Leading the Counter-Woke Revolution | Konstantin Kisin | EP 333
If you just become the mirror opposite of that which you're opposing, it's not the mere opposite; you become the mere reaction to that which you were opposing. Then you will fall prey to the same set of problems. The conservatives are toying with censorship as an answer to the problem of the woke miasma. I do believe that no has to be said to drag queen's Story Hour, but by the same token, as soon as you go down the book forbidding route, you instantly introduce into your own ethos the problem of enabling the censors who are operating by the same principles—in principle—on your side.
I see the anti-woke instinctively going to a position of whatever we're being told is automatically untrue and automatically wrong, and that means that they no longer believe in the concept of truth either. If to you, the truth is the opposite of what the mainstream is saying, you don't believe in truth either. All you believe in is this pointless destructive battle, in which truth and reality no longer exist.
If your claim is that we cannot agree on truth without God, then, uh, maybe, uh, maybe I'm going to potentially agree with you that that's perhaps what the world needs, because if you think that's the only way we're going to give our own truth, we need something. Because right now, neither side knows what the truth is.
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Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms. I'm speaking today with Constantine Kissin, who's a Russian-British satirist, social commentator, author, and podcast host at Trigonometry. He has written for publications such as Colette and the Daily Telegraph, and his book, "An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West," is a Sunday Times bestseller. Kissin has been a popular guest on Good Morning Britain and has amassed over 100 million views for arguing against woke culture during a filmed recent Oxford Union debate. As I said, he's also the co-host of the podcast Trigonometry alongside Francis Foster. Together they have garnered over 400,000 subscribers, having in-depth discussions that center on support for free speech in our society.
Hello, Mr. Kissin, it's good to see you today. I'm looking forward to our conversation. We've talked a little bit before on Trigonometry and have we met in person a couple of times?
Yeah, thank—I feel honored that you didn't remember me. Thanks, Jordan.
Yeah, well, my memory has its problems tonight, and you meet a lot of people virtually.
Yes, well, it’s hard too when you meet people virtually. It's hard to remember if you met them virtually or if you met them in person, and they're thicker and taller in person, but other than that, it's a similar experience.
So, you were just at the Oxford Union and you seem to have managed something approximating a hit, as far as those things go. So, what do you think you did right? And why did what you did have the cultural impact it has had? How many people have watched that so far?
It's very difficult to measure because it goes into private Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, etc. But I'm guessing somewhere between 100 and 200 million at this point. In terms of why I think it got the resonance that it did, I think there are a few factors. I think the first one is something that you actually discussed with Joe Rogan recently, which is the world’s crying out for a positive vision of the future. Those of us who spend a lot of time trying to work out what this craziness was happening in the West and why it was happening, we had to do it from a position of critique and criticism.
We've spent five years in our case on Trigonometry doing that. You started earlier, but now I think the world is in a position where it's looking for a positive message. And that is actually one of the things that I tried to do. I tried to persuade people who were there at the Oxford Union at that debate and I said to them, "Look, I don't want to talk to those of you who already agree with me. I'm more interested in talking to those of you who may be woke that was the debate I was invited to participate in and who are open to rational argument." So I think that was part of it.
And the second part of it, Jordan, and again I think this is something you'll be well aware of, we live in a society in which adults are afraid to tell children what they need to hear. So I think a lot of people resonated with the fact that this was somebody who was an adult standing up in front of young people and challenging them to be better, as opposed to either pandering to their preconceived beliefs and biases or cowering away from having that debate. So I think those two things combined, plus a rational argument, a few jokes, you throw that in the mix and you've got yourself a good speech.
Yeah, one of the things that on the part, the part of the comments, we could elaborate on the comments you made in relationship to absolute privation and poverty. And so many people who are watching and listening might not be aware, but there was plenty of doomsaying in the 1960s with regards to the population catastrophe and prognostications on the part of people like Paul Ehrlich, most famously, who wrote "The Population Bomb," that by the year 2000, we'd be out of all our primary resources and everyone would be starving. None of that happened. In fact, primary resources became more plentiful and less expensive, and we have twice as many people on the planet as he was paranoid about in the year 2000. So 8 billion instead of the dreaded 4 billion. And, well, that's happened.
Everyone, virtually everyone, 7 billion out of 8 billion people on the planet now have access to basic resources, and so we've all got richer. And there's a hell of a lot more of us now. The apocalyptic moralists who want to save the planet, let's say, still are putting forward the story that what we're doing is not, quote, sustainable, that we need five Earths to feed everyone on the planet at the level that the West currently enjoys. And they're, what would you call it? Recipe for future progress is a limits-to-growth model.
The problem with the limits-to-growth model is, well, first of all, it's hypocritical because the people who are proposing it aren't going to be the people who are suffering from it, that's for sure. And second, it's wrong technically because—and I think you did a good job of pointing this out in the Oxford speech—poor people can't care about long-term sustainability and iterability. They're so busy scrabbling in the dirt for their next meal, trying to get fresh water, access to basic hygiene facilities, the next meal that anything approximating a medium to long-term vision is out of their reach. And so they sacrifice the future to the present so they can survive. But if you get people up to about five thousand dollars per year in gross domestic product per capita, they immediately start to take a longer view.
I figured this out about 15 years ago when I was perversely working on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, trying to make them less socialist and destructive than they were. And it looked to me like we could have our cake and eat it too: that the best policy possible to produce a quote sustainable planet would be the one that ameliorates poverty, especially on the energy front, as rapidly as possible. So that's part of a positive vision.
I agree completely, and look, I'm by no means a climate expert, but even as just an outside observer, someone whose primary job is podcast and satire, I can see that a lot of the narratives that we have, they seem to have more in common with a religious worldview or a cult-like worldview than they do with a practical attempt to solve the real problems that we face. And I was born in the Soviet Union and I've lived all over the world in many poor countries. So, you know, I don't have the—you know, we talk so much about privilege nowadays in our society, Jordan. We've got male privilege and white privilege and all sorts of other privilege. The main privilege that we don't talk about is Western privilege.
And it takes Western privilege to fail to understand that what you just said, which is poor people don't care about quote unquote saving the planet because they've got more immediate priorities. And so, even if you accept the entirety of the climate change argument—and this is the point that I made in the speech—whining about it or reducing consumption in Britain, which produces one percent of global carbon emissions and is responsible for another one percent, so in total, two percent, it makes no difference. It will not solve the problem when China and India are busy trying to get their people to avoid starving to death.
What I see is a kind of doomsday cult that seems to have taken over, and politically we seem to be pandering to that instead of dealing with the real challenges of the world. And by the way, it clearly has impact all over the place. I mean if you look at what happened in Germany, Germany, for purely political and ideological reasons, shut down its nuclear power stations. It's now a paid South Africa and Michael Shellenberger covered this on his Substack, paid South Africa to not use coal. Well, now what? Now they import coal back from South Africa and burn it. And also, of course, they made themselves extremely dependent on Russian gas at the time, which I hope the war in Ukraine is something we can get onto talking about.
