485. The Rebirth of God: Pathology and Promise | Jamie Wheal
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Hello, everybody.

I had the opportunity today to speak with Jamie Wheal, who's author of Recapture the Rapture, and we talked about his book and his thoughts and my thoughts and my new book as well today. I have a book coming out in November called We Who Wrestle with God, and

Jamie and I are walking parallel paths in many ways, and that's not surprising because like every historical moment has its zeitgeist, right? Its spirit. And that speaks through many people simultaneously. And we talked about exactly what that.

might mean. Jamie concentrates, for example, in this book on what's come to be known as the meaning crisis and associates that with the Nietzschean death of God, which is the appropriate association, the demolition of the higher unity that, say, held Western culture together and gave it its enthusiastic impetus over the last 2,000 years. We've exhausted that in a sense, and because of that, people are

hedonistic and nihilistic and hopeless and anxious and lost. And that's not a wonderful condition. Now, one of the consequences of such conditions, mythologically speaking, is that it's at those times when something new is born. That's why Christ is born at the darkest point of the year, for example. It's very common

mythological motif, and we examine today what it is that died, I would say, and also what it is that's in the difficult process of being born, and what beneficial and monstrous forms that might take, and how that's making itself manifest in the popular and intellectual culture. And so, join us for that inquiry. So, one of the centerpieces of the argument that you make in this book, Recapture the Rapture,

is derived from Nietzsche's famous observation about the death of God. So I thought maybe we could start by talking about that. It seems to me that if you wanted to secularize that discussion, you'd do it in something approximating the following manner: You'd assume that there's only two possibilities, and one possibility would be that our perceptions and our thoughts and our goal-directed striving

moves towards something approximating a higher order or transcendental unity, or it doesn't. Those are the only two options as far as I can tell. And the idea of a monotheistic God at the bottom of everything or at the top is an elaboration of the idea that all the things that human beings are oriented towards come together in a unity. And the problem with questioning that hypothesis is that

you fall into the problem that there's no organizing principle at all. That's the problem of nihilism. Or, alternatively, you fall into the problem that if there's nothing that unites our striving at the highest level, then we have to live

in psychological and social conflict because the various things that drive us will be antagonistic to one another. So you fall into the problem of nihilism or a disunified plurality. Another problem emerges too, and both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky pointed to this because they were thinking along parallel tracks, which is that if the hypothesis that has served as the highest unity

disappears and a unity is psychologically and socially necessary, then other forms of unity will emerge to replace the dead value. And so,

I would say, and this also follows Nietzsche and Dostoevsky's thought, that one of the things that we've seen happening in consequence of the death of God, apart from nihilism and plurality, is the insistence that power, for example, unifies. That's a Marxist insistence or a postmodern insistence that the only unifying narrative is one of power.

And so, the unity problem looks to me like it's inescapable, whether you approach it from a religious perspective or a secular perspective. And that's the landscape of the problem as far as I can tell, like all of those different consequences, let's say, of the death of God are problematic, to say the least. I'll close with one other observation, because it's in some ways what you're striving towards as far as I can tell in this book.

If there's a unity at the pinnacle, let's say, then what is its nature and also what should be its nature? So I would say, for example, that attempting to unify yourself or a society on the basis of power is a counterproductive enterprise. That's not a principle that's going to produce success.

an iterable game, a continually playable game, an expandable game or a desirable game. So, well, those are some, you know, I've been meditating on what you've written and those are some of the thoughts that came to mind. So, I guess I'd be interested in your thoughts on those issues.

Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing, just to clarify, is that everybody knows the God is dead bumper sticker slogan for Nietzsche. Not everybody knows the rest of that paragraph. Yeah, that's for sure. Right? Not everyone knows the rest of the paragraph. So people think of it as sort of like tap dancing on the grave of belief, of piety, that this is a move to modernity and atheism. But it was actually a caution. Nietzsche was saying, hey, you know, modernity is...

killing our gods. But be careful when you kill your god. Because when you kill your god, you rip out the entire social moral construct that underpins faith, devotion, and belief, which I think is what you're speaking about, about the ultimate truth. And when you rip away something that is demanding reverence or submission, and you replace it with merely politicized power games, there can be hell to pay.

Yeah, well, Nietzsche foresaw that directly, claiming that millions of people would die in consequence of the rise of replacement ideologies, let's say. You know, this death of God idea, although Nietzsche in some ways pronounced that as a novel occurrence, you know, a once-in-human-history occurrence, that's not true.

So Mircea Eliade, who's perhaps the world's greatest historian of religions, has documented this occurrence repetitively throughout history. It's a recurring theme, the collapse of the highest unifying order. It's what destroys cultures. They lose faith in their own presuppositions and

and can't undertake the effort necessary to sustain themselves. In consequence, this is so old. So the oldest story we know that we have is called the Enuma Elish, and it's a Mesopotamian creation myth. And it's part of a collection of myths

that emerged around the same time as the Genesis story did and has many of the same narrative themes. You mentioned this in your chat with Elon. Yeah, well, one of the insistences in that story is that careless and fractious sub-deities— that's a good way of thinking about it, you could think about them as motivational states or emotional states, powerful driving forces—

If they're careless and disintegrated, and they lack reverence, they kill the principle upon which they're founded and attempt to live on its corpse. That's a direct pronouncement in the Enuma Elish. It's one of the major plot lines, and it's the prodroma to the return of the goddess of chaos, fundamentally, who returns in that story,

irritated beyond belief that her consort, her orderly consort, has been carelessly dispensed with and determined to produce something akin to the flood of Noah. That's another good analog. This is a very old problem, the idea that there is a central unifying theme.

that has to be attended to and followed by people who want to organize themselves psychologically and socially. And then if that's treated improperly, that would be lack of respect for your mother and father, let's say, from a commandments perspective, or irreverence with regards to the highest value. That there's a pattern to the cataclysm that follows in the wake of that.

You know, it's surprising to me in some ways that that's not more widely known because Iliad wasn't an unknown thinker and he documented this extraordinarily carefully. You know, I talked to Camille Pellia about this at one point. She said something that I found quite striking. So I had familiarized myself with the work of a gentleman named Eric Neumann.

Neumann was Carl Jung's greatest student, which is really saying quite something. And he wrote two very profound books, one called The Great Mother, which is a study of the symbolism of chaos. That's a good way of thinking of productive chaos. It's a study of the symbolism of productive chaos. And another book called The Origins and History of Chaos.

consciousness, which is an elaboration of the hero myth, although much deeper than the sort of treatment, say, meted out to that by Joseph Campbell. And Paglia said straightforwardly that had the Academy, the literary critics in particular, turned to Neumann, Eliade, Jung, instead of Derrida and Foucault, that the entire

intellectual history of the last 50 years would be profoundly different and we wouldn't be in the culture war that we're in now. Now that was very striking to me because she was the only person that I had come across who was a very astute literary critic who knew Neumann's work deeply and the associated works that surround it, including Eliade's work. But we know that Joseph Campbell's work, for example, has had quite a cultural effect.

And I would say one that's been at least to some degree reunifying. All of that work exists in contradistinction to the postmodern insistence that there's no higher order narrative. Because that's the fundamental claim of postmodernism, right? There's no unifying metanarrative. And that's...

