Sex, Death, and Storytelling | Andrew Klavan | EP 426

Hello everyone I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June Tammy and I an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the US you can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information I'm going to use the tour to walk through Some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book out November 2024 we who wrestle with God I'm looking forward to this I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll

be pleased to see all of you again soon bye-bye in my opinion we're in this moment of of great transition not only is my generation passing away but all kinds of world orders are passing away and and a new uh age is is Usher is coming in and we're asked we have to Start with this question is who we trying to serve what is the the creature that we're trying to build governments around that we're trying to build community around that were trying to build uh 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 and in Davos they're going to have the great reset and so on and then you have the people On the bottom are just saying leave me alone 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 [Music] hello everybody today I talk to Mr Andrew claven 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 dooski Crime and Punishment influenced by Raymond Chandler who's probably the greatest Noir um novelist of all time uh also the instigator of a number of great movies like The Big Sleep we talked a lot about the Noir genre and about the the motif of the 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 product by the necessity for produc productivity and generosity the complex decisionmaking 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 table 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 he uh well you've come on my show a couple 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 how many books have you written so Far I'm afraid there's over 30 of them uh it's 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 right right right it's been a long long haul yeah

so the first one when you were 25 and there's been 30 are those 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 right and um and I'm working on one now actually ah what do you working on now now I'm working on a a book about about why I write about murder and my thoughts about murder and what it means oh yes Human Society murder in Mayhem yeah yeah well I

know a couple of uh Thriller murder mystery writers and I'm a great fan of well I like the genre actually especially the Noir genre from the from the 1940s and thereabouts um Raymond Chandler is something else man he's the one who made me a mystery writer he's the guy is that right e oh yes what do you like about Chandler well the moment I became a mystery writer was the moment in the Big Sleep is right at the opening when Philip Marlo walks in and he sees a night in shining armor on a stained glass

window trying to rescue a woman who's tied to a tree and Philip Marlo 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 the time I saw a tough guy who had a 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 right and I just thought that's 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 in their dog knows but women prefer literary pornography and it's very tightly themed like it's very archetypically themed so the typical protagonist is surgeon werewolf V vampire pirate or billionaire or some combination some interesting

combination Of all of those attributes and the standard um plot is a 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 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 it's Beauty and the Beast fundamentally which I really think is the fundamental feale fale archetype

like there's a heroic archetype that goes along with the feminine as well CU women also confront the unknown and all of that but it is the fundamental it's certainly the female fundamental female sexual archetype and so what that means this is perhaps what strike 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 yion perspective of incor operation 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 that 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 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 we have strength we have power we have uh

a kind of sexual power as well and you start to think well you know you if you don't if you don't want to be the bad guy I mean when at some point every young man realizes that nasty guys get more sex and they realize that people who push Women around can be very successful and you have to say to yourself 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 I also could perceive just in

an actual fact that the world is a corrupt place and it's power that makes it corrupt and Raymond Chandler has his that famous wonderful line down these Mean Streets a man must go who is not himself mean and that justang a bell yeah yeah yeah well Okay so so on that too so the literature shows so what what the Psychopaths the narcissists the ACU alans and even the sadists do the men is that 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 from the potentially redeemable you know Philip Marlo hero and then there's another complication too you know to say something in favor of the more beastly men 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 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 that and instead of just admitting that forth rightly 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 attitude let's say that sort of narcissistic and and uh even kellus attitude towards others it doesn't 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 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 all about guys who really cut the edge fellow Andrew

