The Dark Side of Fairy Tales | Jonathan Pageau
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Responsible man, because true strength comes from within. The scene in the opening of the Olympics, it wasn't a political statement. It was presented imagistically in story terms with certain cultural elements. And so we tried to answer politically, but when you do that,

They just say, well, no, you're misunderstanding. And then they start to gaslight and to shift. What we need to learn to do, and that's why I don't talk about politics that much. I talk about stories and I try to tell stories, is because that's the best way to answer. These stories that have been with us for millennia and that kind of uphold our civilization, if we can understand them and then present them again to the world in a way that is clear,

then those stories win because they're the true story. Jonathan Pagiot is a French-Canadian liturgical artist, writer, and public speaker on religious philosophy, symbolism, and Orthodox Christianity. Pagiot first rose to prominence through his popular YouTube channel, The Symbolic World, where his interpretations of mythical patterns have attracted more than 20 million viewers.

Paggio is also the founder of Symbolic World Press, a publishing company specializing in high-quality books which aim to revive the beauty of ancient storytelling. Here at The Daily Wire, Paggio's spiritual and philosophical insights have been featured in Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's 17-part Exodus Seminar, as well as in Jordan's most recent series, Foundations of the West.

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Jonathan, it's great to see you. It's great to see you, Ben. So let's talk about deep and fun things. You know, I spend most of my time, obviously, covering the news, covering the election, and it's not particularly deep. And this year, it's not particularly fun. It turns out that things are very serious.

And it turns out also that the news is transitory. And the thing that you work on day in and day out is the meaning and symbolism of the deepest things in the world. So that means that you're constantly talking about the Bible and symbolism. And now fairy tales. I want to start with having you talk a little bit about your work with fairy tales, because that's something that I think most people don't spend any time thinking about. It's embedded deeply with the vast majority of us. I mean, the minute that you say you've written a book

about Jack and the Beanstalk, this Jack and the Fallen Giant. And most of us know the story, obviously. I'd say the vast majority of the population knows the story. But the point that you make is that these stories are embedded in our civilization for a reason. So why don't you explain that a little bit?

Yeah, well, one of the things we've seen, you know, fairy tales have been actually pretty popular in the 20th century. And we've had Disney do amazing things with them for a few generations, like one generation and a half, you could say. But now everybody, the people that were kind of the guardians of our fairy tales have dropped them, it seems. They don't actually want to deal with them. They're icky to them because they have things in them that they can't deal with in terms of their ideology.

But they were right in their insight that fairy tales are kind of, you could say, downstream from the Bible. That's the way that I understand them. They use a type of language which is similar to biblical stories, but they're more accessible and they're accessible to kids. They deal with fantastical images. So sometimes some of the things in the Bible that are hard to grasp,

because it's kind of dry. The stories in the Bible don't have a lot of description. They don't describe interstates. They're very dry, but they're amazing. They're the best type of stories ever told. And fairy tales are downstream from that, where they use the same patterns and they connect to the same ideas.

but they have a little more buffer and they're more accessible for the common people. So that's how I see them. And I take that very seriously. So even you mentioned the title, Jack and the Fallen Giants. One of the reasons why we're doing it that way is because there's the connection between the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and the story of the giants in Genesis, right? And also later in the Old Testament. So we're trying to help people see those connections and see how the fairy tales aren't just a bunch of ridiculous things that are,

accumulated together, you know, that are just funny and ridiculous, but they actually have patterns that describe the cosmos in a deep way. I think that the way that most people think of fairy tales and the way we tell them to our kids, magic is a big part of that story. And religion has always had this very fraught relationship with sort of the idea of magic. Obviously, the Bible itself calls out things like using witchcraft. It's actually a death penalty offense.

in the Old Testament. So how should religious people see magic? Because these are kind of ongoing debates, interestingly, in Jewish circles, in Christian circles, about what's real, what's not, what does it mean when it's talking about this sort of stuff, and what's the role of magic in these fairy tales?

Yeah. Well, I think that especially as modern people, one of the things we can understand magic as, and this is, I think, the way that C.S. Lewis or Tolkien understood magic, as something like the deep connection of the world, right? So there's a deep pattern in the world. There's a type of causality which is higher than the type of causality that, you know, mechanical causation, naturalization.

does like there's a type of causality related to meaning. Maybe that's a good way of understanding it. There's a vertical causality. I can say things and they happen. And so that's dramatized in stories by something like a spell, you know, like you say something and it happens in the world. But the truth is that you do that all the time. Just ask your child to bring you a glass of water and you basically cause things to happen with meaning.

And so I think that's the deepest level of magic that we can understand in those stories. The problem with magic and the way it's described in the Bible is when we try to use patterns of meaning,

And we try to kind of gain these mysteries of the universe and use them for our own power to predict the future or to, you know, to enrich ourselves and to do all that. And that's why these types of things are evil in Scripture. But, you know, divination is there in the Bible. Joseph has a divination cup. You know, the, how do you call it? The Urim and Thummim. I forget how it's pronounced. Yeah, Urim and Thummim. Yeah, yeah. Those are divination tools that we don't even know how exactly they function. And so it's not like...

Sometimes when we read that, we read the prohibition against sorcery in the Bible, we think that it

It means that they're all a bunch of scientists and that anything that was outside of that was unacceptable. It's rather about using the power of meaning to twist reality and to use spiritual powers for your own sake. You could say it that way. Yeah, I mean, I think one way to read that in sort of more rationalistic, Maimonidean way would be to suggest that when you pray, for example, you could see that as a form of magic, theoretically, right? You're saying words, you hope that God hears those words,

Does that mean that God changes his mind? What exactly is prayer? I've talked about my own personal issues with prayer in the sort of sixth grade sense of it, where it's like, okay, I want a thing, therefore I ask God for the thing, therefore God gives me the thing. God is gumball machine sort of model. When in reality, what Maimonides would say, or probably Aquinas, is that the basic idea is not that. It's that the prayer changes you. You're aligning yourself with God's will, and that means that the thing that God is giving you is now more in alignment with the thing that you want because you've actually changed your own wants. You've changed yourself. And so the idea...

of you having a sort of force in the universe that is effective, that that is actually reliant, they're using that in sort of dark magic or whatever it would be, is that when you are attempting to manipulate God, that is a sort of weird form of dark magic, and it's not going to work out well for you. And when you are attempting to align yourself with God, that's a completely different thing, and your life gets better because you've aligned yourself with God in a sort of rationalistic framework.