That's another reflection of this idea of the death of God. Well, I mean, to be fair, though, to that movement, right, it was critiques of the middlemen wielding narratives in unclear, unjust, or unilateral ways. So when you hold out the monad, there is some ultimate unifying narrative.

ordering truth or principle by which we should all come together, perhaps, right? Perhaps. Super, super interesting point of inquiry. But the trick is the priest class and who gets to position themselves as privileged or preferred intermediaries. Because those guys haven't always done a great job. Well, you see that dynamic in the Gospels. Well, because the

The part of the underlying structure of the Passion story is the persecution and then crucifixion of Christ at the hands of, really, there are more actors, but three of the central actors are the class of Pharisees, scribes, and lawyers. And

The Pharisees are religious hypocrites, and they're exactly the ones who employ the idea of a higher-order value.

to do nothing but further their own status and power, right? And Christ criticizes the Pharisees constantly, pointing out that their religious devotion, so to speak, did absolutely nothing at all except provide for them the highest positions of status and power. The scribes, as far as I can tell, in the biblical narrative are akin to the modern academics who attempt to substitute intellectual inquiry for

what would you say, for exploration and reverence. That's a good way of thinking about it. And the lawyers. Yeah, exactly. And they're also self-serving, but they're self-serving in a more Luciferian manner, I would say, because the proclivity of the Pharisees is to use the religious enterprise to foster their own social status. The proclivity of the

of the intellectual scribe types is to place their own intellect, worship over their own intellect in the highest possible position. Then you have the lawyers, and they're the ones who use legalism, again, in the service of their own narrow and self-focused ends. And so that postmodern dilemma that you point to, which is the proclivity of the

sacred enterprise to be captured by the power seekers that's also a very that's an also a very ancient problem you see that in ancient egyptian mythology for example so the figure of seth who's the evil brother of the king is the luciferian figure that's always the shadow of the

He's like Loki.

rule as a consequence of authority and ability, but some of it's going to devolve into a power game. The problem, as far as I can tell, with the postmodernists, one of many, is that they concluded that there was no other game than power. And that's an unbelievably dangerous presumption. I mean, you can understand its logic. You laid it out to some degree. There's no shortage of corruption.

wherever you look, inside and out. But that doesn't mean that everything is corrupt. And it also doesn't mean that power is the fundamental principle that should unite everything. And of course, the question emerges, and you are exploring this in your book, if it's not nothing, nihilism and disunity, and it's not power, compulsion and force, then what should be at the pinnacle? And that's a, well, that's the fundamental question.

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Yeah, I mean, hopefully it's gnosis. Hopefully it's direct connection to that which is greater than our knowing and a submission to that, but a willing submission with autonomy, not mediated by corruptible middlemen. So you were speaking, you know, like bring all of this down, because this also sounds very Abrahamic to me. Like you feel like you're sourcing from the Old Testament

code-based, right, deference to unifying power or authority. And I'm more curious about the New Testament. So for instance, like just recently, let's just bring it down for listeners, right? Recently, Louisiana, I think maybe Tennessee, but definitely Louisiana has talked about mandating 10 Commandments

in classrooms, things like that. And there's a whole chunk of America that feels like, yes, that is an important return to definitive values versus this choose-your-own-adventure mishmash of whatever feels good for me. And that tends to be an evangelical proclivity, that requirement. It's kind of interesting because they're Protestants. It's interesting to see that particular branch of Christianity change.

develop this insistence on a return to those fundamental stated values let's say yeah but it is super interesting do you know um what's his what's his name uh he wrote fantasyland um

Fantasyland, 500 Years of How America Went Haywire. Kurt Anderson, he was at Harvard and then he did Studio 360, but he's a sort of popular intellectual historian. And he talks about how, in some respects, the Southern Baptist evangelical Pentecostal movement, right? He uses the Scopes Monkey Trial as kind of a pivot point. Almost became...

a pre-Reformation retrenchment of Christian faith because the mainline Protestant faith, the Anglican, Episcopalian, Lutheran, etc., were oriented with the North.

And those faiths from the Scots-Irish, you know, Appalachian migrations and all the sort of history that had led to it became, there was a sort of schism. And the Scopes Monkey Trial was kind of that, you know, evolution versus creationism. That was partly intellectual and partly geographical. Yes, and basically the sort of aftershocks of the Civil War. Mm-hmm.

And that was when we got this break. And that is how you have, you know, what was the YouGov survey? It was something like 56% of Americans believe in demonic possession. Like America is... It's because they watch their politicians. America is a uniquely, profoundly faith-based place compared to Western Europe, compared to all these other places. And characterized by continual revivals of that spirit, right? Yeah. But if we go back to Louisiana and the Ten Commandments and the classroom, why are we posting a deeply ancient...

Quite anachronistic, almost Hammurabi's code level Abrahamic thing. "Not the Sermon on the Mount, not that turn the other cheek and love thy neighbor, not the blessed of the meek and humble, for they shall inherit the earth." Right? There is a New Testament gospel good news.

that is being eclipsed. So it almost feels like the posting of the Old Testament, of the Ten Commandments these days, is almost a shibboleth, right? It's almost a sorting mechanism, which is if you are pre-Reformation, and Sam Harris talks about this with Islam, right? That's his main critique of Islam is they never went through a Reformation, right? So you've got medieval sentiments that

that haven't been updated. Well, yeah, the danger of that, I suppose, is the reduction of morality to abiding by a code. So, okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. I mean, I have some sympathy for the literalism of the Protestants, even insofar as that might have produced a phenomenon like the monkey trial that you referred to, because

What the evangelists have been concerned about, and rightly so, is that an unthinking Darwinism

poses a tremendous threat to the integrity of the moral code that the West is predicated on, and there's absolutely no doubt about that. Now, what that means about Darwinism, that's a whole other complicated question, but I can understand— And specifically biological Darwinism, not social Darwinism? Specifically biological Darwinism, yeah, yeah. Well, because it is very difficult to reconcile the claims of the—especially the—

the more naive claims you might say of the evolutionary biologists with the Genesis account, for example. It's a very difficult thing to do. What do you mean when you say that? The naive claims about Genesis? Well, it's not as if our biological Darwinism has cracked the problem of life.

It's a theory that isn't complete, and the details of it are still being worked out. And that's very damaging often. So, for example, you have, this is just one example, you have claims of people like Dawkins that reproduction can be reduced to sex, and that sex can be reduced to the proclivity of genetic material to replicate itself. And that has all sorts of metaphysical implications.

implications and those metaphysical implications are very damaging they're they promote a certain kind of hopeless nihilism in the sense of it's just it's all just random creation destruction no point of purpose no teleological output partly that and partly or or and partly the notion that

even within that were pawns of these massive forces that are reducible, let's say to something approximating the desire of genes, the desire, I know that's improper terminology, to replicate themselves. Although if pushed Dawkins would say that the genes have no desire, but that's not the point because his book, The Selfish Gene, what would you say? The sense that that desire is there is implicit in the text. And so

That has very troublesome metaphysical implications because people can't live in the absence of some relationship with transcendent meaning. And they need that meaning to help them bear the suffering of their life without becoming demoralized, without becoming corrupt. This isn't optional. And I think one of the things the new atheists did very badly wrong was fail to take the problem that they were addressing with due seriousness.

So, either as an existential problem, you know, although Sam Harris wrestles with that to some degree, because Harris definitely believes in the existence of something approximating transcendent evil, right, which is a religious stance, all things considered. But

The problem of meaning can't just be dispensed with by reference to something like our deterministic relationship to a set of selfish genes. So basically, are you saying that in the God is dead moment and in the rise of the new atheists and them sort of thinking that the battle had been won, that they neglected to replace it with a sufficiently robust...

an inspiring alternate story because random selection, random selection of selfish genes is inadequate to guide culture and the human. Well, it's also not random. There's sexual selection.

Darwin concentrated on sexual selection to a large degree, although for about 100 years after Darwin, the evolutionary biologists tended to avoid the topic of sexual selection because it didn't fit so nicely in with the notion of random evolution. There's nothing bloody random about sexual selection. Butterflies can detect departures from symmetry on the part of their partners at one part in a million years.

Like their selection for beauty is by no means accidental. And it's certainly the case that conscious choice has selected human morphology down to its finest details.

That's not random at all. Now, the mutation process is random, and I know Dawkins knows perfectly well as well. So, you're suggesting there's a bias towards selection of goodness, truth, and beauty, for instance? Well, I would actually say that there's likely a selection towards something approximating the embodiment of that higher order unity that we've been speaking of.

So, I mean, I can give you an example of that. It's like that William Blake quote, Tiger, tiger, burning bright, thy fearful symmetry, right? Fearful symmetry, right, is noticeable. The patterns, the harmonics, Pythagorean music in the spheres, right? Yeah, well, you can think about that in relationship to something like the hero myth. I mean, it's certainly no stretch of the imagination to presume that men who embody the heroism that's part and parcel of the hero narrative are much more attractive to women, obviously.

