496. Beyond Dawkins | Jonathan Pageau

So today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Paggio.

Jonathan is one of the primary architects of ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, headquartered in London with its next conference in February. We're trying to reestablish a narrative of promise, hope, and abundance for the international community.
Preposterous as that might sound, that's still happening. He runs a website and YouTube channel called The Symbolic World, which has a very devoted following.
We've spoken many times and I've always found the conversations extremely illuminating. He has a new book, which is called Jack and the Fallen Giants, and it's part of a series of traditional fairy tales told with a modern, but not postmodern, twist.
And what did we talk about today? We assessed the Dawkins discussion in some detail, focusing really on the issues of perception and categorization. And that's very

much worth understanding because it explains, at least to some degree, the fundamental role that stories play in not only human cognition, but in perception and in the unfolding of the world. It's extremely important to understand this.
And I don't think I've delved into it more deeply with my guests than with Jonathan, with the possible exception of John Verveke.

We've talked about identity and subsidiary participation, the notion that individual identity can't be conceptualized properly without reference to our embeddedness in higher order structures, family, marriage, family, community, nation. Well, what? One nation united under God.
Something like Jacob's Ladder stretching up to the stars. And so join us and hear what we have to say.
Well, Mr. Pajot, let's start by comparing books.
All right. You've just published a new book.

Yeah.

Tell us about the book and tell us about what you're doing with this series and with your publishing arm in general.

Yeah.

And so, you know, we talk a lot about the problem with culture that we have now.

And, you know, I really wanted to do something positive, which is if we're noticing that our stories are being captured, that they're being turned into ideological weapons, why not take them back and present them in a beautiful, celebratory way? And so that's the take that we're doing. And so we're making these books unapologetically beautiful, beautifully illustrated, hopefully powerful storytelling, beautiful cover, cloth binding.
And so people can, we're publishing it ourselves. We want to keep total control over the quality and the beauty of the book.
And so people can go to my website, symbolicworld.com, and go to the store. We're offering the books now.
We're selling it out of our own Shopify. And also, if people want, they can just sign up for a mailing list,

and we're giving out free PDFs of some of the books that we're publishing

because we want to, in some ways, we want to have control over the narrative.

And so we want to bring it together as much as possible

so we can tell the stories we want to tell and not be subject to others.

So you have published Snow White?

Yeah. So this is the latest one.
it's Jack and the Fallen Giants.

We published Snow White, we're doing Jack,

and then we're going to do Rapunzel,

the valiant little tailor.

We're doing girl fairy tales, boy

fairy tales, but in a way that will

bring them together. Fluid identity fairy tales?

Ha ha ha. Yeah, we could

I'm tempted to

do Little Red Riding Hood

actually. I'm actually tempted to do that

maybe off series with the Black

Thank you. Yeah, we could.
I'm tempted to do Little Red Riding Hood, actually. I'm actually tempted to do that maybe off series with a black cover or something, you know, to kind of talk about the problem of the wolf.
In grandma's clothing? That wolf? Yes, that wolf. We might do something about that.
But for now, it's mostly just celebrating. And these characters also will start to, as the series goes goes on there's eight books it's called tales for once and ever and the characters will characters will start to cross over into the different fairy tales and we're going to have like a kind of symphony of the fairy tales come together so age range i think like from four years old to all the way to adult because one of the things we want to do is we notice that in the postmodern fairy tale, there's like a child reading and an adult reading.
Like in Shrek, for example. But the adult reading is mostly just dirty jokes and sexual illusions.
And what we want to do is to have an adult level reading, but that's based on insight. Which is, can we help the grown up who heard these stories when they were young young see something in them that they never seen before.

So we connect them to ancient myth, to the Bible, in ways that's very subtle.

The kid won't notice.

They'll just enjoy the story.

It's an adventure story.

But hopefully the adult will be able to kind of get a glimpse of something more in the fairy tale.

So how would you distinguish the approach that you're taking to these stories or to story in general from propagandization? You know, my students used to ask me, it was an intelligent question too. And it was a postmodern question when I was teaching my Maps of Meaning course in particular.
How do you know that what you're teaching isn't just another ideology? And that is a postmodern question because the postmodern assumption, with a Marxist twist, is that it's all ideology. It's ideology all the way down and everything's a power game.
And so you can't claim to step outside it, let's say. Now, you and I have talked about that a little bit because one of the distinguishing features seems to be the willingness to tie the interpretive enterprise into the historical tradition, to the deeper historical tradition, maybe even into the biological tradition.
So, but I'd like to hear your take on that so that you could explain what you're doing. So I think that the fairy tales themselves, they have in them a trace of human memory.
In some ways, because these stories are old and because they've been told for who knows how long, over and over refined variations. We have evidence it's 15,000 years for some of them.
And so I think that because of that, they contain in them a pattern of memory which is beyond ideology, which is something like the very pattern of human attention itself.

The things that we care about without even knowing we care about them, which is why sometimes fairy tales are so strange at the outset. When you look at the surface of them, they're strange, but for some reason, they're extremely captivating.
And so, you know, I think that by staying close to the fairy tale, you know, and doing it in a celebratory way, because the ideological fairy tales are often very cynical. They're very cynical in the way they approach the tale.
Ironic. Yes, ironic and cynical and inverting.
And holier than thou. Yeah, definitely.
Intellectually superior, luciferian, presumptuous, manipulative. Well, and also you're right.
In some ways, the author is thinking

that they're above the story.

You bet.

And that they are now commenting on the story.

That's the sin of not honoring your father and mother.

Yeah.

Right, that makes everyone into the slaves of servants.

And so in some ways, what we want to do

is more like the way the ancient stories were told,

which is we dive into it and we celebrate it.

And then we also cast light on certain threads

or certain insights that maybe people hadn't noticed before.

That's how the ancients would tell it. You know, they would tell their version of, let's say, Ulysses crossing the waters.
And then they would branch off a little bit from the main story in order to help you kind of seek more clearly what the story is about. And that's what we're doing.
People will totally recognize these totally recognize these stories like it's the story you heard when you were a child but we hope right so that's the first part of it not being propagated is that you're not deviating from the central tradition yeah you you the person will recognize it but then why would they why would they read my version rather than the grim version yeah right that's the question and the and the the answer is something like there are certain threads in the story which are more relevant at certain times. And so you can bring out those threads, kind of show them in a manner that maybe that are secretly hidden in the story because the story is so patterned on human attention.
So like in Snow White, for example, right, the idea that this image of the witch looking into the mirror, that it's something like a cell phone, that it's something like social media looking back and telling you who's the… Narcissus pool. Exactly.
But you can slightly point it. And that witch, that old woman, she's concerned about losing her attractiveness.
And so what she's out to do essentially is destroy young female beauty and fertility, right? And that's the eternal witch that does that. There you go.
The enemy of youthful, healthy femininity, right? That's a tale for our times, that's for sure. Yeah, in the name of this weird tack on beauty, or beauty is power, you could say.

Beauty and power, yeah. And so that's the idea, is to take these stories that everybody already knows, but to just slightly, and to do it very subtly, so that for a child, like most of the children will just see a beautiful story with wonderful characters that is adventurous.
But nonetheless, it's just slightly bringing people into that awareness. Yes.
And also, you know, I mean, obviously my insight into the Bible stories is something that I wanted to bring into the fairy tale. And so, for example, in this, obviously people who can recognize the fact that it's Jack and the fallen giants.
Yeah. It means that I'm slightly alluding to the Nephilim and the idea of the giants in the story of Noah, for example.
Nothing explicit, but some of the patterns and the tropes that I'm using have to do with this idea of the fallen angel or these principalities that can be corrupted. So there's this idea that psychologists developed a long while back when they were trying to determine whether or not a psychological description was real.
Like anxiety, for example, is that real? Well, it's not a physical quality like color or mass. How do you determine if it's real? And one of the answers to that famous answer, I think it was formulated by Paul Meal in the 1950s, was they described it as convergent validation.
And so the idea would be that you use a number of different measurement techniques. And if they converge, then you have some, you can trust to some degree that the phenomena that you're dealing with, the phenomenon that you're dealing with is real.
Your senses do that, right? We have five senses. They're qualitatively different.
And so evolutionarily, biologically, we've determined that in order to determine whether something is real, you need to triangulate on it, so to speak, but from five different positions. And then we do more than that because we also talk about what's real.
But it seems to me too, and I did this in my Maps of Meaning book, and I wanted to make sure that the propositions that I put forward could be validated pharmacologically, neurologically, psychologically, and from the perspective of cybernetics and narrative, five dimensions of so-called triangulation. And that's another distinguishing, that's another factor that distinguishes such theorizing from ideology, right? It's also predicated on the idea that there is something like a reality outside the interpretation that has to be consulted when making truth claims.
And so it's a tricky thing to get right because, of course, the line of reasoning that you and I have been pursuing does accept a certain degree of postmodern critique, even though the postmodernists weren't the only people that

figured this out, because the postmodernists did figure out that we see the world through a story. In fact, that a story is in fact a description of the structure through which we see the world.
You know, I made a mistake with that with Dawkins. You know, I didn't get the answer quite quite right because I was thinking about it mathematically later.
So if you're building an

equation, the statistical process will determine that for you.

But whenever you make a judgment, you do a weighting.

