536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
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One of the things I figured out recently, the significance of the fact that the root word of question is quest. You have a question, which is your plea to the gods, let's say. You await a revelation, and then the critical process is something like internalized dialogue. I got interested in the Talmud. It's a lot like the Platonic Dialogues.

And you have this fictional colloquy. That's the only way to describe it. Rabbis who maybe lived centuries apart are brought into debate and discussion. If we lose touch with those ancient stories, we lose our ability to actually understand what's going on. Elijah, you mentioned Elijah. Elijah's foes are the nature worshipers. That's kind of relevant in today's society, given the rise of nature worship. Something will attain the pinnacle point. What happens?

in a universe where finite beings try to find some meaning and encounter or are afflicted by infinity in some way. This is a terrifying thought, I think. You said you saw a similarity with the dialogues. So what else caught your attention? There is a question that I know to be absolutely fundamental because it shows up both in the Hebrew Bible and in Plato. And the question is,

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So I had the opportunity today to speak with Dr. Jacob Howland, and I wanted to speak with him for a variety of reasons. He's a philosopher, longtime academic, integrally involved with the new University of Austin, which is one of a handful of institutions that are attempting to reorient, traditionally reorient, modern higher education education.

He's also interested in the interface between modern technology, AI, for example, and philosophy, partly political.

in an attempt to solve what's started to become known as the alignment problem. How do we ensure that these autonomous intelligences, because that's what they're developing into, will have the well-being of human beings, for example, as one of their priorities? Or maybe their top priority, you might hope. But what we really ended up talking about was the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem, philosophically,

And at a deeper level, less geographically centered, the relationship between rationality as such, the Enlightenment project in science, and the underlying metaphysical substrate. And it turned out that the conclusions that Dr. Howland had drawn were,

seem to be very similar to the conclusions that I've been drawing along with people like John Vervaeke and Jonathan Paggio, for example, a variety of the lectures that we have on Peterson Academy. It does appear that something really quite revolutionary on the intellectual side is beginning to emerge because the flaws in the Enlightenment have become apparent.

so structural that it's clear that a new pathway forward not only has to be found, but is

is likely already upon us. And the appearance of new institutions like the University of Austin, like Peterson Academy, like Ralston, are an indication of that. And so we delve deep into the philosophical relationship between enlightenment rationality and the underlying narrative substructure. That's a good way of thinking about it. And we discuss that in terms of the relationship between

Athens and Plato and the ancient religious texts of the Western world. So join us for that. So, Dr. Helland, I wanted to talk to you today primarily, there's a bunch of reasons. I think the main reason was that we have overlapping interests in new approaches to higher education and maybe education in general. And you're involved with the University of Austin and

I've been involved in Peterson Academy and also Ralston College. And so I thought we could talk about that more narrowly, but we share philosophical interests. And I'm also curious about your take on

new developments in AI, especially with regards to the large language models. That'll be an interesting discussion because I've used them quite a bit now. And I have a colleague who's helped me program a number of them, custom LLMs. And they're uncanny machines. And I have no idea where they're headed. Well, that doesn't make me special. No one knows where they're headed. And so that's the broad definition

landscape that I hope to traverse with you today. But I think we should start with, let's start with a little background about you so that people can situate you. You're a philosophy professor. You're an acclaimed educator. So fill us in on who you are. First, let me say, I appreciate your having me on your podcast. This is a great opportunity. So I...

How far back do you want me to start? Oh, back ways. We can start with undergraduate if you want. Right, sure. So, well, I'll start with my parents. My father was a biology professor at Cornell University. My mother was a writer. First nine, ten years of my life, I live with my mother. I have an older brother. My parents were divorced before I have any recollection of them being together. So I was just maybe a year old.

During that period my mother was a struggling writer and lived in poverty and we lived in Chicago and I had the unfortunate experience of being in Chicago Public Schools in 1968-69 and a lot of tension. Things became very difficult because my mother was quite poor and couldn't sort of make ends meet. When were you born? I was born in 1959, end of 1959. Yeah.

So let's see. My mother comes from a Jewish background. Her whole family was from Chicago. Blue collar. My grandfather graduated from the 10th grade and worked with his hands making nuts and bolts in a big factory. And

My father, who's not Jewish, actually we're descended from a John Howland who came over on the Mayflower. And his side of the family were all scientists. His father was an engineer at Purdue University who designed the sewer system of Lafayette, Indiana. His older brother was a genius who graduated from Purdue at the age of 17 and was an engineer, optical engineer, just had 20 patents, patents.