Tate who is a a a buffoon and a a pimp and a 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 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 is a 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 is too I mean the thing about Tate is he is a complex character because not all of his brav 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 could 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 not without like 20 years in in serious hang your head repentance but he is a complex figure because 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 who was that s there was a there was a show for a long time about a serial killer who decided yeah Dexter exactly the same sort of thing right and

you see the same sort of thing pop up for example in 50 Shades of Gray which is again an archetypal example of the feminine Proclivity for a certain kind of structured pornography so yeah okay so 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 Phillip in Sleeping Beauty you remember when the evil queen turns into the Dragon Prince Phillip fights off the dragon which is the unknown itself and then he's able to

free Sleeping Beauty it's exactly is St George Motif and this 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 virgin Jenny Jenny uh his his 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 partly part a Consequence of actually having faced the

the this under structure of chaos right and and confronted the Mean Streets and the Darkness that's underneath every society so that's that called to you from from U the Philip Marlo novels from Chandler's work oh it was 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 one of the Problems with storytelling and with Mythos is that when it conflicts with reality uh 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 a chess game by himself a solitary chess game and he turns over the board and says this is not a game for Knights In other words this Mythos that he brought this ideal that he brought into the world is not fitting with the LW Angeles Of the 1950s which is full of corruption and the problem for me with if you watch for instance um movies that make uh romantic Heroes out of

mafosi The Sopranos I mean you're talking about the attraction of a guy that 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 every single one of them their faces turned Scarlet they just spit rage because they've seen Them they've picked up the bodies they picked up the people they've killed and exploited and they'll tell you they're animals they're not really uh admirable at all and so bringing that masculine energy into the world a very delicate operation and

something that you have to reme you have to remember as you're doing it that the people you're dealing with are real and have the right uh the same right to life and health and happiness that you Have C uh you know very complicated entprise yeah well this is also the terribly narrow needle eye that women have to thread right because they have to find a man who's capable of contending with the darkness of the world 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 that 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 so and and it's not surprising at all that they have that proclivity to overshoot towards the more negative end when they're young that's well documented in the in the in the clinical literature right you mentioned 50 Shades of Gray I mean that's one of the 10 bestselling Series in all all of fiction which is amazing well well it also

came up so Interesting it it developed its popularity during the me too movement so you saw this height of attack on toxic masculinity at the same time that in the conscious 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 a Ran's novels as well you know with the with the interplay between dagy Tager I think it is and is it Hank Reon is it Hank

Reen I think so that that she ends up in a kind of semi- rape delance with and so and so so the other thing that's very cool about about Chandler and and I'm wondering how this impacted you too is he's an unbelievably good stylist like and and and and and Master of dialogue that witty harsh film Noir dialogue I mean I don't think anybody ever topped what Chandler did on the 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 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 deep transsexual theme running through his stories and one of his sons became an actual transexual and there was always something that bothered

me about his 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 castleblanca 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 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 wh right right right bitter about it yeah I thought your girl dumps you you still got to fight World War II you know and 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 are

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and use code Jordan to get 25% off any purchase of $130 or more that's Mi ZZ main.com promo code Jordan for 25% off today right you see that in the maltes Falcon too by the way which we also just watched same sort of thing this 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 Joo willink as

well I don't oh yes of course yes yeah yeah yeah yeah because willink is tough as a boot he knows perfectly well and he's told me this repeatedly in our in our various conversations that you know he could have been 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 and that Disagreeableness and competitiveness goes goes together hey I read an interesting study this week man this is this really really uh helped me

understand something I've been I've been studying for a long time so people tend to feel pain as a consequence of the disruption of social relations it's not anxiety it's pain and so loneliness and and uh grieving for example are variance 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 um people who are more disagreeable right so that would be that's 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 in reference to other people and it's all 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 EMP AIC 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 you can easily tilt into the antisocial right so this is 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 cuz that that's also

part of that with with the willingness to be generous and productive I think you know um um Joo 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 uh 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 with Walter White's relationship with Jesse for example oh absolutely Breaking Bad is a perfect Example what we're talking about but again it's also an example of the the breach between storytelling and reality I mean we tell our we think in stories you're uh 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 into 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 I you know you're not uh you're not a an absolute physical uh monster but you're standing up to an entire Canadian government because you have that that spine and one of the tricks for women growing up I think is understanding the difference between the

