Beyond Order: Montreal Lecture | Jonathan Pageau | EP 262

And now please welcome tonight's host from the Symbolic World podcast, Jonathan Pageau. [Applause]

Welcome everybody! I am very excited because for the first time, Jordan Peterson is in Montreal. It is the first time that he’s speaking here. Jordan has lived here; he lived here for eight years. He was at McGill, and he loves this city. And so it’s really great to have everybody here to listen to him speak.

I want to rewind you in my life to 2015. This is before Jordan Peterson was famous; he was a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and I was driving down the road. I was listening to the CBC, and I don’t know, I was just getting my son at his friend’s house one evening. There’s this conference on CBC, and here’s this professor, and he’s saying things that I am not used to hearing on the CBC. The way that he was speaking, the references that he was making, he was going through Solzhenitsyn and Milton and Dostoevsky. He was talking about the nature of reality using words like logos, which you usually don’t hear on the radio. I was really surprised; I was very surprised because he was saying things that were connecting to something that I was already thinking.

This is an experience that I’ve heard many people say about Jordan’s work, which is that when they hear him, he’s expressing something that they had on the tip of their mind, that they could almost see, that they could kind of perceive. Jordan is able to bring it together for them in a more succinct and very powerful way. And I was so excited that I was hitting the steering wheel; I was screaming in the car! I am not like that. This is not usually the way that I act. I was so excited that I went to get my son, and all I could think about was what I’d heard on the radio.

I couldn’t believe it! I got home, you know, I’m online on Google: “Who is this Jordan Peterson fellow?” I find him, U of T, you know, he’s a professor of psychology. I start listening to some of his lectures, and every lecture I’m astounded at the way in which he’s talking about the world. And especially for me, what was fascinating was that he was helping the secular world understand what some of the religious patterns, some of the mythology, some of the rituals that we engage with, what it is that they could mean for them. Why do they make sense? Why do we do these strange things like have rituals? Why do we, you know, how, why do we have these strange stories that, when you look at them on the surface, are completely absurd?

He was really helping people to gather that together, so I was so excited I wrote him a little email. I said, “Thank you so much for everything you do,” and I sent him a link to a talk that I had given, a talk that I had given at a university, also at a college in Ontario, at King’s University I think, and I was talking about similar things as Jordan in that conference. I was talking about the problem of complexity and how, you know, how patterns come together and manifest certain realities. But you know, I just said I’ll just thank him because, like I said, I’ve never done this before. So I write him, I’m like, “Thank you so much”—and the next day I get an answer, nice little answer, you know, “Thank you so much for your message,” with a link to a few more videos. But then two hours later, he calls me! I did not expect that either. He, and I was, as much shock as I was experiencing, I felt like on the end of the phone he also had the same kind of shock because he had detected in the things that I was talking about similar patterns to what was interesting him.

And so since then, since that moment in 2015, Jordan and I have been having an ongoing conversation about the pattern of reality, a conversation about how complexity relates to the question of religion. And because he was coming to Montreal, Jordan said, “Why don’t we try to continue this conversation together?” So tonight with Jordan, that is what I hope to do. We’ll be going through the different arguments about the question of the pattern of reality, of how complexity comes about and how it moves into all the way that we act, how we decide what is good, and how we move into the good. So I’m super excited to have Jordan with us, and I know he’s excited to be in Montreal, so everybody please welcome Dr. Jordan Peterson! [Music]

Thank you, thank you! Yeah, well, it’s great, it’s great to be here. It’s always such a thrill for me to come to Montreal. This is such a great city; I loved living here. And we haven’t been here for, I don’t know, five years or six years. I have lots of friends here. My former advisor and business partner is here; he's in the audience tonight, Robert Peel. Bob was one of the people who helped design the Self-Authoring program and the Understand Myself program. And got lots of old graduate student buddies in the audience tonight, so that’s pretty fun.

And I wish I could go out and wander around the streets and see how the city’s doing, but it looked great when we came in today. So I’m really happy to be here, and thank all of you for coming. And I’m really happy to be talking to Jonathan. As he pointed out, we’ve been conversing seriously with a variety of other people too, including Bishop Barron and John Verveki in particular. I just… Jonathan came up to my house in Toronto, oh, a week ago, not very long, and we had a three-hour conversation with Professor Verveki at the University of Toronto. And that went really well; we’re going to really set it on YouTube at some point in the relatively near future. And so we’re hammering out the same problems in some sense from different perspectives, and that’s quite fun.

And so I thought it would be a good opportunity to—I like to use these lectures or these opportunities to push my thinking on a particular question farther than I’ve been able to push before, you know? I don’t like to give the same lecture, and I like to discover something new. And Jonathan’s a really good person to talk to when you’re trying to discover something new, especially on the symbolic front. And we’ve had quite a fruitful interaction, especially about ritual I would say, and traditional belief. And the ideas of traditional, not just Christianity; it’s broader than that.

Jonathan is very well versed in postmodern theory, which is extremely helpful, and also in cognitive science, as well as deeply read theologically and a great artist. You should check out his website; he’s really something; he’s made some lovely pieces for us. So, away we go! Thank you very much for agreeing to do this, and again, thank you all for coming! I hope we have a bang-up evening; that’s the plan!

So one of the things that prompted your foray into religious thinking, there are different venues that you kind of brought you into it, but one of them was definitely the problem of perception. That is, the man in which humans perceive and the place where cognitive science was coming and realizing the limit of perception, or at least how objects in the world aren't just self-evident, and that there's a process by which we're able to come together and the way in which the world kind of shows us or manifests to us how it is that we're supposed to inhabit it. So maybe you can start with that and talk a little about that.

Okay, so we can hit that from a variety of different perspectives. I mean, the first problem the cognitive scientists really stumbled across—and the AI types who are developing robots—same thing; and the postmodernists, the literary critics, they all run across this problem at the same time, which was that any reasonably complex environment is susceptible to a near-infinite number of interpretations. And so when you hear the postmodernist say things like, “Well, there’s no fixed meaning for a text,” which is something they really started to understand, I would say really in the 1960s, they’re actually right. You know, you think about a Shakespearean play or a biblical story. Well, how many interpretations are there of Hamlet or of the story of Cain and Abel? Well, there’s an indefinite number of interpretations, maybe one for every reader. Now, there’s some overlap because we can commonly understand the stories, but if there’s that many interpretations, which one’s right? And if none of them are right, well then are none of them right? And is there even any such thing as right in that situation? And so that’s the problem with textual analysis. And then in the real world, outside of text, let’s say every visual scene is incomprehensibly complex. There’s an indefinite number of ways of seeing everything, and this is partly why we don’t have general-purpose robots: it’s because AI engineers originally believed that the problem of robotics would be the computation of action in the world, but it turned out that the problem of robotics was seeing the world.

