Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro: Religion, Trans Activism, and Censorship

Alright world, here we go Jordan Peterson Ben Shapiro Dave Rubin We have a lot to do We have about two hours to do it I thought how am I going to start this. I could ask them how they are, we could dive right into some deep topics, but then I thought no, let's do something else, a lot of people don't seem to like us, that's kind of weird, we've been literally running around the world for the last few months. and we have met thousands. and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people right now who are good decent people from all walks of life trying to find some answers and meet other people who think like them or don't think like them but just want to find some decency in this world and yet the online world seems relentlessly hateful and you probably get more hate than anyone so I thought it would be an interesting way to start this off as three people who I think are basically trying to show some decency. just the level of anger and hatred that we have oh I'm coming to you because it doesn't bother you anymore oh yeah I mean I try to protect myself from that to a certain extent I mean I've certainly lessened that amount of time.

I spend almost nothing reading Twitter comments, yes, I think contentious exchanges with journalists, I would say, are the most stressful things I do and usually make me nervous for a day or two afterwards, although I would say It's still worth it It's a shame to do it, but here's the thing, so a couple of observations. The first is that a lot of the pejorative comments that have been directed at me, for example, have been that my followers are a bunch of angry young white men and so on. I'd like to break that down a bit. I mean the first thing I've learned in the last month is that I no longer have to apologize for the fact that most of the people who are watching my youtube videos our men there is nothing wrong with talking to men and if men They benefit from what I am discussing, so it is much better that women have to live with men and that is of great benefit to women and there are many women who write to me telling me that and also meet me at these talks saying exactly what same and then they are not angry, so how do I know?

As you just pointed out, we have spoken to 250,000 people in seven months, how many incidents? of anger that we have had, I mean, when I tell you, literally, none, zero, zero, true, it is zero, the shows have been love, yes, yes, they are very, very positive, yes, and we had an interlocutor who obviously I wasn't a fan in one place. I wasn't even at that show, so the conferences couldn't be more peaceful or positive as far as I'm concerned, and then the people there aren't particularly young. I would say the average age is between 30 and 30 years old. 40 and there are a lot of older people, especially in the US there are now at least a third of women for what it's worth and I think that's because women buy more books in Europe and there are still more men, but that's because because in many of those countries the book just came out recently and you know it's definitely not the way the media portrays it, they make it seem like it's ninety-ten.

I mean, I owe you at the beginning of the show, when I reference something about it, I usually say it's 6040, yeah, sometimes it's a little bit more one way or the other. others, but it's certainly not the way, well, I think a lot of the vitriol is, look, I just finished reading another book on postmodernism, an Oxford book on postmodernism and on Derrida in particular, and like there's really an attempt from the postmodernists and this is allied, I think, with their fundamental Marxism to demolish the idea of ​​the autonomous individual, so, for example, one of the things that is really interesting about the current debate on freedom of expression is that it really It is not a debate because you have to belong to the Judeo-Christian/Enlightenment tradition to believe in freedom of expression, because to believe in freedom of expression you have to believe that there are autonomous individuals who have their own points of view and who can spontaneously generate ideas creative and then engage in active dialogue in a way that is seen as fundamental goodwill and truth and that they can change the opinions of others and that they can reach a negotiated agreement, they have to believe all of that, including the autonomous individual in that concept. logos, which is what dirt is, Derrida was so so who criticized so harshly this idea of ​​logocentrism, we must believe in the autonomous individual and the postmodernists and neo-Marxists do not believe that the individual is a spokesperson for an assembly of power and that he does not there is freedom of speech, that's why they don't have a platform, right, it's not right, it is so that the debate about freedom of speech goes much deeper than who should be allowed to speak.

The debate about freedom of expression is whether there is or not. something like freedom of expression outside of the power game that the neocolonial Europeans are playing and, therefore, what I am doing and what you are doing with me and I think what everyone in IDW is doing to some extent is speaking to to people as if they are autonomous individuals who are the basis of civilization and sovereignty and that is an absolute anathema to the radical left and that is why they see it as a fundamental challenge, and it is, so the individual is the fundamental challenge, I think it's perfect for you because it's Just like you, as an individual, Ben Shapiro, you get more hate online than almost anyone and it's not just that you get hate, it's the nature of hate when you're a white supremacist and you happen to be wearing a yarmulke, which is a bit confusing. you know what you are, that you're a Nazi or whatever and it's like I know you're okay with criticism, but it's not leveling criticism, it's just endless, overblown hate, okay, well, that's it.

The weird thing, you know, if you're a good person, you try to be a good person every time you get criticism. As a good person, your first response should be: Did I do something wrong? Was it done well? And yes, and as someone trying to improve as a human being and also in what I do. I spend a lot of time trying to look at those reviews and say "okay, that's reasonable" and it's usually something from ten years ago, "okay, yeah, I should." I've done better Those were those stupid ones I shouldn't have said that right, yeah, but it wasn't always 10 years ago for you because you even had that nice moment in this studio where you said you had a kind of public and private relationship. position on addressing

trans

people with the pronouns they want, you don't want to be forced to do it, but privately, if you knew someone who was

trans

and you respected them, of course you would use the pronoun correctly in the same way I do. would do.

I don't do that with anyone about anything in general, if I'm in a private conversation with someone and I don't, when I want the conversation to move beyond something unrelated, then I'm not going to go out of my way to offend them because It doesn't make sense, but in a public conversation where the topic being discussed is human biology, then I'm not going to give in to the argument that I've now abandoned my argument by using the pronoun of your choice because that's undermining my own argument. Now we are in a public debate which is a different forum, but that idea is that they are not sympathetic and I think this relates to the fundamental assumption of people on the left, which is that they are more understanding human beings and people who oppose them. politics or Unfriendly Human Beings and this goes back to the individual versus communal distinction for the left.

If you are an individual, this means that you are inherently unsympathetic toward others because your individuality is against the collective. If you are, you are a member of the collective. You can show that by the amount of sympathy you have for other people and I think that, but also for the collective it's also a very strange form of sympathy, because the collective doesn't suffer, the individuals suffer, you know, and that's one and the same. So the other thing that's interesting about that reflective identification of sympathy with virtue is that it's actually extraordinarily immature as far as I'm concerned, because most complex problems can't be solved by reflective sympathy and virtue.

Reflective sympathy is more like, it's more like an instinct, it's more like anger, it's more like jealousy, rage or love, in fact, it doesn't have that cognitive component that allows you to take apart complex systems, analyze them and determine what the problem is and how. X Ellucian could be seen. and then putting that out there in a cold, calculated way toward some positive end is this automatic assumption that because you're overwhelmed with pity, let's say that somehow makes you morally virtuous and not only does it not make you morally virtuous but A It's often the case that that and this is the great Freudian observation that that all-encompassing compassion actually has an all-consuming component and that's that overprotectiveness that Jonathan Height and Lukianov have been writing about, for example, and it's very much what interferes with development. of people's autonomy and therefore the reflexive idea that because you are a sympathetic person you are right is bad enough, apart from the fact that all the sympathy is on the radical left, which is certainly not good , I think one of the things you talk about and this is where I think the left has taken advantage in many areas and I would say the left and I'm not talking about people who are liberal.

I always make this distinction, there are people who are on the left, thanks Mauro, they are on the liberal right and this is Dave's point all the time, if you are for free speech but you disagree with me on tax rates, You are a liberal if you are someone on the left and you want to shut down debate because you fundamentally believe that freedom of speech is a presumption of the power structure, then you are on the left, but what Haight says, and he is right, is that in any conversation that have with someone there is a kind of gateway to the conversation. and that's showing that you have good will, so showing sympathy is one way to do that, so what the left likes to do is prevent the conversation from happening by preventing you from appearing like a sympathetic human being, which means, For example, when I talk about transgenderism the first thing they tell me is that you don't care about transgender people, why are we having this conversation?

You are trying to say that you are trying to create violence against transgender people and that is why this language is used constantly. It is used because if we accept that I have enormous sympathy for people who suffer from what is by any measure a disorder and if I say that we have to seek sympathy for these people and try to find the best scientific solutions and try to find out what is best for society at large, not just for transgender people, but also for children who are teaching who can be easily confused about gender, or if we are looking for what is the best solution for doctors, for whom there is an article in The New York Times like last week. a person who suggests that doctors should be forced to perform transgender surgery simply based on their wishes, not even based on an assessment of need, the doctor should not be able to assess whether someone needs transgender surgery or if basically the situation in Ontario It's already in Canada, yes.

I mean, it's on demand, it's like any other elective surgery. Yeah, I mean, these kinds of things have real social consequences and what the left will do is not want to talk about the social consequences. They say you're not welcome in the conversation because you're not understanding and this is usually what they throw at me and you know a lot in the sense that my motto facts don't care about your feelings but what I mean by That's not that you shouldn't care about other people, it's that in the end the solutions that will lead to a better life won't be based on feelings, they will be based on facts, this doesn't mean you have to be unfriendly. human being so for example there is a story that I haven't really told publicly because I don't like to tell these stories publicly because you know that Maimonides has a foundation of principle of charity, which is the best form of charity is anonymous charity because then you don't get credit Therefore, it is fine.

I don't want to make it seem like this happened simply because I was trying to get credit for it, but several weeks ago I was speaking at a university that will remain nameless to maintain anonymity. reasons and I was on this topic came up a transgender person stood up at the microphone and asked a question and the conversation went sideways, the person suggested that they start talking about their personal history and I started looking for holes in the personal history. a little bit and it's probably an exchange that I could have handled better, but in any case the person got very upset and started crying and then left and this is all on tape and it was one of those situations where I give speeches in Q&A . forums and because there are a lot of videos of me destroying people, there's one of those situations where if the tape comes out it gets five million views and Shapiro destroys transgender people, right, Ryan?

I do not want thatThat happens in my conferences if there is going to be a ship Hiro destroys the video that we didn't even cut, then I would like it to be like just a rational exchange where everyone leaves feeling good about the exchange and someone gets lost in someone. This was something different, the person was visibly emotionally upset, very upset and the people running the event knew who this person was so I called the person on the phone and told him I really didn't go. I wanted to go. You know I have my public position, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have sympathy for you.

I went to the organizers of the event. I asked them to cut that part of the tape because there is no reason for this person to be exposed to ridicule and then I had coffee with the person the next morning to make sure they were okay emotionally, okay that's not coming from anywhere if I do not do it. I don't care about people, this is coming from a place where these are vital and important public conversations, so shutting down those conversations by saying I don't care about a human being, I don't care about what happens to people, is the most disgusting way. of non-platforming because it's not just saying you know this is a platform of your views because your views are so terrible and so horrible, but it's saying that your views are inherently evil, yes they are inherently sociopathic and you are, and you are, and that's and that's something that I think is actually a form of Laurie beyond understanding that you can take care of people.

I think you can take care of people and I mean, one of the things that has been characterizing the tour that we've been doing is that when I'm lecturing, I'm not lecturing to the audience, I'm lecturing to individuals and I'm also not lecturing to them, that's the wrong way because I always include myself in the discussion, so if we're talking about ethical principles and how they could What would you call it? I found it more solid. I always put myself on the list of perpetrators who need some improvement, so it's just a matter of arguing with people one at a time, even if they are very old. audiences and then when I see people afterwards, because I meet about a hundred and fifty people after each talk, so I don't have a huge amount of time, but I do have enough time to make personal contact with each person and I am very careful to do it very carefully. . because I am very happy that they are there and they often tell me a story about how they were suffering in some way or that things were not right in their lives and that they have been trying to develop a vision to aim for. high is something worth aiming for, which is part of the advantage of hierarchies, right, it's something we should talk about because you can't aim for something without privileges over something else and if you don't have anything tame in then you don't have any purpose in your life and that's a fucking catastrophe so anyway they come up with a vision and they're trying to be more responsible and then the individualistic aspect of it is you know I have.

