Jordan Peterson Part 1 - “We’re Heading Towards Dystopia, THIS Is What We Must Do Now” SF475
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Hello there, you awakening wonders. Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand. It's a brilliant and special edition where I talk to Jordan Peterson at depth about the impact of Christianity on politics. Everyone's talking about that now. Kamala Harris is making weird gaffes at some of her rallies. Donald Trump is praying. Christianity is, I suppose,

back to the forefront of people's minds, even when it comes to political issues. This could be an epochal moment. Let me know in the comments and chat if you agree with that. For the first 15 minutes, we will be streaming on YouTube, Rumble and Locals. But after that, we'll just be on Rumble and Locals.

Our show with Reslan or whoever we have as our first break bread guest is going to be deferred to the time displayed below in the lower third now because we're still trying to confirm it. I'll let you know we've had some challenges technically because I'm moving around the world and I'm doing the show using different tech and stuff like that. Things that frankly I

aren't your problem, but we will have solved them by the time you're watching this. And there'll be an episode of Break Bread coming soon. And we'll be streaming tomorrow at the usual time, live, tackling the subjects that matter to you. So for now, we're going to go over to the conversation between me and Jordan Peterson. Let me know what you think. It'll be available on YouTube just for the first few minutes. Then you're going to have to click the link in the description and join us on Rumble. Enjoy it now.

So what's our goal in this conversation? Our goal in this conversation, Jordan, is to recognize these contradictions.

you know, I actually love you. And like when we do stuff together, I feel like, oh, this is the plane of reality, intellectual and spiritual reality that I need to live on. In fact, while you were talking out there, I thought, I wonder what would happen if we had to spend 24 hours together. I think it would be very difficult. Blood and feathers everywhere. And then like, you know, I see stuff like online and why should we care? Why should we care about that culture with the way it treats us and with its obvious malevolent intentions and

Yet, I want them to know that we are good. I want them to know that we are good. Here are the areas where they will attack us. Stance on war. Any sense of hypocrisy. We've both been publicly attacked. We've both been subject to, I would say, when we first communicated, it was all around ideas around gender. You were kind of ahead of the curve of what would happen, I suppose, with enforced speech and what was coming out of academia and how it would map out

onto the culture. I wonder how that relates to my own journey, moving from sort of like an institution like Hollywood, having had allegations made against me. Even now, when you see the Epstein and Diddy stuff, that's clearly not an amplification of individual transparent promiscuity metastasized by allegation and media malign intent. That looks like actually, because, you know, in the case of Diddy, which

these are allegations and nothing's been proven. I suppose it's a principle I would like apply to anything said about me. But what one starts to get the sense of through, say, let's say through Epstein, then it's easier with Epstein, is that there is something dark going on in the culture that's difficult. And this perhaps is a nice thing for us to achieve from the conversation, Jordan.

It's increasingly difficult to imagine that the conversation that's defining the run up to the election, a conversation that appears to be, broadly speaking, globalism versus nationalism. You could make that claim.

that it can't just be about matters of dominion. They must be about matters of spirit on some level. Now, prior to us talking, you may have seen the video, perhaps we'll have posted some of it on social media by now, where Jordan and I were discussing that on some level, everything is symbolic. And, Doctor, you gave examples from your clinical career of how an elevator could become a sepulcher, that a generalized bravery might be derived from confronting a personal demon. Therefore,

Archetypally, I ask, what is playing out in this clash of collisions where there is a total bifurcation of narratives, both sides making extraordinary claims about the other, Trump's detractors claiming him demonic, tyrannical, despotic, the detractors of globalism and those kind of bureaucracies, I suppose that would include both of us, saying that this could be an inflection point where free speech,

perpetual war and citizen management accelerate into an unprecedented terrain if the Democrats are successful in this election. So with those two polls, what do you think is ulteriorly playing out? How can we apply the Jordan Peterson of archetypal analysis to this particular clash?

Well, I think probably the simplest way to understand this at the moment is that the fact of universal connectivity and the fact of rate of technological change and information interchange has made the underlying contours of social networks

interaction more starkly clear. So I would say the same thing is happening that's always happened, but way faster, way faster. And so in a way it's clearer, you know, because when something is moving very slow, it might be hard to see that it's moving at all, but things are moving very fast now. And so I think what that means is that we can see things

That we couldn't see before or we can see them more clearly when we kind of had to darkly intuit them before now There's always been an idea that behind the facade. There's an eternal spiritual battle that's an ancient idea and

It's an idea that's easily deride, deridable and has been, I suppose, since the dawn of the enlightenment as a, as a superstitious conception of, of, of the world. But it doesn't appear to me that it is a superstitious concept at all. It's, it's a reflect, it's an indication of the fact that things have a pattern and, and,

There are patterns that are eternal and eternal patterns play themselves out in the proximal at every moment, even invisibly. Well, it's not so invisible at the moment. And I think this is right. I think it's true. And also, all that is gross must have had a subtler precedent that all gross matter must have been preceded by some nascent form of itself, a kind of fractalism.

outpouring, realities aren't just going to sort of blob into reality complete. So the idea that prior to the observable and the discernible, which by definition are that which can be detected sensorially, that there was an existence approximately

or at least before it became observable, is not a ridiculous claim at all. All we're doing is quarreling about the semantics. Was there a creator? Was there a preform? Was there an unmanifest? I reckon we could jump between a few disciplines, physics, quantum physics, theology,

and find that paradigm somewhat consistent the alternative would be ridiculous it's only when we like what I've started to observe myself and it's really helped me reading a Christian apologist whose name is Joseph Boot he

He used a brilliant, gosh there's a lot of Jungian reiteration rhymes and alliterations in this bit and even the repetition of an image. He used the famous paragraph, in fact page, that precedes Orwell's much repeated, if you want to envisage the future of humanity, see a boot stamping on the human face forever.