I mean, that's the basis of every romantic adventure story that's ever been written. And so there is something like selection bias in the direction of the same patterns that are portrayed in our most fundamental narratives. And none of that's accidental. And I would say that does imply something like a relationship between sexual selection and embodiment of the virtues that are part of our deepest stories, because we

Part of the pattern of the hero is the portrayal, the embodiment of existential courage in the face of life's catastrophes. Okay, so this is a beautiful point here, because to me this distills your exact role in the information and influence space. Because we've talked about two things so far, right? One was the...

erosion of the monad, a unifying truth. And then you've also just talked about kind of in some respects, not biological determinism, but sort of the way things are, right? The Chad, high testosterone, heroic male being true and just, right? The natural outcome. It would be natural that women swoon, it would be natural that he leads his people, those kinds of things. So you are holding in my understanding of your work,

a deep Western Judeo-Christian and sort of enlightenment value space. Would that feel accurate to you? Because, and you're saying, hey, so there are important things here, but how do we, how do you, for instance, speak these and not end up as a battering ram in the culture wars, right? Not a useful idiot, a useful genius, right? To

Christian ethno-nationalism, seven kingdoms, right? Like jihadi for Jesus peeps. Or biological determinism and grist for the mill of the incels, right? So you're speaking language that comes from a much deeper place, but in our current moment of hot takes and retweets and rage bait, what you're saying has the capacity

to get weaponized into some very ugly things that I don't think are from the heart of what you're saying. Well, that happens with hero mythology all the time, right? Partly because it can get fractionated. I suppose part of the attraction of the ethno-national Christian movement that's developing, let's say, on the right, which in some ways is another form of Pharisaism because it's the attempt by the bad actors on the prejudiced,

side of the equation to harness the power of Christianity for their own self-aggrandizement. But there's an attraction in that, too, that's deeper than that, because... And just base tribalism, us versus them, right? Well, that and the fact... Yes, definitely, but that also and the fact that compared to a dependent and neurotic male, an aggressive and warrior-like male is attractive. And so...

in so far as our culture has done everything it could to demoralize young men, in part because of, what would you say,

an implicit critique of the oppressive patriarchy, all it does is increase the attractiveness of aggression to the young men who are demoralized. And the Christian nationalist types are capitalizing on that. It's not surprising. I'm not trying to justify it because it's a fragmented story. I mean, the hero, the archetypal hero, has a warrior element, but that warrior element is conjoined with

an extreme proclivity for self-sacrifice, generous social conduct, and reciprocal altruism. Yes. So, and that's an unbelievably important part of the story. Now, you even see this, by the way,

in female pornographic fantasies, because we know the landscape of female pornographic fantasy, which tends to be literary, is the object of desire is a man with a well-developed capacity for mayhem. So that, well, the standard characters, the Google engineers mapped this when they were looking at pornography use online in a very good book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts. The canonical hero of female pornography is

vampire, werewolf, pirate, billionaire, surgeon. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Right, right. But what happens in the narrative is that that monster, that beast, is enticed into a reciprocal relationship that's permanent. So there's the wildness and the monstrosity part of the masculine psyche that's being portrayed in the fantasies, but then that's something that's

you could say in a way, domesticated, although that's not exactly, that's not a perfect term for it, but brought into productive relationship with, well, with a woman in the pornographic fantasy, but then the broader community. So there's a balance, there's a very tight balance, and it's one that women are trying to strike all the time in relationship to men, is they want men who are capable and

and even capable of being dangerous, but they want that encapsulated within... It's the soothing of the savage beast, right? There's a need to harness that kind of unrestrained or unconstrained vitalism. Yeah, to harness it. Right, right, right. Well, and you see this in the Abraham story in particular, because Abraham is a relatively...

sheltered and privileged individual at the beginning of the journey. He's 70 years old when it starts. And God comes to him as the voice of adventure, right? Because God tells Abraham that if he goes out in, that he's to go out into the world to leave his zone of comfort

Right? To occupy that exploratory space that's maximally rewarding and to expand himself in consequence. And that that's to be done in preference to the comfort that he already experiences. That's very interesting. It's a very interesting characterization of God. And God makes Abraham an offer, basically, which I think is an offer that's very much worth thinking about from an evolutionary biology perspective.

God tells Abraham that if he abides faithfully by the spirit of adventure, and he makes the sacrifices necessary to transform himself in that endeavor, just as you have to change when you take on more responsibility and more adventure, that four things will happen to him. His life will become a blessing to him, that's a pretty good deal, and genuine blessing to him, that

His name will become recognized and admired among his peers, but for valid reasons, so he's not a narcissist or a psychopath, that he will establish something of lasting permanence, and that he'll do that in a way that's good for everyone else. Now, is that the explicit promise? That's the covenant. You bet. That's the covenant. Before he jumps?

That's the offer that's on the table when the spirit of adventure makes itself manifest. Good quote. Well, that's what God tells Abraham when he's attempting to entice him into the adventure. Because the question that's posed in the Abrahamic story at the beginning is the question that Dostoevsky asked about socialism in Notes from Underground. You know, Dostoevsky's critique of socialism, which was a situation

successful socialism was essentially this. He said that if you provided people with all of the everything they needed and wanted at hand, he said, so they had nothing to do but busy themselves with the

reproduction of the species and the eating of cakes, right? So it's a hedonistic paradise, an infantile hedonistic paradise. Well, what could be better than that? And Dostoevsky's response was that if you provided people with nothing but that, they would smash it to bits just so that something interesting would happen because that there's an impetus towards upward moving development that

overrides everything else, including the mere satiation, let's say, of material needs. That's also exemplified in the image of Jacob's ladder, this sort of upward extending pathway to the transcendent that Jacob determines to traverse when he decides that he's going to change his life.

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Well, so here we've got higher and lower. You're saying that might be an aspirational kind of soul urge, right? But then like Bob Sapolsky's work at Stanford could also just be dopaminergic novelty seeking in the sense that we flatline when we're faced with everything we always want. It is dopaminergic novelty seeking. We're hardwired to get the 4x return on what's new.

Yeah. Different. So we discount current value. So that system that you're describing, the dopamine system, that's an appetitive reward system and it signifies the possibility of consumatory reward. So it's a quest system. And it's not a cognitive system precisely because the dopaminergic system is...

grounded in the hypothalamus, which is an unbelievably old part of the brain. It's right on top of the spinal cord. It's the basic motivational control system of the entire brain. And the dopaminergic system is instantiated in that. Half of the hypothalamus is...

concerned with fundamental motivational states like thirst and hunger, lust, defensive aggression, etc. The other half is focused on exploratory behavior. So, and that's approach behavior, that's movement forward. And so that, if you think about that, the action of that system, that dopaminergic exploratory system, that is what's instantiated in hero mythology. And it is, it's a fundamental movement

source of the kind of reward that people really like to pursue, but it is associated with exploration and expansion, not with satiation and consummatory reward, right? It's a very, very different notion of reward. You know, when you said, is this—I can't remember precisely your wording—is this nothing but—I know you didn't exactly say that—the action of the dopaminergic system, I would say, well—

My sense is that, and I think we're on the cusp of this, is that we're going to see that our theological presuppositions and our biological presuppositions are pointing in precisely the same direction. As the neurosciences got more sophisticated, that's become more and more obvious. Well, yes, and that feels like the sort of implicit theme of our conversation so far. We've been talking about the monad, and we've been talking about high-T heroes. Yeah, right. And so, potentially...

Is it that our science will finally catch up to our philosophy and theology? Or is it that we write convenient just-so stories to explain what is actually being dictated at a more primal base level, beyond our can and beyond our will and motivation? I don't have a point of view on that, but I'm curious about it. Well, I don't think they're convenient just-so stories because I think they're as correct as anything can be correct. I mean, let me give you an example of that. So,

The hero myth that's laid out in the passion story has, as part of its structure, the insistence that there's nothing that's more transformative than the willingness to embrace the full horror of life. Right. Because that's what the passion story is. It's an archetypal tragedy taken to a metaphysical level. And it's an archetypal tragedy because...

