And it's just breathtaking to see something similar happening today again. Thank God we don't have a Siberia. That's why I call this soft totalitarianism as opposed to the hard version of the Soviet Union. But we still have a system now put in place, not only by the government, maybe not even mostly by the government, but by every major institution in Western life: the media, the universities, the military, big business, woke capitalism, and so on and so forth.

Which adopt this same foolish egalitarianism, and they will marginalize those who stand against it. Those who stand against it and can prove that they're good by the quality of their work. You know, I think that there's some—it’s a relevant passage.

Martin Lazis, he was the head of the Cheka—the precursor to the KGB—in Ukraine back in the early years of the revolution. There's a passage from one of his writings that applies to us today. Lazis told the agents to go down into Ukraine and judge people not on the basis of whether or not they had actually spoken out against the Soviet order, but rather look at their class file, look at where they worked, who their people were, and then punish them on that. That, he said, is the basis of the Red Terror.

And this is what you get when you have a system and an ideology that privileges people or judges people on the basis of group identity, not individual quality of individual character or individual work. This is something that is pushed in our own culture today—not from the bottom up, but it's coming from the real revolutionary class, which are the intellectuals who have marched through the institutions.

It is the intellectuals, but you pointed to something too, which is really to me almost staggeringly incomprehensible, and that's the emergence of woke capitalism. And so I look at these CEOs, like the CEO of Disney, and I think, are you actually so daft that you don't notice that you're empowering a fifth column within your own organization? Do you actually not understand that equity means, in the final analysis, that you get to get shot first?

Do you not see that the unequal distribution that characterizes the capitalist enterprise—and at least in principle—based on more going to those who work harder, although it's an imperfect system, is exactly the opposite of what the equity agitators are striving for?

And why is it that you're enabling that within your HR departments within your own corporation? And so I mean we can point our fingers at the idiot professors, and we should. But then what the hell's up with the evil capitalist overlords? Are they so clueless that they can't even—what do they want? They want to not take responsibility for the fruits of their own success? Do they want to play both ends against the middle? Or is it just blindness? Like, I don't understand this.

No, it's guilt. I remember when I worked in newsrooms, yeah, most of my career, we—the people who are pushing equity, so-called equity and diversity and hiring, which often meant hiring people who weren't good enough to do the jobs that they were being given, this was all being pushed by white upper management who were trying, in my view, to atone for their own anxiety or to get ready to discharge their own anxiety about their privilege.

And the people who are paying the price for it were those people who were truly capable farther down the chain there because you would never see these white upper managers resign to make plays for a person of color or a gay person or a minority person. No, they were making other people deal with their own—the upper management’s anxieties and sense that they were frauds.

And I think it was also a form of indulgences in the medieval Catholic sense of indulgences. If they would use their power to put, you know, the oppressed in places—in positions within the company, then they felt that they had somehow gained holiness or gained...

Yeah. Well, do you think we should be cynical or sympathetic about that? Or both?

So imagine working on the argument that we were developing earlier is that, as you pointed out, if you've been given much, much will be asked from you. And let's say that if you're a middle-class, upper-middle-class manager of a decent corporation in the United States, a lot has been given to you.

And so what that means, actually, is a lot is being demanded of you, even by your own conscience, right? Because you look around and you see your wealth, and you see your opportunity, and you contrast that, say when you walk down the street and see a homeless person. You contrast that with the privation that still exists around you.

And if you're a vaguely decent person, that sets up an unease and a disquiet in your conscience. And then you might say, well, in order to expiate that unease, you have to live as morally as your wealth demands. And failing that, then you're going to take maybe the René Girard route and look for scapegoats. You're going to look for someone else to sacrifice so that you act morally instead of bearing that burden on yourself. So, but you know, it's a tricky thing, right?

Because on the one hand, you can admire the fact that the pangs of conscience are requiring action on the ethical front. But then you have to be cynical about the fact that while you're trying to take an easy route out by making someone else pay instead of actually doing the work that would free you from the pangs of your own conscience in the face of your privilege.

Yeah, and I think I'm glad you brought up René Girard because I quote him in the book as saying that the proper and morally justifiable concern for victims was turning rather into a permanent inquisition and a system of totalitarian command. Girard saw this 20 years ago, and now we're living with it.

So this was, as you were saying earlier, why communism was more, uh, easier to accept than Nazism, because communism really did take the proper concern for victims. But they created hell on earth by taking it too far. And I think, Jordan, that one of the key missing points here is Christianity. Christianity is a religion that concerns—it stands up for the poor and the victimized. It takes a side of the victimized.

But Christianity also has buried deep within it the point that Solzhenitsyn made, like this: that the line between good and evil does not pass between social classes or identity groups; it passes right down the middle of every human heart. Any oppressed person can easily become the oppressor tomorrow because human failure, human frailty, original sin, is common to human nature. And we saw this in the communist world where those who really did suffer a lot under the regimes they overthrew became even worse oppressors themselves.

Well, so here's the moral hazard that goes along with that guilt that you described. So imagine that you're now, because you have privilege, you're concerned about those who have been victimized and who have less. And then you could take the steps necessary to be properly philanthropic, productive, and generous with your time and your resources, or you could take an easy route.

And this is the scapegoat route. You could identify the oppressors who have oppressed the victims and who are actually responsible for their existence. And those oppressors are not you; they're someone else. And then your morality consists in ferreting out the oppressors and damning them and mobbing them and chasing them away, which is essentially what happened, let's say, with the kulaks in the Soviet Union.

