Hedonism, Taboos, Society, and Deprivation | Ben Shapiro | EP 418

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, along with an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as access all relevant ticket information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I'm looking forward to this, I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

I think almost all postmodernism is a form of projection, and so when they suggest that all narratives are about power dynamics, I think what they are saying is they wish to use their narrative as a power dynamic. A narrative they understand is the thing that drives human beings. And so what they do is they read their own willingness to drive human beings via a narrative like victim-victimizer into every narrative. So it must be that every narrative is driven by an underlying power substructure.

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Hello everybody! I'm talking today with Ben Shapiro. Ben and I have had occasion to speak privately and publicly a number of times, and he participated in the Exodus seminar that we released last year. We've been able to deepen and extend the dimensions of our conversation as we've progressed. Today, I'm going to talk to him about the counter-Enlightenment—the realization across many disciplines that empirical rationality are insufficient processes and modes of conceptualization to orient us in the world. I think that's an established fact now, and it's a revolutionary fact. It means that we see the world through a story. Ben and I are going to talk about just exactly what that means, not least about the fact that the left, in particular the radical left, has insisted that the fundamental story that the world should be viewed through, and is inevitably viewed through, is one of power. That leads to the victim-victimizer narrative that characterizes Marxism and that now so bitterly characterizes whatever the hell it is that we have in front of us now, this demented pastiche of postmodernism and a kind of meta-Marxism that makes everyone either a victim or a victimizer. We talk about that in detail, and so if you're interested in that, then this is the talk for you.

So happy New Year, Ben! Good to see you.

Yeah, great to see you!

Hey, so I thought we would avoid the political, at least to some degree, for the majority of this conversation. I actually have some ideas I want to talk to you about, and so I'm going to run them by you, and then I want your reactions, obviously. So here's the first thing I've been thinking about. So I'm writing this new book called We Who Wrestle with God, and one of its presumptions is that I suppose this is something I just talked about with John Verv too. We've been conceptualizing it, I suppose, as a counter-Enlightenment.

Here's what I think's going on at the deepest level. So the Enlightenment was predicated on the idea that we could orient ourselves in the world either empirically, as a matter of course with regards to the data at hand, or rationally using a prior structure of logic, or as a combination of both. But that turns out to be wrong, which is what the postmodernists figured out. And it wasn't just the postmodernists; the AI engineers figured it out at the same time, the cognitive scientists, the affective neuroscientists, people who are studying narrative.

The fundamental problem with the empirical and rational hypotheses—starting with empirical—is that we can't orient ourselves by the data alone because there's an infinite plethora of data. There's no way of wending our way through the data without prioritizing it in terms of importance. And that can't be done using empiricism per se or even rationally, because you have to specify a goal; you have to bring in the domain of values. Now, my hypothesis is, at the moment, the working hypothesis is that the structure that we use to prioritize the facts so that we can navigate forward is, when described, a story. A story is a representation of a hierarchy of attentional priority.

Now, the reason this is revolutionary, I think, is because it puts the story back at the center of the stage. Okay, so the I'd like your comments about that first, and then I'll turn to the next part of this.

I mean I think that that's totally true when you say that you have to have some sort of values frame to determine exactly how you view the data. That's obviously true. Because, as you say, there's an entire ocean of data out there, and how you prioritize which data is more important is dependent on how you value that data. That's true in everything; from abortion to the trolley problem, any time you get into some sort of dilemma about what human beings should do, the "should" is a question of values.

You can have as many facts as you want on the utilitarian aftereffects of that, but even the questions of utilitarianism are dependent on questions of values at the end. And that's why utilitarianism, as a sort of standalone philosophy, tends to fail. And when you say that the fill-in there is story—because story is a representation of values in an easily understandable way—that is absolutely true. I mean the fact is that what a story is is by nature something that is being told to you, and there's something deeply human about that. When someone tells you a story, you don't tend to question the story in the way a journalist would question a story. When someone says, "I'm going to tell you a story now," you listen all the way through to the story with reliance on the storyteller. That innately is an act of faith.

And so when you do that, what you're really saying is that I'm assuming the set of values for the sake of this story; I'm assuming the set of values that are embedded in the story. And then we can operate from those premises. And what makes a story good or bad to pretty much everyone is our innate understanding of the underlying coherence and values that are embedded in the story.

Okay, so that touches on a couple of other things that I think have become much more clear recently, too. So I was playing with ChatGPT yesterday, and I have an employee who used to be a student who's an expert at large language models now. The way that large language models work essentially is that they calculate conditional probabilities. And so you could imagine that there's a pretty high conditional probability that an "S" will follow an "E," for example, if you look at how letters are segregated, and a very low probability that "X" will follow "Z." You can model words based on the statistical likelihood of the juxtaposition of letters, and then you can model word-to-word correspondences, and then word-to-phrase, and phrase-to-sentence, and sentence-to-sentence, and paragraph-to-paragraph.

The large language model AI learning systems derive a picture of the statistical relationship between words at pretty much every level of possible statistical relationship. So it's not just word-to-word, like the old Markov Chains; it's word-to-fourth-word and word-to-fifth-word and word-to-tenth-word. And we actually have no idea how deep the models go. The answer is they go deep enough so that the output that they produce is sufficiently indistinguishable from human output that we find it acceptable as such. That's really the criteria.

But this is very cool, Ben, because when I talk to Sam Harris, one of the things he said to me repeatedly—and he said such things to other people—is that our interpretations of narratives are arbitrary. So he kind of goes postmodern on that front. If you're trying to interpret biblical stories, for example, all you're doing is reading into them, right? It's a projection that the story, as such, has no intrinsic meaning. But I think that this is not only wrong, but now demonstrated to be wrong.

Because what the AI learning systems can do is map out the relationships between words and concepts statistically. So now we have an empirical validation for the Freudian or Jungian notion of symbol. So yesterday, for example, one of the things that I've noted in stories—you see this in Disney movies, for example—is that a character like a witch, which is a, from a Jungian perspective, a symbol of the negative feminine that's associated with nature and chaos and the unknown and darkness and fecundity, there's a web of associated ideas. And you might say, well, those associations are just arbitrary.

But now we can say, well no, they're not! Because if you look into the entire linguistic corpus, you can map out the semantic distance between concepts. And that means that there's going to be clusters of concepts, and a cluster of concepts is no different than an archetype or a symbol. And so now we have at hand the possibility of an empirical mapping of such things. And we've been playing with these systems. So we've designed systems, for example, that can interpret dreams. So you can type in your dream, and the system will tell you what it means. You might say, well, that interpretation is just arbitrary, and I would say that's not arbitrary at all!

Every dream exists within a framework of meaning. The meaning is something like statistical distance from a web of associated meanings. If you flesh out that web of associated meanings, that's no different than delving more deeply into the substructure of the dream. That's no different than a formal analysis of a text. You know, that a real literary critic whose mind has been shaped in some ways the same way that an LLM model has been shaped would do. Someone with a great corpus of literary knowledge is going to be able to perform the same kind of analysis as an LLM, and none of that's arbitrary.

