Q & A 2017 09 September

Near here now. How do I know that I'm actually live? Hey guys, can you hear me? Hi everyone, good to see you. So, I'm a little on that tired side tonight, so I'm going to start with a relatively straightforward question. Somebody asked what's up with all the Lennon pictures in your house and how is it to look at them every day.

Well, about in 2001, in a fit of manic collective insanity, I decided to start seeing if I could find Soviet-era artifacts online, mostly through eBay. I had read a paper by James Pennebaker who claimed that past events start to become historically significant about 15 years after the relevant event. So, 2001 was 15 years after their fault essentially, after the fall of the Berlin Wall—close enough.

I started looking on eBay to see what sort of Soviet artifacts I might be able to find. First of all, I was kind of curious about what would be available for purchase. I also thought it was deeply ironic that the most free market of platforms ever devised, which would be eBay, could now be used to scavenge communist-era artifacts from Russia.

You know, it just seemed like, to be someone who was raised during the Cold War, the fact that I could buy things like heads of Lenin on eBay was just too compelling to not pass up. You know? And so I started buying things that I had some familiarity with because of what I've read historically.

The first thing I bought was about a three by five silk flag that was awarded to a factory for meeting its five-year production quota. I don't know what you know about those infamous quotas, but what would happen is that there were dictates sent down on high about how much factories were supposed to produce, and the implied what the implication was, produce or else by any means necessary.

So, two things happened. Three things happened. The goods were often shoddy because they were rushed, there was deception about how much was actually produced, and then people were overworked and under-supplied. It was a bad system, but it was very interesting to actually have one of these flags and see what they were like.

Then I bought a clock—a stainless steel clock, a wind-up clock that was a submarine clock, and it was bomb-proof! So, I thought that would be handy if someone ever bombed my house and I needed to know what time it was. So, I bought that. Then I found this painting that's actually off to my left here—it's five Russian revolutionaries all young and stalwart-looking, standing on the edge of a cliff with a red soldier or a white soldier off to the side. They're all shackled together, and he's preparing to execute them.

That was a fairly common Soviet motif. On my right side, I have a decorated Soviet war hero who's worked in a steel foundry, and like a lot of the Soviet art glorified, I suppose, the working class. And I suppose there's nothing wrong with that depending on the degree of propagandistic intent and falsification. But they're kind of like Norman Rockwell paintings, except they don't have the same degree of sentimentality, which is quite interesting.

What's it like to have them around? Well, pretty much every square inch of my house is covered with paintings, and a fair number of them are, I don't suppose, the sorts of paintings that people would usually have in their house. Some of them are of the Second World War; some of them are strongly political. But sometimes people say, "Well, I wouldn't want to live in a museum," but I guess that isn't how I feel. I like having these historical artifacts all around me.

I really like watching the propaganda and the art war in the paintings because many of these paintings were produced by very talented impressionist artists who were trained in the classical European tradition. They spent months making these paintings, and yet they're subordinate in some sense to a political ideology. But what's interesting is that as if the political ideologies ease into the past, the more purely artistic elements of the paintings seem to remain.

So, it's cool to kind of watch. It's a very slow process, but it's very interesting to watch the art itself emerge triumphant over the propaganda. And then, you know, these things also remind me of what I'm interested in, and that’s the study of ideology. They remind me how powerful ideology can be and how many different pathways it can take to control, I suppose.

It also reminds me of the reality of the 20th century because it was a terrible reality. If we forget it, then we're likely to repeat it. Now, my kids grew up in this house, and you know, I asked them about it because I suppose the paintings are fairly heavy and maybe even somewhat frightening. But they really liked it, and the people that I had give me a reason to invite people into my house, and gives me something to play with.

I guess I need things to play with by all appearances. So, that’s the story of the Soviet paintings.

So, please tell us about your ideas of the problem of gender-integrated combat units and how it affects morale. Please talk about the role trans people should or should not serve in combat units.

Huh, well, you know, I wouldn't say that I'm exactly an expert in that regard. I don't know how gender, how multiple-gendered combat units are going to work. But because I'm fundamentally a traditionalist in most ways—mostly because I'm afraid of the unintended consequences of radical change—I would say that it's dangerous to adjust a system that's working.