I hope so too.
Well, yeah. So what you get in Germany is the worst. And for all those people who are watching and listening who might have environmental concerns: look, if you have environmental concerns, one of your goals is, in principle, to improve the environment. Now, if you implement a set of policies that make energy five times as expensive—which is what's happened in Germany—and you improve things on the pollution front, at least you could say, well, you know, energy is much more expensive, and that's pretty hard on the poor people. But look, we've accomplished one of our own goals. And, you know, you'd have to contend seriously with an opponent who put forward an argument like that. But if the reality on the ground is, well, we made energy five times as expensive, we've made ourselves hyper-reliant on the Russians, and a single point of failure on the energy front, and we're producing far more pollution, particularly in relationship to coal burning, and the grid is much less reliable than it used to be, it’s like, well, you didn't just fail according to my definition of failure, you failed according to your definition of failure. And so how in the world is that even possibly justified?
And then I think we get into the religious realm, yes, at that point. And so Alex Epstein has done a pretty good job of laying this out. I like Lumberg on the IPCC front, and we'll get back to that. You know, accepting the idea that there will be something like two degrees of climate change in the next hundred years, and figuring out what to do with that. But Epstein has pointed out in his new book, "Fossil Fuel Future," he laid out something I'd also investigated in my Maps of Meaning book: this underlying religious narrative, and it's basically a Gaia narrative. It's an earth-worshipping metaphysic and it is religious, and it's implicit structure. And the idea is that the planet is a hapless, fragile virgin threatened by a rapacious, consuming, tyrannical giant, and not society.
That the individual is a parasitical predator riding the back of that rapacious monster, and that is a religious narrative. And it's religious because it's a fundamental narrative that frames everything else, and it also partakes of the archetypal underlying structure that makes religious stories religious. And so you can conjure up an opposite story, right? And this would flesh out the religious landscape: the opposite story would be nature is a hideous, gorgon-like demon, who's hell-bent at every aspect to freeze us into terror and devour us. That's nature read in claw and tooth. Culture is the walled garden. It's the walls of the walled garden that protect us from the absolute ravages of nature.
And the human being is a heroic enterpriser, bending into a relationship with the planet and with culture that approximates something like environmental stewardship. It's a much more positive vision. Now, it casts nature into disrepute and probably elevates culture to unidimensionally, but you need both sides of that picture in order to have a complete picture of the world. So kids are being offered an incomplete religious view of the world that's focused on nature as hapless virgin. And so everything is being sacrificed to her. That's complicated by another fact, and Constantine, I think this has to do with the problem that the conservatives and the liberals, for that matter, real liberals, haven't been able to come up with a promising vision.
It's that while adolescents enter this period that Jean Piaget called the messianic, not everyone gets to that point, but relatively cognitively sophisticated kids do. And so this is about age 16 to 20, let's say. This is also when you want to induct kids into the armed forces if you actually want to manage it effectively. It's really when their final touches of their enculturation occur. It's when their prefrontal cortexes prune themselves most thoroughly. Another that happens also between the ages of two and four, but it happens between 16 and 20. You sort of die into your adult self.
Anyways, Piaget noted that people of that age, cross-culturally, have a desire to identify with a purpose that transcends themselves. And that would be cultural identity, right? And they need that. They find it in music often; they find it in their subcultures, but they need to be offered that. And it is—there's something heroic about it because they actually do want to look outside themselves. And then the radical envious lefties come along and say, "Well, all you have to do is wave a placard at an oil company, and now you're cultural hero of the universe and you know standing next shoulder to shoulder with the Messiah himself." And that's pretty damn appalling, and it's certainly not true. But in the absence of an alternative vision, then people are going to gravitate towards that as they do, and so you can't blame—you can't exactly blame young people for that, even though it's tempting now and then. There's a narcissistic element too.
So one of the things I really like about Bjorn Lomborg, you know, he accepts the IPCC climate projections: two degrees in a hundred years. He's attempted to model that as decrement GDP production. So he figures, given current trends, we’ll be 400 percent richer by the year 2100. But then you can knock off some percentage of that because of the costs of climate change. That’ll be non-trivial; I think he basically concludes we'll be like 350 percent richer instead of 400 percent. And that's not nothing, but it's by no means a catastrophe.
And he's pointed out very clearly too that even in the IPCC reports themselves, there's no looming apocalypse. And the idea that there's a scientific consensus about the apocalypse, that's a lie. Now, I think the reason people want to fall for it is because we also like to accrue to ourselves unearned moral stature. And if we can get moral stature by waving a placard while we're complaining about an oil company while driving to the protest, then that's a lot easier than doing all the hard work that would be necessary to actually start a family and operate properly in a community, and maybe join a church or join a political party and actually Trump through the difficult process of trying to figure out how to do something concrete and real that would actually be of service. And so this woke enterprise is extremely attractive to narcissists. And that doesn't mean they're all narcissists, but it's extremely attractive to narcissists.
And so that's a like a panoply of problems, all of which we're facing simultaneously.
Well, Jordan, let me pick up on a couple of those points. Well, a few actually. So first of all, in terms of this religious worldview, I think one of the other things that's so appealing about it is human beings crave doomsday scenarios. The idea that we're living in some kind of unique moment in human history when the world's about to be destroyed, whether that's true or not, by the way, is incredibly appealing; that is something that gives your life meaning and purpose even if your life has no meaning and purpose.
And the thing with this woke ideology is that—and this is something I kind of started to notice—is my journey into this discussion in general was through comedy. I was a stand-up comedian, and in 2015, 2016, in particular, I started to look around and I just saw a lot of people who seemed for some reason to suddenly hate themselves. Like, it was so suddenly normal. As a comedian, you spend most of your time backstage listening to other comedians. And out of the blue, you’d start getting these kids in their twenties going on stage and going, "Well, I’m a white guy, therefore blah, blah, blah," and then they do a bunch of self-deprecating jokes, the premise of which was, because they were white, they were evil. And this ideology, I think, is fundamentally about self-hate.
And if you hate yourself, well, why wouldn't you crave the punishment that you therefore deserve, right? And I think the doomsday narrative maps so well onto this for that reason as well.
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We need a place, symbolically speaking. We need a place to put hell, and we need a place to put the apocalypse. And the reason we need a place to put the apocalypse is because the human vision is apocalyptic. And the reason for that is that we all die. Right? Everything comes to a cataclysmic halt for everyone, and it could happen at any moment. And it could not only happen to you; it could happen to you and everyone you love, and it could happen to your whole society. And that sort of thing has happened, and it definitely always threatens.