Okay, so the reason I'm pointing to all this is twofold. So you tell me what you think about this. So let's say that we've reached a kind of revolutionary agreement that the story is primary. So there's an implicit framework of value weights through which you look at the world that constitutes your character and your ethical presuppositions. If I told a story about how that M pattern made itself manifest in the real world, that would be a story, and I can infer from the story what your weights are, and I can use them to adjust mine. Okay, so let's say that all seems appropriate, and I don't think it's just appropriate.

I think this has been absolutely demonstrated in multiple disciplines simultaneously in the last 30 years, culminating in the large language model demonstration, which is an unbelievably compelling demonstration. Okay, so let's say now we've agreed that the story is primary. Now, that's what the postmodernists basically concluded in the 1960s. But here's what they did. They said, the story's primary, which was a great observation and a brilliant deduction. But then they said, and the primary story is victim-victimizer, right? And that's a strange twist on the Marxism that most of them were already encapsulated in.

Now, I've been criticized for my views on postmodernism, my assumption that it's a form of Marxism. And so here's what I think Marxism and postmodernism share and here's how I think they're different, and this is a good thing for conservatives to know. They share the victim-victimizer narrative, and that in itself isn't Marxist. That's a variant of the story of Cain and Abel. It's the ancient way of viewing the world through the lens of resentment, and Marxism was a variant of that. Now, the postmodernists dispensed with Marxism. They did that partly because people like Solzhenitsyn showed how brutal and catastrophic by necessity Marxism became.

Now, all those French postmodernists, they were steeped in Marxism. They didn't want to give it up, so they kept the victim-victimizer narrative and they turned it into something multi-dimensional, right? That would be the intersectional postmodernism, where you can be a victim or a victimizer on any dimension of comparison and all of them simultaneously. So it’s like a meta-Marxism. It’s like the full flowering of bitter resentment. But here’s the difference, and this is so stunning. It just hit me hard this week.

The Marxists insisted that the primary dimension of victim-victimizer, and really the only one worth considering given their universal human vision, was economic. And the bloody postmodernists put that at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy. And weirdly, although they accepted and propagated the victim-victimizer narrative, they inverted the hierarchy. So you can think about someone like Claudine Gay: there’s no way you can make the case that Claudine Gay was oppressed economically. In fact, economically, coming from a rich family as she did, she’s clearly a victimizer. But that doesn’t count, because for some incomprehensible reason—maybe—and this is where I would like particularly like your comments—the postmodern victim-victimizer types abandoned the economic issue.

That’s why poor white people can't be oppressed, even though I think the most compelling case you can make for the victim-victimizer narrative is on the grounds of economic inequality. Now, I’m not saying you can make an overwhelmingly powerful case for it even there, but if you were going to make a case that would be—you got to give Marx credit for at least identifying that as perhaps the cardinal dimension of potentially tragic inequality. So, okay, so what do you think about that? The prioritization of Marxism or the victim-victimizer narrative as the cardinal orienting story of mankind, and then this weird inversion of Marxism that characterizes the radicals that we see today?

I mean, I certainly think that there's a lot of support for that idea. There are a lot of philosophers who, for example, have treated Marxism not as an outgrowth of a capitalist economic theory, but actually as a sort of perverse and twisted outgrowth of a misread of Christianity. That Christianity is suggesting that the meek will inherit the Earth, but on an economic level, the meek aren't inheriting the Earth, therefore there must be some form of class exploitation that’s going on.

Reading Marxism as a weird offshoot of Christianity rather than a weird offshoot of capitalism is sort of one way of seeing that. Nietzsche actually did some of this, right? Nietzsche sort of suggested this when he treated Christianity as a perverse version of a victimizer-victim narrative that replaced the idea of good, strong, and beautiful and weak, nasty, and terrible, right? His moral prism was the idea that just because something is good and strong doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily bad, and he was creating what I think is a perverse view of Christianity as arguing against that, and then creating a victim-victimizer narrative in opposition to that.

When you talk about the postmodernists, I think one of the things the postmodernists are doing is I think almost all postmodernism is a form of projection. And so when they suggest that all narratives are about power dynamics, I think what they are saying is they wish to use their narrative as a power dynamic narrative. They understand it as the thing that drives human beings. And so what they do is they read their own willingness to drive human beings via a narrative like victim-victimizer into every narrative. So it must be that every narrative is driven by an underlying power substructure because their narrative, they believe, is driven by an underlying power substructure. And I think obviously that's wrong.

And again I think that that also comes from a postmodernism again as sort of a weird perverse offshoot of the Enlightenment in the sense that if you're talking about a priori view of the world, which is that everything that you have arrived at in society, everything that pre-exists to you is effectively arbitrary or a version of cram-down power, that there’s no validity to the world that you inherit, which is I think one of the premises of some of the changes that came about because of the Enlightenment, but also one of the premises of postmodernism, which is you get to wreck all the systems because you were born into an unfair system driven by perverse views of power—that's the great lie.

And so postmodernism has to have its own narrative. I mean, this of course is the great kind of meta-failing of postmodernism, is that in its desire to destroy all narratives as forms of power, they have to derive their own narrative in order to do that, right? Postmodernism is self-defeating on the very intellectual level, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not effective. And again, I think a lot of this lies in frankly a perverse misreading of biblical narratives.

So let me touch on that one. Okay, so I just wrote about the parable of the unjust steward. Now, it’s a very interesting parable. The story is about this employer essentially, and he has an employee, a servant, but an employee for all intents and purposes. He threatens to fire him for misusing his funds, and the employee goes out to some of his subcontractors and offers them this deal, where if they pay off a certain proportion of their debts immediately so that he has some money so that he can move forward in good faith apart from this side deal with his employer, then everything will be set straight.

And so he does that and generates enough capital to satisfy his master. Now there’s a certain dishonesty in his maneuverings, but Christ says to his followers that the children of Darkness essentially are sometimes wiser than the children of light, and that there’s some utility in serving Mammon properly as long as you don’t prioritize that over service to what is to the highest. It’s a very, very interesting parable.

And because, as you mentioned, there’s a reading of Christianity that has what you might argue is like an anti-materialist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist bent, but I believe that a close reading of the Gospels puts that interpretation completely off to the side. There is an emphasis that those who claim false power will be held to account for that and that those who are just and good but marginalized will be brought to the center, but that has nothing to do with an essential narrative of fundamental oppression.

It’s a much deeper idea than that: the true virtue will be rewarded, and false virtue punished, even if the false virtue is associated with material prosperity, right? The truth will be revealed. So Christ’s point in that particular parable is that the discipline that you can learn while managing, let’s say money, or managing money for someone else, managing material prosperity, is a virtue that is first of all genuinely a virtue and that can be a precursor virtue to service to the highest possible good, which it should be a subset of anyways.

And that it can’t just be tossed off casually as, you know, all service to material prosperity or life more abundant is to be regarded with extreme suspicion. You know, and it’s also not money that’s regarded—it’s not money that’s regarded as the primary sin in the Gospels either; it’s love of money. And that means the prioritization of money over God. It doesn’t mean the pursuit of life more abundant.