And actually, both of those guys are still alive. But in any case, so as a child, I had strong influences on my mother's side, let's say literary and cultural influences. One of my earliest memories was being in Iowa City when I was a kid. My mother was reading me a story by Tolstoy called How Much Land Does a Man Need?,

And my older brother got me up early in the morning. I don't know. I was probably four or five. He was a couple of years older, and he finished reading the story to me. So we always had – she always took us to see ballet and museums and things like this. Anyway, fast forward. We moved in with my father. I graduated from Ithaca High School at the age of 16 because my dad –

said, well, I'm going to go on a sabbatic leave and I don't want to take you with me. And so you can graduate early, which I did. Went to Swarthmore College, took a philosophy course. I initially thought I was going to be a physics major. I see. So you really are split between the aesthetic and the more scientific engineering. Exactly. Exactly. Because that's useful to know. Yeah. And I was very, I'm not a mathematician, but I

I did very well in mathematics. But I found that the physics was frankly too challenging. And I took an English course and some other things. And I finally took the philosophy course with a very brilliant man named David Lockerman. And he's one of these people that anyone who knew the guy said, this is the most brilliant person they'd ever met. I was very fortunate too. And that was at Cornell? No, that was at Swarthmore College when I was an undergraduate. Yeah.

So I studied philosophy, history, and English. Those were my sort of three big influences. I got to read a lot of great literature, Russian lit, Latin American literature, American literature, studied history, in particular African history, I think, which was quite interesting. But I fell in love with Plato, went to graduate school at Penn State University, and David Lockerman came to Penn State then, and that was great 'cause he was on my dissertation committee.

My main professor there, I suppose, besides Lachman, was a man named Stanley Rosen, who was a student of Leo Strauss. And I studied Greek and wrote a dissertation on Plato's political philosophy. Got a job at the University of Tulsa, which was great, for about three decades. I was the first chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. They put these two departments together.

And I had written a book on Plato's Republic, and then I had published my dissertation, and then decided I really wanted to get to know my religion colleagues. So I started studying Kierkegaard and wrote a book on Kierkegaard and Socrates. Then I also, when we got to Tulsa, see...

I had Jewish experiences as a child. For example, I remember Passover at my grandfather's house where he'd grab my hand and take me to a shoal when he was saying Yartzeit for a relative, which is on the anniversary of their death, you say prayers. But other than that, I didn't really have any Jewish identity. Got to Tulsa, first thing that happens, and this truly is the buckle of the Bible belt.

Lady comes from across the street and says, won't you join our church? So my wife, who's not Jewish, said, well, and she was unemployed at the time, and she started going to some classes and went to listen to a couple of rabbis and said, I think you'll like this rabbi. Joined the synagogue. I've never been particularly observant, but started attending. And I got interested in the Talmud. And so I started studying Talmud. And

We were lucky to have several very high-ranking Jewish theologians come through Tulsa. And I told them, wow, you know, that Talmud is really interesting. It's a lot like the Platonic Dialogues. And I don't know how much you know about Talmud, but the thing is, so it's this massive corpus. There are two Talmuds. The main one is the Babylonian Talmud, two and a half million words. The Jerusalem Talmud is about a million words, but the Babylonian one's the main one.

And you have this fictional colloquy. That's the only way to describe it. Rabbis who maybe lived centuries apart are brought into debate and discussion. Talmud privileges questions. Privileges questions. Questions. Most of the time, there are no answers. Or at least, yeah, I think that's probably fair. Most of the time. So you have debates and you have discussions. And much like the Platonic dialogues, the Talmud will start with a practical question. For example, you have two plots of land.

One is your vegetable plot. The other is your neighbor's vegetable plot. His tomato plant leans over into your plot. Who gets the tomato? Then, just like Plato starts, you know, in a dialogue called the Lockeys, Socrates runs into a couple of guys. They're saying, should we have our kids study with this guy with a newfangled weapon? And in three pages, they're talking about what is courage. In the Talmud, it can be three pages, and they're talking about why did God create the universe? Yeah.