And so the cost of not—it’s the problem of placing Satan, as far as I'm concerned, is that you have to have a place where you localize evil, and it's convenient to localize it in others. And it's ethically justifiable to identify oppressors who produce victims, and convenient if they're not you.

But the proper locale for Satan—and I think this is part of the whole Judeo-Christian enterprise, to specify this properly—is that that is in fact inside your own heart. And that what you should do to constrain evil—and that's really what we're talking about in this podcast, period—is to take on the moral burden that produces atrocity in the world onto yourself.

And Solzhenitsyn’s advice was to start by not lying. That's the first thing you do. Let me read out some of his rules for responsible conduct. It's like a bill of responsibilities; we can think of it that way instead of a bill of rights:

I will not say, write, affirm, or distribute anything that distorts the truth.
I will not go to a demonstration or participate in a collective action unless I truly believe in the cause.
I will not take part in a meeting in which the discussion is forced and no one can speak the truth.
I will not vote for a candidate or proposal I consider to be dubious or unworthy.
I will walk out of an event as soon as I hear the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda.

Well, that would produce a lot of abandonment to a lot of meetings right now.

It would, and it will not support just journalism that distorts or hides the underlying facts. And so Solzhenitsyn—this is one of the things I so greatly admired about his work and also about your book—his diagnosis was that it was the willingness to knowingly deceive yourself and other people that generated and supported the totalitarian catastrophe, and that your primarily—all primary obligation was to cease participating in that.

And so that does place the tempter, the deceiver, and so the prince of all lies, let’s say, Lucifer himself, in your own heart, and puts on you the moral weight of engaging in that battle in the psychological or spiritual space. And that also—see, this is one of the reasons I dislike modern universities so much is because what they do instead of helping students develop their moral character or even talking about such a thing as a moral character is that they teach the students to identify the perpetrators and then to protest against them.

And then that can easily transform itself into this scapegoating and mob culture that we have now, all operating under the flag of a moral banner. Right, because they don't see the capacity for evil within their own hearts. Right, and reason, sadly, seems to be impotent against this sort of thing.

I think, Jordan, that one of the most important cultural events of our time happened on Yale University’s campus in October 2015. You'll remember this when the students got so angry—undergraduates at Nicholas Christakis and his wife Erica—simply for saying they thought that the students should be able to make up their own minds about the kind of Halloween costumes to wear.

You'll remember this became a huge blow-up on campus, and on YouTube people filmed this confrontation on the quad there at Princeton between Nicholas Christakis—a liberal distinguished professor with white hair, baby boomer—and these kids. There was Nicholas Christakis trying to use reason to engage these young people in dialogue. They didn't want anything to do with it. They were screaming and crying and cursing and demanding that he apologize for his lack of care. And it went nowhere.

And as you recall, Yale University the administration sided with the students. That was a collapse of authority right there. But it also signaled the collapse of rationality. And this was repeated many more times in other universities over the subsequent years. But when it happens to the elites like that, in the universities where the elites are formed and elite networks are formed, that is when the revolution really takes off.

Yeah, well, it was appalling on the part of Yale to side with the students and not with the professor. And that was a sign of a catastrophic collapse and also of the inability of those who hold the reins of tradition, let's say, to defend themselves against even the most unsophisticated accusations of group guilt. Because people are guilty, especially if they're conscientious.

You know what the other thing that bothers me about the universities a lot? There's many things, but one of the things that Jean Piaget noted, the developmental psychologist—you know, he was interested in bridging the gap between religion and science, say that that was the fundamental motivation for his entire life’s work, by the way. Very few people know that.

Because that's one of the odd things about geniuses, you know, is that we tend not to take their true motivations that seriously because it's too disturbing. But Piaget pointed out that the last stage of cognitive moral development in adolescence—in late adolescence—was something that he described as the emergence of the messianic impulse.

And so imagine that when you’re a mid-age teenager, 15, 16, something like that, your primary concern is to get away from your family of origin, start to establish independence, but do that by becoming a stalwart member of your in-group. Right?

So you move your allegiance from the family to the broader community, and you do that with your friends. But then there's a step past that where you're trying to sort out what your ethical obligation is to the—to yourself and the broader community at large, which is something like specifying the grand purpose of your life.

And that produces, especially among ambitious and perhaps better young people, is the desire to do something important with their lives. And then they go to university, and instead of being chastised, I would say in some real sense—which is to be taught, “Look, you've got lots of potential, but you don't really know anything. You've got 15 years of apprenticeship in front of you before you're the kind of tool that won't cause trouble when it's applied.”

And so just sit back and subject yourself to the long apprenticeship that's going to discipline you, get your life together, mature, learn how to work, learn how to be productive, and then go out and do what you can to improve the world for the better. They're taught instead that the mere existence of their youthful outrage—which is compromised in its integrity by their resentful sense that they're at the bottom of the hierarchy, which in some sense is true—that's all harnessed to the ideological demands of the resentful faculty who I think are mostly irritated because they're not making as much money as bankers.

You know, it's a really pathological system of interplay. And so the faculty members can absolve themselves of moral blame by pointing at the evil of capitalists who are despoiling the world— that's convenient for them, because of course those evil capitalists have more money than they do, and they should be more rewarded given their genius.