And it isn't obvious how you derive that weighting from the facts alone.

Yeah.

Right?

There's a regress problem there.

And so, stories are a description of the manner in which we weight our attention. That's a good way of thinking about it.
And there's patterns to that. And some of those patterns are ancient, historically and biologically.
And they're more trustworthy because they've stood the test of time, immense spans of time. They speak to us much more directly.
And you made an allusion to why that's a reasonable proposition earlier, when you notice that there are things that are strange in fairy tales that we still accept. And so the Pinocchio story, especially the Disney version, has always struck me that way because there's a real narrative discontinuity in the story when Geppetto ends up in a whale.
And there's no explanation for that. We know that he's gone out to search for Pinocchio because Pinocchio's lost.
So the sun has gone missing, right? And you can read that both ways. And then the next thing that happens

is Geppetto's in the abyss, in darkness, inside a whale, and no one in the audience minds. It's like, well, of course, that's where you end up when you're a woodcutter looking for your lost puppet, inside a whale.
That's right. Right, right.
And then the whale turns into a fire-breathing dragon, Just like in the Sleeping Beauty story, the witch who entraps the prince in the castle, she's the eatable mother and she's going to keep him there until he's too old to be good for anything. She turns into a fire-breathing dragon.
And that's not a problem either. Yeah.
It's completely consistent. We completely associate it.
It's because, like you tried to bring up with Dawkins, is that there are structures of attention and memory that are probably biologically encoded in us at this moment. The weightings are biologically encoded.
Yeah, well, I've been thinking about this from the large language model perspective.

Like, I believe that large language models have

given us an existence proof of this symbolic realm, because all the large language models do is calculate statistical probabilities. And so there's some probability that any given word will be associated with any other given word.
And then you can think of a network of probabilities, not only of words, but of phrases and of sentences. And the billions of calculations, the billions of mathematical, what would you call them? They're elements in something like a regression equation.
The billions of them map word to word, phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, sentence to paragraph, like all those levels of mapping. And so they've mapped out the statistical relationship between words.
But there's no reason to assume this is, I think, a key to Jung's collective unconscious or one key. There's no reason to assume that exactly the same isn't true of images, right? So you could imagine that human cognition has a propositional level, which is word, but under that, closer to action is an image level.
And the words, like in a story, you get words describing images, right? Then you can capture that richness in the image. And the fact that there's a statistical relationship between the words is replicated with regards to the images.
There's statistical relationships between images so that witch and cat go together. And witch, cat, and swamp go together along with broom.
And so if you see any of those in an animated production, they're evocative of the others. And that's the symbolic overtones yeah and so and so you can see that that image level of cognition is a little more foreign to us than the propositional it seems like we're more at home with the word once you drop into the image realm you're more into the realm of dreams, right? And dreams play with those symbolic, those statistical association.
It's so cool that we have something like a mathematical model of the symbolic world now. And so it's indisputable that it exists.
Yeah. And I think that, you know, one of the things that happened in the 20th century, and you did it with Maps of Meaning, is that if you, when you do comparative storytelling, or you do comparative religion, you can notice that there are certain patterns that vary to some extent, but there are certain patterns that actually converge quite astoundly.
And, you know, and people always struggle to find some maybe historical connection, some actual influence, but you'd actually realize that maybe you don't actually need the historical connection. Well, it begs the question anyways, even if there is a historical connection, you have to explain why it lasted, right, in both cultures.
So it doesn't really, I know that there is an endless argument about the movement of ideas versus their spontaneous generation, but it's a red herring in many ways. And there are so many examples, but you could take a simple example, like the idea that wearing something on your head, like a crown, some version of that, or horns, something that you have on the top of your head, you can see that appear like a headdress, that a headdress is a symbol of status.
You know, you think that that's obvious, but it's like, it's a pretty universal thing that happens in all these cultures that have nothing to do with each other, but it's just, it has to do with the manner in which human attention is structured. The fact that we look at people's eyes, the fact we look at people's faces, the idea that if you add something to that, you know, an ornament to a person's head, that you are signifying something very specific.
Yeah, attractiveness. And then the thing is, is that the attractiveness shares features with the sun and the moon because they're the most attractive features in the celestial sky.
And the high status headdress wearer whose head is also on the silver coin that's the moon or the gold coin that's the sun is high status.

So they dominate the social landscape

like the sun and the moon dominate the skies.

It's up and not down.

It all makes sense just in terms of human experience.

And I think that that's your effort with Dawkins

to try to get him to see across

and to understand that even the way that he thinks about

Thank you. your effort with Dawkins to try to get him to see across and to understand that even the way that he thinks about replication, the way that he thinks about how something replicates and then how something is conserved through time, that we can apply that structure to human memes.
But he doesn't like the word memes, but archetypes or human behaviors or human behaviors. One of the funny things about talking to Dawkins about memes was that...
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He only invoked trivial examples. That's because he saw them as parasitic.
He really uses the word, you know, the idea that it's like a parasite. Yeah, yeah, right.
But if you take the idea of a meme or like a human behavior that isn't biologically encoded, let's say shaking someone's hand. Like shaking someone's hand is not wearing a backwards baseball cap.
There are equivalents of shaking someone's hand or showing your hands, something like that in pretty much every single culture. It's like a universal gesture of showing your empty hands to someone or encountering the empty hand of someone.
Or the welcoming hand. And you can completely explain it, why that symbol would have emerged universally through culture.
Yes, and you could also explain why people who were good at doing it didn't get killed. Exactly.
Yeah, and you could see how then, you know, through different phenomena, that it would then slowly become more closer and closer to biology, at least, or come very close to...

Yeah, well, that's that Baldwin effect that we started to talk about when we actually found some common ground. And it looked to me like he hadn't conceptualized that before.
I mean, and that's not surprising because it's actually a very complicated idea. But one of the things I really wanted to do with Dawkins that I don't think I did that successfully was to congratulate him on the depth of the realization of the importance of the meme.
Yeah. Right.
And I mean, you'd expect that if a discovery of that sort is significant, that it wouldn't be unique, that there'd be echoes of that idea elsewhere. And there are definitely echoes of the meme idea in the idea of archetype.

But the thing, it's so radical, that idea. And he's right on the verge of grasping it.
Because once you can produce an idea that lives in abstraction, which is the right way of thinking about it, that it lives, then those ideas can compete and they can undergo life and death. And so what you have is an abstract substitution of life and death and the testing that goes along with that for actual death.
This is the thing I really believe that this might be key to the idea of the word theologically, is this is the thing that makes humans so absolutely distinct. This is also why the Malthusian types are completely wrong, right? Because the Malthusian types with their zero-sum game biology, they think the right biological model for a human being is like mold in a Petri dish.
So the Petri dish is, it's got agar in it, let's say, one form of food, a finite supply, the mold being relatively mindless, devours all the food, and then it expires because there's a finite resource. And that analogy does hold in various animal populations, maybe in all animal populations except the human.
But the thing about human beings is, well, we can substitute a different food. And we can substitute a different approach to the resource management problem.
And we can transform the nature of our being without dying. And that makes us an entirely different kind of creature.
That Malthusian law, there's no evidence that that Malthusian law applies except when societies degenerate. And also, this is something I wanted to run by you after that discussion I was thinking of.
And one of the things that I'm adamant about is the idea that different beings that we recognize as having coherence exist at different levels. This is kind of a subsidiary vision of reality, that you have cells in you that have a certain coherence, and you have systems in you that have certain coherences, and you have that also in your thinking.
Those systems join together to make Jordan Peterson or to make me, you know, and that, but that also continues up and that some of the meme level structures, they're actually there to preserve what I could call higher order beings, right? And so, for example, if you take the, a certain practice, which would be incarceration, for example, in our culture, right? So that incarceration is actually done in order to preserve the coherence of the social body. The body politics.
That's the reason why it's done. But there is an analogy between that all the way down to the meme, because if you incarcerate someone, you obviously reduce their capacity to reproduce.
And therefore, while you are trying to maintain the higher order being, you're also participating in the maintaining of the coherence. Also, if you put people who kill people in prison, then less people die at the individual level.
That's actually one of the explanations for the relative domesticity and tranquility of modern society is all the hyper-aggressive men were killed. Yeah.
Yeah. So we tamed ourselves.
Right. Well, and Wendalkins and I came together near the end talking about the Baldwin effect.
We were really referring to something very much like that. It's like you establish a story that transforms the social landscape.
Imagine now it transforms the hierarchical arrangement of the people within the social landscape, right? So that once a story is accepted, the people who are better at acting it out get more social status. While men who accrue more social status are radically different in their reproductive capacity.
Now, it's the case for women too, because the children of high-status women are more likely to live, but high-status men are likely to have way more offspring, and it's way more. And so, once a story dominates, it can shift the social hierarchy that transforms the reproductive landscape.
Then you start selecting people for their affinity to the story. Right.
Well, that's the Baldwin effect. And that's a really good, well, that's the one thing that we discussed that Dawkins got really excited about.
And it was unfortunate that it was relatively near the end of the discussion. But also there's a kind of sadness when I see that to me is the idea that his eyes light up.
When now he can talk about the reproducibility of the genes, it seems like it would be far more interesting to understand the analogical structures that reproduce themselves in the hierarchy of orders. Yeah, well, we should definitely talk about that in more detail.
I mean, one of the things that you and I were discussing today, and this was also emerged out of the Dawkins conversation, was the implicit assumption on the part of the materialist reductionists that there's a level of perception that sense data. Yeah.
Right. And this is just not true.
It's not true neurophysiologically, part first, because there is no perception independent of action, and there's no action independent of goal-directed motivation. So all perception, all perception, is associated with motivation, which is, you know, another thing that the postmodernists insisted on, right? Now, it's more, it's even worse than that in a way, because all perceived unities are actually multiplicities in and of themselves, right? And we can go all the way down to the level of the proton.
Like the proton is composed of parts. And so I suppose if you were the ultimate materialist reductionist, you'd say, well, there's no protons.
There's just quarks. But there's no quarks.
There's just a quantum field. just potential.
Yeah. Well, would that be the same potential that the spirit of God brooded on at the beginning of time? Well, no, no, it wouldn't be that.
Obviously not. Right, right.
And I think that what you're saying is absolutely right. You know, one of the things that emerged during the conversation with him, you know, at some point, Alex O'Connor trying to mediate, doing a really good job.
By the way, he said, you know, he said, we're talking about the reality of dragons and the reality of lions. And Dawkins was saying that the reality of dragons doesn't interest him.
The reality of lions interests him because they're just literal beings, whereas dragons are metaphorical beings. And I was like, no.
And then Alex O'Connor said, you know, the lion is the gene and the dragon is the meme. And I was like, no, that's absolutely wrong.
Every category is a meta category. Every single category is something which transcends the parts that make it, the examples that make it.
This is also why the, so one of the definitions of postmodernism is acceptance of the insistence that there's no uniting metanarrative and i've thought through that a lot it's like all narratives are uniting metanarratives it's like okay how far do you go exactly where does the uniting metanarrative end then right there's no muscles there's just cells there's no cells there's just organelles there's no organelles there's just molecules Yeah, and so it's like in the same, it's like there's no muscles, there's just cells. There's no cells, there's just organelles.
There's no organelles, there's just molecules.