The passage before that, the whole page before that, Jordan, is incredible. Man and woman will be separated from one another. Families will be separated. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. Now, I discussed this recently with...

Tucker Carlson. And he deduced that Orwell, as an Englishman, he believes, was not proselytizing about or projecting a dystopian or a further dystopian incarnation of Soviet communism. But he was, in fact, pondering, projecting, reflecting, imagining what social democracies such as the one he lived in, obviously Britain, might become in time.

And I've read some analysis lately that sort of offers us that social democracies will always become tyrannical. And indeed, that does seem to be the trajectory. We're not looking, in fact, at 20th century forms of despotism like communism and fascism. What we're seeing is sort of liberalism oddly morphing into tyranny. And we're at the point where all of these bloc,

bizarre and ironically Orwellian contradictions, like in terms of the use of language, freedom is captivity and all of that. We're watching it happen in actual real time. And just before I conclude, that what I enjoyed when reading the analysis, or at least just the citing of that Orwell passage in Joseph's book, I think it's called Mission of God, was that when you stamp on a human face forever,

it's not just the desecration of something beautiful. Whose likeness are we made in? What is it you are destroying when you stamp on the face? And what is the function of totalitarianism? And what is a prerequisite of true totalitarianism? The annihilation of removal of God, because you cannot have true annihilation if the divine principle remains. It's only when you annihilate

absolutely secularize, materialize, rationalize that human power can, if it indeed is, because remember I'm asking you if you think there's an occultist undergirding, can fully, because it might be human, we might sort of rational, might become evil at some point in this conversation. They might become synonyms, I wonder, particularly if we have fallen, where did we fall to? So what I understood from that, what was explained to me, was that

These totalitarian globalist ideas have as a prerequisite the annihilation of God so that God's power, God's principles, the unity that is implicit in any sacrament is annihilated.

And can therefore be replaced by human power. And now they lay claim to the powers of the God that they have destroyed. Okay, okay. So let me take that apart. So the first thing I would say is the reason that Cain kills Abel is to attain revenge on God.

Because Abel is God's favorite. So the proximal target is Cain, but the distal target is definitely God. Okay, so, right, I'll show you. That's the motivation of Cain. Cain is rejected by God because his sacrifices are insufficient. We're not exactly sure why. It's not specified in the story. It's intimated that Cain could do better if he chose to, but he decided not to, and he knew it, and he knew what that would mean.

result in, and he invited in the temptation to become bitter about it instead of changing in the face of his failure. And he knows that, and he knows that that's why he's suffering. And God tells him that, and instead of changing and repenting, even though he's being informed by the divine itself, even though he knows that, he kills Cain. And he does that to spite God. And he triggers off a chain that starts with murder and ends with genocide and the flood.

Right. Brutal. Okay, so that's one answer to the propositions you put forward. Another is the story of the Tower of Babel, which is what happens right after the flood. You might say that the world deteriorates in two ways when the divine is offended. And one is chaos floods back. That's the flood. And the other is that alternative conceptions of power emerge. That's the Tower of Babel. So it's the engineers...

who build the Tower of Babel. It's the descendants of Cain who build the Tower of Babel, fundamentally. The people who are off the divine path, and they build alternative conceptualizations of the divine that are secularized. These Tower of Babel constructions, the ziggurats that are referred to in the text, were towers that were built for the self-aggrandization of secular leaders.

So they were testaments to their own deification. Right. And the consequence of that, according to the text, is that if you build a false tower skyward,

You will confuse yourself so badly that words themselves will lose all their reference. Right. People will be unable to agree on what constitutes a man and what constitutes a woman. And that is a fundamental disruption because I believe as a psychologist that there is no more fundamental perceptual category, not just conceptual. There's no more fundamental perceptual category than man and woman. It's

Sex is 650 million years old. It's older than trees. The distinction between male and female is more fundamental than the distinction between up and down or black and white or dark and light. And so... Okay, that's all we can show you on YouTube. You're going to have to click the link now if you want to see the rest of this conversation. And it's worth it because, in a sense...

In this conversation, I actually learn things about my own understanding of faith and power. And I think when you're watching content like this, what you want is authenticity and integrity, and it's available to you in this conversation, because I'm genuinely learning and being surprised by what's happening. So click the link in the description. We're going to be on Rumble right now. If you can confuse people so badly that they don't know the difference between a man and a woman...

The Tower of Babel has stretched to the sky and people are unable to understand one another and that's what happens in the story of the Tower of Babel. It's traditionally often interpreted as a, what would you say, a just-so story about the origin of multiple languages. So I don't think that's what it means at all. It means that if you disturb the underlying metaphysics sufficiently, if you build your temples to the wrong gods,

you will confuse people in precise proportion to the misalignment of your aim. And if you do that with the ultimate in presumption, you'll confuse people so bad that their words will no longer have meaning, no longer have shared meaning. And it seems to me that that's an archetypal pattern, is there's two ways a state can degenerate, let's say. Floodway, which is everything's wiped out in an orgy of chaos, right?