I think that's exactly right. And that's why we don't understand prayer in religion as just asking for a bunch of stuff. Although that's part of it. Like we do ask God for things, but that's always associated with contrition, with confession, you know, with trying to work on your sins, to also to worship God. And like you said, what that does is that at some point, you know,

asking for a new Corvette just becomes ridiculous to you, you know, as you come closer to God. And so then you'll ask for the good of your friends. You'll ask for people around you to find God. Like the desires of your heart will change. And that's when, you know, that's when the prayer starts to become effective because you're not asking for anything just because it's your whim.

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So I think it'd be awesome for you to take me and the listeners through kind of your analysis of one of these fairy tales. So pick one of the fairy tales that you like the best and give us sort of the deep read on it. We could pick Jack. I think Jack is a good example because also we just published the – we're just publishing the newest version. And Jack's fun because the thing about Jack is at the outset, it looks ridiculous. It's really difficult to –

to see what the connection. Since I was a child, I loved that story, but I was always wondering like, how do we get from these different parts of the story to the others, right? But it's actually, once you kind of understand it, it's actually quite, it's deeply coherent. And so like a lot of the stories Jack is of coming of age story at the outset, right? There is, and this is also the thing that's difficult about a lot of Puritan interpretation of fairy tales,

is they try to get rid of the coming of age and sometimes sexual imagery that's in the fairy tale. By doing that, they miss a whole part of it. Now the other part, like the more progressive types, let's say in the 20th century, have tried to emphasize just sexuality. But that's also wrong. It's both. Just like in the Bible, there's a bunch of sexual symbolism. But it's not just about sex. It's about how sexuality can show us a deeper meaning and a deeper participation. So you see that in Jack. So basically Jack doesn't have a father.

and his mother's poor, right? And so she's the poor woman. She's the widow in the story of Elijah. She's someone who doesn't have anything coming from heaven to give her an identity, to hold her together. And so Jack has to trade

the cow, he has to trade the feminine for seed. And it happens about at the time that he's at that age where that's going to happen to him, where he's going to kind of leave his mother, his body's going to develop, he's going to discover masculinity. But it's magic seed.

you know, but Matt seeds are magic in themselves. Like it's, they don't even have to be magic seeds. They're C they're the difference between a cow that gives you milk and seed that you can plan in the ground. And then they, they give you a whole bunch of food forever if you're able to do it right. So that's, what's going on in that story. He plants the seeds at night and he wakes up with a giant beanstalk. There is a little bit of a sexual illusion there about him discovering masculinity. Uh,

he climbs the beanstalk and then he encounters a giant. And so in encountering the giant, he basically encounters the problem of masculinity, the problem of hierarchy, the idea of trying to integrate a world of masculinity when you're coming of age. Anybody knows that? You try to...

You have to, when you try to join a team or you have to do anything, you have to prove yourself and the other men are giants to you, right? So then, but he has a problem. His mother's poor. And that's one of the problems that he's trying to deal with, the poor mother. And so he finds a bag of gold. He steals that from the giant, brings it to his mother. You think the problem's solved, right? He found a bag of gold, solved the problem, but then the gold runs out. So what's better than gold?

What's better than gold is the way you make gold. If you can produce gold, then it's much better than gold. So he goes back up and he gets a chicken that lays golden eggs. He's reached a higher level of understanding, like a higher pattern of masculinity, a higher pattern of civilization, just a higher pattern of how the world functions. Brings that down to his mother. But again, that's not enough, it seems. He has to find something else.

And then when he goes back up, the last thing he finds is a harp, a golden harp that plays music. So you think, what the hell? Like, what is the relationship between the gold, the chicken that lays golden, and the harp? But it's once you understand that what he's getting from heaven is something like patterns. He's getting patterns of beings.

So you think of Moses that goes up the mountain, right? What does he get when he gets to the top? He gets a pattern of being. That's what the law is. He gets a pattern of space. That's what the pattern of the tabernacle is. And so this is what he's getting. He's getting patterns of being. And now he gets the highest pattern. For all intents and purposes, he gets what we call the music of the spheres. Basically, the pattern of everything is what he's attaining, right? The logos itself, if you want to use another type of language,

And so he steals that from his mother and then he comes back down and then he cuts the

He cuts the beanstalk and the beanstalk falls. And so now he's gotten from heaven. But it's a weird Promethean story. It's actually a little suspicious because he's stealing these things from heaven. So there's something of a Promethean element to what he's doing, which is he's going up Mount Olympus and he's stealing the fire from the gods and bringing them to earth. And so this is the...

Once you kind of understand, you can see that it's totally coherent. It makes sense with a lot of the Bible stories. It makes sense with the ancient myths. And that it's a great story, actually, because Jack is a thief who goes into heaven to steal knowledge from the gods, basically.

And so in our version, what we do is I play with that, where I use reference the idea of the fallen angels and the fallen giants. And this idea that in some ways there's something suspicious about what he's doing, although we all tend to do that, but there's something suspicious about it.

I mean, one of the things that's fascinating about what you're doing in reexamining these fairy tales is it demonstrates how they can also be emptied of all meaning. So you mentioned that the early Disney fairy tales are replete with tremendous darkness. I mean, if you watch the original Snow White from Disney, it is incredibly dark. I mean, if you show it to your kids, this was rated G.