And they can stick the students on them. That's the scapegoating that Girard described. And then it wraps up the whole problem in a neat little bow. Except that it's the students who—like, it's a catastrophe for those students at Yale to have got away with being a demented, neurotic mob and undermining the authority of a distinguished professor. It's like, what the hell were they paying for at Yale if it wasn't the opportunity to subjugate themselves in an apprenticeship sense to distinguish professors? Is that all just a lie?

Well, that's what Yale said its status... You know, Jordan, a few years ago a friend of mine from Europe, a journalist, was at Harvard on a Neiman Fellowship, you know, a very prestigious journalism fellowship where they bring about 25 journalists from around the world and 25 from the United States to Harvard to spend a year taking graduate classes.

Well, I happened to be in Boston when this guy's fellowship was ending, and I took him out to lunch to ask him what have you learned, the biggest lessons you've learned at the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the United States. He thought about it for a second and said, “How fragile the American elites are.”

I said, “That's interesting. Can you help me understand that?” He said that when they started classes in the fall semester, professors would say things to the students, like these are graduate students, right? Like, “Uh, class, we're not going to talk about this issue or that issue today because a couple of you came to me ahead of class and said it would be too triggering. So we’re just not going to talk about it.”

My friend said all of us Europeans looked at each other like, “Wait, is this guy serious?” But he was serious. And this happened in class after class after class. The Europeans said by the end of the semester he realized how fragile the next generation of leaders of America would be because they are so weak that they can't deal with the anxiety caused by issues and questions and ideas raised that they would be required to grapple with.

On the other hand, he said every single one of them believed that they had a natural right to move into positions of leadership. The guy ended by telling me, “Look, I get to go back to Europe. I don't have to live with this. But the safety and security of my country depends on a strong America. We're not going to have a strong America because your ruling class is so corrupt and so weak, and they will use whatever power they are given to suppress anything that causes them anxiety.”

Yeah, well, and they're also possessed of the idiot progressive postmodern notion that all reality is just ideas anyways. And so you can avoid difficult discussions, and then you avoid the difficulty, because after all, the real world, where the actual difficulties are, doesn't even exist.

And when you're in a university bubble and you're a protected faculty member, you can actually get away with that idea for quite a long time, because in some sense there are so many walls surrounding you from the real world that you can dance blindly, you know, on the way to your own grave without even noticing that you're doing something pathological.

Yeah, but look, Jordan, it's happened—it’s gone beyond the universities now, as we know. Just before we came on to record this, I sent you a tweet from the Toronto Police Department saying, this woman has gone missing, and it's a 27-year-old man with a beard. And I mean, he's clearly a man; he calls himself Isabelle.

And now you're in trouble. Now, how are you in trouble? Well, you know, it's—what is a woman? As I've heard asked by the Daily Wire folks. But you know what's crazy about this is it made me think of Orwell’s line in 1984. He said the party’s final and most essential command was that you deny the evidence of your eyes and your ears. This is happening on a widespread basis.

That's the true test of loyalty. Yep, yep. Loyalty to the system, yeah. And then reliability and hypothetically moral integrity, all of that. If you'll sacrifice your own eyes to the cause, then how could there be any evidence that you're anything but morally superior?

Right. Well, a man named Patrick Benda in the Czech Republic—his father and mother were legendary dissidents. Dad went to prison under communism for his dissident activities. He told me that you have to remember that even before communism came into power, 20 years at least before, all the intelligentsia had gone over to socialism or communism.

And if you wanted to have any part in the intelligentsia, you had to make that conversion too. Well clearly the same thing has been happening in our societies with regard to gender ideology, to critical race theory and all these other elements of woke ideology. If you want to get into the intelligentsia, you have to believe that.

But not only the intelligentsia. If you want to get into law school, into medicine, into the U.S. military, for God’s sake, and into big business, you have to affirm these lies. So one of the things—one of the big lessons of Live Not by Lies came from Václav Havel, the first president of free Czechoslovakia and a playwright who led the opposition in communist Czechoslovakia.

He wrote this famous parable called The Myth of the Green Grocer. He said, imagine there's a little green grocer in your communist country, and like every other business owner in town, he puts up the sign in his window that says, “Workers of the world unite!” Nobody believes it, but they put that communist slogan there because they don't want trouble.

But what happens one day when the green grocer decides to take that sign down from his window? Well, the secret police come; they arrest him. He loses his business. When he gets out of jail, he's got to work as a street sweeper. He's humiliated—his family loses privileges, and on and on. He really pays a price for his dissent.

But what has he gained by that? Havel says he has shown the world that it is possible to live in truth, to live in integrity if you are willing to suffer for it. And if enough people do that, said Havel, then everyone will start to question all the lies the system is built on.

That it has to start with people who are willing to suffer for their kids. Okay, so let's interject or just for a second. One of the things I used to tell my clients when they were facing a conundrum was, “You're trapped in an illusion because you want to keep your job, although you hate it, because you're afraid of the alternative. But you're discounting the risk of maintaining your current course. You're used to that, and the risk has been discounted. And you're suffering under the delusion that there's a pathway forward that does not involve suffering. And that's simply not true. What you have is the option of picking your suffering.”