And the totalitarian way, which is that we build these false monuments, we build these presumptuous monuments to false gods and degenerate into a totalitarian stagnation. And of course, that eventually falls as well. But those are the patterns. Too much order.

That's the Tower of Babel pattern. Too much chaos. That's the flood pattern. It's like, yeah, of course. Of course that's what's going to happen when you misalign and you're not balancing those two forces, obviously. And it's a consequence of pride in the Tower of Babel situation. That's Lucifer again. It's the same Lucifer, symbolically speaking, who's behind the sin of Eve and the sin of Adam and the presumption of Cain, for that matter.

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and the femininity of the flow of deluge as a representation of the... Yeah, well, that's chaos. That's exactly it. Of the feminine principle. Sure. So, for example, one of the precursors of the flood story is a story from Mesopotamia called the Enuma Elish, which is the oldest written story we have. And the chaos dragon in...

The Mesopotamian story is Tiamat. She's feminine. She's a feminine dragon. Tiamat is the same word as Taom, and Taom is the force that God encounters as the primordial waters when he casts the world into order at the beginning of time in the Genesis account.

Right? So that's that primordial chaos. It's often represented with feminine imagery that is always the target of the patriarchal ordering principle that extracts from that order, from that chaos, the order that's good. Right? And so tiamat, taom, the flood, those are all the same thing. Now, you know, you might say these interpretations are arbitrary too, eh? But here's something very cool. It's very cool. It's remarkable. So,

Since Freud, and there were other thinkers at the same time, people have insisted that symbols are interpretable. And the objection to that is, no, that's just arbitrary meaning-finding.

Well, the existence of these large language models has demolished the argument that it's arbitrary. Because what we've been able to show with the large language models is that you can map the statistical relationship between words and ideas. So the typical large language model has like two trillion mathematical parameters. It's insanely complex.

So, and here's how they work, essentially. So, imagine that within a given, you can tell a word is a word partly because of the statistical relationship between its letters. Z-X-Q-R is not a word. Why? There's no prob, there's zero probability that those four letters will appear in proximity, in that proximity in a word. A word like, uh, dored, D-O-R-D, that's a much more comprehensible non-word. Because it, its pattern is the pattern of words. Consonant,

Consonant vowel, consonant, consonant. Okay, so it's a plausible non-word. Why plausible? The statistical pattern is right. Okay, letters occur in relationship to one another with statistical regularity if they're actual words. So do concepts. So, for example, the word witch is...

Say, you could calculate with a large language model what subset of words would be necessary to replace the word witch semantically. And you could imagine cauldron, cat, dark, swamp, coven, evil, spell, potion, right? You know those are all

part of which they're part of what comes to mind when the idea of which emerges. Well, you have a word. There's a bunch of words in proximity to that word statistically in the corpus of language. That's the collective unconscious in many ways. The corpus of linguistic relationships is the collective unconscious. There's proximal words.

There's slightly more distal words, there's remarkably distal words, and then there's words that bear virtually no statistical relationship to the concept. That's a concept. We can map that now. That's a symbol. That's a symbol.

We can map that. And so the notion that there is what there are archetypal and symbolic patterns in the corpus of language, that's not demonstrably true. We have an existence proof for that. And I built a large language model with one of my colleagues using my books, right? And it's a bit broader than that, but the first corpus of information that it refers to when you use it

is derived from my books. And I used it to write some of the new book that I'm publishing in November. And I used it when I ran across biblical passages that I couldn't understand, and I'd ask it what they meant, and it could do a first, good first pass approximation. And I think we'll get to the point quite rapidly now where we'll be able to build large language models that can do accurate dream interpretation.

Because dream interpretation, I think we're going to be able to turn dream interpretation into a science because we're able to take an image and it's kind of what the psychoanalysts did. So if I was interpreting a dream you had,

Because I know how to do this from studying psychoanalytic theory and all the symbolic material that I've studied. The first thing I do is get you to tell me the dream. Okay, so then I'd have it in my imagination. And I would watch to see what images and ideas your dream brings to mind in me. So now I kind of have those at hand, right? Assuming that...

whatever images came to your mind have some similarity in meaning to me, right? Which basically assumes that there's something similar about us, right? That we can communicate. Then I'd ask you to go through the dream step by step and to tell me what images and ideas come to mind while you walk through the dream. And then I'd look for patterns that were in that dream that were reminiscent of the broader narratives and the myths that I know. And we'd collaborate in

what we're essentially doing is exploring the realm of symbolic associations around the core of the dream. Now, what the dream is trying to do, this is Jungian theory, imagine there's something you don't know, okay, and your dream is compensatory. Your brain uses your imagination to fill the gaps in your explicit knowledge. You don't know something. You imagine something that...

fills that gap, right? And that imagination is trying to express itself in a way that will expand your semantic representations. The dream interpretation furthers that process by saying, okay, well, here's the cloud of images. Here's the associated ideas that seems to be surrounding a center, like which is the center of that cloud of concepts. What's the center here? What does that point to? That's the revelation of the new idea that emerges in fantasy.

in compensatory fantasy. And all fiction tends towards that. Like the Avengers series, let's say. The Avengers series has a point. It circulates around the center. If it didn't, it wouldn't have any coherence, wouldn't have any narrative coherence. It's making a point. The Harry Potter series makes a point insofar as it's coherent. In Harry Potter, you can see the mythological landscape very, very clearly. And you can in the Avengers too. I mean, it's

The Chitauri are demonic and satanic figures, obviously. They come from another dimension. I mean, it's the invasion of the earthly realm by the satanic, clearly. I mean, obviously, and that's a standard archetypal trope.