People were scared in the theaters. Kids were crying. Like, it's a real thing. And now because we basically have said that children should never experience anything that scares them or that upsets them, many parents will never show their kids anything like the old Disney movies. The old Disney movies, again,

If you watch Pinocchio, Pinocchio is scary as hell. Truly, it is frightening. I mean, there are children turning into donkeys and being caged forever. I mean, it's really, really scary. And then you fast forward to kind of the fairy tales that are retold today. And now it's all kind of the same thing. It's always some young girl who is becoming self-harming.

empowered and never really has to face a villain. It turns out there really isn't a villain. There's just somebody who's sort of misunderstood. And then eventually everybody, you know, it all comes out right in the end because she has found her inner sense of confidence. And then the world is somehow a better place. And that's the story of pretty much every single one of the Disney fairy tales for the last 10 years. So you can see the transition in American life in how these fairy tales are told. Yeah. And

you're totally right. Not only that, but there is a type of arrogance, which is that we're going to transform the fairy tales. We're going to twist them. We're going to change them into something that's ideologically aligned with what we want. But the truth is that the fairy tales are not ideological at all. They offer a full story and you can see different aspects of humanity in these fairy tales. And they, they, they're not political in the,

the base sense, right? It's about really deep relationships of children to hierarchy, about how to integrate the world and how to be excluded from the world. All of these really powerful and important statements. We can see that Disney is, they don't know what to do with Snow White. They just don't know what to do with it. They're stuck because they don't understand it, first of all. And then they think they understand it because they think it's all about patriarchy and about politics.

but they don't understand how it is a coming of age story of a young girl. And that young girls in the real world coming of age also means encountering someone with which they're going to found a family without that.

The world runs out of people. Like if it's just about empowering yourself and being independent, then you don't, then the world runs out of people in the end. - Yeah, I mean, that is one of the amazing things that again, I think that the left wing political ethos has taken over so many of these stories. My favorite example in terms of sort of the Disney arc

And again, I'm an old Disney fan, huge Disney fan. It makes me really sad to the core of my being how Disney has destroyed its own IP and really screwed itself up as a company on behalf of politics. My favorite sort of compare contrast here is the difference between the Jiminy Cricket Pinocchio

always let your conscience be your guide, which is literally a line from the movie. I mean, the entire story of Pinocchio is that the boy who's coming of age refuses to let his conscience be his guide. He has to explore every bad idea. And then finally, he learns that responsibility on behalf of protecting his own family and his father is actually the way that you become a real boy, right? The way that you actually mature in the world is to take on responsibility and

and duty, and act with conscience, as opposed to going to Pleasure Island, right? I mean, like, the thematic could not be clearer in the original Pinocchio. And you take that, and then you contrast that with the immorality of the most popular song of the last 20 years from Disney, Let It Go, which is entirely about, there's literally a line in there that says, no right, no wrong, no rules, I'm free. Which is about as pagan an ethos as is possible to find. You can see the arc of American morality in about 60 years right there. Yeah, exactly. And

I think you're right. And that's why they don't know what to do with the fairy tales because the fairy tales just don't, they don't play that game. There are deep reflections of reality that have been built up over millennia, you know, and we have to treat them with respect. And because if not, they're going to turn against us, you know, and even what happens is that when you twist the fairy tales,

you end up saying things that you don't even know you're saying, because you don't even understand the, the, let's say the, how fraught it is to play with these, with these patterns and to just kind of twist them as you want. And it'll turn against us. You know, like I said, the, the idea of people don't realize that the idea of the self-made person, you know, that is not how, that is not how civilization functions. We need, we need each other. And so if you think it's ridiculous that the princess ends with the prince or that a movie ends with a marriage, it's like,

That's how the world works. That's how the world works. If you just want to explore your own personal desires and doing that, you're not going to... You're basically going... It's an anti-human stance. And it...

These anti-human results. I mean, that's exactly right. If you look back to, you know, if you look back to Shakespeare, which is sort of a, you know, a toned up version of fairy tales. I mean, all of his comedies are essentially a form of fairy tale and every single one of them ends with a marriage, right? Every single one of Shakespeare's comedies ends with a wedding at the,

at the very end, because that's why life is funny. Life is funny because all these bad things happen, and then the generations move on. You get married, and you build a thing, and with a tragedy, everyone dies at the end, right? Death is a tragedy because actually, you have not fulfilled your function of passing it on to the next generation, and usually in the tragedies, it's not just an old person dying, it's the young person dying that's the real tragedy. The end of Lear isn't Lear's death, really. The end of Lear is Cordelia's death, and

That's true throughout all of the stories of the West is this importance on the deepest things. And because we have become a sterile civilization, and I wonder how much of that is connected to the sterility of rationality. I really pride myself on rationality. I love reason. Reason's great. Logic is great. But the truth is that the things that people tie themselves to are, in fact,

beyond reason. And that's one of the things that you are really very much focused on is the fact that the things that people most believe in are not in fact the things they can reason out. It's the stuff that's sort of pre-rational. Yeah. Well, one of the things I've been arguing now for a decade is that

There is a relationship between the excess of rationality and the excess of desire, that those two things actually kind of happen at the same time. So when you look at the Enlightenment, you have the Enlightenment move right away, and then right in the shadow of that, you have Marquis de Sade and Césaire Mazocque, you have sadomasochism and sadism, sadism and masochism happening right at the outset of the Enlightenment.

