426. Sex, Death, & Storytelling | Andrew Klavan
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Hello, everybody. Today, I talk to Mr. Andrew Klavan, who's a compatriot of mine at The Daily Wire, but also much more than that, an author of some 30 books he started publishing when he was 25. He's a thriller writer, a writer of crime fiction, very much influenced by Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, influenced by Raymond Chandler, who's probably the greatest writer

noir novelist of all time, also the instigator of a number of great movies like "The Big Sleep." We talked a lot about the noir genre and about the motif of the flawed masculine hero, which I suppose is every man that's ever lived, although they vary substantially on the hero front.

and less substantially on the flawed front. Anyways, we had a chance to delve into all of that in some depth, into the reality of murder and mayhem, into the difficult balance between the monstrousness that characters a good man and his necessary guidance by consciousness, by conscience, by the necessity for productivity and generosity.

The complex decision-making that a woman has to undergo to evaluate a man who has to be a monster, let's say, to even be good, but also a tameable monster so that he's not too terrible in his monstrosity. We've talked a fair bit about religious issues delving into Mr. Clavin's

journey to a Christian faith that paralleled his investigation into the literary domain. So all that and more in the upcoming conversation. So, Mr. Claven, thank you very much for agreeing to sit down and talk to me today. This will really be the longest extended period of time, I think, that we've been able to talk to each other directly, eh? Well, you've come on my show a couple of times and we've discussed things, but usually it's pretty brief.

Yeah, yeah, well, good. This will give us a chance to get into things more deeply. I thought we would concentrate primarily, I think today, on writing, although we'll branch out from that wherever we happen to go. So maybe, first of all, tell me, how many books have you written so far? I'm afraid there's over 30 of them. I've been at it a long time. How long have you been at it?

I published my first novel when I think I was about 25, and I'm now like 110, so it's been a long, long haul. So the first one when you were 25, and there's been 30. Is that all fiction?

No, I wrote a memoir of my conversion to Christianity called The Great Good Thing. And recently I wrote a book called The Truth and Beauty, which was about the romantic poets. Right, right. And I'm working on one now, actually. Ah, what are you working on now? Now I'm working on a book about why I write about murder and my thoughts about murder and what it means in human society. Oh, yes. Okay.

Murder and Mayhem. Yeah, yeah. Well, I know a couple of thriller murder mystery writers, and I'm a great fan of... Well, I like the genre, actually, especially the noir genre from the 1940s and thereabouts. Raymond Chandler is something else, man. He's the one who made me a mystery writer. He's the guy. Is that right, eh? Oh, yes. What do you like about Chandler? Well, the moment I became a mystery writer was the moment in the big sleep. It's right at the opening when Philip Marlowe walks in,

And he sees a knight in shining armor on a stained glass window trying to rescue a woman who's tied to a tree. And Philip Marlowe says, if I lived here, I'd have to climb up there and help him because he's not making any progress.

And that was the first time I saw a tough guy. I was very enamored with tough guys when I was a teenager. It was the first time I saw a tough guy who had a purpose. He was carrying within him an ideal of chivalry that he wanted to bring into the corrupt world. And that was actually Chandler's idea. And I just thought, that's who I want to be personally, and that's what I want to write about.

Yeah, right. Well, there's a St. George image lurking at the bottom of that. And, you know, that ties in for me. So the Google boys a while back, the engineers, they did an analysis of women's use of pornography, men's too. Well, so males use visual pornography, as everyone and their dog knows. But women prefer literary pornography. And it's very tightly themed, like it's very archetypally themed pornography.

So the typical protagonist is surgeon, werewolf, vampire, pirate, or billionaire, or some interesting combination of all of those attributes. And the standard plot is attractive young woman,

all of whose virtues are not well known. So it's like mousy librarian type, you know, the Hollywood beauty who takes off her glasses and you know exactly that. She attracts the attention of this more predatory male, let's say, or at least a male with the capacity to be predatory.

entices him into a relationship and helps him reveal his commitment and his good side. And it's beauty and the beast fundamentally, which I really think is the fundamental female archetype. Like there's a heroic archetype that goes along with the feminine as well, because women also confront the unknown and all of that. But it is the fundamental, it's certainly the fundamental female sexual archetype. And so what that means, this is perhaps what struck a chord in your soul, is that

You were enamored, you said, of the image of tough guy, right? And so that would be equivalent in some sense to a desire from the Jungian perspective of incorporation of the shadow, right? To make yourself into someone who's capable of being stalwart and tough, a James Bond sort of figure. That's a good example in the modern age. But then you found that that should be allied with a purpose, right? Yes.

And that rescuing of the maiden, you know, that goes two ways. Of course, the maiden gets rescued, but the fact that that dangerous hero rescues the maiden and,

and is therefore attractive to her is also his salvation. Right. And I mean, it is the problem that young men have to solve, right? It's the problem of power. You know, we have strength, we have power, we have a kind of sexual power as well. And you start to think, well, you know, if you don't want to be the bad guy, I mean, at some point, every young man realizes that nasty guys get more sex than

And they realize that people who push women around can be very successful. And you have to say to yourself, well, is that who I want to be? And I very much did not want to be that guy, but I did want to be successful with girls. And I also could perceive just...

in actual fact that the world is a corrupt place and it's power that makes it corrupt. And Raymond Chandler has that famous wonderful line, down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean. And that just rang a bell inside me. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so on that too, so the literature shows, so what the psychopaths and narcissists, the Machiavellians, and even the sadists do, the man...

is that the false confidence of the narcissist is a mimicry of competence. And that can be put on very early. And young women are particularly susceptible to that camouflage. And that partly accounts for the differential success of, you know, bad boys, let's say. Now, it's partly because the women are looking for the beast that can be turned into the ally.

But it's not easy for them to distinguish the beast who is beast right to the bloody core and should be stayed away from in every possible way from the potentially redeemable Philip Marlowe hero. And then there's another complication too, to say something in favor of the more beastly man is that the other thing a woman doesn't want and no men really want to have around either is a man

who's actually weak and unskilled, who pretends to be moral and kind, you know,

not only to cozy up to women, but also to parade his weakness as moral virtue. You know, I'm not the mean guy. I'm not the bad guy. Well, the reason for that is you're too goddamn weak to manage that. And instead of just admitting that forthrightly and doing something about it, you parade it as a moral virtue. You know, and I think that sort of man is actually a lower form of man than the outright bully. And there's some evidence that other people think this too, you know, because the...

The kind of antisocial bully types, especially in elementary school, aren't unpopular. They're ambivalently popular. Now, what happens is that as their life progresses, if they continue with the bullying process,

attitude, let's say, that sort of narcissistic and even callous attitude towards others, it doesn't work well as a long-term strategy. But the bullies are certainly more popular in elementary school, say, and even in junior high, than the bully victims are.

I think it goes beyond that. I mean, I think this is why feminism has blown up in women's faces so much is when you outlaw masculinity, when you call it toxic, when you make people feel bad about their masculinity, only outlaws can be masculine. So if you look at the golden age of television, we just passed through that lasted about 10 years from about 2020 to 2010 or 15.

All of the shows were about bad guys, the Sopranos, the Shield, the Wire. They're all about guys who really cut the edge. This fellow, Andrew Tate, who is a buffoon and a pimp and just a terrible person. For a period, he was immensely popular, especially with teen boys. And he would tell people how to abuse women and how to get them into sex work for your profit. And I would look at that and I would say, the guy's a pimp.

What are you talking about? But they would say, well, you're not hearing him. You're not really understanding him. But I think I was. I think what they had lost was the idea of St. George. They had lost the idea that your power is a path to virtue. It's not an obstacle to virtue if you use it correctly. Yeah, well, you know, and to give the devil his due, I mean, the thing about Tate is he is a complex character because not all of his bravado,

And posturing is false because he is a mixed martial arts fighter. He is a genuinely tough guy. And he is also someone who came up from the street. You know, and so you can imagine that within his soul, all sorts of different forces contend and just...

And I am not making excuses for him because I think the electronic pimping aspect in particular is, like, I think that's unforgivable. It's absolutely 100% unforgivable. There's no excuse for ever having done that in your life, not even once. And it's not even necessarily the kind of sin that you can recover from, not without like 20 years in serious hang-your-head repentance. But he is a complex figure because he's

allied with his bravado is a genuine physical toughness. And it is definitely the case that as you pointed out, something I warned about years ago is that, you know, if you think that like strong men are dangerous, you wait till you see what weak men are capable of. And if you demonize everything that's positive, everything positive that's associated with masculinity, you do drive it into the unconscious, you drive it underground. And then you do get this weird attraction, you know, like another element of that attraction is

There was a show for a long time about a serial killer who decided to... Oh yeah, Dexter. Dexter, exactly. The same sort of thing, right? And you see the same sort of thing pop up, for example, in Fifty Shades of Grey, which is again an archetypal example of the feminine proclivity for a certain kind of structured pornography.