And that really shocked everyone because when you look at the world, it’s like, “Well, there it is, you know, no problem, you just open your eyes and bang, there are the objects.” And yeah, they’re objects. It’s like, “Well, how many of them?” Well, you could get lost in the details of this carpet. If you were a photorealist painter, you know, you could take just a section of the carpet, and it would take you maybe three weeks to paint it in a high resolution manner. And even then, you wouldn’t have captured anywhere near the detail, and you’d only have done it under one condition of illumination, and that’s just a fragment of a visual scene. And so I started to get extremely interested in this problem, which was the problem of attention. How do we reduce the indefinite multiplicity of the potential landscape of perceptions to the self-evident things that we see? And the answer to that turns out to be extremely bizarre. Partly, it’s well, we don’t see objects; we see meaning, and we infer objects.

And that’s quite the bloody revelation when you start to understand that because, you know, modern people, atheistic materialist types, they think it’s sort of a dead world intrinsically, and you overlay a meaning on top of that and that’s a secondary overlay because the object perception is primary, and it’s not real, the meaning. It’s like, that isn’t how your brain works; you see meanings. So for example, with little children, there’s this experiment for example called a visual cliff. If you take a baby who can crawl and you put—imagine a table like this and then another table the same set here, and then a plate of glass between them. If you have the baby crawl towards the visual cliff, the baby will stop. And the reason for that isn’t that the baby sees like an objective pattern and thinks, “Oh no, I can fall.” They see a falling-off place. And then they maybe they can infer some common objective pattern out of that, but we see meanings. Our primary element of our perception is meaning mapped right onto our body.

And that really upends, in some sense, the whole empirical notion of the way that we act in the world, the whole rationalist enterprise, although less that. And it poses very strange epistemological questions. So that asks questions about the theory of knowledge, but also very strange ontological questions. So for example, if you’re a Darwinian, think, “Okay, well we evolved to perceive the world in a manner that’s accurate enough to ensure our survival,” and that’s about as accurate as it gets in some sense if you’re a Darwinian. Well, we perceive the world through stories, actually. Like, technically, well, does that mean that the world is a story? Or if not, what does it mean? And the answer to that is it’s not so obvious. And one thing that has become obvious that Jonathan and I have talked about a lot is that it’s clearly the case that we see the world through something that when we describe it is a story, so you prioritize your attention through a structure of value, and you can’t see unless you do that.

And so that even means that the objective world—and this is something the postmodernist also kind of pointed out—the objective world isn’t even so clearly objective. Not in the way we thought, because you can’t even see objects except through a hierarchy of value. And so we’ve talked a lot about what that hierarchy of value might be and you’ve hit that particularly from a more theological perspective. Well, one of the surprising things that comes out of it is the idea that we are aiming, when we’re acting, that is, in the world. When we’re moving, when we’re doing things, we’re always kind of aiming towards the good and avoiding the bad, we could say. And that actually becomes, in a certain manner, the definition of how we perceive objects themselves. Right?

Like, if I see an apple, without even thinking about it, I’m always asking myself, is it a good apple? Is it an apple that will reach its purpose? And when we say its purpose, it’s actually our embodied human purpose. That is, I see an apple, I’m asking myself, is it good to eat? Right? And then, well, you’re also assuming then there’s a platonic element to that too. So like, does it fulfill its function as an apple? Which would be, for us, it would be, well, it’s ripe and it’s not rotten and it’s delicious. And the reason you see it—it’s tied into an ethic. And you might say, well, what kind of ethic is it tied into? It’s like, well, do you want to eat? And do you eat because you want to live? And do you want to live because you think living is worthwhile? And to what end are you devoting your life? And you think, well, none of that’s there when I see an apple. And that’s absolutely 100% wrong; all of that is there when you see everything. And so you’re embedded in an ethic of aim, and you can’t organize your perceptions without it.

And that ethic of aim, fundamentally, the highest order aims, or the most fundamental aims, you can use either metaphors—the most basic things or the highest things—they are phenomenologically religious in structure. And I mean that by definition. So like when you talk about the deepest things, and so those would be the things that move you the most or the things that are your ultimate aim, you’re in the landscape that produces religious experiences when people are in that domain, and that’s deeply rooted biologically.

So one of the religious instincts, for example, is the instinct that’s associated with awe and with the compulsion to imitate. So you know, we maybe you imitate a hero; you know, and the ultimate hero would be a divine figure. And so that’s why, for example, religious people might talk about the imitation of Christ. But that experience of awe, which you might have when you look up at the night sky, that’s associated with piloerection, which is the feeling of your hair standing on end and/or chills running up and down your back. Which sometimes you’ll feel, for example, if you listen to music and you’re deeply moved by it. And that is a reflex that’s probably 60 million years old, because it’s the same reflex that you see when a cat sees a dog. You know, maybe it’s afraid; it puffs itself up. That’s piloerection, and does that. So it looks big, and then it dances sideways, and it’s the experience the cat is having is something like the experience of awe.

And that’s not cognitive, like that’s 60 million years old. It’s really old, and it’s a primary religious experience. And so, and it’s tied into perception in an extraordinarily deep level. Partly because the things that you’re in awe of will be the things towards which you aim your perceptions and your actions at the highest level of organization. And so that’s actually what the awe experience, in some sense, is for. Right? It’s to show you what is at the top of the structure that directs your attention. And that happens with everything you do.

So in a way, it also becomes a way to understand two aspects of the religious, you could say. One which is the terrible aspect of it, this idea of this terrifying figure. And the other is the imitative part, right? So you have this notion that the cat sees the dog, or let’s say a young boy sees this giant warrior that, you know, walks out in front of him, and he feels this sense of mixture of fear, of being impressed, and of wanting something from that or like wanting to move up towards that.

Yeah, well I think we talked about this in relationship to the night sky. You know, there’s a very famous image of Mary that Renaissance artists really went to town on—there’s hundreds of paintings of this. So it’s Mary with her head in the stars and her foot on this serpent. So it’s that serpent is the serpent in the Garden of Eden or Satan or evil. And the idea there, it’s an image of the divine feminine. And the idea is that in order to protect the vulnerable from evil, you have to be oriented to the highest that the cosmos has to offer. And the reason that's assimilated to some degree to the stars is because when you go out at night and you look up at the heavens, well, first of all notice that you’re looking up at the heavens. That’s the term we use. But that you also do come face to face with the infinite, in some real sense, right? I mean you’re looking out towards the nearest thing to the infinite you’re going to encounter.

And that does produce a sense of awe, and that’s in one part of that—that’s a humility, like the cat might feel in relationship to a dog—but in another thing, it’s a call to imitate even the cosmos because along with that sense of being awe-inspired by the heavens and feeling insignificant in some sense, and humble, there’s also a call to a greater form of being. And that’s, you know, one of the things human beings did because we were preyed upon and became predators. One of the things we did was imitate the predator. You know, and so we were in awe of a predatory animal, like we still might be if you meet a grizzly bear in the woods. You know, you might freeze, and you’re certainly going to attend to it. But then there’s part of you that is deeply called upon to imitate the capacity for aggression of the predator so that you can defend your loved ones against predatory action. And some of that would be to be the warrior that can fight off the grizzly bear. But then abstract it up into the religious sense, it would be to be the ethical actor who can protect your family from, um, from unscrupulous psychopaths, you know, forces of malevolence that border on the satanic.