And there's a sense in which if you don't have something that unites them together, and if you don't have something that transcends reason and emotion or reason and desires that kind of unites them, then they're going to separate. And at the outset, you can start with just reason, but then that collapses into just desire. And that's what we've seen. We see this weird pendulum even happening in our society.

where on the one hand you see these systems of absolute control being set up by states and not just states but something beyond states and at the same time this worship of complete idiosyncrasy and like complete personal self-made self-identification and my identity is actually my desire it's not even anything that that

hold me together. It's just whatever whim I have. But those two things actually interestingly go together. You need something to hold identity, reason and emotion or reason and desire into the transcendent. That's more Jonathan in a moment. First, folks, it is election season again. It's time to choose who we think is the best candidate for office. But let's be honest, choosing the right candidate for any office is a huge undertaking. I mean, like the offices even at

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Yeah, it's one of the things that, again, I think it goes back to much what you're talking about with fairy tales. But I've talked about this theory that I've, it's always pretentious to say that you've coined a theory. So I haven't really coined this theory, but it's what I've termed role theory, which is the idea that all of religion is really, and all of,

culture is built around particular roles that are universal to human beings. And we as a society have decided that roles are bad. Roles are impositions from the outside. What we really are is that free-floating, authentic desire and that any roles, because roles come with rules, is an imposition on us. And therefore, we have to explode those rules and explode those rules

in order to live a free and full life. When in reality, the roles are what makes us who we are and what pretty much every fairy tale is about and what every great story is about is a person reconciling and making the most of the role that has been laid out for them. The world pre-exists you and you're born into a role the minute that you're born. And I mentioned this with regard to, you know, the religious community I know best.

Now, the Jewish community, when you do a brit milah, when you enter a child into the covenant at eight days old with an actual mark in their flesh, when you do that thing,

You literally say that the child is entering the community and you say that the child should enter the community by going from this to fulfillment of the commandments to the chuppah, to getting married. This is the path that we're laying out for you at eight days old because you're born into a thing and those roles are pre-laid out for you and you have liberty to live out

you know, choices within those roles. But the minute that liberty becomes a universal asset that destroys the roles, the minute that that happens, it's no longer liberty. Now it's libertinism and everything descends into chaos. Yeah. And it's the same with just even basic citizenship. We tend to understand citizenship as a right, but citizenship in the ancient world was understood as a role. That is, you are a member of this group, but it also means that you are responsible for, for, for the group and you, you're asked to participate in the, in the body or else it's,

Or else what? Exactly. We're just a bunch of the suburbs, right? We're just a bunch of people laid out on land that have nothing to do with each other, that have no common goals, no common purposes. And that's the fragmentation that we're seeing in North American society. And you mentioned citizenship, and it's really fascinating. I was rereading a book by Victor Davis Hanson about colonization.

culture, and I think it's called carnage and culture. And the basic idea is why the West wins wars. And he lays out a description of ancient Greek citizenship. And the basic idea that he points out is that what made you a citizen, you had private property. And because you had private property, you were expected to defend the private property. When somebody came knocking, the entire phalanx would go out and just eviscerate everyone. And so the Western way of making war was

Here is our state. We're all going to go out. We're all going to eviscerate them. We're not going to take prisoners. We're not going to be nice. We're going to eviscerate them so we can go back to farming. And then, but it was a duty. The duty was you pick up your spear and you'll be part of the phalanx. And you can see how that's shifted in Western civilization to now arguments over who has a right to serve.

I mean, what do you mean a right to serve? That's such a bizarre statement. A duty to serve is a thing that you have. A right to serve is a very weird thing to claim because usually the service is in fact in service of the right, meaning you do your duty so that you have the other side of the coin, which is the right.

You have a right to property because you did your duty. Not you have a right to serve and no private property. It's such a weird reversal of everything that was traditional. Yeah, but I think it is in some ways a – it's a difference in the way we understand the human person, and it has to do – I mean it's a kind of diabolical –

which is that I'm owed this. I'm owed whatever. I'm owed the rights. I'm owed this. I'm owed pleasure. I'm owed all of this. And then ultimately, what it really is, is I should be God. Like, that's the ultimate thing that's behind it, is that I'm...

I don't like God because really I should have that too. And so it is right that it's that move in the garden, right? It's the move of Eve and Adam and Eve that reach up and take the apple for themselves instead of understanding that they are tenders of the garden and whatever they receive, they receive from God. It's not for them to just take upon themselves. And it has to do with, I mean, it's funny because that's it with Jack. Like this Jack story, this is why

in some ways he's going up to just take it. He just goes up and takes it for himself. We really have this idea that that's how the world functions. Like whatever you need, you have to go and take it for yourself. But that's not, like you said, that's not the deepest form, right?

Anybody who's a father knows that the deepest thing is to give like the deepest thing is to be responsible for these people and to be able to be a model and to, and to give to those around you so that we can come together. If we just think of taking then, yeah, we end up all alone, basically.

You also have a duty to a history that precedes you and to descendants who are going to be there long after you. I mean, this is Edmund Burke's point, is that basically civilization is a contract between those who have died and those who are not yet born. I mean, the idea that you are a freewheeling, atomistic individual is such a negative, and it's actually a satanic idea. And I mean that in sort of the Miltonian sense, right? As a Jew, we're not big on the Satan theology, but...

the Miltonian Satan, which is the idea that you would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, is the idea that you would rather tear down all the structures of the civilization around you just so you can claim your autonomy than you would be in a place of prosperity knowing that you're not at the top of the hierarchy. Uh,

And that is a deep human impulse, and it's a destructive human impulse that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel, which is really the story of a figure who is, for a reason he can't discern, rejected by God. He brings a sacrifice. Actually, his idea to bring sacrifice is,

And then Abel brings the sacrifice and Abel's sacrifice is then taken by God. And God specifically designs this as a test of Cain. It's hard to read the text without coming to the conclusion that God is doing this specifically in order to test Cain because he then has this...

exchange with Cain the first time in human history that God is explicitly testing someone in advance of the thing happening. Right where he says that sin crashes at your door because God knows what's going to happen if you but you can master it. Right which he's basically saying like figure out what Abel did right instead of trying to destroy Abel and Cain can't handle it and he goes and he kills Abel. You know that that is the story of humanity in a nutshell and it feels like we've built a society of Cains and so

And so anybody who's considered a builder has to be immediately struck down. By the way, I don't think it's a coincidence that at the end of the story, Cain actually repents. Cain repents and then he becomes a city builder. Yeah. I think you're, I mean, the story in Genesis are definitely interesting.