So they privilege questions. They have multiple intellectual perspectives. The rabbis are never on the same, like they're constantly debating. And sometimes, as in the academy, the American academy, you know, it gets a little heated and contentious. So you have these debates and...

And then... Except it's not obvious that the American Academy privileges questions. Well, that is true now. Right, right. I was really referring to the old joke about, you know, why is there so much conflict, you know, and why is it so heated? Because the stakes are so small. Right, right. But in any case, and very often at the end of a sort of section of debate, they've got a little acronym, which basically means the answer will be revealed in the days of Elijah. Now, the reason I mention that is

The belief is... Elijah, specifically. Right. So the idea is that there is an answer, okay? We may not be able to understand it or we haven't achieved it yet. And I say that because in the Socratic perspective, I think there's also an answer. That becomes very clear in the Apology where Socrates, you know, has his friend, his friend Chirophon goes to the Delphic Oracle, says, is there anyone wiser than Socrates?

And the oracle says no. And what's great here is that Socrates, by the way, he makes no argument for this. He says it is not permissible for the God to utter a falsehood. That's his faith, right? So I have to take this statement seriously. But I'm not aware that I'm wise. Dreams, eh? Yes. Dreams don't utter falsehoods. They're incomprehensible often, but they never lie. I like that. That's a lot. But what I want to say is... It's their voice of nature, you could say.

Yes, very much so. And of course, I mean, that's a whole interesting subject because also even in Plato, this question of how do we explain dreams? Is it a communication from the divine or something? But in any case, Socrates says... Depends on what you mean by the divine as it turns out. Yes, indeed. Socrates says that it's impermissible for a god to utter a falsehood. So he now dedicates his entire life to answering two questions. What is wisdom and who is Socrates? So his entire philosophical quest comes out of this

moment, the shortest revelation in history, which is no, right? No, there's no one wiser than Socrates. Yeah, and isn't that not because he knows what he doesn't know? Well, he knows what he doesn't know.

I thought he made a statement to that end. Absolutely. Okay, so the reason I asked that is very specific. Well, because you said that the Talmud, like Plato's, or the Talmud specifically, which are like Plato's dialogues, privilege questions. Now, the thing about questions is that questions require questions.

They require the recognition of ignorance, and that's a form of humility. That's exactly right. Of course, humility is the opposite of pride. One of the things I figured out recently, we could talk about, maybe this is what we'll talk about, in fact, mostly. It had never struck me before this year, weirdly enough, that the...

the significance of the fact that the root word of question is quest. Because quest is adventure. And so I've been trying to figure out what I do in my lectures because they are popular. And it's strange because I discuss the sorts of things we're discussing right now, and yet many people come and watch. And so I've been very curious about why that happens. And so I've taken the process that I use apart and

What I do essentially is figure out what the question is. And it's an actual question. Like before I go on stage to talk for 90 minutes, I have a question, which is part of a set of questions that I'm pursuing. So it's a real question. I actually want the answer. Yes. I use the time on stage to answer.

Well, to further the quest, and the quest is the answer, and that's the treasure at the end of the pathway. And then the lecture itself, which isn't exactly a lecture because it's a quest, is an attempt to answer. Now, the reason I think it's so relevant to privilege the question is because your thoughts are structured the same way your perceptual systems are structured. And what that means is that when you set the quest, you set the question, you set the aim first.

And here's a thought. You tell me what you think about this, because this is a terrifying thought, I think. The spirit of your aim answers your prayers. So if you have a question, you'll...

the answer to the question will make itself manifest in your consciousness. People usually say, I thought up the answer, which I think is a terrible answer. That isn't what happens. What happens is that when you set the aim, which is the question, I would like to know this, this is the direction I'm seeking, then the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you will be in keeping with that aim. And then you search for the words and...

Are you a vehicle for them? Likely. You're a vehicle for the spirit of your aim. Well, and that's what's happening when I'm talking on stage. It's like I have a question. It's a real question. I'm thinking, okay. And there's a little more to it because I use stories that I know as investigative tools. So they're like, they're tools of inquiry. But the fundamental thing is the inquiry, the question. And it's very interesting to me that

So one of the things I've thought about, too, is that, well, thought, essentially, it's got a question element. You set the aim. Then it has a revelation element. The ideas come to you. Then it has a...

critical thought element, which is like a dialogue, essentially. It's like, okay, well, here's the question, here's an answer, but here's another answer. Okay, so how do we... And maybe here's another answer. So how do we sort that out? Well, we have an internal dialogue, which is an analog of an actual dialogue you'd have socially, and the consequence of the dialogue is the... That's the separation of the wheat from the chaff, you might say. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So...