I have pointed out to two people that they must take responsibility for themselves, which is not the same as being individually selfish and doing it in a way that also makes them responsible for their family and doing it in a way that also makes them responsible for the community , so individualism is not the selfish individualism that leftists or critics criticize by any stretch of the imagination, it is the individual positioned in an iterated game that includes them as individuals extended across time, so there is already a collective on that. some sense and then in relation to family and community, but from the individual award which I think is part and parcel of the Judeo-Christian enlightenment philosophy anyway, these people come and tell me a story and say they were in a bad place and that things have gotten a lot better and they're a little sad about the bad place part and the visibly altered vision often and then they tell me how things have gotten better and they're very happy about it and it's very touching and emotional and that's where That's where the care takes place, that's right at the level of the individual.

I went to a supermarket yesterday, this happens quite often, so I was there and two of the guys behind the meat counter came out separately and said they had been watching. In my lectures and one of them talked about the fact that you know you have a 7-year-old son and you want to do right by him, so you've been looking a lot for ethical and moral guidance and you've been reading and listening to my book. and I focus on the parts about telling the truth and not lying and I'm having these conversations with people one at a time about how they strive to develop an ethical and philosophically grounded ethical perspective, you know, and it's very interesting to see this happen and look who's doing it this is this I think an important point is that I get asked a lot because I get a lot of criticism and criticism.

I get asked a lot if I've ever been confronted in public because I went out in public, you know, with my my family went to Disneyland on Thanksgiving Day to Disneyland and I found out that C harassed him, no it wasn't hard for him, but people were approached me because they like my stuff or enjoy it and want to take pictures. It probably happened 35 to 40 times over the course of that day and I was asked if there had ever been a situation where someone came up to you and said something mean or unpleasant, yeah, I can't think of one, I can't think of one. only time this has happened online now.

All I understand is that the point here is that when it comes to individuals who are affected, you know who really and who really feels good or bad about you, yes, it is a collective mob mentality that allows people to protest against you and then protest against me and then that. The mob mentality is adopted by individual journalists who see themselves as sort of champions of the people, um, broadly speaking, but not champions of individuals because they still can't find the individual who has been victimized by Jordan Peterson, yet. they can't find. the individual who has been a victim of Dave Rubin or an individual who has been a victim of the entropy row, you can't find those people, so instead what it becomes is, oh, it's just another group. broad the one who is a victim, but none of those people have come to me personally and you said you victimized me you hurt me because they can't a situation where this happened well I always loved always love when they say we are radicalizing people and it's like I open my inbox I get emails from all sorts of people usually on the right saying they were a little more extremist on the right, yes because they see a decent liberal who will treat them with respect, they have modified their opinions but what do you think of this in a moment?

On a psychological level, the disconnect between what seems to be happening in the real world on a day-to-day basis and the way a large number of people behave online. What do you think is psychologically good? It's a tough question, I mean, it could easily be. For example, if you think about places like Twitter, let's take Twitter as an example, we don't understand, we don't really understand much about how people communicate, period psychologically, one of the things that psychologists do know is that if there is any distance between you and a person, so, for example, if you are inside a car, you are much more likely to act in an impulsive and hostile manner and that is because one of the things that seems to mitigate that impulsive hostility are the mechanisms that are activate when you're face-to-face with someone, so those could be mechanisms associated with innate sympathy, for example, and that regulates your behavior, and because most of the time in our evolutionary history you interacted directly one-on-one with someone, that seemed to work. well enough, the cavemen had to etch insults on the walls and that took a long time, but on twitter as it could easily be, I read this little article here a while ago that shows which words should be in the content most likely to be retweeted and almost all of them were high-level negative emotion words, so it could be that you have this big group of people and then it could be that it's just the person who is in a bad mood and is irritated that day or a chronically sort of thing or a disposition so, let's say, and whoever is specifically angry about something they saw at that moment probably tweets and that gives you this wildly skewed view of the consensus because you assume that if there are a hundred people showing up in a crowd outside your door, you assume that there are more than a hundred people mad at you right there, a representative of a much larger group on Twitter, you can't tell if the 30 people saying snarky things especially anonymously to you, you can't know if they are representative at all and they probably aren't, and you know that very narrow bandwidth of 140 or 280 characters could also be something that really facilitates impulsive, angry responses, and that's why we don't do it.

I don't understand anything about this psychological time and I think something else is also happening and that is that both Twitter and Facebook, all social networks, are basically something different in the history of humanity in the sense that they are just a crowd without a purpose , so it's a crowd seeking. a purpose, meaning that throughout human history we had to have face-to-face interactions with people. The only reason you would appear in a crowd is because the crowd had a purpose, so where did you normally do this when you went to a meeting? church, right, everyone was there to worship, everyone was there with a common goal in mind, right, you were a member of the military, so there was a common goal in mind, every time you got together it was because there was a party, so that everyone was there for the party.

Twitter is legitimately people waking up and I just want to interact with other humans, there are no other humans around, so I'm here and you're here and we're all here and look, someone just said something weird, there's a common purpose. jump on that and then there's this pat on the back effect of the person saying something and I mean we all use Twitter so we all know that if you're the most dangerous thing on Twitter than most, if you could do something with Twitter, I would get rid of the mentions tab, the reason is that if you are simply human behavior, it encourages bad behavior, especially because it encourages you to watch and see how people respond to you because as humans we are constantly looking to see how people respond to us. responds and this is usually a good thing, right, it's generally a good thing, except it's an ego machine.

Yes, I'm sorry because the key, one of the keys to being a good person, is to recognize the majority of people. I'm not thinking about you 95% of the time, right, you're not that important as a human being, so in order for you to be important, you really have to do something important, but because Twitter works in such a way that all you get is that feedback. loop, it increasingly encourages you to seek more of that feedback that makes you feel good. I mean, you get a little bit of endorphins every time there's nice comments about you, you're new, you're a new way or nice comments that happen in real life there's never a situation in real life where that happens when it happens it's an important life event is a wedding it's a Bar Mitzvah true it's something where people collectively celebrate you but on Twitter everyone collectively celebrates everyone else and the people who voice the strongest opinions are the people who receive both the most condemnation as the biggest celebration, so in a strange way, it's not that we want people to go into their bubbles, but these squares are almost there, they are too big to function properly, so every week there is Another story in the that Jack says, I'll get rid of the likes or the follower accounts and they're always trying to bring up these ideas to manipulate the way we behave with each other, but in a weird way, having everyone. from everywhere on these platforms really doesn't make sense in some weird way.

I'm not saying we should be a separate plan, well there's no community, yeah, because their names are right, so it's like we need something that has community, I think, but then the danger has been our little equity, I mean, it's the need, it's fascinating because if you look at other places, the Internet structurally, the way the community works is a little bit different than the way it works or used to work ten years ago. Back in the day, when people were visiting websites directly, there was something like National Review in the corner and there was a bunch of people you know, like us, sitting around and discussing ideas back and forth, back and forth, like a group blog, yeah, and it was restricted to the people who were discussing the ideas and then underneath our video game board or whatever exactly and then underneath you would have the comments section that was about those particular conversations because Twitter is fragmented, no.

There is no real conversation on Twitter. It's me saying something and you're responding and I'm not primarily responding and then I tweet something else.thought and then you're responding and the idea of ​​having a long conversation every time it happens on Twitter at the end. of the conversation you find someone saying that this is not the appropriate place to have a long conversation. If we're going to do that, we'd be in a capsule, right? We'd write each other letters like this, right? This is not the way to do it and even when I'm talking to my Peters, even when I'm talking to left-wing people who I talk to on the phone instead of having a Twitter conversation about it.

I'll call, I'll pick up the phone, I'll call them and have a conversation because you can't have a good conversation. Twitter, you can see how much of this is connected to one of the things you've mentioned in a lot of the talks, which is that we're getting information a lot faster right now, not only can we open our phone and basically have the world right there, but we can listen to podcasts at double speed, which if you listen to Pierrot at double speed you go back inside more, but yeah, I wasn't doing half of it, but that's the nature of technology. accelerating our ability to assimilate information that perhaps we have not evolved faster, well, we are also absorbing a type of pseudo-information because it looks like information but it is very low resolution, so you get a lot of information, but it is not.

It's not real knowledge, it's like there was a funny New Yorker cartoon where a wife asked her husband: do you know this or do you just know it from Google? that you don't have to take any responsibility for them either, you know especially if you are anonymous and that also brings out the worst in the people you know and the phenomenon of trolling, I mean one of the things you notice about children during An example is that if children don't get enough attention, they will certainly seek bad attention because the fundamental human currency is attention and it's one thing to be hated but another thing entirely to be ignored and I would say that generally speaking, if you cornered people and made them choose You know if they were if they had knowledge that was transparent to themselves they said you would rather be ignored or hated they take it hated because at least then you exist because you exist at least somewhere in your relationship with other people and that's why some of the bad behavior is rewarded.

Precisely for that reason it attracts attention and that makes you mean. I mean, you think of people who commit Highness crimes like school shooters. so they do these things that are almost inconceivable a big part of the drive for that is fantasies about notoriety and and and and the rise of obscurity and anonymity even though it's notorious it's hate the idea is that I'd rather be dead and more infamous than alive and I know which one, by the way, I think was one of the first websites to say we're not going to post to these people, yeah, and then we're going to give them exactly what they like.

I do not accept. The credit is like the first. Several names are escaping me, but there are other people who have been promoting this for a while, but yeah, I'm late. We should have done it sooner and I spoke to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about it about ten years ago. years ago about the idea that publishing the names of these murderers is precisely one of the mechanisms that ensures that this will continue to happen and there is no doubt about that, now how to mitigate that is very complicated, I mean, and that does relate to a deeper conversation that saw this CDC study that came out of it again for the second year in a row life expectancy in the United States fell, so you had constant increases in life expectancy in the United States for 150 years and now for For the first time in modern American history, life expectancy is reduced for two years in a row and that, specifically, due to two phenomena, one is the increase in heroin overdoses and the other is suicide.

Suicide is now at record rates in the modern era and we had 70,000 heroin overdoses, opiate overdoses, Oprah overdoses last year, I think it was 50,000 the year before, so we are starting to see a decline in hope of life, there is a crisis of meaning and that is why I think part of the resistance to Jordan, in particular, but I think also for me and for anyone else in IDW who is at least searching for meaning is that the left has been saying for a long time that we found the right meaning, the meaning was do what you want to do, the meaning was not responsibility. what you want to do, that's the meaning, the meaning is rebelling against the system and when it turns out that a lot of people don't find meaning in that, from my perspective there is a god-shaped hole in people's hearts that is being filled by hatred and polarization and tribalism or that you just can't do it forever, no one can maintain that level forever of trying to tear everything down, well, there's also, there's, there's, there's, there's nothing to it, especially when your opponent It weakens, you know.

We thought maybe we had talked a little bit about hierarchies so you know that one of the things a hierarchy does is fundamentally put some things above others and you think the left criticizes what is valid. The criticism is that if you build a hierarchy, well, let me take a step back, we'll look at this in a sequence. Okay, so the first proposition would be that we have real problems because people suffer and like us. real problems and we would also like to solve them and that solutions exist and that if you have a solution and then you implement it socially and then you have to get people to cooperate and compete around the solution, you are going to produce a hierarchy and If the hierarchy is valid then the people who are best at producing this solution to the problem are going to lead the hierarchy.

Well, that would be a right-wing conservative position. It is as if we need hierarchies, they privilege values ​​and are necessary. solve problems and there is a relationship between the ability to solve the problem and the structure of the hierarchy. Well, then we'd say that's true when hierarchies work well. Well, that's the point of view of the right and then those on the left would say. Wait a second, your hierarchy becomes rigid over time and ossifies and can be occupied by people who use power instead of competition to dominate it and they do it unfairly and they warped the structure of the hierarchy and that makes it difficult for people to get in, including talented people and then the hierarchy itself as a structure has a problem because the dispossessed people tend to accumulate at the bottom and everything seems relevant and true, so then you could say, well, you need the right because you need the hierarchies and and they need to be implemented and that's what managers and administrators do, that's what conscientious people do because they're hierarchically oriented and it's a very efficient way of operating and people are actually happier within hierarchies because there's a chain of identifiable command, but then the left has Their position is yes, but we must be careful with the dispossessed because they are the majority and we must ensure that things do not degenerate into tyranny, so I think the political discussion is that the left and the right constantly look at each other. another to ensure that hierarchical structures remain in good health and that is why freedom of expression is necessary.