And so one of our existential problems is that we always have to face the apocalypse. And the way that's been handled in the symbolic landscape of Christianity is that the apocalypse is a distant occurrence in a heavenly place. Now, it's ambivalent, right? But it's turned into a psychological reality or a spiritual reality, an ever-present spiritual reality instead of being necessarily played out in the here and now. But then there's a place for it, and that's appropriate because there should be a place for it.
And we're also tilted as information processes very hard to the overweighting of negative information. And the reason for that, I would say, is, well, you can only be so happy, but you can be really, really in pain and then dead. And so you're more sensitive to a unit of threat than you are motivated by a unit of pleasure, and that's well documented.
And so then we also have to contend with the fact that we're tilted towards hyper-processing negative information. And then on the privilege front, this is a really complicated one. I think that some of the guilt that the woke types are capitalizing on, and also genuinely experiencing, is a consequence of the felt need for some true atonement.
So you talked about Western privilege, and so, you know, if you live in the West, you're in the top one percent by global and historical standards. So you are privileged. And then you have to contend with the fact that, well, you didn't really earn that, not to some degree, because your pathway forward is going to be proportionate in its success to your work. But you know, you're born and there are highways, and there are automobiles, and there's an electrical grid, and you have this wealth that's offered to you. And then you might say, well, that's unearned privilege. And to some degree, it is. And then the question emerges, well, what should you do about that?
One answer is to flagellate yourself and to feel guilty, because there are people out there who weren't arbitrarily rewarded to the same degree you were. And that is an existential problem. And the other solution is to do whatever you can to earn the gifts you've been given, the talents you've been provided with, right? And to say, well, my goal is to justify by my actions the privileges and opportunities I have been granted, and then to work hard to extend those to the degree that's possible to the people around me and to others.
And I would say that's genuine atonement, and I think everyone has to do that. And so you know, if you're not living a life that says, "Moral, as you are privileged," you're going to lay yourself open on the guilt front, and then the woke ideologues are going to tear a strip off you. And certainly, these kids that you've observed flagellating themselves for their privilege, they don't know how to atone for the fact that there is an unequal distribution of talents, and that seems to be built into the cosmic structure.
Well, that's why I felt it was so important that someone told them that. And everything you said, particularly about how to respond to privilege, resonates with me so much because I've been, you know, my family's been destitute; my family's been very wealthy. I've been the son of a very rich family. I've also been someone who slept on the street for weeks. I've seen both of those. And what I learned from all of those experiences is that, like you said, you have to make the most of it and then extend that opportunity to other people, and that's the only way of dealing with it. And there's no other way if you want to be constructive.
But let's come back to your point about a positive vision for the future and why conservatives will struggle with that. I think one of the reasons is that inevitably young people do need to rebel against something, and conservatives instinctively want to suppress all rebellion because they want to avoid change. And that's why, as someone who’s kind of some—I call myself politically non-binary—that's why I'm excited about talking about this political vision and a positive vision of the future, because I think that's what's needed.
And I don't think the anti-woke position, which a lot of us have had to engage in for some time, is going to be the answer because you have to have something that people buy into. And it can't be normative in the way that conservatives often want it to be: "You must do this!" That's not going to work with young people. They don't want that. What they want is something that allows them to channel their rebellion into something heroic and productive, as you said, which is why I think showing young people the way out of wokeness through what I talked about in the speech and what you and I just talked about, which is work hard, build, and create—that is going to be the way.
And I think you probably know my friend Melissa Chen. She tweeted something about this years ago that I thought was so spot-on. She said, "You cannot remain woke if you build anything, whether that's a business, whether that's muscle, whether that's a family." And that's why I challenge these kids, the dogs of the union and the audience who were watching, of course, to build and create things, because the moment you start, you suddenly find out that, hey, just whining about stuff doesn't work. And when you get down to the business of doing things, it turns out there's a reason that things are the way they are. There's a reason things don't work quite the way you'd like them to, because reality suddenly comes into conflict with ideology.
And so that's why I think it's so important to give kids and young people a path to doing things, because it's only when you're doing things that you start to realize the limitations. And the, you know, I'm a huge fan of Thomas Sowell, and this is one of his things that he always says: that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And you only learn this as a young person by the experience of doing stuff. Because when you're young, you come at the world and you go, well, the world isn't perfect; I must perfect the world. And no one's explained to you—and you probably didn't listen if they tried to explain to you—that the fact is the world is not perfectable. The world will always be imperfect, and all you can do is tinker at the edges to try and improve it.
So one of the things I've noticed on my tour, one of the things that's perplexed me, let's say, is that I wrote these books that are full of rules, and you might think that that would turn people off for the reasons that you just described: young people being turned off by, let’s call it, conservative moralizing, and that’s a kind of finger-shaking, "You should and should" as if you were doing your duty. It's something like that. Yes, and look, you should do your duty, but you can also understand why young people would chafe against that, because, well, why should they be certain that doing their duty in exactly the same manner that duplicates the past is the best pathway forward? Because sometimes it clearly isn't, and there are inadequacies of the past that need to be rectified.
So the conservatives stumble in relationship to establishing a bridge to young people by being moralizing, and the more evangelical types of fundamental Christians fall into the same problem. Now one of the things I've noticed—and this has been very, very cool, and I've really tested this in hundreds of venues—is I usually sometime in one of my lectures talk about the necessity of finding meaning as the antithesis of suffering, let's say, because the quest for meaning becomes most compelling when you're simultaneously suffering or someone you love is suffering. That's when the arrow finds its mark, let's say.
And I walk people through a thought exercise, I suppose: well, what do you have when you're suffering that's going to sustain you? And you might say, well, you have the work that you're still capable of doing and the fruits of your labor that might offer you some security. You have whatever creative enterprises you might be able to engage in that still contain the shadow of meaning at least. Then you have your intimate relationships and the person who might be caring for you while you're in dreadful condition, and you have your family and your friends.
And that’s really what you have. And then on the abstract end, you know, maybe you have beauty and truth and justice and, you know, the noble ideals. But then you might ask yourself, well, how do you have the armament of work and creative endeavor and friends and family? And the answer to that is that's in precise proportion to the amount of responsibility you've taken for developing those relationships and those abilities.
That's right. And so there's a clear pathway between the voluntary adoption of responsibility and the meaning that will sustain you through suffering. And that's a much better enticement to participation for young people than a kind of finger-wagging top-down morality, which is you must behave this way, you know, or you're no good. And even though, as I said, there's some truth in that, it's not an invitational vision.
No, and I think that there's a way to summarize that very neatly, Jordan, which is what I know would work for me, which is to say there are things that you want. What are they? And if you want those things, this is what you need to do. You don't have to do it. I'm not saying you must do it. I'm not your dad, but if you want to achieve these outcomes that you care about, then you're going to have to put in the work. And I’m not telling you which outcomes you should pursue necessarily, but the way to get there isn't going to be to glue yourself to a road to stop an ambulance getting to a hospital, which is what these Extinction Rebellion people do here in the UK.