Christ technically undergoes virtually all the varieties of suffering that are possible. Yeah, absolutely. Comprehensively. Or even welcomes it, which is a very strange thing. But that's not where it ends, because there's a mythological surround of image and story that accompanies the passion, that also insists that after Christ is crucified and died, he harrows hell, and that's something like a...

forthright confrontation with the domain of malevolence itself. But the story is very straightforward. If you think about it from a developmental perspective or a biological perspective, the story is that there's no way that you can adapt to life without embracing all of its horrors, including the proclivity, the human proclivity for evil. And then there's an additional addendum to that, which is

the degree to which you'll be redeemed is proportionate to the courage that you embody in that confrontation. And I think that looks to me just to be correct. So it's not a just-so story, unless life itself is a just-so story, because the alternative hypothesis is that you could adapt property to life by shrinking from its most aversive elements. And that's preposterous. I can't

see any circumstances at all under which you could make a credible case that that could possibly be true. Because even when children are trying to expand their competence, let's say, in a relatively incremental manner,

What they're always doing when they do that is putting themselves on the edge of their ability and flirting with catastrophe. You know, you can do that foolishly and dangerously, and sometimes that's useful, but you can do it in a manner that's incremental and sensible, and it works just as well. Or even better, right? I mean, play is arguably just the ability to make mistakes without fear.

That's what all animals do, all mammals do, wolves do it, kids do it. Right, and that might be also the highest form of engagement. Well, and volitional novelty generation. So rather than just faceless, formless, pointless evolution, creation, destruction, right? When volition, when free will comes into the mix, we get to create new. We get to explore the adjacent possible.

Well, and that seems to be no different than the biblical notion, for example, that human beings are constructed so that the role they play is one of co-creation. I mean, that's what's implied. And stewardship. That's what's implied in the initial Genesis narrative when there's an insistence that

We first see God characterized as the creator of all things, and then we see human beings characterized as made in the image of God, which obviously implies some lower resolution

embodiment of that creative capacity. And that seems to me to be perfectly accurate. And I do think that that's as good a definition of what consciousness constitutes as anything that's ever been described. I mean, we are playing constantly. We play with the possibility that's in front of us exactly the same way that

The God in the initial phases of the Genesis story plays with the "dohu vabohu," which is the chaotic possibility out of which reality itself emerges. And there's a perfect isomorphism there, and as far as I'm concerned, you can map that

We have mapped that neuropsychologically. I mean, the further reaches of that exploration haven't been integrated completely into the culture yet, but it's there. So then you get sort of Stuart Brand's whole earth catalog bit about like, we are as gods, we may as well get good at it. So how do you say isomorphically, we are the same, we are made in the image of, and we are sort of doing another version of that. And how does that not end up in narcissistic inflationism?

That's a great question, but that's also the first question that's dealt with, one of the first questions that's dealt with in the opening chapters of Genesis, because God lays down an injunction to Adam and Eve, which is a very specific injunction. He says you're... He basically tells the first two human beings that they have full freedom in the garden.

to interact with everything that's there, to name it, to steward it, to utilize it, but they're not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And what that means is that they're to abide by the implicit moral order and not pridefully replace it. And that's exactly—see, this is the mistake Nietzsche made, because Nietzsche's

medicament for the death of God was that human beings would have to create their own values. And that's the one thing that God tells Adam and Eve they're not to do in the garden. The notion is it's fairly straightforward, and this is something that Sam Harris has some appreciation for, although not religiously, is that there is an implicit moral order

And that has to be followed. It can't be replaced by the presumptions of human beings. That's partly what Eve does when she sins, is attempt to do that. But you know Elaine Pagel's work and her translations of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls and then the Gnostic Gospels won the National Book Award, right? I mean, that book blew my mind when I read it in grad school, because at that very moment in the Genesis story, right, in one of the apocryphal gospels,

at the moment that Yahweh is bowing up on Adam and Eve and saying, "And who allowed you to eat from the fruit of the tree of good and evil?" Right? That exact moment in booms Sophia, the mother of all this, and says, "And who made you a Yaldabaoth, demiurge, false maker? And why are you flexing on your children?" Yeah, well, that's the Gnostic interpretation, you know, and I would say that's actually

As far as I'm concerned, that's part of the flaw in Pagel's work, is that proclivity towards Gnosticism. Because there's a reason that that original demiurge, let's say, lays down the law. And the reason for that is that there is an implicit moral order. And, you know, you touch on that in your book, in one part in particular, when you talk about the infinite game. Yes. This is another way of conceptualizing the implicit moral order, let's say, is that

And so, for example, if you and I only interact once and I have the chance to take advantage of you for me, there is you could argue in a sense that there's every reason for me to do that. But and so that in any one off interaction, you could say that the appropriate default position, if you're cold and calculating about it, is to take advantage of your partner.

advantage to utilize power and compulsion. Game theory 101. Yeah, exactly. Okay, but you know perfectly well that that rule doesn't apply to iterated games. So we're going to interact with each other repeatedly, especially when that's open-ended. What you get in that situation is the emergence of a whole different set of

of the guiding principles that allow the interactions to continue. So the notion would be... Yeah, to keep playing the game for as long as possible and include as many players as possible. Right, and to have all the players actually playing, which means that they can't be subject to compulsion or force. Because one of the things Jock Panksepp, for example, has documented, and he's done the best work by a large margin on the neurobiology of play,

Panksepp has showed quite clearly that that state of play, which is a highly desirable state and an expansive state, is also relatively fragile in that it can be disrupted by the emergence of any other motivational state. And the outcome has to be uncertain for it to be fun, right? For it to actually be a game and not just a beatdown. It has to be uncertain and there's more than just uncertainty. It has to be uncertain.

And the consequence of playing the game has to be the expansion of skill, not only at that game, but in associated games.

Right. Which is why if you're if you're picking someone to play with, you don't pick someone that you can just easily defeat, which, you know, if victory or power was the name of the game, you'd pick someone. Or like, you know, kids playing basketball or touch football. Right. When the big brothers, you know, enroll the younger brothers and they get their butts kicked and they're like, all right, it's three on five or OK, we'll spot you. Right. Exactly. Or whatever it will be to make the outcome. Right.

Right. Well, uncertain and challenging. Yeah. Right. Right. So we can all play full out and not know how it's going to turn out. Yes. Yes. Because you want that to be a consequence of the game. And it's very interesting to see. And it's very interesting to think through the fact that if children have a choice, if they're even remotely well socialized, they'll pick a fair and challenging game over certain victory. Yes. Well, as far as I'm concerned, that mere fact alone is,

does irreparable damage to the hypothesis that the fundamental motivating force in human endeavor is power. Because if it was power, you'd pick the easy victory every time. Like, why wouldn't you? Because anybody that you can crush is in your control. That's not a game. No one wants to play that game. Not even the victor, unless they're narcissistically psychopathic and immature.

And so it's so interesting because in a free choice situation, children and adults as well will pick a game of optimized challenge over a game of certain victory. And I think that you can...

expand on that, you make that a general principle of motivation. This is exactly the choice that Abraham makes. Our two golden retrievers do that. We have a young puppy who's giant, 90 pounds, and his big sister who's only 60 pounds. And he started being a bully and she stopped playing. And then now all he ever does is flop over and play the submissive to her so they get to play. So they've evened it out. Right, right, right, right. Exactly. And you can see that

As Panksepp showed, mammals in general seem to have a specialized play circuit, and it is regulated by precisely that. So one of the things he demonstrated, which was Nobel Prize worthy as far as I'm concerned, because it was a remarkable discovery, was that if you pair juvenile male rats together in repeated bouts, the dominant rat, so that would be the one has a 10% weight advantage, because that's enough to

allow a rat to reliably pin its opponent, which is what they like to do in their wrestling bouts. If the larger rat doesn't let the smaller rat win at least one third of the time, the smaller rat stops inviting the play bout. And so, I mean, people didn't understand the significance of that. The significance of that is that there's an implicit morality that emerges in consequence of repeated voluntary play. That's a major leak discovery.