And so you see the same thing in the Harry Potter series, right? And it's not by fluke that these series, Harry Potter and the Avengers, let's say, the X-Men as well, have been so fantastically popular and that we've devoted as well so much computational energy. And I mean this literally, you know, that...

Demand for high-order computational products, the more and more sophisticated chips, is driven by the necessity of representing fictional landscapes more and more accurately. That's actually on the demand side. How powerful a bloody processor do you need in your laptop to run a spreadsheet? Not very powerful.

And so we're putting literally billions of dollars, billions or tens of billions of dollars into constructing these fictional landscapes that actually do inform us about what's going on. It's part of the manner in which the whole culture is exploring the transforming horizon of the future. It's not fluke. None of that's fluke. Now, those are hard patterns to detect because they're

They lurk behind the scenes. That's why. That's the best way of thinking about it. They're, they're, what would you say? How do you describe it even?

They're the place, a fictional account like that, like the Harry Potter series, let's say, that's where the proximal, it's the attention of the culture, meets the eternal. That's where the proximal meets the archetypal, right? And a great story always does that. It brings the archetypal back into the proximal. And that's what gives it its massive commercial impulse and

It's what attracts everyone's interest. People are interested in those stories for a reason. There's a reason, right? Do people know what the reason is? They say, well, I really enjoyed that. Well, you know, that's not next, but why did you enjoy it? You know, why are you interested in the adventures of some orphan kid who lives under a cupboard and has magical relatives? Right?

Like, what the hell's going on? Oh, well, I just enjoy it. It's like that. Sorry, that's a rather shallow analysis for how much did J.K. Rowling make? Like, what percentage of Great Britain's GDP did she produce? Like a lot. Well, you can't just you can brush that off if you want, but you're a fool if you do it. You're a fool to do that.

Yes, she tapped a very powerful resource, much that was unmanifest or had previously been manifest in different incarnations. She was able to corral. She's got a deadly accurate mythological imagination. She figured out things in that series that I cannot believe she knew.

Like that image of the snitch, that's such a sophisticated image. The snitch, that ball that the seekers chase, that's literally a representation of the container of the primordial chaos in the alchemical literature.

It's a symbol of the spirit Mercurius, who's a psychopomp of the gods that points to the, what would you say, that is part of the manner in which the underworld makes itself manifest to the human imagination. Okay. How the hell did she know that? Well, I suppose because there's a commonly accessible receptacle that she was granted access to, and in a way it's obvious that language wouldn't work if there were not such an accessible receptacle. And certainly not, not, not.

we wouldn't understand the mystical image reference. I've often wondered whether or not the idea that these signifiers and signs were arbitrary and interchangeable. I speak only one language, but I've sometimes wondered if the ubiquity and success of the English language is in the same manner that J.K. Rowling might have mapped

charted and penetrated an ulterior realm with deeper meaning in her proximal retelling of an archetypal story might be happening in a subtler way along the lines of your description of the clusters of associative associative meaning might occur in language models i.e. which cauldron can it's one woman i should add by the way because someone else is putting it in the comments let me tell you um

as well as there's sort of like an ulterior, an anchor is dropped down into those depths and it receives the charge of an available resource. I've often thought what English must do is it must have some resonance that feels accurate, whether it's through onomatopoeia or rhyme.

resonance, that there is some that achieves musically something beyond what it can achieve just rationally through the maths of linguistics, through the ability to track patterns, breaths and distinct distinctions, label and lingual gymnastics and tricks are somehow consistent.

guided along like the bull that would take you through a sing-along some deeper and more absolute reality there are a few things that i want to pick up from the course of our conversation because remember we were we began with what is actually playing out when we talk about nationalism versus globalism how is globalism so brilliantly able to render nationalism as corrupted and ugly and nefarious likely using tropes like racism or

using the totems of nationalism, the leaders of it, as undertaking personal attacks against them that sometimes expose inconsistency because if you take a figure like Trump, he previously existed in the culture in a different role and didn't suffer the same kind of ignominy or certainly not the same kind of attacks. So

When we talk about it, I loved it, talking about the two image systems of the sort of the priapic polarity of Babel. I wonder what you think about how the golden calf fits into that and the feminine chaos of the deluge, that these are the two principles that somehow have to align. And in that polarity... The golden calf is materialistic hedonism.

And it's populism. That's a good way of thinking about it. It's the worst element of populism. Here's why. Well, so, the golden calf worship emerges among the Israelites when they're lost in the desert. So they've escaped from tyranny, right? So they're not in the Tower of Babel anymore. They're in the desert, in the desert wilderness, right? So they're in this space between places. They're on the way to the Promised Land. They're nowhere, and they're lost. They're nowhere, and they're lost.