Well, now the problem with that, let's see if I can get back to where I was. I was going with this to start. oh yeah, the problem with that is that if you were just a rebel you would say, well, we're going to criticize the system, whatever it is, so that's a very important thing to begin with: to tear down that hierarchy of values ​​and the idea of value hierarchies as such but that puts you in a terrible conundrum and this is what I have been focusing on in my public lectures, isn't it? If you accept the essential idea that life is suffering and life is suffering tainted by malevolence, which I think is an even more precise formulation: you have a fundamental existential problem and that is suffering and then you need meaning to oppose it to strengthen yourself against catastrophe, so if you tear down hierarchies then you have no meaning, there is nothing to fight for. and without that meaning that you are anxious and overwhelmed by definition, we know that neuropsychologically because the purpose frames you well, it gives you a game to play and rules to follow and then the purpose gives you something to aim for and a positive emotion and of there the problem. with what the left is offering and I think this is actually the kind of problem that Sam Harris and atheists are running into as well, it's like well where's the purpose?

Well, we don't have one, it's just rebellion against the unjust hierarchy. as if, but the hierarchy also gives you value, well, okay, the cost is so high that we are going to demolish the hierarchy, well, then you will be left with nothing, well, but no, you will not be left with anything because you will be left with What we are left with is inalienable suffering, so it is nothing, that is suicide and I think the left's solution to that has been intersectionality, which means that what they have done is just take it higher or they have taken hierarchy and I have said that hierarchy is bad because it is ossified and it is terrible and it is not just that they have destroyed the hierarchy and then we are all leveled, it is that they have inverted the hierarchy in certain ways that merit itself has become a sign that you are an exploiter yes of course if you are at the top of the hierarchy then it is because you did something wrong to get there and you got hurt you are going to get there you are there for last we will be first we I will simply take this triangle and turn it upside down to whether the cables are at the bottom or the top, so I think there's something absolutely fundamental there as well because I've been trying to understand what the core is.

The problem is that it drives the pathological left and I think it is the story of Cain and Abel, fundamentally it is the jealousy of the successful and the worst type of successful person, since it turns out that from a jealousy perspective, psychologically speaking, it is like If you got your power arbitrarily, if you inherited it or got it unfairly, you're a little annoying, but not so annoying because you're not that good, you're just lucky, right?, and that's why I can be jealous of you because you're lucky and stuff. It's unfair, but you're just as reprehensible as I am, right, but then let's take the alternative position, let's say I don't take responsibility for my life in any sense and I don't take on any moral burden and that turns out that you're not only successful but you're competent and well, well, then you are a real enemy because you are a judge in those circumstances, because it is your goodness, in a sense, your competence and your goodness that really shows me. in a negative light and instead of wanting to deal with it and seeing myself poorly reflected in your mirror, then I'm going to make the accusation that everything you've done is simply a consequence of power and, more profoundly, me.

I'm going to criticize the idea of ​​merit and competence itself because that shakes me out of my self-hatred. Well, none of that is real, none of that merit, none of that confidence is real, and none of the failure I'm experiencing is failure. consequence of my own inaction, however, everything is someone and then I saw someone else's fault and then I am justified in going after them too, yes that is a good thing, one became here, they came. The story of Nabal is, I mean, it's explicit about this and This is even buried in the text, right, that's explicit, I mean, God specifically says to Cain, Tim, of course, you have the ability to overcome, yeah, right, and that, and he goes to Calais, yeah, and that's the general idea, you know, that's the crux of it.

The story is that because Cain complains to God, he says what he basically says, something like it's not fair what happened, that's right, how dare you create a universe like this where I'm splitting my head. half trying to, you know, thrive and everything's okay? against me and I have my brother that everything he touches turns to gold and that's right, God tells him directly, look at yourself, it's your insufficiency that's driving this and it's the last thing Cain wants to hear and they say that That's what a murderer does and I think that's the last thing most people want to hear.

That's what's so appealing about a left-wing ideology that doesn't really provide any meaning outside of the cult of victimhood. This is this feeling. that the last thing people What I want to hear in general is look at yourself first, it's a lot easier to say, but it's also bad parenting, I mean, but it's also funny because one of the things that happens in my conferences is because I have been doing something different. You know, instead of saying look, I think one of the things that conservatives do wrong about responsibility is that they conceptualize it too rigidly in terms of should and ought and that's true, but it's also a mistake because what What I have been suggesting to people is that no, what you don't understand is that all the meaning of your life will come as a consequence of accepting an answer.

Yes, it is not simply a matter of duty, it is that you need this sustaining meaning because otherwise. you sufferstupidly and you become bitter and resentful and you become cruel and murderous and you get to genocide, that's all the way and that's a catastrophe, that's hell and then, if you don't have something meaningful to pursue to oppose that, that's yours. , that's the degeneration of nihilism, okay, so where do you find the answer, where do you find the meaning, let's say, well, you look at the people you admire and almost everyone. The people you admire are people who take on a heavy burden of responsibility and if responsibility is associated with the hierarchy of values, then you are trying to pursue something of supreme value, then that is the responsibility that gives you meaning and so you can speak to the people. about taking responsibility for their inadequacies if you point out to them that they could be much better than they are, so that there is a trajectory and so that suddenly the idea of ​​taking responsibility even for their own inadequacies and mistakes arises. associated with hope and not just condemnation and that works and that, like when I presented that line of argument at conferences and you've seen it several times, it always happens that the conference rooms go silent, yes, some people are absolutely fascinated with that idea and this is interesting.

I didn't interview Tucker Carlson, who I know is also here with you and one of the things we talked about was he knows what people should do in dying cities, they are in areas where the industry has left what they should do, they are experiencing difficulties and I was saying that falsely telling people that jobs are coming back is not going to do anything for them, which is the only thing you are guaranteed in the United States or a free country. The country is the adventure, right, that is what you are guaranteed and that is also what makes life meaningful.

It's that sense of adventure. That's what the United States was built on. That is the fundamental command. The first command that Abraham has given is to get up, leave the land of. your father is where it happened and you're going to go somewhere, yeah, where I'm not going to tell you where you're going, you're just going to go there and then when you get there, maybe you know it well and that's it and that's it, but I think one of the Areas that you and I think would be interesting to delve into is when it comes to leading toward purpose, how do we define what purpose is?

Because I think one of the things that's been difficult in the West at least since then. The death of the Judeo-Christian value system in many ways or at least the one we are running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian value system is nothing but from the diminishing importance of that value system in the minds of many people, the decline of life Biblical has been this idea, you can create your own meaning, yes, right, you just did it, if you find something that really matters to you and then you search for that thing that really matters to you, this will bring you happiness and that can This can be true for a a certain number of people, but the vast majority of people are incredibly bad at finding their own meanings.

Yes, there has to be something out there that can be discovered for that to be the case. I think that's what psychoanalysts say. why I like you so much because that's what made him such an astute critic of Nietzsche because Nietzsche believed that we had to create our own values, but the psychoanalyst, starting with Freud, began to notice that values ​​were actually integrated and Freud saw that first. of everything in dreams, right, and then young people, too young, dismantled it and associated dreams with myths and said no, no, you don't understand that values ​​are built in you, don't believe them, you can rediscover them and that's the resurrection.

The question is, and we didn't discuss this before, is where exactly that moral system comes from, so obviously it speaks to the idea that you know that you believe in God because of the starry sky. up and the moral law in here you can you can discover all this within I'm not convinced that human beings can really discover meaning within because if that were true then prosperity and liberalism and human rights and value for individuals and all things that we associate with good things in the West that would have been universal and are in fact not universal, emerged at a particular time, in a particular place associated with a particular value system, that's why when people ask me why I think the disclosure is necessary why it's important because I think without having to make these fundamental assumptions to get from point A to point B, you're going to have to make fundamental assumptions at point a.

Now you can get that from Revelation. either you can just assume it and then try to explain where those assumptions come from or you can just pretend those assumptions don't exist, which is, I think, actually what Sam does and I hate to criticize Sam in his absence, but I think that Sam he just assumes that when he says things like we are here for the greater flourishing of human beings, yes you actually have to define each of those terms, they are a bunch of assumptions built into what all that means is that he is doing and not I'm sure Sam recognizes that he's doing them, but that's why for me and this is kind of the thesis of my book next year, the West is based on the basic revelations of Jerusalem, which means that human beings are facts in the life of God. image with individual value and with individual purpose and with a collective purpose where we come together and pursue to live in a more virtuous way and that is one pole and the other pole is the reason for being of Greece, where we have the ability to look at the world that around us. us and draw conclusions from that world and at those poles all modern science is built, all economics is built, freedom of expression and the free and free lives that we live now and I think we have been doing it gradually over the last 200 years .

To destroy both poles, Jerusalem in terms of the Apocalypse and Athens in terms of reason, which we have abandoned for postmodernism, is to deprive ourselves of a purpose. In a strange way, this is the failure of the Enlightenment liberals, all the people I grew up loving and caring about, people I still admire, that and this small group of liberals who still remain who have not accepted leftist dogma but who are not necessarily religious per se or believe in these stories, but they really do. comes from the Enlightenment period, I think it's a good observation that this is kind of their failure and I just don't want to, I don't blame it, it's their arrogance, I would say, because even the people who are not enough, they are not enough. in your world to fight to fight this new I really know that this is where I am right now, which is an incredibly uncomfortable place.

I come from a much more atheist perspective, obviously, than you and certainly where you are and yet I can look at what the future is now and it's like there's nothing left there and we need some foundations just the position without the underlying myths exactly with the winter where I disagree with people like Steven Pinky. I'm an Enlightenment guy, but the thing is, when I look back in time you know what people like Harrison Pinker attribute to the Enlightenment. I see the Enlightenment as the latest flowering of a process that was indescribably older than that. It is exactly correct, I mean, then, in the and in the historical.

Sam is certainly based on religious traditions, but from my perspective it is based on something that is biological and that is much deeper than that, like our true propensity to admire competition and reciprocity, and I think that needs to be socialized to back to your point, so I wanted to One of the things that Dave mentioned before we started was that we could have a little conversation about the difference between Judaism and Christianity and I transferred it. I'd love to hear it and you want to make a comment on the topic of neo-illumination. So I will say that there is a whole chapter in my book that deals specifically with the opinions of a lot of people who I love, you know Sam and Michael Shermer and then Pinker and the whole neo-Enlightenment school of thought that I have.

I think it includes General Goldberg over conservatives, yes I love these guys and I feel like intellectually I'm more comfortable with that position, but I realize they're just narrowing me down, so here's my basic view and my basic thesis is that there are two. One of the views of the Enlightenment is that, in general, Goldberg's words "it was the miracle that depends" came out of nowhere, suddenly reason dominated over revelation and crushed revelation and, in the wake of that crushing, came the full flowering of the economy, humanity, freedom and liberalism. and that those things were opposed to reason to revelation was exactly what they were and not only that they were not intended, but that they were completely opposed because it is true that reason in the Apocalypse is our intention, but it is also true that certain assumptions support the assumptions of reason in In order for you to believe that reason exists and is not just an evolutionarily favorable activation of neurons, then you have to do it, if you want.

I think Sam's position that the goal exists in the absence of anything remotely approaching a system of assumptions is untenable. It's completely unbearable I think I think that because you are created to create more small copies of yourself I mean this is evolutionarily speaking what you were created to do how that has to do with discovering objective truth is not only beyond me so the in and what has to do with the existence of objective truth in any case, in any case, the illustration is based on certain fundamental assumptions, it is based on the idea that you can act as an individual freely making rational decisions in a predictable world of laws. each of these assumptions has no basis in a world of pure scientific determinism it simply does not exist it does not exist then the educated self the layman ate himself what happened is that the Enlightenment was the Enlightenment and I think you see this in conscious Kant He settles all of this, sees that this fight is coming and so he tries to recreate

religion

, spirituality and God again in a moral system without really saying it.

