If there is a Jesus You're Not Jesus you are not at the center neither is anybody else if you're not United by responsibility and by voluntary self-sacrifice you will be United by power to let you know that the ego is still in here I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ but I'm going to give as best a shot as I can give at being poor if you lose your individual relationship with Divine Guidance the Only thing that can possibly emerge is either chaos or despotic Force Elon Musk in a matter of post
can disrupt Elevate new potential Kings desiccate them and remove them in a matter of moment are you hopeful and what are your [Music] concerns so I had the opportunity today to once again sit down with Russell Brand we've talked quite a bit and we're getting to know each other quite well which makes the discussions even more Interesting and faster paced and we we started out with the discussion of of Christianity and it's what would you say the the challenge that it poses in its fundamental elements to the doctrines of dissolution so you could say that
on the nihilistic side or and to the insistence that the only proper centralization and unifying force Power and so well those are very both of those are very powerful arguments one the nistic Argument is that everything is fundamentally meaningless and fragmented and that all Unity of any sort is an illusion in this like veil of Tears entropy ridden veil of tears and the contrary position to that on the side of power is that only the naive believe that unifying forces are anything but the imposition of compulsion and power and that it's as a I said
it's terminally willfully blind to assume that um there are any principles other Than the Hoban Battle of all against all well is there an alternative to that well the the Western alternative the judeo-christian alternative has been forever been something like the proposition that an ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the alternative to nihilism and and to power and well we tried to sort that out and to clarify that more particularly uh to investigate that claim and to see what it means in the context of relatively formal Religious beliefs say specifically belief in Christianity and with regards
to the Alternatives like there's we're definitely at something approximating the end of the Enlightenment that's partly what the culture war is about the rationalism and empiricists their account of the world was insufficient the postmodernists challenged it with a high degree of success although they turned to power and that was a dreadful mistake well everyone is what would you Say feeling out what the alternative might be and the discussion we had today is an attempt to further that process so join us for that how's this Christianity thing working out for you it's powerful transforming agent it's
beautiful to moment to moment know that if he is the creator of all things then his DNA is present in every moment in every moment the continual renewal of the mind that it talks of in Roman seems comparable at least To ideologies that I'm somewhat more familiar with Corral together Loosely under the term New Age stay continually present in the moment die unto yourself allow yourself to die as it says in Galatians be born again moment to moment now as we enter this period of wild and giddying flux Jordan it seems that a root to
Eternity is a a valuable escape hatch to have identified so how it feels like I'm Reading Genesis right now have you read it have you done a course on it and like uh there's like even when you're reading about uh Sodom and lot and reading about like a culture of gang rape that precedes the storm of fire it feels like yeah I'm reading that then I'm like you know sort of scrolling on X and looking at the world and the hills are an inferno and Britain is beset with a rape gang crisis that appears to
be being handled in an unusual way Bureaucratically the pillars and institutions are quaking and shaking too much intersection inappropriate intersection between the Judiciary the media and the government not a lack and not enough proper coordination and interconnection and communication between those same institutions because I suppose you want coordination but what you don't want is conspiracy you want agreement in principle which is very different than like conscious and what Would you say incentivized coordination so this beginners mind so I did a course for Peterson Academy on The Sermon on the Mount and this so I thought
I would mention something about that in relationship to this idea of like every moment being born a new let's say so in The Sermon on the Mount Christ says to focus your attention on what's most high and so you could think about that even if you don't exactly know what that means you could think about that as the Attempt to get your intent right so in so far as you can conceptualize what the good is is even in your ignorance that's what you're trying to put first and foremost so you do that first and then
you attend to the moment and so then you get the advantage of a kind of a distal view which is associated with life eternal you might say and what's important at the Pinnacle of all things but then you get that hyper attention on the moment that makes everything born a New and you know psychologists have caught in onto that to some degree with their discussion of Concepts like flow because if you've got your act together and you're oriented upward and you're conversing or you're engaged in an activity that sense of unity with things does emerge
and that involves a lack of self-consciousness and the ability to focus in a very intense way and I think that's associated by the way there's an insistence in the Old Testament that the First board is to be Sanctified to God and I think what that means is that you imagine that your life is made out of episodes which is how you would recount your day let's say first this happened then this and then there'd be a conclusion then there'd be another event the question is what attitude should you use to frame each new event and
the attitude that's put forward as optimized in The Sermon on the Mount is that when anything new begins you want to reorient Yourself to what's highest so you think well how can I make of this opportunity the best possible event like how how could I Orient myself so that I would be participating in that and you do that every time there's a transformation of viewpoint and yeah that way you get to have your cake and eat it too you might say I'm going to do it now you seek the first the kingdom of Godly first
the kingdom of God and I'm thinking I'm in a conversation right now with Jordan Peterson and how do I Orient myself in this moment in this situation now it feels like amidst the flux that we've earlier addressed or at least alluded to it appears that much of what you came to represent as you emerged in public life has proven to be true it's not like the culture has just shifted we aren't going to see so many pronouns in the Bios we're not going to see an escalation in gender approving surgery hopefully that won't be concomittant
with a lack of Compassion for people the some people are different and do identify differently indeed one of the things I'm most hopeful about Jordan is that with the transitions of power that are taking place and the way that it appears to be bleeding or at least influencing outside of its political jurisdiction like we're seeing like how American power and in particular the influence of Elon Musk which is a truly Global power and now what when when I meant when I said Globalism like 18 months ago I meant something different to what I might mean
when I say globalism now because it appears that Elon Musk in a matter of posts can disrupt Elevate new potential Kings desiccate them and remove them in a a matter of moments and it's it's interesting to see how the old world we will reorder itself on the basis of what's emergent now and the reason that I I feel that Christianity is so significant is because it's significant With with regards to every single issue but now that we don't have as we did with the previous project an attempt to completely control ideological life through politics we're
