444. The Collective Unconscious, Christ, and the Covenant | Russell Brand
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Hey, everybody. I've got a chance today to continue my ongoing conversation with Russell Brand. I want to talk to him today about the collective unconscious and about what it is, because I think we now understand what it is.

I'm talking to him about sacrifice as the basis of community, about the distinction between authority and power and logos and power, about the danger of the use of power, about the necessity of the story, about how all that's played out in his own life, about the

proclivity of the modern self to identify itself with its whims and desires and passions and the inevitability that that identification turns into something that closely approximates worship. The idea that something should supplant, has to supplant that for maturation to take place and for society itself to stabilize and remain productive and abundant. We talk about the call to adventure.

as a variant of the establishment of relationship with God. We talk about the burden that Christ left on his followers in the aftermath of his death, all of that. So if that's what, what would you say? Wines your clock? Well, this is the discussion for you. So good to see you, Russell. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. It is a great joy to be in your company. Thank you for having me.

So I want to run some ideas by you and I want you to tell me how they echo for you personally and also philosophically. So I think I've figured out what the collective unconscious is.

I want to run that by you. Well, I've been thinking about these large language models a lot and about what they do, because they can obviously mimic human thought at the verbal level quite spectacularly. Now, of course, the woke ideologues have done everything they could to muck them up spectacularly right from the beginning, and we're going to pay a big price for that. But there's still something there that's very, very...

telling about how we think. So let me lay out the idea and you tell me what you think about it. So what these models do is map the statistical relationship between, you might say, markers. And so imagine that you can tell the difference between a word

like, imagine a word B-I-N-T, which isn't a word, but it's kind of a plausible non-word. And it's a plausible non-word because the statistical relationship between the letters mimics the likely statistical relationship between letters in a real English word. So it's much more of a word than Q-N-Z-T. Okay, so now...

There are statistical regularities between letters that enable us to identify words. And then there are statistical regularities between words in phrases that make sense. And then there are statistical regularities between phrases in sentences and sentences in relationship to one another. And then, say, within paragraphs, and then paragraphs in relationship to one another.

And the large language models are trained to map all that. So what that implies, obviously, is something like any given idea is statistically likely to exist in relationship to a certain set of other ideas and not distal ideas. And so...

If I throw an idea at you, I'm also throwing a network of associated co-ideas at you at the same time. And then out farther in the penumbra are even more distantly associated ideas. And more creative people are going to be able to leap from the center to the distal ideas. We already know that from study and creativity. So the large language models map

the statistical association between sets of ideas. That's a good way of thinking about it. You could imagine the same thing happens with images. So, if you bring to mind the image of a witch, you're much more likely to bring to mind the image of a cauldron and a black cat, for example, and maybe a spider, maybe a pumpkin.

So, the collective unconscious would be, take a given culture, the collective unconscious would be the statistical association between ideas insofar as that culture has represented the ideas. And that's mappable mathematically. And so a symbol would be something like a set of, it's a set of statistically associated concepts.

Right? Especially image-laden concepts in particular with regards to symbol. So, it's a weight. What the collective unconscious seems to be is the system of weights between concepts through which we see the world. So, and that makes it a real thing. It makes symbols real because a symbol is a network of ideas with a core idea at the center. So...

Yes, how beautiful. Firstly, I wonder, some of the areas we might, at least it seems to me, that I ought address as occurring are the difference between signifiers that are, of course, according to post-structuralists and to much of the work done within semiotics, arbitrary,

and potentially universal, natural, or at least practical symbols. I wonder, for example, about the idea that is it a type of language that a barn full of chicks will respond to the silhouette of a bird when it travels above their heads on a wire in one direction, because when traveling from north to south,

the silhouette resembles that of a hawk, but when it travels back along the same trajectory, but in reverse, they do not respond because it no longer resembles the silhouette of a hawk. A hawk does not travel in that formation. That is a type of language. There is language within nature. This is the first thought. So you're referring to something. Yeah, okay. So that adds an additional dimension to the

to the model. So then you might say that there are co-occurring patterns of regularity with biological significance that exist in some real sense outside the merely conceptual. And those are probably marked in the fundamental analysis by death, right? Because one of the other things I've been thinking about is that

People ask me questions like, you know, do you think God is real? And a question like that always begs the question for me. It's like, well, what the hell do you mean real? Like, what makes something real? And, you know, you could say tangibility, although that's only one dimension of what makes something real. It's like, I think what makes things real in the final analysis is probably death.

And in the example you used of the silhouette, which is a very famous example with regard to birds, the silhouette traveling in one direction, that signifies death reliably, right, over a very long span of evolutionary history. And any creature that didn't respond to that silhouette was at a much more

at a much higher probability of being picked off. So then one of the things you might note, and this is where the postmodernists got things like dreadfully wrong, and where the large language models have drifted into insanity. So imagine that there's a statistical relationship between concepts that's okay. So then you might say, well, what gives that statistical relationship reality? And the postmodern types would say, well, it's just arbitrary cultural construction.

But it's not because there are patterns of relationships between events that are part and parcel of the world per se. And some of those need to be accurately mapped by the conceptual system or you die.

And so I would say the ideas that ring most true to us, that grip us in this sort of archetypal way, are ideas that bear directly on our survival, whether we recognize it or not. They strike a chord within us. Here's a good example. We'll shift sideways for a minute.

I've started to understand why, so I'm on a tour right now, We Who Wrestle With God, and it's focusing on biblical stories. I'm trying to explain, I'm trying to understand what they mean and then talk about that so other people can understand insofar as I'm able to. And one of the striking meta themes of the biblical library is the necessity of sacrifice, right?

And so I've been trying to understand, first of all, what it means to sacrifice. It means to give up something that's desirable for something that's more desirable. It's something like that. It's something higher. And it's higher because it extends over a longer period of time and it includes more people.

And so, like, sacrifice is the basis of community. Well, why? Well, it's obvious, Russell, as far as I can tell. It's like if you're in a communal relationship, which is any relationship, obviously, then you're giving something up that's immediate to you.

to establish and maintain the relationship, right? So it's a sacrificial gesture. And once you understand that, once you understand that sacrifice is at the basis of community,

the question immediately arises, which is, well, what's the most effective form of sacrifice? And this biblical story, Old and New Testament together, is actually an examination of sacrifice per se. It's an attempt to spiral down to the core of what constitutes, well, you might say, the sacrifice that's maximally effective sacrifice.

maximally acceptable to God, but it's something like what sacrifices by necessity at the core of community. I also don't think there's any difference between that and cortical maturation, by the way. I think they're identical concepts because as you mature from, you know, hedonistic power-mad two-year-old, what happens is that you integrate modes of attention and action that

facilitate your longer-term survival, but also your inclusion within more and more complex webs of social community. That's all sacrificial.