Rane Khan says that he is actually not an atheist. He's actually trying to create a rational basis for Christianity. revelation and Christian reasoning to avoid the trap of having to quote the Bible, but you can say that this all makes sense anyway, well, that's why I see this as the failure of modern liberals, because it's like even some of some of them our IDW team that most of these people, most of us originally came from the left and it's like the position we find ourselves in now is that there is no one on the left who will talk to any of us without attacking us or do the usual. tricks now we have all these people like you and Prager and the rest of them that are willing to talk to us willing to debate everything you know all this and I still see a hesitation because people are like that, it's built like that to people who conservatives are evil or even thinking about the world through a religious lens or something is somehow evil or stupid or something and it's like I just can't play that well, I think psychoanalysts and some of the neuroscientists that I knew, the ones that were more informed about emotions and motivation and were also interested in dreams and instincts, so those would be the neuroscientists that were concerned with emotions and more about cognitive types, cognitive types They're like the rationalists in the field of psychology, they're very open to both, they were surprisingly open to the ideas of the Union, you know, the idea that you know our rationality is embedded within our emotions and all of that is embedded within our motivations and all of that is embedded within our bodies, so rationality is Isn't this what you would call a free-floating soul in some sense, that is able to contemplate the objective world, but something that is deeply rooted within all sorts of other structures on which its validity depends?

One of the things psychoanalysts were so good at. What I am pointing out, and I think it agrees with the neuropsychological evidence, is that your rationality is limited by dreaming and it is literally that way because if you are deprived of dreaming, which puts you in the mythical world, then you literally lose your Keep in mind that there has to be a continuous dialogue between the revelation that would be associated with the dream world and rationality or rationality cannot stand on its own and the reason for this is that, as far as I can tell, the assumptions of the rationality are in the myth in the myths, which was the argument I was continually trying to make with Sam and so the question is what constitutes myth and one of your points was that there is this idea that human beings are made in the image of God and therefore me.

I've been thinking about it a lot and my feeling is something like this and you tell me what you think about this, okay, then you wake up in the morning and your consciousness emerges out of nowhere in some sense and what you see in front of you. You are not determined like clockwork in what you are going to dodo that day, in fact, your consciousness is that part of you that deals with what is not yet determined because all the things you do are fundamentally habitual and Determinists are unconscious, they can become habits and you have no conscious control over them , so consciousness seems to be that element that deals with what has not yet been determined.

Well then you wake up in the morning and what you face as far as I know. I am concerned with potential, there is a field of potential in front of you and that is the future. Whatever that potential is, it is what could be and what is not yet and then as a consequence of the choices you make guided by your goals ethical, then you transform that potential into reality and you literally do it with your conscience and I believe that that is the reflection of the image of God in man and I believe that that is what is proposed in the first sections of Genesis because that is what God does good.

God is a structure with which he confronts nothingness with something that approximates consciousness, the logos, and extracts our order from potential and And then one of the interesting things is that there is a repetition of the idea in Genesis that if you confront the potential with the truth, then that is the logos, let's say with the truth, then the order that it produces is good, then there is a way that is really interesting ethical statement, right, you take this potential, you interact with it morally, the consequence of interact morally is that you produce reality and the reality that you produce is good and then human beings are a microcosm of what you see, I know that's exactly true, I mean, I think this is the kind of philosophy in philosophical terms, this is basically the argument, but Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas are making this argument basically at the same time, you know at the beginning when he says that Bracy Parral became so minor is that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth what makes the being human in the image of God is our creative capacity and the creative capacity is the ability to transform through an act of will something that was not into something that is and that is what the first chapters of Genesis are is God taking things and simply making them and then what makes them good is that these things are this is the Aristotelian part is that these things are directed towards our purpose towards a purpose so what The Greek idea of ​​rationality what distinguishes it from other ideas of rationality is that Greek rationality is based on a fundamental premise which is that you can look at a thing and the thing was made for something right, so if you look at a glass the glass was made to contain liquid and you can say that because that is the nature of the glass now there is nothing in science this is a glass it was made to hold liquid it is just a piece of glass that is made in a certain particular shape but we as human beings know that this glass was made to hold liquid and that we can look at the universe in the same way we can tell what the purpose of this thing was and that's why when God says something is good the use of the word good in Aristotelian thought is good is suitable for the purpose what makes you a good pilot, for example, it is your ability to land a plane, what makes it a good glass is its ability to retain liquids, and what makes you a good person is your ability to use rationality in search of virtue and transform the world around you.

By doing so, that is what makes you a good person and that is why when it says at the beginning of Genesis that God has the tree of good and evil and that you are the knowledge of good and evil and it is a sin to eat the knowledge of the good and evil. My understanding of that is that what human beings did was, instead of trying to function according to God's purpose for things, they tried to figure out what the universe was. to be used in accordance with reality, we decided to overlay our own vision of what reality should be in a moral sense and that there is a fundamental disconnect there and it leads to suffering, so let's simplify this for just a second because I want to do a question that I know you don't like to get when we get into the Q&A, but I think it would be interesting for the three of us to talk over here, which is for the average person listening to this. that alone can take in a lot of these ideas and a lot of this right and I think that's actually most people who are just living their lives.

I think a certain group of people listen to them both and do well, these two guys think some guy is speaking to them from heaven. I mean, I know this is the ultimate. I know why this means you don't love this question because it's ridiculously oversimplified, but how do you reach those people and then the thinking people? We'll wait a minute, what are you talking about? The superior loves facts/feelings, but he's talking about this guy from imaginary heaven who wrote this book and blah blah blah, what do you think it is? Is there any psychological trick to understand? people over that hurdle, if you wanted them to start exploring some of this, you know we can, we can do high level stuff for hours and hours, but eventually it just keeps getting to a kind of smaller and smaller place where people can be okay, so that's very difficult to question and I'll try to approach it this way, so there's a line in the New Testament where Christ says that no one comes to the Father except through him, which is hell.

What anyone can say, I mean, there are many statements in the New Testament that are surprisingly strange in the sense that I am the way, the truth and the life, is another, is associated with the same idea and well, with some of them, so here it is. Here is the idea and it relates to your question, although I don't know exactly how it is as if there is a spirit at the bottom of things that is involved in the creation of everything, so, for example, people. We talk about evolution as a random process, but that is not true, it is not true, mutations are random, but there are also many sources, other sources of variation of genetic variants, but the selection mechanisms are not random, so now The question is what are the selection mechanisms.

I'm going to have to go a lot, well, there's a selection mechanism here. Human women are very sexually selective, that's why you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors, so the male failure rate at reproduction is twice that of females. So the question is, how is it possible for men to be differentially successful? and the first answer is, well, women reject if human women reject, but then the question might be: do they reject based on what, and the answer is, well, it's something like competition and then the question is how do you do it? defines trust and then the answer is that men put themselves in hierarchies and vote on the competence of others and it's really contradictory in a sense from an evolutionary perspective because you would have to wonder why men would put themselves in positions where they raise the status of some men and then they give them a huge reductive advantage since that is to their reproductive disadvantage in a sense, okay and there are reasons that part of that could be, let's say you decide to follow the best leader in a fight well, then no. you die like he can get all the women but you don't die so at least you're still in the game and it might be the same if you're following the best hunter and the best hunter.

It wouldn't be the person who was best at hunting, it would be the person who would be best at hunting and sharing it and organizing the next hunt and all that, and so the men will organize themselves into groups and privileges. certain men that puts them at the top of the reproductive hierarchy and what that means to some extent is that there is a spirit of masculinity that is shaping the entire structure of human evolutionary history, that's what that means and then I think Well, that could simply be a biological issue. epiphenomena and then it would be a spirit that is the spirit of positive masculinity that manifests itself over epochs of millions of years perhaps and has actually shaped our consciousness and then you can think of that as a figure and it would be the figure that emerges is how it is how it is that is how the essential spirit of all the great men who defined what constituted greatness that is a spirit okay, now that is a purely biological explanation you could say well, that is gone for all intents and purposes. , you may have an image of that built into you, even the feeling that you can experience something divine and paternal could simply be a reflection of that evolutionary process, so it would be a biologically reductionist argument for the existence of what we experience as God, but there is also another possibility which is that that actually reflects a deeper metaphysical reality that has to do with the nature of consciousness itself and I would say that I believe that is true, I believe in the biological case and I believe in the case biologically reductive, but I don't think that exhausts I think there is a metaphysical layer beneath the bile that biology is a genuine reflection of and that is the kind of macrocosm above in the microcosm below that we really reflect, including in our consciousness , something about the structure of reality itself and that might involve whatever God is, which is why I think this is so interesting because what you're doing there, especially at the end, is giving him a little bit of space to say, I don't HE. right, you have to do it, yeah, but I think that's what people don't want to concede to believing in God, it's like, well, that's it for me, that question is always like, well, what makes you so sure of That you know that God exists?

It's like, well, me. I'm not sure I'm not willing to affirm that certainty, you know, but hey, I made the argument, so what do you think when he takes it to the end and then there's that little gap in it? I mean, again, I don't think that's very problematic in terms of general religious thought, I mean general religious thought that goes back thousands of years and that's why when you look at Thomas Aquinas as proof of God , what he comes to say is basically what you say, which is that if you dig deep enough then you get to something and that something is what we call God, so he doesn't say God, he doesn't.

The Bible begins with the premise that God exists and created the universe. Thomas Aquinas starts with we have a universe which says that God is there and he says that when you go deep enough there has to be a force that lies behind the combined logic of the universe and that thing is what we call God, so it's there. trying to reason his way. Let's go back to first principles and I think the case for God is not the way we think of him as a jolly guy with a beard in the sky who takes care of all our problems or anything but the idea that there is a logos.

Well, this is that there is a structure, a fundamental structure to the way life is and there was a reason and the fundamental purpose of why life is and what is underneath that you can call God and that without some association with him. and that is your conscience. reflects God again this is one of the fundamental this is a kind of live proof of God from anissa is that the principle of sufficient reason the idea that you are capable of understanding the universe if you really believe that you are capable of understanding the universe of Either way, then your mind has to do it somehow, if you believe in objective reality like Sam does and you believe that your mind is capable of grasping an objective reality, not an evolutionarily beneficial reality, but an objective reality, your mind is reflecting a greater reality. right mind your mind is reflecting a greater logic, well, what is behind that greater logic must be something correct and this is the idea that there is a god that is behind it, so the proof of God, I honestly believe, It is not extremely difficult and I think that we all have, whether of biological origin or, in my opinion, of logical origin, the belief that there is a structure in the universe of predictable structure that did not arise from simple randomness and that there is a reason why things are like this. way they are and that from that we can extract the fact that we are capable of acting within that logical universe of everything or pure chaos, you would not be able to act, you can tell by the Kassadin that surrounds you, so would both of you then argue that on a micro level?

On an individual level and on an individual level, you could live a perfectly good life with whatever moral subset you believe in, but I think ultimately they're both arguing that on a macro level a society just can't, can't, can't. It works without the myths, no, you are embedded in that and very well, and I was talking about this Christian idea too, so I have been thinking about that statement that no one comes to the Father except through me and I thought, okay, but what does it mean? that's exactly what it means and I've been working on this a lot throughout these conferences that you know I've been participating in well so there's this notion and that that height and Lukanov are also pursuing pampering the Americans.

Keep in mind that one of the ways you can encourage noble people is to have them face things that scare them and that are beyond their capabilities. So what is itWhat do you really want to do? Do you want to challenge people optimally? that makes them braver and stronger, not less fearful, it makes them braver and more competent, okay, and I would say the clinical evidence for this is overwhelming if you gather a hundred trained doctors and use them and say well, is there? usefulness and getting people to understand their ethical history and confront the things that they are avoiding, everyone will say yes, those are fundamentally healing and this is literally what we are doing backwards from that university, yes, exactly backwards.