not going to be altering language wildly and radically we're not at war with nature and old taxonomies we're not seeking to annihilate the principle of God that we may lay claim to his kingdom I wonder how these new forms of government May evolve and unfold and I wonder how these New forms of nationalism might develop well we've been at for this Arc um Enterprise we we've been trying to wrestle exactly with that issue and I think your comments about you know Elon let's say as a globalist force that isn't exactly akin to the previous globalist
force is like well maybe we we've tried to distinguish this technically in our discussions at ARC okay so here's some principles you tell me what you think about them policy that Requires force and fear is indicative of it's at least suboptimal and it's probably tyrannical so that one of the ways you determine whether a policy is acceptable is whether or not it's Invitational right and so it' be like I make you an offer and hopefully you're on board voluntarily which would make you a much more efficient participant as well and even if you're not fully
enthusiastic about it you can't think of a better alternative that you would lay Claim to right so it's like you can imagine if we're going to negotiate reasonably we might say well we're going to be Duty bound to accept the best offer we can conceive of right I mean hopefully it'll be one that also fills you with enthusiasm but in the absence of that at least you won't be able to think of a better alternative so no power no Force no fear right and then the other thing that we've toyed with let's say or played
with is the idea That not only does the vision of the future have to be Invitational there has to be an element of play about it because like I studied play fairly deeply neuro physiologically and play is a really interesting motivational State because it's very fragile it can be disrupted by almost any other motivational state so the sense of play which is like Direction with variability right because that's play is Direction with Variability that only emerges when the situation say of communication and cooperation is being optimized so then you might say another way that you
you can tell if the Venture is proceeding well is that if everybody engaged in it can engage in a sense of play and I like the play idea partly because it's voluntary obviously but also because play implies a fair bit of tolerance for you know for deviation along the path yes yes yes the vicissitude now I'm Assuming that your experience as a clinical psychologist must be primarily interpersonal although you will ultimately be dealing with large data sets but the reason I'm fascinated that you'd bring up play so early in our conversation is because when precisely
looking at the posts of Elon Musk and Trump with Trump saying you know make Canada the 51st state or we're going to reach all the way down to Panama or we're having Greenland or Elon musk's Sort of um puckish uh pugnaciousness in dealing with his detractors on his own platform doesn't have that kind of haughtiness and piety that we remember that kind of um Pharisee like certainty of the m materialist rationalist neoliberal oligarchs who appear now to be being displaced this play though I wonder Jordan and this is not an assertion I'm making with regard
to the list previous listed individuals I know our audience When it comes to Trump and musk and stuff but there isn't there mischief and play in the Demonic also now like the reason I the reason I like play one I'm a comedian one of I enjoy Lial spaces and I enjoy the uncertainty that's a prerequisite of play the true Spirit of pioneering discovery that is encompassed with in play is it and I enjoy actually in fact perhaps much of the Trump phenomena was this politician isn't talking like other politicians way back 2015 with Hillary Clinton
cuz you'd be in jail that moment I like people don't say that like up against the sort of school M sort of of Bluster and haughtiness have you come to you know the English have Beed to the world abundantly that kind of sort of Victorian certainty glanc the not at the piano leg in case you feel a tessent stirring in the loins total lack of joy and play now isn't it interesting to see that tool of play wielded now by The truly powerful by Trump and musk it'll be interesting because you know their detractors continue
like you know you might see a late night talk show host saying see I told you I told you they're going to take over Canada what Elon Musk doing meddling in British politics but regardless of the again as a Christian regardless of the IND you know Trump's not God musk's not God they're all human beings that are going to come and go and perhaps I've been Thinking this about Elon Musk somewhat lately is there a point where order of magnitude Alters Essence I.E is not musk just a reiteration of Murdoch because you know Tony Blair
used to cow toow bend the knee go on holiday to ensure that Murdoch would report uh support his new labor movement it was understood that Thatcher required Murdoch it was undersood that if Murdoch Unleashed an ocean of ink against an opposition party the government would remain in power now Murdoch he still has a some power across the the anglophonic world and you know I don't know what Murdoch's powers like now but what I know is that Elon musk's like a version of a media magnate at least when it comes to the social media aspect of
his vast Enterprises but when it becomes not a 20 minute perusal of some rag but an everpresent mirror reflecting back an ongoing conversation the ability to maneuver and censor that as well as the manner in which he's Conducting that conversation again not the sort of what would appear to be and perhaps I'm being naive the economically LED kind of I imagine Dow Jones watching sort of traditional entrench mentality of digger for that was the nickname wasn't it of Murdoch you now see this sort of well perhaps it's perhaps again it's the technology that leads because
the technology now diffuse cybernetics no inst instantaneous systems taking place in the present because M because Our systems for understanding God were mechanical in the Industrial Age they were they were agricultural at the Advent of that significant seesmic shift in our kind's Velton Shong so now now that we have this instantaneous omnipresent potentiality maybe everything's changing so in short what I'm saying is is like is What's Happening Now entirely unique because and because it is temporal because of the temporal component because of this Instantaneous immersive ability to alter conversation maybe it no longer is even
paradigmatically the same Jord well well you know I I just did an interview with p POV who's going to be the next prime minister of Canada in all likelihood and he chose to speak with me in depth instead of talking to the Legacy Media let's say and it was actually rather comical from my perspective because all the Legacy Media outlets in Canada had to play catchup which I uh contemplated With some degree of you know inappropriate satisfaction but but there's something so we had to talk about that because POV had expressed some doubts about his
performance in the discussion he said there were many topics he didn't get to and so we talked about that and I said well you know the long form podcast format can't be manipulated a prior successfully because if you come to the podcast with a set of talking points and you stick to your Script you're going to get first of all no one will watch you and I've seen this with political figures this isn't a guess I know this is the case no one will watch you and all the comments will be negative you have to
come there knowing where you stand but ready to follow the thread of the conversation wherever it goes and to do that you have to sacrifice the pre-planning okay so then we might look into that more deeply and we might say well now that video is Predominating let's say over the written word the that means that that might mean the reemergence of something like spontaneity over over propaganda like that could be the casee because the New Media forms do prioritize spontaneity instead of preparation now you can see that as a technological shift you know back when