And so the problem with the green grocer who puts the slogan up in his window is he thinks that he's avoiding suffering. But he's not; he's delaying it and amplifying it for his future self. Once you understand that—because people have commented, they tell me, “Well, you're so correct, courageous.” And I think, well, no, you don't understand. I'm just afraid of the right thing. I know that there's catastrophe to the right and catastrophe to the left and catastrophe straight ahead, let's say. But I also know that conflict delayed is conflict multiplied.

And if I have to pick suffering right now because I'm going to say what I bloody well think and suffering later, way more intensely, with way more other people, because I refuse to say what I think, I'm going to pick the former. And I'm not going to delude myself that there's some safe path that involves lying, because there isn't.

That's another thing—well, another reason I liked your book is—and this is Solzhenitsyn’s, um, what would you call it? His key insight, in some sense, is that you think that lying protects you. That's wrong. And you think, well, how could it possibly protect you? What you're trying to do is adapt to the world. And if you lie so that you're no longer adapted to the world, then you're going to run into sharp objects and fall into holes non-stop.

And the blinder you are, the sharper the objects and the deeper the holes. And when you really understand that—like once I understood Solzhenitsyn's connection between lying and the totalitarian state—I mean, I had come at that for other reasons as well, but he was a big contributor to that realization. I thought, well, there’s no way I’m going to say things that are false, because that’s clearly—that's the road to hell, not metaphysically, not philosophically, actually really, for sure this will happen.

And as a clinician, this is one of the things that also terrified me; I never saw anyone ever get away with anything. The chickens always came home to roost. People paid for every sin. Sometimes it took them years to draw the causal connections, but a lot of what therapy was was, “Well, let's see if we can figure out something went wrong. Let's see if we can figure out when. Let's see if we can figure out why. Let's see if we can figure out how to undo it.”

You remember in Solzhenitsyn, in the second part of The Gulag Archipelago, I think he said that when he was in prison and decided that part of the reason he was there was because he was a sinner because he made mistakes, he decided because he had so much time on his hands that he would go through his entire life with a fine-tooth comb, try to recollect every single time he violated his conscience, and then see if he could figure out how to atone for that in the present.

And that's basically the psychotherapeutic process. It's like, where did you go wrong? How did you lie? How can you set yourself back on the appropriate path? And I think that's the fear of God; that's the beginning of wisdom in some sense. It's like what's the old idea? There's a book where everything you've ever done is written down.

Yeah, that book—that's reality itself. And you do not have the power to twist or distort reality without it snapping back at you in ways that you can hardly possibly imagine. And remember what um Solzhenitsyn said? “Bless you, prison!” I mean, great, imagine he was, he suffered horribly in prison, but he said, “Bless you, prison,” because it brought him to that salvation.

It brought him out of himself. Yeah, well then he was also honest enough, by the way, when he did say that, to say, “I do say that knowing that so many innocent and good people died in those prisons and were tortured beyond recovery and did not have the benefit of that eventual redemption.”

Right, because that's suffering—that's real trouble. And there's no necessary proof that if you undertake to suffer for the truth that you won't pay the final price. The problem is you're going to pay a price for the alternative too, and so will everybody else. And you know, that's another metaphysical issue in some sense: you know, what's worse, death or hell? And I would say, if you think it's death, all that means is you haven't been to hell yet.

Hmm, that's powerful. You know, and I think that one aspect of this new totalitarianism we're dealing with is the fear—not only no fear of hell, but fear of being inconvenienced, fear of anxiety.

Here in Budapest, when I was in this city researching the book, my translator was with me on the tram, and she was a young woman, a young Catholic woman, married with one little boy at home and another on the way. And as we rode through the city on the tram to do an interview, she said, “You know, Rod, I really struggle with my Catholic friends here.”

She herself is Catholic. “When I try to tell them that my husband and I have been fighting lately, or my little boy is really causing me a lot of sleepless nights because he's not sleeping well, they say, ‘Oh, you've got to get a divorce. You've got to put your child in daycare, go back to work, you’ve got to be happy.’” She said, “I tell them, ‘Wait a minute, you don't understand, I am happy!’ But you know, a happy life also entails some struggle.”

She said, “They don't understand it at all.” I looked at her and said, “Anna, it sounds like you're fighting for your right to be unhappy.” She said, “That's exactly it! Where did you get that?” And I brought my phone out and went to chapter 17 of Huxley’s Brave New World, where John the Savage confronts Mustafa Man, the world controller of this perfect state where everybody—all their needs are taken care of, they’re entertained at all times, they get lots of drugs, lots of feel-good drugs, lots of porn, etc., etc.

He brings in the dissident, John the Savage, to say, “Why wouldn't you join this? We give you Christianity without tears.” And in the end, John doesn't want this; he wants real life. He wants reality, even with its—so let's think that through for a minute. That’s actually pretty straightforward in some sense.

So one of the things Solzhenitsyn said about hedonism—he said the doctrine that life is for happiness is invalidated by this: the first sound of the jackboots kicking into your door. And so then the question is, well, what do you do in the face of suffering when your philosophy is hedonistic?

And the answer is collapse. And that means that happiness, as an aim, is shallow and weak; it cannot withstand suffering. Obviously, because when you're suffering, you're not happy. And if the purpose of life is to be happy, then suffering—when you're suffering, your life has no meaning.