So, yeah, okay. So when you started writing, it's so interesting that that image, that stained glass image of St. George, right? Because St. George fights the dragon, which is the real evil. He's like Prince Philip in Sleeping Beauty. You remember when the evil queen turns into the dragon? Prince Philip fights off the dragon, which is the unknown itself, and then he's able to free...

Sleeping Beauty. It's exactly a St. George motif. And the same thing happens in the Harry Potter stories, right? Because Harry goes underground to fight off the Dragon of Chaos, and that's the basilisk that turns you to stone, the thing that makes you terrified. And he frees Ginny, his best friend's sister, right? And they kind of have a romantic entanglement. And he does that

with the help of the phoenix in some sense that helps him be reborn. And he's reborn in part a consequence of actually having faced this under structure of chaos, right? And confronted the mean streets and the darkness that's underneath every society. So that called to you from...

From the Philip Marlowe novels, from Chandler's work. Oh, it's the moment. Reading that passage was the moment I thought, this is the kind of writing I want to do. And also, this is the kind of person I want to be. Because one of the things, one of the problems with Chandler

and with mythos is that when it conflicts with reality, you start to have, you start to leave victims behind. And one of the great scenes in the big sleep is when he's playing, the detective is playing a chess game by himself, a solitary chess game. And he turns over the board and says, this is not a game for nights. In other words, this,

mythos that he brought, this ideal that he brought into the world is not fitting with the Los Angeles of the 1950s, which is full of corruption. And the problem for me with, if you watch, for instance, movies that make romantic heroes out of Mafiosi, the Sopranos, I mean, you're talking about the attraction of a guy, Tony Soprano is a very attractive person. The Godfather is a very attractive person. And then you talk to police officers who've actually dealt with those people and

And every single one of them, their faces turn scarlet. I mean, they just spit rage because they've seen them. They've picked up the bodies. They've picked up the people they've killed and exploited. And they'll tell you they're animals. They're not really admirable at all. And so bringing that masculine energy into the world, the very delicate operation and something that you have to remember, you have to remember as you're doing it, that the people you're dealing with

are real and have the same right to life and health and happiness that you have. It's a very complicated enterprise. Right.

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which means he has to be able to reflect that darkness in his own soul and his own actions. But he also has to do that while simultaneously being productive and generous. And so it's an unbelievable tight balance of opposing forces that women are aiming for. It's no wonder they overshoot in either direction, you know.

And it's not surprising at all that they have that proclivity to overshoot towards the more negative end when they're young. And that's well documented in the clinical literature. You mentioned Fifty Shades of Grey. I mean, that's one of the ten best-selling series in all of fiction, which is amazing. Well, it also came up so interesting. It developed its popularity during the Me Too movement. So you saw this height difference.

of attack on toxic masculinity at the same time that in the unconscious, so to speak, there was this burgeoning desire among women who were listening to this discussion regarding toxic masculinity to be, you know, taken by a brute, you know, this, this, this,

This billionaire, you see the same damn thing in Ayn Rand's novels as well, you know, with the interplay between Dagny Taggart, I think it is. Is it Hank Reardon? Is it Hank Reardon? I think so, that she ends up in a kind of semi-rape dalliance with. And so the other thing that's very cool about Chandler, and I'm wondering how this impacted you too, is he's an unbelievably good stylist. Yeah.

Like, and Master of Dialogue, that witty, harsh, film noir dialogue. I mean, I don't think anybody ever topped what Chandler did on the gritty novel front. And The Big Sleep is also a great movie.

It is. I mean, that's a great movie. The Long Goodbye is a great novel. Yeah. And his writing, his writing is unparalleled. I mean, I think that that was one of the key things, of course, like every young man of my time, I was enamored with Hemingway. But when I got to, when I got to Chandler, I found something much more beautiful actually on the page. And there was also something that bothered me about the tough guys. You know, Ernest Hemingway, I think had a very deceptive,

deep transsexual theme running through his stories. And one of his sons became an actual transsexual. And there was always something that bothered me about his view of sexuality. And I was also bothered by the fact that a lot of tough guys become tough by not caring about the things that I cared about.

So for instance, I Castle Blanca may be my favorite movie. I think it's one of the great movies of all time. I just watched that this week, man. Yeah. It's perfect. It's perfect. It's a perfect movie, but there was a point when I started to say to myself, well, you know,

His girl dumped him. And so he's staying out of World War II. It's kind of wimpy. Right, right, right. And he's bitter about it. Yeah, I thought your girl dumps you, you still got to fight World War II, you know? And so what Raymond Chandler captured was the responsibility that this guy had. He was not just a tough guy. They were not just moments when he had to break the law and break people's backs and bones. But there were also these moments when he was trying to preserve something that he knew he had inside himself. And that was just really important to me as a kid.

Right. You see that in the Maltese Falcon too, by the way, which we also just watched. Same sort of thing. This underlying moral commitment of the flawed tough guy.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and, you know, the attraction, I think a better example for young men at the moment, well, Rogan's a good example. Joe Rogan's a very good example because he's definitely a monster who's got himself under control. But Jocko Willink as well. Oh, yes, of course, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because Willink is tough as a boot. He knows perfectly well, and he's told me this repeatedly in our various conversations, that, you know, he could have been quite the criminal because he's definitely got a...

I wouldn't say a bloodthirsty aspect, although that's in there, you know, because he's a disagreeable guy. He's very competitive, and that disagreeableness and competitiveness goes together. Hey, I read an interesting study this week. Man, this really helped me understand something I've been studying for a long time. So people tend to feel pain, right?

as a consequence of the disruption of social relations. It's not anxiety, it's pain. And so loneliness and grieving, for example, are variants of pain. And if you take a child who's misbehaving and you isolate them, that isolation is a punishment, and it's a punishment because it's associated with pain. And that can be ameliorated with opiates, by the way. Like, this is very well understood. So part of social bonding,

Part of social bonding is mediated by pain responses. And I read a paper this week that showed that people who are more disagreeable, right? So that would be, that's a masculine characteristic, show less activation in their neurological pain systems when watching someone else in pain. And so that's part of that.

that's part of that underlying neurology that can lead to a certain callousness, right? And a certain lack of care in reference to other people. But then you can also understand it as a necessity for things like, well, hunting would be an example, military service, police. Like, anytime you're dealing with something where the threat of physical combat is real,

An excess of empathic responding is likely to be an impediment. Now, the price you pay for that is that if you do have the wiring that makes you less directly sympathetic in the face of other people's suffering, let's say, you can easily tilt into the antisocial, right? So this is another...

precipice that has to be negotiated by men who are wired to be competitive and tough. It's like, well, how do you ally that forthrightness and bluntness, because that's also part of that, with the willingness to be generous and productive? I think, you know, Jocko told me that the way he learned that was in the military, because he found that

the development of high levels of skills in other people, like that mentoring relationship, was so rewarding that that's what oriented him. That was one of the things that oriented him primarily to the good, you know. You know, and you see this to some degree in those stories that you were talking about, even in The Sopranos. Like one of the things that makes movie mafiosos admirable is that they actually produce a

family around them, right? That's structured. There's a mentoring relationship there. You even see that in Breaking Bad with Walter White's relationship with Jesse, for example.

Oh, absolutely. Breaking Bad is a perfect example of what we're talking about. But again, it's also an example of the breach between storytelling and reality. I mean, we tell our, we think in stories at your, you know, you deal in psychology. Psychology is a kind of story, sexual fantasies.

are a kind of story and stories are all about physical action. They're all about things, people moving and doing things. But in real life, I've met many a man who could break me in two physically, who hasn't got a moral or strong, morally strong bone in his body and will cave immediately when he is dominated by a stronger mind.

You yourself, you know, you're not an absolute physical monster, but you're standing up to the entire Canadian government because you have that spine. And one of the tricks for women growing up, I think, is understanding the difference between

between the kind of strength that turns itself into brutality in a sexual fantasy and the kind of strength that simply stands where it's supposed to stand and will not let the world push it aside. And then you return to that fact that you're not afraid to be isolated. You're not afraid to walk away from the society because when the society is wrong. I mean, I think this is one of the

terrible things we're dealing with now throughout a society that's lost its mind and lost its way a little bit is that you have to be willing to be canceled. You have to be willing to be thrown off social media. You have to be willing to lose your job even in order to simply speak the truth. And that's a kind of strength that I think men exhibit

more than women. And I think that men exhibit it sometimes when, if you looked at them, you'd think like, "Yeah, that's kind of, he's not a real tough guy. He's not a, I could, I could knock him out." Which is why, you know, you hear the stories of Ben Shapiro being bullied and you think like, "Sure, you know, you can be bigger than him. You can hit him." But it's a little hard to have as much integrity as he has to stand into, to walk into a riot and make your speech.