bandwidth was staggeringly expensive in every second on broadcast media cost a fortune you could imagine that risk minimization was The name of the game and that every second had to be controlled but that restriction is no longer present even at all and so what that should mean what that might mean and that's what you're referring to is that an entirely new form of political discourse might emerge and that people who are capable of generating a certain degree of perspicacity and wisdom spontaneously are going to be prioritized over those who have a bent towards incentivized or
Instrumental manipulation I mean PV could do that right he had a conversation with me he got no questions ahead of time none and so and he was willing to go along with that and but it is really a completely different way of now we've been talking to Democrats too trying to get them on the podcast circuit and the resistance so far has been the utter inability and unwillingness of people on the Democrat side to forego their pre-planned agenda With regards to a conversation lent is approaching those meaningful 40 days leading up to Easter this year
hallow has launched an incredible prayer challenge to help you embrace the core principle of this sacred time prayer fasting and almsgiving by joining Jesus in the wilderness through fasting and sacrifice you open yourself to tremendous spiritual growth experience this journey through Hallow's lent prayer 40 prayer Challenge titled the way following the path Jesus provides you'll discover answers hope healing truth and Beauty drawing from the profound writings of St Jose Maria esrea in the way you'll deepen your faith daily throughout lent the challenge features the remarkable story of tekashi nagai a Japanese radiologist who vied the
atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945 through difficulty and heartbreak his journey led to profound spiritual transformation this Lent as you meditate on the lives of those who followed Christ you'll discover that despite today's distractions and suffering Jesus's sacrifice on the cross opens the door to his love peace and eternal life join over a million others in prayer this Lent get three months free covering the entire Lenton season when you visit hall.com Jordan download the app and join the lent prayer 40 challenge today right right some time ago you said we Were entering this era of
New Kings you said I don't know when you started saying if you said it to me about a year ago New Kings you said and I like I clocked it and thought it was interesting and now we're sort of seeing how that's playing out the boundaries are shifting kind of a sort of sort of cybernetic gerrymandering as the sort of this space moves Beyond geography and into something more conceptual yet actual in so much it can be Administrated and it can be controlled now to your point about spontaneity I wonder if it's in any way
ultimately distinct from the sort of Socratic idea that the spoken word had a different a distinct authenticity from the from I agree well well and it was Socrates who decried that if I remember correctly right he was afraid that if the written took Primacy that the the concretization of thought would eliminate I mean I think Fuko wrote About that as a matter of fact in favor of Socrates proposition that the spoken should take priority over the written but it does have something to do with this paradoxical relationship between propagandizing and pre-preparation and see it isn't
obvious me to me that you can lie effectively spontaneously in a conversation no not necessarily continually now you remember about 500,000 words ago 10 minutes ago at the beginning of our conversation both speak Relatively quickly I mentioned that an everpresent omnipresent God if God is the absolute Creator a temporal a spacial outside of the limitations of space and time it struck me the other day as I was having one of these kind of uh Transcendent experiences that I've been having since becoming Christian that the pre that God would be present in every moment and discernable
in every interaction that there would indeed be narrativized lessons discernment is the Right word there because that's what discernment is for discernment is to find the PATH where the sacred manifests itself in each moment yeah to detect or divine to Divine where is it is that Divine as a transitive verb rather than as a description of sublime and what I what so when to your point about how now you said that thing about new sovereigns ages ago and I said ages ago after reading Martin gur's book The Revolt of the public that there was an
Inevitability The Independent Media and the way that it you know M gory saw this much earlier than any of us he saw like I think he saw like who napsta what that's done to the record industry how's that going to play out wait a second and then you sort of like you know Arab Spring Occupy Movement brexit Trump like watching how institutions are unable to adjust to the new thermals and the new Contours that emerge with this sudden uh impactful and incursive instantaneous Communication I said like as a an occupant of New Media spaces like
yourself how long is it before inevitably The Independent Media and and a new form of independent politics uh coales align and a aemerge we're seeing it now that it will become so porous as to be uh so porous as to be without distinction and it seems now that what you what distinction are you referring to there exactly media is this category politics is this category those Distinctions will dis po example PA have I think has been he's certainly been the most effective Canadian politician on this front but he might be the most effective politician in
the Western World at the moment in using New Media so one of the things he's done for example is write and produce 10-minute documentaries to educate Canadians about economic reality he's done that very effectively they're very high quality documentaries and he told me that he Writes them and narrates them which is you know quite an interesting skill set CU that's quite diversed from typical politicking but it is you know the thing is is the intermediaries in some ways the intermediaries are no longer necessary between the leaders and the populace now this is something that um
the mega and the Maha types are are trying to work out right now from a from a strategic perspective is like oh we now have the Opportunity to communicate directly to the public at indefinite length right because also the technological constraints that made everything compressed into a 30C sound bite that's gone and so then PV has been very effective at just talking directly to the Canadian public and that's why he won the conservative leadership and it's part of the reason along with Trudeau's catastrophic failure that he's going to be the next prime minister but it
does It is a sea change and it is driven you know in large part by this technological transformation you now you've been down I've got two questions for you that I want to go in two directions the first is re regarding the question I opened our conversation with in relationship to Christianity you're a very open person and your interests flash all over and do you have any do you have any faith in the stability of what you've newly found or do you do you Think that there's a risk or a possibility of your attention given
your open Nature shifting to something else or do you feel that you found a kind of Bedrock that's qualitatively different from the sorts of orientations that you've had previously let's start with that it feels like something absolute is being encountered which has um ameliorated mitigated neutralized and somehow compounded and Infused something that Was always latent and yet coring within me the self the self as the absolute I want this do what thou will shall be the whole of the LA and the problem with the new age the problem with I'll have a little bit of
Buddhism and I'll have a little bit of Sufism and I'll read a bit of Fuko and I'll conjure up my own little Pantheon in fact it was you that said it to me um that if God is everything God is anything and I encountered that more empirically when Returning to a kind of new age festival and I feel what is this feeling that I'm having here having you know since comeing a Christ in a a new age festival and I don't you know I still got the other day is adored permanently about my body as