You know, this is also a place I think where the Jewish tradition has got things very right because my sense is there’s a laudable emphasis in the Jewish tradition on the goodness of a good life, right? The material present physical goodness of a good life, and that is different than that spiritualized reading of Christianity that makes everything in the material world like damned and corrupt by definition.

Yeah, it’s a very weird take on Christianity that Christianity is all about vows of poverty. I mean, given the development of the Western world, it’s the richest civilization in the history of the world, and it’s driven largely by religious Christians. If you look at the generation of American wealth, particularly in the late 19th century, for example, this is all religious men. John D. Rockefeller is attending church and dedicating churches. I mean, like, this kind of bizarre notion that Christianity is in direct conflict with capitalism or property rights or anything like that—that’s obviously foolish and wrong.

But that’s why I say I think that Marxism is a bastardization in many ways of a misread of the Bible. And I think that so many of our problems—because let’s be real about this—the Bible shaped the modern world. And so that means that even the perverse offshoots of the Bible shaped the modern world. And so even the victim-victimizer narratives that we see in the Bible, many of them are deliberately or maybe not deliberately missing the point.

You know, when people look at the Cain versus Abel narrative and they say that what that story is actually about, for example, is Cain being vicious and treating himself as a victim and Abel’s the victimizer and therefore he kills Abel and therefore he’s punished—the reality is that what that story is about is him recognizing the sin of that. I think that the Cain and Abel story—that’s fascinating about the Cain and Abel story—is everybody misses the end of the Cain and Abel story. The very end of that story is not just Cain going wandering in the wilderness; it’s that he’s the first person in the Bible who actually does repentance before God.

He says, “I’ve sinned,” and then God marks him with the Mark of Cain. The Mark of Cain is meant to protect him, right? The Mark of Cain is not meant to mark him for murder. He says, “I’m going to wander; I’m being outcast; people are going to kill me.” And God says, “I’m going to give you this mark specifically to protect you, because you’ve repented of the victim-victimizer sin.”

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I’m Ben Shapiro, and this is The Divided States of Biden Invasion on the southern border. Watch now on Daily Wire Plus.

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Well, and he also says, you know, he says that the sin that he’s committed is more than he can bear. And I believe the reason for that—it's very much germane to the current political situation, too—is that if you associate success of any sort with power, oppression, and corruption—and we should say that when success goes wrong, by the way, it does go wrong in the direction of power, right? So that power is a corrupting force, and there is a narrative of power. It’s just it’s not the fundamental narrative.

When Cain tears down his ideal, right? Because his ideal is clearly Abel; it’s Abel he wants to be, and he wants the relationship between Abel and the Divine to characterize his life, and then he destroys that completely out of spite and resentment. And that’s when he goes to God and says that his punishment is more than he can bear. And that’s because if you do tear down the ideal—like if you identify success with oppression—then all your success instantly becomes nothing but evidence of your evil. Well, you can’t imagine, as a psychologist, understanding how reward works—I can’t imagine a conceptual scheme more devastating to the function of the natural reward system than to associate the attainment of a goal with what’s most malevolent, right? There’s nothing worse you can do than that.

And you know, to give the Devil his due, so one of the things I’ve been thinking, tell me what you think about this—I’ve been writing about this with Jonathan Pajo; we wrote an article for The Ark on this topic. Pajo walked me through one of the images in the Book of Revelation, and in the Book of Revelation you see the whore of Babylon on the back of the beast that represents the state—this multi-headed beast. So the multi-headed beast is sort of a degenerate version of the unity of the state; it’s starting to deteriorate, so now it sprouts multiple heads, right?

Diversity of heads, you might say, right? Well, and I mean that in some real way, because if the state isn’t unified, it’s fragmented, and a fragmented beast has multiple heads, and the heads can fight. So there’s the demented state on top of the demented state. On its back is the whore of Babylon. And so the way that we’ve read that is that when the patriarchal structure deteriorates—so when masculinity itself becomes corrupt, the corruption of femininity accompanies it. The destruction of femininity is something like the disinhibition of female sexuality; it maybe transforms into a marketable commodity.

That’s a good way of thinking about it. You can think about that in terms of OnlyFans and online pornography and all of that immediate—or even the selling of women in short-term relationships for sexual purposes. Women can sell themselves just like pimps can sell them. And so there’s this correspondence between the beast—the patriarchal beast destabilizing—and then the feminine destabilizing. Of course, it has to be that way because one sex can’t destabilize without the other.

Now, what’s cool about this, from a conceptual perspective, is that the beast ends up killing the whore. And so here’s a reading of that: the power-mad state will draw you into its clutches with the promises of unbridled hedonism, right? It says, “You give us power, and we’ll enable you to do whatever you want,” which means to fall prey to your short-term hedonic whims. But then the consequence of that, of course, is that the tyrannical state, once instantiated, makes any pleasure of any sort whatsoever not only impossible but forbidden.

And then one more thing on top of that: so imagine we’re in a situation where God has died, and so the thing that united us has disintegrated. So now we’ve fallen into a state of disunion. Then you might ask, well, what powers arise in the aftermath of the dissolution of what’s unified? Here are some answers: the goddess or God of nature, the god of power, the god of hedonism—that would be like motivational whims, short-term motivational whims—and the god of despair, right? Of nihilism. So those would be powerful uniting stories that don’t unite everything, but that carry a substantive amount of explanatory weight.

You know, like Freud, for example, his explanatory narrative was sex, which is an explanation, essentially, of hedonism, and the biologists like Richard Dawkins fall into that trap as well—identifying even the human impetus to propagate across time with nothing more than the reproductive urge fundamentally. So, anyways, imagine that there’s a hierarchy of gods, so to speak. You lose the top unifying God—that’s the death of God. Elad tracked that as a recurring phenomenon in history, by the way, that paralleled the disintegration of the states upon which the states that were founded on that unifying vision.

So then it collapses into the next highest unifying narratives. Certainly power is one of those; hedonism is one of those. And then they have an alignment. There’s another twist on that too, which is that one of the reasons—one of the things you might ask yourself is why would you want to pursue power? And the answer would be, well, so I can compel other people to do things. Then you might say, well, compel them to do what? And then the answer to that’s got to be something like, well, I want them to do what I want them to do. And so that way, power becomes the handmaiden of hedonism.

And I think we see that in the modern radical leftist movements as well, because they are characterized by an unholy union of absolute hedonism and this insane insistence that power rules everything. And as you pointed out, that also justifies the use of power. I mean, I think that's also the only promise that the left in this context has been able to fulfill, meaning the promise of tearing down the existing systems was that it was going to bring about human fulfillment—a kinder, better world, a more accepting and tolerant world, and unbridled hedonism. Well, it turns out that the last of those is the only one that has actually been fulfilled in the modern world, and the others are all lacking. The others are just not there, because you actually need intermediate social institutions built from the ground up in order to actually provide for human fulfillment, or human unity, or any of these other things.