Yeah, and so it's like, in the same,

it's like, there's no history,

there are just like events,

but you organize your day.

Your day is a metanarrative.

You know, every conversation is a metanarrative.

When you sit down and have a meal,

it's a metanarrative.

Well, I asked Carl Friston,

who's the world's most cited neuroscientist,

I asked him at one point directly, is every perception a narrative? And he said, yeah, a micro narrative. He said, yes.
Right. So this is so, so, you know, you can understand here too, why there is a culture war.
And there's a variety of reasons. But one reason is, is that something has been discovered in the last 60 years, which sounds the death knell, particularly for empiricism.
It doesn't mean that there's no utility in empiricism, but it certainly indicates that the fundamental axiomatic presuppositions of the empiricists predicated on their idea of something like raw and basic sense data, that's just, it's not true. Yeah.
And it's not only not true, it's impossible. It can't, it can't work that, it can't, and it doesn't work that way.
And, you know, some of the evidence for that too is the fact of the hyperintelligence of these large language models, which actually learn the same way human beings learn. They learn through reinforcement rather than...
Yeah, that's because they really are. Large language models are derivative of humans.
They're not intelligent. They're derivative of human intelligence because it is human care that has trained the large language.
Yeah, right. It's a human saying good, bad, good, bad, or the farms of humans.
Part, actually what the human beings say directly, and this is very much associated with the idea of sin, right, to miss the target. Yeah.
The human beings say, this is the target. Yeah.
This target is called cat. This deviation from cat is wrong.
Yeah. Right? And so, yeah, exactly, exactly that.
And so then the question is, we talked about your book, we're going to talk about my book for a minute. We just both got these today, so that was fun.
Yeah, that's right. So yeah, so I just got this today.
This is coming out November 19th, We Who Wrestle With God. One of the cases I make in this, and I'm interested to know what you think about this, is that these metanarratives, this is one of the things that tangles up Sam Harris, these metanarratives are still associated with the transpersonal world.
I don't know if you can exactly call it objective, right? Because the patterns of attention that characterize our stories have to be functional in the actual world, right? So they're bounded by the material, they're bounded by the biological, they're bounded by the social, they're bounded by the psychological. They can only maintain their validity within all of that binding.
So they're looking at... Or else we don't care about them and we don't remember them.
And that's the idea. Yeah, that's how they're bounded by the, well, both the psychological and the biological.
That's the immediate one. But then memory, obviously, and attention is completely bound in our biological.
We care about the things that, you know, we care about the things that will threaten us. We care about the things that will feed us.
We care about the relationship that we can bring. And that is, those are the things that we remember for good or for ill.
yeah so that heideggerian care that's right that's right that's right right what do you wait what's important to you yeah yeah and you can't have categories without that without that weight you just can't avoid like even in the sorry to bring back the dawkins conversation it just happened because i it's still fresh in my mind you know daw at some point said something like, I don't care about these stories. I care about the kind of science and the kind of prediction that can help us land a spaceship on the moon.
I know, I missed an opportunity. And I was like, I care more about why the hell would we want to land a spaceship on the moon? Why would humans do that? That's more interesting to me or more important than

the fact that we're capable of doing it. Well, it's also, there's two things there that are interesting.
The first is, well, we landed on the moon and for Dawkins, the fact that that's remarkable is self-evident. For a psychologist, it's like, that's not self-evident, buddy.
There's lots of things we could have done and had been doing for a very long period of time before we landed on the moon. So it's something like Star Trek, right? To boldly go where no one has gone before.
It's the Mariner's journey. It's the Mariner's story.
You have all these stories, ancient stories, the story of Ulysses or the story of St. Brendan who goes out into the ocean and goes in a land that nobody has been before.
These are the stories that we care about. The idea of going out.
And they plant a flag. Well, that's what we did on the moon.
And the flag, that's the staff of Moses. That signifies the new center, right? The center of identity.
It's the joining of something with identity. That's why we plant flags or crosses when the explorers would encounter new lands.
They would plant a vertical pole to say, this is an identity. This is the new center of the world.
This is a new center. It's a tree.
It's a pole. It's a marker, just like a street marker.
It's Jack and the Beanstalk. Yeah, exactly.
It's an identity. That's what it is.
Well, and it's also the case, and I missed this. It's so foolish.
I knew there was so much going on. Well, there was.
There was. But he's interested in the technology that gets us to the moon.
It's like, okay, the technology that gets us to the moon. How about the social, the nature of the social contract that produced the education system and the technology that made the moon voyage possible, right? I mean, one of the things I've learned, not least through analysis of the biblical narratives, which is partly what we who wrestle with God does, is that the ethos that upon which a society is founded is the prime natural resource.
And so there was a reason it was the Americans that got to the moon. And part of the reason for that was the nature of the American social contract.
Then the question is, well, what's that social contract predicated on? It's like, well, we hold these truths to be self-evident, right, and what constitutes the self-evidence and what's underneath that? Well, the entire Judeo-Christian landscape is underneath that. And what's underneath that? Well, it's something like the social structure itself and the biological reality underneath that and the patterns in the material world.
And well, God only knows what that's ultimately reflective of. I mean, the deepest narrative insistence is that there's a pattern that's fundamental, that's beyond the mere material.
And I see no reason whatsoever to assume that that's an incorrect presumption. Yeah, well, because it's also true at every single level.
Once you start to see it, once you start to see that every category is a meta-category, that every category is an agglomeration of parts towards a purpose, then you realize that all categories in some ways transcend its parts. It transcends its elements.
And so they're all, they all are moving towards this transcendence. It's because they're related to something higher.
Yeah, they keep pushing up higher. Plato wasn't ridiculous in understanding the notion of forms.
I think that one of the things that, let's say, contemporary thinking or even Kogsai can help the Platonic form problem with is that these forms, they're purposes, they're reasons, right? Some of the saints, like St. Maximus the Confessor, collapses it together.
He does talk about that. It's like the reason why we notice a form or an identity is because we're seeing a reason for it to exist.
We're noticing a purpose. And that's in line with this whole perceptual mechanism that you bring to light.
And so it's not that these ideas or that these forms exist in some weird, I don't know, like weird ethereal realm. Purposeless fact.
Yeah, it's just that they are, because they bind multiplicity together, they're relatively invisible because you can't see the you can't see the category you're always seeing but it also fades into the ineffable right so that's that that's the structure of jacob's ladder you could imagine that as you move down into the material so it's a new year 2025 and you're thinking how am i going to make this year different how am i going to build something for myself i'm dying to be my own boss or see if i can turn that business idea i've been kicking around into a reality but i don't know how to make it happen well shopify is how you're gonna make it happen and let me tell you how the best time to start your new business is right now shopify makes it simple to create your brand open for business and get your first sale get your store up and running easily with thousands of customizable templates no coding or design skills required. Their powerful social media tools let you connect to your channels and create shoppable posts to sell everywhere people scroll.
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Let's say you're taking taking things apart you're taking meta categories apart into their subsidiary meta categories all the way down well you run into something like potential potential at the bottom right and then if you move up to the top well you run to something spirit yeah exactly exactly well that's the jacob's ladder imagery And it's so interesting too, because Jacob, just before he has the dream of Jacob's ladder, which is this spiral, it's often portrayed as a spiral. William Blake portrayed it as a spiral with angels moving up and down, right? So he sees this infinite upward movement that characterizes life with the ineffable divine at its pinnacle, right? And then this is exactly at the time when Jacob decides to leave his pathological mother, right? Who he's been conspiring with to betray his brother and his father, right? He leaves and he decides he's going to be a new person, right? So he reorients himself.
Then he has this dream. Then he starts making sacrifices toward the dream, which is absolutely perfect because that is exactly what you do.
And we could walk through that. It's like, well, why do you make sacrifices toward the dream? Well, it's because it's that dream and not some other one.
So his previous dream was, how can I screw over my father and my brother and, you know, stay in a relationship with my mother that's a little bit too close? Okay, so that was his pinnacle of aim. And then he understands, he comes to understand, I think, not least because of his brother's anger and the danger that that represents, and maybe some daunting sense of conscience, that that aim is inappropriate.
And he decides he's going to transform. And then he has this vision of infinite potential.
And then he makes sacrifices. Well, the first thing he sacrifices, obviously, is the previous pathological dream.
And so every aim, well, you talked to me about this a bit. Every aim requires a sacrifice.
It requires the sacrifice of all other aims. Yeah.
Well, it's a two sacrifice. Two sacrifices.
There's a good way to understand it. And we get this, I think, from the Yom Kippur sacrifice in Scripture, which is there are two aspects of the Yom Kippur sacrifice, which is the sacrifice of atonement.
That is that on the one hand, you remove that which is sinful. You remove that which doesn't fit.
Right. Which violates the aim.
Which is something like a cutting away. Yeah.
But then there's also a man in which you offer up the best part, right? And then that purifies the being. And so if you think of any aim that you encounter, right? On the one hand, you have to reject the things that don't fit, right? It's like if you're playing basketball, you're not playing football.
That's separating the beat from the chaff. Yeah.
You have to, reject the things that don't fit right it's like