And I think that once people—young people are on that path, we don’t get to control the art and the culture that they’re going to create. That is their path and that is their duty and that is their job to do. But if they are doing it from a place of constructive, taking on responsibility, as you say, putting in the effort, building and creating things for the future, then I think that is part of the vision for them because, as you say, I think we live in a society, particularly now—you know, I'm not a religious person, but it's clear to me that with the death of God you end up in a position where a lot of people lack meaning.
And of course, you've got all sorts of other economic disincentives for people to have meaning. It's harder to start a family. People are deferring it until a later point. I myself, you know, I just turned 40, and we had our first child only a year ago, less than a year ago. So a lot of young people are in that position now. And it's having that experience that changes you and makes you more responsible. It forces you to take on responsibility. It also forces you to look at the world in a different way.
So that, I think, is part of the vision. And you know, talking about family is difficult because, again, you get to the normative position where it's like you must have children, which is not what I'm saying at all. But again, I think if you start from the incentive point of view, my experience of life is that people respond first and foremost to the incentives that are in front of them. And if you want—if you like meaning, if you don't know what to do with your life, then finding an intimate partner and having a family is going to be a big part of that, in addition to meaningful work, etc.
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So I had lots of clients and students who would come to me who were in search of a meaningful pathway forward who said, "Well, I don't know what to do." And I would say, "Well, what do you want for your life?" And they say, "Well, I really don't know." And so then I learned two things about that. The first is, uh, don’t do nothing—that’s a big mistake because all you do is get older and weaker and you withdraw more. And so even if you don’t know what to do, pursuing nothing is a very bad idea. You have no hope then because hope comes from pursuit, and you’re anxious because you need to specify a path.
So you have no hope and you’re anxious if you do nothing, so nothing is not the answer. That means nihilism is not the answer, and I don’t think that’s shocking to people, but it’s worth laying it out because it seems uncontroversial to me, Jordan.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you’re not a nihilist or possessed by that, except probably sporadically. So then the next proposition was something like this: well, look, you don’t know what to do, so why don’t we just look and see what other people do that seems to work? And maybe you don’t have to do any of these things or all of these things, but if you don’t know where to start, here’s a good place to start. And this is also something conservatives can offer. It’s like, well, here’s the basic template for a reasonably tolerable life—we’ll begin with that low bar.
So there are seven or eight major domains. So you don’t know what to do with your life, well, let’s break your life down. You probably want an intimate partner. Most people do. Now, you might not, but probably you do, even if you think you don’t. And so you might be one of those exceptions, but don’t assume that to begin with, because that’s an uncomfortable place to be if it’s true.
Now, maybe you’re a radically creative genius like Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso and you’re so idiosyncratic that you can’t bind yourself to any one person, but you know they were one in a billion, and probably you’re not. Now, maybe you are, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Probably you want a family of some sort—parents. You want to have a relationship with them, siblings, children. Most people have children—that’s the best relationship you’re ever going to have, if you’re fortunate enough to engage in it.
And so you probably need a vision for that of some sort. Friends. Helpful to have some friends. You could develop a vision for that. You need a job or career, because otherwise, you die, and people think you’re useless; they shun you, and then you die. That’s a bad outcome, unless that’s what you’re after. You should regulate your behavior in relationship to temptations like drug and alcohol abuse and sex because short-term impulsive hedonic gratification doesn’t play out well across time, and it tends to make you unpopular. So that’s not a good recipe for long-term progress into the future.
You should think hard about doing something on the civic front. You should take care of yourself mentally and physically. You should have a plan for that. You need an educational plan because there’s probably something you could learn and get better at, and that doesn’t have to be academic; it could be extremely practical or creative. And you should figure out how to make productive, generous use of the time you have when you’re not working.
And so that’s like a conservative vision, right? Because it fleshes out the generic landscape of human striving and it’s a good place to start. If you don’t know where to start, you could start with one of those things and move towards it—two, or four—and maybe you don’t have to do all of them. But my experience as a clinician has been that if you are failing on all eight of those fronts, you’re not depressed; you just have a terrible life, right?
So conservatives can say—traditionalists can say—here’s the basic template, here’s the responsibility you can find in meaning. Well, now you’ve got to cobble together something idiosyncratic and unique to yourself. That’s the making the map, the archetype manifest in the confines of your own life. But that’s the basic way forward. And we’ve found if students do an exercise like that, a writing exercise, and answer all eight of those questions, the probability that they’ll drop out of university in the first year—about 40 percent of kids do, roughly speaking, in the first year or two—the probability that they’ll drop out is decreased by 50 percent.
So just thinking through, just developing a vision on those fronts is highly motivating, and it keeps anxiety at bay, and it unites people psychologically, and it helps them identify with the pathway forward. It’s not optional, so and that’s an antidote to the death of God in some real way too, right? That journey towards an integrated single point of meaning.
We should talk about the religious front a bit because we started talking about it with the woke religion. You know, you just defined yourself as not religious, and so, but you're concerned about false religions, right? Is that a reasonable way of thinking about it?
Yeah, I think, well, I'm concerned about bad religions, and bad religions take many forms to me. This seems like a bad one, and religion does—sorry, does that imply that there's a good religion?
I think they reply that, yeah. Well, for me it does in the sense that there are forms of religion that are beneficial to society and to the individuals who participate in them, in my opinion, even though I myself cannot force myself to believe something I don't believe, right?
But this religion—I mean, it has all the worst elements of other religions, and on top of that, it doesn't do what most other religions do, which is offer a root, an actual route for redemption, an actual route for atonement. Because, even if you participate in wokeness fully and you say, "Well, I'm not, but I am a straight white man, and I am guilty," and "the sins of the world rest upon my shoulders," what can you do? You can never purify yourself, because you can't be transracial, because that's whatever that is, right? That’s the worst form of racism.
What can you do? You can't atone. No matter how many times you kneel to BLM or whatever else it is that you do, you’re never going to be clean or purified. It is a religion that says you, Jordan Peterson, as a straight white man, are guilty forever, and all you can do is apologize for the rest of eternity, and that’s it. That seems to me like quite a bad religion.
Okay, okay. So let's play this out. You can help me with this, and you can take the atheistic stance and hammer away at me.
Okay, but all push back. I'm not an atheist, by the way, but go for it.
Oh, okay, okay. Well, okay, let's start by characterizing—you said you're not religious; you're not an atheist, but you're not religious, so maybe you can clarify that.
I’m agnostic. I have no idea what’s going on.
Okay, okay, fine, fine. So it's agnosticism. All right, so we're playing with the proposition that there are clearly pathological forms of belief, and in a deep-level pathological forms of religion. Okay, so we'll start with that premise. And then the counter premise is that there is something that’s the opposite of that. And you started to flesh that out in one dimension, which is that if it's a genuine religion, in quotes, then one of the things it offers is an actual pathway to atonement, which means that you have some means of dealing with your sinful inadequacy that doesn’t crush you, okay?