kind of strength that turns itself into brutality in a seexual 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 you return to that fact that you're not afraid to be isolated you're not afraid to uh walk away from the society because you 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 uh social media you have to be willing to uh 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 H that's kind of he's not a real tough guy he's not a I could I could knock him out uh which is why you know you hear the stories of Ben Shapiro being

bullied uh and you think like sure You know you can be bigger than him you can hit him but it's a little hard to be 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 strength well well that speaks to a to a higher order 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 criticism but the 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 when you were thinking about that stained glass window is that There's a kind of character that's 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 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 a 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 an infant is always right when it's in distress and your moral obligation this is say an infant under 6 months of age your moral obligation as the primary caretaker of An infant is to never question its emotional distress never and to respond immediately no matter what and being able to do that and also simultaneously having the wherewithal to withstand understand 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 6 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 a woman to play those things off one another oh I think that's definitely true yeah and and and Also to work out I mean mercy and Justice are in Conflict ex

everywhere but in the mind of God so I I think that it takes two people really to bring that together yeah and I and I 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're you have to remember the moral web and the moral web is a complex thing you know You the those things are 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 uh 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 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 and it definitely takes two people at least and it definitely takes two different kind at least that's right at least yeah 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 Marlo right because they're obviously meeting out Justice constantly and that's part of the attractiveness of their character

especially when it's devoted towards you know defending the the the fem fatel from some evil persecutor but they're always leing that with mercy and it is As a consequence of following the dictates of their conscience and certainly Marlo is a very consy conscience ridden creature um yes yes so as as is Sam Spade for that matter yeah and and even James Bond for on the more comic book end of things you know you you were talking too about characters like Breaking Bad the guy in Breaking Bad Walter White and in The Sopranos you know and

it it 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 you know 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 narciss this hyper almost narcissistic masculine element and it was also very interesting that he ended up IED 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 was very interesting to watch all that unfold you know well the whole culture was spiraling off in the hyper feminine Direction well I think I think this the superhero is really interesting genre it has always bothered me because

it seems to be storytelling without sex and death in it which means it's storytelling in some sense without 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 stories every movie there's a woman who's going to punch a Guy and he goes rolling 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 dangerous thing but it's also saying something about our attitude to our Humanity or 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 had was 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 stor 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 can treat your body like a pin cushion and not get get pregnant and maybe

and solve your syphilis problem and yet the moral web is still in place you will destroy yourself by simply treating yourself Disrespect 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 as 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 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 um 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 to the gamet 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 up you upend that with the pill right 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 is well it changes it

somewhat right because the immediate consequences for um 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 isn't why not have an endless orgastic 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 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 now 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 no one I I think it's an opram 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 I

in uh in the truth and Beauty I write a chapter on Frankenstein in which I make the argument that Frankenstein the do Frankenstein who creates this monster has not violated as Mary Shelly 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 has science and fantasy have been beginning have been trying to solve the problem

of women and the fact that they create a consequence a deep consequence to our chief physical pleasure they've been trying to solved that since science uh 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 well okay the evidence seems to be that there is actually well well actually the evidence of on with regard to that is clear so so let let me lay it out this the 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 so and what 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 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 melanism and sadism right and so and it's worse than that not only do those predict 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 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 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 early and

frequent sexual experience that's been known forever forever no one debates it in the in the criminology domain and the same is exactly true in personality with regards to these dark you know sadism psychopathy melanism 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 untameable 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 maintained in a civilized way and so this this is to me the essential question we're 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 in my opinion in my opinion we're in this moment of of great Transition not only is my generation passing away but all kinds of world orders are passing away and and a new uh age is is Usher is coming in and we're as we have to start with this question is who are we trying to serve what is the the creature that we're trying to build governments around that we're trying to build Communications around that we're trying to build uh 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 in Davos they're going to have the great reset and so on and then you the people on the bottom are just saying leave me alone uh and let me do let me do what I want to do and obviously somewhere between those people is the idea that that kind of the American Founders started 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 and I fear that the not the scientific worldview but the scientistic worldview blinds us to certain things that that people are and that may be ineffable I think everything has a has a physical analogue but it doesn't mean that that's its cause and you see this in in for instance when we drug people for depression and they feel Happier are they happier and uh I think a lot of them