if you're playing basketball you're not playing from the job yeah you have to all the things that don't fit with the aim if you're if you're studying for a test then you study for the test and you're not you know chatting on the phone if you if you're doing other things then you're you're mixing and you're you're let's say you know you're creating confusion in the aim so that's the let's thepegoat part. You cut out that which doesn't fit.
And then you also offer up what you're doing to the aim, which is beyond you. And that's important.
It's something that you're not gathering it into yourself. You're not giving it to you.
Well, that's where the higher meaning emerges as well. Because it's...
So I used to ask my students why they were, why they were in a, why they would do a given piece of work, why they were taking an exam. I'm taking the exam because I need to pass the course.
Why? Well, I'm passing the course because I have to finish the year because I need to get a degree because the degree is means to a job because, and then after that, they often got kind of incoherence, like, well, why bother with the job? But there are answers to questions like that. It's like, well, to take up my responsible citizenship so that I can establish a family, so that I can build something lasting for the future, so that I can be a credit to myself, so that I can be a credit to other people.
That's the covenant, by the way, that Abraham, that God offers Abraham, right? And so there is this participation in higher and higher purposes. And one of the things that's so cool about that is that if you're participating in the highest possible aim, say, towards the ineffable that caps this pyramidal structure, then the power of the divine ineffable saturates all the micro activities that you engage in because it's imbued with rich purpose.
And you can say that that makes everything glow. Like it makes things glow, not in a physical way, but it makes things, you know, it also infuses a kind of joy and a kind of peace, right? Because it's why Christ says that his burden is light, which is a very weird thing to say.
Yeah, because you realize that, you know, whatever it is that I'm paying for here, because I know it's embedded in the highest good or aiming towards the higher good, then I'm happy to do it, right? Everybody's experienced that. Yeah, because by definition, there isn't anything better you could do.
Yeah. I mean, that's the ineffable transcendent unity that Jacob swears to serve.
And he identifies that with the God of his ancestors, which is with the one true God of his ancestors. Yeah, and you can understand that you can miss aim, right? And so we see that, for example, like take someone who's studying his tests or whatever is doing this.
You see it happen with people who become extremely wealthy. Maybe they have this idea that really what I want is to become rich.
That's the purpose. So they do all these things.
They get there. But then once they get there, they've got a big choice to make because it turns out that that's not the highest aim.
It turns out that it doesn't reach high enough. So you can see it when people reach a certain level, a certain threshold of being very, very wealthy.

Either they start to, you know, sacrifice, let's say, start to give that towards higher purposes, right?

Help others, you know, start to use their power and their wealth in order to help others reach these goals.

Or they fall into a kind of hedonism.

Power of that hedonism.

Yeah, exactly.

And then they just become a caricature of themselves.

Then their wealth speeds their demise.

Yeah, I agree. reach these goals or they fall into a kind of Hedonism.
Exactly. And then they just become a character.

Right.

Then their wealth speeds their demise.

Exactly.

So you can see it.

I think that even in a conversation with people like Dawkins,

at some point we can start to help people see that the hierarchy of

aims is something that you can, it's objective. We can argue about certain details about it, but it's also not arbitrary.
No, it's not arbitrary. Well, okay, so we can continue expanding this hierarchy of upward aims.
So you want to be a good father, you want to be a good husband, you want to be a good person. Well, then that's nested inside the hero myth by definition, fundamentally.
And so you want to be a good husband, you want to be a good person, well then that's nested inside the hero myth by definition, fundamentally. And so you want to embody the hero myth.
Then the question is, because you can keep expanding the terrain, what's the ultimate hero myth? And I think, this will be the next book, I really do think that that's laid out properly in the story of the Christian Passion. And I think that the classical Christian insistence that that pattern is implicit in the Old Testament writings is right.
And so now, why do I- But it's also like we actually say, it's even crazier because we say that it's implicit in the structure of being itself. That is something that people don to think of that, that that's what we're saying.
But when we say that the Logos created the world, Yeah. right, that the Logos that was incarnate in Christ is the origin of the world.
Right, right. That's John's presumption, a strange idea.
And so we are intimating that this story is at the origin of the world in the sense that it contains the pattern of the highest form of being that yields all the other ones. That kind of makes it possible for all these other ones to...
Okay, so let's walk that through because I think it's possible to make a strictly conceptual case for that. Well, so one of the things that I read in Jung's work that really struck me when he was talking about archetypes, he talked about the passion story.
And he was speaking, you could say, technically, looking for patterns. He said, well, what you have to understand about the Christian passion is that it's the archetypal tragedy.
Okay, so let's think that through. Okay, so now we know that there's a category of story that constitutes a tragedy.
Now, I'm not saying it's only a tragedy. No, it's not.
Because there is a resurrection. It's a comedy.
But it does include tragedy in it, for sure. Yes, yes.
Actually, it subsumes the tragedy within a comedy. That's right.
Exactly. But let's start with the tragic element because I think it's easier to understand.
Okay, so now imagine there's something in common among all narrative forms that we recognize as tragedy. So there's an ideal, there's a staff around which all tragedies circulate, and they're better or worse examples of the ideal platonic tragedy.

Okay, so how do you interpret the Christian passion in that regard? Well, obviously, the most tragic possible outcome is the worst possible demise of the least deserving person. Yeah.
Right? By definition. Okay, well, that's clearly played out in the Christian story because Christ is

represented as sinless and ideal and also as really universally regarded as good even by his enemies, even by the people that are going to kill him. And so there's tremendous insistence on his transcendent goodness, And then his mode of death is betrayal at multiple levels.
A painful, disgusting, humiliating, and shameful death. Because that's what the Romans designed crucifixion for, right? And young, young in front of his mother.
Like all the things that could happen to you that are terrible in life are stacked up in that story. Okay.
So, so what's the, so what you might say? Well, the question is that's going to be reflected in your life to some degree, because all of those terrible things, some of those terrible things are definitely going to happen to you. So then the question is, what attitude should you bring to bear on that reality? And the answer in that story is something like the answer in the book of Job, which is faith predicated not only acceptance, but welcoming, right? Well, let's take the contrary position.
Well, bitter, resentful hatred of life because of its suffering. Well, first of all, that's not going to do you any good.
It's just going to magnify your suffering. And then I've also kind of tracked where that goes.
That's the story of Cain. If you're bitter and resentful and angry because of the unjust suffering that characterizes life, that isn't where it stops.
It transforms into murderousness. It transforms into rejection of the ideal.
It mutates into a genocidal proclivity and then a deicidal proclivity. That's a hellish descent.
And so obviously, unless that's what you want, that's not good. So there's this notion in the Christian passion that the deepest radical acceptance of the most painful preconditions for existence is the precondition for life more abundant and the descent of heaven.
Well, I don't see an alternative to that viewpoint because the other viewpoint is the one I just laid out. You know, so in the book of Job, Job is tortured badly by God, betting with Satan, who proclaims to God that he can shake Job's faith, that Job's courage and evident goodness is merely a consequence of his privilege, essentially.
Yeah. And God says, I don't think so.
Have Adam. And Job's decision, it's so interesting, Job's decision is that regardless of how the facts lay themselves out with regards to suffering at the moment, he will, on principle, refuse to lose faith in his essential

goodness, despite his inadequacies, like his mortal inadequacies, and refuse to lose faith in the essential goodness of being. And one of the ways he justifies that is by recourse to his own ignorance.
He says, well, and he does this in the dialogue with God, I don't know all things. I'm in no position to be the final arbiter of the value of being.
And so I accept it's on principle. It's essential goodness and strive upward regardless of catastrophic suffering.
And I think all you have to do is invert that because that would be the counterposition. Nothing means anything, which is a foolish counter position or you aim down well yeah i mean i agree and it it's a difficult but i think what you're asking people to swallow it's a it's a hard pill to swallow for some people because in some ways you know what we're saying to people is that suffering is part of existence right so we have this story for example Garden of Eden, we have a story that explains the origin of death, the origin of suffering.
And the reason why we need that story is because of the fact that we can perceive the gap between the fact that we suffer and the notion that we have that in some ways this is wrong, that there's something off about the fact that we suffer, right?