So let me tell you something that Carl Jung said about the Catholics. This is very cool. He said he really regarded the Catholic confession as a form of, uh, what would you say, God’s mercy manifested in the world symbolically speaking. And here’s why: okay, you're going to do stupid and cruel and unworthy things, even as you define them, so you're going to be guilty before yourself. Forget about what other people think. You might also be guilty on that front, but you’re definitely being guilty in relationship to your own conscience.
And then you have to deal with the fact that you’re not who you should be, and that can crush you. Certainly, that crushes people who are depressed. It crushes people who are anxious, and it definitely crushes people who have post-traumatic stress disorder because they often develop PTSD because they watch themselves do something terrible.
So, all right, so now there’s an existential problem. You’ve got to stumble forward with your inadequacy. Now, if you’re Catholic, you can go to the church and you can say, once a week or however often you want to, here’s a bunch of ways I’m really stupid, and they've hurt me, and I’m trying to detail them out completely, and in principle, I’m trying to rectify those faults—first by their admission and second by the determination not to propel them forward.
And then the priest says, "Okay, as far as God is concerned, that’s good enough." And you have to go do these rituals of atonement, and your slate is wiped clean for the week. And you're going to go out and be a fool again, but you get to start again. And so, you’re proposing that one of the hallmarks of a genuinely healthy religion, assuming such a thing exists, a fundamental set of beliefs is that there has to be a pathway forward to the rectification of inadequacy and flaws. Is that fair enough?
That is a positive aspect of religion that I can see.
Yes.
We'll be back in one moment. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series "Just the Way You Are." What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way? So, am I done or something? Get the hell up! Get your act together. Adopt some responsibility. Put your life together. Develop a vision. Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world, and that'll be the adventure of your life.
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Okay, so now you said earlier that you do not want to be compelled to believe things you don’t believe, right? If I’ve got that right.
I can't make myself believe things I don’t believe.
Yeah, yes, yes. So that's like that suspension of belief, right? So I think this is a place where both agnostics and atheists do where things stick in their throat in relationship to something like the classic Judeo-Christian traditional belief set. And that’s parodied by the proposition that people who have that faith believe in a bearded man in the sky, let’s say, and that that's so preposterous that no one sensible can believe it.
And then, if faith requires the sacrifice of reason to that degree, then, well, then we’ll sacrifice faith instead of reason, something like that. And there’s an Enlightenment claim lurking at the bottom of that. Does that seem reasonable, all of that?
Okay, so let me set before you a set of counter propositions and you tell me what you think. So I’ve been working on this idea in my new book. It’s called "We Who Wrestle with God." And I’ve been basing this work on the proposition that there has to be a unifying animating spirit. And so unifying means it would unify you psychologically, so it would bring the diverse elements of you together, so you weren't a house divided unto yourself. And it would also unify other people.
And it has to unify the individual and other people simultaneously because, well, you fall into disunion psychologically and then you're anxious and hopeless. And if you fall into disunion socially, then you fight. So the alternative to a unifying vision is psychological disintegration and social chaos, right? It’s unity versus multiplicity. That’s another way of thinking about it.
Now, you can have a tyrannical unity, and that’s not good. That’s a tyrant, literally. So what might a non-tyrannical unity be like?
Okay, so let me just tell you a couple of brief stories, and very, very quickly. So I think the biblical Corpus is a metanomic literary work. It takes one story after another and juxtaposes them in somewhat a non-sequitur fashion, making the case that there’s something in each story that’s emerging that’s the same. And I would say that’s the monotheistic animating spirit.
So, the Bible is a series of meditations on the nature of the monotheistic animating spirit. And so the next question would be, what is that spirit? And I would say, well, that’s what those stories are trying to portray. So here’s some examples, and you can tell me about, tell me what you think of this.
So in the story of Noah, the animating spirit—so that’s Yahweh—is the voice that calls the wise to prepare when the storms are approaching. And then belief is whether you abide by that voice or reject it. Belief in both cases, because you either accepted and acted out or you rejected and acted out, there’s no faith decision. Both of those are a faith decision.
Okay, so that’s Noah. Then in the story of the Tower of Babel, which is the next story, the animating spirit, Yahweh, is portrayed as the spirit that totalitarians compete with when they build their towers to the heavens and the spirit that makes everyone speak a different language if that totalitarian enterprise goes too far.
That’s why everybody ends up speaking a different language like we do now. We can’t even agree on what constitutes a woman. And so God is, Yahweh is presented as something necessarily transcendent, and that if human beings build something technological to replace that, then the consequences will be, well, that the structure will be devastated and people will no longer be able to communicate.
Okay, and then in the Abraham story, Abraham is privileged; you could say he’s got white privilege even though he was Middle Eastern. And he has rich parents and he can just sit in his tent and eat peeled grapes and do nothing and be an overgrown infant. And, well, he’ll be secure, and well-fed, sheltered—all of that. So the basic problems of his life are solved, and so far as material security can offer that.
But then a voice appears to him that says you have to leave your comfort—everything: your family, your tent, your tribe, your nation—you have to go out in the world and make your way. And then Abraham does that, and of course, he’s father of nations, but he does that; he has just a dreadful time of it, right? It’s tyranny and starvation, and the Egyptian aristocrats conspire to steal his wife. And, you know, he goes right into the bloody mess of life, and Yahweh is put forward as the voice that calls him to adventure.
And then I'll give you one more example. So in the story of Moses, the Exodus story, Yahweh is presented as the spirit that opposes tyranny and opposes slavery and leads the enslaved out into the desert, right where they’re lost, and guides them when they’re lost towards a more positive vision. And so it’s an animating spirit because animating spirits animate you; they propel you into work towards movement, and you’re always possessed by an animating spirit. There’s no way around that. It’s one spirit or another.
And the monotheistic claim is that all those animating spirits need to be integrated into a superordinate spirit and that that spirit has to be characterized and then celebrated. So, okay, so that’s my counter proposition to the atheists and the agnostics: I think that’s all just true.
Now, I don’t exactly know what—
Yeah, so well, so tell me what you think about that.
You know, because that’s the last step. I have a problem with, because the animating spirit, why that has to be unified and codified as God is the part of it that I don’t get.
Okay. For me, those things could be intuition. For example, I have a very powerful intuition. There have been many times in my life when I’ve done things that were actually counter-intuitive, but something has made me aware that what I must do now is X.
Right, okay, so let's go with that something. Fair enough. So I would say that what you're characterizing there, that intuition, the hypothesis in the biblical corpus is that intuition is a manifestation of an underlying unifying spirit.
Now, I understand that. Now, you might—but so why is that?
Well, it’s your—
Well, that is exactly the question, and that's where faith comes in. That's the point of faith, right? And that's the step that I can't make myself make because I don’t believe that that is what it is.