So I've often, now I've started to think about thought itself as secularized prayer. And that makes sense historically, if you think about how thought might have developed. You have a question, which is your plea to the gods, let's say. You await a revelation. Well, then you have to determine whence comes the revelation and is it reliable, especially if there's

many of them, or if you're unclear about your aim. And then the critical process is something like internalized dialogue. And so it seems to me that, like I've thought, and I'd like your opinion on this. Well, is it Socrates who taught the Greeks to think, at least to think critically? Like literally, is he the first man who determined how to internalize dialogue?

So, okay, so that's a bunch of questions. Yeah, very possibly. Well, that's right, because we don't know when thought itself emerged, especially critical thought. Critical thought's hard.

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It seems to me that you're on a very fruitful path in talking about this. While you were speaking, I was thinking how this shows up in a lot of fields. So even, for example, in great literature. And the example that came to my mind is Jorge Luis Borges. Have you read any of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories? Okay. So it seems to me that this man's writing is itself...

guided by a fundamental question. And maybe this is true of other great authors. In fact, I would be willing to give you some other examples. Borges' question is this. What are the effects of infinity on human beings? Because we have stories like Funes the Memorious. The guy falls, hits his head, and not only cannot forget anything, and not just from that point, I mean, he actually remembers everything, but his experience is

is as vivid, his memories are as vivid as the moment of experience itself. And so he's completely overwhelmed and he just lies in the bed. He can't even, he lies in the dark. And then we have, for example, The Immortal. And it's about a guy who is in North Africa in fighting, this is his earliest memory anyway, and fighting in North Africa in a Roman legion and accidentally drinks the water of life, the water of immortality.

And then after centuries and centuries, he seeks death. And he reasons that there must be an antidote, right? If there's a place where you can drink water, it makes you immortal. There's got to be some other spring or something that you can drink and allow you to die.

But the problem is that his life just blends together. He can't separate anything out because... So is he looking, is Burgess looking for the advantages to finitude, let's say? Yes, well, let me put it a different way. What he is suggesting is that we are creatures of finitude. We are creatures of finitude in terms of our lifespan. We are creatures of finitude in terms of our intelligence, our memory.

We are creatures of finitude in terms of our capacity to understand. So, for example, there's another wonderful story. It's about a Mayan priest during the time of the conquistadors. And they destroy the civilization. They throw him in an underground prison. And there are some bars. And on the other side is a jaguar prison.

And he begins to recall that there's an ancient myth that the gods have inscribed in the world somehow a phrase that gives you complete omnipotence, if you could utter the phrase. Anyway, and one day he's watching the jaguar and he realizes that its spots spell out somehow this phrase.

Which he then utters, and then he's looking for a way to destroy the conquistadors and restore Mayan civilization. But now he sees everything, this great wheel, the entire universe, he understands everything. And he has no longer any interest in doing anything. Because that knowledge simply... It's complete. It's complete, and it's totally irrelevant what's happening here on Earth or anything like that. My favorite is the Library of Babel, which is about this, the universe is a library, and the library has...

you know, hexagonal cells and every cell has X number of shelves and every shelf has X number of books of exactly the same length written in 23 characters or 24, whatever it is, certain number of letters, comma, period, space. And the,

It's inhabited by librarians, and they're looking through these books, and they're trying to find some meaning. But there's... It's an infinite library. It's an infinite library. And by the way, the mathematicians have done the calculations on this. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, and like the most...

coherent phrase in any book that any librarian, that this librarian who's narrating it knows, and he's gone all as far as he can, is something like, oh, time thy pyramids, right? So everyone starts looking for books because they realize like, there's, you know, I want to find something that will explain the meaning of my life or my purpose or something.

And then the fundamental proposition of the library is formulated, which is that any book that is possible is actual in the library. Right, right. In other words, any, and you know, they can, it's like a million characters or something. So any combination of characters exists. Mm-hmm. That means that there is a book in this library that describes exactly this event. We're sitting here having this podcast. This is a possible book. It must exist in this library. Mm-hmm.