Because if you would imagine that, you know, this is just the way the world goes, then we wouldn't perceive a gap.

The fact that we perceive a gap between the difficult suffering that we have in life and something else, like something that we think should be or that we could hope would be, you know, that's accounted for in that story. So we can complain about that.
Like we can say, well, it's horrible. I hate that story.
Like I hate the fact that, you know, this Adam and Eve, they eat this apple, they fall, they fall into this separation, they deal with this separation. And now I have to, you know, we don't like the story, but everybody lives with that gap.
Everybody, even, even the most angry atheist is usually an angry atheist because of that gap. Because they can perceive the difference between some ideal that they have of how things should be and the reality of what they're living with.
I saw that with Stephen Fry. He was, you know, he got visibly outraged talking about bone cancer in children, that he would hold God accountable for that.
And you can't have your cake and eat it too. That's right.
The fact that you're outraged by that means that you have faith in a transcendent moral order, which is being violent. You think that children shouldn't have bone cancer, which is like, you know, things happen.
Like if the world has no meaning and that bone cancer scientifically is no more or less interesting as a healthy bone, it's just different phenomena that you're analyzing that lead to different predictable outcomes. You know, no.
Value-free facts. Exactly.
Value-free facts. No, we do care.
And we do find it difficult to see the suffering in humans. Okay, so I've got a question for you about that pattern in the story of Adam and Eve.
So, in We Who Wrestle With God, I take apart the story of Adam and Eve in more depth than I've managed previously. Delving into the notion that the fundamental sin of both Adam and Eve is one of pride, right? That's their temptation by Lucifer, the serpent, their temptation to become as gods, which is the temptation that's first offered to Eve, right? And she accepts that.
Her desire is to establish the foundations of the moral order subjectively, which is happening everywhere in the world at the moment, by the way, and promoted not least by hyper-inclusive women. So that's very interesting to see.
A sin of pride, she's going to take it to herself to establish the moral foundations. And then she attempts that, and then Adam exceeds, which is the sign of his prideful weakness.
And so you have Adam and Eve as the archetypes of male and female. You have Adam as the namer and the subduer and Eve as the helpmate, so to speak, the ezerkonegdo, I think is the phrase, who brings things to his attention that he's left outside of the ordered structure, right? And then each of those patterns has its associated sin.
Now, in the story of Adam and Eve, suffering and death enters the world with sin. Now, I've really been trying to figure that out because on the one hand, no, because everything dies and suffers.
And on the other hand, well, wait a minute. A lot of suffering, especially the unbearable sort, is brought about by misaligned aim and pride and the desire to usurp, like a lot of it.
Like, who knows? Well, that's the question. Who knows how much? And so then you might ask yourself, if we aimed upward, unceasingly, if we were perfect, as Christ calls upon his followers to be in the gospel accounts, what would become of suffering and what would become of death? Now, you have this interesting idea in the gospels that Christ's radical exception of the terrible preconditions for being produced the victory over death and evil.
Okay, so there's something about that that's right,

because the more you open yourself up to the realities of the dark side of life, death and malevolence, let's say, clearly the more capable you are of dealing with it. And we don't know the ultimate extent of that.
And we don't know what it would mean to, this is where my knowledge just ends as i tried to indicate to dawkins these texts you know move out into the ineffable you know i could ask you the same question he asked me a variant of it it's like do you believe the resurrection happened yeah we don't live in the same i would say this is okay we need to talk about this for sure like we definitely need to talk about this because this is i mean i understand why it's the most difficult thing for secularists to kind of get to yeah but the reality is that at some point you start to notice that the patterns that we're talking about they are the patterns that inform the structure of reality reality, right? That they are the patterns by which we notice that we even identify things as having existence, that we can see their value, that we can weigh their value in the same way that you're talking about. So those patterns are, let's say, our perception of those patterns have been refined over time.
We start to notice that these are the ones that actually hop down in some ways, constrain reality. And so...
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See site for details. In the end, the idea that those patterns would happen, it doesn't bother me one bit.
It doesn't bother me to think that as the image of the resurrection, let's say, the image of the notion that you said, exactly,

like that if you are willing to give up

your prideful holding onto something

and you're willing to die for all intents and purposes,

that that is when life becomes abundant.

That is when life becomes real.

And you can see that, right?

All the tingling of that in the Old Testament

with Abraham offering up his son,

all of these things happen. But the idea is that if that in the Old Testament, with Abraham offering up his son, all of these things happen.

But the idea is that if that is the pattern of reality,

then to me, it doesn't bother me one bit

that it just happened.

I don't have an explanation for it from the bottom up

because that's not why I care for it.

I care about it because I can see,

top down from constraining stories,

I can see that it's the most affording story. So if someone says, finally, they say that this man that represents the pattern perfectly, that it happened in his life, that he resurrected.
But I can't explain the physical reasons and the physical mechanical ways in which it happened. At that point, honestly, I don't care because I know that it's real because of what it affords.
And the question is, and this is the big question, is... Well, that's how Dawkins defined the reality of quantum mechanics, by what it affords.
Yeah, well, there you go. And that's exactly the right way to think about it, is that it's just that it's not the same type of affordance.
It's an affordance of everything. It's an affordance of everything that we find valuable, everything that we think is worth pursuing, everything that binds our societies together, that's what it affords.
The problem I'm having increasingly, so to speak, as a materialistic reductionist, let's say, as a scientist, is that it's becoming more preposterous for me to believe that it didn't happen than it is to believe that it did happen. Because there's also another one, which is because, you know, the insipid, you know, thing hiding behind the idea that, for example, the crucifixion, that the resurrection or the virgin birth didn't happen, is that someone lied.
That's what's there underneath. And if you listen to someone like Dawkins for long enough, he'll say, right, that the disciples just made it up, Jordan.
They just made it up. Jesus didn't resurrect.
They just lied. And so, I mean, that's a big deal because, okay, so that means that our civilization is based on a lie.
That's right. That's right.
That's right. Yeah.
I mean, we have to take that into account. And I don't- Well, and then what are, yeah.
What does a lie afford? And then you might say, let's assume that they lied for power and prestige. So we'll use the postmodern critique.
Okay. So there are implications to the fact that our culture is based on a lie that people told for power and prestige.
That is exactly the postmodern Marxist critique. That's exactly it.
And the cancer that's eating the universities that Richard Dawkins loves is predicated on exactly that viewpoint. And this Christian story handles that problem in its very structure, which is that it kind of sucks for them.
But all of Jesus' disciples were killed. All of Jesus' disciples were imprisoned, tortured, and killed.
And so in the structure of the Christian story, the idea that they would have lied in order to gain for themselves any kind of prestige and power, and that they all died holding on to that story, and all of them tortured and killed, is a pretty interesting idea. And the Babylon Bee made a hilarious video about that, where the disciples are sitting there around the fire, and they're like, we're going to make it up.
We're going to steal his body and then pretend he's resurrected. And then they're like, and then we'll all be rich and famous.
And the answer is no. And then we'll all be horribly tortured and killed.
And everybody's cheering as if that's what they want. But that is something that's encapsulated in the Christian story, which is that the fact that the very people who witnessed these events, that they didn't gain anything from that at all.

Yeah, I've thought of a lot about death recently. I mean, for all sorts of reasons.
Both my parents died this year. But I've thought abstractly about death as a mechanism, too.
Death is actually a purification mechanism. Yeah.
Right. So for you to stay alive, you have to be dying optimally all the time.
All the cells that are damaged have to go. Anything that might be carcinogenic has to go.
You occupy a knife's edge of life and death, and that's what keeps you alive. And so when the reparative process of death goes wrong, you die.
You completely die. And so then the question might be too, what would happen to you if you optimized your capacity for death? Now, this is a very serious issue.
Fasting does that. There's some evidence that the carnivore diet does that because it mimics fasting.
There's good evidence that you only repair when you're in a fasting state because your body scavenges damaged tissue then, which is exactly what you'd expect it to do. Any organism facing food deprivation whose body scavenged its healthy tissue first would die.
So that's not the solution, right? So you can, you know, and cancer is a disease where death disappears because cancer cells, hypothetically, they're immortal. You know, they don't senesce the way normal cells do.
And so, so then I wonder, well, if you got the process of death right, what would that mean in terms of your thriving and your wellbeing? And does that mean the attitude towards death? And if you got that right, what sort of effect would you have on people around you? And then what would be the cumulative consequence of everyone getting that right i mean i i don't like these are things that i they're they're beyond me in some in some fight in the final analysis but i've really become obsessed with that notion in the adam and eve story that death enters the world with sin because there's something about it that's right.