And so that’s all part of the ethical enterprise, and weirdly enough, all of your acts of perception are necessarily nested inside a structure that’s pointing to what is at the highest or you’re incoherent. Those are the options. Well, that’s a strange thing, right? Because you can say, “Well maybe your hierarchy of value isn’t unified, and there’s nothing at the top.” It’s like, “Okay, it’s not unified. Well then you’re confused.” And if you’re with someone and your hierarchies of value aren’t unified, then you are in conflict or you’re aimless or you’re hopeless or you’re anxious or you’re lost. That’s the phenomenological consequence of lacking this united pyramidal ethic. So you can’t get away from the necessity of this unless you want to live, you know, aimless, nihilistic, confused, hopeless—all of that.

So we’ve got awe, and we’ve got the desire to imitate. And I think the third part that I’d like to bring up and hear what you want to think about that is the notion of celebrating. That’s something that, I don’t know, it seems to be particularly human. Maybe there are examples of that in the animal world; I don’t know. But there’s something about humans which celebrate. And in celebrating what we’re doing is we’re recognizing these pinnacles, whether it be celebrating a great basketball player or celebrating the images of our nation or the, you know, the unity of our family when we come for Thanksgiving. There seems to be something…You really helped me understand the relationship, the technical relationship between the concept of worship and the concept of celebration. Because you might say, “Well, you know, what does it mean to worship?” And a cynical person would say it means to believe things that no one but a damn fool would believe, you know? And that’s kind of the dismissive modern attitude. But that isn’t what it means.

Like, worship has this celebratory aspect, and that is tied into this instinct to imitate. So if you have a sports hero, first of all he’s a hero, and he is someone you put on a pedestal, which indicates a kind of elevation towards the divine or towards the sky, metaphorically speaking. And then there is this compulsion to imitate, and that’s no different than celebration. And so, partly what’s happening in a church ceremony for example is that an object of celebratory worship is specified. And in the Christian tradition, that’s Christ, and which is a very strange thing because of course he met absolutely abysmal end. And that’s an unbelievably complicated idea too that the tragic, the ultimately tragic element of human life is to be voluntarily apprehended in the deepest possible sense, and that what that produces, paradoxically, is a celebration. And then also a vision of the resurrection. And that’s an idea that’s so deep you could lose yourself in that.

Well, we’ve lost ourselves in it for 2000 years because one of the things that this attention problem brings about is the question of sacrifice too, and you see it in the religious ceremonies. But you realize that in order to exist in the world, you’re constantly having to sacrifice. That is, you have to sacrifice the idiosyncrasies in order to be able to grasp the object because this can be all kinds of things, right? I could be a dog’s true toe, it could be a million things. But in order to be able to grasp it, I have to sacrifice idiosyncrasies. And I also have to somehow, let’s say, recognize it in its highest form or kind of move it towards its highest form. And that seems to be an aspect of religious thinking which is actually part of attention, which is exactly—well the sacrificial aspect of attention in part is that whenever you see something as that thing, you sacrifice the possibility of all the other things it could be.

And that’s delimiting to a large degree; you know, it hems you in. But that’s also a relief because you know how many bloody million things do you want to attend to at one time? But part of the reason, you know, the idea of sacrifice, the conscious idea of sacrifice emerges very early on, for example, in the biblical writings. Because the second story in Genesis, I think it’s Genesis 3, is that the Cain and Abel story. Genesis 3 or 2? After Genesis, 3? Genesis 4. Okay, so it’s very early on. And there’s this insistence that, so human beings are already destined to work as a consequence of the fall out of the Garden of Eden. But the Cain and Abel story is specifically about sacrifice and about the degree to which a sacrifice has to be of the highest quality. So you have this one protagonist, Abel, who’s a prototype for a mode of being that stretches throughout history, and Abel’s sacrifices are to the highest, to that which is the highest imaginable.

So he’s aiming as high as he can, and they’re genuine and honest. And the consequence of that is that God smiles upon him, let’s say, but that his life is extremely successful. He gets everything that a sensible human being would want and need, and he’s contrasted with Cain, who’s bitter and arrogant and makes second-rate sacrifices. And you want to think about that personally—it’s like, well, did you give it your best shot when you failed? And if the answer is no, it’s like, well, who are you trying to fool, exactly? You trying to fool yourself? Well, good luck with that. You’re trying to fool other people? It’s like, well, who made you so smart and them so dumb? And is that how you think about other people? You can just pull the wool over their eyes? And then is it more than that? Do you think you can bend the structure of reality? And so you’re gonna make these half-witted sacrifices, and that’s going to please God too? And that’s what you believe?

And you know, Cain is very annoyed that his sacrifices aren’t being rewarded, and he goes and talks to God and basically calls him out and says something like, “You know, what kind of stupid cosmos did you make here? Here I am breaking myself in half, and all the good things are going to Abel. What’s up with you?” Which is really quite the thing to do, you know? And if you don’t think people do that, you don’t know much about them. And God basically tells him that he doesn’t make good sacrifices; he knows that perfectly well, that he was tempted by bitterness and arrogance and deceit to enter into a consensual sexual relationship with the spirit of vengeful sin itself, which is a hell of an accusation. And well, you know, these people who shoot up high schools, for example, they dwell on their sin for months or years before they commit that act. And they are entering into a creative relationship with temptation. They let a terrible spirit inhabit them and they enter into a creative union with that. It’s not, it’s they brood. And you know, that’s a sexual metaphor too, and they go to some pretty dark places. You have to go to some pretty dark places before you take an automatic rifle out in an elementary school.

And so if there’s—you don’t think there’s any brooding in that, any communing in a creative way with the spirit of vengefulness and misplaced aim, then you don’t have much of an imagination for that sort of thing. And then, you know, good for you, but you better be careful if you meet someone like that. And so there’s this idea of necessary sacrifice. Right. And that sacrifice is necessary for any—like think of a basketball player. I like to always bring it to something that at first is not religious at all for people to see what we’re talking about. The basketball player has to, one, sacrifice million things that all his friends are doing that are fun, or that he could be doing. He has to just… he has to take away all the idiosyncrasies and focus on one thing. And then he has to—that’s when the Abel sacrifice comes in. He has to give his best. If he doesn’t give his best, then he won’t make it. There’s no way.

And so the sacrificial pattern enters into pretty much any type of excellence or excellent behavior. We can—yeah, well, and it also might, so it’s integrally tied with the problem of perception itself, and the fact that we have to sacrifice a multiplicity of potential interpretations or patterns of action to focus on one. But it’s also integrally associated with the idea of the future because to ensure that, you know, people are aware of the future in ways that animals aren’t—or animals are only partially aware—we’re very aware of the future and aware of our mortal limitations in a manner that seems unique to human beings. And we sacrifice, we constantly sacrifice the present to the future. That’s actually the definition of work, and that emerges very early on in the biblical narrative corpus—the idea that humans are destined to work, but that also work is the sacrifice of the present. And that’s part of the fall, in some sense; it’s the sacrifice of the present to the future. And we regard that as the hallmark of maturity fundamentally. Right?