Now, there's a lot of Jordan Peterson 101. There's a lot of hits running simultaneously here, JP, because we've already touched on the idea of chaos and the necessary inevitable emergence of patterns within chaos. And it seems that you are positing to a degree that this chaos is analogous to perhaps the collective unconscious. And some of the patterns that are emerging in AI models, even with the biases evident within them, are an indicator of how

how these patterns emerge within a container and I suppose to say a container is to indicate that we are acknowledging an absolute.

We've moved from this idea of a collective unconscious and patterns emerging within chaos into sacrifice, which is obviously another great Jordan Peterson theme. And as you say, perhaps the overarching theme of the Bible, my contribution to this incredible amount of information that you are relaying, it has to do with where might one's intention be?

carry you in so much as it seems that in this process of maturation and uh and what and a personal relationship with sacrifice how that develops and evolves it seems to me is when one starts to acknowledge that there is not when you use the phrase immediately beneficial that

when we're referring to immediacy, we are talking about both spatial and temporal immediacy. And we might have to consider that when dealing with the sublime, as surely the Bible is, that even these categories are called into question. The most basic and taken for granted categories of any temporal creature will have to be challenged.

This perhaps helps me to understand how the ultimate sacrifice as rendered in the New Testament and most, I suppose, would regard as the defining Christian image, the image of sacrifice can tackle the complex idea of the pact that is made by the sacrifice of the man God.

Because as I explore and attempt to understand Christianity more deeply, the nature of the triumvirate, the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the nature of this pact is something that I'm mulling over. And I feel that the reason I can't reach resolution is because it's irresoluble. Because I ask that when there is absolute disunity,

dominion and omnipotence with whom might a pact be made. And I'm starting to conclude that it must be a kind of colon that, you know, that all is coming from the same source. Okay. Yep. Yep. Yep. Well, I can tell you a story about that and you tell me what you think about it.

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That's a very good question, because the thing you're pointing to, too, which is definitely the case, that the nature of the relationship between man and God in the biblical stories is covenantal. It's contractual.

and it's relational, right? So there's an insistence that it's all of those. It's like the relationship you have with a being, even though it says explicitly in the biblical stories, in the background, so to speak, that God is beyond all categories of being and non-being. But on top of that is overlaid the insistence that, well, insofar as you're concerned, it's still going to be a relationship with something that's a being.

or that's the essence of being itself. Okay, so why relationship? Well, there's two questions. Why relationship and why contract? Okay, well, let's think about work first of all, and what it means to work.

Obviously, work is a sacrificial enterprise because when people say they're working, what they mean is they're giving up what they or something within them would rather have happen right now if they had their druthers for some longer term investment. Right. So then the question is, well, investment in what contract with what?

And you can say, well, it's a contract with the community. If I put in, that's what money is. If I put in time and effort, then I'll get something that I can redeem in the future for something, for some specified value. But then that community that you're contracting with is a community that's predicated on a certain ethic, because otherwise the

the contract wouldn't stand. Like if the deal was, well, I can work and I can store something up of value and then some ravaging mob can just come and take it. Well, that's going to take this spirit out of my work pretty damn quickly.

And that was probably the fate of most people who ever stored anything of value prior to the emergence of something like a complex, sacrificial civilization, where envy, for example, was regarded as off the table. You couldn't just take something that someone had because you wanted it. And so...

The notion of work itself is the notion of a contract with the future. But the viability of that contract depends on an underlying ethos. Okay, so now let me tell you a story about how that contract might be conceptualized. Can you tell me what you think about this? So I've been studying the story of Abraham.

He starts out as Abram, by the way, A-B-R-A-M. So he has a different name, which is actually relevant as the story progresses. So Abram has privilege in modern parlance. He's got rich parents and everything he needs, everything he needs is right at hand for him.

I mean, it begs the question, of course, what is it that you actually need? But what Abram has is kind of like the, he's either got, he's got the materialist paradise at hand. There's nothing that he doesn't have at hand that whose absence would cause privation. So I would say he's a fully satiated infant.

And you can think about that as a notion of utopia. It's the notion of utopia that Dostoevsky criticized, by the way. And what happens to Abraham? He's like 75.

And the spirit of God comes to him. That's how the story lays itself out and says, look, buddy, you got to get the hell out of your zone of comfort. You have to leave your father's tent. You have to leave your people. You have to leave everything that's made you comfortable. And you have to journey out into the world. And Abram agrees to this deal. Okay, so as soon as he agrees that he's going to

forego his infantile comfort, even though he's like 70 by this time, so he's a bit of a late bloomer. God offers him a deal. This is the covenant. And so I think it's a description of the consequences of the full manifestation of the spirit of adventure. So imagine that there's a spirit within you that calls you to a more profound level of development. It's the spirit that you would

encourage, if you had any sense, if you had in your children, if you had children, you're launching them into the world. You're saying, follow the spirit of adventure. Okay, so God offers Abraham a deal. He says, if you do this and you make the necessary sacrifices, then you'll live a life that will be a blessing to you. That will happen in a manner that will redound to your reputation. So you'll become known, but in a way that

in the right way to become known. You'll become influential and admirable in the proper manner as a consequence of undertaking the adventure. You'll do that in a way that will establish something permanent, so that's a dynasty with innumerable descendants because of the pattern that you're establishing. And you'll do all of those, all of that in a way that's maximally beneficial to everyone else.

So the case is being made in that story that there's no difference between the direction that the spirit of adventure orients you and the provision of plenty psychologically, socially, and over the longest possible span of time. And that's the covenant. And so the notion would be that

And this is what is portrayed to Abraham, is that there's no better possible way of conducting yourself psychologically or socially, all things considered, while in this story, then following this voice that calls you out into the world. Now, when Abraham does go into the world, all hell breaks loose, right? He encounters famine and tyranny and war and death.