And that's part of that implicit moral order. Say that sentence again, please. That there's a morality that emerges in consequence of iterated voluntary play. And it's patterned. So this also makes completely short shrift of any arguments about something approximating moral relativism. It's like, no, no.

Wrong. Why? Because the constraints that exist in the domain of desirable, repeated, iterated play are... It's a very narrow... It's a straight and narrow path. It's a very difficult path to traverse. This is what you're trying to teach kids when you socialize them between the ages of two and four. Because at two, they're still basically...

narrowly egocentric. Impulsive, in-based. Yeah. They want whatever it is they want to be granted now.

regardless of consequences for themselves and the future or other people. That's... Maria Montessori mapped that. It goes from individual, you know, basically acquisitive play to then parallel play. We'll be doing our things beside each other in collaborative play. And then ultimately, potentially, to competitive play. Which is still collaborative. Exactly. Because you have to abide by the rules in competitive play. Let's up the ante and make this more fun. Right, exactly, right. So that's actually that...

Competitive play is actually an intensification of cooperative play, right? Because you set out the rules. Are you suggesting that just baked into, take your pick, it could be mammalian, it could be primate, whatever, but some level of our existence, there is an implicit desire for fairness and...

for reciprocity and for some other what you would be calling in this instance a moral direct. It is the moral direction. I mean you see that you see that in conversation.

I mean, because what happens in a conversation is that each person makes an offering, and the goal of the offering is mutual expansion of apprehension, but also desire to continue the interaction. Well, that's very tightly bounded. So, I can give you an example of that. So, we ran a seminar—this works with any seminar—

You only need, in a seminar, you only need one person who's playing a power game to bring the seminar to a halt. Yes. Right? So, you have a very... Tear it in the punch bowl, man. It only takes one. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, the rule for a seminar should be, well, here's the question we're trying to address...

And then you offer your suggestions as to a solution, and I listen, and I offer mine, and we allow those ideas to wrestle with one another, hopefully aiming at something like a synthesis. And you're not doing that because you want to appear smart or dominant. You're not doing it for some reason other than the direction of the conversation, and everybody in the circle is playing that same game. And then you get an incredibly successful

productive conversation. That's a logos-centered conversation. So you know that... Emergent logos. Exactly. Truth in word. Well, and it's redemptive truth. You know, Christ said in the Gospels that wherever two or more were gathered in his name, he was there. Well, that's what that means. And all the...

Valid members of the psychotherapeutic community understand this, even from a scientific perspective, because one of the things Carl Rogers probably did more to detail this than any other great therapist, his notion and Freud's as well, was that untrammeled communication oriented towards something like death.

improvement was redemptive. It was healing, and that's exactly right. Charles Lim did work at Hopkins on MRIs with jazz musicians. Keith Sawyer's done stuff at UNC Chapel Hill on group flow. In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace.

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Right, and the emergence of something that can only be presenced as we gather. Right, right. Well, you see musicians doing that all the time. For sure. Jazz, Steph Curry, basketball, you know, comebacks, you know, Patriots in the Super Bowl. There are those emergent moments where there is a co-creative emergence that supersedes anything that anybody else singularly brought to the table. Right, right, right. And your point is that you can mark that electrophysiologically. Right.

Well, that it has neurophysiological correlates, for sure. Chickens and eggs, TBD. Yeah, sure. And that, and the interesting way, this was one of Keith Sawyer's students, but they then went to prove that, you know, let's say the autotelic nature, the self-driving motivational nature of these things, you get like, you know, 100 points if you do it by yourself, but you get 300 points if you do it in conjunction with others. It is three times more rewarding.

to co-create that experience than it is to have it in isolation. Yeah, well, that's probably an indication of something like the relative payoff, because...

It's definitely the case. This is partly, too, why the injunction to love your enemies is necessary, because the biggest payoff you're going to get from a genuine discussion is one that you have with someone whose views are maximally different than your own, but who is playing an honest, communicative game. Yes. And so, why is that an enemy? Well, you...

you tend to presume that anybody who varies in their fundamental presumptions from you is on the other side of the fence. But they're also the people that have the most to offer if they're playing a straight game. Yes. And so... Well, can we try that?

well, hopefully we're doing that at least as much as we can. Yeah. Well, I was thinking about that, you know, because it was a fair amount of travel. I came down out of the mountains yesterday, you know, it's a bit of a pilgrimage to come up here. I was thinking of every person who's ever asked me about your work, my thoughts on it, me tracking it, us getting to see you when I was with Adrian Grenier and when you came to Austin and getting to see... That was a crazy experience, by the way, even just walking to that stadium at UT.

the throngs of people convening on that stadium and the way everyone was holding themselves, the way they were walking down the streets, stopping together. There were so many couples. All the young men were wearing blazers. The women were wearing floral long skirts. I said, what the hell is going on here? Is this...

Is this double scheduled with prom? Is graduation happening? I literally had that vibe. And the last time I had been to that stadium and seen anything like that, just that amount of kind of magnetic draw was when John Mayer and the Grateful Dead had played there.

So I was like, what on earth is about to happen? And we went to the stadium and you launched into a very professorial opening. It was Nietzsche, it was Jung, it was all these things. And I could sense the kind of Texas crowd not necessarily having their footing. And it wasn't until you shifted into the Cain and Abel story that you could feel a palpable drop in the audience.

And all of these wonderful Texans who had been gathered were like, ah, it's Sunday school. We're going to get a Bible story. Right, right, right. And so, speaking of the infinite game, which if anybody's curious, that's James Koss' concept of finite and infinite games. Finite games are win-lose, right? And have a victor and a victim. And infinite games are win-win, right? Friendship is an infinite game. For sure. And...

And I'm sure you've seen the study on dark triad folks on both sides of the political spectrum, right? That fundamentally anybody in the moderate middle, the sort of 90% middle, don't test, don't score for dark triad, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sociopathy, or authoritarianism. But...

I know they've added that one. You bet, they had to add it because it was lurking at the edges. Totally, just the idea you get off on doing those shitty things. But that 5% on the far left and 5% on the far right do score off the charts for those. And then you map that with Tristan Harris's research, the Center for Humane Tech, those guys, that 90% of all social media

is governed by 10% of posters. So you break those, that 10% in half, and you've got the dark triad folks, the 5% and 5%, posting 90% of what we see and believe each other are about.

Absolutely. Well, that's a much better way of construing the political landscape than the political manner of construal. A large part of the pathology of the culture war is actually the parasitic predators on the edges. With massive amplification, algorithmic amplification. And the protection of anonymity.

Right. And it's really bad. And so you've got Silicon Valley business interests amplifying it algorithmically to sell ads. Yeah. But you've also got bad international actors. Oh, yeah. You've got North Korea, Iran, Russia, China. Oh, yeah. Russia and China all looking to crack the edifice of this liberal democratic experiment. Yeah. So enabling the psychopaths, that's a good way to do it. Right. Yeah. You bet. So so so the the.

the risk I'd like to take and ask you, which is my experiences is that you are taking a stand for the most deeply Western traditional expression of the infinite game. And you're saying, don't throw babies out with bathwater. There's something profoundly valuable here in both the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition, theological tradition, as well as the emergence of Western liberalism

Yeah. Right? Because that's your whole hyper-logic reaction to Stalinism. Right? You're saying there's something precious here. And it is under threat from all sides. It's under threat from precisely the actors that you described. And you're taking a stand for the infinite game, but you are becoming a weaponized battering ram.

for Christian ethno-nationalists playing the finite game. So can you, never mind the woke social justice folks, they can't organize their way out of a goddamn paper bag. At this moment, they are not actually a threat. They're a pain in the ass, but they're not a threat. Militant Christian ethno-nationalism being inflamed by Putin