Can you delay gratification? Well, if the answer is no, it’s, well, then you’re two. Can you delay gratification? Well then, I mean that technically. Because two-year-olds can’t delay gratification, which makes it very difficult for other people to play with them, for example. If you can delay gratification, then you can work. If you can work, then you’re mature. It’s the definition of maturity and responsibility. And it pervades—it's so interesting to see that it pervades the act of attention itself and that there’s no—because, you know, I used to ask my students, because I was trying to figure this out. I’d ask them a question like, “Well, why are you writing this essay?” Or, “What are you doing when you’re writing this essay?” That’s a better question. So you think, “What is someone doing when writing an essay?” And one answer is, say, “They’re doing it on a computer.” Well, they’re moving their fingers up and down. And that’s actually a really good answer because that’s not an idea. Right? Moving your fingers up and down, that’s not an idea. That’s where your spirit meets your body. You’re actually moving something physical.

And you don’t really have consciousness of the musculature or, you know, you don’t know how you move your fingers, but you can do it. And so at the highest level of resolution, when you’re writing an essay, you’re moving your fingers. And now you know how to type, and you have automated structures for doing that, and then you’re composing words, and the words are in phrases, and the phrases are in sentences, and the sentences are in paragraphs, and the paragraphs are in sections, and the whole thing makes an essay. But then that’s a subset of a class, and you want to grade for the class because you want to pass the class because you want to get your degree. But why do you want to get your degree? It’s well maybe you’re interested in that field of study, and you think being a scholar is a good thing, and you want to have a job.

And so while you’re writing an essay, you’re—what are you doing? Preparing to have your career. And then does that—are you doing that because you want to be a good citizen and a good father perhaps, good mother? And do you want to do that because you want to be a good person? And are you mixed up in all of that? And so you’re doing all of those things, well or badly, at the same time, all the time with everything you do, all the time. And there’s no way around that; it can't be simplified. The whole structure has to be there. And that’s another reason why we don’t have general-purpose robots yet is that they’re just not embedded in that ethic that stretches all the way up from the most minute motor patterns of action and perception to the highest possible ethical striving. And then the question becomes too, is like, what’s at the top? And that’s the fundamental religious question.

And that the idea of what’s at the top has transformed across the centuries. The ancient Egyptians, they put two things at the top. They put a god known as Osiris, who is basically the spirit of the state. So you could think about him as the spirit of tradition. And the problem with Osiris was that he was old and anachronistic and willfully blind and lost in the underworld. All of those things—real problem. And it’s sort of like when everybody complains about how corrupt society has become and how they feel alienated from their culture, that’s all Osiris, fundamentally. That’s how the Egyptians represented it. And so that was one part of what should be at the highest tradition. And the other part was Horus. And Horus is the famous Egyptian eye, and Horus is a falcon because falcons have great vision. And so Horus is the spirit of living attention. And the Egyptians believed that the pharaoh, who was sovereignty embodied, was the incarnation of the union of tradition and vision.

And so that’s what they thought should be at the highest, which is—and that’s what they symbolized by the gold cap, by the way, on the pyramids. And so because the gold cap is—it’s at the top of the pyramid, which is an ethical hierarchy, a pyramid. And the top is qualitatively distinct in some sense from the structure itself. It’s because it’s in the highest place; it’s different than everything else that is underneath it. And we all wrestle with the problem of what should be in the highest place, there’s no way of escaping that problem. And you might say, “Well, nothing’s fine.” You’re polytheistic, you’re confused, you’re all over the place, you’re scattered; that’s the consequence of not having this unified internal structure. And if your society doesn’t have it, well then you can’t get along with people, and you’re in conflict. And so these aren’t—none of this is optional. We’re doomed to—well, my new book is going to be called “We Who Wrestle with God.” And I would say, “Well, because that’s Israel, right? That’s the definition of the term Israel—is we who wrestle with God.” Which is so interesting. And those are God’s chosen people.

We who wrestle with God, and it’s because that’s our fate. We’re going to wrestle with ethical issues, period. It doesn’t matter if you’re atheistic or religious. In fact, lots of people who are atheistic are way more obsessed with religious ethics than religious people are. Well, they are! Right? Because they—well, they are! Because, and they’re more honest about it sometimes because they’ll advance genuine confusion and distress, which is appropriate. But it’s not like they just ignore it. It’s—they’re often so anti-religious that it consumes their life. It’s like, well, that’s fine. There, wrestle away, man! If you’re wrestling with God, it’s like, “I don’t believe in him.” It’s like, “Yeah, he doesn’t believe in you either.” But you know, or maybe he does, which would even be worse.

And so we have the pyramid. And in the Bible, we have especially the mountain. We have a few structures like that—there’s the mountain, the mountain of paradise in particular, or Mount Sinai on Zion. We also have the temple itself, which has this structure in terms of it’s a pyramid towards unity—this invisible unity or this transcended unity. And so the question is, what comes down from the mountain? Because one of the things we talk about is how we—most of the things we’ve been discussing from the beginning and a lot of the big discussion that’s happening is bottom-up. And I’m totally fine with that, but there is something which comes down from the mountain—let’s say the law. But what is that? How do you see that? What kind of nominal or structural power or authority comes down from that hierarchy?

Well, one thing maybe before we address that precisely, maybe you could just run through the sorts of things we talked about in relationship to sacred architecture and the relationship between the sacred architecture and the structure of a perceptual or cognitive category, because that’s extremely interesting. So why don’t you lay out this church structure with the holiest of holies? And this is very common anthropological structure.

So most… well, the idea is that just like Jordan was talking about in terms of multiplicity and the problem of complexity, we have that problem when we act. We also have that problem in space. That is, how do we encounter space? How do we embody space? And our spaces end up being hierarchical. Right? A house is hierarchical. Your house has a porch where you meet strangers. You know, you have an entry where you maybe let a few people in. You’ll have your dining room where it’s more intimate. Ultimately you have your bedroom where only you and your lover will be in this secret place. So there’s this hierarchy of intimacy that we normally have that you have to live with or else you’ll go crazy. But you can understand that as scaling up in terms of societies as well, where there are these spaces—these temples usually would have three sections. And there would be a section that was more open. In the Jewish temple, for example, you had courts for the strangers, courts for, you know, people that were still kind of impure; they weren’t supposed to go in. Then you had a court for the Israelites, then a court for the priests. Then ultimately, you had to place this one invisible place that only one person was allowed to go in, and that’s where they would receive the revelation of God.

You see the same thing with Moses going up the mountain. At the bottom of the mountain, all these crazy people worshipping golden calves, and then it’s kind of wild and crazy. And as he goes up, there’s this, let’s say, rushing away of multiplicity. The elders remain on the mountain; then he moves up, and then he enters into that space alone. So you can see that space itself has that kind of hierarchy. And when you experience it yourself, you can do it. Go up a mountain. I always tell people: if you want to understand what holiness is, just go up a mountain.

Because at the bottom of the mountain, you see idiosyncrasies, you see little things, you see details; you don’t have a big picture. And as you go up the mountain, that picture starts to become clearer and clearer. And when you reach the summit of the mountain, you have the experience of seeing all reality in one breath, like in one moment. And that is really this kind of hierarchy of perception. But it’s also the hierarchy of the good. So we have the idea that ultimately that’s the same thing for ethics, that there is something—that there is a good up there. There’s something which binds them all together in that structure.