And then if you're suffering and there's no meaning in the suffering, then you're really suffering. That’s really hell. But then you think—and this is something that's really heartened me. I talk to my audiences, especially to the young men, and say, “Look, first of all, don't aim at being happy, because that's just not gonna work, especially when the storms come and barbarians are beating at the gate. You can just forget about that.”

And there's going to be times in your life where you're suffering so much you can't believe it; and so you're going to need something a hell of a lot more robust than happiness to get you through that. And then you might say, well, what's more robust than happiness? Or maybe even what's more robust than pain?

And then you could say, well, how about adventure? How about adventure? How about we go out and sail the uncharted seas? You know, how about we go—and, Jesus, I talked to a guy the other day. He's a driver for me down in Nashville where I am—ex-military guy, special forces guy, tough as a bloody boot. Now he works as a cowboy out in Montana, you know, a real character—perfect bloody American archetype.

He knew he wanted to be in the special forces when he was five. So I talked to him for like half an hour, trying to figure out what motivated him, you know? And he told me probably ten stories about his life—all very colorful and deep anecdotes about battle and rescue and physical privation and discipline.

And every ten minutes he said, “I was looking for a new challenge. And then I was looking for a new challenge. And then I’d already done that, so I was looking for a new challenge.” And for him, life was nothing but a sequence of impossible mountains to climb. And that's exactly what he wanted.

And that's what I think we all want, you know? In the story of Abraham, when Abraham is perfectly happy in his father’s tent, eating peeled grapes and, you know, having his diapers changed—even though he's 80 years old—and God calls him out to adventure.

And it’s very catastrophic, right? Because Abraham encounters tyranny and starvation and war and conspiracy to steal his wife and his own proclivity to lie cowardly, and this is all like in the—that's his first sequence of adventures. And you think, well, what the hell’s going on here? It’s certainly not the case that God called him out to be happy.

And I think the right moral to draw from that story is that God, so to speak, has called us out for something far greater than mere happiness—far, so much greater than happiness that happiness pales in comparison. He’s called us out for the adventure of our life, that's of sufficient moral integrity to justify the suffering.

And that's something—and if you tell people that, if you let them know that, you know, well, that makes them stand up and cheer, right? Because deep in their heart, they know that's true; especially demoralized young men—they're not from churches today, from church leaders, God quite the contrary, they're hearing that spirit of adventure calls you to be a patriarchal despoiler of the planet.

And that demoralizes young men; and that’s of course exactly the point, because demoralized young men aren't oppressors. Although yes, they are, and they're not the spoilers of the planet, although yes, they are. And so happiness—it's like, you know, that’s just—happiness is a side effect of moral adventure, you know?

And if it comes along, you should be bloody thrilled. But as a name, it's for narcissistic three-year-olds, as a name. You know, the last chapter of the book is a pretty hopeful chapter, interesting about the point you just made.

I met, when I was in Bratislava in Slovakia, a young photographer named Timo Krishan. And Timo was a toddler when communism ended, so he was brought up with much more freedom and many more material benefits than his parents and his grandparents.

But he said that the higher he rose in his profession and the more money he made, the more anxious he was and the less happy he was. Well, he set out at one point to go do a photography project by interviewing the elderly people in his country—Christians who had been sent to the gulag in Slovakia for their faith.

And a lot of them still lived in real poverty today, and they had suffered terribly for their faith. But he said as he went to take their picture and hear their stories, he saw people who were deeply at peace and deeply happy.

One man even told him that solitary confinement was one of the happiest times of his life in retrospect because there he communed with God, and he knew he had union with God. Timo told me, in the end, this really changed him because he realized that he himself was the tyrant in his life because he had been seeking happiness and riches and all that, whereas he should have been seeking God, like these old people who had suffered had.

I think this is the kind of Christianity that young people can respect, but nobody respects this moralistic therapeutic deism or the social gospel kind of woke Christianity. It's going into the dustbin.

No, it’s just another form of woke idiot utopianism—the kind that finds devils everywhere except in the soul and that's concerned with group redemption and not with the travails of individual progress toward the divine, let’s say. And that is what the churches can offer.

Let's talk about that a minute. So you talk in the book too about ideology as a substitute for religion. And I had smart students at Harvard in particular, but also at the University of Toronto when I was lecturing on my book Maps of Meaning. I was trying to put forward an antidote to ideology, and the students would say, “Well, why is your conceptual system not just another ideology?”

And that's a very—that's a very complicated question, and it's a postmodern question in some sense, right? Because all systems of knowledge are nothing but structures for the imposition of power, and there's no way out of that. And so there's no such thing as an anti-ideology wisdom; there's just another ideology.

Now, I don't believe that's true, but you've talked about ideology as a substitute for religion. And so why are you convinced that the religious claims that you abide by and put forth are not merely another form of ideology and another, what would you say, mask for the manifestation of power?

Right, because I believe that they are rooted in transcendent truth and truths that have withstood the test of time. I'm an Orthodox Christian, Eastern Orthodox Christian. The roots of my confession go back to the very beginnings of Christianity, and it is a form of the faith that I believe is true to human nature and true to the way the world is constructed.

You know, I was recently interviewing Iain McGilchrist. I know you've interviewed him or he's interviewed you in England. He's a psychiatrist who is not a religious believer, as far as I know, but he talks about the mind and the brain hemispheres and the making of the Western world.

And he has talked about—he told me that if he were to convert to Christianity, he would become Orthodox because he believes that Orthodox Christianity gives the best account for reality, for the way humans move in the world and take in the world.