Well, now here's the idea. The idea, so imagine that you are in some sense the embodiment of that fatherly spirit that has characterized humanity since the beginning of time, is locked up in you, is part of your potential and such. Perhaps that is encoded, at least in part biologically, but also sociologically. It's in the air, so to speak, around you in the myths and in the stories that we tell each other, okay, now what you decide to do and this is where I think we could have an interesting conversation about the relationship between the Judaism and Christianity.

There is an idea in Christianity that I think is the central idea, which is that you need to face the potential for malevolence that exists within you and in the world, so that is Christ's confrontation with the devil in the wilderness with Satan in the desert. You have to come. accept that malevolence that is part of existence and you have to voluntarily accept the burden of suffering and that is Krauss's acceptance, okay, so you assume that you say suffering, so there is an idea that Christ is a messianic figure because he took the suffering of the world upon himself and what that means to me is that he was someone conceptually speaking who decided that the suffering of the world was his responsibility and that that's what you're supposed to do, you're supposed to decide that that's your responsibility. you take it as a burden, you do the same with malevolence, so when you read the story, you read the story as a perpetrator, true, maybe you also read it as a victim, but you certainly read it as a perpetrator and that's up to you. mm-hmm Okay, so the question is what happens when you do that and I would say the answer is two things: First, start forcing yourself to develop, learn what you need to learn in the world, and absorb the information you need.

It would allow you to begin to face the suffering and rectify it so that it forces you to become a more competent person and that is the part of socialization that you thought was so important, but then a secondary thing happens which is taking that on. The additional stress and demand voluntarily transforms you biologically because within your genetic structure, let's say, there is all kinds of potential, but that will not be unlocked unless you put yourself in a position where the demands are necessary and therefore following that path, the truth, let's say, the acceptance of suffering and the confrontation with malevolence, so that is the heaviest burden you can take on, then it actually produces a psychophysiological spiritual transformation in yourself that matures you into becoming the representation of the father on earth, so that's how glad I did it.

I'm glad you brought us here because the question I asked you was just one thing I said, you guys started, that I wanted to get to something about most of the lectures that you, when we do these things, usually Talking about the Old Testament now, obviously, you're an Old Testament guy. I found my question to be: do you think Ben or just people who believe exclusively in the Old Testament are missing something, so you just made a case for something potentially missing here, get your argument right, which I'm going to argument is that what you just said is not Christian in the sense that you are saying that everyone is supposed to imitate Jesus and the basic presumption of, from what I understand, talking to Christian theologians. is that we are fundamentally incapable of taking on our own sin and so we have to have someone come in the form of Christ to earth to be able to accept that suffering for us and that is the purpose of God actually becoming incarnate in Christ. to provide humans with the ability to retreat from original sin which we don't really have the ability to overcome beyond a certain point and that is why Jesus as a singular figure is necessary.

In fact, I agree from a Judaic point of view with everything you say. because for me it is about accepting responsibility for my own sins on myself and I do not have the ability to say that there is a suffering servant, the suffering Lamb of God who sacrificed himself to relieve me of my sins and therefore give me justice. shot at life, yes, well, I think that's a very good objection and I think there's a bit of confusion about it in the Christian community, for example, so I would say that perspective is more explicitly Protestant and then I would put the Catholics on the side. side of that, but I would put the Orthodox pretty far from that, which is why I think so many Orthodox Christians have become interested in what I'm saying because its meaning and this is where my knowledge of Christian theology begins to grow.

It's over because I'm not an expert in, you know, doctrinal differences. His sense is that it is imitation that is of primary importance. Now it's a strange thing because even in classical Christianity you have, let's say, Protestant Christianity. this idea that well, Christ died to save us all from our sins and so we're already redeemed, but that doesn't alleviate the moral burden strange enough because you'd think it should, so there's this paradox and I think it's part of The The reason why this is is something extraordinarily complicated, but in the Karamasoff brothers Christ returns to earth and in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition and then he is doing his miracles and raising people from the dead and he likes to be all messianic and The first thing that happens is the Inquisitor arrests him, puts him in prison, and then comes to visit them and basically says, look, the last thing we need after establishing this church for 2,000 years is you, you've caused a lot of problems. a moral burden for human beings that is too much for them and that is why what we have done is dilute it and put in some intermediaries so that the moral demand that his example required does not simply crush people to nothing so that everyone The ideal is a judge, then you have the supreme ideal which is Judge Altima and from the point of view of the inquisitors, that judge was too much, he was too demanding, so I think there is an and so anyway, so the Inquisitor analyzes all this argument.

He says we're going to have to get rid of you again because you're too much to bear and then Christ listens and doesn't say and doesn't say anything and then just as the Inquisitor gets up to leave Christ he kisses him on the lips and when the questionnaire gets white in shock and then he leaves, but he leaves the door open and that's the brilliant, that's the brilliant ending of Yes by Dostoevsky and what makes him a genius because he basically says something like well, look that the The Church Catholic reduced the burden and is corrupt in the way that earthly organizations probably are and does allow a way out, so you can put your sins on Christ, say, and that lightens your moral burden, but it still keeps the damn door open, well, it's crazy, which is why I think it's really fascinating having spent a lot of time with Christian theologians over the last few years writing this book is that the original presumption, I think, when, when, when you talk to people who are Christians and Jews and have interfaith conversations.

The original sentence can see the difference between them is that what you hear from Jews is Judaism based on Zak and Christianity is based on faith. Christianity is about the acceptance of Christ. When you accept Christ, then you have accepted what you need to accept and everything flows from there and Judaism says that it is not just about accepting God, it is all these Mitzvahs, there are all these commandments that you have to fulfill and these are the ones that They perfect you as a human being, it is the fulfillment of these Commandments accepting the sovereignty of God because he is the one who gave the commandments but in reality you have to act in the world and if you do not act in the world then you have not fulfilled your responsibility in the world .

This could also be an argument as to why. You could have, although I know you wouldn't have realized that you could have Jewish atheists and they believe it's just their actions here, yeah, 100%, so that's why you know Jews have had a lot and I think that most Christians believe. This too, the idea of ​​having a moral atheist is not really a difficult idea, yes, it is the idea of ​​having a system based on atheism that is completely immoral and will fall apart almost immediately and the idea of ​​having a moral system based on atheism if you examine your I think atheism falls apart.

I think moral atheism is basically separating your morality from your atheism and then ignoring your atheism in pursuit of morality, which is fine, you can live well that way, that's fine, but I don't think that's the case. psychologically sustainable and if you really examine the core of your ideas, but having said that, I think that Christianity, after its original Mullen Aryan point of view, when Christianity first emerged, the idea of ​​Christ on earth was that he had marked the beginning of the messianic era because this era was a new era it was a new day and then it turns out that people looked around well this looks a lot like the old days at this time not much has changed and then what changed What changed was our spiritual state that The new redefinition of the messianic era is that what Christ had brought to Earth was a new spirit.

He had brought a new spirit to the earth and had cleansed the people of his sins and given them a new chance to live. basic life, yes, and that in doing so changed the nature of how things work well. Judaism basically said, well, we never thought that nature changed in the first place, right, that's a different thing and, ironically, I think it's one of the sources of the Christian life. Anti-Semitism over time is an attempt to distinguish what makes Christianity different from Judaism other than Christ because Christianity and Judaism in most of their major philosophies have a lot in common.

It's interesting. I just interviewed a fellow named John MacArthur, who is a prominent pastor. Christian theologian. I interviewed him a couple of days ago for our Sunday special and this came up. I asked him where you think the differences are between Christianity and Judaism and he basically said Jesus is right, that's the difference and I think that's the main difference. honest answer because when I listen to Christian theologians try to distinguish Judaism from Christianity what they say about Judaism I find that it is not accurate as to what Judaism actually says and when I listen to Jews try to distinguish Christianity from Judaism I think that okay and I'm not saying they're the same because obviously they're not, they're different belief systems, but in terms of the underlying value system, we say the Judeo-Christian value system is because in terms of the value system itself, the points In common they are overwhelming.

They are overwhelming, the differences are mostly doctrinal and historical and in terms of what you think, I think Christians read a factual version of their own lives through a variety of mechanisms, whether they say predestination exists , but to show that if I really choose that I would be acting this way, it is an act-based version, it is simply retroactive from the end and so, if you tell a Christian that you really believe that you can lead a terribly dissolute, appalling life , terrible, but if you believe in Christ with all the fiber of your being you will go to heaven and they will tell you and many will say yes but then you say but what makes a good person and they will tell you right no but yes but they'll always do it , but if you believe in Christ you wouldn't do all those things right, that's the thing, well, no and that's why people always criticize me when I give an answer to the question that you don't ask, because my answer has been Well, I act as if God existed.

Well, that's a bit of a weasel. It's like no. It's not because it gets to the core of this. What do you mean by believe? Well, do you believe in Christ? Well, that means you enter the words that he existed. well that's a pretty superficial form of belief, in fact I think it's no form of belief at all, in fact it says in the New Testament that Christ himself says it's something like not everyone who utters the words Lord Lord they will be saved rightly and Thus, and Nietzsche's criticism of doctrinal Christianity, Christianity was basically based on the idea that Christianity had taken the easy way out by insisting on the declaration of faith rather than the embodiment of belief in action, which would be the imitation of Christ, by the way, is Jesus.

The original criticism of Judaism is correct, it is that everyone takes the commandments extraordinarily seriously, they don't take the spirit of the commandments ooh, yes, exactly, that's exactly, it's exactly the same, it's the same.same, so you know, Nene Chia's criticism of Christianity was that there were very few true Christians because they didn't take on the burden of action and I would say that belief actually manifests itself in the burden of action. Now maybe you want to say that maybe you want to be in a position if You were a Christian to say: Well, my explicit statements of beliefs match what I act because maybe there would be a unity in that, but the fundamental question is what is your belief, what manifests itself in what you do because that is what you bet on me. belief is what you risk your life in, that is belief and you risk your life in what you act on and therefore you are trying to represent the idea, so you take, I think you take on the suffering of the world and the malevolence. of the world as your responsibility, you know, what's really fascinating is that I think what this all comes down to is that a lot of this debate comes down to which end you're teaching from.

I think they're almost two sides of a coin and if you're talking to a group of non-religious people who don't believe in the Bible, right, you're talking to an adult who looks at the Bible and says, I don't believe all these ridiculous miracles. happen, why should I bother participating? Why should I believe? All these things and my argument has always been that because you believe all these things, you just pretend you don't believe it, in the sense that you don't care about the historical circumstances, but all the things that you're acting on. daily life I said this to Sam right on stage is that you know you and I have ninety-five percent of the same values, where do you think they come from?

And Sam said, well, you know, I've studied a lot, a lot, a lot. Okay, but that doesn't explain why you and I have ninety-five percent of the same values. I might have known some of those things, but I didn't spend time studying the philosophies of the East, the reason we have ninety-five. percent the same values ​​because you grew up in a Judeo-Christian civilization with 3,000 years of common history, that's why we share the same value system, you need mushrooms and in a river in Brazil exactly and somehow we ended up in practically the same place approximately what what we think is really important in life and what freedoms are important in all of this and we have disagreements on the limits but this is the West, right, this is the West is different, it is not the same as other philosophies and that is why what I am Talking to people about that, the case I'm making is that you are part of this great river of history.

You can pretend you're not part of that big river. You can pretend you're not living off the vapors of that river. to live ouu you can pretend the gas tank works by itself that's not right there's a fuel tank so you're still living off of it that's but and but that's something different than what you teach a child and this is where I think things become different because I think his Jordan philosophy is self-sustaining for a group of people who look at the values ​​they live and say where they come from and how I justify them. but I think it would be very difficult to teach values ​​to a child before teaching them the myth, so I think you approach people and tell them that your values ​​may be justified by the myth, yes, but when you teach values ​​to a child, It's a myth that you have to teach, you have to keep teaching children the history first of course and then come the values, yes, so there is a difference between this and that is that we won't even listen unless you teach the history to national level and that is why As a religious person, I teach my children the stories first because the values ​​are embedded in the stories and what I do I have questions about the stories.