This is a difficult leap, but that structure manifests itself with every act of perception you make. So for example, you know, I can look at the scene; I’m in a lot of different ways. I can look at—most of you are in the dark, so I can’t see you very clearly. But I can, you know, see a bunch of people. I can see one person or I can see the arm of one person or I can look at the floor here, or I can focus on this. And you know, by focusing on this, I center it; I privilege it. Right? I give it a sacred quality. And you might think, “Well, no you don’t.” It’s like, “Yes, you do, really! Because now you’ve determined that this is the most important thing that you can do at this moment in this place in relationship to the entire ethic that you inhabit, and you can’t see this without doing that. And if you get it wrong, you pay for it.”

Yeah, well you might spill it, for example. Or if you’re driving and you don’t end up focusing on the right thing, you will die. You die! Yeah! And so it’s not a theoretical problem; it’s a real problem of structure. It’s a very strange thing to understand that you inhabit this sacred architecture with every perceptual act you undertake. And also, perception is an act, by the way. You think, “Well, you just open your eyes, and then you see the world.” It’s like, “No, that isn’t how it works. Your eyes are moving all the time. If they stop moving for more than a tenth of a second, you will go blind because the cells exhaust themselves.” And so there’s all sorts of little micro-movements that your eyes are making—some of them involuntary and some of them voluntary—without which you can’t see.

And the act of visual perception is very much like the act of exploring something with your hands, which is why, you know, if you close your eyes and someone hands you a cup, you won’t be able to tell if it’s transparent or not. But you can feel it out, and you can develop a pretty good visual picture of the object. So you can see with your hands. And that’s partly why kids want to grab everything, because it’s hard to see with just your eyes. And if you can add your hands to that, it makes it easier to see. And so, and that’s active exploration. And you’re feeling out the world with your eyes. You’re never a passive recipient of a priori sense data, so the empiricists are just wrong.

And then the rationalists have been arguing with them for centuries because the rationalists always presumed that you didn’t just get raw sense data; you had to impose a a priori interpretive schema on the world. And that’s the difference between rationalism and empiricism, and the rationalists are right although they thought that was just rational, and that’s where they were wrong. So it’s very strange that the structure of sacred architecture, say, duplicates the structure of cognitive category and also the structure of perceptual category.

So we inhabit a temple, corrupt though it may be, with every interaction with the world that we undertake. And that’s really quite a frightening thing to realize. Very—it's a very frightening thing to realize when you really realize it. It’s like, “Oh, oh, oh, this is real." And it’s even worse than that. It’s like, it’s the precondition for the idea of reality itself, which is—that’s really real. Right? I mean, you’ve got real; that’s nothing. It’s the precondition for reality itself. That’s super real! And you know, to some degree, the Christian idea of the logos and the Greek ideas, well, is the expression of the recognition of the precondition for the real itself.

And that’s really something to understand as well. You know, scientists—I talked to Richard Dawkins when I was at Oxford. You know, and one of the things that characterizes Dawkins is that Dawkins believes that the truth will set you free. That is not a scientific presupposition; that is a religious presupposition. But it also might be the religious presupposition without which science is not possible. Because all the scientists I know who are real scientists, they abide by the truth to an unbelievable degree. You know, if you’re a social scientist and you have a data set in front of you, you know, say 200 columns of 500 rows, you know, a complex data set, man, there are a lot of ways you can get that to talk to you statistically.

And you make thousands of decisions when you’re doing a statistical analysis, and every single one of those is an ethical decision, and one of the decisions is, well, do I prioritize my career or do I prioritize my pursuit of the truth? And so often those are antagonistic because if you have a big data set, you want to discover something in it, and maybe there’s nothing there. And then you’ve wasted two years, and like that’s pretty hard on your career. And so that battle between career promotion and adherence to the truth goes on with every statistical decision. And so much of social science is just not true because the incentive structures are set up badly, and so people will falsify their data with a million micro-decisions and produce nonsensical patterns as a consequence.

It’s all an ethical enterprise. And not just nonsensical but dangerous—like dangerous for society as well! Oh yeah, these have consequences! Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, if you falsify what hypothetically constitutes objective truth, that’s devilishly awful because you actually harness the validity of science to your own self-aggrandizement or your own ideology, and that’s happening—oh yeah, it’s happening plenty at the moment, folks!

So, yeah, it’s really bad. One of the things that you’ve been able to bring about as well is this idea that of aiming or the notion of sin as missing the mark, let’s say. There’s a great quote by Saint Paul that says—everybody knows it—says the wages of sin is death. But there’s a manner in which that’s even technically it seems like something that we could defend. Like that if you do not aim properly, right? So the wage of the—the price of not aiming properly—that’s not pessimistic enough! Yeah! Because death is one thing, but hell is another thing! You know? And so hell is the place that you go when you’d rather be dead.

Yeah! And if you haven’t been there, well that’s great for you. But death wages—it’s like a technical description of the place where unity breaks down! Like that, you know, when you die, that’s what happens. Your body stops to cohere, your cells start to go their own way and things start to break down, and if we don’t aim properly, then that’s death.

Yeah! Well, that touches on another interesting problem. So I talked to Sam Harris relatively recently again—it’s about the fifth or sixth time I’ve talked to him publicly. And I did it better this time. One of the problems with the discussions I had with Sam Harris, for those of you who don’t know, he’s one of the world’s most famous atheists, and I suppose that’s his primary claim to fame. Well, I’m not being sarcastic about that. Like, he was well-known with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and, um, the—then it tough. Yeah, Bennett. The four of them! The four atheistic horsemen essentially. And they, well that’s what they were known, and he became very well known as an advocate for this rationalistic atheism along with these other three.

And they’re, you know, they’re pretty damn good at defending it. But I talked to Harris, and for the first four or five times I talked to him, I did something I don’t usually do when I talk to people, which is I was having an argument. I was trying to win. I wanted to establish a point because I believe that the way he was looking at things was wrong. And that was my role—to show how that was wrong. And I don’t do that when I’m talking to people generally. Generally, what I do is listen to them and try to figure out what they think.

And the last time I talked to Harris, that’s all I did. I just asked him questions, and we got way farther in our discussion than we ever had. And I found out that with Harris, he identified the spirit of totalitarian certainty with the religious impulse. So for him, there was no differentiation between those things. And so what Harris is objecting to when he objects to religion, apart from the meditative religion that he practices, was the was totalitarian dogmatism of the sort that might be responsible for, you know, social atrocity. And so fine, no wonder you’re against that! It’s like, is that the same as the religious enterprise? It’s like, no, I’m afraid not! That’s not a very differentiated analysis.

But I get your point, at least. And then the other thing Harris wanted to do is he wanted partly because he was so upset about the moral relativism that threatens us, let’s say, and that he believed was responsible for such things as the Auschwitz nightmares, that he wanted to ground an ethic in objective fact. Because the only thing he believes is real is objective fact, and so that’s his motivation. Now, that’s problematic as far as I’m concerned because of some of the issues we already raised, which is, well, which objective facts? There’s like an infinite number of them, and that’s actually a fatal error. That’s a fatal problem with your supposition.