Now, but there are also weird mathematical problems because if you think about it, it can't be the case that any possible book is actual because you can have catalogs of catalogs of catalogs so that it, like mathematically it explodes. But anyway, so my point is, what happens in a universe where finite beings, finite rational intellects, try to find some meaning and encounter something

or are afflicted by infinity in some way. So just to go back here, that's Borges' idea.

Well, it's a fundamental problem, right? Because obviously we have some relationship with the infinite. Yes. Right. It might be a relationship of negation. But there's no escape from the conundrum that we're finite and faced with the infinite. Indeed. But the point I really wanted to emphasize in what you were saying is this question becomes...

a fertile soil for these literary growths.

In other words, this is the question that animates his being as a writer, and it's highly, highly productive. So we all know that questions are highly productive. And limitations. You see that in the creativity literature. Exactly. So there's a great, extremely comical example of that online. So haiku is a poetic form that has ridiculous limitations. Yes, right. And you might say, well, why bother with it? And the answer is, well...

You can't play a game without rules. That's the answer. Okay. Now, but there's a spam haiku archive online. So it's only haiku that's only devoted to the luncheon meat. Like the last time I looked at it, it's very funny. They're very funny. That's pretty good. And it's ridiculous. MIT engineers made the archive, of course. And so...

There's 50,000 haikus there about spam. And it's ridiculous, and it's supposed to be, and it's comical. But the point is that without that absolutely preposterous set of limitations, that whole universe of poetic beauty, you might say, and comic endeavor wouldn't have come into being. And so...

It's a very strange thing that there is a genuine relationship between finitude and abundance. Yes. Right? Exactly. So there's a right balance between constraint and possibility that produces abundance. Too much possibility, there's nothing. That's Borg's point. And then too much limitation, there's nothing. But there's some optimal balance. And maybe, I mean, you could, it seems reasonable to propose that the,

issue, fundamental issue in human life is how to get that balance exactly right. That's really what the Jews, the ancient Jews were wrestling with when they were trying to figure out how you have a relationship with God. You know, modern people say, well, there's no such thing as God as well. Do you have a relationship with the infinite or not? You have some relationship. Maybe it could be a productive one if you could

What? Formulated properly. Yes. Well, look, so as you know in the Hebrew Scriptures, God creates human beings. He's almost immediately disappointed with Adam and Eve.

Now they're on their own, you know, they get their wish, right? I mean, the serpent says to them, "Oh no, God knows you will become as gods." The best interpretation here, I think, is Maimonides who cites another rabbi and he says, "Well, the word for gods is Elohim, but it can also mean rulers." So they actually get what they wish for because there's no need for rule in the sense that we understand it, that is, limitation law and so forth.

to order chaos in the garden because you're sort of, you're in the presence of God. Now, once you're kicked out, now you've got a problem. And the problem of chaos that's internal to the human soul immediately asserts itself because Cain kills Abel.

And of course, they screw up so badly. Problem of misaligned aim, like Adam and Eve turn away from the proper aim. Yes, exactly. Like the builders of the Tower of Babel. That's exactly right. Because they no longer, this is exactly what happens with the Israelites when they demand a king. God basically says to them, well, if you conducted yourselves properly and maintained the covenant with the divine, you wouldn't need a king. It's like, rewind.

on a king. And see, so after all these failures, and yes, you know, the flood and the Tower of Babel and everything. So finally we speed up. In this part of Exodus where the Ten Commandments and then the so-called Book of the Covenant and, you know, the rest of the laws are laid out, this seems to me to fit exactly what you're saying. God is limiting these human beings, right? Like, here you are, these freed slaves. We got to give you, you know, a

some sorts of channels in which to move your desires and stop signs and restrictions and so forth. And only within those 613 laws can you have a flourishing life. Well, and it's even stranger than that in some sense because you have, first of all, you have

the idea in the Garden of Eden that if your aim is proper, then you don't need... well, to set your own course, right? Which Eve decides she's going to do regardless. Once you set your own course and you're steeped in sin because your aim is misaligned, you need rules. Now remember in the Exodus story,

God provides the rules, first of all, directly from God, and then the Israelites go astray instantly, and then they get kind of a second rate, and you could argue in a way inferior and more tyrannical set of rules. And that's because you could imagine tears of proper aim, and God's hoping that the Israelites will aim at the

at the highest conceivable, and they fail at that, and he says, well, here's something that's still high, and they fail at that, and he says, well, it looks like you guys are going to have to settle for this with me hanging around the fringes, because that's all you seem to be able to manage. So...