Those are the things that actually, in the end, play out in a civilized society. Yeah, yeah. Well, that speaks to a higher order of virtue than mere absence of empathy or fear, I think. Because it isn't that, certainly, like, I am very agreeable by temperament, as it turns out. And so conflict really does bother me now. I'm

I don't think Ben is particularly disagreeable, but he's certainly more disagreeable than I am. And there's an element of him that really likes the conflict. This is obviously not a criticism, but the issue there is that there's a kind of commitment to character. And this is probably the apprehension of this is what attracted you when you saw that or when you were thinking about that stained glass window is that there's a kind of

character that's sophisticated beyond mere physical strength, which isn't trivial, that enables people to move forward or to stand their ground despite being afraid, say, and despite being empathic. You know, and the fact...

It is very complex because you said, for example, that that's likely more true of men than women. And that's a tough one, eh? And so we could take that apart a bit. I mean, it's certainly the case that the most woke academic disciplines are female-dominated.

And it is definitely the case that women are, by temperament, more agreeable than men. And what that means, I believe that's primarily a specialization for infant care. And that means that the proclivity for... Because, look, an infant is always right when it's in distress. And your moral obligation, this is, say, an infant under six months of age, your moral obligation as the primary caretaker of an infant is to never question its emotional distress whatsoever.

never, and to respond immediately, no matter what. And being able to do that, and also simultaneously having the wherewithal to withstand conflict, especially if it's generated on emotional grounds, that's a very contradictory set of demands. I think that's partly why human beings require two parents.

Because it's just too much. Well, it's just too much, I think, for one person to take primary responsibility for that intense care that characterizes especially the first year, but particularly the first six months. And then also to have the emotional capacity to start to implement necessary disciplinary procedures that

you know, result in some definite, some emotional tension, no matter how short term. You need a man and a woman to play those things off one another.

Oh, I think that's definitely true. Yeah. And also to work out, I mean, mercy and justice are in conflict everywhere, but in the mind of God. So I think that it takes two people really to bring that together. Yeah. And it also means you're not just dealing, when you're dealing with all these archetypes and when you're dealing with these fantasies that are stories and these stories that are fantasies, you have to remember the moral web. And the moral web is a complex thing. You know, those things are complex.

borderlines that only we can see. They're not railings in the road. They're things that you have to be able to say, I am going to stay within this borderline and I'm going to be able to define that. And that's one of the reasons, for instance, that men go out into the world to support their, the mothers at home and the mothers don't always know what the men have to do to get that done. And the men have to make those, those very difficult decisions. Am I going to, you know,

It take this guff from some guy because I need the money. Am I going to do a job that I shouldn't do? All of those things come into play. And that's, you know, again, the complexity is intense and it definitely takes two people at least. And it definitely takes two different kinds of people to find their way. Yeah.

Yeah, you talked about the interplay of mercy and justice. You know, I think that's a good definition of conscience. The conscience is the voice that signifies the interplay between mercy and justice. And you see this in characters like Philip Marlowe, right? Because

They're obviously meting out justice constantly, and that's part of the attractiveness of their character, especially when it's devoted towards defending the femme fatale from some evil persecutor. But they're always leaving that with mercy, and it is as a consequence of following the dictates of their conscience. And certainly Marlow is a very conscience-ridden creature,

Yes. As is Sam Spade, for that matter. And even James Bond on the more comic book end of things. You know, you were talking too about characters like Breaking Bad, the guy in Breaking Bad, Walter White, and in The Sopranos. It's also been in recent years where we had the rise of the Marvel Universe, and Tony Stark is another good example of that sort of thing because that guy is so hyper-masculine that he's damn near fascist.

And it was so interesting to see, first of all, that Iron Man was the Marvel character who rose to preeminence in the movie fictional universe, because that certainly wasn't the case in the comic book world. He was kind of a minor superhero. But Tony Stark had those same attributes of, you know, this sort of hyper-masculine, almost narcissistic,

this hyper almost narcissistic masculine element. And it was also very interesting that he ended up allied in some profound way with the Hulk, right? That they played off each other and that Stark was the person who was also able to control and deal with and channel the Hulk in the most effective possible manner.

It's very interesting to watch all that unfold. You know, well, the whole culture was spiraling off in the hyper-feminine direction. Well, I think the superhero is...

really interesting genre. It has always bothered me because it seems to be storytelling without sex and definite, which means it's storytelling in some sense about the human, uh, without human nature in it. And what disturbs me about that is I see this across all genres. One of the things, one of my absolute, uh, hobby horses is women beating men up in every movie. There's a woman who's going to punch a guy and he goes rolling, uh,

ass over tea kettle out the door, which is not what happens when a woman punches a man, her hand breaks, and then he beats the crap out of her. And that's a dangerous thing. But it's also saying something about our attitude to our humanity, our turning away from humanity as possibly hyper-humanity through technology approaches. I mean, I think when I was

young, you watch stories that were largely about the past. You watch war movies and cowboy movies. And the science fiction that we have is very rare, but it was also kind of a projection of the past into the future. So even when you dealt with monsters that were very human, they were Dracula, the werewolf and all that. Whereas now we're watching...

movies and telling stories that seem to look forward into an inhuman future. And what bothers me about that is without, because I think it's actually true, is that without sex and death or beyond sex and death, there's still going to be a moral web and we're still going to have to negotiate it. And yet the immediate punishments for immorality, the fleshly results of immorality are not going to exist anymore. Just like with, for instance, birth control, you can, you

You can treat your body like a pin cushion and not get pregnant and maybe solve your syphilis problem. And yet the moral web is still in place. You will destroy yourself by simply treating yourself with that.

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Well, let's walk down. Yes. Well, absolutely. Let's walk down that road a little bit. I mean, I think at a deep level, part of what you see, part of the reason that you see the sorts of things that you're describing, which is women occupying the more masculine heroic role taken to the extreme in say these superhero movies where women are regularly beating the hell out of men, which has, you said virtually never happens in real life. Um,

And this sort of ties into some of the things that The Daily Wire has been doing, for example, with their documentary questioning, What is a Woman? And, you know, it's easy for that to be a satirical question, and that was a satirical documentary. But there's actually something really fundamental going on at the base of that, because the truth of the matter is that with the introduction of the birth control pill,

the question, what is a woman, actually became immediately paramount. And now that's been unfolding for multiple generations because the obvious distinction, the most obvious distinction between men and women

prior to the pill was the ease with which one of them could get pregnant. And it was impossible for one of them and very easy for the other, and that turned out to be a walloping difference, and perhaps the cardinal difference. I mean, the biological definition of female is literally that sex that gives up most in the process of sexual reproduction, that devotes the most resources. And you see that even

in the relationship between the sperm and the egg, I think the egg has 10 million times the resources of a single sperm in terms of what it's donating to the gamete. It's something like that. And so, and that's echoed at every level of the dichotomy between masculine and feminine. So what is a woman? A woman is the human sex that devotes most to the problems of reproduction. So that's a good definition. Now, you upend that with the pill.

Because all of a sudden, that difference is ameliorated to some substantial degree. Now, your point is that doesn't change the underlying moral landscape. Well, it changes it somewhat, right? Because the immediate consequences for...

for fornication, let's say, to use an archaic term, for sleeping around, the immediate consequences are clearly ameliorated. And that leaves us to wonder, well, you know, the whole 1960s was an experiment in some ways. It's like, all right, sex has now become consequence-free, or so we thought. Well, then why not have an endless orgiastic party?