It’s very hard for me to imagine a situation, especially a combat situation, where women and men can actually be treated equally. I don't think that the broader society would even want to see that. I mean, I suppose there are exceptions to that sort of thing, like the situation perhaps in Israel.

Although I suspect even in Israel that the women take the less combat-heavy jobs now. I don’t know that, but maybe I'm just being prejudiced in that answer, but it just doesn't seem to me to be a very wise idea. What about trans people? Should they serve? I really can't say. I don’t have anything—any advice about that. I'm just not informed enough to make a complete vote down.

I think it's very strange, however. I've talked to some people in the Canadian Armed Forces in recent months, and I do think it's very strange that this is the sort of problem that our military is actually trying to solve. You'd think that there would be more important things to concentrate on than rapid gender equalization in the military. I just don't see why that's such a priority, but maybe that's just my old-fashioned conservatism speaking.

Derrick Fake asks, "How do you see love, eros, in your general worldview? Where does love come from?"

Well, you guys ask impossibly hard questions. Well, I think the truth has to be embodied inside love, or embedded inside love. You know, it's not easy to figure out hierarchy of values of ultimate values. There’s great traditional values such as the good, the beautiful, and the true.

Then let’s say the courageous and that sort of thing—it’s not easy to figure out how you arrange those hierarchically. But it seems to me that truth is likely something that serves a master of one form or another—at least ethical truth—and love is something like the decision that being is fundamentally good or it's the decision to act as if being is fundamentally good.

That might be the right way of thinking about it. So, you know, I thought about this in relationship to my son when he was little. He was three years old and was unbearably cute. You know little three-year-olds, they’re fairly easily hurt. I mean, they’re quite robust in some ways but they’re fairly easily hurt. They can run probably into traffic, and you know they skin their knees and they bang their heads on tables.

You know, they're prone to emotional breakdown and they have all these extreme fragilities that make you nervous. I would say that also expose you directly to the fact of the potential tragedy of life, which is I think one of the reasons why having children matures you in a way that nothing else can.

You know, I imagined—I’ve written about this in my new book, "12 Rules for Life"—imagine that I could remove his vulnerabilities one by one. Once living, he couldn’t be hurt. And so, you know, I thought, "Well, I could make him into a robot that was 15 feet tall and made out of metal." That would remove his physical vulnerability.

He'd need to have tremendous strength. And, you know, you could turn him into something like a superhero with all these strengths instead of these exceptional vulnerabilities. But what I realized very rapidly was that every time you removed a vulnerability, you removed an essential part of the person—right? A part that you really loved.

Because with a little three-year-old boy, for example, it's their fragility in some sense that's a huge part of their charm and appeal. It's not like you'd wish it on them, but it's part of their value as beings. I think that reflects something like the paradoxical situation that the Daoists referred to when in the Dao teaching they talk about what makes a plot valuable is the empty space inside it.

It's what it's not as much as what it is that makes it well actual, first of all real, but also useful. And there's something really profound about that in the limitations. I would say limitation is the precondition for being.

And it's really, I’d like to get this right so that you can follow it because it’s one of the most useful thoughts I think that has ever occurred to me. The first is that limits are a precondition for being, just like rules are a precondition for a game. You can't play a game where you can make any move at any time.

You have to narrow the playing field substantially. You have to put restrictions on what can be done in order for anything to be done. So maybe being is this paradoxical state where there's just enough limitation to maximize possibility—something like that.

And that seems right to me. Why that would be, I have no idea. But maybe that's something like an answer to why there is anything—why anything was created. I know I'm speaking metaphysically, but I still think it's worthwhile doing so.

And then, well, if limitation is the precondition for being, then that introduces suffering into the world and tragedy. Because, of course, suffering and tragedy are consequences of limitation. So then the situation is that if you want to have the being where possibility is maximized, you have to accept the limitations that produce tragedy.

And so that's maybe the justification for tragedy, assuming that such a thing needs to be justified. Then the final thought in that three-part series is: well, maybe there's a way to live so that the tragedy that's an intrinsic part of limit becomes bearable or becomes even something like celebrate-able.