It's important to notice that the curse that God puts on Adam and Eve and the serpent, they are actually iterations of some of the things that you talk about, which is that death is represented not only as the dissolution towards dust, indeed, but it's represented as a play, an excessive play between the tendency of the dust and the tendency of the imposition of unified order.

And you see that in the curse.

So you can see it.

So, for example, God starts with the serpent and he says, right, you will now crawl on your belly in the dust.

He's the usurper. So he's trying to put himself in the highest position.
And he says, you'll eat the dust, right? And then you will try to bite at the heel of the son of man, and then the man will have to crush your head, right? So then he says the same thing to the woman, by the way. He says the same thing in a different guise.
He says, you will now reproduce, you'll create multiplicity in pain. So it's like your movement towards multiplicity will be in pain.
That's because of the prideful misalignment of her aim? Well, that's because you've broken the balance. Exactly the balance that you're saying.
By reaching up too high, now you're falling down too low too low but if you fall down too low then the reaction of the too high it'll keep playing between the two it'll be too much order, too much chaos so you're reproducing in pain you try to aim for your husband and now your husband will rule over you and then he says the same to Adam he says you have to work the work the ground. It'll produce all these spikes, all this multiplicity, all this multiplication, and you will have to rule over it.
And so it's like this, it's not saying that any of this is good. It's just that it's like cancer and dissolution, like those two excesses.
So with regards to Adam, so one of the curses that God delivers to Adam is that he will now have to work, that his efforts, his life won't be walking with God in the garden. His life will be effortful toil.

Yeah.

Okay, so I've been thinking about that too and its relationship to pride and presumption.

You know, it's been a frequent experience of mine in recent years that a young man will come up to me, often in a restaurant.

This has happened many times in a restaurant. And he'll say something like, well, you know, I took this job at this restaurant and I thought it was beneath me and I was pretty angry about it.
And I didn't do a very good job. I was resentful.
I didn't feel that I had been rewarded appropriately. It's a Cain argument.
My sacrifices weren't accepted by God. And so I wasn't putting my best foot forward and I thought I was better than the job.
And since I read your book, I stopped doing that. I started coming to work early and I started throwing all my effort into it.
And I've been promoted three times in the last six months. And they're like glowing away.
And so, so why am I saying that? Well, by the way, it's God, it's not a curse. It's a description.
It's a description. I mean, I use the word curse myself.
I know, but it's not, he's just saying this is what's going to happen. Because of what you did, this will be the consequences.
Okay.

So then you have to ask yourself, if, so the idea that we're made in the image of God is a reflection of the idea that our spirit hovers above the water of potential.

Yep.

That what we're surrounded by is a landscape of potential.

Okay.

So now you understand that you're surrounded by a landscape of potential, even if you're born in a manger with the animals. Right, right.
Even in the conditions of your lowly and unprivileged birth, there's a landscape of potential. Okay, now you orient your aim upward and you strive to extract from that potential the order that's good.
Well, then your effort isn't toilsome. It doesn't matter what you're doing at that point.
And there are no lowly jobs, right? Because being a waiter, being a dishwasher, those aren't lowly jobs. It's so interesting because that's what in some ways you've been saying from the beginning.
And I think that it really does coordinate with the Christian message, which is that when Christ came, he didn't completely come to remove suffering. In some instances, he did remove suffering.
But he seems to point to the fact that the highest thing you can do is actually suffer for the right reason. that if you suffer for purpose, that that suffering actually ceases to be suffering in the way that we understand it.
Right. That's something that you see.
You've described that as glory. Exactly.
It seems to be this idea. Well, yeah.
Well, the thing, look, if you go to a movie and you watch your favorite secret agent operating, it's not like he isn't carrying a burden, right? No burden, no adventure. That's right.
No adventure, no meaning, right? So that, I don't know, the idea is something like God took death upon himself to make being possible. That's the sacrifice that's at the foundation of the world.
And then the surprising thing is that, you know, those types of stories, they become extreme sometimes in the Christian story, but you can kind of understand them, which is that the martyr, right? The person who's willing to die without compromising their highest aim. You know, it's like most of us are not called to do that, but that becomes an image of what we're supposed to do at a small level, right? It's like, I am called to sacrifice my immediate pleasures or my life in the smallest way, you know, maintain my highest, and then I will gain my life, even if I lose it for all, it looks like I'm losing it for the outside world.
Like I'm not getting all the advantages that you could think, but because am oriented properly that's what like being a father that's what a father is right you know this is why the psychological the psychological literature indicates that people with children are less happy than people with those no yeah whatever well i look at that and i think well you should rethink your happiness measures there but that's what it is because you're a little on the shallow It's like, well, you're not tiptoeing through the tulips because the thing you're taking care of might die. It's like, there's a bit of a weight there, but you're not going to give that up.
You're not going to give that up. No, and the levels of joys that you encounter in being a parent, for example, being a father, have nothing to do with the superficial pleasures.

That's why you can see that the people who give themselves to those roles and give themselves

into responsibility with the right perspective, they're less attracted to just going out and

drinking with the buddies all the time. You might enjoy moments of frivolity sometimes,

but you're not a slave to them because you're like, you know what, this... I got something better to do.
I got something better to do, exactly. I got this better thing that is actually difficult, but it's tiny.
Well, you know, in the alcoholism literature, one of the things that's quite striking, there's no evidence that treatment for alcoholism works, by the way. Like treatment centers.
Yeah. That doesn't mean people don't stop drinking.
The most reliable cure for alcoholism is religious transformation. And the reason for that appears to be that if you love alcohol, it's a very good drug for you.
It likely has opiate effects. It facilitates social bonding.
It's a very effective anxiety-reducing agent, and it has psychomotor stimulant effects like cocaine. Plus, it's a major source of calories.
It's like, go alcohol, if you're genetically tilted in that direction. So then the issue becomes, not so much why drink, because that's obvious.
The question becomes, why not drink? And the answer to that, that for people who undergo a moral transformation is because they have something better to do. And that actually works out psychopharmacologically because, for example, if you're embedded within a hierarchy of meaning, first of all, the embeddedness of that, the fact that your existence moment to moment is related to these higher order constraints, that reduces anxiety because your aim is singular.
You're not affected by the dust and the multiplicity, right? So anxiety declines. But then equally importantly, if each of your micro actions are related to the heavenly aim, so to speak, then each of those actions carries a more significant psychomotor kick, which is the same pharmacologically as the cocaine-like effect of alcohol.
So the purpose that's established as a consequence of the reorientation of AIM actually constitutes a pharmacological substitute for the drug itself. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So that's true.
Because, I mean, you see it when you're raising children. You can see it.
It's like, you know, it's like I'm, it's like I got my hands in poop. It's like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? But it doesn't, you don't care.
It doesn't bother you at all because there's something pulling that forward. Yeah.
So the suffering, the difficulty, the sleepless nights, all of these things, they kind of vanish. They're difficult, but they kind of vanish in time as you are looking toward...
Right, because while their significance transforms because they're related to a different aim. Yeah, exactly.
Right, and the aim, we can talk about that aim. So I write about this in the story, in this chapter on Abraham, in this book.
Abraham is promised a son forever, and through his son, the possibility of establishing a numberless destiny. Right, right, right.
And he finally gets his son, him and Sarai. And they're pretty thrilled about this.
And then God flips the situation around and says, you know, that son I've been promising you forever as part of our agreement, I think you need to offer him to me. Right.
So why don't you take it from there and explain that? Because see, this is one of those stories that the atheist types again point to when they're making reference to the cruelty of God in the Old Testament text. It's a funny thing, eh? Because on the one hand, the authors of these stories are supposed to be naive and childlike.
And on the other hand, they're capable of comprehending a deep malevolence and describing suffering. It's like, well, you could have one of those critiques, but you can't have both.
So, and there's no doubt whatsoever that those Old Testament stories deal with human frailty and malevolence and suffering very, very, very, very straightforwardly and realistically. Okay.
So now God calls on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. And I mean, it has to do with all the things we were talking about until now, which is that if you think that you completely own something like a purpose or a goal, if you's only my son no matter what it is it it will become infected it won't be affording of true purpose and true life it always has to be given up and you'd like you know that too because you've talked about this so many times which is that when you raise a child you know that you're going to give that child away.
To what? To what? And so you're going, you're raising the child for someone else than yourself. Like, especially the idea even that you will give your- Raising is the right word there.
And so you raise your daughter up, let's say as a father, I raise my daughter and then I give her in marriage to someone else. And it's like that is, but that's actually the only way for that to be real to me is if I understand that whatever it is that I have, I have to offer it up towards something beyond it.
And then it becomes real. As soon as I try to hold on to it.
Well, then you get it back too. That's right.
You know, and then this is. You get it in the book.
This is what Jesus says. When Jesus says those who, who tried to save their life will lose it.
Right. And those who are willing to, to die, willing to lose their life will gain it.
And, and it's a structural argument. It's not, it's something that is true at every single level of being, because, you know, even in the structure of any object or any thing that you can understand that let's say you take a car, right.
And it's Like the steering wheel in the structure of any object or anything that you can understand that let's say you take a car right and it's like the steering wheel in the car has to offer itself to the purpose of the car right the steering wheel has doing that you hit the dish then it's like a completely ridiculous fetishized object like why would it what's the point the real all the parts of the car have to give themselves to the purpose of the car but then even you that car you have to when you buy it you can fetishize it but you can also use it for higher purposes you visit that's the proper relationship with money by the way and then that's how all being is constituted and so abraham god says i'm going to give you a son and then abraham has a son. And then God says basically what he's saying.
He doesn't say it right away. Abraham has to go through it for real.
It's not just play acting. He's basically telling Abraham, if you want your son, you first have to give him to me.
You have to give him up towards something which transcends you and him and everything. And if you do that, then you'll get it, then you'll get him back.
Like I said, that's true of anything we do. If you're fixing the roads in the city and the person fixing the roads is doing it just for their own interest, then they'll just be corrupt and they won't fix them properly.
We see that all all the time in systems. What you would want...
They'll avoid the labor whenever they can. They'll do a half-assed job.
Someone who knows what they're doing and the reason why they're doing it, and is willing to sacrifice their attention and energy towards the purpose. And then by doing that, they actually make a better road than if they just tried to hold on to what they're doing.
And that's true, like I said, of every single thing that you do all the time. And so that's the sacrificial aspect of this idea of offering up.
Yeah, well, it's very practical, too. I mean, the psychoanalysts, I think it was Anna Freud, but maybe not, but I think it was Anna Freud who pointed out that the good mother necessarily fails.
Okay, so one of Freud's unheralded moves of genius with that twist in it that Freud always had was his observation essentially that human beings have the longest dependency period of any creature. Let's say 18 years.
And so what that means is that that bond, the bond that makes that dependency possible is an unbelievably powerful force. The maternal instinct, let's say, the paternal instinct as well, but we'll focus on the maternal for now.
That also means it can go terribly wrong. Right.
And that happens when a mother infantilizes her child