And I'm very interested in this idea of misaligned aim. Yes. Well, because I think the spirit of your aim answers your prayers. And so, okay, so now you talked about Borges and you talked about the question. And that was part of a conversation we were having about questions in general. Yeah, so let's go back to the... Yeah, so like the fruitfulness of the question. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, I think this is absolutely crucial. And let me say that there is a question that I know to be absolutely fundamental. Okay.

And I know it to be fundamental because it shows up both in the Hebrew Bible and in Plato. Okay. In Plato, it shows up in the very first sentence of Plato's Phaedrus. And in the Hebrew Bible, it shows up when Hagar runs away from Sarah for the first time. And the angel comes to her in the wilderness. And the question is, where have you been and where are you going? Yeah, right. There's a question. Now, for me, this is absolutely fundamental for individuals, for families, for tribes, for...

for nations, for societies. And I view it as...

an urgent question today. Well, it's probably the question, it's at least one variant of the question of identity. Yes. We're in an identity crisis, obviously. We've cascaded into identity politics. Right. And given your frame here, you could say, well, the reason for that is because we don't know where we've been. Yes. And certainly there's no unified sense of that, which is a big problem. And we don't know where we're going. You could add maybe one other foundation stone to that, which would be

Where have you been? Where are you now? And where you're going? Yes. That's a full narrative, right? Right. So, okay. So, let's just focus on these. Yes. Why did that capture your interest specifically? Well, I mean, first of all, it seems to me that each part of that, and let's say, where are you now? Yeah. Okay. This is crucial. Yeah.

No part of it can be answered without the answers to the other two. Right. Because, look, the future is trackless. Where are we going? Well, our only resource really is where are we now and where have we been? More fully, I would say that, and this is just my hypothesis, but I think there's a lot to it, that there are no rules.

really fruitful growths in the future that don't come out of the soil of the past. That is to say, a rich understanding of the past. And we could do this... Spoken like a true conservative. Well, I mean, listen... But that's the sort of thing that makes you think in a conservative direction once you realize that kind of... Well, and that's a whole other interesting thing because the fact is that, and I've shared this with a lot of colleagues and friends,

I actually think that part of the hostility to studying the Western tradition on the part of those who are antagonistic to the West comes from the fact that studying the great books actually

makes you not only intellectually conservative, but in some ways politically conservative. Conservative enough, for example, to say that we need to study the Western tradition. They're all related. Well, the other issue, tell me what you think about this. I also think that if you think about the Maoists, for example, and the fact that

For example, the Red Guards destroyed all the Chinese statues as far up as you could reach with a hammer. We're going to obliterate the past and we're going to build the new man in keeping with our... Well, there's the question, right? In keeping with our what? Revolutionary presuppositions. Okay, but then you have to say...

well, where did those revolutionary presuppositions come from? Did they just spring like Athena out of the head of Zeus? No, they have a history too. Or worse, they have a spirit, they have a personality. And this resistance to studying the Western canon, let's say, which is not even exactly Western, get right down to it, right? It's much broader than that. I think it's a...

It's not only terror, let's say, that you'll become more conservative, but also it's a rebuke to your intellectual hubris because you can no longer presume that your selfishness

power-mad whims say are of sufficient significance to be the determinants of the future. You have to subordinate yourself to the tradition. Yes, right, right. And I think Luciferian intellects dislike that.

And you could be even more cynical than that. You could say that people who are underpaid in relationship to their IQ, that would be professors, are angry enough with their lack of status to elevate their Luciferian presumption to the highest point. And that means they're very interested in

dissociating themselves from the canon and making themselves, well, they do the same thing Adam and Eve do. It's like, we're going to make our own values. Yeah, look, I mean, here's another thing that, I mean, you mentioned Mao. Now, as you know, under Mao, the little Shinto shrines and things that people had in their homes were replaced by pictures of Mao. They worshipped Mao. And at the same time, Mao, Stalin,

whoever, you know, these guys had this notion of a new man. We're going to have a new man. Yeah. But... Yeah, new. New. But here's the thing. Actually, it's all very, very old. So we were talking about Exodus. And so let me just throw this out. I happen to have just taught a couple of classes on Exodus. I filled in for one of our professors. The way I look at that book...