I guess that would be akin to Nietzsche's wish for the eternal return—like you thought you should live so that every moment that you lived recurred eternally, that that would be a good thing. And so it's a heroic mode of being. It’s conceivable that a heroic mode of being that requires the adoption of responsibilities gives your life sufficient gravitas and weight and meaning so that the tragedy of being can be withstood without becoming corrupt.

I would certainly hope that that would be the case, and I think there's some reasons to assume that it might be.

So, can you talk more about the resurrection? This remains a stumbling block for many of your more atheistic followers who have otherwise embraced your approach to understanding Christianity.

Well, I can only talk about it symbolically to begin with, and that's I think not sufficient. But I hope as I move through the biblical series that I can zero in on that more and more particularly. But, I mean, the idea of the dying and resurrecting God is a very old idea, and it's echoed in such things as the imagery, say, of the Phoenix, which burns itself up and then mysteriously returns to its earlier form.

I think, speaking purely psychologically, that idea of the dying and resurrecting Savior is something like a reflection of the fact that in order to progress psychologically, you have to let go, especially in the face of obstacles. You have to let go of those things that are impeding your progress that might be very dear to your heart.

You have to let them go and let them die, and then you have a new part of yourself be born. So, because when you're wrong, you have to let the part of you that's wrong die, and then a new part springs to life in some sense.

It's a new part that's partly a union of your mind and a union of the information that's contained in the error that you've committed. It's like the birth in some sense of a new spirit.

And so, you could say that there's this idea that you have to have faith in Christ because Christ is the way and the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father but through Him. What that means symbolically, as far as I can tell, is that you have to embrace the process of voluntary death and rebirth in order to continue moving forward properly in your life.

It's also that process of death and rebirth that rejuvenates the Father, and it’s also that process of death and rebirth that produces the Father to begin with. If you think about the Father as the symbol of culture, then at minimum, the idea of the resurrected Christ is the idea that you should identify not with that part of yourself that's stagnant and dead and that already knows but is prone to error.

You should identify with that part of yourself that's always stretching beyond what you currently know and has the faith to let go of old certainties so that new patterns of being can be brought into place. And so now that's a purely psychological explanation, and I think I've made the case in my biblical lectures that I'm striving for a psychological interpretation at the moment.

My experience with the biblical stories is that there are layers of depth in them that are sufficiently profound—perhaps because of that staggering hyperlinking of the text and its association with almost the entire corpus of Western literature—that as you keep digging, you find more and more.

And so I don't know what to make of the more metaphysical claims, but I'm going to leave it at that because I do know it’s only speculation. See, I guess it is that we don’t—I really don't believe that we understand consciousness, and we don’t understand its role in the cosmos.

It could be that consciousness is just an epithet nomina of materialist processes, but there are a couple of things to me that seems to mitigate against that explanation. The first is that we don't have an account of consciousness that's useful; we have no idea how the material substrate of the brain produces this awareness and self-awareness that seems to be crucially important in the existence of the cosmos.

Insofar as if there's nothing to experience something, it's very difficult to say in what way it exists. You need a viewer and an observer. Scientists sort of gerrymander that by positing a hypothetical observer, and they talk about phenomena where there is no actual observing. So consciousness could be just an epithet nomina, but it could also be something central to the nature of being.

Certainly, mythological stories present that way—that there’s nature that would be nurture from a scientific perspective, and there’s the social world that would be the Great Father from the mythological perspective. And that’s all there is from a scientific perspective. But from a mythological perspective, there's active consciousness, and that's associated with the idea of the logos.

The logos seems to be something like—if you think about it as consciousness—it seems to be this thing that encounters the potential of future being and then determines, at least in part, how to shape it. Now, obviously, we're constrained in many ways; we can't shape things in any old way, but we can certainly advance in the direction of our imagination.

Then you might say, "Well, is that real? Is the idea that we have a consciousness and that it's free in some incomprehensible sense, and that it plays a role in constructing the cosmos, is that real?" And then I would say, "Well, it depends on what you mean by real." But I would also point out that you act as if it's real, and that our functional legal systems, like the legal systems of the West, are predicated on the acceptance of its reality.

It was an idea that took many, many thousands of years to emerge. First of all, the only sovereign was the king and God, and then the nobles became sovereign, and then men became sovereign. Then, with the Christian revolution, every individual soul became sovereign. That idea of individual sovereignty and worth is the core presupposition of our legal system and our cultural systems.