a reminder and what it felt like is it's false idolatry false idolatry is predicated on a polarity between the self and the idol Christ replaces the self MH you die on the cross with him it's the self that has to go there is no That what self exactly how do you conceptualize the self that has winess the russl The Observer the witness the russl by default inadvertently I'm always in the service of the centrifugal force around which urges projections Reflections the intellect the memory they all like you once said when talking about like the word
which might have a bunch of associated words like cat and all that I got Russell and Russell's memories and Projections I got this sort of loose sense of a Continuum of self now what it was very deliberate that Center should be replaced yes Cent before he was right and we nearly touched on this before cuz wbh was right the center cannot hold and that's what we're experiencing with the emergence of the Hydra The Sovereign is unfolding the seed is cracking open the wheat is is being born it's being borne out now the thing is is
before with the narcissism me being a devotee of the Other culture a devotee of the false idolatry I worshiped self now at first it felt like a sort of the pilgrimage was very sort of meekly undertaken for I was not a robust child athlete nor was I a high school heartrob I was a sort of a broken and wounded little trickster in the world and when I became impowered at puberty and attractive and potent and then famous and it all was I felt evolv or growing but one of my teachers would say inflating it was
Inflating like I you know it's difficult if you've felt pretty worthless your whole life and all of a sudden there's a culture queuing up to give you sort of accolades and Pat you on the back and there's a sort of a an endless cor of fellacio suddenly available it's difficult not to think that you might not be rather magnificent now the reason I like I as a sort of a counterweight to the feelings of inferiority I would have been resist I Always knew something about Jesus I knew something about Jesus but my odd contemporary translation
of that was I want to be him I want to be the Savior I want to be in direct commune with God I want to lead I want to be empowered and then when when the Desolation came the Desolation and despair when the Grail came again not like the Adolescent despair when you know you've got a whole life and a bunch of hormones about to hit you and Elevate you middle-age Desolation and decimation desecration despair despondency when that incursion came when those arrows landed there was a clarification took place amidst the catastrophic white noise and
Haze was not just the cross but the solitary figure fully man fully God to whom we must bow down now they do what they can in the United Kingdom to make AR stringent anad and beral the figure of Christ the TV shows the ceremonies and sermons themselves with some Noble Exceptions I've had some brilliant English Christian teachers J John um father Dave although he's just become a bishop and he's certainly not a Catholic Minister father Julian at bromton loads of people out of UK I'm not being dismissive in a widest sense I'm just saying sort
of culturally the way that Christianity is presented is somewhat mundane and then over in this country the United States where we are now sometimes they can make give it so much Carnival that it can seem too sequin glistening and rid ridiculous but somewhere within all of us is he's there he is there for that was his gift he died that we may know eternal life and we may be redeemed of our sins and he bequeathed upon us the Holy Spirit now what I felt was again it wasn't sort of flashbang wallet the moment of the
baptism was powerful the moment of sort of this slowly the slowly separating Fugue and as I say the clarification and Emergence of the face of Christ was very real and I knew what the compromise was if there is a Jesus You're Not Jesus you are you are not Jesus you are not at the center neither is anybody else he is firstborn among the dead and the rest of us we're all lined up before the throne as Sinners the people that have tried to destroy me the people that hate me the people that I've wronged the
people I've sinned against all all of us just one congregation before him my cherished and Prized individuality sometimes that cast me so low worthless disgusting worse than everybody else there sometimes self- reification and self-deification I am so spectacular I am so marvelous all of it now just sort of eased into I am as he made me I am as he would have me now I don't know that I might not you know it'll be for someone as as you say open peretic intellectually and capricious as I have sometimes been perhaps it would seem audacious to
claim That I belong to him but that I surrender to you as my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ I serve you yeah well something you want to do with care that's for sure so surely surely but to let you know that the ego is still in here I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ but I'm going to give as best a shot as I can give at being Paul that that's I'll come down I'll come down from Jesus but only so far oh no sorry Lord Sorry Lord Paul's just a man like
us Paul's just a man like us acts is full of men like us Ephesians written by a man like us Galatians a man like us and now and amidst these tectonic shifts and new and emerging kings and new paradigms and new language he he is Christ you know we you okay so how Okay so so let's come and have a drink please because that was real life as well I ran with it because spontaneous spontaneous Don't Stop Don't Stop film sorry okay so this This I want to take apart this idea two things here I
want to take apart this this idea of the self you said and like the narcissistic self let's say and then I want to contrast that with this alternative self that's a consequence of the acceptance of something like voluntary self sacrifice and I kind of want to do that technically because i' I've been trying to work through the relationship between power and Hedonism so as far as I can tell there's not much Point in power apart from the sadism without Hedonism because power needs to serve desire because why else have it okay so then the question
is you might say well the power serves my desires but then there's a problem there n pointed to this by the way back in the mid 1800s he said well when you say my or when you say I you're assuming some sort of a prior Unity that's Transcendent that isn't self-evident even though you think it is so you might say well I want my Desires to be requited and that's a focus on me but what you're doing is you're identifying the I or the me with the desire and what that means inadvertently is that you're
replacing I or me with the desire and what that means is you're actually possessed by the desire and so what narcissism actually means and I think this is true clinically narcissism means subjugation to a series of possession by fragmented whim and then people say well I'm getting what I want it's like there's no I there you're a battlefield of whims and then you might say well if your whims are being met successfully why is that a problem and it seems to me that the fundamental problem is it's actually self-defeating like one of the things we
know about Psychopaths for example is T me say psychopath some people think you think I'm one I'm actually very compassionate no I I was thinking about you being one of the People who are talking about Psychopaths yeah yeah that's a very important distinction so Psychopaths betray themselves as badly as they betray other people so psychopaths are completely unable to learn from experience which seems to mean that they don't give any consideration whatsoever to their future self so they give no more consideration to their future self than they give to other people and then you might