are not as 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 I think most psychologists now agree with that did you know a baby's heart begins to beat at just 3 weeks at 5 weeks that Heartbeat can be heard on ultrasound and this can sometimes be their only defense in the womb that's where pre-born steps

in pre-born rescues 200 babies every day from abortion simply by providing mothers with an ultrasound after hearing her child's heartbeat and seeing its perfectly formed body in the womb she's twice as likely to choose Life by 6 weeks the baby's eyes are forming by 10 weeks a baby's able to suck his or her thumb pre-born needs our help to save These precious lives for just $28 you could be the difference between the life or death of a child and if you become a monthly sponsor you'll receive stories and ultrasound pictures of the lives you helped

save all gifts are tax deductible and 100% of your donation goes towards saving babies to donate dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby that's pound 250 baby or go to preborn docomo that's preborn [Music] Docomo well you know one of the things that we're skirting around in some sense is the question of what limitations 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 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 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 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 def 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 any case the 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 and 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 If you now can't be killed if you're now an immortal creature which in principle is the aim of you know of all of our striving to overcome our illnesses and our subjection to weakness like are you is there anything in you that's now human yeah I I

think this is absolutely true and that death not only makes things real it actually gives us meaning you know the poet uh John Keat said that life was the veil of Soul making and and I think that the reason it's the veil of Soul making is is death gives everything 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 uh against Christianity against the

Christian idea of Eternity is that where will the meaning come from I think that's a solvable issue obviously but Still here now we are dealing it is 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 um 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 Aeros and Thanatos you've taken away the meaning of being Being Human as well and you leave us with with virtually nothing and some of these transhumanists also become death worshippers because what they talk about is it's it'll be great when human beings are gone it's time for these these meat Sacks to get out of

here and and leave everything to AI there are people who believe that AI is is more important than we are and for me it's always the question of like why what what what Consciousness does AI have what is it what is precious about AI we're the ones who are pre is precisely because we die precisely because this moment and and this in 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 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 it's it's a very close relationship and if you have infinite time the the 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 plentitude 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 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 onethird of 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 by what by sexual urgency and and and scarcity right and you see you see the same thing if you're reasonably well off financially the same can

under 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 the solution

is 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 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 to me it's the Urgent question and it's why the it's why the Ancients matter more than ever uh in in this hyper modern uh moment it 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 oldfashioned 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 I this is 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 us with compassion because they're us because the in the end if we can't figure that out we can't figure ourselves out it it really is it 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 Colombia student a woman celebrating the slaughter in Israel and quoting Chairman Mao and I thought chairman ma was the worst mass murderer in human history I don't think anyone has ever racked up the body count that uh 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 ma

as if he mattered morally and so I I think that we 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 in the story of Noah

that's apropo 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 cat apocalyptic catastrophe comes out on the other side which in some ways

is what every single one of our successful ancestors did Right to to to manage to negotiate through life with all its vicissitudes and leave progyny behind and leave behind the progyny 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 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 act 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 The chairman ma 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 I I have to tell you a wonderful story from my Hollywood days because they made the the Noah story into

a movie with Russell Crow was 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 enough so fig but but according to the producers what the evangelicals complained about was that they showed Noah getting drunk and the poy 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

uh in both their Decency and their wickedness I I actually think that this I 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 Floy with yeah and power and alienation but I think one motivation that 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 uh intolerable to so

many people and it's that that I think causes you to have both the pious Christian who couldn't care l about the person next to him and the guy in Davos who thinks he's going to it's 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 right it isn't what it mean it might mean that in some peripheral sense because it 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 and the Nar by Def 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 you know 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 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 but the 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 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 presumption That mere ideological Purity and the claim to serve a higher power I'm saving the planet is sufficient to pass for genuine the genuine moral effort of hoisting your own godamn cross as it as it turns out in a more fundamental sense right it's a substitute for True moral effort that's it's it's true and it brings us