So we all walk around acting as if every one of us is a divine center of logos because we give each other the respect of individual citizens who are sovereign and that are equal before the law. The funny thing is, if someone doesn't treat you that way; treats you as if your free will is an illusion or refuses to regard you as someone who plays an active part in choosing the outcome of their life, then you get very, very annoyed.

And so if it's an illusion—and perhaps it is—we don't understand an alternative to it, and it's unbelievably functional.

So, back to love. Well, we will make the case that limitation is necessary for being, and then we can make the case that tragedy is an inevitable consequence of limitation. Then we might say, "Well, is being worth the tragedy?" and I think the answer yes to that is love, and the answer no to that is the opposite of love.

Because when you love someone, you love them in spite of or even because of their vulnerability. Not that you don't want them to transcend that—because you do—but I think that love is the acceptance of the price of being. It's the way you manifest your acceptance of the price of being. Because if you love someone, you know they have their vulnerabilities like every human being, but your basic judgment is that despite the fact that they have these vulnerabilities that are even fatal and that are certainly tragic, it's better that they were them than they weren't.

And I think that's the right attitude to have towards being itself. It's an optimistic attitude, and I think it has to be predicated on faith because I don't think that you can necessarily derive that conclusion by looking at the available evidence. The available evidence is kind of 50/50 in many situations.

But I can tell you, if you talk the other attitude that being is unjustifiable, then that leads you down a very, very dark road, and then you soon start to work in a way that makes things far more intolerable than they should be. So that's my answer to that.

Any tips on avoiding booze? Yeah, that's a real tough one. Well, I would say a couple of things. If you’re a binge drinker, there is a drug called naltrexone that you could consider. You take naltrexone every day; it doesn't really have any psychological effect on you. But if you're an naltrexone responder, what will happen is that it will dampen your positive response to alcohol.

Some people who are alcoholic, many of them have a very pronounced opiate effect from alcohol. It looks like it's mediated by beta-endorphin, and naltrexone is an opiate blocker. So what naltrexone seems to do is dampen the positive response. The positive response, which would be opiate and then dopaminergic, is the same response that makes you want to keep drinking when you start.

If you're one of those people that has a drink, and then has to have another one, and then has to have another one, and you know soon all your money's gone, then the probability that you have an opiate response is pretty high. And naltrexone can help with that.

Generally, when people take naltrexone and they keep drinking, they try to control, but they keep drinking and learn over time that the alcohol doesn't have the same punch. It's still pleasant, but it doesn’t have the same overwhelming punch that it did at one point, so that would be one suggestion, and it’s worth trying.

The other is like make a plan. I would say do the Future Authoring program, you know, because it isn’t that you’re trying to avoid booze exactly; it's that you're trying to restructure your whole life. Because if you're a drinker, then all your friends are drinkers, and you’re used to drinking in every social situation, and the places that you go to socialize are places that you drink.

It's really built in as a whole set of habits, and so what you have to do is kind of redesign your life. You have to think of things—you can't just stop drinking; you have to figure out what you're going to start doing instead of drinking. There's a hole that you have to fill in.

The Future Authoring program will also help you figure out what your life could look like in the absence of alcohol and what kind of hell you could end up in if you keep drinking. It causes all the problems that it can cause.

And I think you really need to think through the hell that can occur, and you have to think through how your life could be valuable without alcohol so that you can be motivated enough to try to regulate it. I would also say if you fail and slip, don't berate yourself and beat yourself up. Just start quitting again because, you know, if you could cut your alcohol intake down 75%, that's a hell of a lot better than zero.

Often people go all or nothing just like they do when they're quitting cigarettes. They quit for a month, then have a cigarette and say, "Oh my God, now I've broken the pact." Then they'll smoke a whole pack and be smoking again. You don't have to do that. You can just decide that you slipped and that you're gonna get back on the wagon again.

You know, it can take a long time, but I do believe that you need a better vision of life. You have to find something to do that's better than alcohol, and that might take some real consideration, especially if alcohol is a very potent drug for you. I would also say don’t hesitate to try the naltrexone. It’s got a pretty decent clinical history, and it's basically harmless.

So, I’ve listened carefully to your Cain and