I think some of the most powerful stories that have ever been told. And it's difficult for people because they're, they're told in a, in a weird way, you know, they're, they're not told in the modern way that we understand them. And there's not a lot of exposition. They're very short. And for example, like the genealogies, people aren't used to seeing stories in genealogy, but just the genealogy, uh,

of the descendants of Cain and the descent of Seth is like, there's amazing stories just in that genealogy. And so we need to recap, we need to recapture those stories, obviously, because like you said, the problem of civilization is there in the story of Cain, you know, the, the question of the, the dangerous and,

opportunity, the danger of civilization, the opportunity of civilization are there in the story of Cain. You know, there's a reason why Cain was seen in relationship to Rome. You know, this idea that also Romulus killed his brother and founded a city. You see, it's a universal story that manifests itself in all different ways. And the problem of civilization as inside and outside is one that, you know, is, is

It's difficult to reconcile. We have to find the right way, the right balance in order to be able to deal with inside and outside. And a lot of the laws in the Old Testament are there to find a way to balance that, right? So on the one hand, you have the identity of the people of Israel, and then you have the strangers, but you do leave a corner, you leave the corners of your field. You have certain ways of dealing with the stranger, which is there to prevent that.

let's say, the all-out war that led to the flood, right? The all-out war there. It's not described in Genesis, but we have other traditions that talk about how the development of civilization went out of control, and then there's all these wars that lead to chaos. And so the rest of the Bible is always playing out these first stories, right? And trying to help us find solutions to the puzzles that they bring. At least that's one of the ways of understanding it.

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One of the things that you've been doing, and of course Jordan Peterson has been doing, bringing focus to the mysterious and the symbolic as a source of truth is really, really important because there's been a sort of bifurcation that arose as a fact of the Enlightenment, that the Enlightenment was reason, and then on the other side, you had sort of romantic symbolism. And so the romantic symbolists went in the direction of pure authenticity, pure autonomy, these sort of

romantic notion that, again, all meaning was to be held internally and that you had to search in the inners of your heart to find reality as opposed to enlightenment, which said, OK, here's a set of facts and then we're going to analyze those facts. We're going to determine whether those facts are useful or true or not. What you're doing is something quite different, which is you're saying there's a set of established symbols and these symbols predate you. They're not to be found in your heart. They're to be found outside there. And we need to explore that for deeper truths.

And it is astonishing that doing some of the stuff that you do, which to sort of the layman seems abstruse, has met with this kind of sort of, I would say, success and enthusiasm. Yeah, it is surprising. I never would have been able to plan that talking about Simples the way I do would lead to me being able to do this for a living. It's pretty astounding. But I think that that's really, you really hit the nail right. That is, one of the problems that happened in the modern age, and it happened in Christianity,

sadly, is this kind of division between meaning and fact, right? So you have, even now today, you have like the more fundamentalist, let's say, Christians that think that what's in the Bible is something that really happened. And then you have the more liberal type of theologian that say, oh, it's all kind of meaning and allegory and metaphor.

and you know it's like why can't they just be both at the same time that is the most I think that's even the deepest Christian way of seeing it that this notion of an incarnational vision right that the highest things and the lowest things actually come together and manifest in particulars and so for me the fact that the

in the Bible, the things that are described there are all things that happen. It's just not a problem. They just happen to not be describing them in the way that maybe you expect them to be described. They're not describing them in a way that modern historians would recognize as a threshold of whatever historicity, but who cares? I'm not interested in your modern definitions. They're describing events that happen in the best way possible in order to render their meaning in a universal manner that can go on through the ages.

So how do you describe what happened in Genesis in the creation of the world? How do you describe the origin of the world in a way that includes meaning and purpose and morality? It's Genesis 1. It doesn't describe the Big Bang. The Big Bang is a lower form of description because it doesn't tell you how to live. Describing this explosion that happened before time and space doesn't explain to you what it means to exist. But if you want to tell a real origin, one that has any relevance, you have to include in it the origin.

the meaning order of the universe and the moral order of the universe. And that's Genesis 1. I mean, it's Genesis 1 to 3, let's say. And that's the best way to describe the origin of the world. Did it happen? Yes, it happened. Did it happen in a scientific way? No. And who cares? Why do you think that that's the highest way of describing an event? It's not. I mean, that's especially true because, again, if you read the first three chapters of Genesis, I mean, there wasn't a dude named Adam.

The word Adam means man. I mean, it's used all over the Bible to mean man. That's the Hebrew meaning of the word Adam.

Right. And Eve is only named Eve by Adam after she provides life. I mean, like these names are clearly meant to imbue vast symbolism. They're not meant to. It's not like there was this guy named George and he lived in a garden where he did some gardening. And then there was this weird garden snake and he was talking like that. That's not what the story is about. And I think that because, you know, we've, again, reduced the world to sort of, as Bertrand Russell would say, sort of a place of fact.

that we're then surprised when we lack meaning, and then we're unable to construct our own meaning. And so what that means is that even the things that clearly are supposed to be symbolic have been turned sterile. And so you see this all over the place, the hijacking of traditional symbolism and their use for—

I mean, literally sterile things. So the most obvious example would be the Olympics opening ceremony where they're using the symbolism of Jesus and the 12 disciples to promote homosexuality and transgenderism. I mean, it's literally taking the message of Christianity and turning it into a hedonistic, sexually sterile

promotion tool. It's amazing. Not just cannibalistic. There's even a, there's like a, there's a cannibalistic, uh, because, you know, everybody knows that the myth of Dionysus has this part of it. It's called the Sparagmos, which is the ripping apart of the king, right? It's like, it is this, this frenetic orgiastic, uh,

energy that that destroys the hierarchy that's what it is right he ripped the king of the women ripped the king into pieces and so and this whole imagery it's like it was a it was perfect this is the thing that we have to understand ben is that the the the kind of psycho progressive like the really fringe the the hard leftist they understand symbolism very well they intuitively have the right

They know what they're doing. And so the coherence of the symbolism of that scene was absolutely right. It's right to their purpose, which is to the complete destruction of all identity and of all purpose. And so it's like you can, once you see that, it's really important for us to recapture those stories and to recapture the symbolism because we're faced with things that often we've lost our weapons against.