Now it’s complicated, right? Because you say, well, the wages of sin or death, you can take an ecological and evolutionary view of that. It’s like, obviously, whatever ethic we use to organize our behavior and our societies has to serve the functions of, let’s say, reproductive fitness. So there’s got to be a concordance between the domain of ethics and the domain of evolutionary biology, let’s say. And then it’s an open question to what degree you can use the findings of evolutionary biology to buttress your ethical claims.

So here’s an example. I talked to Frans de Waal two weeks ago, and that’ll be out soon. He’s the world’s greatest living primatologist, perhaps. The only—his only competitor would be, um, what’s his name? He wrote Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham, who I also talked to about a week ago. And de Waal’s work is unbelievably important. It’s unbelievably important because he’s concentrated on the idea of the alpha male. And you know we have in part, popular parlance, we have an idea of the alpha chimp, right? Or the alpha male for that matter. And it’s pretty much a postmodern, neo-Marxist view of primate sociology. And that is that the biggest, ugliest, meanest male dominates by brute force, and so now he’s at the top of the pyramid.

And so the implicit claim there from the biologists is that power, those who express power most effectively, power being the ability to compel, those who express power most effectively will dominate the pyramid of social hierarchy, and they’ll prevail reproductively. Well, that’s pretty gloomy, that idea! You know? But people think, “Well, that’s what—that’s how you look at the world if you’re sensible.” It’s like, “Well, Frans de Waal’s been studying chimps for 30 years, and that’s not true! That is not what happens!” He told me flat out that frequently a small male can become alpha, especially if he has the support of an influential female.

And the small male becomes alpha and has the support of the influential female not because he expresses arbitrary power but because he’s unbelievably good at mutual reciprocation. And so he has friends and he does things for his friends and they do things for him and they trust each other, and he has lots of friends, which also means he has no enemies, which turns out to be really important, because the brute chimps, like the psychopath alphas, they do rule now and then, but they get torn to shreds by their enemies because, you know, they’re tough, let’s say, and mean. But they have an off day, and two chimps they stomped a week before ally together and tear them literally tear them into shreds.

And so the psychopath chimp types who use power to attain dominance get have very short rules and end in a very bloody way. And so de Waal has pointed out, like Piaget did among children, that power is an unstable ethic upon which to base a social hierarchy, even for chimps. And chimps are male dominated. They have a patriarchal society, and they’re relatively brutal; and it doesn’t even work for them. It certainly doesn’t work for human beings. So whatever is at the apex of the pyramid, it’s not, as the bloody Marxists insist, you know, the raw expression of power and exploitation. Wrong! Wrong! Not the case! Doesn’t even work in nature! Doesn’t work for rats, doesn’t work for chimpanzees, certainly doesn’t work for people!

And then there is a kind of natural ethic that emerges out of that, right? Because with rats and with chimps and with other social animals it varies to some degree from species to species. There’s the necessity for something like mutual reciprocity as the basis for successful social organization, and that’s something like treat your neighbor like you would want to be treated. It’s something like that! It’s the behavioral equivalent of that! And you asked earlier, you know, from whence does the highest injunction emerge? Or—

Yeah! Or what comes down?

Yeah, yeah, yeah! Well, it’s strange, right? Because some of it’s bottom-up. It’s like even among animals, mutual reciprocity seems to be a cardinal organizing feature, even done in the spirit of play interestingly enough because play is a mammalian universal. And that’s kind of bottom-up. But then at the same time—and this, I suppose, pertains to the role of the mysterious role of consciousness in the world. It’s like, well, we’re also aware of this, right? And we also think about it abstractly as a good. And we don’t only learn it bottom-up; we also conceptualize it top-down. And then they meet, and that is—the that’s Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets. And so what did he meet on the mountain? Well, God!

Well, he met whatever is at the highest place. And we all are stuck with the problem of determining what we are going to put in the highest place. And increasingly I’ve been viewing the biblical corpus as an attempt to cast narrative light on the nature of the spirit that should be at the highest place. So I can give you an example of that. So in the earliest stages of Genesis, God is—so what should be in the highest place? Remember, that’s ineffable and non-utterable in some sense and also incomprehensible. That’s technically insisted upon by the religious types. But whatever it is, it’s that which encounters chaotic potential and then uses truthful language rooted in love to extract habitable order. That’s what should be in the highest place.

And then that’s the spirit in which men and women are fashioned. And you might say, “Well, I don’t believe that.” It’s like, “Well, I don’t know what you mean when you say that because, like, do you believe that people have intrinsic worth?” And you might say no. It’s like, “Well, is that how you treat the people around you?” Because if you don’t treat them like they have intrinsic worth, if they have any sense, they’re going to get the hell away from you real fast! Right? Because that’s the one thing that everyone wants, is they want the relationship they have with another person to be predicated on mutual recognition of intrinsic worth.

And that’s very much tied in the idea of starting with the idea of the logos that inhabits us all. It’s certainly tied in with the idea of self-evidence in the Declaration of Independence—the American Declaration of Independence. You know, “We hold these truths as self-evident.” Well, what do you mean self-evident exactly? Well, part of it is, you know, individuals, people are fashioned in the image of God. “Well, I don’t believe that.” Well, who says you don’t believe that? And maybe you don’t, but that’s not so good for you! And it’s certainly not so good for the people you’re interacting with! Even if that person happens to be you! Because, like, what’s the alternative? People have no intrinsic worth? Then you’re in Dostoevsky territory. It’s like his book, Crime and Punishment, because Raskolnikov, the protagonist, decides that all this is nonsense, right? There’s no intrinsic worth; there’s just power.

And so he decides he’s going to murder his landlady, who’s a really nasty piece of work. And you know, he can make a real good case that the world would be better without her in it, and he makes that case. She’s horrible; she’s a horrible person! She basically enslaves her niece and tortures her, and she’s like this mentally impaired young woman, and she’s a grasping greedy psychopath who makes everyone’s life brutally miserable. And so Raskolnikov thinks, “Well, you know, it’s the act of the ubermensch to dispense with this woman.” And he lays out the argument perfectly coherently. Well, it’s a complete bloody catastrophe because he commits the murder and he gets away with it—not really, because you can’t really. And so that’s the pathway, and Dostoevsky does this perfectly well. He said if there’s no God, everything is permitted.

You know, when modern people, especially the atheist materialist types, they look at that, they think, “Well, no, that isn’t what we mean.” It’s like, “Yeah, maybe you’re not Dostoevsky.” You know, like he was a man who could see way down into the bottom of things. And so you might disagree, it’s like, “Well, fair enough, but you’re you, and he was Dostoevsky.” So you know, you might wonder who you should be listening to. And if you look at historically, you can see that at the first moment when let’s say the religious ideal starts to crack, you get some positive things like, you know, science and the enlightenment.