KGB stooge, continuation of the Stalin lineage, being undermined and eroded by Christianity. Like, if you could police your own side of the culture war more and call those folks up to truly Christian values, not weaponized ethno-nationalism,

then you would unlock something in the culture war debates that we're not getting when you get positioned via audience capture and echo chambers as just beating on. Well, people have tried to throw me in with that lot fairly regularly over the last 10 years, and it hasn't been very successful. I mean, I would say a lot of the activity on that front right now has been coming out of

what would you say, the Nick Fuentes crowd online and all the people who are associated with that, you know, absolutely pathological movement. And tenant media, right? They've just gone… Yeah, yeah, well, so what does that imply? Well, it implies that the Pharisaic danger is always with us, which is that

the highest possible virtues can be weaponized by the worst possible actors. In fact, that's exactly what they'll do. I mean, one of the things you see, for example, with the dark tetrad types is that

One of their ploys is victimization. Yes. Either I'm special, or I'm vulnerable, or I'm righteous, or then I'm vindictive. Like I said, it's a cascade. Yeah, but they're extremely good by temperament at playing the victim card. And it's an extraordinarily effective ploy when you're dealing with conscientious people, because you can make them feel guilty.

or agreeable people, because you can make them feel sorry for you. And so that kind of covers the political spectrum. The psychopaths capture the liberals with agreeableness, and they capture the conservatives with conscientiousness, because they tell the conservatives, well, you know, you're more racist, you're more...

you're more sexist than you should be. They try to guilt them into that. They use guilt, yeah. They use empathy for the left and they use guilt for the right. Oh, and the agreeableness is on the part of the audience. Like, I play the victim, so I'm agreeable, so I'm going to try and help you. Absolutely, absolutely. And it's particularly easy to capture women in that matter because they tend to be more agreeable. So they're much more susceptible to victimization ploys. And it's not surprising, I mean, because...

women are in a very complicated situation because when they have infants, at least for the first eight months of the infant's life, they have to be 100% empathic. And so you have to be able to do that. Now, the problem with

having an orientation to the world that's fundamentally predicated on empathy is that the psychopaths can game it. Yes. And I mean, that is the fundamental problem. This is also why we know, for example, that young women are much more susceptible to the blandishments of the dark tetrad types because they can be manipulated in consequence of their empathy and they don't have the

worldly experience to tell the difference between people who are in trouble and people who use claims that they're in trouble to do nothing but manipulate. And this is a massive... Like, the problem that you laid out of the dark tetrad actors, let's say, on both sides of the spectrum, this is a civilization-challenging problem. It's not some side effect of the culture wars. It's like, whenever...

society is in a situation where the dark tetra types get the upper hand, everything is gone. They demolish everything. Arthur Brooks wrote about this, I think, in The Atlantic a few months ago, but it was sort of one in 14. One in 14 people.

So if you've got just a group of 30, you've got two in that crowd that are likely to play that game. Yeah, well, it's a continuum, right? And given the social norms these days, let's just say sort of educated, you know, knowledge worker economy types, right? We're all trained in nonviolent communication. Everybody's voice has an opinion. There's no bad ideas, right? There's a very flat egalitarian sort of structure.

social space. - Right, that's right, there's no intervening hierarchies. - So to actually call that early and stop it when a dark tetrad person is playing those gambit, you seem like the asshole authoritarian. - Yeah, right. - But it's kind of be like, no, no, not my first rodeo. I've seen this before and we're nipping this in the bud because like you said, it only takes one person in the seminar

to clear the deal. So I watched Mark Zuckerberg at Congress and, you know, he's a kind of a convenient whipping boy, let's say for the conservatives. And, you know, no doubt he's made his errors and some of those he's publicly admitted, although I have some sympathy for him because my suspicions are that the typical person, including the typical corporate magnet, win elections

They're approached by high order governmental agencies and asked to comply because of reasons of national security, especially five years ago, would have listened. You know, you might think you're the one person who would have withstood that pressure, but it's like, I don't think so. And asking Mark to do that.

I think that's too much to ask for someone, especially under those circumstances, because he didn't understand the full extent of his social media enterprise or how to regulate it. And he certainly didn't understand that he was being asked to do corrupt things by a government that was hell-bent on a certain form of censorship.

Having said all that, it's not like we know how to deal with this. We have these new communication technologies, Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and X, and the narcissistic psychopaths have free reign, and that's abetted by their anonymity and by the algorithmic expansion of their troublemaking.

But it's not like anyone knows what to do about that, right? Because when you tilt towards control, well, then you have the problem of the suppression of free speech, which is a real problem. Like, that's not trivial. And if you just let there be a free-for-all, well, then the bad actors have a disproportionate effect. And we don't know what to do about that. Like, one of the things I've thought through, for what it's worth, is that I think it's a big mistake to put the anonymous people with the real people.

Do you mean like trolls or just faceless accounts? Faceless, I think that social media networks should separate the faceless accounts from the verified identities. Well, it blows out millions of years of primate reciprocity and tribal balance. Yes, and that actually turns out to be quite a problem, right? If I can't hold you accountable in any matter for what you do, all that does is... Or even just to say it to my face. Mm-hmm.

Right, right. Well, people are much more civilized face-to-face for exactly those reasons. All those mechanisms kick in. I mean, we know perfectly well, this is actually valid social psychological research, if you anonymize ordinary people, the worst sides of their character come forward. And like a lot of what regulates us is that implicit bias.

requirements signified even by facial expression in face-to-face contact that's indicative of the desire for reciprocity. There have been studies on that with dating apps, right? That people are ghosting and doing all sorts of atrocious behaviors to each other on Tinder because it's a random dating pool of data points. In the past,

I went on a date with you because you were my best friend's sister or we met at church or there was something in our neighborhood or region and relational networks and I didn't want to pee in that pool. Yes, precisely. Versus just swipe for another one. It's also the case, see, we also overestimate the degree to which moral control is internalized.

Which is back to Nietzsche.

The reason that the typical good person is good is because they're socialized enough to be socially acceptable or even desirable. And what that means is that a ring of people surround them constantly. And that means they can outsource the problem of the regulation of their behavior to the crowd.

So, for example, while you and I are talking...

whether you're still engaged in the conversation, whether you're thinking of something else, if we're turn-taking properly. And if I'm attentive and you're there, then I can use those moment-to-moment operations or observations to regulate my behavior. That's not internal, right? It's a dynamic that's playing out between us. And much of...

With mirror neurons and micro muscles of the face and affect and posture and bagel tongue and the thousand things. All of that, right. It's deeply mirrored, right? And so the upshot of that is that I don't have to undertake a tremendous amount of the complex problem of regulating my own behavior as long as people can stand having me around.

Because they'll do that for me. And all I have to do is pay attention. And so we do outsource a lot of moral regulation to the community. And that's fine. But what it does imply is that... So you're suggesting that's sort of Vygotsky and scaffolding of our good behavior? Is each other? Well, it's also partly the demand. Of course, it's partly the demand for the continuation, let's say, of the infinite game. You know, I mean...

If I have a friend and I'm a kid and I'm playing one-on-one basketball with him, you could say that each basketball bout is a finite game in that I could win it or lose it. But the friendship, at least in part, could be a sequence of those games. And the rule for a sequence is something more like, well, try being a good sport and fun to play with. Which is, well, that's way different than win.

Right. It includes winning because if I if we're going to play, I would like you to try to win. Part of being a good sport is playing full out. Exactly. Exactly. In a fair game, in a fair game. And the fair part of it is a nod to that higher order morality that's part of, say, an infinite game rather than a finite game. But all of that's embedded and embodied in all of our social communicative practices all the time. The psychopathic types and the narcissistic types, they just use that to manipulate.

Right? They're not using it to play a finite game or to play an infinite game. And this is interesting too. They use which bit? Well, whatever information they derive from the social interaction, they just put to their own self-serving purposes, right? They're just using it to facilitate manipulation. And you might ask, and this is a perfectly good question, well, why not do that? This is why people like Andrew Tate are attractive, let's say, to the incel crowd. It's like, if I can manipulate you and I can get what I want...

then why the hell shouldn't I do it? That's just will to power 101. Precisely. Why shouldn't I take advantage of that? Why shouldn't I lie and cheat and steal if it means I get my way? Well, part of the answer to that is, well, that might work momentarily, but you're also playing an infinite game with yourself. And we know perfectly well that the

The typical outcome of the psychopathic pattern of interaction is negative for the psychopath himself. They're incapable of learning from experience, for example, so they repeat their errors. They don't modify their own behavior. And so if you're a psychopath and a narcissist and Machiavellian, you can optimize certain behaviors.

forms of short-term return, but it's a really bad medium to long-term game. So even if you don't include other people in the purview of your moral sentiment,

Walmart.com and Amazon Prime.