But what you can do is if you wreck all the intermediate institutions and you turn everybody into an atomized individual, you can certainly guarantee them the pursuit of whatever hedonistic pleasure is available, but that’s only for a time. I mean, as you mentioned, at a certain point, if there is to be any factor at all, the power is going to have to crush that too. Because, I mean, and this is what Orwell says in 1984, essentially, is that if the hedonic will exists in opposition to other wills, it cannot be a ronian general will, right? There can’t really be a ronian general will to just giant hedonic pleasure.

That eventually those hedonic pleasures come into conflict with one another.

Right. Exactly.

Exactly! That’s exactly why. Well, there’s also a very—there’s another reason too. So even, technically speaking, the hedonic drives are primordial; sex, for example, or aggression. And one of the things that characterizes primordial drives, apart from their power and their multiplicity, which can put them in conflict, as you said, is their short-term nature.

So one of the things Pajo has walked through with me is this is a very smart idea too. So imagine that the unifying structure of the meta-narrative deteriorates, and what you get are a variety of states of potential domination by hedonistic whims, emotions, and motivations, fundamentally. Now, they’re very short-term in their orientation because they want what they want in a single-minded way. That’s what a cyclops is, by the way—they want what they want in a single-minded way, and they want it bloody well now and they want it for the person in question. Now, the problem with that is that what I want now for me is not the principle upon which any social relationship can be founded, right?

Because if it’s for me only now—which, by the way, are the identity claims of the radical leftists—if it’s for me now, it’s certainly not for my wife, it’s certainly not for my children, or my parents, it’s not for the broader community. Like there’s no reciprocal altruism—there’s no productive, generous, reciprocal altruism in atomized individualism. And so then it can't survive.

So one of the things we are seeing—talked to Louise Perry about this too on the sexual revolution front—is that even without government suppression of sexuality, let’s say, what we’re seeing is a widespread abandonment of sexuality, such that, this is particularly true in Japan and South Korea, I think it’s 30% now of young people in Japan and Korea under the ages of 30 are virgins. We see it now that half of women in the West are unmarried at 30, half of them won’t have children, and 90% of them will regret it. We see the widespread turning to pornography, right? And you could think about that as the ultimate expression of short-term hedonic gratification, but we see the consequence of that. And the consequence of that is inability to perform sexually and the disruption of actual relationships.

So I don’t even think we’d have to see the state itself turn into a totalitarian beast and eradicate hedonism. I think that the pursuit of short-term desire—which is also, by the way, what psychopaths do, right? Like here’s something cool. I’ve looked at the literature, psychological literature on this in depth recently. So that hedonistic mating strategy of one-night stands, let’s say, that absolutely characterizes psychopaths, and so one of the hallmarks of the development of antisocial behavior among adolescents is early and frequent multi-partner sexual involvement, right?

So the short-term mating strategy that characterizes hedonism is literally indistinguishable from the dark tetrad orientation, which is manipulative, psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic. They had to include the—they had to widen the nomological spectrum to include sadism to get all the co-occurring pathologies properly clumped. And so it’s so interesting that this is something women should know, you know. If you’re dating a man whose fundamental orientation is short-term sexual gratification, he’s either pursuing a psychopathic path of manipulation, or you’re training him to become that person.

One of the things that also is fascinating about all of this is that the amount of sexual boredom in the society is extraordinary. So you have more sexual choice and variety available than literally any time in human history—given free license by the state because there are no intermediate social institutions in which sort of informal mechanisms of disapproval could make themselves felt. And one of the things it turns out psychologically that human beings are turned on by is taboo. And so when you get rid of literally every taboo, then people tend to get bored.

And then the question is, yeah, well, there’s no novelty, right? Exactly! Novelty goes away. And particularly men are driven by sexual novelty; it’s something that is very deeply ingrained. And the power of what marriage was supposed to be is it takes this short-term hedonistic desire and it said, because female virtue still existed, that in order for you to obtain this, you’re going to have to sublimate that desire for the building of something greater. I mean the part that Freud that everybody ignores is the part where Freud actually is in favor of sublimation.

It’s only later psychologists and philosophers who suggest that sublimation needs to be destroyed and done away with in order to free all forms of human artistic expression and material expression. But Freud never says that. Freud says you actually have to sublimate a lot of those short-term hedonistic desires to something higher, but again that gets back to kind of the fundamental premise that you were speaking to, which is there is this narrative of accepted values that we all used to live inside of. And when you destroy that narrative by saying for some reason that it’s not true because it’s not coming out of your own head, well once that happens we don’t hold the common narrative. There are no common narratives, and if there are no common narratives, then everything is then acceptable.

Then what exactly is the taboo? Where does the sublimation take place? There is no sublimation, and there is no future orientation because what sublimation really is is orientation of short-term in favor of long-term.

Well, and in favor of other people, right? So it’s long-term plus the social.

Yeah, well, so you can do that; you can think about this technically as well. If there’s no uniting narrative, here’s the necessary consequence: first of all, there’s no higher-order, superordinate aim. And that means motivation itself, on the positive side, takes a hit because we experience positive motivation and the impetus to move forward—we experience that only in relationship to an aim.

So if you destroy the ultimate aim, you destroy the structure upon which reward itself is dependent, apart from satiation-induced rewards, right? And they produce quiescence, not movement forward. Okay, so you lose positive emotion, then you multiply negative emotion. And the reason you do that is because one of the things that constrains your anxiety response, which is actually a calculation of the entropic distance to a given destination, technically, is if you produce a multiplicity of aims, then you increase anxiety proportionately.

Now, you know, there’s probably some optimization function so that a choice between three aims is great, and a choice between 100 is devastating. Okay, so that’s two things that happen when the unifying overarching theme disappears. But there’s a third thing too which is something you pointed to. So there’s a relationship between scarcity and deprivation and value, right? And so if you are served by a stimulus, let’s say, or resource—so you’re overfed—then as soon as you’re not hungry, food is of no interest. If you’re stuffed, food is nauseating.

Now, you remember in the Exodus seminar we covered—I don’t remember if you were there for this, but I think you might have been—there’s this situation when the Israelites are out in the desert wandering around like damned slaves and bitching about the fact that they have no tyrant. They start complaining about the fact that they don’t have enough to eat, and God sends them quails until they’re literally coming out of their nostrils. Yeah, first they complain about the manna, and then, well, they complain that they’re hungry, and God sends the manna. And then they say, “We’re tired of the manna; we want meat.”

And God says, “You’re going to have as much meat as you could possibly imagine.” Here come—God actually gets angry, and actually, Moses for the first time gets angry at the people over their requests at this point. Right?

Well, and what happens is because they have an absolute surplus of what they hypothetically find desirable, it becomes disgusting. And this is certainly the danger on the sexual front. So we don’t know, like we actually don’t know how much deprivation is necessary for proper sexual function to make itself manifest, right? You have to—and it doesn’t take much thought to figure this out. It’s a rare person who hasn’t primed their appetite with hunger before a Thanksgiving feast, right? You want to have a plate of pancakes at 5:00 if you’re going to have a Thanksgiving feast at 6. And you might say, well, why not? Because more is better.