And that's actually a real question because the reason to do it is clear and the reasons not to do it have become murky. Well, AIDS put the paid to that demented dream quite rapidly, but then there were more subtle things, right? And one of the subtle things is, well, okay, why isn't a woman, why can't a woman just replace a man now entirely? And how do we discover the limits to that? You know, I see some limits emerging and, you know, I mean,

We now know, for example, that half of 30-year-old women now don't have a child. Half of them. It's more than half, actually. Half of them will never have a child. And 90% of them will regret that. And so even if we push, even if we erase in our 20s the difference between men and women, as the difference is erased in childhood, because boys and girls are quite similar compared to, say, teenage boys and teenage girls,

Even if we equilibrate men and women in their 20s, that certainly doesn't mean we equilibrate them in their 30s. I think it's an open question whether if you remove the immediate physical consequences of a bad act, it ceases to be a bad act. I think that this is the key question that we're facing right now. You know, in The Truth and Beauty, I write a chapter on Frankenstein in which I make the argument that Frankenstein

the Dr. Frankenstein who creates this monster has not violated as Mary Shelley did, has not violated God's prerogative. He's violated a woman's prerogative. He's created a being, which we all do. We all, anyone who has a child has created a living being, but he creates it without a mother. And if you read Frankenstein in that way, you begin to see that science and fantasy have been trying to solve the problem of women and the fact that they create a

a consequence, a deep consequence to our chief

physical pleasure. They've been trying to solve that since science existed and really since imagination existed. I mean, prostitution in some ways is a way of trying to solve that problem as well. And I believe that the attacks on men now are not really attacks on men. What I think they are is trying to clear men out of the way so that women can cease being women and can actually become men as well. Because what women do is they raise this question. Are we purely physical beings? If you can remove

The physical consequences of a bad act, does it cease to be bad? Is there something within us? And I obviously, I'm a Christian and I believe there is. Is there something within us that is damaged by immoral action? The evidence seems to be that there is actually. Well, actually the evidence with regard to that is clear. So let me lay it out. The clinical evidence is clear. Okay, so let's go down deep into the biological for a minute to sort that out.

Okay, so there's two fundamental strategies of reproduction among sexually reproducing creatures. There's the zero parental investment strategy, and there's the profound parental investment strategy on the two ends. So fish and mosquitoes, by and large, are on the zero investment end. What they invest is sperm and egg, and that's pretty much it. And the way those organisms manage that is they produce...

tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies of themselves and leave them to their own devices. And almost all of them perish. But almost isn't the same as all. And if you produce 100,000 offspring and only one survives, you're successful in replication. Okay, on exactly the other end of the spectrum are human beings. Because our offspring have the longest dependency period

period by a long margin, even compared to our immediate primate cousins. And that's partly a consequence of our rapid or comparatively massive cortical expansion and the need for extensive socialization. We're a high investment species. Okay, so now let's look within the realm of human attitudes towards reproduction. There's a distribution.

There are those who engage like mosquitoes in short-term mating strategies, and there are those who engage preferentially in long-term pair-bonded mating strategies. Okay, now we could ask ourselves, what are the personality characteristics that go along with that? Well, the clinical literature and the personality literature are clear. Here are the predictors of short-term mating strategy preference.

Early onset criminality, familial history of antisocial behavior, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism. Right. And so, and it's worse than that. Not only do those predict things,

the proclivity and preference for short-term mating, one night stands, let's say, sex only for pleasure in the absence of a relationship. It's also the case that practicing that produces those personality characteristics. And you can see why, because if the goal is that you're going to subordinate all things, including the possibility of any relationship whatsoever, to

to mere sexual pleasure, you're now using the other person as an object for pleasure, but you're also using yourself. You're also training yourself in a form of psychopathy. And so I don't even think this is debatable. I think the evidence for this is, like I've known for 35 years, that one of the best predictors of criminal proclivity among teenagers is early childhood.

early and frequent sexual experience. That's been known forever, forever. No one debates it in the criminology domain. And the same is exactly true in personality with regards to these dark, you know, sadism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. So for all the women who are listening, men too, for that matter,

If you're out with a guy and his orientation is, you know, let's get it on, babe. It's one night stand. There's no more reliable marker of his untamable, primordial, malevolent beastliness than that.

Right. And there's not a debate about that. And it brings us back to where we started in a way. I mean, this is the conundrum we're faced with in this scientific moment is can you solve the problems of being a human being without solving human beings, without getting rid of human beings themselves? Because all of the things that we admire are very basic and yet in a civilized society have to be

in a civilized way. And so this is, to me, the essential question we're looking at. You know, we talk about what is a woman, which is an excellent question, but what is a human being and what exactly? We can't even begin, in my opinion, in my opinion, we're in this moment of great transition. Not only is my generation passing away, but all kinds of world orders are passing away and a new age is coming in. And we're asked, we have to start with this question of who

Who are we trying to serve? What is the creature that we're trying to build governments around, that we're trying to build communications around, that we're trying to build avenues of information around? And I don't think the question is asked often enough. What you have is the people at the top trying to solve problems with great, big, wonderful ideas. In Davos, they're going to have the great reset and so on. And then you have the people on the bottom who are just saying, leave me alone and let me do what I want to do. And obviously somewhere between those

people is the idea that kind of the American founders started out with is, what are people? What do they do right? What do they do wrong? And how do we not only control the people, but how do we control the people who control the people? And I think we're back to those questions again. And I fear that not the scientific worldview, but the scientistic worldview is

It blinds us to certain things that people are and that may be ineffable. I think everything has a physical analog, but it doesn't mean that that's its cause. And you see this in, for instance, when we drug people for depression and they feel happier. Are they happier? And I think a lot of them are not as happy.

As shown by the fact that we now have a medicine for depression, and yet depression is spreading. When you have a medicine for polio, polio goes down. When you have a medicine for depression, it spreads. And I think that's because we're not actually treating the depression. I think most psychologists now agree with that. Well, you know, one of the things that we're skirting around in some sense is the question of what limitations do

Like the question of what defines a man or a woman or a human being is actually a question in some sense of boundaries and defining limitations. Right. Right. Now, one of the ideas I've been wrestling with recently is that death makes things real. You know, because one fundamental philosophical question is, well, what does it mean for something to be real?

And it seems to me that the hallmark of the real is death, is the finitude of existence. Something can be so real that if you encounter it, it kills you. And then if that's true, if mortal limitation defines reality, it makes us—let's walk through that—

Is something that threatens you with death serious? Well, yes. Right? Right. Death, now, it might not be the most serious reality, because I think you could make a case that something that threatens your soul is more real than something that threatens your life. And I think if people understood that distinction, they would sacrifice their life to save their soul.

So that's something we could talk about. But in any case, the logic of the argument depends on accepting the proposition that what we take most seriously is what we regard as most real. And certainly those things that threaten us with death, we regard as most serious. And therefore are those things that help us define what is real. I don't know if we transcended our

mortal vulnerability, which is the dream of the transhumanists, it seems to me that we would, instead of solving the problem of mortality, I think we would substitute a kind of soulless existence for life itself. It's something like that, you know, because you might say, well, if you now can't be killed, if you're now an immortal creature, which in principle is

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Yeah, I think this is absolutely true. And death not only makes things real, it actually gives us meaning. You know, the poet John Keats said that life was the veil of soul making. And I think that the reason it's the veil of soul making is death gives everything meaning.

All meaning, I think, comes from death. Even the moment of love, the fact that it's precious, the fact that it passes, the fact that every moment passes is what gives it such urgency and importance. And one of the arguments I've heard against Christianity, against the Christian idea of eternity, is that where will the meaning come from? And I think that's a solvable issue, obviously, but still, here, now,

We are dealing, it is death that gives our life meaning and is death in which we find the meaning of life. There would be no purpose. I believe that if we had no death, if we actually eradicated that, we'd get something like the end of the time machine where those people are sitting around, you know, doing absolutely nothing and just kind of floating downstream. Right. And it looks like paradise, but in fact, it's hell. And I think that that is, this is the...

This is the thing that disturbs me so much about these superhero movies is really when you take away the traits that make us human, death and sex, eros and thanatos, you've taken away the meaning of being human as well. And you leave us with virtually nothing. And some of these transhumanists also become death worshipers because what they talk about is it's

It'll be great when human beings are gone. It's time for these meat sacks to get out of here and leave everything to AI. There are people who believe that AI is more important than we are. And for me, it's always the question of like, why? What consciousness does AI have? What is precious about AI? We're the ones who are precious precisely because we die, precisely because this moment happens.

And this internal life that I lead and that you have to assume I lead because you lead one too, that's where all of the meaning exists. And the fact of your life is so urgent and sacred. Well, right, right. Well, the relationship between urgency and the sacred is definitely, it's a very close relationship. And if you have infinite time, the question that immediately arises is then why anything now?

Right. And I think that's actually, in some ways, you might say even that that's one of the curses of plenitude and wealth, even especially if it's unearned. It's like, well—

How much urgency does there have to be to drive you forward in a meaningful fashion? You can think about this in terms, for example, of the effects of pornography. You know, we know that young people are much less likely to couple than they were. This is particularly pronounced in places like Japan and South Korea, where I think it's about one third of the young people there under 30 are virginal. And one of the questions you might ask yourself is, well, how much is the

fractious but necessary long-term relationship making between men and women driven by sexual urgency and scarcity, right? And you see the same thing

if you're reasonably well off financially, the same conundrum emerges with regards to your children, which is, well, how do you provide them with optimal deprivation, given that you could provide everything for them? In which case you become something like the, you know, the infinite mother that destroys their souls by providing them with so much care that there's absolutely no reason for them to ever get up and do anything. That's...