say well what's the problem with that and the Problem is you gratify whim in the present at the cost of yourself and others in the future and that's not a sustainable game so now I've been trying the the postmodernists essentially presumed that the only uniting story was one of power yes okay so then you might say well what's the alternative to that conceptualization that still allows for the possibility of of Union because you could have nihilism versus Power for Example Le well I think what the biblical stories are pointing to is an ethos a voluntary
self-sacrifice right and that is actually the antithesis of power and then you might say well that's there's a relationship between accepting that as a valid proposition and reconfiguring the notion of the self because when when my wife when Tammy had Michaela we took our daughter up to Northern Saskatchewan when she was about a year old and there's a bunch of old People there and they're all just watching this baby like mad like she was on fire you know they're all 65 7075 and they're so thrilled that this little creature is around and they're watching her
intently and Tammy said to me that it was such a relief to her not to be the center of attention that something had become more important to her and that calmed her down and it gave her purpose and so then you might think the true self rather than the hedonistic Self-defeating self which we axiomatically assume as the self the true self is actually found in the consequences of voluntary self-sacrifice because then you get you sacrifice you get to be married you sacrifice you get to have friends you sacrifice you get to have colleagues and people
who are voluntarily participating your endeavors you multiply your force and then the self becomes like it's the short-term Psychopathic and manipulative whims that Are sacrificed that you reflexively identify with the self and what's that what that's replaced with is harmony across all the levels of being simultaneously from Individual like couple family Town Society State and then all the way up Jacob's Ladder right so and that's based on the argument would be that's inevitably based on something like the acceptance of voluntary self-sacrifice as an existential necessity and that seems to Be that's the pattern of Christ's
life clearly and obviously is Ed by the abortive sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis which um precedes preempts and acts as a prologue to the ulate sacrifice and I tried to take that apart because that's that's a story for example that the atheists like Dawkins point to as indicative of the sadism of God but I I think I I think what it means is that of course you offer your children to God because you can't protect them and you Don't want them to be nihilistic and so what you do is you say they their service as
tools in the hands of the Divine takes priority over everything is that's right well remember Abraham gets him back right and there's a lesson there it's like if you're willing to devote your children to what's highest they return to you also faith faith demands of us that even though materially and actually you're in a moment where there's a knife above Your child you are okay then God I mean this doesn't look good for from where I am but I know that my perspective is just a set of interlocutors of fragmented desires that transubstantiation is being
taken anyway you are taking the body and the word you used was possessed by the false Idols by the desires continually the trans substanti substanti transubstantiation of of Desire is continually taking place I am occupied I am occupied by desire I Locate myself here in this desire My polarity is achieved by my desire and inverted Comm as my cuz who is the my if the false idol is now has now occupied me if I possessed by that makes you a slave to the desire I am its parasite so we have no choice the only antidote
the only self is him he is the only salvation it's only by dying on the cross with him that I can neutralize it because otherwise I will be possessed again now elsewhere in that you talked About something that I picked up while reading that book you gave me told me to read profane in the sa oh you read that oh great the homogenity that you're not even living in a morass of nucal space but arbitrarily scattered fragments and those desires that you just talked about those desires that of which you become the temporary host you
become puppeted by and parasited by if you don't have a if you don't have within you the Fortitude that as just a sort of a set of urges and memories and Pro ejections without the ideal without the Supreme ideal as maximum power maximum sacrifice maximum power maximum service not maximum power maximum F fulfillment of desire that's that's yeah that is the narcissistic Paradigm in America today over 60% of all abortions happen through medication pills that can be legally mailed to any state in the nation these pills not only End the baby's life but also carry
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place life-saving medical equipment in women's centers where it's needed most join us in this crucial Fight For Life call pound 250 and say baby that's pound 250 keyword baby or Visit pre-born docomo not maximum short-term fulfillment of Desire the promise is still something approximating life more abundant right see part of the reason way overcoming self Jordan because you're no long the self is no longer the totem at the center of it well it's that immediate immediate element of it too though it's atemporal though it's aoral you've annihilated time that's what it means that's what it
means to Participate in life eternal I mean part of the reason that Christ is the provider of Loaves and F endless Loaves and Fishes is because there is no more stable economic Covenant than one that's founded on the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice so if you found your whol see we have a very skewed notion in the west of what constitutes natural resource because there's s there's such a thing as the resource curse right so if you look economically at countries That are blessed with natural resources they're not rich not by and large they're corrupt and
poor and that's because the idea of natural resource is wrong the only natural resource the only true natural resource is the principle that the Covenant of Cooperative social productivity is predicated on and that's the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice if you have that everything becomes a resource everything that's why Christ is the miraculous provider of the Loaves And the fishes and the water that never runs dry because if you organize your Society on the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice then everything is abundant always it's not immediate gratification of whim it's something much more sustained and productive and
communal and and upward serving and what do it tell us Jordan if our culture is antithetical to that and organized around the exact opposite principle that the self is the Apex that the family Isn't real Nation isn't I mean and I understand post structuralism in a way and understand the arbitrariness and I understand the nature of those arguments but in the same way that CS Lewis observed that something that is foreclosed against and forbidden continually in scripture Usery and uh debt-based culture has become the economic foundation of the West that's something that is scripturally forbidden
becomes essential is an indication that Paul and John and our Lord I'm not talking about the Beatles I'm talking about the New Testament were all right when they said this is the Dominion of the evil one that you fight not against flesh and blood and I'm interested in what you think about this occultist component because I because you are a genius when it in Clinical Psychology and using that set of tools to dissect something which I think is part of the mysterium tremendum and therefore not Subject to that particular analytic not ultimately not ultimately these
are secondary these are it's a secondary discourse if we if scripture is the absolute if this is if this is the word of God if this is him then that that which flows out of it even if we do take the branch of Yung and afford ourselves the ongoing mystery we are acknowledging the continuing uh with the unknowable supernatural Preternatural aspatial atemporal compon opponent of all this so I wonder I wonder because I don't think we are going to be able to get I feel that what has been happening for the last you know I