And the answer is no! The right amount is better. And the right amount involves a certain amount of deprivation. And I think that's—I read this interesting article yesterday showing that women are more likely to lose romantic interest as a relationship progresses than men. I don’t think that’s surprising; they’re higher in trait neuroticism, so they’re more likely to experience negative emotion.

And then, women have more—their response to sexuality is more multi-dimensional than men, because the risks are higher in any case. One of the ways around that is for men and women in a marriage to stay apart from each other for periods of time. These researchers looked at eight hours. If you get some distance, the desire reemerges.

Then you were talking about novelty, and so it’s pretty interesting too, so you said men will chase novelty in a sexual relationship. Well, I think part of what is incumbent on married individuals is to figure out how to keep that novelty alive, right? So that means that each of them have to be transforming. And I think the best way to do that is in relationship to a spiritual pursuit.

And then I think women also want novelty, but the novelty they’re looking for in men is probably more multi-dimensional and performative, right? Because women are hypergamous, and they like men who are above them in the hierarchy of status, let’s say, or capability. And I think what women want are novel displays of hypergamous capacity, and that is the novelty orientation for women in relationship to sexuality.

Well, one of the things that’s actually fascinating about this is that, biblically speaking, not to get into abstruse Jewish law, but I mean this is actually—right in the forget about the absurd Jewish law and right in the Bible, one of the mandates is that for a period of at least one week out of every month, married couples are not supposed to have sex. Right? This is like right in the Bible!

And so that one of the purposes of that, presumably, would be to create the scarcity and the novelty that you’re talking about, because if you’re married, then obviously there’s tremendous availability of sex. I mean, contra every single weird public opinion out there, married people tend to have sex significantly more than single people, and it is not particularly close. But theoretically, the scarcity goes away, the novelty goes away, and then so does the romance.

And so, anyways, that’s a danger, right? And so the Bible literally says, like one week out of the month minimum, you’re toast; you can’t do anything during this particular week. And I think that, again, there’s a good rationalistic and there’s a good way—I shouldn’t say rationalistic, because there’s a reason for it. But it’s something inherited wisdom over time is sort of the message of the Bible.

And I think that that’s, you know, not knowing why you do the thing, but do the thing, and then it works is in some ways much of what we’re talking about—because that’s the story of what works is the story, right? That’s what we’re really talking about at the end of the day.

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Yeah, what works? What works, all things considered, over the longest possible span of time and situation. Yeah.

And so with regards to narrative, imagine that each person's life is a narrative, right? When described, now there’s a competition for validity between those narratives. Here’s what we do. So Mer Eliot tracked this with regard to the development of religious narratives. So you imagine it’s easy to understand, and it’s very much like a large language model derivation by the way. You can imagine that there’s a bunch of natives sitting around a campfire talking about their—the ten people they admire the most.

Okay? So now what that points to is that there’s a commonality across those people, and the commonality is a commonality of what constitutes what is admirable. Now you can imagine another person, a young person maybe, sitting there listening to these accounts, right? But then you ask him later what the discussion was, and he doesn’t tell you all ten stories. He gives you an amalgamated composite of what constitutes the admirable hero as a consequence of deriving the central point from the amalgamation of ten stories.

Now this is exactly what young boys do when they play the role of father in a pretend play bout. They don’t actually imitate directly, through one-to-one corresponding mimicry the actions of their father; they watch their father in multiple situations and abstract out the commonalities that make him a father, right? So we abstract out the commonalities of admirability across a set of compelling stories. Those stories echo to us because they attract our interest, right?

So that’s the correspondence between the archetype and the soul—that’s a good way of thinking about it. Then you can imagine that as the hero’s stories aggregate and increase in sophistication, the transcendent nature starts to make itself more and more manifest because you get a pattern that’s been applicable across many generations and situations. And so this is also the answer to the problem of pathological consensus.

You know, like it’s a conservative dictum that you should do, by and large, what other people do, but obviously that goes astray at times like when we’re possessed by idolatry and ideological idiocy, Nazi Germany, Maoist China, Stalinist Soviet Union, and all modern universities, let’s say.

So then you might say, well, we still need the consensus. And what has worked and what we’ve observed to work is a consensus. What do we do if that goes astray? And the answer is, well, we also have the consensus that’s developed across time. And the consensus that’s developed across time is instantiated in our traditional narratives, so they’re an anchor that can be used to resist movement, let’s say, in a pathological direction when the consensus itself goes wrong.

That’s what it looks like to me. And I think that’s associated with the vertical axis of Mount Sinai symbolically, as well as the horizontal axis that really does constitute something like a consensus.

So Jordan, I wonder what you think about this proposition that’s occurring to me while you’re talking, which is that one of the great failures that we’re experiencing in modern society, obviously, is a failure of conversation. That there’s a difference between verbal and oral learning and just reading things.

And that as we become a society where we don’t talk to each other as much, that one of the things you lose about the narrative is the person who’s telling you the narrative. That when your parent tells you a bedtime story, it’s not just the bedtime story—it’s that your parent is telling you the bedtime story. When you sit around the campfire and you abstract that larger story, it’s the people who you’re talking to, who you trust to be good people, who are telling you their various stories that allow you to abstract that out.

And so as literacy has increased over the course of the world, that’s allowed for the spread of knowledge, but it’s also shallowed some of the stories themselves. Because you sitting in a room reading the Bible is actually not the same thing as you sitting in a room with people discussing the Bible, like we did during the Exodus seminar, and getting various points of view, then abstracting out the lesson.

And so as we move from a society that engages in conversation and oral learning to a society that’s very much about you and advice in front of you or you and a book in front of you or you in a TikTok video in front of you, that isn’t actually enough. That the form of tradition that we need to get back to is a form of oral learning and conversation—a sort of back-and-forth dialogue that allows us to actually understand the narratives in a powerful way. Otherwise, you do end up with the postmodern dilemma of I’m sitting there, and I’m reading a text that I just discovered, and I’m bringing whatever my prior biases are to that text.

You actually do need a teller of the tale in order for you to fully understand what’s going on.

Well, you point to a bunch of things there. So one is, okay, so let’s blame some of this on the Protestants and their insistence that the biblical corpus per se is sufficient.

Now, one of the huge advantages of that was the promotion of literacy worldwide, so we’re going to give the Devil his due, but it does have the problem that—two-fold problem that you just described. The first problem—Jung pointed to this—the first problem is that Protestantism tends towards fractionation. And you can see that with the multiplicity of Protestant churches, because if it’s just you in the text, there’s an infinite number of ‘s. And I think the logical extension of this are the identity claims that the radical types on the hedonic left are now putting forward, right?

I’m the interpreter; I’m the only interpreter. It’s between me and God, and no one else. It’s like, well, that’s great unless you’re deluded, in which case the god that you think you’re following might not be God at all. Now then you might say, well, how might I determine whether the god that’s calling to me is God or Satan, let’s say? Part of your answer is, you have a two-fold answer: One is, well, is the story being told to you by people, actual embodied people that you actually respect as a consequence of your knowledge of, let’s say, their ethical conduct?