because she doesn't want to let him go,

to offer him up to some higher purpose, right?

There's no purpose beyond the relationship

between the mother and the son, let's say.

Well, that's devouring.

That's the Oedipal situation.

That's sleeping in the same bed as your mother,

which is something that literally happens

in families that are particularly eatable.

Right. Too much closeness.

Right. And so that's a failure of the mother to offer the child to something beyond herself.

That's also a form of female pride.

There's no position for my son or daughter that's superordinate to their affiliation to me.

And so that also stops them from, that's the evil queen in Snow White as well. That'll stop the daughter from being married or the son from being married.
And like, I've seen this in my clinical practice where spider-like mothers will cripple their children so they never leave. But then the thing is they don't have their children.
Not least often because they end up suicidal, let's say. But they live in these terrible, dark households that make your soul ache when you walk into them.
There's just catastrophe and chaos everywhere. And everyone is crippled in body and soul.
And the children are in the house not because they love the mother who they would actually like to yeah wreak horrible revenge upon they're afraid to leave and so what the mother ends up with instead of love is terrified suicidal children who who've crushed everything about them that should have been encouraged so that she can feed on their corpse fundamentally but brutal and the the structure of the sacrifice of abraham and isaac of isaac is one that we experience all the time just that people struggle to see it we tent we call it war that's war is exactly that structure we have a nation we have a higher structure, a higher order being. And that higher order being at some point asks the people to offer their children for the continuation of the existence of the higher order being.
And sometimes in that case, they don't get them back, right? Or they get their other children back, you could say. There's something of that going on.
But the idea that the story of Abraham and Isaac, that it's some weird, completely freak thing that just shows the cruelty of God. It's like, we deal with that all the time when we have war.
Like they ask, in World War II, we sacrificed our children because we believe that the higher order existence of our nations was worth preserving. And we're willing to give our children up to that purpose.
Well, we would say, too, that the parent who makes that offering will be able to tolerate the fact of the child's demise. If the higher order structure above the nation is intact, so that the war is just, and it's just because it serves the eternal verities, and those are unified in something ineffable that sits at the top of the hierarchy.
I mean, that's the story of World War II. I mean, there's many stories of World War II, but the fact that it was perceived and was arguably, inarguably, just war meant that that sacrificial offering was justified in a way that would stop it from being traumatic.
Still terrible. You know, and the reality of human sacrifice, right, is one that has existed forever.
And we have to be able to understand it. You know, if we understand mimetic, the mimetic structure, we can understand that human sacrifice is something that did in fact preserve groups.
And I hate to say it, like it worked because you, you know. Well, you said, you said,

you implied much earlier that every act we take is a sacrificial act. And some of that representation that emerges in the religious text is actually the propositionalization of the fact that human beings learned that you could make sacrifices and that would stabilize the future.
That's what you do when you work. Yeah.

But in the biblical story, what you do when you work.

Yeah.

But in the biblical story, then you have this weird situation where, you know, ancient cultures did practice human sacrifice. Like they would kill someone publicly, visibly, in order to bind the group together to show that we're willing, you know, we're going to offer this thing up.
And this is something that, by the way, even in the Middle Ages, you had these stories, like if you know about the assassins, for example, in the Middle East, these Muslim jihadists, that the leader would ask one to just jump off, just to show. It's like, you want to see how tight we are? You up there, kill yourself.
And they would just jump off into the pit and kill themselves. And it would bind everybody together.
Everybody would be like, yeah, like we're holding together towards this purpose. The idea that human sacrifice is just a ridiculous superstition.
Like it works. Now, how do you go beyond it? And I think that the story of Abraham starts to show that, right? Is that Abraham doesn't kill his son, right? That there's something that if you offer your, to the highest, highest.
That's part of that translation of action into abstraction. It's like, so imagine that there are corporeal sacrifices that people act out.
And then there's a realization at some point that that pattern of sacrifice can be duplicated psychologically, can be duplicated spiritually. So no longer, so that that, so the idea would be that if you sacrificed appropriately at the psychological level, you wouldn't have to sacrifice corporately.
Yeah, or you could say, for sure that's true. You could say, imagine that if we, let's say, if people all sacrifice to the very highest good, right, to the love that is the foundation of reality, right, the infinite goodness that is foundation of reality, then we wouldn't have those other sacrifices.
We wouldn't go to war. Like, we wouldn't have to sacrifice our, literally sacrifice our children up.
And so, it's normal that the structure that way. Okay.
So then one of the things I'm trying to wrestle with in this book is, so I make the equation between work and sacrifice and attention and sacrifice. Okay.
So now we know that the world is founded on sacrifice. The community is founded on sacrifice.
Why? Because you have to give up yourself to be part of a community. By definition, that's what constitutes maturity, is the giving up of yourself in relationship to your family and the broader community, and then all the way up Jacob's ladder.
It's a sacrificial process. Then the question, once you understand that, another question emerges, which is, what is the form of sacrifice that's most pleasing to God, so to speak? Or you could put it a different way, which is what's the pattern of sacrifice that has the most profound effect? And that's actually what the Bible explores, is that it's continually exploring the sacrificial pattern that establishes the proper covenant with what's highest.
And you can say, well, there's nothing that's highest. It's like, well, then you're in the dust problem.
It's like there's, so molecules aren't real, but atoms are, but atoms aren't real because like subatomic particles are real. It's like, you can't do that.
You can't just dispense with the higher order structures. Yeah, because all structures are higher order structures.
Right, right, right, And there's no reason to there's no canonical reason to put a limit on that upward pattern of organization. Yeah, and I think that that's the trick often that is posed by the secularists or the atheists, right, is to want to, they find some cap.
I don't know where it is. Oh, I know where it is.
I get my win now. Whatever permits me to just do whatever I want.
Yeah, Michel Foucault, in a bloody nutshell. Right, he turned his entire intelligence, which was substantial, to solving exactly that problem.
Where does the metanarrative end? At the level of my desire. Well, and then where does the need for power come from? Well, if the metanarrative ends at the level of my desire, then I'm going to be quite the creature to play with because it's all about me.
So what else do I need along with my hedonism? The capacity to use the force necessary to compel you to go along with my whim. And then Foucault would say, like the other postmoderns, there's nothing but whim anyways.
There's nothing but whim and power anyways. Right? Yes.
Devastating. Destructive.
So I think that the things that you're intimating in your book and that you're intimating in the way you talk about it is that we start to notice that this very structure, the structures that bind reality together at every level, they don't stop at the human level. They go up and you can see them in the way that humans bind together that are analogous to even the human body.
I think you should rephrase that and say that the idea that they stop at the human level is an indication of the pathological effect of a kind of Protestant, Enlightenment individualism that assumes that the human being is the capstone, the individual human being conceptualized as an alienated and isolated human being is the capstone. And the problem with that is that it's not that the individual is subordinate to the higher order structures.
It's that the individual properly construed is the harmony that exists at all those levels simultaneously all the way up to the highest aim. And so who I am, it's like I am a father.
It's like there's an I that's playing that role. It's no, not in the least.
Like that being a husband, being a father, being a citizen, those are parts of my identity, right? They're the extended, they're my extended identity. And the more, the higher that extended identity becomes, the more solid it is as an identity.
And it is definitely the case that as

we've lost those superordinate identities, that we are collapsing into multiplicity and dust,

right? Into the alphabet mob, for example, right? The never ending multiplication of

identity by whim. And then all that happens as a consequence of that is misery.