And that calls on him to become increasingly more than he is. Every time he has a new field of adventure that reveals itself in front of him, he's called upon to make a sacrifice. He has to change. He has to let go. He has to abandon the parts of him that are no longer appropriate to the new situation. And he does that now.

intensely, so intensely that he is eventually rewarded with a new name, which is Abraham. Instead of Abram, he becomes a new person. It's a good way of thinking about it. So, and then, well, obviously Abraham is called upon to make an ultimate sacrifice, which is the sacrifice of his son, Isaac. And that's part and parcel of the notion that

Everything that you have is to be offered up to the thing that's highest that pulls you forward. And that's what God is. That's part and parcel of the story. It's a definition of what's to be put in the highest place. That's a contract. I get it.

I like the mirroring of Abraham's sacrifice in the old Testament and the sacrifice of Christ as the apex event in the new Testament, that there is an inversion of that principle. I enjoy too, the idea that the endowment of spirit and the spirit of adventure is the maximal principle of a, a great father. I enjoy this idea very much as well. And I was, uh,

wondering, Jordan, whilst you were speaking about...

the values that that may entail. Because a little earlier when you were talking about money being sort of one of the establishing principles for community and the way that values can be maintained and community can be maintained, and you said it's an expression of ethos and a demonstration of ethos. I thought that one of the contemporary arguments that rages that you often find yourself saying

significantly and visibly placed on one side of is the idea that sort of the this ethos and these values have become co-opted over time now i know you often talk about how sort of uh that conservatism versus progressivism is a necessary cultural tension and you know that many of your detractors and opponents would easily and definitively use the phrase uh word patriarchy to describe let's

some of these relationships and what they have culturally endowed and what perhaps they would argue we as men are oblivious to some of the components that are packed into that. What I've come to query is the impossibility of

the perhaps the equality that it is stated they crave within that framing i.e. that something that comes from this forgive the literalism genesis would always have to be expressed in this manner and

to create a paradigm that represented a true expression of the divine feminine, it would have to be a different paradigm altogether. This is interesting to me, bearing in mind what you've said earlier about AI being a sort of a conglomerate, an aggregation that could...

be mapped onto our understanding of a collective unconscious, i.e. archetypes emerge out of patterns observed over time. But what fascinates me also, because I feel it might be practical, for surely as a theology evolves from the Old Testament era,

the New Testament, is there a sense, without yielding what territory might be inferred to Islam here, if we were to continue the trajectory to the insisted final prophet, that what we are offered in Acts

for example, in the immediate era after Christ's death and resurrection is that the kind of divinity endowed by the second covenant, God's reversal, inversion and return on Abraham's sacrifice might become not ubiquitous, but at least accessible, accessible to many.

that we will perform greater feats than he, that you, my apostles, will perform greater feats, that as he has sent me as his apostle, I send you as my apostles. I read Acts again recently in some easy, accessible, almost slang version of it. In fact, a man who shares your surname, Eugene Peterson's book, The Message. And what I was struck by in this version of Acts

was the vivacity, the lividness and vitality of the book and how the sense of urgency of Christianity that it, you know, think of the critiques that are often slung in your direction. Conservatism, it stayed. You know, this is a very sort of, and admittedly it's 2000 years old, but a very sort of a vibrant call to arms, an urgent sense that, oh my God,

We are living in an atrophying and dying ideology. We must become alive with Christ. We must change the world. And even the accounts that are given in there are accounts of people jailed and on trial. Even though it is literally biblical, it's very distinct from the Old Testament with its locusts and its deserts and its tribes and its manor. Now it sort of feels overtly and literally

and literally political so what i'm saying is is that somehow like between these two sets of books and i don't know how arbitrary that taxonomy is even uh jordan obviously it must be an area of your expertise by now having sort of watched the incredible content you've generated around it uh what it

Has there been a significant reversal of charge? And what is that charge? How are we endowed with that charge now? At the point when you have Richard Dawkins saying, I am culturally Christian, are people starting to recognise that this is not just a Remnian ideology?

this is a living thing that has been discarded. I listened to that Bishop Barron who you had on your show the other day talking about ethereal angels. And I thought, yes, the religion that I'm interested in is not a precursor

and a parallel to psychotherapy. It is a precursor and parallel to quantum physics, helping me to understand what do you mean when you say self? Who is this self? What do you mean when you say reality? When you say reality, what are you talking about? And is it possible that reality is something that we

conjure here as vessels and conduits of the divine if we have the capacity to somehow in the moment through practice disavow the strong gravitational literally pull of the material and the unconscious ethos with which we are continually inculcated by the insidious nihilistic

albeit glistening culture that attempts to make us all devotees of this new banality.

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So there's two forces that lead the lost across the desert. There's the prophetic and the political, and Aaron is the political. And in that part of the story, the prophetic disappears, and the political falls under the sway of something like the immediacy of hedonism. So the Israelites immediately turn to worship of the golden calf, and it's something like money. So a calf is obviously money.

Calf is in the class of livestock, and livestock is bodies at hand to consume. It's a form of wealth, obviously. And golden calf is the first level representation of that abstractly, you might say. It's halfway to money, a golden calf. But it's still materialistic. Now, when the Israelites start to worship the golden calf and become materialistic,

They become concerned with immediate hedonistic self-gratification. Okay, and so then, and it isn't only that they're worshipping the golden calf. They're dancing around naked, drunk. It's a pride parade. I mean, and I'm dead serious about that. I'm dead serious about that. Is the political descends into a pride parade as soon as the prophetic disappears. Well, why? Well, because everyone falls under the sway of their pride.

the dominion of their immature instincts. You know, when someone says, I want what I want right now, what they're failing to understand is that they've come to a conclusion about what constitutes I. And the I that they're allowing to be constituted is actually the dominion of their instincts. They're reverting to a form of

They're reverting to the same sort of behavior that characterizes Abraham before his adventure takes place. It's mere hedonic immediate gratification. Now you might say, if you were progressive, it's like, well, what's wrong with that? And the answer is, well, why don't you put 42-year-olds out in the forest and see how long they last?