And the other is, well, is there an active and living discussion around such issues that’s conducted by a group of such people? So, you know, one of the things Pajo has helped me with a fair bit is understanding more deeply the role of ritual and congregation in the maintenance of social structure, but also in the transmission of the stories that need to be transmitted.

As an academic type and also as someone, let’s say, as an intellectual, prone to the temptations of the Luciferian intellect, it’s very enticing for me to think that it can just be me in the text. But the problem with that is that you’re blindest at your blindest spots, and you need that additional community to tap you out of your delusional self—delusional, unconscious self-serving atomistic individuality into something more like the universal space.

And you know, I talked to Sam Harris recently, and Sam and I—and I suspect you as well—share a preoccupation with the reality of evil. And part of the reason that Sam beat the drum so hard for objective standards of morality grounded in science—an attempt to reduce the narrative to the objective—was because he wanted to put a firm foundation under claims that there was a transcendent good.

And the only way he could see to do that was through the empirical route. Now, you know, I’ve been looking at Robert Axelrod’s work on the emergence of cooperation in iterated systems and I think—so I think there actually is a place where the approach that Sam favors can be integrated with the sort of things that you and I and the Exodus participants, for example, have been discussing.

So imagine that there’s a landscape of repeated interactions, let’s say they’re voluntary trades of information, of emotion, of goods. The voluntary part’s important. And that across those trades there’s a pattern. Now Axelrod showed in his computational simulations that if you and I were trading under certain conditions, the best strategy—the winning strategy in a competition of strategies—would be for you and I to cooperate. But if you cheated, for me to whack you with proportionate force and then to go back to cooperation—that’s tit-for-tat.

Now, you imagine that our lives are characterized by a sequence of repeated trades in multiple dimensions with multiple players in a game of indeterminate length, and that there’s a pattern of interaction that is optimal across that plethora of interactions. I think that the highest order narrative that grips us, you’d find that compelling, that would be told by the people we admire, and that’s in concordance with the biblical narrative—is a map of the strategy that works best in repeated interactions with multiple people across the broadest possible span of time.

So that’s a place where the empirical and the theological could reach perfect concordance.

And well, I think the evidence points in that direction.

Yeah, I totally agree with all of that. And I also think that when you talk about, you know, the fact that these narratives have to be told to you by people that you trust, that people who you consider to be virtuous and all the rest of this, I think that even people who don’t advocate for that understand it innately, which is why attacks on the church, for example, are never attacks on the Bible. Those are not effective attacks, right?

The sort of attacks that you see from Richard Dawkins, for example, about the text of the Bible, never has any impact on people who are truly religious, because truly religious people exist within the context of religious communities. The most damaging thing to any institution is an attack on the people who comprise the institution and make the rules as non-virtuous and violative of the fundamental principles of that institution.

This is why the attacks that have been most damaging to the Catholic Church have nothing to do with Catholic doctrine and everything to do with the activities inside the Catholic Church surrounding, for example, cover-ups of child molestation. It’s why attacks—any institution are going to be the most telling based on taking people who you previously thought were virtuous advocates for the system and bringing them low and tearing them down.

And I think that one of the things that we’ve seen wholesale—that’s also, that’s why, so in the Gospel texts, Christ’s fundamental enemies in the earthly world, so to speak—excluding transcendent evil—are the Pharisees, the scribes, and the lawyers.

So I’ve been going through those stories in depth, and so the Pharisees are moral hypocrites. They’re the people—see, this is another way that we can sort these disputes out with people like Dawkin and Harris, because what they do is they identify the religious enterprise with the totalitarian proclivity, but that bespeaks a lack of differentiated judgment.

Because this is where I think the arrow hits its mark: the worst totalitarian hypocrites use the religious enterprise as the most effective disguise for their psychopathic maneuverings. And so—and I think the separation of church and state is a protection against that.

So, like—and we know this clinically to some degree, because if I’m a narcissist—a psychopathic narcissist—I’m going to claim victim status and milk the compassionate for all their worth, being relatively callous myself and unfeeling in the presence of other people’s pain, perfectly willing to manipulate that. And then I’m also going to proclaim, exactly as the Pharisees do in the Gospel texts, I’m going to proclaim my moral virtue to elevate my standing in the community. I’m going to pray in public like the protesters do, and I’m going to take the best seats in the synagogue, right?

By parading around my moral virtue. And so that ties into what you’re saying, because the most effective way of demolishing the traditional proprieties, the traditional endeavor, is to claim to embody them while using God’s name in vain, while pretending moral virtue oriented towards the highest.

I’m saving the planet! Well, really, in reality, doing nothing but pursuing your own evil agenda. And so we could be wise enough to see the wolves in sheep’s clothing, to see the totalitarians like the Iranian fundamentalists, who use the religious enterprise to justify their own self-serving behavior and then bring—they milk it, and they discredit it simultaneously.

So that’s like a truly malevolent act, right? It’s only for you. Plus it discredits what is holy, and that’s praying in public. And there’s a tremendous amount of the Gospel texts devoted to insisting that that’s a cardinal ill, and that’s the same thing as using God’s name in vain. The third commandment of Moses, right?

It’s—and I think it’s one of the cardinal sins of our time to parade your moral virtue around in the name of what’s holiest when all you’re doing is elevating your own moral status.

I mean, I certainly think that’s the case. And I also think that we have to be careful on the other side not to fall into the easy use of the charge of hypocrisy to destroy the principle. Because you can see that exact same attack being wildly misused. You can see some—everyone is sinful. And so the idea is that if I can discredit an idea by attacking the advocates of the idea as sinful, well then you can basically destroy any ideology that way.

It’s why religious people, for example, very often say, “Oh, we’re held to a higher standard.” Well, I mean, to be fair, you should be held to a higher standard. You do proclaim to be religious. But it’s also very easy to destroy entire swath of ideology based on this and using human beings’ inherent fall and inherent sinfulness in order to discredit, you know?

And you see this literally with every ideology, right? Capitalism is bad because of Bernie Madoff, etc.

Okay, so I got a good story about that for you. So you remember in the story of Noah? So Noah shepherds his family and the human race, for that matter, through the return of the pre-cosmic chaos, right? The waters come back; God floods everything, returning it to the state that preceded creation and brings up a new civilization. And Noah is to thank for that.

Now he goes out after he lands because it’s been a harrowing trip, let’s say—plants a vineyard and proceeds to get rip-roaring drunk. And so he drinks like three gallons of wine and passes out, and he’s laid there naked. I think his robes are lifted up over his body, and he’s laying there in his tent exposed. And his son Ham comes along and has a pretty good laugh about how stupid his father is, which is a pretty damn ungrateful thing to do and foolish, because Ham would be—it'd be a great accomplishment of Ham to be half the man that his father was.