I think also that—and why did he say that specifically of Orthodoxy? Was it its emphasis on ritual? It was the emphasis on the idea that you have to have a balance between the left and the right. The right hemisphere is the noetic, where noetic information comes in.

And in Iain's construct, Western religion has become too left-brained; it's become too logical, too caught up in creating a—the—yeah, that's the idea.

Well, Sam Harris has come to the same conclusion in some sense, despite himself, because Harris is the ultimate rationalist. And I would say for very positive reasons in some regard, because Harris is deeply concerned with atrocity. But that was so unbalanced that he turned to a meditative Buddhism that has a completely amorphous deity in some sense at its base—amorphous enough so that Sam's corrosive rationality cannot take issue with it.

And he finds solace and respite in the meditative practice. And now he spends most of his time developing his meditation app and teaching meditation courses. That's a good example of the sort of thing that Iain is pointing to.

Yeah, I think too that ideology tends to be very, very brittle and tends to be a left-brained construct that tries to impose a purely human rationalistic framework onto messy reality. And, you know, that's the Tower of Babel, eh? Right?

That's the warning of the Tower of Babel. Ideology can't deal with contradiction, with the ultimate mystery and paradox of human life. And I think Stephen Pinker had a quote that was in The New York Times today, as we're talking, where he was talking about wokeness and why wokeness is ultimately going to fail.

He said, “It is an algorithm for constant, for permanent inquisition,” because none of these artificial constructs can deal with messy humanity and with human freedom. I think that Christianity can deal with human freedom; it has ultimate right and ultimate wrong.

But it also recognizes that humans are frail and it calls for mercy. It calls for us to be humble and to recognize that every one of us is a sinner. Every one of us is capable of being the grand inquisitor if given the right opportunities.

So one of the things that struck me mostly from reading Jung and his school in their inquiry into the archetype of the hero was that there was something in the hero narratives that was counter-ideological in the deepest sense. And so an ideology is a Luciferian enterprise, and it attempts to bring the entire purview of reality under an axiomatic system—under the dogmatic dictates of an axiomatic system.

And woe to you if you challenge the axioms, let's say. That makes you a heretic and worthy of being mobbed, um, and so you might ask, well, what truth might we find that can be regarded as transcendentally axiomatic that's also not Luciferian?

And I think that Christianity—you see this in the prophetic tradition in Judaism as well, but Christianity insists that there are at least two elements that have that nature. And one is that the highest should most properly serve the lowest, and so that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the willingness of the elite—let's say the talented, the productive, the blessed, the gifted—to justify the unequal division of talent by serving to ameliorate the catastrophic suffering of the dispossessed.

Now, Nietzsche warned about that, right? He thought that Christianity would devolve, in some sense, into the woke nightmare that it has devolved into. But I think he failed to give the devil his entire due. The notion that the highest is the highest because it voluntarily serves the lowest—that's a deadly idea, and I don't think it's an ideological idea at all.

I think it's an idea that removes the paradox of human existence. And so—and that—so there’s that. But then there's another insistence in both Judaism and Christianity, and I'm not saying it's limited to those doctrines, by the way, that the way to deal with suffering is not to avoid it or to circumvent it with a shallow hedonism, but to face it intensely, head-on, and voluntarily in its full manifestation.

And so one of the things I've realized about the passion story—which we—which Jung regarded as an archetypal tragedy—and in some sense a limit case, right? A story so tragic that you cannot write a more tragic story—is that it drags the observer, and so that's all of us in the—in Christendom—through the entire catastrophe of human existence.

Right? So it confronts you with the mob, the mob that's after you, that you are also part of. It confronts you with moral relativism in the face—in the shape of Pontius Pilate. It confronts you with the oppression of the totalitarian state of foreigners, let's say, in the case—in the guise of Rome.

It confronts you with the betrayal of your best friend. It confronts you with the willingness of the crowd to punish the virtuous and free the criminal. And that's the story of Barabbas and Christ.

And Piaget told me the other day, Jonathan Pajo—that an alternative name for Barabbas was Jesus. And that what the crowd did was pick the political revolutionary over the spiritual leader. And that's perfect.

And then it confronts you with the reality that we all face our own mortality and too early, and the fact that sometimes the innocent and virtuous are punished. And so it—and then, of course, there's the horrible, tragic, torturous death.

All of that—and that's all signified by the image of the crucifix. And what we're doing to ourselves—even though we don't know it, and I'm speaking mostly psychologically, although somewhat theologically—is that we're exposing ourselves to the ultimate catastrophe of human existence while simultaneously manifesting the faith.

The faith that if we face that unflinchingly, that will resurrect us instead of killing us. That's quite powerful. It’s something, man. It's something.

It's something I've been puzzling out for, well, a long time, but particularly for the last six months. I'm going to write about that in my new book. But when I talk to my audiences about that, you know, and I would especially say this has an impact again on demoralized young men and say, “Look, we don't know the limits to the expansion of your personality if you're willing to face things without deception.”

That's a variant of that radical honesty we were already talking about: “Don't live by lies.” Well, life is rife with injustice, atrocity, and suffering.

And so what do you do with that? Do you avoid it? There’s good physiological evidence, by the way, that if you take two groups of people and you subject one group to a stressor involuntarily, and you get the other group to take on the stressor voluntarily, that the pattern of psychophysiological response is entirely different.