But Marquis de Sade is right there waiting to manifest the spirit that Dostoevsky finds in Raskolnikov. It’s there in terms of… Sam, one of the things that I haven’t heard you talk about too much, but there’s something about what you said with him that brings it up to me—is that he sees this hierarchy or this religious structure as a totalitarian impulse. It’s this kind of structure that comes down and manifests itself. One of the things that comes down from the mountain, let’s say, in religious stories is also compassion. Without the hierarchy, there is—is it possible for there to be compassion? Because compassion is also the manner in which we accept that nothing ever reaches the ideal, that we can recognize it but we also know that it’s always kind of beyond us. And so there is a sense that it’s judging us; there’s also a sense in which it kind of yields because, you know, every glass is imperfect, and everything, every—every house is imperfect, every building—everything that we notice or we can also see that it doesn’t reach that ideal.

I don’t know if you ever thought about that a little bit.

Well, let me think about that for a second. We’ve never talked about compassion before, so yeah, well, when I think about compassion, I mean first of all I do not believe that compassion is an untrammeled moral virtue. And I think one of the terrible things about our society, one of the deadly eatable things about our society is that we’ve put compassion in the highest place unthinkingly. And compassion is for infants, and I really mean that technically! So like, if—imagine that your ethic was that you were 100% compassionate. Okay, so what are you like? Well, you’re like a good mother with a child under six months of age because, because human babies are born premature in some fundamental sense.

So, you know, the average gestation period for a mammal of about our size should be two years. And so our babies are born radically premature, and there’s complex reasons for that. One is that there’s a arms race, an evolutionary arms race between the circumference of the infant’s head and the dimensions of the pelvic hole through which the baby has to pass to be born. And if the pelvis of women was any wider, they couldn’t run. And if it was any narrower, than the child would die, like many children did, right? I mean the human birth mortality rate was abysmal right up until about, well, certainly a hundred years ago. And the baby’s heads are compressible, right? The bones aren’t fully formed when they’re born, and often kids are born and their heads are cone-shaped because they’ve been subject to such pressure during birth.

So it’s a really—it’s a narrow needle to thread, and there’s been a lot of evolutionary tinkering to get that right. Now, why in the hell did I say that? We’re talking about compassion. Sorry, I just lost my place. Compassion, right. Yes! You were talking about the excess of compassion.

Yes, yes, yes, sorry about that. So, you know, our infants are born unbelievably helpless. And they are basically prenatal until they can crawl. And that’s, say, seven or eight months. And so prior to that, because they’re so utterly helpless, everything they do has to be regarded as above moral reproach and 100% right. And so if you have an infant who is crying, who’s six months old or four months old, your job is not to judge the infant or to punish the infant or to discipline the infant. It’s like the infant has a problem, and all of your attention is to be focused on solving that problem, period! 100%! That’s it! And that’s great for people who are under six months! But it’s deadly; it’s increasingly deadly as the child matures! Because that kind of all-encompassing, “I will do everything for you” is also the enemy of development! And that’s—that’s the whole Freudian nightmare! I mean that’s what Freud put his finger on, and he knew that that was the pathology of the age: the eatable mother. And it’s like, “Yeah, well, welcome to the age of the eatable mother, everyone!” Because that’s certainly what we see now.

And so if you put compassion in the highest place, well then that’s what you have: is you have a state of being where everything is an infant. And the only hallmark of ethic is pity. Now, Jung talked about classic conceptions of what is in the highest place—God. He said, “Well, God rules with two hands: mercy and justice.” And that’s—that discrimination— you know how bad discrimination is? It’s like, “Well, no it’s not! It’s differentiation! It’s judgment! It’s putting things in their proper place! It’s setting the highest above the lowest! It’s formulating a pathway for further development!” And you know, a mother might say, “You’re just fine the way you are,” but what’s that to say to someone who’s, well, ten? It’s like, “You’re not fine the way you are! You’re ten! You’ve got a lot of growing up to do!”

And you’re probably not fine the way you are when you’re 20. It’s like you’re just a fraction of what you could be! And if it’s all maternal compassion—and I mean that in the symbolic sense—it’s all maternal compassion, it’s, where’s the impetus for development? And there’s no judgment there! And I think the most dismal thing you can tell 18-year-old boys in particular, especially if they’re miserable, is well, “You’re just okay the way you are.” And they’re not first of all! And no one thinks they are, including them! Well, they don’t! No one gives a damn about malfunctioning 18-year-old boys! Like… [Applause]

But you can say with the proper admixture of justice and mercy: it’s like, “Yeah, well, you know, you’re not so bad for 18, and you could be way more, and good for you!” And then you can encourage that. And that’s the spirit of justice, and that’s a patriarchal spirit fundamentally. It’s the encouragement and the calling forth of further development. And so you could see it like in terms of—we bring it back to something very ground, like very technical, which is walking down the street. So I’m walking from this point to that point, and there is a perfect way which I could get there, but if I do that, I might spend all my time trying to figure what that out, and I might not even be able to move! There’s also a manner in which I could go anywhere and fall over! So there has to be— even in almost every act of perception, that right hand and left hand that you talk—right? That mercy and justice has to have heart; there has to be allowance for imperfection and error.

Well, also orientation towards the aim! And getting that balance right! Well, that’s part of what consciousness does, I would say, is it constantly adjudicates between those two higher-order principles. Now, those aren’t the only principles. But—and there’s no final solution to that, right? You can’t just say, “Well, we’re all compassionate and we’re done with.” It’s like, “No.” And it’s— it’s an ongoing problem, right? With your kids, you’re always wondering, they make a mistake; it’s, well, how much do you forgive them? And how much do you say, you know, how about you don’t do that again? It’s really embarrassing; it’s terrible for you if you replicate that error; your life is going to be a bloody catastrophe; you’re old enough to figure it out.

It’s like clue in! And you might say, “Well, who loves the child more? The one who says, ‘Oh, it’s okay; everything you do is lovely,’ which it isn’t? Or the person who says, ‘You could do better?’” And you know the answer is, well, it’s a discussion between those two viewpoints constantly, constantly! Because—and in your relationship with yourself, it’s like how much do you forgive yourself? And the answer certainly is zero! It’s not zero! That’s—no one can live without being able to forgive themselves to some degree! But by the same token, you know, you don’t want to let yourself off the hook for every idiot error you make! And because that just doesn’t work, because there are real errors, and there are real consequences, yes, for you and other people! And—yeah! And there’s—the real, which you know, we’re all wondering about now!

This is one of the things that I think is quite comical, and I talked to Dawkins about this. You know, the rationalists, the scientists, the atheists, and the postmodernists as well, really took the idea of the divine to pieces. And even in the dismissive way that you see with someone say like Harris, although, like I said, he has his meditation and his—he dwells in the realm of the sacred. He just leaves it ineffable, right? And doesn’t ritualize it; doesn’t turn it into any kind of intellectual creed. And I think he does that because if he turned it into an intellectual creed, his rationality would just tear it to pieces, and so then he would have nothing!

You know? In any case,! We’ve dispensed with the idea of the sacred transcendent let’s say, and that’s the hard-headed way of thinking about the world. But what the reductive atheists didn’t quite figure out was the Dostoevsky problem! It’s like, well, if there’s no God, everything is permitted. Well, how about we don’t believe in objects anymore? Well that won’t happen! It’s like, “Yeah, really, that won’t happen, eh?” What makes you think that?