So anyways, he laughs at Noah, and then he gets his brothers and he says, “You know, the old man’s drunk out of his mind. Why don’t we go and he’s all sprawled out? Let’s go over there and we can all join in a good laugh.” And his other sons, Noah’s other sons, take a blanket and they back into the tent and they cover Noah, okay? And so they show him respect despite his flaws.

Now, the way that story ends is that in tradition, slaves are the descendants of Ham. And so the moral of the story is that if you’re foolish enough to dispense with your wise traditions because you can point to flaws that inherit to men better than you, far better than you—let’s say Thomas Jefferson for example—that you are walking a pathway that will turn you and your descendants into the slaves of people who have proper respect for tradition. And that seems to me to be, well like that’s spot on.

That’s dead on. It nails the pride, because Canada is unbelievably appalling in this regard. Our politicians will apologize even for imagined historical wrongs, even if they show no sign whatsoever of being anywhere near as wise as the people who hypothetically committed those wrongs, just so they can parade their moral virtue in comparison to the great men of the past.

And one of the things too that is worth thinking about in that regard is there’s almost nothing more cowardly than attacking the dead, because even more than the unborn, they can’t defend themselves, right?

So, well, and it’s very difficult to read into that attempt to demoralize and devalue the past. You can’t read into that the attempt on the part of the people who are doing the criticism to be better people. You can read into that their willingness to condemn and make contemptuous to redound to their unearned moral virtue. And that defines the universities now; you’ve got all these bloody literary critics who are above the people whose works they depend on and criticize—all these art critics who have perverted the museums with their commentary on the hypothetical sins of the artists.

That’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s very amusing to consider that their destiny is going to be indistinguishable from that of slaves.

I mean, one of the things that you’re talking about here, again gets back to that victim-victimizer narrative: the more successful you were as a human being, dead or alive, the more you are then targeted for your failings because your success must be a sign of your oppression. And that’s really most of what we’re watching right now is the coalition of the supposedly marginalized who are coming together to destroy the thing that they hate in common—not because they have anything in common themselves, but because they believe that the reason they’re marginalized is out of some sort of unfairness or pure power dynamic, as opposed to the fact that in a free society, the people who very often end up marginalized are the people who don’t abide by the common rules of the society.

And in a working society, those rules are good. It doesn’t mean every rule is good, but it means that a lot of rules are pretty damn good.

Look, Ben, it’s also the case that the intersectionalists basically make this claim even though they don’t notice. Like we could each find dimensions along which we were marginalized, and maybe still are for that matter. I mean, within every human being, there are going to be dimensions of lesser attainment and greater attainment. And so there’s some dimension along which we are comparative victims, right?

And I mean, it’s certainly the case as well, and the intersectionalists have this right to some degree, is you do run across people from time to time who appear to have very little going for them across very many dimensions, right? And their lives are genuinely difficult and hard. Now I’ve met many people like that in my clinical practice, and I’ve also observed, and this is another error in the determinism that’s characteristic of the victim-victimizer narrative and the Marxist and materialist approach to the world.

You would expect that people who were marginalized on many dimensions simultaneously might harbor a certain amount of bitterness and resentment as a consequence of that, and a certain amount of justified hatred for the status quo. But my experience as a clinician has been that people who have been battered and tormented may be more likely to collapse altogether, but they also seem to me to be more likely to have the opportunity to derive an absolutely stellar character out of their misadventures, right?

To conclude from everything that they have been subject to—that taking on a rule of the bully themselves, for example, if they were from an abusing family, is the wrong conclusion to derive from that example. And we know that this is true even mathematically, because if all abusers abused, it would take no time for every family to be characterized by abuse.

So what you see in the clinical literature is that people marginalized by abuse, let’s say, genuine abuse—if you look at an abuser, someone who abuses their kids, they are statistically much more likely to have been abused as kids. But if you take the population of everyone who has been abused in childhood, only a small proportion of them become abusers again.

When you talk about the marginalized and, you know, the ability to rise up from that, it seems to me that very often the people who have legitimately experienced the hardship in life, as you say, the preconditions to success are sometimes there specifically because once the conditions for their marginalization are removed, if given the opportunity, they can succeed.

What we’re seeing in society is the is a self-enervation: it’s people who are self-marginalizing, people who don’t actually have any reason to claim marginalization or very little to claim marginalization—who don’t have tons of obstacles—and then when they are unsuccessful, it is significantly easier to suggest that it must be some external force that is marginalizing me.

This is how you fall into conspiracism, is by suggesting like, well, you know, you’ve had—I see this in Claudine Gay’s essay in the New York Times, where she’s a victim of circumstance and she’s been victimized by everybody. No one’s had more opportunity in life than Claudine Gay, but it would be much harder for her, because she’s had all these opportunities, to say, okay, well the reason I’m failing is because of marginalization.

And if I weren’t marginalized, I would do X, Y, and Z. She can’t really say that because she wasn’t presented with the marginalization. When it comes to, you know, people being bullied and people who are being mistreated, I think one of the great lies that that we’re told is that the reason bullying has to stop is because if you are bullied, you are thus much more likely to be destroyed as a human being.

I find that many of the most successful people I know—again, this is anecdotal—but many of the most successful people I know were viciously bullied as children, and in fact use that as fuel to fire them to greater success, because the idea was, “Okay, I do have to work twice as hard. I do have to—but if I do that, then I am going to succeed.”

There’s—I think, in other words, there’s a difference between labeling the entire system unfair and labeling the situation in which you live unfair; those are two very different things. If the entire system is unfair, there’s no way to fight against it. If the situation which you currently are is unfair, the way to fight against that is to move beyond that particular situation.

I think you would be hard-pressed to find a man or woman who hadn’t been bullied. You know, I’m thinking about a friend of mine who was a pretty tough kid. He ended up going off to work in the rigs when he was about nine, and he was a tough kid.

I think he got kicked out of school when he was in grade nine. I mean, it was grade 10; I think he got kicked out of school if I remember correctly because he body-checked the very well-built and strong gym teacher in a hockey game and then challenged him to a fight. So this was a tough kid; this gym teacher could do an Iron Cross, by the way. Like it was a major feat for this 16-year-old kid to stand up to him.

I’m not justifying it; I’m just pointing it out. But I also remember him in grade six being chased and pounded daily by the bullies who were in grade eight. You know, I mean most boys—I don’t know any—I can’t remember any of my childhood friends who weren’t subjected to some degree of sustained bullying because even if you’re the toughest kid in your class, you’re not the toughest kid.

There’s no 12-year-old—or virtually none—who’s tougher than the 15-year-olds that just doesn’t happen. And then you might say, well, what about women? It’s like, have you watched women? They may not be getting into physical altercations, although that’s not as rare as we think it is, but the probability that any given woman has been unmercifully bullied by some pack of Mean Girls for some prolonged period of time is virtually certain.

That could happen within a family as a consequence of sibling rivalry, or it can happen in the broader social sphere. And you know, I’ve been reading about the Christmas stories again. I’ve been writing about the Gospels, which is why I’m bringing them up. But, you know, you see in the birth of Christ the same threatened beginnings as you see in the birth of Moses, right?