And so how do you deal with something that's presented to you imagistically, right? It's like the scene in the opening of the Olympics. It wasn't a political statement. It was presented imagistically in story terms with certain cultural elements. And so we try to answer politically, but when you do that, they just say, well, no, you're misunderstanding. And then they start to gaslight and to shift.

What we need to learn to do, and that's why I don't talk about politics that much. I talk about stories and I try to tell stories, is because that's the best way to answer. The best way to answer, because the real stories, the true stories, the one that are embodied in fairy tales or the Bible or even the ancient myths, these stories that have been with us for millennia and that kind of uphold our civilization, if we can understand them and then present them again to the world in a way that is clear, then

then those stories win because they're the true stories. And one of the things that you've been talking about lately is the symbolism of conspiracy theories. And this is really interesting because obviously we now have a society that's rife with conspiracy theories. I was talking with someone the other day and it's been a weird ride because I,

As somebody who really, really strongly does not believe in conspiracy theories, because I think it generally assumes a level of competence on the part of human beings that is nearly never present in human beings. But there obviously have been things that elites in our society have done that if done not intentionally, very much mimic conspiracy theories. They very much look like top-down, containing control ideas.

to really take control of the levers of society. Obviously, the most obvious example being COVID. And I think that that has now expanded itself so that we're now in a world where that has been used as a tool by people who legitimately are full-time conspiracy theorists to basically say you can't trust your own eyes, trust me, which is a really dangerous form of demagoguery is to be,

wrong about 99 out of 100 conspiracies. You're right about one. And this is supposed to now legitimize the other 99 conspiracy theories that you hold. So if it turns out that the elites in the society were having sex parties in New York while locking down New York, then that also means the moon landing isn't real. And that also means that there's an elite cadre of people meeting at the synagogues on Friday night to determine the weather patterns, right? Like there's this willingness for human beings that once that flip is switched,

once the switch has slipped rather, that now you believe all the things because you can't believe anything. So you may as well believe, you know, the worst about every single thing. However, what do you make of the prevalence of conspiracy theories and where do you bring symbolism into all this? Well,

The first thing to understand about conspiracy theories is that the first thing they represent to us is that we don't trust our leaders. We don't trust the elite. That's the first thing. And so you can take the most extreme version and you can understand it. The idea of the lizard people, I actually kind of like that one because it's quite coherent, right? That is, our leaders are lizard people.

Our elites are lizard people. And you think, okay, that's just insane, right? No, I mean, I obviously, I don't believe that they're genetically lizard people that are the elites. But if you just pull back one step and you look at the image, what it's revealing to you is that the elites have another allegiance.

Their allegiance is to themselves. They have their own world that is one that is strange and foreign to me, that I don't understand. They have their own purposes that aren't related to helping us and to being what leaders should be, which is shepherds helping the world in which they are. And they have their own intentions that are obscure and are snake-like. And that's why you come up with a conspiracy theory like that. And the thing is,

Is that true? Well, I think that is true, you know, because it's not true out of a concentrated desire necessarily to make it happen. It's true because of the way in which our, because of technology, because of all kinds of things, the way our society sets itself up, which is that the elites have nothing to give to the people anymore, right? In an ancient Roman world,

if you were an aristocrat, you had to build public buildings. You had to do public things. If you didn't, at some point, they're going to kill you. Like they really are. They're just going to go to your house and get rid of you if you don't participate in the common good of society. But now we have these weird world of

of finance and like completely isolated elites that we don't even know who they are, but that they can act on us and they can have massive amounts of power without us knowing. So that's a good example. And conspiracy will also always have, conspiracy type thinking will always have similar ways of, always have similar patterns. It has to do with the lizard people. And I mean, I can help you understand it too. And that is to some extent why Jews are often,

targeted because it has to do with the lizard people question. It has to do with the idea that as soon as I notice that things don't go right, it's as if my leaders or the people deciding for us have other allegiances.

And this is what people have accused the Jews from the very beginning, right? It's like, you have another allegiance. You know, you're not part of our religion, not part of our group. So because of that, then right away, you point towards the people that aren't, let's say, part of us. And so that's why as soon as things start to go wrong, like people tend to point in that direction and just say, oh, these strangers among us, they're the ones that are responsible because they don't have an allegiance to us.

And then the biggest character, obviously, is the lizard people, the biggest character. And so we have to be able to, I think we have to be able to understand conspiracy thinking, why it leads to certain types of frames and certain types of thinking. And, you know, the best way to do it is, the best way to deal with that is

you know especially in the case of anti-semitism i think is to is to be able to just show like someone like you or someone who is part of our society and contributing to society and helping you know it participate in in america's culture or in america's identity or whatever and to say look like you know everybody has multiple allegiances right and that is just how it is but if one of our central allegiance we can recognize amongst each other then we can we

We can go beyond the simplicity of just pointing to people that aren't us as the origins of everything that's going wrong. Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk about, you know, the kind of lizard people symbolism, obviously the snake at the beginning of Genesis is a lizard, right? The snake doesn't walk on its stomach. The snake actually has feet and hands. So, I mean, it's a lizard. And so the basic idea of, you know, the satanic impulse, the sort of