What rational person wouldn't have questions about the stories? Of course, you have questions about reality or reality. historicity of the stories that does not undermine, number one, the importance of the stories and, number two, the point is that you have to believe in the fundamental assumptions embedded in the stories, whether so that the values ​​of Northern society know, That's exactly why you said. Before that, the Enlightenment couldn't have arisen out of nowhere, right? I mean, that's exactly what you were saying, that I needed the whole base. Well, I think that for people who are fundamental evolutionary biologists and I kept trying to make this case.

Well, you can present a case like that to Pinker and the psychologist, but also to Harris. It's like, what do they get? Where do you come from thinking that this is a consequence of the last 300,400 years? It's like we're watching time span even the figures of the Enlightenment, they lived in a world that was like 6,000 years old. We are living in a world that is 3.5 billion years old. You have to expand your thinking about the origins of phenomena like morality, a long time ago. beyond the Enlightenment and so this adventure is a good example of the wisdom that is embedded in those myths, so I didn't know that and I'll apologize for pausing for a second and I would say in that story specifically because as a point to believe, I believe that this is a historical circumstance and whether you call it myth or history, as long as you believe in the reality of the myth and you and I believe in reality in different ways and this is part of the fundamental distinction because my Lo What I understand is that your understanding of what is true and what is real is an almost utilitarian Charles Purse view because you recommended two books to me, but my view is much more like Sam's in the sense that most Religious people believe objective truth over historical myth, yes, but when it comes to moving beyond that question, then I think we are complete.

The strange thing about these mythological stories is that there are forms of abstraction that are truer than what they are abstracted from. right, my math is like that and I'm going to give a lot of lectures on the Exodus and I think the mosaic story is a really interesting example of that it's like what a lot of here is a kind of truth, this is a literary truth and It's true that well this happened and this happened and this happened and this happened and there was a pattern to what happened, let's call it the heroic pattern for lack of a better word and then the question is, well, what is the reality, the details? of what happened, but in the individual life of each person or it is the general pattern that manifested itself in all those people and I would say that if you want to extract guidelines for an adequate life, then reality is the abstraction that is extracted from the multiple stories.

And so even if the story of Moses is a composite story in some sense, that doesn't mean it's not true, it's true in form and this is something I could never move forward with regarding Sam, it's like there's a literary truth. Well, it better be that way because otherwise, what is literature for and how is literature ranked in terms of quality? If there is no standard of truth. Well, what is the truth? Well it is an abstraction and if you don't believe that abstractions are true then I'm not thinking because you can easily argue that a proper abstraction is more real than what it is abstracted from, you certainly argue that with mathematics and therefore These stories are not only pragmatically useful, although I try to explain things. biologically, when I can do that it is that usefulness is true in the broader sense in which we have been describing the truth, so this story of Abraham with the call to adventure is very interesting and it is something else that I have been teaching to my audiences about this, well, what is the purpose of life?, well, it's an adventure, well, where do you see that?

Well, you see that in the Abrahamic story in particular because Abraham is this guy whose destiny is not cast well, he's 80 years old and he's still in his father's intention and God says you know me well and that's the true calling, right? what do you think well? There is a call to adventure while there is a call to adventure young people die without that call to adventure that is what attracts them to Isis for the love of God it is the call to adventure, in fact, and you could say well, that is warped and twisted in those individuals because society has not been able to channel that into the proper channels, has not given them a moral equivalent to war in William James terms, has not called them.

He gets them out right, but God calls Abraham and all that happens to Abraham to begin with is that he runs into famine and tyranny and a conspiracy to steal his wife like she's some damn shepherd's fee and you think, oh, I see well, it's not. that God is calling you to happiness, he is calling you to the great adventure of your life, and that comes along with suffering, burden, malevolence and all that, and it is something great and noble, like a sea expedition. on the high seas is not that impulsive, rewarding immediate happiness that seems to be what you would say the obsession of our culture today, so it's a call to the physical adventure that I think people are missing right now, but I think It is also called spiritual adventure in the sense that you are supposed to see how your values ​​compare to reality.

I mean, this is the most famous story of Abraham. I said well, the most famous story is the sacrifice of Isaac and in that story. My view of that story is that I have never found it particularly disconcerting. A lot of people find that story particularly disconcerting because it's God saying you know, sacrifice your child, but to me what he's really saying is the fundamental truth that the story is the fundamental truth of raising a child and committing to something because what God is actually saying to Abraham is that you have to put your son at risk of death to live by a certain set of values ​​and then Abraham has another faith enough to say and I trust. that God is not actually going to kill my son, but by committing to this set of values, I will, in fact, do so when there may not be any cruises with his son in the world now.

Yes, that's true, you're not just doing it on behalf of your child. family, you are doing it in the name of your God, you are doing it in the name of a larger purpose and, by the way, this is what it means to be. I think a nemesis, a fighter, a soldier and an emissary to the West. I think this is true, especially as a Jew. I think it's always been that way with Jews because this is the reality, every time I see some, my son is born eight days later, we circumcise him, we take a baby, we pre-engage him and say this is going to be your life now your life is I'm pre-committing you this is me doing you know what Abraham Isaac did I'm putting my son in greater danger by circumcising him and making him a Jew than he would otherwise be because Jews are much more dangerous in the world than other people and that's the point is that I'm telling my son: I pre-commit you to this fight, I pre-commit you to a set of values ​​and that puts you at additional risk, but that's also what gives you meaning and Throughout Jewish history, sometimes God can't find the ram in the thicket, sometimes there is no ram in the thicket, sometimes children die, that's okay, that's all, that's the reality of life and also It's the reality of committing to any value system worth committing to, it's very interesting because I don't know if I've heard you talk about this at conferences, this specific topic through the biblical lens, but this is very consistent with everything. the rest. you talk about how to be a good father that you have to leave them well you, sir, you deign well you when you were when you were talking about that the image that came to mind was the piety of Michelangelo because what happens with Mary is that she she has foreknowledge that her child will be broken by the world and yet she offers him to the world and then you think well if a parent is doing this morally then you are offering your children to be broken. for the world in the service of God, that is a sacrifice to continue and if you are the right parent, then you sacrifice, you sacrifice your children to God because what you want from them for them is to serve the highest value possible if you love them. that's what you want and that's a mortal burden for them and well, that's perfect, perfectly illustrated because I think payment is the female equivalent of crucifixion mmm, right, because of course Mary is tied to the integrity of her son and yet he is broken at the peak of his power and beauty, all of that and she has to accept that as part of the precondition of a proper existence, so there is an element of real sacrifice there and that is reflects in that story and so and and and it's in its way and it's right that way and it's a very hard story, so teaching your children values ​​is, in fact, sacrificing yourself for the world in a way that you wouldn't do if you didn't.

It is teaching them the values, but it is also what allows them to live a full life by doing so, by precommitting their child to the values, this is one of the main problems I have with the way the left has rewritten parenting , this idea of ​​parenting is that you're supposed to let your child run out of the world without any preparation, without any pre-committed set of values ​​and discover the world on their own with nothing. Now one thing isSaying you should encounter danger is another thing, making everything inherently more dangerous by not preparing. his son for the possibility of a world that requires values ​​and good intentions.

I know we saw this in Sweden, where we were, we weren't sure why there was so much support for everything they are doing in Sweden and when we will do it. This quality check after people submit questions you know online and then I watched as Jordans spoke we answered questions and 90% of the questions had to do with gender issues and a lot of them were about gender neutral kindergartens and castration. of the father and all that stuff and it's like that's exactly what you're saying and give these kids, well, it's also extremely interesting to follow your line of reasoning, well, let's say you decide, well, I'm going to release my kids into the world. so that they discover everything for themselves, so what happens is that the world becomes so scary that you have to protect them from everything because they don't have they don't have autonomy they don't have exactly they don't have discipline they don't have anything built in value all that and therefore , the counter consequence of that maximum freedom and I have seen it with people who have two-year-old children and they do not put any restrictions on them, they have not taught the child what no means and you can teach a child what "no" means very quickly , so if you have a child who is learning to crawl, for example, and you know that he or she may be going to pull something heavy off the shelf, all you have to do is grab his leg and hold him. them and I tell them no over and over again until they stop what they're doing and usually cry, then you know that's cruel, okay, so you stop them and then if you do that for a week, then all you you have to do is Say no and they will cry and stop and then two weeks later they won't cry, they will just stop now.

No, it's a big deal, right, because no, the imposition of patriarchy against that, against that instinctive, explores another savage, yes, that's right. against the noble savage, right, so it's a big deal, no, but it's okay, but now once your son has it, you can leave him alone because he can explore like crazy, yeah, first, first of all, you can stop him saying no and so on. That's really helpful because if they're going to do something dangerous, one word will do it, but the second children are very intelligent and what I learned with my children was that once you told them that there were five things in the house that they couldn't do , then they generalized.

From that, they discovered the pattern of things they couldn't do and then they wouldn't do them and then they could be left alone, they could be autonomous and then parents would come along who didn't teach their children no and they would follow their child around. two years as totalitarians 100% of the time because they couldn't be trusted to have any autonomy, yes, so the consequence of that absolute lack of discipline is the need for constant supervision and this is also one of the reasons why that I have so many problems with the way they talk about the genderless parenting aspect.

It's one of the reasons I have so much trouble with this whole idea that children saying that everything is biologically prewritten and biologically determined and that the way you raise your children has no impact on what their future life will be like is a nuisance. I mean, I hate to say it that way, but I have two kids under the age of five, it's absolute nonsense, so I told the story the other day on the radio or on my show on the podcast about my son, so my son He's two and a half years old and just a lovely human being, which means if you were an adult, he'd be the worst person. because because two year olds are wild, this is what they are.

Anyone who tells you that children are good by nature is full of lies. Children are innocent by nature. Children are not good by nature. Children are selfish by nature, mean and brutal towards each other. so they are happy and then they are moved, joy, right, this is what they are and my son, well, he has an older sister and his older sister loves shiny things, it's her thing, she's a girl and she's very feminine, so that has all these sparkly shoes lying around so my son decided he wanted to go and wear his sister's sparkly shoes and I went up to him and said no but those are girl's shoes oh I said no those are girl shoes, we don't wear them and he said and started complaining, he said no, hey, he said I want, I want Lee, I want my monster's name, I want his shoes, I want his shoes and I said, those are girl things and then I took him to the exit. the Western Outfitters around here and then they look at me and I bought him a pair of cowboy boots and now he won't take off his cowboy boots the way the left would see him, it's me cruelly crushing his spirit, maybe he just wants to be a little girl. maybe he wants to be raised in an effeminate way, yeah, except by giving him the option to go buy him cowboy boots and then telling him here are some cowboy boots and there's more gender, it turns out that's what he likes and you know .

What if he didn't like that he's two and a half years old, could you decide for him? Um, for the hate I'm going to get just for sitting here listening to you tell that story about how your parents did it. I don't respond to Shapiro, who didn't want his son to wear shiny shoes. Robin, he's not an adult when he's 17 years old. If he makes an affirmative case, why he should wear shiny shoes, do it, yes, when he is two and a half years old. the guy who instills the system that I believe will lead to his greatest happiness.

I am the totalitarian in my own house. I am the king of my own house and I can determine whether I believe my child will live a happier life. the desire to wear shiny shoes at the age of 25 or whether it would be better for him to grow up in a situation where it is easier to choose according to gender stereotypes, which, by the way, are reflected in all human cultures - the idea of that gender stereotypes are exclusive to the West is absolute nonsense, there are differentiations between how a treatment is and how we treat women in every culture in the history of humanity, yes, well, that is again the reason why from Sweden was, yeah, well, I mean, because we discovered it basically like you explained it. and feel free to clarify this is that they have done egalitarianism, men and women have been equal for quite some time and yet what has happened there is that more men are engineers and more women or nurses, yes men and women are more different. they are still different, yes, more Dvorak's, yes, that's right and yet the social justice warriors or whatever they are, won't let them win, so they really experience well, the other, the other problem here is also good, imagine that, just imagine hypothetically. that you were going to try to raise your kids in a gender-neutral way, so there were actually studies done on this thirty years ago where they looked at self-proclaimed feminist parents and self-proclaimed non-feminist presidential parents and then blindly coded their interactions according to gender stereotypes. behavior and I didn't find any difference between the two groups and the reason is you know you think you socialize your children completely if you are a social constructionist everything is correct from top to bottom because your child is a blank slate but your child it is not.