That's what I think this whole moment in history is about. I mean, we do seem to be on the verge of solving so many problems, and yet you solve the problem. The solution is, in some ways, the problem, and the idea of choice and the vastness of our choices and the...

lessening of the consequences of our choices actually threatens to strip us of the human being for whom those choices are made. And so it's exactly, yeah. And I, and I think that's why the, the actual, you know, we have to return to those actual Aristotelian questions of who we are, what we are. It's, it's a weird thing to be talking about in this moment when it seems like we're going to travel into space, we're going to travel into inner space. We can clone people. We can make people live forever. But,

but to me, it's the urgent question. And it's why the, it's why the ancients matter more than ever in, in this hyper-modern moment. It really is. We really are reaching a branch in the road. I think everybody can feel it coming and it's, it's dispiriting to hear our leaders talking in these old fashioned terms about what they're going to do and how they're going to solve our problems for us without really taking into account who we are. And, and they're,

the responsibility of leaders to our happiness and to make our happiness possible and to make it possible for us to find our happiness, which we can only do on our own. This is something I think that makes it so important that we –

look upon the least of us with compassion. You know, this is why you look upon the least of us with compassion because they're us. Because in the end, if we can't figure that out, we can't figure ourselves out. It really is. It is amazing that people who are somewhat older than this generation. Recently, I heard somebody after the October 7th attacks on Israel, I heard a Columbia student, a woman,

celebrating the slaughter in Israel and quoting Chairman Mao. And I thought, wow,

Chairman Mao was the worst mass murderer in human history. I don't think anyone has ever racked up the body count that Chairman Mao has racked up. And the ignorance that that entails, and the ignorance that entails spreads out to an ignorance of Shakespeare, of Plato, of the Bible. You have to be totally ignorant in order to be quoting Chairman Mao as if he mattered morally. And so I think that we've come to this moment when

Futurism makes it seem as if all of the wisdom that was piled up behind us is meaningless. What did they know? They didn't even know whether the sun goes around the earth or vice versa. When in fact, they knew all the things that mattered because they were dealing with life at a much more basic level. And without that basic understanding, the future is going to be a disaster. So there's a scene in the story of Noah that's apropos in that regard. So

Noah is presented as a man wise in his generations, right? So which means that for a man of his time and place, he was properly morally oriented, which is all that can be

required, expected, even in the best possible case of any of us, with like vanishingly few exceptions. So he's a good man, and he attends to the warnings of his conscience, and he shepherds his family and the human race, for that matter, through a complete bloody apocalyptic catastrophe, comes out on the other side, which in some ways is what every single one of our successful ancestors did,

to manage to negotiate through life with all its vicissitudes and leave progeny behind and leave behind the progeny who actually survived. It's so unlikely. So all of our ancestors are Noah to some degree. Now, after he washes up on shore and the flood recedes, he plants a vineyard.

and proceeds to get rip-roaring drunk on the consequences, right, once it's all brewed up. And he's lying in his tent, nakedness fully exposed, and his son Ham comes along and has a pretty good time poking fun at the old man, right? And then he decides to get his brothers in on the joke, and he invites them to come and have a gander. And instead of

acting in a manner that's derisive toward their father, they back into the tent and they cover him up with a blanket. And so, and then, but this is where the story gets serious because the tradition that surrounds that story is quite clear. The descendants of Ham are slaves, right? And so what that means as far as I'm concerned, and I think this is dead right and it's relevant to what you were saying is that

You adopt a pose of moral superiority, derisive moral superiority to the past.

At your immense peril. Because if you're foolish enough to presume that, for example, in your stunning ignorance and moral superiority, that Chairman Mao is a model, the probability that you're going to end up as a slave is 100%. You're already a slave to the ideology. You know, it's only by...

I have to tell you a wonderful story from my Hollywood days because they made the Noah story into a movie with Russell Crowe. It was a big epic movie. And they completely changed God's motive being Hollywood. They completely changed God's motive for destroying the world from sinfulness to being not environmental enough so that they weren't being green enough. But according to the producers, what the evangelicals complained about was that they showed Noah getting drunk.

And the Hollywood producers were left explaining to the religious Christians that no, that was actually scriptural. That was actually in the Bible. So piety of any kind is actually a way of blinding ourselves to what human beings are in both their decency and their wickedness. And I actually think that this –

I believe, you know, there's always been, especially in the, once the age of science begins, there's always been this idea that you can find a single governing motivation for human behavior. So you have Freud with Aries and power and alienation. But I think one motivation that we completely forget about is the motivation to appear virtuous to oneself and others.

And I think that the knowledge of our brokenness, the knowledge of what we really are is just intolerable to so many people. And it's that that I think causes you to have both the pious Christian who couldn't care less about the person next to him and the guy in Davos who thinks he's going to, it's fine for him to make the decision. Okay. Well, you, you, you put your finger on something absolutely crucial there, I think. So,

One of the things I've been exploring really in depth, especially in the last month, is the intersection between a biblical injunction and a gospel injunction. So the biblical injunction is, do not use the Lord's name in vain.

Now, people think that means don't swear, and that isn't what it means. It isn't what it means. It might mean that in some peripheral sense, because it is a warning against the careless use of God's name. But what it really means is do not claim moral virtue, especially of the highest sort.

for acts that are clearly self-serving. Now, there's no more self-serving act than one that's narcissistic, by definition, because narcissism is the core of self-serving. Okay, so a narcissistic act is one that elevates my moral virtue falsely.

Okay, so now then imagine the worst extent of that sin is for me to claim that my narcissistic motivations are actually done in the name of what's highest. And that would be God in the case of the totalitarian religious zealot. And it would be compassion in the case of the modern left-leaning atheist who has basically made the goddess of mercy his or her unconscious God. Okay, so now I can claim false moral virtue

and I can elevate my social status and my self-regard without commensurate effort, especially, and I can circumvent all the problems you just described, which is actually contending with the depth of my genuine misalignment and sin. Okay, now that's echoed in the Gospels, like,

Christ goes after the Pharisees in particular, as hypocrites. And so they're the religious types that you just described, the ones that parade their moral virtue. They're the same as the bloody modern protesters too. But the false butter won't melt in their mouth evangelical types and the zealots in the Islamic world, they're all of the same type. They take this

unearned moral virtue, they're acolytes of God, and they use that. Christ accuses their praying in the marketplace, which is no different than protesting, to elevate their social status so that they have good reputation among men, which he also warns about, and so that they can occupy the highest seats in the synagogue. And so there's this terrible sin, and it's opposition to that sin that gets Christ crucified.

Right? Because it's the Pharisees he really makes enemies of. And he says to them, he says, they worship the dogma of men as if it's the commandments of God, and that they are the same people that would have killed the prophets whose words they purport to worship. Like, they're vicious criticisms being put forward by Christ. He makes terrible enemies out of the Pharisees. But what he is calling out is exactly what we see at Davos. It's exactly that, this worship.

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That's it's true. And it brings us back to to the idea about sometimes solving the problem is the problem. One of the wonderful things about the Enlightenment is it gave us all these systems that marshal human flaws for the good of all. So you have capitalism, which is a wonderful economic system. And you have democratic republics which elevate people to power over.

ostensibly on merit and some kind of connection to the people, but they don't eliminate the fact that the love of money is the root of all evil and power corrupts. So what you now have is people who no longer have to confront the parasitical nature of their wealth because they can say, oh, well, I created jobs, I created wealth, I spread the wealth, but they're still corrupted in soul because they fall in love with money, which is a form of idolatry and it does eat people away. And you have people who are in power

whether through wealth or through election, who can say, well, I'm not, it's not like Henry V thinking all this is a ceremony. I actually have been elevated by the people or by election, or I created amazon.com or I did something like that. And yet that power is still corrupting. So as we solve the problems, we still haven't eliminated the fact that the human being is a broken system. It's a contradictory system, a system that actually is aiming, but it was us

Oscar Wilde, I think, who said, we're all standing in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. And I think that that idea that we forget that we're standing in the gutter because now we can actually say, you know, Tolstoy, you know, found God and he thought, oh my God, I'm a parasite. I'm living on the backs of the serfs.

But now you don't have to say that anymore. And people, this is why I despise Ayn Rand, by the way. This is why I just can't, I despise the fact that she's a terrible writer. I just can't stand this elevation of power and wealth to a state of virtue. It's simply not. It is power and wealth, and sometimes it's deserved, and sometimes it's used correctly by people who have virtue. But it's not the virtue itself, and it can be incredibly destructive to the human soul.