I ought to be in control. You ought to be in control. Our morality supplants for God. I mean, maybe one way to fight the sort of conspiracism is to say that there is a part of us that is all lizard people, right? I mean, it's not as though there is a genetic cadre of human beings who are more likely to be the lizards. It's not as though there's elites who are gathering together and then they decide, okay, it's time to strip off our skins and

and underneath is the satanic lizard. It's more like that's always been a part of humanity. There's a part of all of us. I mean, it's sort of like the argument that's been made historically with regard to, for example, the death of Jesus, right? The anti-Semites historically have suggested, well, the Jews bear the guilt of the death of Jesus down to today because it was the Jews who killed Jesus, whereas the explanation that I've been given by my Christian friends, at least,

is yes, the Jews were involved of the time in the killing of Jesus, as were the Romans, as were everyone. Meaning that the idea is that everyone was involved in the killing of Jesus, which is why supposedly, you know, according to Christian theology, his blood washes everybody clean. Is that the entire story is one of the guilt of humanity washed away by Christ's death. Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. But it's also good. I mean, it's also, I think you're absolutely right. And this is the thing about corruption is that, you know,

it's like we someone who complains about the evil elites and how in what they're doing and that doesn't pay their taxes right or cheats on their taxes or does whatever it's like corruption happens at every single level right and we justify our corruption uh you know people who don't you know you know we have it here like construction worker come to my house he'll always ask me do you want a receipt or don't you want a receipt and it's like corruption is endemic at every level so that's definitely something we have to understand but i think it's also

It's good to recognize, for example, COVID was a good example. We don't have to believe in absolute top-down control to notice that evil things are happening. All you need is motivation.

You just need aligned motivation for things to manifest themselves the way they happen in COVID. So it's not like the people at the top are like, we're going to just tell everybody what to do and to close the hospitals and everything. But if you give incentive for people to act, they will act according to, they will act together with that incentive. And so I also don't tend to believe in absolute top-down conspiracies, but I do think that there are people that believe that we should move towards

let's say something like a world government, I don't know exactly how to phrase it, or more internationalist vision. And that even though they didn't plan, I don't think anybody planned COVID, COVID happened or whatever. But then it was an opportunity to put into place a

things that they already wanted to put into place. And so I really do believe that because I've been aware of people developing different types of tracking systems and stuff like that for a very long time, for decades that that's been going on. And so once the COVID happened, the

social credit systems already installed in China. And so let's have a little version of it here and see how, see what happens because, you know, we really need to be controlled by our big state mother and, and maybe even more than our big state mother. So I do think that there is, it's important to kind of see that,

To understand, for example, the idea that it is possible for our elites to not be aligned towards us, but to be aligned towards other purposes. That's what corruption is, by the way, all the time. When someone receives a bribe, that's what's going on. It's a lizard people situation. You receive a bribe, it means that now you're acting towards the person that gave you the bribe, and you're not acting in the position that you were put there to be. That does exist. That type of corruption does exist.

So one of the things that's happened, I think also, is when we talk about symbolism, there has been a purposeful attempt, you mentioned it earlier, to sort of unmoor all the symbolism that is inherently understood by human beings from its traditional rootings and flip it

in reverse. And so this is one of the reasons, it's funny, so half my wife's family is Moroccan. They come from Morocco. In Morocco, big into mysticism in sort of the Jewish sense, big into symbolism and mysticism. And that's one of the things that they really are into. Again, I'm more rationalist in my approach to religion, but there is something to the correlation between the willingness to be into those sorts of things and the willingness to just call and

on dumb stuff. So the rationalists among us, something dumb will be uttered. Some proposition that makes no sense will be uttered. And we'll try to come up with 300 reasons why that's a really, really dumb proposition. And meanwhile, my Moroccan in-laws will just be like, that's stupid. And then they'll laugh at it.

And it turns out that that's a healthier response. And I think that one of the attempts to undermine the symbolism is an attempt to undermine that gut reaction. If you can discombobulate people from the symbolic felt roots of their civilization and make them not even understand what those symbols are about, they can't just take as granted the world around them anymore. If you can reverse the symbolism of male and female, for example, then it becomes a lot easier to get away with propositions like a male can be a female.

No, you're right. And especially that one. I mean, the desire to deconstruct the basic male-female opposite that is set up in the beginning of Genesis is going at the very core of reality. It's like, if we can take that, if we can take that, then we can define everything, that we can decide what everything is. And humanity is indefinitely programmable.

But that's impossible. It's not going to happen. If we go too far into these directions, it'll lead to the kind of madness we saw in the 20th century, where we think we can just make humans into whatever system that we devise. But that's not true. The problem that we have now, and in some ways, how can I say this? The ancients didn't explain symbolism.

2,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, they didn't explain it. They were just living in it. And they would use it in their structures. They would use different analogies. They would use different ways of seeing. And the fact that I have to explain symbolism or that my brother or Jordan Peterson or whoever who tried to explain symbolism is actually a sign of disease. It means that we have been deconstructed so much that...

Things like you said that your in-laws would – just with normal insight would not be able to explain how, why. They just know. OK, that's right. That's wrong. Like that's – this is not a good portrait of the world. But sadly because the education system is so –

has been so deconstructive that now we have to explain it because without it we have... and the thing, like I said, the woke really madness is that they understand symbolism and they give you just enough that's true

that it does create insight in people, right? Like think about the idea of fluidity or the idea of the rainbow and the notion of multiplicity, all that symbolism. There's a reality to that, right? There is a sense, there is an aspect of the world that is fluid. There is an aspect of the world that is not defined, right? That is in the corners of the field again, or that, you know, is the day of non-work. Like we have all this type of symbolism, things that shouldn't be part of the rational work part, right? And so if you can understand that and weaponize it,

we have to have better answers than just, like you said, just giving arguments against it. We have to be able to give a better participative thing. So one of the things I've been doing, for example, is really helping people understand monsters. Like understand why there are gargoyles on the outside of churches. Understand why there are

you know, these characters in the Bible that are these in between characters like Ruth, uh, you know, uh, that, that are kind of like these strangers that are integrated and they're related to the corner of the field. And this idea of leaving a remainder, all of this stuff that's actually in the Bible, that's part of, of scripture and to help people to kind of understand that symbolism, because that's the type of symbolism that is being weaponized, uh,

against civilization. And so how can we understand it properly, integrate it properly, so that we know what a gargoyle is, but we don't put it on the altar, right? We don't put it up into the thing that we worship. We just know that on the edge of things, they are indefinite. There's a fringe that's indefinite on the edge, and that's completely normal, and that's how the world is made.