If you're a psychopath, you dispense with your future self. That's why so many of them end up in prison. Well, okay, so you probably know these stats, Stone Cold, but right? So large numbers of psychopaths end up in prison, but then also, what, one in three Fortune 1000 CEOs are at least sociopaths? Yeah, I doubt that. You doubt it? Yeah, no, I don't believe that. I don't believe that. I think that's overblown, and I think there's a lot of implicit leftist, anti-capitalist idiocy in those studies. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of Machiavellian people...

some of whom occupy positions of power. But the problem is it's not a, to become, you know this, you know this, to become successful in any enterprise that iterates, you can't screw people over. Not very well, because they remember, and people have evolved modules for remembering cheaters. Like, we're very good at remembering cheaters. And so, most people who are engaged in reciprocal, complex reciprocal social interactions can't be psychopathic because they get caught.

Can I ask you a question on the capitalist thing that you just mentioned? Because I've heard you say a couple of things in, I don't know, however long, the last couple of years. One was, I think it might have been in your conversation with Elon, talking about any sort of neo-Malthusian, we've got too many people question, right? And that being sort of what you were describing as sociopathic. And then something along the lines of,

Capitalism and individual achievement attainment, being a noble and virtuous good, and therefore high net worth CEOs, billionaires, etc., should be valorized, not kneecapped. Which, in my reading of you, I took to be sort of against Paulus Poppy gets whacked approach.

socialism, right? You're saying, hey, you have to preserve space and valorize humanity. We can't hate ourselves, right? That on the population question. And if there is somebody who is ingenious, creative, you know, bringing value to society, they shouldn't be kneecapped or, you know, regressive taxation, etc. No, you should put them in positions where you can exploit them. No, I'm serious. This is the reason for meritocracy in places like Harvard, you know, because the reverse view is, well,

everybody deserves a chance, let's say. And look, it's not like there's nothing to be said about that. But it isn't that we're awarding positions at Harvard because we're benefiting the people who get the positions. That happens. That's not the reason. The reason we pick the smartest and most competent possible people we can to educate deeply is so that

Everybody else can benefit from their ability. That's the reason. The reason for meritocracy isn't to reward the meritocratic. That's necessary because otherwise they'll stop being productive. But you know there's a Pareto distribution in terms of productivity. And the Pareto distribution is a vicious game. The square root of the number of people in an endeavor do half the work. So if you have 10,000 employees doing one thing, 100 of them do half the work.

It's like you want to reward those hundred because the whole 10,000 and then beyond depend on them. And so you need to tilt society in the direction of

the kind of behavior that's a broad benefit. Now, it's going to benefit the individuals as well. Yes. So can I pose to you a thought experiment? Yeah. Okay. So in hearing that, right, fundamentally like pro-free market, pro-individual accumulation of wealth and pro kind of a progressive expansion of humanity, population, etc.?

But let's just wind back the clock way back machine to like 1970. And because that's a good inflection point or like, you know, 70 to 73, you've got Freeman doctrine, right? That's what that's when Freeman first writes sole responsibility of corporations is shareholder profit.

That's when you've got Club of Rome saying, hey, we can't, you know, infinite growth on a finite planet. We're going to cook this thing. Right. You get Paul Ehrlich's population bomb. You get those famous bets. So you basically get those two arguments. You get, are there too many of us? And or is there too much of an lopsided distribution of profits and wealth? Yeah. Right. Now, at that time, when those arguments were, they weren't new at the time, but let's just say they were distilled at that time.

You had a 30 to 1 CEO to average worker pay ratio. Now it's over 300. Yeah. Right. So that's a big difference. That's a 10x. That's an order of magnitude change. Is that argument still true? And if so, for how much longer? And when you and I were born, there were half the humans on this earth.

Right. And that was a question that was, again, that was the Ehrlich stuff, that was the Club of Rome stuff. We since had the Green Revolution, and most economists would agree that 4 billion of us, pretty much half of the world's population is only here because of synthetic NPK fertilizers, glyphosate, Roundup, you know, basically just industrial chemical, petrochemical hyperproduction of foodstuffs.

So if it was true in the 1970s, and I, because philosophically I'm aligned with you, right? That whole kneecapping, weak affirmative action, tallest poppy stuff, right? And spiteful taking from those who have thrived or succeeded. That's kind of Ayn Rand 101, right? But...

It was true in 1970, but the landscape has massively changed. When and how or if do we ever need to update those arguments and revise them in light of current events and growth curves? Well, I would say the answer to the problem of hyper-privilege on the economic side, there's a gospel's answer to that, which is from much will be asked from those to whom much has been given.

But that's trickle, that George W. H. W. said that, right? Trickle-down economics feels a lot like getting pissed on. Well, I'm not speaking even of it from an economic perspective. I'm saying that the problem of unequal distribution of opportunity and wealth is a pervasive and universal problem. It's not attributable, first of all, to capitalism, which makes Marx, for example, a weak critic of the Pareto distribution problem.

Because the Pareto distribution problem characterizes all sorts of systems that have nothing to do with capitalism. So you can't attribute the accumulation of wealth per se or privilege for that matter to capitalism. That's a dead argument. That doesn't mean that the accumulation of goods in the hands of fewer and fewer people isn't a problem. It's a major problem. The question is how you address it.

Now, it doesn't appear to me at all that you can address it using something like left-wing economic, a left-wing economic approach, not in its more radical phases. No, but techno-philanthropy sucks too, right? The Gates Foundation, malaria nets in Africa are all getting used to fish in Lake Tanganyika. Well, it's hard to do good. That's part of the problem, that it's actually very hard to do good. You know, and...

I suppose it's also the part of the problem of the conundrum of wealth, is once you accrue wealth and you want to do good with it, does that mean that you know how to do good? And the answer is no. It's really difficult. Well, and just because you got lucky with PCs in the 90s, does that mean you can solve world hunger or epidemiological challenges or anything else, right? Right. There's a removal from your core of expertise. Right, well, that's the problem with gigantism, right? You're trying to operate your experiments on too broad a scale, and

It's also the problem of unintended consequences, as you pointed out. You know, the use of malaria nets to fish, for example, which no one predicted. And, you know, the way that we've, what we've evolved to deal with those sorts of problems is something like small-scale experiments designed to determine the consequences of a given course of action before they're ramped up into huge sociological experiments. I mean, it's pretty...

It was a dawning realization in the social science community, probably started in the 1930s, and it never got to be as pervasive as it should have been, that whenever you implement any policy whatsoever, experimentally or socially, you have to build in an evaluation element to make sure that your stupid intervention does only what you hoped it would, and not a bunch of other things, many of which are counterproductive. It's a huge problem. But...

It's not reducible, let's say, to the problem of billionaires per se, because the other advantage of having a multitude of extremely wealthy people is that you have massive pools of capital that can be implemented for all sorts of technological reasons. And you also have a diversity of, what would you say, sources of power, which is a good check against authoritarianism on the political side. And so...

But I do think the fundamental solution to that problem is it's an ethical solution and not an economic solution, is that if you're fortunate enough to be hyper-intelligent, for example, or hyper-wealthy, you better understand that what comes along with that is a moral burden that's equivalent to the virtue. And that if you don't bear that, you're going to be not only a destructive force in the world, but also a destructive force for yourself. There's no free lunch, even if you're rich. Well, that's an interesting thing, because what I...

feel you're doing here is you're merging, right, a free market, almost Randian, right? The alphas get to alpha.

with what we started with, with your higher order code or implicate moral law. So rather than just saying a free market sorts it all out and it has its own implicit logic, right? And those at the top deserve to be, you're saying, hey- It's not sufficient. Yeah, now you're bringing in, right? The Judeo-Christian- I think the scientific game has to be embedded in the Judeo-Christian game, let's say, but so does the free market game. You know, when people like Adam Smith knew this,

And the Scottish liberals, for that matter, their basic argument was something like, given the presuppositions of a stable Judeo-Christian culture and the ethics that go along with that, then the liberal free market enterprise is possible. It's like, and the more libertarian types, they take the second half of that and dispense with the first, and that's not going to work. That doesn't

You need that underlying ethical scaffold, and it's likely because it's related, as we already pointed out, to something approximating the biological foundations of psychological stability and growth and the associated sociological interactions that emerge out of that. You can't dispense with that.