don't know if it was 20 years I don't know if it was the last 50 years I don't know if it's beyond time but certainly it seemed to me it was a result of materialism rationalism and individualism and the naal conclusion natural conclusion that flows forth from Materialism is that all that is real is the self and the desire and what you just described there that you may as well just have a mosaic of desires lining up prophesied that at the end of World War II he said that the logical conclusion of protestantism would be
that everybody was their own church right because there's there's no end to the fragmentation right and that that's associated with let's say the Worship of a diversity for its own sake but the problem with that is fragmentation and entropy and also the narcissism that goes along with every single person being the center of the world and you know the the complex one of the complex problems that's associated with that is exactly the question of well if it's not you that's the center once you understand that the you that you presume is actually an aggregation of
immature whims in its Default form then what is the you that should be Paramount now Yung knew this this is why he regarded Christ as a symbol of the self right he believed that the he believed that the central Unity of spirit that would in some ways naturally emerge as these underlying complexes or motivational States aggregated would take on the appearance of the the self-sacrificial passion and it it has to be that way like I this is I believe because if you're going to Orient yourself towards the future you have to sacrifice the present like
obviously and if you're going to orient yourself towards other people in a communal relationship you have to sacrifice the immediate demand for the gratification of your whims that's what kids learn between two and four like they learn to for example when they learn to take turns which is like a predicate for having friends right cuz sometimes it's you and Sometimes it's me otherwise we're not going to get along that's obviously sacrificial because to do that you have to sacrifice you taking the first turn every time and so I don't see any way out of the
argument that a future mature future orientation is sacrificial and mature future oriented communal orientation is self-sacrificial and then you'd say well what's the pattern of that and Christ's insistence right is that he embodied the pattern of the Prophets and the law that was already extent in the Old Testament and embodied it and that embodiment is the ultimate demonstration of voluntary self-sacrifice I can't argue my way out of that it just seems like that just seems I can't see an alternative to that interesting when we pursue it rationally of course it makes sense because elsewise in
some ways what would be the point that like I can empirically say that having tried to live a life at Times that was um that was motivated by selfservice like well why not take loads of drugs oh yeah that's what happens well why not just have sex with everyone who's around you who wants to have sex with you why not do that all right oh I see that's what happens so in a sense those uh prohibitions those e edicts the those sanctions were in a sense compassionate at the point of origin but the mistake how
do so what do You mean I don't I don't follow that exactly you can do what you want but if you do do it you be unhappy rather than it being I'm going to kill you if you have sex with loads and loads of women go have sex with loads and loads of women and find for yourself see how you get told you told you that that won't work for you but well that is what you do to some degree if you're a reasonable parent of adolescence for example yes one of the Things you do
is is say go make some mistakes and find out for yourself it is required that's I suppose that's the well you would associate that theologically with the granting of free will like right why not make everyone just into a slave of divine command yes exactly and but what we have to do is actually Jordan is not pursue it I don't I believe not entirely down the the lines of rationalism I.E if you sacrifice this now things will be better In the future if you are Cooperative with your peers because in a sense that's no different
than the kind of evolutionary biology that comes out of pinka and um your man Dawkins and all of the atheists oh we can rationally even love we can describe love no there is something that is beyond reason there is something that is beyond our understanding beyond our Canen now first we must enter into an alternative state that state is belief like me I'm pretty Clever so to sort of like go all right so God came to Earth in human form lived a life as a normal person with genitals and fingernails and farts and picked stuff
out his teeth then he died because somehow there had to be Absolution for sin somehow some I can't even when I try to put it in rational language some frequency had to be orur some Templar some portal some opening some new mure something had to be done a transition had to be achieved I can't r unpack it But when through despair that set of that that Stout that Mosaic of traits and Recollections that I and urges that I call Self when it is annihilated and when it implodes there when that becomes inutil who is there
amidst the archetypal morass and miasma is there some form some figure now if I believe in him if I go Jesus Christ you are my king and my Lord and my savior something happens so I believe we have to go Beyond like even though I have personally experienced if all you do is narcissistically pursue pleasure and power and the Privileges of the false Cathedral of the evil one that we now have normalized and regard to be ordinary life Fame celebrity materialism rationalism commodification Commerce all of that when I broken out of it by An Almighty
slap from the heavenly father I don't re-enter into it with the kind of idea that oh this will be good for me And this will pay dividends one day it's like I I I am I live only in you I allow me to become a Living Sacrifice continually renew my mind live in me my heavenly father now I will change and I will become absolutely what he wants me to become but it isn't in order that eye because if it is absolutely in the moment it is right so you're saying that it can't just be
grounded in a more enlightened form of self of what would say self-service yeah okay so okay so Not te yep got it got it got it so well some of the things that were occurring to me um when you said that so there's a dream that Tolstoy had at and recounted at the end of his confession he was in a kind of suicidal Despair and he had a dream that he was suspended on a bed and he was looking down like wa in an immensely high above the Earth and he was looking down into this
Abyss that he could fall into and he and then he looked up and he could See a rope that connected him to heaven but he couldn't see what it was attached to but he understood that that rope that disappeared into the ineffable was what was protecting him from like eternally so to speak from plunging into the abyss and one of the things you're making reference to is the fact that because you're finite let's say and not omniscient that your conceptualizations are always going to ground themselves out in something that is truly ineffable Now the same
problem obtains in science right because if you pursue uh the if you pursue your investigations into the Micro World you ground out in the quantum World which no one understands and then if you pursue your your uh investigation temporarily and you encounter the Big Bang you're stuck with a miracle at the beginning of times and I think part of the part of it is and Yung made some reference to this is like if you're finite and bounded in your Intelligence and your apprehension there's a cloud of like mystery that surrounds that that's like that's dreamlike