back too 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 Marshall human flaws for the good of all so you have capitalism which is you know a wonderful economic system and have de uh Democratic republics which Elevate people to power 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 you now have is you 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 are 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 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 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 what it was it wild I thought 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 real he thought oh my God I'm a parasite I'm living on the backs of the Surfs but now you don't have to say that anymore and people this is why I despise Ein Rand by the way this is why I just can spite from 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 this to the human soul yeah well I the reason that I've stayed as firmly as I've been able to in the psychological domain is because I've I don't believe that systemic alteration strikes to the core of the problem I've always I've been concerned I would say my fundamental intellectual interest It's not only intellectual existential interest is the issue of evil and and I'm not really that interested in systemic evil partly because I'm much more interested in actual individual motivation because I wanted to know see I wanted to know

how I could be an Art's prison guard but more than that I wanted to know how I could be an owitz 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 there are some people who would be tilted more in the direction of The Temptations and Pleasures that being an owitz guard would provide right there are some people who are more temperamentally protected against that particular sinful route you know it'd be very hard for someone who

is hyper compassionate to make that particular era they'd much 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 inab ility not your moral virtue you've just never

Managed to elevate yourself to a place where you have 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 this can segue us into the next part of this conversation maybe that's actually also what got me interested in 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 and so I think the 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 relative relatively elaborate faith and it's it's not the faith that you were born into right and so do you want to walk us through through that a bit and and and I'd like To know like what were the steps 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 meta fiction you

know yeah it created actual problems in how to write natural fiction I 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 unsatis fine because I feel that God is God of the real world I feel you know he's not a fantasy God he's not and he's not God of Candyland he's God of this world since I was baptized at the age of 49 it's kind of a long story so I don't want to

go into that's okay that's okay we'll lay it out because I am very curious about I think it'd be helpful for the listeners so when I when I was in in college the first wave of the uh postmodernists were coming in and we were starting to hear About relativism and the djunction of language with with meaning and all of these things and uh I guess I was 19 years old and I read Crime and Punishment and when was this what year was that uh 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 con and you know DFI was writing before ni but He actually dfy I believe was an actual prophet and he actually prophesied what n was going to say he saw he saw those ideas coming and so you have this scene in a novel where a man takes an acts not just to the pawn broker who is bedeviling him but to his her sister and kills in in just a

scene of incredible uh innocence and and evil kills a woman who has can't think straight and just looking at him with this blank look and I thought you know y You know there is no way this is not an evil act and I that's point 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 it's not it remains evil and that Means that means that oural and 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 and it is 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 of Postmodernity so when I when I read if you read the mad scene in Hamlet Hamlet goes through walks through all of the ideas in postmodernity 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 uh he says nothing's either good or bad but thinking makes it so 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 actually thought what they were saying was sanity and I think what Shakespeare was saying was they really did know but they were saying anyway because the logic was following that way so that for other darker motivations right because it allows for a complete abdication of responsibility and a descent into responsibilist Hedonism that comes along with it there's no way around that that's why the Marquee desad is also a standard bearer of the Enlightenment rationalists and he and II knew that I mean the thing that's so

remarkable about Crime and Punishment you pointed to one of the things you know and it was certainly my my investigations into what had happened in in Nazi Germany and in worst places even the horrors that were perpetrated if you can read about those 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 you know that should wake you up yeah yeah 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 interest very similar experience by the way too because he's been obsessed by the issue of evil as well like 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 that's right that's right once so that happened with crime and punishment for you a that's so interesting it did because of my milia because I was a uh secular Jew in coastal cities in the artistic world that was a novelist I was dealing