Yeah, well, the reason that I've stayed as firmly as I've been able to in the psychological domain is because I don't believe that systemic alteration strikes to the core of the problem. I've always been concerned, I would say, my fundamental intellectual interest— it's not only intellectual, existential interest— is the issue of evil. And I'm not really that interested in systemic evil.

Partly because I'm much more interested in actual individual motivation. See, I wanted to know how I could be an Auschwitz prison guard. But more than that, I wanted to know how I could be an Auschwitz prison guard and enjoy it.

And if you don't think that you are that person, you don't know much about people. Now that doesn't mean that there are some people who would be tilted more in the direction of the temptations and pleasures that being an Auschwitz guard would provide. There are some people who are more temperamentally protected against that particular sinful route.

It'd be very hard for someone who is hyper-compassionate to make that particular error. They'd be much more likely to turn into a devouring mother, for example, and infantilize everyone. But I was still very curious about

how you erect barriers in your own soul to the blandishments of those who would provide for you an avenue to that kind of sadistic misuse of power. And you might say, I'd never do that. And I'd say, no, the opportunity for you to do that just hasn't presented itself. And that might be because of your own inability, not your moral virtue. You've just never managed to elevate yourself to a place where you have power.

power over anyone else. And that's not a virtue. That's that weak man that we were talking about at the beginning of the discussion. And that's also what, and this can segue us into the next part of this conversation maybe, that's actually also what got me interested in theological ideas, you know, because I became convinced that the fundamental issues that beset us are psychological, but that the fundamental psychological issues are indistinguishable from the theological.

Well, I think the battle against evil, and I do believe in the reality of evil, the battle against evil is fundamentally fought in the soul. And so now you have had a long journey towards a relatively elaborate faith, and it's not the faith that you were born into. Right. And so do you want to walk us through that a bit? And I'd like to know, like, what were the steps forward?

How did this come about? I'd also like to know how it dovetailed with your fiction writing in particular.

Because I think of the theological is like metafiction, you know? Yeah, it created actual problems in how to write natural fiction. For a while, I wandered into fantasy writing because it was the only way I could express the new level of reality that I was seeing. But ultimately, I found that very unsatisfying because I feel that God is God of the real world. I feel he's not a fantasy God, and he's not God of Candyland. He's God of this world. Since I was

baptized at the age of 49 is kind of a long story, so I don't want to go into it. That's okay. That's okay. We'll lay it out because I'm very curious about, I think it'd be helpful for the listeners. Well, when I was in college, the first wave of the postmodernists were coming on and we were starting to hear about relativism and the disjunction of language with meaning and all of these things. And I guess I was 19 years old and I read Crime and Punishment.

And when was this? What year was that? I see if 19, I would, it would have been 73, 73. Okay. So now I'm situated in time. You read crime and punishment. Oh, that'll do the trick. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, here's the scene of a man who can, and you know,

Dostoevsky was writing before Nietzsche, but he actually – Dostoevsky, I believe, was an actual prophet, and he actually prophesied what Nietzsche was going to say. He saw those ideas coming. And so you have the scene in a novel where a man takes an axe not just to the pawnbroker who is bedeviling him, but to his retarded – her retarded sister and kills in just a scene of incredible –

innocence and evil kills a woman who has his can't think straight and just looking at him with this blank look. And I thought, you know, you know, there is no way this is not an evil act. And I think that's exactly, there is no construct that you can have. And this to me is the only leap of faith I ever took. The only leap of faith I ever took in my journey to Christianity was saying that there is something that is

that is evil and therefore something that is good or not evil, whether or not every single person in the world thinks so, and whether or not you can convince yourself it's not.

It remains evil. And that means that our physical actions and our mind is linked to a level of meaning above the natural, which is what I mean when I say supernatural. I don't mean like magical things happening. You mean transcendent. Transcendent, yes. And it transcends the natural and the physical. And so for that to be true, first of all, that moment when that murder happens in that book inoculated me.

to the blandishments of post-modernity. So when I read, if you read the mad scene in Hamlet, Hamlet goes through, walks through all of the ideas in post-modernity. He says, well, I'm reading, what are you reading? I'm just reading words, words, words, as if the words were disjointed from meaning. He says, nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Right, right. And the only thing about that is Shakespeare,

the great said, was saying, showing to you that Hamlet is pretending to be mad. He knows that the things that he's saying are mad, but the professors who were coming into my university didn't know it. They actually thought what they were saying was sanity. And I think what Shakespeare was saying was they really did know, but they were saying it anyway because the logic was following that way. Yeah.

For other darker motivations, right? Because it allows for a complete abdication of responsibility and a descent into responsibility-less hedonism.

That comes along with it. There's no way around that. That's why the Marquis de Sade is also a standard bearer of the Enlightenment rationalists. And Dostoevsky knew that. I mean, the thing that's so remarkable about crime and punishment, you pointed to one of the things. It was certainly my investigations into what had happened in Nazi Germany, and in worse places even, the horrors that were perpetrated. If you can read about those horrors,

And you can imagine human beings doing that, and you don't regard that as evil. I don't want to be anywhere near you. That should wake you up. Oh, God, if that doesn't wake you up. And I think this is so interesting that you had a very similar experience. I think Sam Harris had a very similar experience, by the way, too, because he's been obsessed by the issue of evil as well. Evil is something so palpable that if you face it,

then you will become, you'll either become convinced of its reality or there is no hope for you. Imagine earning a degree that prepares you with real skills for the real world. Capella University's programs teach skills relevant to your career so you can apply what you learn right away. Learn how Capella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu. That's right.

That's right. So that happened with Crime and Punishment for you, eh? That's so interesting. It did, but because of my milieu, because I was a secular Jew in coastal cities in the artistic world, I was a novelist, I was dealing with sophisticated people, the idea of believing in God unironically, or even beyond the Jungian, well, you can't tell whether this is a

delivered meaning or real meaning. That idea was absolutely closed to me. I couldn't reach it. And so I spent many years struggling with the postmodernist and my novels, the themes of my novels are how could you tell what was real? I'm writing thrillers, but they were thrillers about the nature of reality, the inability of theory to contain reality. And so I was struggling with that.

And I was beginning to realize that you simply could not get to moral reality without some idea of an ultimate good, and that that ultimate good had to be a personal good, because there is no good without choice, without consciousness, without morality. So I was beginning to understand— Maybe without relationship, which is why— Without relationship? Well, it's so interesting, because one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is this weird insistence that—

that our fundamental relationship with reality

must and should be covenantal. It's actually a relationship that's best construed. Well, and then you think, okay, let's think about that for a minute. Okay, so what's a human being? Well, a human being is a personality. Now, if a personality can function in the world, like a personality exists in relationship, that's like the definition of a personality. And so if it's

our personality that enables us to survive, to exist, then in what possible manner is our relationship with the world not covenantal in the final analysis? Like, I...

I can't see a way out of that. And so that means there's a personal element to it that's relationship-like. It's not like we stand as dead objects in relationship to a set of dead facts. That's not how it works. You know, this is why, to me, if there's such a thing as the most profound

moment in all of literature. It's Moses confronting the burning bush because he's confronting what's a symbol of the creation and destruction of the world. Things are born and they die. They grow and they're consumed and they never end. And it says to him,

I am, I am. It says that this is a person speaking to him. Right. The fact that that is happening. Yes. And the fact that it's happening between a consciousness, Moses's and this object, which is the universe essentially in small makes it impossible to know whether it's in that relationship that it becomes, I am, which was kind of what Jung, I think was talking about the uncertainty of that. But yeah, but it also sort of says that,

more in an Aquinas point of view, that if you accept this on faith, you will then contain it. It will then become part of what you see. Well, there's more in the Moses story than that too, which is absolutely crucial, you know, because up to that point, Moses is a escapee from Egypt. He's essentially a wanted criminal, and he's a shepherd. Now, he's doing all right as a shepherd, and he's made a good relationship with his father-in-law, and he's got a couple of wives. Like, he's got a normal life.