And the answer is not very long. And the reason for that is because there's nothing in that realm of instinctual self-gratification that's going to be able to propagate itself communally over any reasonable amount of time. I mean, that's why we have communal organization, why we make those sacrifices. It's because as you mature, you start to understand that mere whim or mere desire

First of all, is a pretty narrow definition of who you are, especially because it changes moment to moment. Just like gender, apparently, right? It's this shape-shifting... It's actually an a prior decision about what to worship. Like, if you're a pagan, for example, and you're polytheistic, for example, all that it means is that it doesn't mean you worship nothing. It means that you worship

You identify yourself with your instinctual desires. You define I as whatever desire rules at the moment. That's just a kind of possession and it's an immature possession and it can't work because there's nothing in it that's productive. It's all mouth and need and no action and sacrifice. And so there's something wrong about it, fundamentally wrong about it.

Something fundamental. That's Peter. That's the land of Peter Pan. Right. The boy who won't grow up, who thinks that maturity is nothing but like power and corruption. That's represented by Captain Hook. Now, to give the progressives their due, to give the left its due, of course, that patriarchal

structure that is predicated on sacrifice can become corrupted, co-opted, gigantic, right? Lumbering, blind, willfully blind. It degenerates in the direction of power always. So this is a good rule of thumb. You can think about this in the confines of your marriage or even your relationship with yourself.

When the proper integrating spirit isn't at hand and operative, then the relationship degenerates in the direction of power. You start to use compulsion. You start to use force.

You know, you exchange angry words with your wife and you attempt to force her to adopt the point of view that you think is appropriate. But the fact that that happens continually does not indicate that that's the basis of the relationship. Right? It's not. Is power the basis of the relationship? Well, the progressives obviously say yes. They say there's nothing other than power. That's what the bloody postmodernists concluded in the 1970s.

And if it's not power, what is it? Well, it's the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice. That's the antithesis of power. That's clearly the antithesis of power. And then you mentioned, I'll just add one thing, because you mentioned this call that you saw in Acts, which is Christ's insistence that

Those he leaves behind will do works greater than his. This is also where I see the insipid element of Protestantism in particular, although not only Protestantism, that says, well, all you have to do is say, Lord, Lord, and you'll be saved, right? All you have to do is claim belief in the Christ who's already redeemed us. And then, you know, now you're in the kingdom of heaven.

And that isn't what the biblical text indicates. It indicates that those who are left in the aftermath of the resurrection will be called upon to do greater things than Christ himself, which is a hell of a call given the nature of his sacrifice, right? This is no joke. And what we're called upon to do is to participate in that process.

Right? Fully. Or else. Like, and seriously or else. And I can feel, everybody can feel that nipping at the edges, including people like Richard Dawkins.

I may say that when you reach immediately for pride as your example of hedonism, you do yourself no favours in my humble opinion, sir, because you could just as easily use an example of hedonism and indulgence that doesn't have such overt and explicit connotations when it comes to a particular expression of human sexuality. That's just one point. Let me go on for ages, if you don't mind. Now,

I am aware, of course, of... I've lived hedonistically. I've been a drug addict. I've lived indulgently for long periods of time. So I understand the nature of that power and...

in practice, how it may as well be a god and how you conceptualize that could be pantheistically. You could see it as Aphrodite or as Venus. You could see yourself as being devoured by Cupid and certainly Venus.

by Eros and making yourself the subject of such high humors. Priapus, man. Priapus. Priapus indeed. Indeed. Indeed.

But I saw some things in what you were saying that struck me as important. That when you were saying that, of course, when we default to making the self our deity, the sovereign being that which is part

currently charged, whichever instinct is at the wheel, whichever instinct is in the driving seat, that will become sovereign at that moment. If you have no recourse against that, if you have no principle, if you have no path, if you have no Tao, if you have no Christ, if you have no way of

breathing and living God into being, then you will default to the instincts in conjunction with cultural influence. Those will be the two poles that will generate patterns as surely as if they were magnets on iron filings.

and for there to be any charge at all, there must be polarity. This refusal of the call, the inability to accept maturation, the inability to throw off infancy and to accept the chalice, to accept the grail, to receive the wound, to know what you must do,

There is a tension in this for me in the maintenance of the necessary innocence that Christ himself insists we must find. And it seems that when you said for a moment, and I'd love your take on this as well as everything that I'm saying, that the self is amorphous. The self is an event. It is not in stasis. The self will be discovered and will evolve in relationship.

then indeed we do lend some credence to those who say these two categories of maleness and femaleness or man and woman do not suit me. Now, no doubt these ideas, like all ideas, race, distinction, nationality, commerce, have

been lent further charge by, I would say, powerful sets that seek to govern and control consciousness itself, that see that as the ultimate terrain, that require for the perpetuation of their control, the continual flinging of rocks into that pool to prevent something glorious coalescing there, some new unity.

What I would offer is this, that surely the synthesis that we're requiring out of this thesis antithesis war that we're plainly still in, is the ability to acknowledge that there must be some kind of fluidity. There must be some kind of freedom. There must be some kind of acceptance that tradition cannot become a rod to steer, control or prod others.

that our religious faith, that our spirituality, that our morality and our ethics must be for the marshalling of our own instincts and designs and desire for power. And you're right. And I always love it, Jordan, when you return it to how are you behaving in your marriage? How are you behaving in yourself? I was thinking about how do I behave in my marriage?

with my wife? How often do I tend towards power in irritability, leaning arrogantly into whatever sets of abilities I'll claim for myself in desperation? And God knows I spend significant time there. But because both you and I tend to, as you laid out earlier in our conversation, move from the micro to the macro,

to march gladly out to the penumbra to see what might be found there. It leaves us with a kind of one, a duty to demonstrate in our conduct that quality of joy and open heartedness, that quality of good faith. And I feel that perhaps the next marker of our progression might be when we can say that

Well, what is it that is of value in these ideas that are emerging out of post-structuralism? The sort of this willingness to cast out even nature. Even the body I'm born in isn't me. Nature itself isn't real. To hell with the sun. To hell with Jesus. To hell even with my own chromosomes. Neither the crucifix or the why are of value in the final analysis. I'm

And because I've lived there a while, because I've lived continually in indulgence, because I have been so many times humbled and my humbling continues yet. What it leaves me with is that there is something obviously, obviously there is something in what you have brought into our culture that people were looking for and needed. And I value it and I appreciate it. That's why I apologize when I'm late, you know, tidy your room, man, arrive.

on time and stand up straight you know like but there is also something that I am before I was an aura boris consuming my own self and now I am more porous looking for ways to be open to solution and

You know, and I feel there is something we have to deliver. I think that there is something that we have to deliver. And I think the time, the fissures and fractures are emerging now. The possibility exists now for even, say, your most vehement and vocal detractors to recognise in you what you have brought to the conversation that is true. And for us to recognise what they have been saying that is accurate, that is correct,

that is worthy of being heard. And I would say that sort of if you just casually, maybe out of habit, use pride as the example, that instead of the many heterosexual and normative ways that people are equally indulgent and sort of lost and adrift, and I know those worlds because I've lived there, then I think that we're not affording ourselves a pathway through this that would be beneficial.