Right, and the text insists on this because it's not very far from Egypt to Canaan. - Yeah. - Right, so you might say, what the hell are they doing? And the answer is it takes lost people forever to find their way because they have no direction. So you can get nowhere, you can take a long time to get nowhere if you're sufficiently lost.

And it takes the Israelites three generations to recover, to start to recover from being slaves. Okay, so they're completely lost. Now, Moses is leading them across the desert. And Moses is guided, and the Israelites, by the pillar of light in the darkness and the pillar of darkness at night. Right? And so that's the light that shines in the darkness that guides you forward, that calls you, and that's the warning of darkness even in the light that is conscience. Right?

Right, so that's the divine marker that leads you across the barren landscape. Okay, and Moses is the reason, the proximal reason for that manifestation of God.

So the Israelites are progressing properly towards the promised land as long as they pay attention to the prophetic voice of Moses and that Moses himself attends to the dynamic between the two pillars. Fine. So that's what guides you when you're lost. Calling conscience. That's a good thing to know. Okay, so now Moses disappears for a while. He's the prophet. Now, the prophet is allied with the political. That's Aaron.

So Aaron is the political voice. Now the prophet disappears, so now there's no connection between the political and the divine. And so what happens is that Aaron starts to do exactly what the people want, but not exactly. He starts to do exactly what their least admirable motives demands. And so what happens to them...

Literally what happens to them when they start to worship the golden calf is, well, it's a carcass, that's a calf, it's gold and it's material. So they're worshiping the material, but it's a drunken, orgiastic, hedonistic celebration that makes them the laughingstock of their enemies. That's what they devolve into, right? And that is a precursor to chaos.

But it's very specific in the Old Testament account. It's orgiastic hedonism that's allied with the populism that necessarily emerges on the populist side if the connection between the political and divine is severed. Right, right, right. So what's the golden cough now?

Well, I would say, let's see, where do you see it? I certainly think that the pride festivals have devolved into the golden calf worship because they put sexuality at the forefront. Sexuality and pride. Not helpful. Not helpful. You don't stake your identity on your sexual desire. Why? Well, because it's not just like you can't stake your identity on compassion.

which is like the female sin, essentially. Compassion is all that's good. It's like, no, sorry, it's a lot harder than that. And sexual identity is insufficient. It's not a good orienting principle. I don't think God's powerful enough of an avatar. I think, like, as an individual, I staked my identity on sexual desire for 10 years as a promiscuous hedonist, and I had the same impulse. I was looking for God. There's something about the sort of...

I recognise your point with the don't bring your sexual identity to the forefront of your identity and culture. I can see why there would be a sort of an ontological value in that principle. But I feel like it's not... I don't think that the whole culture is being guided by that principle. I think that's an ancillary expression of the problem. And I think it's more likely to be found in commodity. And to your earlier point... What do you mean by commodity? I think it's more likely to be found somewhere within...

materialism, commercialism, and the worship of commodity. I like that orgiastic component. I understand the importance of that. But the orgy... Well, there is a materialism in the golden calf story, right? Because it's not just drunken, orgiastic nudity and the celebration of the pleasures of the moment. It's also the worship of the golden calf, which is a kind of fundamental materialism. And so, now, the...

One of the ways of understanding that, I think, let's see, the best way to approach that, because you said that's not comprehensive enough. It's not. Let me make reference. It's not central enough. It's not centrifugal. It's ancillary. It's part of something that's a more complex dynamic dance. And so one of the things you see, I wrote an article about this with Jonathan Paggio on imagery from Revelation that describes the end of the world.

And so you can think a part of what the book of Revelation is, is a description of the eternal nature of the end of time. And so it's something like, well, what's the pattern of things degenerating? And so one part of that pattern is exemplified by, there's a series of images. So it's a scarlet beast,

with multiple heads on which a very attractive prostitute sits, who's the mother of all whores. And she's arrayed in gold and very attractive. And so it's this scarlet beast, that's the color of blood, is the degenerate patriarchy. That's a good way of thinking about it. It's got multiple heads. So what's the degenerate patriarchy? The degenerate state is

emerges when the unifying principle disappears. So that's in the aftermath of the death of God. Multiple principles emerge, right? And that's the headed hydra. And it's a disorganized soul. It's the degeneration of the patriarchy into a multiple headed beast. Okay. If the patriarchy deteriorates, that's masculinity. What happens to femininity? Well, it deteriorates too. It commoditizes.

And so at the end of time, the patriarchy fragments and its heads fight with one another and female sexuality commoditizes. And obviously, when the masculine deteriorates, the feminine is going to deteriorate with it. And that is happening at an insane rate in our culture. You know that, what is it? At least 25% of the traffic on the net is pornographic. Right. So in fact, you could even argue, and I really think you can make this case, that

It was the commoditization of female sexuality by unsuccessful men that drove the development of the World Wide Web, the sharing of pornographic images. Now, it wasn't the only thing, but, you know, you don't want to underestimate the sexual as a powerful motivating force. Well, no, given that that's how we're all here.

Right, right.

of power. But what you're talking about in the beast image is the hydra, which is to some degree the dissolution of power as a result, as you said, Jordan, as the loss of the unifying principle. I should have added something to that. Well, I should think so. Well, that story has an end. So the...