Like, do the Buddhists believe in objects? Not really! You know, the world’s maya, it’s illusion; there’s no transcendent material world; that’s a Western idea! And I really think it came out of, well partly Greece but certainly came out of ideas that are associated with the logos on the logic side, and on the religious side it’s like, there’s a transcendent world; it’s material, it’s a transcendent world; you can’t just do any old thing. You will be the object of world; the world will object to what you’re doing. And so then, it’s an inexhaustible source of corrective wisdom, and it’s the—in some sense—that’s the precondition for science! You have to believe that before you can be a scientist!

There’s a reality out there that transcends your knowledge! And the postmodern types, I mean, technically, they just rejected that completely. They collapsed ontology, which is the study of being, let’s say, into epistemology. Said no, it’s all words. It’s like, oh, I see! So we stopped believing in God; now we stop believing in the object! And if you’re wondering why the DEI types are taking on the STEM people, if you haven’t noticed that, and are going to win, by the way, it’s because they don’t believe in the objective world! What the hell do you need scientists for? You know that there’s no objective reality; it’s just whim! People can’t believe that; it’s like, you think that—I think we’re in a kind of—we’re in a moment! There’s this zeitgeist! There’s this change that’s happened. You’ve been part of it! Definitely!

Where suddenly people are starting to realize this! And I think it’s also going together with the extremity of the madness of the ideologues. And that exactly is it, that we are at a point where objective reality itself or mathematics themselves are being questioned by ideologues! Where two plus two equals five, where people are arguing for these types of things! And how do we—exactly how do we come back to that without, let’s say, bringing about this notion, this incarnational principle, we could say, right? That even things that we encounter in the world, they are embodiments of, embedded in higher truth, you could say that they kind of scale up. And that there’s a flexibility to it, right? It’s not— it’s not hard! But that flexibility is part of how we engage with it!

Yeah, well, as far as I can tell, and I mean, I think this is happening to some degree in the culture, is that, I mean, Jung believed, Carl Jung believed—and he was the wisest psychologist I’ve ever read by a large margin—he certainly believed that we had to delve—so Jung was a student of Nietzsche. I don’t mean he, you know, formally, but he was very well versed in Nietzsche and thinking, as much or more so, than in Freudian thinking. And he really devoted his life to addressing a proposition that Nietzsche put forward, and Nietzsche said, “Well, God is dead, and we have killed him, and we’ll never find the water to wash away the blood.”

You know? And he thought that was an absolute catastrophe because Nietzsche was a very smart man and a very wise man. But he made a real error, I believe, and he posited that because of this collapse of values, this precipitous collapse of the value that unifies all values or that is the precondition for all values, that we would be lost. He certainly felt that we would fall into nihilism or that we would fall prey to communist idolatry in particular, which he predicted dead on just like Dostoevsky did! But then he also said that the solution to that will be that the superman will have to appear—the ubermensch! And he will be that, the man who can create his own values!

And so both Freud and Jung were interested in that idea. Freud more peripherally, but Jung more consciously. And part of what Jung was trying to find out is, well, could we create our own values? And the answer he came up with was no, that’s not possible! And why? So the question is why? Well, you know, for the psychoanalysts, we were beset by fantasies, and these are sort of autonomous personalities that dwell in our subconscious, let’s say in our imagination, in our dreams, and that possess us from time to time. The spirit of rage, the spirit of lust, the spirit of envy. These ancient gods that possess us, and these values that—and temptations and impulses that come upon us that we cannot control. They’re part of our autonomous nature.

And because they have this autonomy, and so that would be the autonomy of emotions and the autonomy of motivations, and then even the autonomy of the spirit that unites motivations because we don’t know, for example, in the spirit of play— for example, play is an instinct. Play integrates base motivations into a higher unity! But it’s an instinct! And so Jung realized very rapidly that it wasn’t technically possible for us to create our own values. And that’s partly his stumbling upon the problem of complexity. So the world’s just too complex for us to generate our values in the span of a single life out of whole cloth autonomously, no matter how much of a superman we were.

Yeah! And that partly the reason that’s impossible is well, okay, so generate your own values. What the hell are you gonna do with your wife or your husband or your friend? They’re—what are they gonna—they're just gonna live by your values all of a sudden? Well, that’s what the postmodernists are demanding now, the radical types. It’s like my game, right? My identity! I’m whatever I say I am moment to moment! And there’s no negotiation! And that’s because they’re two years old! And I mean that; I mean that! I mean that technically!

I mean one of the things I learned partly from reading Freud is Freud had this idea of developmental fixation! And he noticed in his clients and his patients that people would get stuck at a developmental level. And so you’d be talking to an adult and all of a sudden they were four years old! And I learned to see that in my clients. And people I talk to, I’ll do that with, if they’re annoying me, you know, like, “Okay, who the hell are you?” “Oh, I see, you’re a 13-year-old mean girl.” Okay, away we go! I know who I’m talking to now!

And these solipsistic identity totalitarians are two years old! And two-year-olds are very governed by emotion, they’re completely incapable of negotiation, they’re egotistical in that their worldview dominates. They have no notion whatsoever of negotiated play! And their belief is their identity is 100% generated by them dependent on what they feel moment to moment, which is exactly how a two-year-old operates!

And most of them get socialized out of that by the age of four! And those that don’t have a very dismal time of it after that! So, and I think we have a lot of people like that now because screens have interfered with pretend play and negotiation, and because eatable parents and social systems have produced—have enabled a kind of immature narcissism that makes itself manifest in these absurd claims about identity! And that’s all part of creating your own values!

I can be whatever sex I want to be moment to moment! It’s like, fine! But how are other people supposed to deal with that? Because they don’t know what to do! Well, it doesn’t matter! They have to do exactly what I want them to! It’s like, hey, good luck with that, you and your Superman, your Ubermensch! With your own values!

And this is also partly why the liberals—the small L liberal types—are wrong in a fundamental sense, and this would include most therapists! It’s like, you might think of identity and of sanity itself as sort of an internal psychological arrangement. You know, so you have your act together; it’s sort of in your brain or in your psyche, and you’re sane, and there’s insane people around you! But you’re saying it’s like, “That isn’t really right; it’s sort of right.” But, you know, you’re saying, “If you’re a reciprocal partner in your marriage, you’re saying, “If you have three or four friendships that you’ve been able to maintain because you can act reciprocally,” and the sanity is actually the balance between you and you and your wife or husband, and then you and your wife or husband, and your friends, or you and your wife and your husband, or your husband, and your children, and your friends, and your larger family.

It’s—and it’s this nested thing that we already talked about, it’s like: you can’t be sane in the absence of that! Because that’s actually the definition of sanity. And it’s collective as well as—that’s why the kingdom of God is within you and without you. It’s exactly that! It’s like, “Yeah, you have a harmonious psyche, but you know, are you dancing with yourself to music that no one else can hear?” That’s not helpful!

There’s a communal element of it that has to be in place. And so if you’re saying your marriage is sane, and you have sane relationships with your children, you have sane relationships with your friends, and you’re a good employee or a boss, and you’re a participant in the civic world and all of that is embedded in this hierarchy that has the spirit at the top that enables