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You asked really, I think, two fundamental questions there. One had to do with the nature of authority and force, and the other had to do with fluidity. Oh yeah, there was a third one, which is what did the postmodernists bring to the table? Let's start with that. Well, here's one thing they got right. We see the world through a story. That's true. That's revolutionary, that truth.

And I think that the science now points extremely strongly in that direction. The AI systems are trained in accordance with that notion. All the great psychologists' perceptions that I've studied and talked to have concluded the same thing: we see the world through a story. The description of the structure that we see the world through is a story, and we have to weight our perceptions.

That goes back to that collective unconscious idea that we started with, is that we see the literal things we see, our perceptions themselves are a function of that waiting process. They're a consequence of a narrative process. And so the postmodernists got that right. And that's why we have a culture war in part, because we're trying to work something out that's very deep. We see the world through a story. Is the story one of power and tyranny? Well, the answer to that is no.

to a large degree, unfortunately, but not fundamentally. And that's where the postmodern lefties go so terribly wrong because their insistence is that the world is a battleground of power. And there isn't a more dangerous conclusion that you can possibly draw than that. Now, you still have to give the devil his due. So I'm going to consider briefly the story of Moses.

Okay, you talked about the rod of authority, right? It's to be used sparingly. Well, Moses is the archetypal leader and the main figure in the Old Testament, arguably speaking. And he has the flaws of the leader, even the prophetic leader. And the flaw is the proclivity to default to power.

And he does that quite regularly. In some of Moses' actions are the kinds of consequences and...

motivations that someone like Dawkins would point to and say, "A God who would produce a motivation that evil is not a God that I'm willing to abide by." Now, he says at the same time that he is a cultural Christian, so the situation is complex and people are starting to wake up to that fact. But Moses, his pattern of failure, his Achilles heel, is to use power when he's called upon to use invitation.

And this is actually fatal in the final analysis. So in Numbers, which is where the story of Exodus basically concludes, Moses has

shepherded his people through the desert, which is where you end up with when your tyranny crumbles, right? You end up in the desert, which is why people don't like to let go of their presuppositions. Anyways, he's shepherded through the desert basically for three generations and they're on the border of the promised land and the Israelites run yet again out of water and they prevail upon Moses to intercede with God to provide water. And God tells Moses,

There's some rocks nearby. You go tell those rocks to deliver the water. You go speak to those rocks properly, and they'll deliver the water that will save your people. And Moses goes to the rocks, and he hits the rocks.

not once, but twice with his staff. Now this staff, this is the rod of Asclepius. This is the flag you plant when you establish new territory. This is the liana or vine that connects heaven and earth.

It's the staff that defeats the staff of the court magicians. It's the staff that turns into the serpent that eats all the other serpents. This is a major league staff, right? It's the authority of Moses. And he uses authority when he's called upon to use the logos.

That's his sin. And the consequence of that is dire. God, Aaron, so the political arm, dies, and Moses is forbidden from entering the promised land. And so what's the rule there? The rule is to the patriarch, let's say, the rule is do not use force when you could use invitation.

Don't fall prey to that temptation. Now, the left looks at the patriarchy and says nothing but force. It's like, wait a minute, guys, nothing but. That's a bit too extreme a claim. You mean nothing but? It's like, OK, why the hell are your lights on? You know, look around you.

You think all of that's a consequence of force, do you? You think that's all of that productivity, all of that life more abundant, all of that material wealth. You think that's a consequence of nothing but force. You think your marriage is nothing but force. You think your family is nothing but force. You think your community, your friends, all business relationships, that's nothing but power, is it? And why am I supposed to believe that you're not saying that just to justify your own use of power?

Because that's how the radicals, that's how they operate as far as I can tell. It's like, well, the world's just a battleground of power. And the only thing important is who has the rod?

And that's a big problem because no, that's not a solution. And there's a lot of self-service in the claim that power rules. It's very, very, very dangerous. Now, if it isn't power, what is it? Well, it's the antithesis of power. You know, when Christ is the third temptation that's offered to Christ when he's in the desert and he encounters Satan is the temptation of power.

And so we can, which he refuses. And so we can derive from that the idea that the pattern of Christ's life is the antithesis of power. And what you see in that life is the constant refusal to use force

No matter what, right? And the Roman soldiers make fun of him. They say, well, if you're the son of God, you know, why don't you come off the cross and lay the landscape to waste? Which is at least in principle within the purview of possibility. And the answer is, well, you're not allowed in the final analysis, you're not allowed to use force no matter what, right? Invitation, logos, not force, right?

And that seems to be tangled into this idea of voluntary self-sacrifice as the antithesis of power. Perhaps then, Jordan, what we might explore is something that I think I heard Emmett Fox describe earlier.

was that were we to be invited to save but one soul or entire material empires, we always choose the soul and I suppose also in the Bhagavad Gita choose Krishna above all the artillery and armoury in the world and the greatest weapons available. Choose only Krishna, choose always the divine.

that if Christ's power is not materially practiced and yet indeed we find once more at the centre of the discourse that word, that concept, power, the word and concept upon which the postmodernists arrived and you say reductively alighted as conclusive, I wonder might we consider

But where this battlefield ultimately resides is internally. For surely Christ's actions indicate that his power is in self-sacrifice and in inaction and in the refusal to implement force. Clearly, when you describe the these benefits and benefits,

if not glory, the practical application and operation of culture and the legacy of the patriarchy of Western civilization, the institutions flawed but yet functioning, it's

clearly reductive to say that that is nought but force. I suppose yet they may say the benefits are inadvertent consequences only afforded in the same way. Just to use an example off the top of my head, that the eventual end of slavery,

ultimately delivers a workforce that gives you the idea of progress, but still allows establishment interests to operate quite comfortably once they're fortunate? Well, I don't think there's any reason to dispute the reality of the claim that the fundamental landscape, well, I think the fundamental landscape is good and evil, but right on top of that is tyranny and slavery.