But then he has that encounter with the ground of being, right, that beckons to him. And he pursues it deeply, and then the voice of being itself speaks to him. But then the next thing happens.

that's when God charges him with the responsibility and the ability to stand up against tyranny and to oppose slavery. Right? So now all of a sudden, because Moses has made that connection with being itself, he now becomes the person who can genuinely lead. And then he says to God, it's like,

well, you're charging me with this, and this is revealed to me, but I don't even know how to speak. And God says, yeah, that's your problem, buddy. And that's so interesting because it, well, because it's so interesting because, so Moses is now delved deep into something, some interest that beckoned to him, and he's confronted the fundamental reality of being itself, and that's transformed him. And now he's left with the aftermath of that, which is he has to figure out how, as the

flawed person he is, unable even really to speak because Moses has some impediment in his ability to communicate, he still is charged with the moral obligation like your superhero characters or like Philip Marlowe, like your heroes, to stand up against tyranny and to oppose slavery. And you know, it's an open question for all of us, especially if we're concerned with authoritarianism.

or licentious hedonism for that matter. It's like, what is it that transforms us into the sort of person who has the moral fortitude to stand up against that? And it is something like the establishment of a relationship with the ground of being itself. If you have that,

burning inside you, nothing is more frightening than losing that relationship. Nothing. Yep. Yeah. And it also gives you the idea that because you can communicate with it, you can become like unto it. You can move into that image of God within that is your, your essential personality that we all know we've fallen short of. Right. Right. Right. What happened, what happened to me, and this is kind of interesting because it goes back to the Marquis de Sade,

uh, that is, is I came to a point where the logic of God became unavoidable, but on almost the same moment. Um, and maybe for similar reasons, though, I think there were much more deeply personal and connected to my past. I, I had a crack up. I, I went nuts. And, uh,

I found a psychiatrist who was recognized as one of the greats. And what I now consider to be a literal miracle, he cured me. I went from being a suicidal, delusional, hypochondriacal, paralyzed human being to being one of the more joyful people I know. It was insane. I mean, this transformation was entire and insane. When was this? When was this? I was about 28 when I cracked.

And by the time I was 30, I was on the way out. I was on the way back. And by the time I was 32, I was fine. So what happened? What were the precedents of the dissent? Well, what—

What would the, I'm sorry, say that again? What caused the dissent? What caused the breakup? What caused your breakup? I mean, I was, I had a child. My wife and I had a child. I was absolutely, as I am to this day, madly in love with my wife. And that was one of the things that kept me alive. And

And we had a child and I couldn't make a living doing what I wanted to do. I knew I had a genuine talent for what I wanted to do. And I was absolutely a complete failure. I'd published a book. It had sold no copies. I had nowhere to go. I was just getting my writing, which was, is based on the tough guy writers. It was crystal clear, pellucidly clear had become impenetrable. If not, what I was saying. So I was unable to make a living. I was unable to proceed in my profession. Um,

And I just broke and I had all kinds of psychological problems and getting to the place where I could act in the world. And here's the interesting thing. I mean, the guy who cured me was a, I would call him a neo-Freudian.

And Freud was an atheist. And so I began to feel that up until then, the question of God, I was kind of, you know, I was agnostic. How can you possibly know? And how can you, you know, why would you have faith? Why can't you just go in uncertainty? The burden of uncertainty had a certain nobility to me. But at this point, I thought, well, maybe I should become an atheist. And so I started to read atheist philosophers. And one of them was the Marquis de Sade.

And he was the only atheist philosopher to this day, maybe Foucault. He was the only atheist philosopher who made sense to me.

Everybody else, I thought, you know, you cannot maintain a moral stance. You can be a moral person and be an atheist because you're basically what Nietzsche said, you're living in the shadow of a dead god. Yes, absolutely. But you can't be more than make sense. Yeah, well, Raskolnikov had figured that out, or Dostoevsky had figured that out. And that's one of the things that's so absolutely powerful about that novel is that Dostoevsky was such a genius, right, because he set Raskolnikov up

with every metaphysical reason to commit the crime, every personal reason to commit the crime, right? Every opportunity to commit the crime. And then he commits the crime and he gets away with it. Like it's perfect. And then everything collapses around him because it turns out that he does violate this intrinsic moral order. There is no such thing as the perfect crime, even though he could have got away with it. He ends up killing someone innocent, which is...

an inevitable consequence of starting to wander down that road, right? Dostoevsky had all of that. He's the perfect counter enlightenment thinker because he does exactly as you're suggesting. He does exactly what the Marquis de Sade does. He says, "Oh, I see. So there's no final arbiter."

Oh, I see. That really means I can do whatever I want. Yes, yes. He used to stand in front of a painting by Hans Holbein of the dead Christ in which Christ is buried. He's in his coffin and he's looking through the earth at him.

And he's so entirely dead that Dostoevsky loved the painting because he thought it was the best argument against Christianity and he wanted to confront it. And that's why he gets such wonderful arguments in Brothers Karamazov, because he confronted all the hardest arguments. So that was my leap of faith. I read the Marquis de Sade and I thought, that's right. He's absolutely right. If there is no God, this is the world of sadomasochism, of torment, of torture for pleasure.

that looks like hell to me and I'm going to go home by another way. I'm turning around and I'm just going... That was my leap of faith. My leap of faith was... Why do you think you reject it? Why did you reject it? Because look what's happening now. We have this weird marriage of licentiousness and power, mad striving, and they go together by necessity because there's no licentiousness without an accompanying tyranny because someone has to mop up the responsibility. But then you might say, but you might say...

like Raskolnikov did, you might say like the pleasure worshipers do. It's like, you know, fuck it. Nothing matters. Why shouldn't I just pursue my whim? Why should I make that my identity? Because all these identity crises that we're seeing now are nothing but the elevation of whim to the highest possible place, right? Why aren't I identical with my

momentary sexual proclivity, fluid though it may be. You know, like that's a real question, right? And what do you put in? Okay, so why did you decide not to, I mean, you've got the logic for it now. You accept the conclusions that Desaad put in front of you.

But you rejected that like you rejected Raskolnikov's triumph to some degree. Why do you think you rejected it? You know, my only answer to this is what I consider to be Jesus' hardest saying. He says, to them who have, it will be given, and to them who have not, even what they have will be taken away. Something was inside me that looked at that

And, and, you know, I thought, you know, it's pornography. It's his, he wrote his philosophy in sadomasic pornography. Some of it was kind of a turn on. I thought it was kind of exciting. And yet I, it horrified me. It made me think, no, you know, I'm just, it, it was just that thing. There was something inside me that rejected that. And I don't know, you know, CS Lewis says, nobody knows any story, but his own. And I don't know if everybody has that thing inside him. I really don't. It,

Oh, yes, I think everyone... I hope so. Well, I don't think there's any difference between that and the essence of consciousness itself. Now, I've thought about this a lot, because I know, for example, that there are families where the tendency for the proclivity towards antisocial and psychopathic behavior is transmitted, and I know that there's a genetic proclivity for that. Now, that doesn't mean a determinism.

Right? And so it's certainly the case that you could say, well, the constraints around our relationship with the good vary substantively from individual to individual. But I don't think it matters in the final analysis because it looks to me like this is the truth of the matter. It's something like you're given your talents and they differ widely from person to person. But you're given your talents and your impediments and those vary too. But

With every talent comes a corresponding impediment. You know, you see this in the rich man, the story of the parable of the rich man, who has to give up everything that he has. Now, you know, Christ doesn't tell him that there's something wrong with money.

What he says, he does an analysis. The guy says, I'm miserable. And Christ says, well, you know, are you doing the right thing? Do you honor your parents? Do you abide by the commandments? Are you living a good life? And the guy says, yeah, like I seem to be a good guy. I'm like, I'm checking off those boxes. So I got the dogma thing going down. I'm adhering to it. And Christ says, and I think in some sorrow, it's like, well...

you're screwed. Like, you have to radically revalue your entire life. And that probably means you have to give up everything that you've accrued because it's not working for you. And the disciples themselves, they say in the aftermath of that, they say, oh, well, if that's the price of salvation, no one will pay it.

So it's not a point to the fact that the money itself in and of itself is the problem. And the parable of the unjust steward also makes that crystal clear because Christ says directly that often the people who are just pursuing money are wiser and more moral than those who claim dogmatic moral virtue, right? So that's...

Crystal clear. Yeah, yeah. But it is a question. I mean, you know, think of the blessings I did have in my life, cheap among them, a wife I loved so dearly and who loved me back and a profession I loved. I mean, I love to write and I love beauty. I still, I'm still a kind of beauty monger. I love

culture and the things that work and sing. And so I had so many things that caused me to turn away from ugliness and cruelty that maybe it simply was enough life experience to do that. I was a young man in many ways, but I was not chronologically young. I was 30 already. And I think it just made me turn back. Well, that also says that you had higher order forms of

Even pleasure, let's say, beckoning to you, you know, that affiliation with beauty, that's a good counterposition to the most aimless form of idiot, sadistic hedonism, because it's a higher form of pleasure. You know, it's like Jocko Willink discovering the pleasure of mentorship as opposed to the pleasure of domination. You know, I mean, there's something to be said for being able to pound someone out. You know, it beats the hell out of being weak and useless. Getting pounded out, yeah.