It's entirely different emotionally, motivationally, and in terms of the damage it does. And so the involuntary imposition of a threat is stressful and damaging. But the voluntary acceptance of a threat is invigorating and revivifying. Two different spirits.

That's a good way of thinking about it, you know. And I, this might be a little bit off topic, but you're talking about young men and suffering. We have seen in the Orthodox Church and are seeing an increasing influx of young men into Orthodoxy.

And what we find that they say is that this is a form of Christianity that challenges them as men because it gives them a fight, that Orthodoxy is about asceticism, it's about fasting in season, it's about overcoming the self. The great saints are those who have overcome themselves and maybe even given their lives for the truth.

But I find that to be so much more exciting and challenging for me rather than the insipid social justice warrior forms of Christianity.

Yeah, well, it's clearly the case that the church is—the modern churches—and this is probably most true of Protestantism, but perhaps least true of the Orthodox at the present time—is that churches are asking far too little, not far too much. The church should ask of you everything.

And to make it easy to be a believer is completely counterproductive. It’s the most difficult thing to manifest and to be a believer. I mean, to manifest the faith necessary to confront the iniquities of existence, because faith doesn't mean the willingness to abide by doctrines that you regard as untrue, as we've described today.

It means instead to risk yourself on the off chance that if you confronted life honestly, you could thereby transcend the suffering that's intrinsic in life. And that's faith, right? Because you can't do this—Kierkegaard pointed this out quite clearly—which is why he believed redemption was an individual enterprise, is that you cannot be supplied with enough evidence to convince you that forthright contact with reality is the best path.

You have to stake your life on finding out whether or not that's true. There's no way out of that. Now, people can be guided by imitation, right? And by example—that's what the saints do, let's say. Well, that's what Christ did, let's say; that's what the martyrs and the confessors of the communist bloc did. And some of these people are still alive.

And it’s just such a scandal to me that in the West, we've completely swept it under the rug. I was telling some of the crew here before we started tonight that when I was in Hungary, I interviewed a woman named Maria Wittner. Maria Wittner was—she's very old now— but she was a hero of the 1956 resistance to the Soviet solid invasion.

This young woman took a gun and went into the street to fight the Soviets, and she suffered for it in prison, horribly. But she’s tough as nails and would do it again. These people are still among us today, Jordan.

I met a bunch of people in Eastern Europe—people in Estonia, for example, who were heroes of the anti-Soviet movement. Some of them from the time they were very little kids, as you pointed out—people who are both unbelievably tough in ways that people in the West can hardly imagine and also characterized by that peace that you described earlier.

You know, this sort of pro—because they've been through things so bad that the normal vicissitudes of life seem like outright pleasures by comparison. You know, I dedicated my book to the memory of a Catholic priest named Father Thomas Love Kolakovic. And he's an important figure, not only of his own time, but an important prophet for our time.

And I'll tell you why. In 1943, Father Kolakovic was living in Zagreb in Croatia, his home country, doing work against the Nazis in the underground. He got a tip that the Gestapo was coming for him, so he escaped the country, went to his mother's home country, Slovakia, and began teaching at the Catholic University in Bratislava.

He told his students, “I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is the Germans are going to lose this war. The bad news is the Soviets are going to be ruling this country when it's over, and the first thing they're going to do is come after the church. We have to be ready.”

So what he did was put together these small groups of Catholic students to pray. But not just to pray; but to talk about very seriously what was happening in the world around them and to make concrete plans for how to act to get ready for what was coming.

Within two years of that man coming to that country, these small groups existed all over the country in a network to prepare for living in the underground, to prepare for persecution. Now, here's an interesting thing. So he confronted that straight on.

Yeah, he did, and he knew what was coming because he had studied in seminary the Soviet mindset, because he wanted to be a missionary to the Soviet Union. Here's the interesting thing: the Catholic bishops of Slovakia hated him doing this. He was scaring people, they said.

Yeah, yeah, it’s never gonna happen here! You know, calm down, Father. But he didn't calm down. He kept working. Sure enough, everything happened just like he said. When the Iron Curtain fell over that country, they came after the church.

The reason that the underground church was so strong in Slovakia is because this visionary priest, Father Kolakovic, saw what was coming, and he gathered people around him to form groups to prepare. I believe, Jordan, very firmly that we are living in a Kolakovic moment in the West today, and the visionary Christians—and not even Christians, people who can understand, who can read the signs of the times and who have courage, whether they're Jewish, Muslim, or of no faith at all—need to understand what's happening and start coming together now to prepare.

This is part of the message that these people...

Yeah, well, Rod, one of the things that I'm planning to do is to make a video sometime in the near future. It's preposterous and presumptuous of me to do it, but I'll probably do it anyways. And that's a message to the Christian church.

And that is, and it's very much in keeping with what you just described: the church should be reaching out to young men. It should be saying very straightforwardly—and I mean in the most straightforward sense—“Your noble ambitions are welcome and necessary here. You can come in and help us clean up our mess. We can help you clean up your mess. And we can move forward stalwartly and confidently into the future.”

And I think the time for that is right because there is no institution. There is no institution at the moment that overtly welcomes young men. It's quite the contrary. It says, “Well, you're part of the patriarchal oppression. You’re a despoiler of the planet. Your ambition should be squelched. Maybe your sexuality itself is counterproductive.”