Right? So if we go back to the story of the Israelites, if we go back to the Exodus story, you have there the claim that the reality the leader always contends with, always, is the reality of tyranny and slavery at every level. And that's something like a power dynamic. But that doesn't mean that the solution to the problem is that the slaves become the tyrant.

In fact, that's a solution that's offered to Moses as a possibility. In fact, the Israelites clamor for it, just like they later clamor for a king. The slaves want a king. Is the slave tyranny dimension or the slave tyrant dichotomy played out in the capitalist landscape? Well, obviously, like obviously, I don't see that there needs to be a dispute about that. It's

As an entry player in the capitalist world, you play out the slave-tyrant dichotomy. And you might say, well, that means the slaves should overthrow the tyrants, right? But that doesn't address the fundamental problem. The problem is, think about it this way. How the hell do you stop being a slave? Well, a slave to what? Well, we could start, you know, you already described this to some degree. How about you stop being a slave to your own goddamn whims?

Right? Like exactly how is this battle to free yourself from slavery to be undertaken? Well, we're going to restructure the entire economic system. It's like, oh, you are, you're going to do that, are you? You're going to do that. You can't even make your bed. You're the prisoner of your own whim. You're a slave to your own desires. There's nothing to you.

If you did manage the revolution, the monsters you release would take you out so fast that you wouldn't have time to think and it wouldn't be pleasant. And we've seen that time and time again. Like the solution to the slave-tyrant dichotomy isn't political revolution. So you see that reflected again in the passion story.

The mob that's upset with Christ is upset at least in part because he refuses to play the role of political revolutionary. And so, because that's not the way out of the slave-tyrant dichotomy. The way out is to stop being a bloody slave. Now, how? Well...

I think that's partly the pathway of maturation, isn't it? Is that it's voluntary service to a higher good. It's something like that. This is what God tells Moses to tell the tyrants and the Israelites. And we always get this wrong. We always forget the second half of this. So this is a civil rights shibboleth. Moses tells the tyrant, the Pharaoh, let my people go.

You know, that's Martin Luther King, but that's not what he says. He says it 10 times, just in case you didn't catch it the first time. He says, let my people go so they may worship me in the desert. And that means to establish a particular kind of relationship outside the tyranny in the wilderness that is,

Well, it speaks of the responsibility of each person to take on the existential burden of existence, the burden of existence, voluntarily, right? To become a locus of authority and responsibility themselves, because otherwise they abdicate that responsibility to the tyrant. And that's not fundamentally a political problem. It has political ramifications. But, you know, like your decision to become a father, that's not a political decision.

And your ability to be a good father is also, that's not a political choice. It's something far deeper than that. To the degree that you're a good father, which is an abstract rule, hence the name father, you're going to be a conduit for the spirit of, for the benevolent spirit of your ancestors. That's a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it. You're going to let the spirit of the father pour through you and occupy you.

And that's a form of worship and subordination. It's not power.

I love it. I love that. Often in my wife, we have a young son, as you know, and I see flashes of the archetype. I see how she is governed by what I suppose Richard Dawkins would call natural processes. But I see beyond that. I see the light that shines. I see behind the behaviour, behind the biology. I feel the resonance growing.

that she is redolent with the spirit of the ancestors, that she's not just their mother, but she is the mother. How could any woman sacrifice so much? How could any woman continue to provide so unquestioningly and so

diligently. I'm struck by several things. It's plain that there is a negotiation. And it seems to me that what you're saying is that the era of this new progressive post-modern Marxist, to use your sort of language that you would use, even if I would query that language, there is a negotiation. And that negotiation, of course, must involve power. I'm struck that

What Moses carries out politically against another king, an alternative king in the Pharaoh, and as the head of a tribe, Christ carries out as an emissary of...

and in the desert. There are parallels. The desert is a parallel. The adversarial nature of the combat, there is a parallel there. But in these distinctions, I suppose there must be information given that we are operating on the assumption that this is operating, this is your term, as a library and sort of as a progressive discourse that's

deliberately trying to induce a state and perhaps it's the states that we're describing quite simply in the, you know, the father, the mother, a role that may be useful to us. And what I feel is, you know, what I feel. A hero. A hero. Yes, yes, yes. To be worthy of the term. And what I feel like is important now, certainly what feels important to me is what is it that I am to revive? How,

is it that I will continue to incline towards this ancestral greatness? What is the duty and how might the power of Logos impact reality differently than force? And it's... Okay, so let me ask you that specifically. Like, you're quite the wizard of words now, and so you have that as a gift. Now, you...

You've detailed out your subjugation to the land of whim, let's say. And now you have this podcast. You have a public presence. You've been vouchsafed that. This is your podcast. I'm in your podcast right now. This is your podcast.

That man, that would get us somewhere. When it becomes an absolute amorphous podcast where the father and son don't even know because the spirit is so abundant and all immersive that we don't even know who's Moses, who's the Pharaoh, who's Jesus, who's the serpent. Now we're getting somewhere, baby. Well, so it seems to me, well, it seems to me the, it's all of our podcast, Russell. Yeah.

So it seems to me that the simplest place for people to start with regard to finding their pathway forward is to be very careful with their words. And I want to know something personal from you. It's like, I believe that what you're doing on your podcast is attempting to

find your way forward carefully. You're investigating and exploring and that's the answer to the question about amorphous identity. It's like the people who push forward the notion that identity is fluid, that's the case if you're progressing forward in exploration and trying to expand your domain of responsibility, let's say.

It's not true if what you're doing to be fluid in your identity is the abandonment of all responsibility whatsoever, right? So, and those can look very, they can look

casually very similar. Now, I want to know from you, it's like, what is it that you're doing with your words when you're doing what you should be doing? And what's the consequence? What's been the consequence of that for you and for your reputation and for your

what would you say, for your dynasty and for everyone else? It's the same Abrahamic question. If you use your words properly, I mean, first of all, do you? If you do, why? When you do, what happens? How do you know when you deviate from that? And what do you think your responsibility is in that regard? Thank you.

The prayer of Jabez, I think in Chronicles 2, Oh, that you would bless me indeed and enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me, that you would keep me from evil.