You know, that insight, which is that there is a center and then there is the edge and both exist, but there has to remain a center, is the central insight that the West has basically thrown in the garbage. You know, you hear the West, people say this all the time. They'll say it's time to it's time to read as Matt Walsh says, decenter your whiteness. Right. And then my race is a decenter your whiteness or decenter.

you know, renormalize the abnormal. Well, I mean, I think that, you know, as a civilization, the minute that you denormalize the normal, there is no normal. And pretending that there won't be a new normal, the new normal will just be chaos. The new normal will be everything that is not normal. And then the norm will become the sort of

planetary bodies that are spiraling around this black hole and merely attempting not to get sucked in. But it's worse than chaos. And that's why it's really scary is that the world has a normal order. It has a natural order. It's the order that God created and it manifests itself naturally. Like it just happens that way, like men, women, and everything. Now, when you try to equalize everything and you try to remove the normal hierarchy of center and periphery and all of that,

The fact that there is a natural order means that not only do you want to just de-center, but you have to overemphasize. And so you actually re-center the abnormal. So it's not just about chaos. It's a satanic thing. It actually creates an upside-down world. It creates an inversion where it's not that there are no centers. It's that the center is the exception. And I'm going to put at the center...

the strangest, most exceptional thing. And it'll be a tyranny. It'll be a tyranny of the exception. It won't be the chaos of just everybody does whatever they want. No, it'll be, I will impose this on you. I will make you change every single rule in your world. Every law, every institution will be transformed in the name of the new center, which is the exception.

And so it's even worse than just chaos. It is an upside down, you know, we say clown world. That's what it is. It's as if the clown was king and is now imposing his clown rule and is making everybody wear big shoes. And he's saying, now everybody has to juggle every day and has to wear big shoes and polka dots. Like that's what we're looking at. I mean, that imposition, I think, is really an important point because, you know, the sort of

soft social imposition of normality, which existed for nearly all of human history, right? The things that we all took for granted in nearly every civilization that existed in the most part without compulsion, right? There wasn't any compulsion to form a family and have kids. That was all, you know, social institutions and you had a family and it's what your friends and family did. And it wasn't like there was a law that said, okay, now it's time for you to get married. Now it's time for you to have kids and you must have

3.2 kids. But you do need real cultural enforcement mechanisms to enforce the opposite because nature rebels against it. Nature, I mean, and you're seeing this in the in the spiraling birth rates of the West. That's nature saying you guys are doing this wrong because it turns out that a civilization that can't procreate is a civilization that definitionally is dying.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's exactly right. And you can see it, like you said, in the 60s or in the 50s, you know, we could have argued that maybe this is going to be greater, that this is going to create more joy and more prosperity and everything. But now we have the results, like we have them. We know what it looks like. It looks like lack of children, you know, decreasing, decreasing birth rate. It looks like depression. It looks like people having less sex.

than they've ever had in the known history. It's like, how could emphasizing all your pleasures and hedonism and everything lead to people having less sex? Well, that's how it is. That's the ultimate satanic move is that, you know, the devil wants, promises you he's going to give you some pleasure. And then the perversion of that is that not only...

Not only do you not get the pleasure, you get less in the end, right? It's like you become an alcoholic. You thought you liked alcohol. And by the time you're done, you need it to survive and you hate it, but you still have to take it. And there's no pleasure left, right? And that's what you're seeing in the kind of pornification of the world is that ultimately it's destroying itself through a kind of new, weird thing.

tyranny. Like imagine, like you can see it. I mean, obviously, I know my kids sadly had to go to public school at some point because of things in our life, and I could just see it. Like it wasn't just that it was like be whatever you want. It's first week of school, trans kids, first week. And you know, if you're suffering, if you have some problem, if you don't know who you are, you maybe should ask yourself the question.

Right away. It's like the first solution to an adolescent's problems. Yeah, I come back to the word sterility because it really is incredibly sterile. I mean, the kind of promise that the taboo would become normalized, that means that it is no longer a taboo. And the human mind searches for the taboo. Well, when you blow up every taboo, there are no more taboos. And so once that happens, then what exactly is going to be transgressive? And the answer is normality is now transgressive.

Yeah, that's how it flips back. And that's when the reality just reaffirms itself is that it becomes a paradox, right? So you move into a world of chaos and a paradox and things that don't make sense. And then finally, the paradox that will end up

reverting back to normal is the kind of double, the double flip like this. My brother talks about this. He talks about this double inversion, which is the things turned upside down. And then they, by a new inversion, they turn right side up. And that's what we've seen with the whole funny idea of the conservative punk, right? The idea that if you're going to be rebel today, then you should get married, have kids, have a purpose, you know, have a career. And that's the way that you're the most punk rock is to do that. Well,

Well, Jonathan, you know, everybody should check out your work. Obviously, you are also part of our Foundations of the West series over at Daily Wire+. Why don't you give us a couple minutes here on what you did with Jordan during the Foundations of the West series for those who haven't seen it? Yeah, so what we did during that series, we really tried to see what it is, like,

what are the foundations of the West? Like in terms of story, in terms of participation. And my part was to look at the Christian Jerusalem and to talk about how the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem. And in one of the biggest and most, and the craziest surprises in history, which is that the people that destroyed Jerusalem are the ones that refounded it as Jerusalem, you know, in the vision of adopting Jerusalem,

you know, a continuation of the faith of the people that they had themselves destroyed. And so it creates this weird moment where you have this city that's both Roman and both, uh,

both religious and Christian, and it becomes the foundation actually for churches all over the world. The Holy Sepulchre became the model for churches all over Europe. And so that's what we talk about and how that leads into Bishop Barron's episode, which is to talk about Rome as the notion of civilization and Western civilization itself. - Well, Jonathan, it's always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for taking the time. And again, folks, go check out Jonathan's work. - Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

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