Well, let's talk about this because my curiosity, it feels like, and you're writing a new book right now, right? Yes, it's coming out in November. Oh, so really soon. Yeah, very soon. What is the name? We Who Wrestle With God, it's called, and it deals with many of the issues that we're talking about.

Okay. At the moment, in terms of that Abrahamic story, let's say. Well, I'm super curious because you were describing the Abrahamic story, but that also has echoes with Jonah, right? Go do a hard thing, go save the people of Nineveh. It has the echoes with... Even if you don't want to. Even if you don't want to and outcome unsaid. And you hate them. And outcome unsaid. And they deserve it. Right, and put down your nets and go be fishers of men, the Sea of Galilee.

in the New Testament. To me, that's the real gut punch one, right? Which is at what point do any of us set aside a good thing? Yeah, well, it's a more appropriate means of feeding the multitude, right? I mean, that's part of the underlying narrative meaning of that particular element of the story. If you're a fisherman, you feed people, and that's a noble enterprise. But if you entice people into the proper ethical relationship with one another, you feed everyone, right?

Right. And so and that's part of a reflection of the fact that what makes a society wealthy, even in the free market domain, let's say, is the underlying ethos of something like iterable development.

reciprocity. It's the precondition for wealth. And so Christ transposes the fisherman. He says, well, you're playing a very useful social role, but there's a meta role that you could play that would do what you do, but more effectively and a bunch of other things at the same time. That's akin, for example, to his suggestion that the

intelligent and wise wealthy individual would sell everything to obtain the pearl of great price, right? Because there's one thing to know that's so valuable that everything else pales in comparison. That's also relevant to the discussion of what to do with wealth. You know, I mean, if you're a billionaire and you're a

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you know, they're gifted with their IQ of 145 and they start to worship their own intelligence. It's like, what did you ask or hope for Elon? Because he's obviously got probably as much power as anybody in the human species. Well, what you hope for Elon is that his moral compass is functional and that he listens to it the same way that Jonah eventually listened to his conscience and that he understands. And, you know, my conversation with Elon, I felt quite positive about who

who he was. I've met him three or four times, and every time I meet him, I'm more solidly convinced that he's doing what he can to aim up, and thank God for that. Now, does that mean that it's without error? Well, that's a bit much to ask, that's for sure, but I was also very interested in how he reconciled his existential

catastrophe, his crisis when he was an adolescent, because he said he turned to the attractions of infinite exploration. And that's one variant of the infinite game. You know, and there's a faith in that. There's a deep faith that's implicit in that, that I think people like Richard Dawkins share. So Musk believes that

The cosmos has a logos, that it's intelligible, that it's possible that that logos is intelligible to the human psyche, that that pursuit is noble, and that undertaken properly, that pursuit is of wide, it's of broad ethical benefit, both psychologically and socially. And that's... Is that arguably your thesis statement as well?

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. When that's part of the underlying faith, you might say, and it's a kind of courage that the created order is fundamentally good. That's why it's an element of faith. Fundamentally good. Fundamentally good. Yeah. Fundamentally good. Yeah. This is one of the

propositions that's put forth very strongly in the story of Job. I mean, Job is visited by unimaginable and undeserved catastrophe. So that's who he is. He's the man who's been visited by undeserved catastrophe. And Job's response is, "No matter what happens to me, it's incumbent on me not to lose faith in myself,

fundamentally, even though I may be error-prone, but fundamentally, and not to lose faith in the spirit that gave rise to the created order. Is that my ignorance may shield me from realization of the good towards which everything is progressing, but it's incumbent on me, no matter how much I suffer, not to fall prey to that kind of undermining doubt. And that's, I think that's noble and functional and

And why is God being so cruel to Job? God only knows. Well, right? But I mean, this is what I find fascinating about this story in particular is that the exegesis of that tale is that there are two distinct authors through several centuries. And the first version of the Job story doesn't include Satan. It is whimsical and arbitrary Yahweh. Right? And then author two is like, well, that's a bit of a plot problem. We've got the problem of evil. Well, look, I think part of

The problem is... Add Satan as a plot device. Old Testament's not pointy horns and Beelzebub, right? Old Testament is Satan, the opposer. He's just the friction. Yeah, adversary. Right, the adversary. Yeah. Well, I think part of it, I think there's two parts to that. One is that it isn't obvious to me at all that you should evaluate the goodness of being in relationship to the dimensions of pleasure and pain.

And the reason for that is that there are many catastrophic pleasures and there are many beneficial pains. And so you can't reduce, you can't use pain

the hedonic dimension as the grounds for evaluation. So that's the... So whatever, when you're talking about the goodness or lack thereof of being, you can't reduce that to emotional state, partly because the emotions aren't reliable guides to the medium and long run, as you know perfectly well, because you have to forego immediate pleasure frequently in order to gain what?

to gain what's worth gaining in the long run. So, the hedonic dimension of evaluation is the wrong dimension. Well, that feels like that's anchored to evolutionary impulse, indifferent evolutionary amoral impulse, right? And most...

wisdom traditions do differentiate. If you're just seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, you're basically just a monkey with clothes. Yeah, right, right, right. That's right. To be twice born, to be anthropos, to go... Subcortical. Right, like any of those things, to be a sort of reborn or true human, you need to transcend that in some way.

Yeah, well, that's part of maturation. It's the replacement of those more instinctive and immediate desires and wants with something that's more sociologically oriented, that's growth-oriented, that's long-term, that's iterable, that's infinite, possibly, and that's mature. And the point of mature socialization is to replace those demands for immediate gratification, let's say, with something that's

much more comprehensive and also upward expanding, right? It's like the definition of civilization in its proper sense. This brings us back to that Blaise Pascal's God-shaped hole in our hearts. Do you think, because there has been a sort of noticeable turn in the last couple of years of a

especially in the millennial generation, right? Who have been, you know, I think Time Magazine did a sort of almost a tongue-in-cheek me, me, me generation cover, right? To echo the baby boomers, me generation. But it's like, it's on steroids amplified by social media these days. And Tara Isabella Burton, I don't know if you know her work. She wrote Strange Rites, which is a fast, she's an Oxford PhD. And it's everything from SoulCycle to Sleep No More to Burning Man, like just contemporary expressions of sleep.

semi-religiosity. She writes in the New York Times and she's been writing about a turn towards orthodoxy and how more and more people are going back, not just back to church where they might have gone as kids, they're like seeking out Eastern Orthodox, they're seeking out like pre-Vatican Latin mass. There was even an article in the Texas Monthly on, what do they call them, the ortho-bros. And there's a whole set of, and again, this is curious, but

Alt-right podcaster bros infiltrating an Armenian Orthodox church in Houston. Let's do this because we're running out of time on the YouTube side. Let's save exactly that discussion for the additional half an hour on Daily Wire. We can talk about that later.

compensatory rebirth of, well, not only the religious spirit, let's say, but the more orthodox religious spirit, and we can take that apart. So let's do that. So everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side for the continuation of this conversation, and that's what we'll delve into. We've noticed, and we talked a little bit about, Jamie and I talked a little bit about this before the podcast, that there have been noticeable public conversions, even from the

what the atheist adjacent types like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Neil Ferguson in recent years, Russell Brand for that matter, and that is emblematic of something deeper that's shifting. And so we can talk about that in more detail on the Daily World side. So join us for that. Thank you very much for, well, at least the first part of this conversation, and we'll continue momentarily. Thank you everybody for watching and listening today.

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