I feel that with words. That's a good one. Yeah. I feel like with words, I'm trying to keep, I'm trying to generate community. I'm trying to use language to create common unity, to instantiate and realize an inherent and already existing connection and that we live individually and collectively in a super state of potentiality. But it is our, he has no hands but ours.

but we are here to formulate his kingdom, that as we have already referenced, that it is, we are his apostles, that this is our duty. Now, experientially how that is, is as you have kindly suggested, it is indeed a gift and therefore requires no effort, requires only acceptance

acceptance and a receptive state. When I'm in this receptive state, the communication is effortless. I'm almost not a participant. It seems to me that what the polarity is, is precisely as you have described, that I am a both carried, I am a vessel for and a vehicle upon my instinct

the flow of my instincts, are that we had the senses, are that we had the instruments to observe the patterns that might be about us, the endocrinal streams that may yet flow and where they carry me and with what telos and with what purpose in mind. Upon these with my rod I try to impose, Jordan, yes, an

ancestral inheritance of some value. And the battleground for me, the battleground for me is the inculcation of this ego. It was very, very well done by the culture. The raw material of the appetites was that they did good work with this clay.

So easy if you feel a continual lack as one might if you have not yet been shown a path to God. So easy to worship their herd of golden calves that they lay before you and all of the bounties that are on offer.

It seems to me that it isn't, and this is from what I have learned from other alcoholics and addicts that walk the path ahead of me, that it isn't the external stimulant that must be addressed and overcome. No, it is the receptive pole. It is the...

is the coordinator, it is the inner coordinator that must be overcome. And I see what you mean now in the difference between the use of the staff and logos. And I imagine you're using that word because there is no perfect English interpretation available for it. And this kind of act

active awareness, this kind of active presence, making ourselves, as I try in the rosary, to imagine the vibrant nothingness, to feel the vibrant nothingness. And here within the vibrant nothingness is the sacred mother. And it is her that I petition that she may convey to her son, the God that she grew in her belly, that I pray to, to be forgiven. But not

Not me as an individual, but me just as one more sheep, just as one more member of the flock. If I can overcome the appurtenances of my identity that I have been adorned with and self-adorned, that I have ornamented endlessly, that with the brush lent to me by the culture, with the lacquer that I have squeezed out of every gland,

applied to fortify this shibboleth of self.

If that if if I can somehow overcome that and where might I overcome it? But in the present, where but the present, where but the as you say, as you say, the message of Christ, the absolute refusal to use force, the absolute refusal to use force, that the higher will might be that the higher will might be engaged, that the higher purpose might find its fulfillment, right?

The challenge, Jordan, that I would offer you, inquiry rather, sir, is that, you know, the acceptance that what is happening is God's will, that the suffering is God's will, to let it go to work on you. But the opposite, as I was taught recently, the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.

And that to live in this, to live in this, the horror of uncertainty and to live there with grace, a grace that I cannot self-generate, even if the source of all things must include me somehow, is...

That is the ongoing challenge. And with language, I suppose I hope to illustrate that there are connections in these patterns of differences, in these signifiers that may yet be arbitrary. I do see the markings of some fractal archetype. Perhaps the success of the language that we're currently using is meritocratic.

Maybe in its jagged consonants and flowing vowels, in its labial fricatives, in its linguistic grace, there is something akin to truth emerging, if we will just allow it. Well, so let me ask you something that's more personal than this is my observation, and you tell me if it's accurate. So you've talked about being...

spectacularly successful in the land of hedonistic whim, let's say. And you've discussed, well, you were kind of an icon for that, right? And a model for that even. And so, you know, you're emblematic of that, of the success of that approach. But that didn't work for all sorts of reasons. And so it seemed to me that you wandered out of that landscape into a kind of amorphous mysticism landscape

but that that's become more targeted, and it's become more targeted in the Christian direction recently, particularly perhaps in the last year. Is all of that accurate? Yes. Okay, that is accurate. Okay, so what do you make of the fact, and you talked about the Rosary specifically just now, what do you make of the fact that that journey out in the desert of mysticism, let's say, is perfect?

is, well, I think the same thing is happening to you in some ways that's happening to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and to Neil Ferguson and to Douglas Murray and to Tom Holland and also to Richard Dawkins, is that there's a recognition emerging that there's something

in the midst of the mystic, let's say, down in the depths of the metaphysical, that speaks of something that's much more Christian than any of us would have possibly imagined, let's say, 15 years ago, or even a year ago, for that matter. And I'm wondering...

that's making itself manifest specifically in your life. Like, how is this mysticism that's obviously part of your nature? That was probably what was pulling you, at least in part, in the hedonistic direction to begin with. That was somewhat desire for communion with the spirit of Dionysius and Bacchus, you know? Like, there's a call to self-transcendence in a kind of radical hedonism. That's for sure. And

And so it's just not the optimal ground, let's say. It might be better than rank cowardice, however.

You know, it was William Blake who said, "Wisdom through excess." And there's something to be said about that. And that's also echoed in the tale of the prodigal son, by the way. It's something to wander in the vast wastelands of the hedonistic world successfully and then come home. There's something to be celebrated in that, even though you're gonna pay for your bloody sins, that's for sure. Even though they may have been necessary and even desirable in some bizarre sense.

So in your life at the moment, it looks to me like you've taken a Christian tilt. Like, what the hell do you make of that? And how do you know that that's just not another form of self-aggrandizing falsehood? Well, you know, just when you think you've thrown the devil out. There he is again. That's for sure. But somewhere to go.

Well, you know, I see Joseph Campbell as a kind of sort of deputy to Jung's principle. And I like how Campbell says, in the end, you must...

might likely explore the native ideology and theology. Now, I know that's somewhat fast and loose, given that I'm in Northern Europe, and the Nazarene was hardly springing forth from Essex Greys on the Thames side. Right. An important point to make. An important point to make. Western. It's like, yeah, not exactly. Yes, yes. How it has felt...