And so the churches have this great opportunity to say, “Hey, they don't want you. We'll take you, and maybe we can muddle through this together, or you can help revivify the institution, moribund as it always has been and always will be. And we can give your youthful vision and enthusiasm some traditional guidance.”

There's a moment here that could be gripped by—well, I hope the Orthodox manage it. I'd like to see the Catholics and the Protestants do it too.

I would too, because we're all in this. Again, this is one interesting thing I learned from this research is that the people who went to prison, the Christians who went to prison, realized when they were there that they weren’t there because they were Catholics; they weren’t there because they were Orthodox or Protestant; they were there because they were Christians.

And they formed bonds of fellowship that reached across lines of confessional lines. In a similar way, I learned in Prague from Kamila Bendeva, who is the wife of Václav Havel, one of the inner circle around Václav Havel. She told me that even though she and her husband were very conservative Catholics, they had no trouble at all working with the hippies—Havel and the other hippies who had no religious faith and led really complicated sex lives.

They had no trouble working with them because these people had courage, and that was the rarest quality you ever found under totalitarianism—courage. And the most Christians, she said to me, kept their heads down and conformed because they didn't want trouble.

But she knew that she and her husband were better off allying with those who did not share their politics necessarily and did not share their religion but who did have courage. I feel the same way about what's happening in our country. This is why I would rather stand in the foxhole with Barry Weiss, a secular liberal, Jewish lesbian, or Brett and Heather—Brett Weinstein, Heather Heying, who are atheists and on the left, and others who don't share my religious or political convictions but who have shown courage.

I feel the same way about Dawkins.

Yeah, and Harris for that matter.

Yeah, because the thing that we all face now is greater than what divides us. We have got to stop this before it triumphs, and I think...

Yeah, two things on that front. I think that the same might be said on the Abrahamic front, is that the traditionalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims should recognize very rapidly that they have a lot more in common than they have at the moment dividing them.

And that the system of ideas that we're talking about—and not necessarily those who carry the ideas, but the system of ideas that we're talking about—is an enemy that's of such greater magnitude than these internecine conflicts that they're not even in the same conceptual camp.

And so there’s an opportunity on that front as well. So, well, we can get our act together, notice that we worship the same God and are all flawed enough not to be able to interpret that with a hundred percent accuracy.

Yeah. And you know who some of them—the bravest people in the UK standing up to wokeness are Muslim parents who don't want this in their kids' schools.

I'll tell you another story. A few years ago in California, after Obergefell legalized gay marriage, there was a bill filed in the California legislature by the head of the LGBT caucus that would take away Cal Grants from so-called bigot schools. These are direct grants to underprivileged, impoverished students who could use them at any school in California, public or private, that was accredited.

Well, this bill would have taken away the possibility of using them at religious schools. It would have affected disproportionately poor Black and Hispanic kids. Well, a friend of mine, who's part of the Christian university system there, tried to get a group of administrators to go around to the big churches in Orange County, the white evangelical mega churches, to say this is going to destroy a lot of Christian colleges in this in the state.

Force them to violate their conscience or shut down. We've got to fight this. He told me that not one of those mega churches, those white rich Republican mega churches, would take this stand. Because they were afraid of being called bigots.

The reason that bill got defeated in the legislature was Black Pentecostal pastors of South Central L.A. and the Latino Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles. So we are seeing immigrant communities who are not buffaloed and bullied by the woke who are willing to stand up if we will just listen to them.

Yep, yep.

Well, so I've been talking today for all of those who are listening with Rod Dreher about his newest book, Live Not by Lies. I would say inspired by the writings of the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

We've been talking about the battle of ideas that is currently dividing and threatening not only the West but the entire world and what we might all do as individuals—and really as individuals—to wander away from the path that leads to hell. And the proposition before us is something like, at minimum, cease to say things that you believe to be untrue.

Cease to act in ways that you know to be wrong. Start with that. And perhaps pick up your damn cross and carry it uphill. Something like that, right? Forthrightly and nobly. And that's really the pathway out of this. If totalitarianism is the some consequence of individuals' willingness to abdicate their responsibility and lie, and I think we've learned that in the aftermath of the communist catastrophe and the Nazi experiments, I think we've learned that now. If we applied it, maybe we could avoid doing the same thing again.

I guess we're going to find out.

Yeah, you know, Jordan, you'll remember that Solzhenitsyn said in The Gulag Archipelago that if you had gone to all the nice liberal intellectuals of 1890s Russia and said to them that within 30 years medieval tortures would be reintroduced into Russia, they wouldn't have believed it. They would have thought it was absolutely impossible.

Well, in a similar way, if you had gone 40 years ago to liberals in North America and said that within 30, 40 years we were going to see the sort of things that are being done to children in the name of transgenderism and we would see people who are clearly men being described by police departments as women and so on and so forth—or else—but here we are.

Yeah, yeah.

So, okay, so for everyone who's listening, I have recently inked a new deal with The Daily Wire, dailywireplus.com. And part of that is to continue these discussions with my guests for an additional period of time behind The Daily Wire paywall.

And that might be annoying to some of you—c'est la vie. Part of it is an attempt to foster The Daily Wire's growth, and part of it is also to provide me with the opportunity to have a hosting system, let's say, for my content that isn't as prone to the vagaries of the new woke doctrines.

And so I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with Rod Dreher on dailywireplus.com.