Your child manifests to a greater or lesser degree all kinds of gender behaviors and in powerful ways and much of what you are doing, especially if you are a good parent, is that you are reacting to what your child manifests as an individual and Much of the Socialization That so-called socialization, which sounds like top down, is actually the establishment of a unique relationship between you as a parent and that individual child with his or her nature and this is also reflected in behavior. genetics literature because what you see is that imagine that there are three sources of variation in children's behavior, biological, their shared environment, so this would be the brother, then this would be the same in the family for the brothers and then that was different and then you Look at the outcome of the behavior and calculate how much was biological, how much was shared environment, and how much was non-shared environment.

What you'll find is that it's almost all biology and non-shared environment, so people have read that to say, well, not parents. It doesn't matter because there is no shared environment, but it is not the case because what happens is that if you are a good parent, the relationship you have with the child is significantly different than the relationship with the child, although there may be moral presumptions that make it so. are organizing. their families, when they feed their children identically, are almost never okay, okay, never, that's Rwanda, it became enabled, I mean, but that's it, yeah, right, I mean, if God is the figure As a parent in that story, treating your children differently is a way of being. a good parent, your children are exactly the same, you are not being responsive to your children and you are teaching them that essentially actions have no consequences because your change is correct, no matter what it is, it is the same result, well, that It is yes, the right to parenting, no, no.

No, that's almost the definition of totalitarian parenting and it's exactly the kind of relationship you don't want to have with anyone, right? You want all your relationships to be individualized and particularized and on and on and on, so we radically underestimate the degree to which gendered interactions between children and parents are child-driven, so here's a fun experiment. There is evidence that parents who drink more are more likely to have children with ADHD. Now I'm not a big fan of the ADHD diagnosis. but we'll leave that aside, so there was some suggestion that maybe ADHD is part of the genetic complex that involves alcoholism and antisocial personality because those things also cluster together and that's why several experiments have been done to see if that's the case and There is quite a bit of diagnostic overlap between childhood conduct disorder and ADHD, so it's a bit irrelevant.

Here is the experiment where you bring parents to interact with children who are not their own and you ask them to do a taste test of alcohol and therefore the taste. the test is well, here there is rum and coke and here there is vodka and orange juice and here there is orange juice and here there is water and what we want you to do is simply rate the taste of each of these drinks well and then we expose some kids and one of the kids is a kid with a diagnosis of ADHD and one of the kids is one who doesn't have it and then you do that with a group of parents and then you ask them to do the taste test, well, You don't care what they classify as harmful drinks, you only care how much parents who were exposed to children who have attention deficit drink, but that's good, it's a good example of the idea of ​​directionality and socialization, it's like you don't have A relationship with your child now obviously imposes a certain degree of social norm if you are sensible because you want your child to be socialized and desirable to other people, you want them to be able to play reciprocally, and you want them to be attentive enough for adults to treat them. well for the world to open up to them properly, so that's what you're doing, but other than that, you're particularizing like crazy because even to get that child to that end state requires a particular path of eyes, since you know, my daughter. was inherently very cooperative and my son was intrinsically very competitive, so the path to getting them both to be reciprocal players was substantially different even though the desired output and they became reciprocal players as if they were part, they were popular kids who were in constant demand as playmates, which I think is the hallmark of successful parenting, by the way, when your kids are four and other kids really want to play with them it's like you did it, you did it right and yes.

It doesn't, then something is wrong. It went very wrong, but there are multiple paths to it, so I'm glad that we've come to this day because one of the things I wanted to ask you about is what we're basically talking about here is living life with a certain set of rules we can eliminate anything, although I heard there will be a couple, there are more to come, that's the rumor that 12 whatever, but it seems to me that we live in a time where energy is around people that have no rules. So, you know, as the Trump thing grew, it was this kind of destructive force, you know, that broke all the things and Eric and I talked about how Eric would have liked Eric Weinstein would have wanted a panther in a store. porcelain, but I said you just don't understand that, you have the bull in your jaw, that's how I now see the energy behind some kind of SJW that left and the news that socialism is great, leave it and that it is much easier destroy them.

Do you think the rules? that you explain in your book and the rules that you talk about from a biblical perspective and everything else that people with rules can survive in a crazy time like the one we live in now, where information travels much faster and there is so much type of entropy behind the chaos that perhaps there was not before becauseWe couldn't transmit information so quickly. Do you think there's enough juice behind me? I slightly disagree with the premise here Justin, I actually don't think the left doesn't. They have no rules. I think they have more rules than we do.

I think we have a certain basic set of rules and then an immense amount of freedom within these barriers. I think that the left by getting rid of barriers is addressing why human beings cannot live. no rules, the really important different point on the left, they reverse engineered a set of extraordinarily complex rules that are applied arbitrarily, so that you don't even know you violated a rule until you stumble upon the rule, there is no favorite place, rules with taboos, exactly, exactly and and that is extraordinarily dangerous, so the energy is behind the search for a new set of rules.

The question is: can we defend our rules in a way that makes them attractive to people? I think that is done fundamentally by pointing out the relationship between rules and aspiration, it is as if the rules define a hierarchy of values ​​and then that gives you something noble to do, that is exactly your call to adventure, so the rules do not limit you. , yes they limit you, obviously, restricted ranges, but at the same time they limit you, they provide an organization. frame and an address plaster is a university and that address is not optional because the other thing, I know the rules are not like pants, okay, you put them on and they are fundamentally restrictive, but they allow you to walk well, that's good, This is also why when you can see that one of the first things that happens in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve become aware of themselves when they dress exactly right, it is at the same time a restriction for protection and culture is whenever it is restriction and protection at the same time. at the same time and then the radical types always say oh you know oh the restriction or the restriction and it's fair enough because there is that tyrannical aspect but the protection and the aspiration are absolutely critically important and I don't think there's any other way I don't think We have nowhere established a nobler orientation toward disciplined aspiration than that which is codified within Judeo-Christian ethics and which is at the core of the Enlightenment and that's fine, so another question about Judy.

Okay, sure, okay, so one of the things I've always wondered about is that I think one of the things that distinguishes Christianity from Judaism is that Judaism has an implicit emphasis on the salvation of the cell and on the salvific properties of the state and I don't think you see that in Christianity to the same degree, so I want to say, because you have to explain that well, well, there is no idea of ​​Israel as part of it and there is the idea of Jewish nation as a people, while Christianity has this universalism, is it built into it?

This is right, so this is a fundamental distinction, okay, okay, so, so, and this is. I've never been able to have this conversation with anyone because it's an incredibly dangerous conversation, but it seems. It seems to me that the advantage of Christianity is that it places the fundamental place for salvation within the individual, that is, independently and if it is as if driven by reasons of mercy towards Christ, which is another thing that we have not finished. One of Jung's talking points regarding Christianity and Catholicism was that there was a merciful element to it because the burden that was placed on each person as a place of redemption, let's say, was so heavy that it was unbearable, so was necessary. intermediary structure to take the load off your shoulders from time to time which is what Catholics do it's like well here are all the ways I've failed okay you're fallible you're a fallible human being you don't have to make it be crushed into a dust for the fact that you're not all that you should be, but anyway I think that's where Jewish guilt comes into play if I'm not okay and I also think to some extent Protestant guilt comes into play because the Catholics are right about that and you can be cynical about that right, say well you send your whole life and then on your deathbed you convert, it's like all that is nonsense because you actually have to repent and so So, if you have a lifetime of There is sin, you can see the mercy in that, in that Catholic approach because it gives you like a reset in a sense, right, you can be washed away, the fact that you are not all that you could be.

It's a terrible burden, right, and if you're carrying that all the time it can just crush you in it and obviously that's present in its earlier iteration in the sacrificial system and the temple among the Jews or among the family, as I say, 3 times a day, you say one serving. in Shmona in silent prayer where you repent of your sins and then we have a full day. Yom Kippur is deliberately designed to do that and try to wipe the slate clean and as to the other question that you are an individual, so to me it's less about the state per se because when you talk about the nation of Israel, I'm Easter Island, in today's biblical language is not about a border state and incorporates salvation within that, it is about the special.

The responsibility of this group of people is to spread throughout the world, right, you're supposed to be in the Hebrew phrase again when you lose a lot of Hebrew today, but we're talking about the Bible, so it's okay that you're supposed to be. a malefic vacatio of Kohanim, she means that you are supposed to be a nation of priests and a holy nation, so Christianity expanded that idea to all of Kim, all of humanity corporately, that is basically true, this applies equally to all humans, now the interesting thing about Judaism is that Judaism actually has almost a two-way approach, so if you are Jewish, then you have these responsibilities, these 613 mitzvot, you are not excluded from the afterlife or from decency, if you are not Jewish, so Judaism is only half exclusive in the sense that if you are a young Jew and if you are not Jewish, we try to discourage you from becoming one, but if you are a Jew, but if you are outside the Jewish nation, you have a share in the afterlife as long as you keep seven basic commandments, the commandments of Noah, so there is a set of seven commandments that were given to Noah, these are basic basic things, do not steal , do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not eat the flesh of a live animal.

Don't you have to create Courts of Justice? These are like all very basic laws and what that means is that Judaism postulates that your Mazzoni is a really interesting philosopher from Israel. He has a new book called the nationwide case, oh yeah, yeah. What's really really interesting is that basically the argument he makes is that the biblical Jewish view of where values ​​should be embedded at the highest level is a safer view than the universalist conception because the universalist conception that you have a set of values ​​that apply equally to everyone, in all times and cultures, actually leads to tyranny and repressions, which means that his argument is that the threat of the 20th century was not a group of nationalisms that incorporated particular values, It was a certain nationalism that wanted to become universalisms, it was Germany. wanting to be the right that ruled the entire world where the USSR wanted to be a country that was capable of applying communism at all times and in all places, so a certain level of particularism in how we apply the basic rules the seven laws of Noah in the Bible In the case of the Ten Commandments, you can have certain cultural differentiations and that allows the cohesion of the group and in a way that you cannot with the great mass of humanity, the problem of the power of Babel expands, if you expand example to be too big, then it starts to become too complex and they are structured in totalitarian exactly so that the Jewish critique of the universalist principle would be yes, there are certain fundamental universal principles that we should all respect and those that we hold have to be accepted both by Jews and non-Jews, but how they are repeated, they have to be repeated within a specific cultural structure, otherwise what you end up with is people trying to impose the cultural characteristics of those structures on everyone else and totalitarianism arises from the idea that I'm going to take my culture, which is different, is actually not better, it's true that we don't actually say that the 613 commandments are necessary for everyone, they are not necessary for people who are not Jewish and to take that and To say okay, now everyone has to comply with those things would be a form of totalitarianism in a way that is not when you say we have this particular set of values ​​that are repeated to us in a particular way, okay, but maybe we could maybe we could think of it this way maybe that would include both sides is that there is a danger to claims of universalism and that is totalitarian utopianism on a grand scale and maybe the universalism of Christianity could be criticized for contributing to that from a conceptual perspective , but perhaps the same could be said about the concentration on the particular on the side of the Jewish emphasis on the state in the sense that, because there are obviously pathologies of ethnonationalism and localization that also manifest as another kind of danger, It would be the danger of too much exclusion and the danger of not enough exclusion. and then the question is how to get the relationship between the individual and the property right, yes, yes, yes, well this is one of the things that I think the EU is really struggling with, because you know I'm quite strange For someone who is a Universalist, let's say that I sympathize a little with the claims of the nationalists in the European Union because it seems to me that what they are complaining about is that, as sovereign individuals, there have been levels of bureaucracy established in this enormous global structure of the EU. that divorce them as individuals from their masters and they want a local structure to have some relationship with the structure and maybe you see in a place and localism certainly with other human beings.