It's almost as if something that felt so parochial and prosaic because of the delivery systems of it's ordinary, it's abundant. It's these grandmas at a bus stop. It's the drab intonations of a vicar in a parish. It's the apologetic Church of England, and I'm not attacking the Church of England, but where you feel that they might almost be afraid to mention God.

in there for fear of stepping on somebody's toes. He's in the broom closet, underneath the mob. Yes, definitely. So because it felt so local, like this figure of Christ, what it's felt like is, oh, it's you. He's always been there. He's always been there. There is something in this that is not

as you obviously are exploring as well as rather beautifully illuminating for us, there's something in these texts

that is about inducing states. And as whenever ultimately a rational idea issued through language, in poetics, you know, through poetics, when you induce a state beyond what is literally encoded, when you invite somehow that you reach beyond what is presented linguistically,

It seemed to me somehow that in returning to this, in returning to the Bible, in returning to Christ, indeed, it does feel like a return, doesn't it? Rather than a novel discovery issued at the shore by a missionary who doesn't know whether he's going to get a pat on the back or a cauldron to swim in at high temperatures. It felt to me like...

This has always been here. This has always been here. I'm of course enjoying C.S. Lewis's approach because I am a product of cultural atheism, materialism, hedonism, and yes, a child as much of Jim Morrison as William Blake. This is about the Dionysian, the Bacchanalian, this is about empowerment, sex magic.

the glory of it all, the abundant glory, throwing off the liminal and the limiting. And, of course, then one arrives one day at the terrible conclusion that there's nothing there. And perhaps only then, indeed, that's why... Well, Jim Morrison died, right, at 27, which seems to be the fate of many, many enthusiastic bacchanalian

geniuses. For surely there must be a death. For surely there must be a death. Hopefully you don't have to kill the host. Hopefully the death is merely the idea. And what is offered, and one thing I feel, as you know, from our previous conversations that I have at least a kind of experiential authority to speak about, while not representative authority, is the impact of the 12 steps on the psyche of an addict and its analysis in the

ultimately, that what addiction represents is a spiritual problem, is a spiritual quandary, and even embedded in the idioms like get off my face, lose myself, get smashed,

is the idea that what the actual impulse is, and indeed think how significant the word craving is within addiction, is a move towards, a pulling, some force, some source, some calling, some clarion call, some harbinger awaiting some personal rapture. The problem is, of course, we

living as we do in these, the context that ultimately offers you as the end goal through materialist and rational analysis that you might become just this type of a person in this type of a society. Something important is lost and those things are...

explicit in the texts that undergird 12-step practice and philosophy. It is plain that they are talking primarily about, and I've said to you before, but I'll say again, that Jung was a key influence on the founders of that movement, curiously, along with first century Christianity. That what they are not saying is...

you know, give up drinking, give up drugs. They are saying, give up self, give up self, give up self. There are phrases like abandon yourself to God completely. Like after they get past the wall, it's not going very well, is it? All this drinking and drug use. And even indicated in the earliest literature for these groups is,

is the idea that there will be behavioral expressions, that there will be sexual behaviors, there will be promiscuity, etc. And God alone. And if you maybe even just take that as one thread and consider what the 70 years since this piece of

folk philosophy was augured in the world of pornography, something that was once, of course, available, but somewhat abstract, and now is normalized, immersive, immediately available. It's

it seems that the environment is encroaching. And this reminds me of something sort of important I want to say. Of course, anyone that explores it, the reason the prodigal son is important is because, like if someone's telling you, you don't want to be doing any of that, and it seems that it's born in prurience and an inability to attract mates, well, what's the value of that testimony? But someone that's come back from there and says,

well, give it a try, but it didn't work very well for me. It is, I think, is a more powerful testimony to deliver. At least it seems to me that certainly that is a testimony that has affected me more. But what is difficult to avoid, I feel, Jordan, is the sense that

not only is there this, you know, and it's something you touched upon earlier. You said, no, it's not only force, you know, and I sort of offered you that perhaps the benevolence that this force has issued could be, and this is of course reductive, an inadvertent side effect of tyranny. And please be aware that I am

apprised of the fact that the forms of tyranny that are emerging now, apparently in opposition to these old school, not to be repeated, let's face it, militaristic, demagogic, populist, strongman forms of tyranny that we're being continually warned of, are far more terrifying. The Kafkaesque, bureaucratic,

banalised, invisible, dreadful, we're here to help, I'm afraid your inquiry can't be heard. This is diabolical. Huxley's hell terrifies me even more than Orwell's, although plainly we're in some amalgam with beautiful gilding from Kafka in the sort of unknowable,

Where is the judge? What is the trial? Who's doing all this stuff? And it seems to me that there must be, even if we are to say it's about power, even if we are asking, is it an internal struggle? Is it my power over my instincts and the expression of those instincts in conjunction with culture that I might call self over time?

There seems to be some other agent. There does indeed seem to be a serpent. There do indeed appear to be fallen angels. There do indeed appear to be ulterior forces at work. For I am struck that when I was an emblem of this culture in my hedonism, I was gloried and made much of. And when I say there is something else, we must move towards God.

This is when the culture comes alive. This is when the spotlight shines. This is when the knock at the door comes. This is when forces are marshalled. It seems to me that something, someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. All right, sir. Look, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to close on that. You know, um,

We'll obviously continue this conversation. How could it ever end? Yeah, yeah. How is your son? He's doing so marvelously well. I mean, it's just beautiful. What it's done to the family dynamic, this child, again, to see my wife mother him so beautifully, to reaffirm my connection with my two daughters, really,

to experience the, you know, bloody hell, man. Like, I tell you, to see your son on a slab with what appeared to be, they might as well have been sort of Mayan priests, these giant anaesthetists, before they carve open his thorax with the happy intention, of course, of saving his life. It feels biblical indeed to be confronted with that. To experience

It gave me moments to a mother weeping for her child, the hopelessness, the despair. And of course, this was within the tundra. This was within the tundra of what amount to lies. And my God, Jordan, my God. You know, I mean, this might give you an indication why someone might go scurrying somewhat keenly towards Jesus. Hey, I got a book for you. Yeah. Yeah.

Read The Sacred and the Profane by Murchie Iliad. He was a big influence on Campbell too. And Iliad is a real genius. He's a real genius. Very short book, punchy as hell, deadly book. He's got about six or seven that are very much worth reading, but that's probably top of the list. The Sacred and the Profane. Next time we talk, we can talk about it. All right. That'd be great, man. Hey, I love you. Nice talking to you, Russell.

My love to Tammy. You hang in there. Yes, sir. My love to Tammy and to your children, and thank you. All right, sir. To everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. To the Daily Wire Plus people for making this possible. That's much appreciated. To the film crew here today in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That's where we are. Thanks for your help. Russell, we'll talk soon. Thanks for chatting today.

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