Well, absolutely. And then you also said, you also, and you pointed to this a couple of times in our conversation, you also talked about the love that you still had and still have for your wife. And so what role did that play?

capacity for love and that experience of love, especially within the bounds of a committed relationship, what role did that have in orienting you and guiding you like through that period of misery, but even later than that? And why do you think that's still alive for you?

Well, it has it had a double role. I mean, one is, of course, love is civilizing and it just is a wonderful pleasure. As you say, it's a higher pleasure. But the other thing about my wife is that I picked her up hitchhiking and I wasn't even driving a car. She was a very beautiful woman and she was hitchhiking. And I thought, I've got to go get my car. And I ran up to get my car and drove around the block at 50 miles an hour so I could get to her before anybody else.

She sat down in my car. That's a very creepy beginning. In those days, it wasn't as creepy in those days. No, no, that's true. No, no, absolutely, absolutely. It definitely wasn't. But she sat down in the car and the experience was exactly like if you've ever done a jigsaw puzzle and you've been looking for a piece for 20 minutes without finding it and then you find it and it goes in. It's this very quiet sense of, ah, you know.

And the fact that I recognize that, and now it's many years later, at least 10 years later, and I'm still absolutely amazed

romantically head over heels with her meant to me that I was capable of perceiving a spiritual reality honestly. Right, right, right. So this is one of the problems I've always had with the postmodernists. They talk about the meaninglessness of language, but I understand what they're saying. And so obviously, except with Derrida, who had the integrity to write absolute gibberish, they actually are disproving their own point. And they talk about

basically the fact that we can't know anything, but we can, we can know if I go North, I get to Canada. If I go South, I get to Mexico. We can't know anything purely by words. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so I really did have some kind of trust in myself. I simply could not break through my milieu, which was so default, at least agnostic and really atheistic. Right, right, right. The funny thing is that

The other thing about this too, by the way, is being a bit of a tough guy. I thought that in my misery, when I cracked up, to embrace God, even though it was logical, was a crutch. So how would I know whether I had embraced him in reality or just because I wanted to get out of this incredible pain I was in? And so I couldn't do it. And when years later, I was now a very happy person. My career took off. Everything started to go right.

I still had that logic and something else was, was true as well, which is that I had been a real Freudian. I had grown up in that real core Freudian world and all the art stank because everybody's trying to prove your mother was to blame for everything and all that. And, and,

I didn't come to feel that what Freud said was utter nonsense. I came to feel that the details of what he said were utter nonsense, that the structure of the relationship between a therapist or a mentor and a client or, you know, a son or a friend or whatever. I thought he got a lot of that quite right. The idea of a transference and all this.

which made me feel that all of the insights I had had in therapy that I thought were salvific had not been. And what had been salvific was the loving relationship I had had with this older man who had taken the place of a father who has not been very helpful.

And it was actually the love that had saved me. And I began to believe in psychology. Well, that's relationship again, eh? Yep. Yep. And it made me feel that psychology is a story, that stories give us the ability to take the ineffable and move it around a little bit. Yeah. Definitely. Right. So you split up things that are actually unified into pieces that you can move. And yeah.

That brought me back to God, and I ultimately, as an experiment, and it comes back to fiction again, how much I love fiction. I was reading, I don't know if you've ever read the Patrick O'Brien novels. They're just wonderful seafaring adventure stories about the Napoleonic Wars. They're absolutely brilliant stories.

Hmm. No, no, I don't know of them. And in them, there's a very intellectual character named Maturin, who's an ugly little man, but very brilliant and kind of a spy. And I kind of admired him and identified with him a little bit. And there's just a scene, he's a Catholic, and there's a scene where he was falling asleep. And the line is, he said a prayer and went to sleep. And I was reading in bed.

And I thought, well, if Matron can say a prayer before he goes to sleep, so can I. And I just thanked God for the journey I had come out of, this horrible darkness that I thought was the end. I thought I was going to kill myself. Instead, I had come out and here I was. Now I had two children. My career was great. I was so happy to be with my beloved wife. I was living in a wonderful place. And I thanked God and it changed my life. I woke up the next morning and

Everything was brighter. Everything was clearer. The details of life. I called it, I christened it the joy of my joy because I realized up until then I had been happy. That's the definition of gratitude, man. Yeah. So you, you, three things you pointed to there that we should take apart. Maybe we can close with this. So the first is, you know, one of the primary Freudian accusations and the Marx did this too, was that religion was just a,

what would you say, a shield against death anxiety, you know, or a sop for the victimized poor, right? So that would be Marx. But Freud, a little bit more trenchant, it's like, well, it's a shield of meaning the weak use to protect themselves against the ultimate reality of pointless death, right? And people like Ernest Becker made much of that in his Denial of Death, which is actually really a great book, even though it's fundamentally wrong. It's a great book. But, you know, there's something really important

not wise about that perspective. So, and here's like, here's three arguments against that from someone who really admires Freud, by the way. First of all, if that was the case, why bother with hell? Because hell, medieval people were as scared as hell, of hell as modern people are of death. The evidence for that's clear. And you might say, well, hell was just a convenient place to put your enemies. It's like, no, no, no.

That's not a good analysis. So if it's just a death anxiety shield, then why decorate it with this terrible moral obligation and the reality of hell? So that's a big problem for that theory. And then you have two other problems, which is, well, you're supposed to hoist your cross

as a Christian believer, and there literally isn't anything worse than that by definition. Because it means you have to stand up to the mob, even if they're your brothers, that you have to forsake your family in pursuit of ethical truth,

That you have to suffer torment, physical and metaphysical, and that you have to face the reality of hell itself. It's like, sorry, guys, that is not a defense against death anxiety. Not least because I think you can make a very powerful case that confronting malevolence is worse than confronting death. Yes. We know this because people are rarely traumatized by a brush with death.

And they are routinely traumatized by a brush with malevolence. So even on those grounds, you can see that the reality of evil is more trenchant and salient than the reality of death. So that Freudian argument, it's just not right. He got that wrong. This is where Freud indulges in quackery a little bit. He's interviewing 20 hysterical men.

Victorian Viennese and he decides that God is a projection of the Father and he says it very definitively and you think like, hey, you're welcome to your opinion. But it really, what you're talking about to me is like saying that you believe in bread to forestall the fear of hunger. You know, C.S. Lewis points out that we don't have any desires that don't have an answer. All our desires have an answer. In fact,

in the world, everything that we hunger for is actually there. And this is one of my problems with the evolutionary biologists who think that they can trace the creation of morality. And my point about that is it's like saying that because I have eyes that

I've invented light, you know, I've invented the human experience of light perhaps, but not light itself. And it's the same thing with the moral sense that we have. You can say it's a result of evolution. That's fine. But it's a result of evolution like the eye in relationship to something that exists, which is the moral order. And, and I think that these arguments really do fall apart because

Once you begin to have a realistic view of God and not the sort of happy, you know, yellow face with a smile on it. Right, right, right. So much. Right. And I have to tell you that weeks after my baptism, my wife, who now knows me to my foot soles, turned to me and she said, you are such a different person. You are just...

Filled with joy and relaxation. And knowing God has been joy on joy for me, I have to tell you. This is one of the least quoted lines in the gospel, is Jesus said, I'm telling you things so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete. And somehow religion manages to turn this into this tormenting experience.

struggle with your sexual desires or whatever. But no, I actually do think this journey toward the self that you were made to be is a very joyful journey. And every time you take a step on it, your joy and by joy, I don't mean happiness. I don't mean again, that smiley face. I mean what the poets, you know, the vitality of life and, and that like in love, the only evidence for love is, is,

over time experience over time is the evidence for love. And I think that's true of God too. Ultimately, there's no proof of God. There's only experience over time as, as you get to know him and it develops in your life. And it,

I highly recommend it. That's all I can say. Well, I think that's an excellent place to close. It's a timely place to close. I think one of the things that we could discuss on the Daily Wire Plus side, for all of you who might be inclined to join us there, is I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about the overlap between evolutionary views and potential religious views, because I think there's something interesting there. And I'd like to talk probably a little bit more about

this idea of gratitude and joy and how those things are linked together. So if you're interested, everyone watching and listening, if you're interested in continuing this discussion, you could do that on the DailyWare Plus side. We'll talk for another half an hour. In the meantime, thank you very much for sitting down and talking to me for 90 minutes. We got deep into many of the things that I was hoping we would cover today. And, uh,

It was a pleasure getting to know you a bit better. And thank you to everyone who's watching and listening for your time and attention and for the Daily Wire Plus folks who made this conversation possible. We'll see you in a bit, Andrew, and bye, everybody else. Thanks very much.

Imagine earning a degree that prepares you with real skills for the real world. Capella University's programs teach skills relevant to your career so you can apply what you learn right away. Learn how Capella can make a difference in your life at capella.edu.