with sophisticated people the idea of believing in God unironically uh or even beyond the yungi and well you can't tell whether this is a delivered Meaning or a 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 my the themes of my novels are how could you tell what was real U my I'm writing Thrillers but there 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 relationship well it's so interesting because one of the things that happens in the Old Testament it's this weird insistence 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 can function in the world like a personality exists in relationship that's 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 can't see a way out of that and so that means there's a personal element to it that's a that's relationship like it's not like we stand as dead objects

in Rel 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're they grow and they're consumed and but they never end and it says to him I am I am it says that this is a person speaking to him the fact that that is happening yes and the

fact that it's happening between a Consciousness Moses's and this uh object which is the universe essentially in in small makes it impossible to know whether it's in that relationship that it becomes I am which is kind of what Yong I think was Talking about the uncertainty of that but also but it also sort of says more in an aquinus 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 well well there there's more in the Moses story than that too too

which is absolutely crucial you know because up to that point Moses is a escape 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 God 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 and that's so interesting because it well because it 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 obl like your superhero characters or like Philip Marlo Like Your Heroes to stand up against tyranny and to oppose slavery and you know it's it's it's an open Question for all of us especially if we're

concerned with authoritarianism or Lous Hedonism for that matters 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 you 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 uh the Marquee dad uh 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 they were much more deeply personal and connected to my past I I had a crack up I I went nuts and I I found a psychiatrist who was recognized as as one of the greats and

and what I now consider to be a literal Miracle he cured me he I went from being a suicidal delusional hyper contrical paralyzed human being to being one of the more joyful people I know it was insane I mean this transformation was Entire and insane I always when was this when when was this I was I was about 28 when I cracked and by the time I was 30 I was on the way out I was on the on the way back uh and by the time I was 32 I was fine so what what

happened what were the what were the Press of The Descent like and what would the I'm sorry say yeah what what caused The Descent what caused the breakup what caused your breakup I I mean I was in I had a a 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 uh 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 abs absolutely a complete failure i' 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 was crystal clear pdly clear had become Impenetrable even I didn't know what I was saying so I was unable to make a living I was unable to proceed in my profession and I just 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 was the interesting thing I mean the guy who cured me was a I would call him a neoran uh and Freud was an atheist and so I began to feel that up until then the pro 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 you why can't you just go in 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 mar dad and he was the only atheist philosopher to this day maybe Fuko he was the only atheist philosopher who made sense to me Everybody else I thought you know you cannot maintain a moral stance and be an you can be a moral person and be an atheist because you're basically what n said you're living in the shadow of a dead God absolutely but you can't make you can't be more consistent yeah yeah well well rol nikov

had figured that out in or figured that out you know he and and he that's one of the things that's so absolutely powerful about that novel is that dovi was such a genius right Because he set rcal nikov 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 all 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 dovi had all of that he's the perfect counter Enlightenment thinker because he does he does exactly as you're suggesting he does exactly what the Marquee dad does he says oh I see so there's no final Arbiter oh I see that really means right can do whatever I want yes yes he used to he used to stand in front of a painting

by Hans Hine 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 he's so entirely dead that does he 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 uh because he confronted all the hardest arguments oh yeah oh yeah so so that was my leap of faith I read the Marquee dad and I thought that's right he's Absolutely right if there is no

God this is the world of of sat masochism of Torment of torture for for pleasure that looks like hell to me and I am going to go home by another way I'm turning around and I'm just going that's that was my leap of faith my Leap of Faith was why do you think you rejected why did you reject it because look look what's happening now you know we have this weird marriage of lenti justness and power mad striving and they go Together by necessity because there's no Lous without an accompanying tyranny because someone has to

mop up the responsibility but then you might say but you might say like ROV did you might say like the pleasure worshippers do it's like you know it nothing matters why shouldn't I just pursue my whim why should I make that my identity because all these identity crisis 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 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 you've got the logic for it now you accept the conclusions that desad put in front of you but you re 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's hardest say 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 he wrote his philosophy in stasic pornography some of it was kind of a turn on I thought it was kind of exciting uh and yet 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 them I I really don't it oh yes I think everyone I think I think well