and then there's something that's akin to the miraculous around that and that's the buffer between the finite and the infinite and I think you're making reference to that when you talk about the danger of reducing religious Faith to the rational even if you're assuming future orientation and communal orientation as a better Rational orientation than present a present whim gratification and I I think that's I think that's right I mean that's that's partly I think why Orthodox Christianity is exerting a fairly powerful attraction on people at the moment because it's quite good at using architecture and
ritual and and sound to fill the gap between the rational and the irrational right and it's not argumentation any more than ballet is argumentation or fine art is Argumentation it's it's more like it's a phenomena that now means to shine forth right it's a phenomena that indicates that there's something beyond what you normally apprehend that's there and that a relationship with that is necessary and I do think that's now you you Associated that Discovery in you with despair so like can you fill in the gaps between the Despair and the discovery of that what would
you say it's partly humility it's partly apprehension of the Necessity of accepting things that are beyond your rational reductionism you have something of genuine value to offer to everyone else discovering your true purpose is daunting that's precisely why I've developed the mastering life collection for dailywire plus we've designed this collection to Aid you in your upward Endeavors tackling some of the essential questions of life you CH a meaningful course because aim is everything real Tools for dealing with the darkness within face the world as confidently and bravely as possible hearken to the call of Adventure
Ure and to climb the confidence hierarchy life is not a game we each have a destiny I've seen time and time again how people transform when they're offered the appropriate tools this is the distillation of everything I've learned about helping people face life's challenges it's the direct result of my life's work as a clinical Psychologist and as a teacher so if you're ready to pursue something deeper and more sustaining than mere happiness if you're willing to face life's challenges head on join me on dailywire Plus you described how on the observable plane the smallest material
components of reality and the largest expanse conceivable of time the origin of time as we might understand it are enshrined in an unknowable ineffable Mystery perhaps in our own fractal reality in the little my little personal Cosmos with its own hierophanies I see I did read that book y y y i I have encountered in various ways those EDG lands now any genius whether it's in a scientific discipline a sport or Arts are trying to find that edge and in so doing occasionally in their renderings will come up with some concert landscape portrait or rhyme
that is indicative of the Perfection that underlies observable Reality that there is is an absolute now me while the in relationship if the sort of culture is telling you you know become don't be in this Ordinary World of Gray's essics with its sort of endless tedium and it sort of trash Glamour and its post proletarian denim bleed into nothing Aspire you to the upper echelons to the great Vatican now in Flames there you will find Salvation but we know what prophets and what Idols speak from those Hills now incandescent and when you get there and
if you had experienced all that stuff if you sort of sleep around like most people probably Jordan that sort of like live a I don't know about most people some people may be like they're like you know I live a pretty chased life but you know as we have discussed and before and as you've touched upon in in on innumerable occasions well have you ever been offered did you receive an offer to The banquet do you know what it's like have you been presented with any temptation to resist have you known that Temptation and like
and when you are and it sort of it's not it is the false defibrillation of his kingdom you can't achieve something there in the falce light in the falce light of the Enlightenment that built out that new template where man sits at the Apex Lucifer himself Lucifer for himself if the the original sin of disobedience is Knowledge apart from him or them depending on how you see it Lucifer is cast out and falls from heaven like lightning precisely because he sees himself as a competitor opponent and alternative to the Divine now I believe that is
the archetype of selfishness that is the that's where that's its germ and germination it selfishness it selfishness replete with the most sophisticated of all possible rationalizations so it's the it's the What would you say Supreme intellect as handen of the passions right right right right so it's it's it's it's that grip of instantaneous motivation allied with this is Fuko to a to a t as far as I'm concerned he put his entire intellect at the service of his of his warped passion diabolical diabolical and he's very good at it like he's very smart he's very
smart great s history in this markx did the same thing Marx did the same thing why why not but like you know the reason That I spoke about that um the despair as being the rupture um as being the point of epiphany is because I suppose I've been taken to the very edge of it you know my person I'm not claiming this is objective or absolute I'm claiming the the precisely the opposite it's entirely subjective of course but I went as far as I could go not only with the Hedonism and the epicurian ism but
also with the oh look you've got a family now and a dog and a thatched cottage and you Live by the river and it's all I've sort of tried all of it and then somehow lurking in the past those two serpents that I had adored my own personal Bal and molock fame and sex turned when I was trying to live even in the within the purview of the culture as somewhat truthful and honest life hey this pandemic don't seem right they're not telling us the truth about the origins of this War I don't think you
can trust these people what's the relationship Between the media and these organizations and and you can't try you and liberalism itself is a kind of Godless ideology this was when those two serpents turned now I already felt that I was kind of an woken an awakened person I kind of felt like I kind of clever had not long but held a festival where rather brilliant people like vanana Shiva and whim Hoff and cie means you know brilliant people had come turned up and I had marched about the Grounds holding a staff chanting Ragnarok with a
bunch of pagans down there by some River the river in fact that serves as a border between Wales the Celtic wilds and England the stable Center and not long after that everything fell apart and I was exposed to so much sin and sin I think here's a good near acronym in in s the stands for self self the cilent serpent self in self now because my background isn't a addiction and chemical dependency and Behavioral dependency I can see that what you do is as well as that sort of Mosaic that we keep referencing to of
of a kind of black mass of transubstantiation placing desire where the center should be no wonder it cannot hold but whilst as a kind of a cardinal o o of that dark worship while considering myself to be awakened of course because you know you have to normalize these things you have to Dy no one's going around mably claiming I am evil everyone thinks they're doing the right thing it's either banal it's either the banality of evil or the celebration of the evil of evil or the invisibility of evil because it's so immersive and absolute and
so far reaching so with the my identity fell apart my identity fell apart peculiarly at the exact same because it's like Russell you know Russell Brand is not a famous womanizer Russell Brand is a famous rapist that's what R what what Look at him standing on stage making these jokes what what are you talking about what are you talking about being able to direct people's will is not the same as overcoming their will or ignoring their will or Co coercing them is precisely the opposite having the ability to direct people's will or Charm or seduce