The golden whore is what the degenerate state offers to people. It's endless hedonic delight. Okay, at the end of the passage, the scarlet beast kills the prostitute. Right, so what does that mean? It means the degenerate state entices you with hedonic pleasure and then destroys even sexuality itself. And that's happening already because one of the things that we're seeing,

in the aftermath of the so-called sexual revolution is that, what is it, in Japan, 30% of Japanese young people under the age of 30 are virgins. The same thing's true in South Korea. It's increasingly true in the Western world. And the probability that young men and young women will engage in any relationship, let alone stable long-term relationships, is declining dramatically. Right, and so this story is something like

Sexuality itself, it's so perverse. No one would have ever guessed this. If you take all the strictures of sexual conduct, sex itself disappears. And you think, well, no way. It's such a powerful motivational force. It's like, okay, well, have it your way.

What are you doing with the fact that 30% of Japanese people under 30 are virgins? Like, what are you going to make of that? Along with a birth rate that's so below replacement that Japan won't even exist in 100 years. This is not trivial. And so that image in Revelation is something like how hedonism... Hedonism is bad, not least because it devours itself.

Right? Something is bad if it can't maintain itself when it dominates. That's, you know, that's kind of a technical description of what might constitute bad. It's a game that degenerates when you play it. And we don't really know what circumstances are under which even sexuality maintains its vitality.

Yes, that's very interesting because I suppose you might argue from the perspective of mould. Mould is a good thing or deterioration and decline and the spread of bacteria or a virus. From its perspective, its malignance is subjective. The decay and deterioration aren't bad if

that decay and deterioration is all-encompassing and ultimately successful by what measure is a bad apple a bad apple only that you can't eat it as an apple anymore and if you are the apple itself or something that doesn't want to eat an apple you can't really make the same claim about its badness.

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Now, what I'm trying to understand when it comes to, I guess, the point that we are talking around trying to sort of create for ourselves a sort of a pole and a network of associated meanings like we would in your dream analysis example, like we would with these kind of let's call them sort of word transactions.

trees acknowledging continually that this sort of polar force of sex which usually seems to me that you're saying is these sort of the the male and feminine principles you said earlier are the instantiation of something even deeper than that so deep in fact as to be absolute ultimately absolute expressions you said more than up and down more than day and night more than other systems of uh pairs or or other demonstrations of duality and the polarity required to uh create energy uh

I'm, of course, going to run with that idea. And what I'm experiencing, and I think the transition that I'm personally experiencing as a person that has come to faith, and I suppose like anyone who comes to faith, is that you have moved to the point where the distinction between myth and absolute truth in this, say, for example, in the figure of and story of Christ, which cannot make rational... I can't make rational...

actual rational sense, I know you can, but I can't make actual rational sense of God came to earth in the figure of a man, died in order that we be freed from sin, redeemed of sin, an absolute sacrifice, nothing else required, and he is born again unto eternal life, that I might enjoy eternal life personally myself. When I pick at that with my analytical and rational mind, I'm just left with threads, Jordan.

But when I yield somehow the faculty of analysis emergent, it almost as if it is the eerie glow of the sort of pillar of light by day is some truth. Some truth is left there. And that truth would be the peace that passeth all understanding or the peace that exists beyond my ability to rationally understand things. Now, an idea I've been kicking around for a while is curious one.

The first time I tried it, it was a pretty superficial endeavour, I'll be honest with you. I tried to look at the work of Shakespeare, not as a literary text, but as a kind of a mystical and mythic text, and along with a collaborator, Ian Rickson, was able to create a show on that basis, using passages and duologues from Shakespeare to create sort of actually a biography. A few Caliban's arguments with Prospero are like my feelings that my stepfather invaded my home. Richard III's

sense of his own ugliness that's my own adolescent despair uh hamlet talking about the sort of the grave digger talking with the grave digger about the jester that reminds me of the occasional brush with a benign father figure in my own life adrift and uh as hamlet was and then so in

I mention this only for this, because it's a sort of a literary text, even though it's almost an incomparably revered literary text, it perhaps doesn't bear the same scrutiny, certainly doesn't have the same sort of duty or function as a theological text. I was thinking that...

But when we look, when we're engaging in discourse about what is this thing, the bureaucratization of our planet, these projects of citizen management, the control of free speech, the amplification of war, the justification of war, the sort of deracinated, untethered,

reasonless pursuit of war that doesn't make sense, like the humanitarian argument doesn't make sense in any context. It can't be humanitarianism. If that principle was applied elsewhere, you wouldn't get the same results. They can't be there just to protect the people of Ukraine, for example, because you would look at other conflicts and see how the same principles and arguments aren't being mapped onto them. So it can't be that principle. And again, this is superficial analysis, but I'd love to hear your response to it. It's when...

When I'm trying to understand the threat that I believe that we face, a threat that you've been describing and pointing towards for almost all of your public life, I see as harbingers and great threats.

harbingers and foreshadowing of these challenges in the first, obviously, in the writing of George Orwell, still obviously, but less so in the writing of Audis Huxley, you know, when we're talking about this sort of golden calf, this sort of hedonism, the soma, the sort of banalisation, the desacralisation, the ease, the beautiful design, the sort of like this sort of like, you know, Steve Jobs, Apple world of sort of banal, anodyne, slick

sanitary imagery. And then adding to that, Kafka. Kafka's sort of bizarre, kind of scratchy, allergic descriptions of bureaucracy that stray into myth and stray into bureaucracies that are not easy to discern. Where has this power come from? What is causing this trial? That's part of the degenerate patriarchal state, right? That

Yeah, even that. That's like the image of a headless giant, even. So, okay, so one of the things... So I just wanted to put you that trident. Huxley, Orwell, Kafka, as a kind of a description of these dystopia stroke utopias. So one of the things that came to mind for me when you ran through those three things, I just re-watched Cabaret.