I mean, the fact is that if you didn't value your own child more than you valued a stranger's child, this would probably turn a bad person into a right one, as we would, actually, it wouldn't sit, are you? a bad person? If it is definitely the other option between saving and trusting. be saving my son and saving some random kid of the same age and I said, you know, I don't see any difference here, do you think this would make me a bad person? So the idea of ​​having social ties that are local in nature is One of the things that the United States got right in some federal structures is the idea of ​​localism.

Localism is very important as a set of rules for everyone because we have these variations and those variations allow us to have the necessary social fabric that is not possible here. Actually, this is where I want to come full circle and get back to the online stuff. The online world is a giant savanna. It's just a huge plane. There is no hierarchy in the online world and not only are there no pockets in the online world. Twitter is just a huge plane that doesn't create any sense of community, what creates a sense of community are the people you actually have social ties with and those social ties are necessary.

The social fabric cannot exist for 6 billion or 7 billion human beings. exists in your community hmm well and as large as that community can grow and there are limits to the growth of that community and perhaps this is what both Christianity and Judaism have in common when talking about the messianic era there will be a time in which that social fabric may in fact encompass everyone, but that is not something that is natural, it could also be that it is still full of particularities exactly right, it is just that the entities have to be properly within a stream in the context correct that we like Who are you in the sense that you have a certain set of social values ​​and as the social values ​​disappear, we like the EU less, but those social values ​​have to be common law, so we all have to have them in the copyright that the French do not have?

They want to be English, the English don't want to be French and that's perfectly fine, they don't have to be French, well, it's good that there are French and English like that, that's part of the advantage of diversity, let's say that there is some genuine diversity and that localism preserves that diversity and this is what's funny about the left, the right, the left will say that diversity is our greatest benefit, and they immediately try to erase everything that is diverse in how people behave, except at the same time they will also say, well, we should be more like countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland and extra countries on planet Earth, right, I mean, Lee, yeah, and by the way, there were a lot of people there who were very concerned about the directions they would take. their countries are going to these leftists in America saying oh it's so cool there because of how many people we met there who are afraid to say any sweetener, there are immigration restrictions andIt's so funny that the left is talking about what a wonderful Sweden there is now. right but because of the backlash right because of the backlash to mass Islamic immigration to Sweden and them and the fracturing of society in areas like Malmo like why are all the Jews leaving Sweden no and has elected a center-right government specifically on the issue of immigration So yes, I want to ignore it individually and collectively.

The biggest source of unhappiness for people is pretending that reality is not reality. When people fight reality, they lose and recognizing that reality is reality is necessary, whether you are a nation like Sweden. or if you are an individual who is struggling with certain realities like people's unhappiness arises from thinking that reality is mutable but they are immutable for the most part you are immutable and reality is not mutable yes, okay, I have, I have one more for you, I have about ten minutes. so let's go deep and personal with the topic we've covered here. I want to know a little about the adventure you're both on.

We've been on this adventure with you for at least the last few months, but wait. I've asked you this before a couple of times and you always give me a slightly different answer. Where does it come from within you that you can do this? And that's what I want to ask you to like. Where does that come from you? Sure you might know all this stuff, you might say all this stuff, you might read about all this stuff, but you, Jordan Peterson, you can go out every day, risk your ass, take the eight, keep going, what's wrong with you?

The first thing we should point out is that I have the same experience that Ben has in public, it's like I had a negative interaction in public and it was minor and it was in Dublin with a woman who was very drunk and it wasn't even that bad, you know? But I've had thousands of personal interactions with people and they're all incredibly positive, not just positive. like they're people who come up to me and are very polite and often apologize because they think they're interrupting me and you know, then we have a brief personal conversation and they talk about how while they've been reading or listening or whatever and that their lives are getting better and that's really good and that they have recommended the book and that's why I'm very happy about that and it's one hundred percent positive and that and that and it's incredible and It's kind of encouraging to be able to travel all over the world like I was in Slovenia a week ago.

I think the effect of YouTube, by the way, I think the effect of YouTube and podcasts is even greater in places where the media is not as reliable or as developed as it is in the West, it is difficult to say how big and effective it is, but it's incredibly big, so people stopped me everywhere and it's an extraordinary thing to go to a new city and have complete strangers approach you. in the most positive way possible and then tell you something private about their lives and then share with you some triumph they've had. It's like there's nothing that can be better than that and then when we do these conferences, it's about Moss. right, we have like two thousand two thousand people who come to the auditoriums and very little of what we've been discussing is political, okay, except the way we've been discussing politics, you know, said the philosophically oriented variant, but almost everything is centered. about individual development and so it provides a kind of energy like that and then I've been in an increasingly fortunate position over the last nine months because, although I still find it very stressful to have controversial interviews with journalists like the GQ interview, for example, They have their advantages, you know, it's not like they're a net loss in terms of promoting what I'm trying to do, which is trying to help people get stronger and then all the elements of this that are positive are enough to sustain this. and allow it to continue and also make me think that there is nothing more relevant, meaningful or adventurous that I could be doing, feeding the meaning and at the same time, finding through this is what it is like every night that we are out there there is a renewed sense of surprise this is real not only now put it and let it go to the universe it's like we're watching these people and when that guy we almost ran away from late on a flight, when that guy who was working at the airline walked up to you right in the front row and I was talking and talking, I could barely talk, yeah, and it was like my God, well, you have people that you know, they say, well, my girlfriend and I decided to get married now we're going to have a baby because we've heard your lectures or here it is here I am here with my father and we put our relationship that happened the father and the son that lived we had not seen each other I think they said seven years, yes, and they got to yes, yes, yes, and everyone was smiling and as if there was endless of stories like that and I believe, well, I believe two things.

I believe that the individual is the fundamental local place of salvation and redemption. I really think that I don't think there's anything that's truer than that and then every time I see someone pull themselves together, I think that's a major victory, not a minor one, and that's why I always talk to people in the audience and when what we do, these meet and greets afterwards, they have this kind of cheesy commercial, you know, but I don't care about that because that's how it has to be, that's how it has to be. and it is configured to work.

I know a hundred and fifty people and I'm very careful with every person I interact with and the reason for that is because I'm absolutely thrilled that they're there, you know? They are there, they are there because they are trying not to make things even the slightest bit worse, right? So one of the issues that we've been continually discussing in these conferences is that not only do you have a moral obligation to aim up and be good taste and choose the highest value you can conceive of and pursue it honestly, but if you don't do it to the about to fail, something that is hellish occupies that space and I truly believe that, as I have since 1987, when I was studying totalitarianism and realized that it was the abdication of individual responsibility, ultimately, that led to the horrors of Nazi Germany and totalitarian communist states;

It depended on each of us, so I thought well then what to do about it. is to do everything possible to strengthen individuals and make them more appropriate moral agents, not rights, not individual rights, but individual responsibility, and I really believe that that's how you keep hell at bay and there's a lot of things because I really believe that there are a lot of energy in that it's like I'm not interested in having a replication of what happened in the 20th century, enough is enough and if with each person who is on a better path that probability decreases by 1 7 billion and so be it and I think the effect is much greater than that.

I think it's a network effect. I don't mean, this is what I was telling you right before we started. I don't think we can really understand how big it is because now there are conferences, you're doing your live show, I'm doing stand-up, Rogen is doing his thing, Sam is doing all this stuff and it's not just about us, I don't want to. It's just about us, but there is some other energy, so when I talk about the energy of destruction that is out there, I think there is a great creation of energy and I think we are part of it.

I don't know how you're going to get over that, I know I'm not. in a short form, which is fascinating, so I go out in public like I say and a lot of people want to take pictures and I'm sure Jordan understands it a lot more than I do and when you do that, you always hear from people, yeah, you know, I met at this celebrity on the street and they're idiots, like I'm an actor, and the actor was like upset because they had to get up from dinner, yeah, I never felt the experience where someone wanted to do it.

I took a photo and I wasn't thrilled that they wanted to take a photo and I think the reason for that is not because, oh look at me, I can be in this random person's photo that they put up too, but because if you really believe that what you are doing is a reflection of values ​​that matter it is not that they are committing to me mhmmm right they are committing to the idea it is that I am what I am affirming and that is incredibly exciting in my entire life to embrace a certain set of values ​​and now millions of people are engaging with those values ​​and finding them meaningful.

That's why it's hard for all of us not to sound arrogant because we take our values ​​very seriously, so when we say that maybe the hope for the country lies in the fact that there are so many people who actually see things like this. I'm not saying that because I care if people were watching me paint my face, you know, so I don't think that has any meaning to me. but the fact that people watch my show and get something resembling the truth and the values ​​from it and what I'm going to say, it's stranger to me, I think it's probably more to me than it is to you, Jordan, because you talk like that. . a lot about self-help and individual help and all that kind of stuff, yeah, because I'm a political guy and I spend most of my day analyzing current events, the fact that I get so many people emailing me and I send them to my wife sends them to my parents because these are the things I'm actually most proud of when I get emails from people and today I got one from a guy who said yeah I hit it with my girlfriend and I didn't know it. what to do about it and then I started listening to your show and I realized that to be a better and more responsible human being I needed to marry my girlfriend and we have been married for three years and she was thinking about having an abortion.

I heard your show, she can have an abortion now that we have a child and it's amazing, amazing, that's what I care about. I think politics, what I do for a living, politics, that's what exists at the top of the iceberg. and what I hope to be doing is talking about this in a way that allows people to draw a straight line to the bottom of the iceberg and say, well, what's really important is not what's happening at the time of the research here, but what's happening. in terms of truth and decency and waiting for the evidence available here to take an example, so every news story is supposed to be linked to the entrenchment of a value system and the fact that people are hungry for those values, that is which I'm really excited about, oh yeah, that's absolutely fine, as you know, I mentioned before the tendency of the public to stay silent when I talk about the relationship between meaning and responsibility and that's good, that's a sustaining thing, it's like Look, there are thousands of people and what.

Are they starving due to a heavy moral burden? This is true, it's so amazing, it's dangling money, yeah, sometimes, a hundred and fifty dollars a ticket, how about you hear someone say, fix yourself, don't buy my no? I'm not talking about anything, you know? There's a book, but yeah, but it's like it's up to you. This is the reality of the reaction because for thousands of years it was the religious community that said: you have responsibilities, you have the duty of the responsibilities of duty and then for the last hundred and fifty years, people said nothing.

We're not going to do any of that, you know what, forget it and now people go, you know, that has some advantages, but it also has a lot of disadvantages. None of us are theocrats in the room. I don't want a religious meeting. oriented society where there is a king above who says everyone wants to do nothing more than that but people are hungry for a set of eternal values ​​and if they don't get those eternal values ​​they will find something else to fill the void here see anger or they will be drugs or it will be hedonism or it will be selfishness and to be ideology or ideology and all these things and and I am an ideologue because my ideology is my values ​​but it will be a political ideology it will be political tribalism it will be something based on race it will be ethnic and there will be no centrality move all those things what we are doing promoting a set of values ​​what matters is that we are allowing people to not only keep chaos at bay but to find a way through the chaos Steve Viktor Frankl says in man's search for meaning that in the middle of the Holocaust what kept certain people alive and why certain people died he said because if you were in the middle of the Holocaust living in the death camp it was the people who found some sense of purpose in the death camp, who really managed to live and how Purpose can be found in the most purposeless place in human history, he said that it didn't matter if human beings can find meaning living in a life in a concentration camp where people are gassed to death every day, then you certainly should. being able to find meaning in the freest, richest, most prosperous human society in the history of humanity, right, right, that Shapiro is how to end it.

I will add that I like it when people approach me; Of course, Ben knows that. There's a girl who works at the hardware store just a few blocks from here who always tells me, Dave, I'm a big fan of yours, but I really like that. ben

shapiro

okay guys i'll be okay thanks to you two you're the religious type i'll be at the orpheum with

jordan

there can't be any tickets left for the other show on saturday but maybe you can get it on stubhub or something andmaybe a certain orthodox Jew will show up because it's after Shabbat, you never know, thank you, you miss out on what's possible, that's fine, thank you all for watching.