Okay, well, I think there are two elements of faith there. One is, if you let your intuition guide you, that’s already a step of faith because you’ve decided that you’re going to go in the direction of your intuition rather than it’s about faith in something someone else is doing.
Yes, yeah, exactly. Well, it’s willing to put yourself on the line for something, yes, right? And so that faith isn't exactly: here’s what I believe to be a set of facts. That faith is more: here are the risks I’m willing to take according to this set of principles. For me it’s more of an experiential thing, as in I’ve listened to this intuition before, and it has given me good advice before, and every time I listen to it, it gives me good advice that turns out to be true.
Okay, well, then I would also say that's very much akin to the Socratic daemon, right? So Socrates said in the Apologia when he was asked—this is his trial when he’s going to be put to death. He’s explaining why he didn’t run away, because the Athenians said they were going to kill him and they gave him plenty of warning, and they didn’t want to kill him; they wanted him to go away, and he knew that and so did his friends.
And all of his friends were telling him to get the hell out of town, and he went and had a conversation with his daemon. Is this spirit of intuition that you’re describing and his daemon said, you can’t run. And he thought, well, what the hell do you mean I can’t run? They want me to run, and they’re going to kill me. But Socrates lays it out in the Apologia; he says one of the—that it was widely established in Athens and elsewhere that Socrates was a singular person. And even the Delphic oracle said that, and she said he was singular because he knew that he didn’t know—he was radically humble, radically ignorant.
But he said that one of the things that made him different was that he always listened to the voice of this daemon. And that's the same word as demon, but it means spirit fundamentally. And in that context, he always listened. That’s what made him different from other men.
Now, the question is, what is the nature of that guiding spirit?
That's right. Now, your objection is, well, why does that have to be considered God?
Okay, so to answer that question we’d have to do something like a technical analysis of what it means to consider something God. So I would say, well, something has to be put in the highest place, and the highest place is the place that takes predominance over all other places. And so if you’re going to be guided by the spirit of your intuition, then by necessity, at least at that moment, you put it in the highest place, and that’s to elevate it to the peak of Mount Sinai, you know, symbolically speaking.
It’s to allow it to be the I at the top of the pyramid through which you see—it’s both of those things. And then I would say, technically, and I learned this from you, is that regardless of what you call it, this animating spirit that you put in the highest place is functionally equivalent to God.
And we could look at the sophisticated religious thinkers who know perfectly well that God is beyond both name and conceptualization. You know, so this isn’t a reductive enterprise. It’s, uh, children can—I ask you a question?
Yes, please do.
Why does this thing have to be outside of me?
It doesn't.
Right, so if this thing doesn’t have to be outside. We’ll return to that. Let’s return. But let me follow that logical sequence out.
Yeah. If this thing is—what does that mean? It doesn’t have to be outside?
Well, it means in the inside, the what? The meat of your brain? Do you mean in the neural connections? Exactly what does inside mean? Do you mean inside the domain of my body and brain? This is a product, right? The way that my thoughts are constructed by my brain and body to understand this is also a product of that, just through a different communication system.
Okay, so fine. So let’s take the biological route, then, and let's—that's fine. Let’s just make it strictly biological then for the time being. So then you run into the problem of the intrinsic logos of the world. So let's say that you are conferring with something that's revealing itself within you that's biologically predicated.
Well, then you might say, well, that's the wisdom of the world making itself manifest through the material realm. And that’s really what the Greeks believed. Like, the Greek notion of logos was that there was an intrinsic order to the material world and that if you allowed that order to make itself manifest within you, that that would provide you with the most appropriate possible guidance.
And the idea of the Socratic daemon is a reflection of the logos—the intrinsic structure of the world. And so the notion would be, well, if you’re in tune with the structure of the world as it reveals itself to you biologically, then you’re acting in harmony with being itself.
I’m perfectly happy with that formulation. There's an ancient medieval idea. It’s even older than that, that the human being is a microcosm and reflects the macrocosm. And that’s exactly the case that Dawkins was making.
And I thought, do you know why I want to talk to you? Because that's exactly why I wanted to talk to you. And so following that logic, you could say, well, there’s a reflection of the cosmic order within you. And that reflection is there because you have adapted to the world. You are adapted to the world in the deepest parts of you—in the deepest recesses of you—and if you consult with that microcosmic embodiment, then it will reveal intuitions that will move you forward.
But those intuitions—this is where I think the crucial difference in the approach we're both taking at the moment reveals itself. See, you're thinking about that as something that’s personal, and it is personal in the sense that it speaks to you personally.
But it's impersonal in that that thing is there whether you're here or not. It's no different than the Socratic daemon, and it’s no different than the voice of intuition that speaks to other people, or at least it has important commonalities.
What's the evidence for that? It’s there whether I’m here or not.
Well, because other people have spoken of the same thing. But now I’m not saying there isn’t an element of it that’s unique to you. There is. No, my point is this: that element that’s unique, just because I have a hat and you have a hat doesn’t mean that the hat is something that we share in common that’s given to us from above.
We can all have our own hat.
Okay. I would say hat’s the wrong metaphor, because it’s purely a cultural construct, and so your metaphor falls prey to the inadequacy of a postmodern viewpoint. Let’s think of a different example.
All right, you have different examples. You have angering, okay?
Anger, right?
So then we might say, well, what sort of being is anger? And it's definitely the case that you get angry in your own way, but it's also the case that if you get angry, everyone can tell that you're angry. And part of the reason they can tell is because they get angry enough—like you—to understand what the hell's possessing you, right?
And so this is part of the collective unconscious problem; that's another way of thinking about it. Or part of the problem that we share: universal, biologically predicated, motivational, and emotional structures. There’s an element of it that is idiosyncratic, and that’s unique to you, and you know religiously speaking, that would be the personal nature of your relationship with God, which isn’t trivial.
But then there’s a universality of it, right? Because if your intuitions, for example, were so idiosyncratic that no one else at all experienced them, you could not communicate with anyone else, right? You’d be so far afield from the norm, and this does happen to people, by the way, who are absolute creative geniuses from time to time. But most of the time, that voice that's speaking to you speaks in a voice that's similar to the manner in which the voice speaks to other people, which is also why I think we have something like a universality of conscience.
It's an interesting thought, but I'm still not persuaded by that. If two cans of Coke both have the same shape, does that mean they're connected?
Well, they’re connected in some ways because you wouldn’t use the word same otherwise, right? Because you’re implying a connection by the fact—implying similarities of their identity.
Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s what I mean. You’re implying similarity, and similarities are a very complex concept. I mean, you might say that things are, from a spiritual point of view, I'm actually not in disagreement with you. I had a very interesting experience. I studied hypnosis for a long time, and in hypnosis, there is an exercise that you can do. I talked about this when we were on Joe Rogan's show called the Deep Trans Identification. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, but what they do is essentially once someone is in a deep state of trance, your identity can be treated sort of like a set of clothes that you can take off and put on someone else's identity in that state and try it out.