or enchant these are sort of shamanic magical kind of qualities that yes I now see where they lead thank you for the lesson Lord I now see where they Lead and I also now know absolutely and look at what's happening in my country right now falling apart with a kind of an extraordinary extraordinary Subterranean potentially Barbarian culture of gang rape like what what's going on this it is like Old Testament stuff so my despair came when the what I had built what I had made for myself my false idol not you know like over my
life I've carved this thing this image of Russell and look at it it can be Destroyed it can be destroyed hour one of the strange things I think about your situation is that you know you were God maybe this is probably right is that you are just like Richard Dawkins is the Exemplar of the atheistic Enlightenment you're kind of the success story of the hedonistic liberal right I mean you got like assuming that would work what you got was it working okay so then the question is well if you get what you asked for like
if it's Magically granted to you as it was in your case what's the consequence of that and you're outlining the consequence so you said well there were practical consequences which that had inverted on you but I'm also interested in the psychological consequences you know because it the question well why not take uh pleasure enhancing drugs like cocaine why not sleep with everyone who presents thems as an opportunity like that's an actual question right Generally the reason is well generally the reason is well you can't right you just don't have the opportunity but then let's assume
that can well let okay okay and then but why can you be more specific about why that didn't work psychologically I can but but it's in the the despair holds the key because I believe that was the communion and the communication that simultaneous with that like while you know people were you know like friends and enemies calling me And you among the friends like you know let's say like God are you okay this is crazy what was also happening is we were taking our son to who was 12 weeks old to have his body carved
almost in half his heart taken out of his body like that that was happening at the same time so it was like well for all of the stur and Drang and the meteorological operatics of this conjured and concocted storm which no doubt I provided the raw material for by being the poster boy of Liberal Hedonism it sort of the Lord showed me this is meaningless this is meaningless and I'll show you it's meaningless look look what's actually happening right now look at your son look at the rain falling on his gentle face as you push
the pram to Great ormon Street look at his tiny smile look at the breast milk coming through his mother's t-shirt because she can't feed him cuz he has surgery in a few hours so you tell me what's real what did it do For you where did it get you what does it mean and there he is Jesus Christ and there he isn't Russell Brand what did what good did he do you for all of your worship for all of your effort for all of the Poetry the pros the posturing the pining and Prim Pim where
did it lead you nothingness welcome to the annihilation what you learn in crisis is true anyway it's true anyway but you just ignored it with all of the ornamentation and Pageantry you are able to distract yourself from it so marvelously so psychologically what happens is a massive rupture and you realize also by the way because in you're in great orry when the most important thing in your life is happening to you let your son is undergoing surgery and he might not survive the surgery so is everyone else's kid so is everyone else's kid who do
you think you are cuz well When when it came in the when it came in the scan you know at six weeks prior to his birth you know I was like I'm not having that Laura I'm not having that I'm not having some kid with tubes up his nose and wies I'm not going to Great Orman street but when you get to Great Orman street through surrender who are you saying oh my God something says something says who are you to not go to Great Orman Street who are you who do you think you are
you're not who you Think you are you're not who you thought you were and the trials and the tests are not punish punishments but lessons is he strips it all away and he takes it away from you and he shows you who you are really and what you are here to do really so what it's like psychologically what it's like psychologically to experience evanism is it's a the Slow Burn of knowing that it was always there when you're watching TV as a kid and Christianity is tedious when you're Singing the wise man built his house
upon the wise man build his house upon the rock I've missed the fundamental lesson the literal foundational lesson that that he's there all the time when you're there in sort of five star hotel rooms and they're asleep on the bed now and you're looking out the window pondering and lonely and empty the sort of holess of it it's there or he's there all the time the threads are always there in every moment in every Mo moment Because in the end like it says in your man um eliad there look it's not even just a homogenous
without the say if you live entirely in the profane you will sanctify profan ity and the culture will sanctify Pro profanity and a priest class will emerge in order to sanctify the profane and to set up falce Idols but it's not even just a homogeneous endless space it's worse than that it's endless chaotic fragmentation with order imposed on top of it it's diabolical and Dark and berserk it's havoc and hell and in the end that hell will show itself not only to you as an individual that's the Pharaoh and the slaves and the consequence of
that is the plagues like yes abs absolutely that's what happens the more dissolute the society the more the unconscious longing for top- down what imposition of structure the more the top down stubborn imposition of structure the more likely that that response to crisis will be pathologized And that the plagues will emerge it's like yeah that maybe that's where them post structuralists and you Fuko and whatnot are right because in that the presupposition is that it's not free will and self-sacrifice it's the imposition of order under the continual threat of violence that creates Society what they
yeah but look absolutely there's no doubt that power is a unifying force I mean that's why in in The Lord of the Rings it's the ring of Power that unites all the Rings If you're not United let's say by responsibility and by voluntary self-sacrifice you will be United by power right that's the rule and and that's why you know in even the isra the Israelites who are slaves under Pharaoh like they're part of a d damic sure the Pharaohs are Tyrant but they're slaves and they're calling out for the Tyrant and so if you if
you call out for the Tyrant power will emerge as the uniting Force and then you might say well why not and the answer is well it's self-defeating it's not it's too rigid to be adaptive and it's fundamentally self-defeating and so that's why not I mean there's more to it as you pointed out because there's the fact that the imposition of the king is a violation of the principle of the Divine Right because if you're following the Divine you don't bloody well need a king which is what God tells the Israelites over And over when they're
clamoring for a king but yeah yeah yeah all right Russell I think we're going to stop on this side I think what we're going to do on the daily wire side yeah is talk about you've been down in Florida and you've been having some association with the mega and the Maha types strangely enough and so I'd like to delve into that a little bit and tell me what you've seen what your hopes are and what you're concerned about cuz you know You're you're a strange character in because well you come at it from the left
and from the liberal side and now you're watching these people who are part of this more conservative movement kind of conservative libertarian movement and I'd be very curious to hear you know what you've concluded as a consequence of your observations okay so obviously you've been made welcome which is extremely interesting and bizarre so yes it's so Preposterous it's all so Preposterous so let's do that on the daily wire side anyways thank you all for your time and attention thanks Russell it's always a pleasure talking to you thank you [Music]