Twice. Brilliant movie, 1970s. Absolutely brilliant movie. And it hasn't aged a bit. It's unbelievably well edited. Great music. It's really a masterpiece cabaret. And it unites those three themes. So you have this Whore of Babylon figure who is played by Lisa Minnelli. And she's this sort of attractive, but not actually as you get to know her,

young woman who believes that she's freed herself entirely from the grip of the terrible patriarch can pursue her sexual gratification as a autonomous individual no matter what and she's Deluded in her narcissistic way into thinking that she's a major talent and she plays a minor role as an entertainer in a cabaret a gender-bending cabaret it's very interesting the cabaret because many of the figures including the band are women and their

seriously devoid of all sexual attraction. Like, they're dressed very provocatively, but they're presented on screen in a manner that's like animated corpses. It's really quite brutal. And the cabaret is gender-bending and gender-twisting, and it's...

what reminiscent of the of the Weimar degenerate Weimar Republic and everything's okay and everything's hedonistic and this terrible catastrophe is playing out in the life of this woman well these celebration of hedonism has taken on place so that's the on on stage so that's the hedonistic element everything goes everything's up in the air for sophisticated people to pursue their pleasure

Okay, the cabaret is run by this guy who's played by Joel Gray, who's the evil... He's the evil master of affairs, right? He's the intermediary between scenes. He's the psychopomp, and he's an evil clown. He's got that Catholic-esque element to him. He's the thing that's operating behind the scenes to shift us from place to place. And...

At the same time, all this hedonistic catastrophe is taking place in the Weimar Republic with all this gender bending and all this free sex. The Nazis are multiplying in the audience. And this Joel Grave figure, he's played so brilliantly. I think he won an Academy Award for it. It's really something. He's celebrating the hedonism and the...

expression of freedom and creative expression that goes along with it that's, you know, seduced this dim-witted, personality-disordered young woman, and at the same time he's thrilled right to his bloody core that the Nazis are in the audience. So you get this weird dance between this structureless hedonism and the calling out from the depths of the despair that's in that hedonism for the most brutal possible of patriarchal forces. And then

There's something even worse that's lurking underneath all that, which is positive delight in the spectacle that's taking place as sexuality...

deteriorates and pathologizes and as the heavy hand of the state arises because it's what is it it's a parody of hedonism it's a parody of masculine power and it's something that's devoted to inviting in exactly what the bloody nazis produced it's brilliant and it's it's so relevant to what's happening in our society now because you see this

kind of hedonistic golden calf worship that we already walked through. And you said that was lacking something. Well, it's certainly lacking the heavy-handed insistence that some globalizing, centralizing force is necessary to bring order to an increasingly disordered state.

I think that you can only bring those about with successive, percussive, incessant crises. I think you can only legitimize this centralizing authoritarianism that's likely what's being teed up by the hedonism if you continually induce crises. And we've lived in... Tyrants rule using force and fear. That's how you can tell they're tyrants. It's like, do this or else. Totally.

Do this or something terrible will happen. It's like, well, tyrant. It's bizarre to see the tyrant emerge cloaked in language and even the apparel and pertinences of the bureaucrat in my country, Keir Starmer, would struggle to be a more tedious and managerial individual, and yet he's

rhetoric post the riots in my country was that of the tyrant. There will be serious consequences. Mark my words, we will find them. Now, of course, superficially, he's talking about perpetrators of the most awful disruption and arson and people that put lives at risk. But

but actually some of the arrests that are taking place are people that sort of said stuff on Facebook. Now, to your point about the sort of cabaret, I think the sort of the more commonly accepted analysis of that film is that it was almost a haven of like hedonism and celebration, a kind of life and play amidst the authoritarianism of the Nazis. The only person who accepts that analysis fundamentally in the film is Hedon.

is the Lisa Manali character. And her life is demolished by her participation. In fact, she sacrifices her future. She ends up, she falls in love with a young man who's also perverted by the Weimar Republic. And she ends up pregnant. And she could escape from what she knows to be her certain dismal death. She sings a song at the end.

Basically stating to the audience, extremely powerful performance. It's really quite remarkable about how she's going to certainly die the death of a drug addicted prostitute and that she's chosen that voluntarily as an alternative to falling in love with this young man who was a good young man and having the child that she aborted as a

A consequence of her hedonism. She's their golden rudal. Top of the beast. Definitely. Definitely. But where we are now, say, I'm wondering if we're sort of part of the global cabaret. I was struck by, as obviously everybody was, the sort of Olympic opening ceremony, because I struggled to think of an event that...