So Christ is born in the lowliest of places and worse than that, he’s subject to severe murderous persecution by the state authorities. Now, Moses is threatened in the same way. He’s born to Jewish slaves, and the Pharaoh determines that all the firstborns are going to be killed. Now you might ask, well, why are these two great heroes presented as victims?

And the answer is, well the vulnerability that enables us to weave a victim-victimizer narrative around our own lives is built into every life. Like everyone starts out unbelievably vulnerable and subject to the depredations of nature, chaos, and the depredations of social order, and we all have to contend with that. And one conclusion to draw from that is that the world is dominated by power; the proper story is oppressor and oppressed.

And the appropriate response is the kind of bitter resentment that characterized Cain. And another response is power corrupts, and the world is full of unfortunate vulnerability, but our job is to act as moral agents to not make a bad situation worse and to strive toward the good. And that’s also the claim that our reliable traditions were founded on the latter proposition and not on the basis of power.

And I also think, so I looked into the anthropological literature on the tradition of the elder. So most societies have elders. Now, if the Marxists were correct, the elders would be the rich people who had power, and they would have been using their socioeconomic status as a kind of cudgel to dominate inclusion in positions of authority.

That isn’t what happens in the anthropological literature. The elders are I think the easiest way to characterize them. They’re people who have a lengthy, publicly observable, and genuine history of honesty, productivity, and generosity, and they’ve derived a wisdom from that. And the reason they’re elders is because people go to them voluntarily to ask them for their advice, right? Well, that has nothing to do with power. Quite the contrary.

Quite the contrary. And you have to be a real bloody cynic to look at a functional society like the United States and say, oh, that’s all power. It’s like, no, some of it is power, and when it corrupts, it corrupts in the direction of power, just like a marriage might if husband and wife start to play tyrant to one another.

But that doesn’t mean that that’s the bloody fundamental story upon which the whole thing was founded.

That’s exactly—obviously we’re in agreement on that. I mean, I think that the attempt to do away with traditional wisdom, particularly in the form of the elderly, has also had some pretty dire aftereffects—not just in terms of loss of wisdom, but in terms of we ourselves.

One of the purposes of a community like a traditional social community—the elders in that society provided what you’re talking about: the wisdom and the knowledge and the advice. And in return, the people who were younger basically supported them. I mean that was the economic deal. You supported your parents. And one of the reasons that people had kids is because they knew that in their old age they would have to be supported by their children.

But their responsibilities were not alleviated. The grandparents had a major role to play in kinship networks. It’s not as though they just sort of dropped off and lived in the back room and watched TV all day. They actually had a role to play in child care and child rearing and advice to parents and all the rest of this sort of stuff.

And then gradually as we saw the encroachment of an ever larger state that basically took away the responsibility of parents to grandparents, what you saw was the marginalization of the elderly. It didn’t make the elderly more valuable; it made them significantly less valuable. The fact that you, as a child, were supposed to support your parents meant that you also made demands of your parents like, “I need your advice on something. I want to know what’s going on.”

Being able to ship Grandma off to an old age home, or shuffle her onto Social Security, and then, you know, let her spend her waning years watching soap operas has been devastating—not only for the elderly in the United States who have largely been marginalized, but to younger generations who really need the wisdom of the elderly in order to continue to function.

We’ve broken the chain of transmission, and we have done that through, I think, economic methods. And one of the great untold stories that I think some of the nationalist conservatives have right is that economic conditions have broken down many of the social relationships that were not primarily economic, but had economic benefits to them that have now been removed by the state.

Now, I think where the nationalist conservatives are wrong is they attribute that to capitalism, whereas I think that it’s much more state interventionism in these particular areas alleviating burdens of responsibility. But one of the things that at root is there is that we tend to think in Western society of responsibility as burden, when in fact responsibility for the vast majority of people across time is actually a form of freedom.

Responsibility is meaning and freedom, yes. I mean, as you become—it’s why— as you become older, you, as a person, want more responsibility. You don’t just want the ability to go out on a Saturday night; you also want the responsibility that comes along with that. Because every duty, every freedom is going to come along with a certain level of additional responsibility if you want to use that freedom wisely.

It’s why, you know, when you see small children—I watch my own kids, right? They’re 9, 7, and seven months. When I watch them, the thing that they play at is not actually cruising around in the car. What they tend to play at is the role play of responsibility; it’s why small girls play at being mom, right?

They take dolls, and they play at being mom. It’s why young boys will play at building things. It’s an actual social function that they are playing at very often, and that’s something that we—that kids aspire to. Then we, as adults, are like, well, I can’t believe my kids want to—they can’t wait to become adults; look at all the responsibilities I have. But I remember back to when I was a kid; that was a cool thing. Responsibility was a cool thing.

And I mean, I still think as an adult that responsibility is a cool thing. The coolest thing that I do is the stuff that I’m responsible for—whether it’s my kids and my wife and my household or whether it’s the employees of my company. Like that, the more responsibility you have, the— I think frankly the cooler your life is because those things don’t hem you down; they define you.

Without that, what exactly—well, we could say voluntary responsibility: voluntarily undertaken and accepted. Yes, right. I don’t think there’s any difference between that and meaning now. If it’s forced on you, that’s a different story.

But we also know from the biblical corpus as well that there’s a tremendous emphasis by God, let’s say on objecting strenuously to excessive use of force. Never use force if it’s not justified, and it’s justified in the most constrained of circumstances. Moses is bitterly punished for using force even at the end of his life.

So, you know, here’s something too, with regards to your observation on the elderly: older people—Jonathan Haidt has written a fair bit about the codling of the American mind, and we see the infantilization of children and young adults and even adults themselves increasingly characterizing educational institutions, say.

But maybe part of that is a consequence of the breakdown of intergenerational transmission of knowledge with regards to child-rearing, because one of the things I’ve noticed with my kids is that they had the model of our family for disciplining—for disciplinary practices, and they know those models. But I’ve watched, and it’s often useful for them to have the example of the response of Tammy and I to the misbehavior of our grandchildren to bolster my children in their conviction that intervening to discipline them so that they’re socially desirable is acceptable.

So imagine this, Ben. The fundamental drive behind infant care is service to the infant. It’s self-sacrificing service to the infant, and the rule is if the infant manifests any displays of distress, that your primary moral obligation is to alleviate that. And that’s 100% true for the first eight months, let’s say.

Okay, so the default feminine proclivity is the amelioration of emotional distress: immediate amelioration of emotional distress. Now that becomes problematic when there’s a conflict between short-term emotional distress and long-term thriving. And you might say that the role of wisdom is to know when to step in to allow short-term emotional distress to be tolerated or even encouraged if the benefit is an incremented long-term adaptation.

Now older people are wise enough to know, well, you know, your kid wants that toy in the grocery store right now and is willing to have a fit about it. But if you give in to his tantrum and reward it, you’re going to produce a child who other children can’t stand, and because he’ll play in that infantile manner whenever he’s in a social circumstance. Now you can model that with new parents and say, “Look, here’s how you regulate the child’s emotional distress,”