And people will often use this to pick up the habits of people that they wish to emulate or things like that. And when we would do doing these exercises in this hypnosis class, first I did it with this very sweet, gentle South African lady who wanted to try on some kind of American preacher. And when we went through the process with her and she opened her eyes, she was that guy.
Right, that, and it is, it wasn’t—I had to run out of the room because that’s how much it scared me, actually, that this was possible.
Oh, yeah.
But when I did it, I had a different—I’m very disagreeable generally, so I tried to be difficult whenever I’m doing anything like this. So rather than being a person, I went, "What if I try to identify as the universe?"
Whatever that is in this process, right? And when I was doing this, all I could feel was my heartbeat slow down. And it was really the only thing that I was conscious of as it was happening. And I could feel my heart expanding. And the two things happen simultaneously: one, I felt an infinite connection with all other human beings in that moment, and the second thing I felt—and this was just—I’m not saying this is what it is, and I’m not making any truth claim about it, but this is what I experienced at the time.
You know how the universe is expanding, and it's expanding at an accelerating rate? The thing that I want to say popped into my head, but it didn't feel like it popped into my head. The thing that I experienced was, what if the universe expanding is a half a heartbeat of some greater organism to which we're all connected?
So I am entirely open to the possibility that we are connected.
And the truth is that part of my hesitation to call myself religious is not even the bearded guy in the sky in whom I don’t believe, because I don’t believe in him. It’s also the fact that I'm just very wary of organized religion being a perverted way of having that conversation that can lead to a lot of problems.
Okay, well, so look, look—fair enough on all fronts, and let me address those points one by one. We'll get back to the identification with the universe notion here in a moment. But on the I'm afraid of organized religion front, look, wary, one of the things I've observed about Harris and Dawkins—and this is particularly true of Sam Harris—is that Harris is very concerned with the problem of evil, and validly so, and deeply so. He’s committed his life to it, and he would like to establish an objective morality.
And the reason he would like to do that is because he believes in the reality of the objective, and he also believes in the necessity of the moral because he’s concerned with evil. And so, you know, I’m kind of on board with that, which is why Sam and I really actually can talk. But the problem that Sam has conceptually, as far as I’m concerned, is that he identifies the religious enterprise with the totalitarian spirit.
And that’s the same mistake the postmodernists make when they identify Western culture with the patriarchy. It’s like, look, it is the case that large-scale systems can ossify, become willfully blind, and degenerate into tyranny. But that doesn't mean that that's their central animating spirit.
Now, you see the same thing with the 1619 Project in the United States; you know this claim that the fundamental foundation—the animating spirit that drove the formulation of the United States was the tyrannical desire to dominate, oppress, and enslave. And you have to say, well, let’s give the devil his due. Every human organization tilts towards corruption by power, but that doesn’t mean that’s the central animating spirit.
And so I would say, well, the same thing applies on the religious front. My sense is—and we can certainly discuss this—that this is really useful to think about in relationship to Wilbur Wilberforce. So he was a Christian Protestant operating in Britain, and he in many ways single-handedly forced the British Empire to not only abandon slavery but to oppose it on the world’s seas for 175 years. And he did that in 100 percent as a consequence of being animated by the spirit of Protestant liberalism.
And that was a consequence of the dissemination and distribution of the Bible, because the idea was human beings are made in the image of God, and slavery is wrong, period. That’s a transcendent truth, and economic rationale be damned; there’s no excuse for it. And so, I think the problem with the skepticism that you’re expressing in relationship to the religious enterprise is that it doesn’t sufficiently separate the wheat from the chaff.
I see what you're saying. We’re not disagreeing because let me take you back to the beginning of this conversation when I did say to you that I believe religion is useful.
Right. And I’m fond of—I can’t remember who said this, but someone said that the poor believe religion is true; the middle class believes it's false, and the rich believe, or the powerful believe it's useful.
I’m not powerful or rich, but I certainly consider it useful. I can see that the lack of it has its negative impact as well.
I just don’t wish to submit myself to a rigid ideology of that kind, combined with the fact that I don’t believe in the bearded guy in the sky.
Right. Okay, so let’s not make it—okay, so let's agree that you shouldn’t subordinate yourself arbitrarily to a rigid structure. Now, you might want to do that sporadically to discipline yourself, right? But the object shouldn't be submission. Now, what's weird in the biblical narrative, you know, is that the goal is not submission; it’s covenantal relationship. And a covenantal relationship is actually relationships.
So one of the things you see with Moses, for example, and you also see this with Abraham, is that they're constantly negotiating with God. That’s why my, the name of my next book, by the way, is "We Who Wrestle with God." It's a negotiation, it's not a submission.
And so God is always threatening to wipe out the Israelites in the desert. He’s just sick and tired of their idol worship and their whiny resentment and their bitterness and their worship of the past tyranny. And he's constantly threatening just to wipe them out and start again. And Moses is constantly interceding on their behalf, telling God he shouldn’t break his word.
And the odd thing in the story is that God actually listens, which is rather preposterous; but the reason that’s happening is to mitigate against exactly the problem that you described, which is to have the relationship with the transcendent degenerate into nothing but blind obedience.
And then the danger of that is, well, blind obedience to who? And I see this as a threat in Islam in the more fundamentalist forms of Islam. It’s like, well, you should submit to Allah. It’s like, hey, fair enough. Allah, as interpreted by who? Oh, uh, totalitarian, misogynistic mullahs? How about no? I don’t buy your Allah.
And I don’t see who made you the right, precisely; and even if I believe in the bearded guy in the sky, I’m not sure I need a middleman to talk to him, right?
Well, that makes you a good Protestant.
Well, but look, we could also go down that rabbit hole a little bit, you know, and it’s worth it because I also think this is how we ended up in this postmodern, um, excess liberal conundrum.
So Jung talked about Catholicism, as we mentioned, and he talked about the utility of and mercy of the confessional and that possibility of atonement. But he also laid out, you know, the dangers of that. The dangers of the Catholic structure is, uh, what would you say, a tilt towards authoritarian rigidity, which is what the Protestants rebelled against.
But then the question is, well, what's the danger of the Protestant revolution? And the danger is that everybody becomes his own church. And then here’s the problem—you tell me what you think about this—here's the logical conclusion of that: you're your own church; you're your own God.
Now you can say what God said to Moses out of the depths of the burning bush. You can say, "I am what I am." And I would say that's what the identity politics types do. They say, "Look, I am so superordinate in my own self-defining identity that no matter what identity claim I put forward, it is incumbent upon you to accept it as if it comes from an omniscient source."
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And I think, like, as far as I can tell, Constantine, that’s where we are, right? Increasingly, by force of law, if you make an identity claim, no matter how preposterous, which implies that there are some limits to identity claims, by the way, like I have to accept—well, there’s one example in Ontario right now that’s become famous for its surreality. So there’s a female teacher in a suburban Toronto who has decided at the ripe old age of something approximating 50 that he’s actually a woman, but he’s not just a woman, man; he's the earth goddess herself.