I don't think there's any difference between that and the essence of Consciousness itself you know and now I thought about this a lot you know 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 but you're given your talents and your impediments and those vary too but with every Talent comes a corresponding impediment you know this you see this in the rich man the story of the parable of the rich man in in who 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 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'm 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 acred 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 it's not a point to the fact that the money itself is 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 it is but it is a question I mean you know think of the the blessings I did have in my life Chief among them a wife I loved so dearly and who loved me back and uh a profession I I loved I mean I loved to write and I loved Beauty uh I still I'm Still a kind of beauty Monger I love culture and the things that are that work and and sing and so I had so many things to turn away from that caused me to turn away from

ugliness and cruelty that maybe it simply was life enough life experience to do that I was not I I was a young man in many ways but I was not chronologically young I was 30 already and uh and I think it just made me turn back well you had 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 Joo

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 well Well Absolut AB absolutely and 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 had and still have for your wife and so what role did that capacity for love and that experience of Love especially

within the bounds of a commed 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 a double role I mean one is of course love is civilizing and it just is uh a a wonderful pleasure as you say it's a higher pleasure but the other thing about my wife was 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 got to go get my car and I ran up to get my car and drove around the block at 50 m hour so I could get to Her before anybody else she sat down in my car know that's a very creepy beginning I know Terri in those days it wasn't as creepy in those days no no that's 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 I'm still absolutely romantically head over heels with her meant to me that I was capable of perceiving a spiritual reality honestly so 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 derah 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 and so I I really did have some kind of trust in myself I simply could not break through my mure which was so default at least least agnostic And really atheistic

right right right the the funny thing is that after 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 Crut right so how would I know whether I had embraced him re 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 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 a real Freudian I had grown up in that real core the Freudian world all the art stank because everybody was trying to prove your mother was to blame for everything and all that 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 a son or a friend or whatever uh I thought he he got a lot of that quite right the idea of transference and all this which made me feel that all of the insights I had had in therapy that I thought were salvific had 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 had not been very helpful and it was it was actually the the love that had saved me and I began to believe psychology

that's relationship again a yep yep and it it made me feel that psychology is a story that that stories give us the ability to take the ineffable and move it around a little bit you know say definitely right so you split up things that are actually unified into pieces that you can move and that brought me back to God and I Ultimately as an experiment and here's 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 seaf

fairing adventure stories uh about the Napoleonic Wars they're absolutely brilliant h no no I don't know of them and in them there's a very intellectual character named Matan 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 fall falling asleep and the is he said a prayer and went to sleep and I was reading in bed and I thought well if maton say a prayer and

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 uh instead I had come out and here I was Now I had two children my career was great my I was so happy to be with my 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 uh the

details of life I called it I 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 uh so you there's three things you pointed to there that We we should take apart maybe we can close with this so the first is you know one of the primary Freudian accusations and the marks 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 used 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 great book but you know there's something really 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 clear and you might say well hell was just a convenient place to put your enemies it's like no no that's not a good analysis so if it's just a death anxiety Shield then you know 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 ethic iCal truth right 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 could make a very powerful case that confronting Malevolence is worse than confronting death yes like I've watched 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 that it's just it's just not right it's not he got that wrong this is where where Freud indulges in quackery a Little bit he's he's interviewing you know 20 hysterical Victorian vienes and he decides that God is a projection of the father and he says it very definitive you're to Forstall the fear

of hunger you know uh CS Lewis points out that we don't we don't have any desires that don't have an answer all our desires uh have an answer in fact in in the world everything that we hunger for is actually there and 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 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 once you begin to have a realistic view of of God and not the sort of happy you know yellow face with a smile on it you got so much um and yeah that there's tell you that weeks after my baptism my wife who now knows me to my foot

Souls 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 uh this is 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 tormented 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 rusto you know the that Vitality of life and uh 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 uh 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 daily we 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 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 [Music] much