was the expression of a power that was untethered from a national ideology. When we've seen, you know, the Soviet Union aren't participating because of the Cold War, or when we've seen sort of the rather noble Black Panther power salutes at the Olympics, this sort of massive

ostensibly secular event the Olympics is peculiarly captured by a nihilistic festival now sometimes I wonder this Jordan whether or not the people that are putting on the ceremony are deliberately sort of gleefully rubbing their hands and saying we'll show those Christians or not it's actually secondary because in the sense it's like the instantiation or and expression of a will that

that's being an ulterior will that's winding its way through the annals of various individuals into the eventual ceremony that it becomes. And what is the point of that ceremony? What does it achieve? And what does it tell us? Okay, so you have these systems of ideas that we described that are associated symbolically, right? By statistical regularity, let's say. And you can think of those as systems of things, right? Or systems of objects or systems of things

of material, but they're not. They're systems of ideas. Yes, yes. Ideas are alive. Ideas are alive. Yes. Every idea has its aim. Every idea has its perception. Every idea has its motivations. Every idea is a personality. Every system of ideas is a personality. If you take... Okay, so now imagine this. So imagine that you take...

100 young women possessed by the woke ideology. Okay? Now imagine they're all from middle class families. Now you take one of those young women and you put her in a dinner party and you're talking to her and you find she's 90% decent young woman and 10% possessed by the woke ideology. And so as long as she's at the dinner, no problem. You put her together with 100 people like that, the whole goddamn devil's in the room.

The whole thing is there. And that system of ideas, it has a will, it has a perception. You could say in some sense it has a mind of its own, even though it doesn't have a soul. And it's going to operate in the conspiratorial manner that constitutes the aim of that system of ideas. And it's going to use the individual actors who are its partial containers as its mechanism. This is why in Shakespeare, what is, I can't remember the line, the gods are

It's the line about the gods treating us for their sport, you know, that we're pawns of the gods that are sacrificed to their pleasure. That's a good way of thinking about it. And the gods are these, in that sense, the gods that are being referred to are these systems of ideas that operate under the facade of things that use individuals as their pawn. You see these things manifest themselves in very weird ways. So here's an example, two examples.

there's a scene in the Joker, the first Joker with Heath Ledger, because the Joker is the evil clown like Jewel Grey. Very, very interesting figure. Now you remember that

The Joker is the figure that can terrify the mafioso, right? So that's very interesting, but the mafioso are organized criminals. They're not heretics. And so you can understand a mafioso. That's partly why they're popular fictional characters. They want what you want. They want your car. You can understand that. They might disagree about who should own it and why, but they want your car. And so really, they're a lot like you. The Joker, he gets half the money from his heist.

And he burns it. So whatever the hell the Joker is, that's sufficient to terrify the criminals. Okay, now there's a scene just like that. Remember Pinocchio? Okay, so Pinocchio is brought to the island of the delinquents. That's Pleasure Island, where everyone's turned into a voiceless, braying slave, right? Brilliant. That movie's brilliant in its imagery.

When the coachman who takes Pinocchio to the island, he reveals himself in a pub to the two criminals, the fox and the cat, that are trying to pervert Pinocchio and his path. When the coachman reveals his true identity to the fox and the cat, he turns red in his horn, and the cat jumps into the lap of the fox, and they're both terrified. And it's because...

Even though the criminals don't know it, there's a chaotic force, chaotic malevolent force underlying criminality itself that if you ever saw would terrify you even if your soul was already mostly black.

And that's the Joker figure in the Batman series. And that's that figure of the coachman, even more archetypically portrayed in the Pinocchio and the Pinocchio story. And that's, it's no different than Lucifer. It's no different than Satan. It's no different than Mephistopheles. It's the same. It's no different than Seth in the Egyptian cosmology.

Yes. Right. I like that. And it's alive. I've got it. The thing that I like is the inference that ambiguity might be more terrifying than malign intent. That malign intent operates within a polarity. It operates within a kind of order. It's identifiable. You can negotiate with it. You understand its intention. Yeah, that'd be criminal intent. Yeah.

Well, thanks very much for joining us for today's show. We will be back tomorrow with a live stream show. Remember, if you're not an awakened wonder yet, consider becoming one. You get to join us every week for an episode of Break Bread, where we talk about Christianity and the impact of Christianity on politics. We, I believe, are in a focal moment, not just because there's an election happening in your country right now, but because something's shifting that's difficult to track and is probably connected to stuff that sort of sounds mad to say out loud, actually. Spiritual warfare.

there. Join us as we track that issue through conversations with prominent Christians, private Christians, and people that might not even be Christian. We invite them to break bread and we invite you to join us for that. Have a look at this conversation with Tucker Carlson from episode one, because this is the kind of thing that you can look forward to. The people I listen to are the people who aren't afraid to die because they understand something that most people don't understand. Everyone else is racked with anxiety because they know they're dying and their time is running out.

And they can't deal with it. So they're, you know, making money that they don't need or controlling people as a way to feel powerful or they're, you know, often some weird health regimen as a way to convince himself they're never going to die.

Those people are fools. That's obvious. The only people I really pay attention to are the ones who seem to have peace about the end of their lives. And why? Because that's a kind of wisdom that does surpass understanding. And that's the only kind worth having. And so those are the people I listen to. And that's the marker for me. Like, how anxious are you about your death? Anything that doesn't explain what happens when you die is pointless. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't actually mean anything.

Right? So I just look at things a little bit differently, I think. Right, thanks for joining us. We will be back tomorrow with a live show. See you then, not for more of the same, but for more of the different. Until then, if you can, stay free.