I don't know if you've seen pictures...
Yeah, yeah.
Well, exactly: it’s she’s an embodiment of that primordial Jordan. Am I hearing you correct if I look at what you’re saying, then are you suggesting that we need God to agree on truth?
I'm saying is that spirit which would enable us to agree on truth is, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to God and necessarily so. So without that, we cannot agree on what the truth is.
Okay, well, okay, so look, I've been having the same conversation I'm having with you with Douglas Murray.
Okay.
And with Jonathan Pajo at the same time. Now, Murray was very attracted by outright atheism, and he was tempted and invited, as far as I can tell, to be part of the Four Horsemen of atheism coterie.
Right.
And, but it’s been very interesting talking to Douglas in recent years because he’s got to that point that you described, which is, let's say, the aristocratic position that religion is useful. But he’s actually stepped past that and doesn’t know what to do with it.
And I think that’s the case for many people on the more traditional front now is that, well, the metaphysic that unites us has to be grounded in something that isn’t merely—that isn’t merely political and and semantic; that’s the right way of thinking about it.
There has to be something transcendental about it, akin to that experience you've had of connection to all humanity, yes?
Okay, now look—Sam Harris thinks the same thing, which is why he's off in meditative space half the time, right? He has an unnameable God because then his semantic brain can't tear it to shreds. He understands that it’s necessary to dip into the realm of the transcendent sporadically in order to renew yourself, you know.
And he’ll say, well, that’s not religious. It’s like, well, it’s not totalitarian, and it’s not systematic. That doesn't mean it’s not religious.
And then Harris, of course, his approach falls prey to the same problem as a kind of abstract Buddhism, which is, yeah, well, that’s all well and good on the transcendental front, but how do you make that self? How do you make that manifest in life? And how do you unite other people in that ethos?
And that’s a practical problem, and you need intermediary structures to do that.
Well, that’s why I think religion is useful for uniting most people, because my experience is they need it. I have many people in my life and in my family who cannot process their fear of death without religion; they just can’t deal with it.
And we all—they all mask it, and they all kind of deal with it in one way or another, but it is having the sense of something above them in that particular way that gives them the comfort to live their life.
And there are other people who maybe don’t need it. I certainly don’t. I enjoy my life. I know I’m going to die. I know that my life only—that this is my experience, in my view, my life only has the meaning that I give to it, and I get to choose that. Now that puts in question the nature of morality, I appreciate that.
And for society, there has to be a structure that gives you a sense of what morality is, which is why I say religion is useful. But for me personally, it’s not.
So when you say you choose it, but let’s go down that road for a minute because, all right, so you open yourself up to an intuition and tell me if I’ve got this wrong. And the intuition makes itself manifest, and the choice is whether you accept that or not. Does that seem reasonable?
Yes.
Okay, so that doesn’t mean that the source of the intuition is you precisely. It does mean that you have a relationship of choice, though.
Okay, but I don’t think that’s any different than this covenantal idea that I described earlier. I think it’s a reflection of the same.
I’m not trying to reduce what you’re saying to that. I’m aware—yeah.
We’re having a good question. So what I don’t understand, and I’m open to being persuaded, is why the leap has to be made to the idea that this thing that I experience and that I have as a—let’s call it a tool, right? I can dip into this source of information that I have access to that can give me useful advice—how you go from that to the idea that we’re all connected under this one thing.
That this is a thing, the fact that other people have similar experiences could also mean, like other people have thoughts because they have brains.
Okay, that’s a great question. That’s a great question, and it’s the same question as, let's assume for a moment that the voice of intuition that speaks to you has a moral element. And the moral element is that it's going to shape your perceptions and your behaviors. Now, you could say that’s the idiosyncratic, right? That it’s only unique to you, and some of that’s going to be true because that’s true insofar as you’re really creative, let’s say, or even revolutionary.
But here’s the rub, as far as I can tell: okay, so there’s this idea that emerges in Exodus that the well-constituted polity has to have two dimensions. There has to be a vertical dimension that unites it with the transcendent, so that would be like the king’s fealty to God.
The idea is that the king himself is subordinate to a set of transcendent principles, and so is everyone else. So that's the vertical axis. And that would be that feeling of universality that you described, like sort of descending upon you.
But then there’s a horizontal axis, and the horizontal axis is something like, well, I have to conduct myself so that I can engage in repeated acts of reciprocal altruism with other people.
Yes, okay.
Now, you need both of those because sometimes, you know, you might say, “Well, you should get along to go along,” or “You should go along to get along.” You should conduct yourself the way other people want you to conduct yourself, and that’s usually true, except when everyone goes crazy, right?
And then you might say, well, what do you need to bind you when everyone goes crazy? And the answer is, well, you need that relationship with the vertical.
And so, except the potential to run the structure that connects people to the vertical often go crazy too.
I absolutely—that’s a big problem.
But that’s why it’s a mistake to construe the religious enterprise as something that’s only a consequence of tradition. Like, look, in the Jewish writings, you’ve got two sources of the religious enterprise. You’ve got the tradition, and that goes corrupt, let’s say in the form of a corrupt king.
But then you have the prophets, and the prophets are those who stand up and say to the corrupt king, you know, there’s a divine order against which you’re transgressing. And if you don’t get your act together, all hell is going to break loose, even though you’re king.
Now your question might be, well, how do we tell the false prophets from the true prophets?
And that’s—
Well, and the answer to that is, by their fruits you will know them. That’s one answer to that. But it does reflect this underlying problem.
But you’ve already said in yourself, you know, you’re leery to accept divine revelation in the form of a handed-down tradition, right? And that does make you a Protestant in the most fundamental sense.
But you also do note that you have access to something like—in, like, the pool of intuition, let’s put it that way—that can tap you, right?
And I would say that to the degree that that intuition is a reliable source, it’s also going to be structured so that it facilitates your ongoing interactions with other people in the best possible manner.
So it’s not purely idiosyncratic, right? It's again, it's subject to its own logos, its own internal logic.
If the— it may be upon occasion that that internal voice will do what Socrates did—the Socrates voice, which is to say you have to offer yourself up as sacrificial victim to the mob, right?
And God help us from that eventuality, but that may happen upon occasion. But it's still the case that if that voice of intuition is deep, when it rises within you, it’s going to rise up within you in a manner that facilitates your integration with the social community and the social community's improvement.
At least, you better hope that’s the case, right? But that all those things are to my benefit.
And also, even the Socrates example—I mean, I think you and I both, you to a much greater extent, have offered ourselves up as a sacrificial for the purposes of combating this bad religion that we talked about earlier.
But even that to me just seems that it’s easier to explain than something as simple as principles that have been inculcated in