Yeah. Anywhere else, Tuesday is just, well, Tuesday.
But if you're at KFC, Tuesday is $10 Tuesday, which means you can get eight hot, juicy drums and thighs for just 10 bucks. Let me say that again.
Eight pieces of hot, juicy, original recipe chicken, hand-breaded in 11 herbs and spices, all for just 10 bucks every Tuesday, only kfc guess tuesday isn't just tuesday anymore it's finger licking good prices and participation may vary tax tips and fees extra so yeah it's it's misery and tyranny exactly exactly what each day predicted you know because just like the the curse or the description of god in the fall you know as you break the proper order and the proper relationship, then you fall towards chaos. And then you come up with these more and more, you know, tyrannical types of order in order to prevent that from happening.
You have to. You have to.
Because if you're not serving an identity that I can partner with in my relationship with you, all we've got left is the Hobbesian state of nature or force. And then the postmodernists say, well, that's all there is.
It's like, well, you can have that world. And they're also wrong about that.
We even know from Franz De Waal's work with chimpanzees that higher order chimpanzee troop structures predicated on power are unstable and liable to end in absolute bloody chaos. Right? The true alphas among the chimpanzees are the hospitable and reciprocal males.
And they don't even have to be the largest. In fact, they're often not.
They're the best at keeping the social contract. And so that's why you can understand this insistence on love as the pattern, right? Because the idea in the same way, the individual has the same reality, which is that for me to fully exist as a person, I can't hold on to this individuality.
I have to give it away to others. And so it's by binding in love with others, right? And joining in these higher order bodies that I come to exist more fully, right? So it's this paradox.
That mystical body of Christ? It's a mystical body of Christ, but then ultimately, of course, the Trinity is the absolute image of that, right? This notion that for something to be one, the one and the many are balanced in a paradoxical way. They don't contradict each other in the Trinity because it's infinite, but that the persons of the Trinity exist in infinite love, completely emptying themselves in each other.
And that's what constitutes God. Of course, we can't do that, but as individuals, we can do it at a lower level where we- Well, that love seems to me something like the desire that all things flourish.
It's something like that. Yeah, or the desire that the other person flourishes.
And in that other person's flourishing, that is the best way for me to actually find my flourishing. Yeah.
Well, there's actually no doubt about that, I would say, technically, too. Like, if I want to make a covenant with you, what I should do, this is what we're trying to do with ARC, I should tell you a story that makes you think, if that could possibly be true, I could be in wholeheartedly.
Well, if you're in wholeheartedly, Piaget figured this out with children. Piaget's claim was that, you can imagine a competition between two types of game.
Okay, one game is predicated on you bloody well better do what I say or there's going to be trouble. Now, you can play a game like that.
A bully will play a game like that. And then the other game will be we are doing this because we're all aiming upward and we're bound together voluntarily.
And each of us gives it full assent. Okay, so Piaget's first observation was this system will outcompete this system because the power-based system has to waste effort on enforcement and this system doesn't.
And that's great, but there's more to it than that too because people aren't bound together only by, say, manipulation of negative emotion, which is what bullies will do. They're bound together by hope.
And hope is actually indistinguishable from psychomotor reward. That's incentive reward.
That's the same system that cocaine activates. It's part of the exploratory system, right? So it's primary incentive reward pleasure.
If you voluntarily assent to a structure, then positive emotion pushes you forward, right? And so then you're way more motivated. And so the best deal I can possibly make with you is one that you're thrilled with.
Yeah. And that's not a zero sum vision at all.
No, exactly. And everybody's experienced that.
Everybody has experienced moments when they're in, at least I've experienced moments where I'm in a team with people and I really want the best for that person. And I, and I can do that because I also see that they want the best for me.
And we together want the best for me. Do you think we're managing that at ARC? Oh, I think so.
Okay, so talk a little bit. Let's end with this.
Talk a little bit about, we were just in Washington, you and I, at this wonderful old mansion with some great people. And we brought together a variety of people who are on the advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
We had our first convention last year. So why don't you tell that story a little bit and tell me about your experiences at this advisory board meeting.
Yeah, I think that it's actually quite surprising because there is very much a diversity of people in the group. And there are people that don't totally align on all the fields, but there is a sense in which people kind of understand that, even though they don't totally agree with the others, that to make you succeed and to make us succeed is what is going to help in the thing that I care about.
And what it's done is it's created a surprising dance of people moving together. And so I'm very much impressed.
There's discussion and there's some friction, but that friction is always released towards a kind of higher order purpose. I think it's because, well, one of the things we wanted to do with ARC was get the story right.
Yeah. Right? So that's the first aim is to get the story right.
And so... But it's also, it's helpful for us now because we're faced with such a dismal story.
You know, the fact that there's such a horrible story, a sort of anti-human story that is being predicated in the environmental sphere, but then also in all these almost antenatal attitude towards families. All of this is the story that is being pushed on us from certain...
The demolition of sex and relationships. And so what it does is it creates a darkness out of which now people, let's say people who believe in the goodness of the possibility of the goodness of the world, the possibility of people coming together, a pro-human vision, are seeing each other across the aisle, are seeing each other through the darkness, and they're seeing these lights and they're thinking, okay, we can actually now join together towards something higher.
It's great to be faced with a dragon sometimes, because it pushes us to work together in a way that maybe wouldn't have been as obvious 20 or 30 years ago. Right, right, right, right.
Yeah, well, and it seems to be, it's a difficult thing to pull together in a preposterous mission, but so far it seems to be working. Like our convention last was very beautiful and it echoed nicely and then we had an arc meeting in germany in bavaria and that was the first time there was about 200 germans there and a number of them told me that was the first time that they had here heard anyone in germany dare to broach the apocalyptic environmental narrative you can't even talk about that in germany which is de-industrializing like mad and handing the bloody planet over to the Chinese, which communists, which seems like a really bad idea.
So we had a successful meeting in Bavaria and replicated the beauty of the ARC mission, essentially. And then a really good meeting in Australia, which was about half the size of the London conference, and the Australians are like seriously on board.
We have, what, three former prime ministers of Australia and well-regarded people who are pushing this along very diligently and positively. And a group of Western Canadians are starting to emerge.
And we've had discussions with people in Mexico and South America. We'll have 4,500 people in London in February.
And you can see things starting to shift, even in the window of what's allowable discourse. I mean, the Democrats in this, I don't want to get political, but the Democrats in this election cycle said nothing about climate.
Yeah, they didn't use the climate apocalypticism to scare people at all. Yeah.
Which, I mean, I don't know, it's hard to tell whether ARC is directly responsible, but for sure we're dancing in the right place. Well, there's also many of the people who are associated with ARC are responsible.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like Bjorn Lomburg, for example.
I mean, he's been a real breath of fresh air, let's say, on the human beings. We've got this faithful scouts of the future side instead of that terrible apocalyptic dread that's crippling young people.
So, well, so, all right. Well, we should wrap up on this side.
So what did we cover? Well, we talked about our books and and that brought us into the realm of category and story and we talked about the structure of categories and that's the structure of perception itself and the structure of reality at least in so far as reality is perceived and perhaps beyond that and just one thing like because it's interesting is that in some ways that's what your book is about. But that is also what Jack and the Beanstalk is about.
It is about this Jacob's Ladder and the hierarchy of goods that someone climbs in order to acquire. And so it's like, I think we're at a moment where we can wake that up.
You can walk through that a little bit. I mean, Jack, instead of feeding his family in the immediate present, decides to take a risk with regards to something transcendent.
And the consequence of that is the emergence of the liana that unites heaven with earth. Yeah, exactly.
Right. Yeah, and it's the idea of the seed, right? Because the seed is already, it's not the milk, it's not the cow.
It's like this, it's the pattern already. Yeah.
You can perceive a glimmer of something that's more than just the brute fact, but it's actually the pattern. It's also the pattern upon which the provision of food ultimately depends.
Exactly. So what's more important, having food or knowing how to make food continue, right? Yeah.
And so that's what Jack does. Jack goes up and encounters first this bag of gold, which is riches, which is, that's nice to have.
Yeah. But then he encounters a chicken that lays golden eggs.
Right. Which is, what's better, to have gold or to have the way that you make more gold? Yeah.
The way that you create more riches. And so finally he reaches the harp, which is basically the music of the spheres.
Symbol of harmony. Yeah, the symbol of harmony and patterns themselves.
Right. So it's very similar to the story.
Right, definitely, definitely. So that's the consequence of climbing up Jacob's ladder.
Yeah, he's also Jack, like Jacob. Well, you can think about those as the substitution of meta-food for food, and then higher and higher forms of meta-food.
Because here's a paradoxical consequence of sacrifice. The best way to ensure the provision of food in the future is to share what you have now with your neighbors.
Yeah. Right.
Right. And that's, well, that's the human pattern of adaptation for sure.
The fact that we share food, human beings, that's very weird. That's a very unique thing.
And that's definitely a sacrifice. So we're in there.
That's what we're talking about. All right, sir.
So everybody, you can join us for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side. I don't know what we're going to talk about.
I usually do know, but I'm not sure what we're going to talk about. So if you're interested in finding out, because we'll definitely continue this conversation in some form, join us on the Daily Wire side.

And thank you for your time and attention.

Thanks to the film crew here in Scottsdale and to Jonathan for coming in today from Montreal.

You came in from Montreal, eh?

Yeah, yeah.