One main thing that's happening there is that book of the Bible is presenting you with the following alternative. Either you enslave yourself to Pharaoh or you enslave yourself to God. No, you can also be lost in the desert. Well, okay. That's an alternative. Okay, right. But that's an important alternative. Those are the three. No, no. I mean, you're absolutely right. Let's just imagine that Moses had never returned and, you know, they got the calf, whatever. Now, that's not going to be a very long-lasting thing.

But what I want to say here is then the question is, well, what is Pharaoh? What does Pharaoh mean? What's Pharaoh? Pharaoh is a man-god. By the way, aside from the Jews who are trying to start a Hebrew republic and the Greeks, which are these little islands of liberty in a sea of despotism, everyone else is man-gods. I mean, the Persian emperor, the Egyptians, et cetera. Right.

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So that means that those societies apprehended a principle of sovereignty abstracted beyond the most powerful man. Yeah, right, right. That's a very sophisticated view of it. And, you know...

I mean, in, for example, Aeschylus' Persians, which is about the defeat of Xerxes' army in the Second Persian War, Xerxes can't be held to account because he's divine. Yeah, right. Okay, so... The buck stops there. But what's interesting about Pharaoh is that, first of all, it is the most...

not only the most technically advanced, I would even call it a technological civilization. If you've been to Egypt, as I have, you see the pyramids, right? And nobody even knows how these things were made. There are blocks that are much larger than this fairly large room we're sitting in. They made the most amazing jewelry ever produced.

And we have a bunch of it just because a bunch of it was shoved in a tiny little room, the burial site of King Tutankhamen. Who knows what the tomb of Ramses had in it? These massive granite obelisks and all this stuff. The entire society was dedicated to the elevation and the monumentalization and the memorialization of the pharaoh, okay?

So it's the exaltation of the man-God. Well, and so what Pharaoh means today is the elevation of man to a God. Now, we do this, by the way,

I mean, Freud has this phrase in Civilization and its Discontents about how modern man is a prosthetic god, right? Like we equip ourselves with all these tools and things like this. So that's a huge temptation. But the suggestion of the Bible is if you go in that direction,

you're going to have a kind of totalitarian society. And to be a slave... Yeah, you get this dynamic between potentate and slave. Yes, exactly. But there can be lots of slaves, right? So, for example, in Persia, the emperor, whether it was Xerxes or Darius or Cyrus, everyone else was known as the king's slave, including the members of his family. So, you have that. Now, you can do that, but the alternative then is bowing down to God. Right.

and being a slave, or if you want to put it in a softer way, a servant to God. Well, that's what Moses tells the Pharaoh, right? He says, let my people go so they may worship me in the wilderness. It's not anarchy. It's not hedonistic freedom of the sort that the golden calf worshipers turn to. It's what we call it, ordered freedom, I think is the general phrase.

So if we fast forward again to middle of the 20th century ideological tyrannies, and this includes fascism, obviously, you... This is like there's nothing new under the sun, in a sense. It's a retelling of the pharaonic tyranny, essentially. Right. Yeah, right. Right, but so the notion that... Like, that might also be part of this resistance. Like, you know... It is. Well, I think that's part of... You want to sustain the illusion that you're... Well, I think that's part of the spirit of Luciferian usurpation. It's like...

The radical types who were trying to produce the new man, they assumed that if they had been Stalin or Mao, the promised utopia would have come. And that is an elevation of the intellect. So I interviewed a guy recently, unfortunately I can't remember his name, who wrote a book about Marx and Satanism. And he looked at Marx's early writings before he became political and

Marx was a seriously warped individual in virtually every way you could possibly imagine. And he was definitely a Luciferian intellect. And see, one of the things I think we've done wrong in our analysis of, let's say, communism, and perhaps also Nazism, but we'll stick with communism, is that we assume that the best way to understand it, to understand what happened, is to do an analysis of communism. But we don't think what you're proposing, which is,

Well, communism, that emerged in like 1850, let's say, something like that.

was it actually something new? Well, your point is no, it's not something new at all. It's really old. It's the tyrant-slave dichotomy. And I do believe that communism is the most recent garb that something very ancient cloaks itself. Oh, yes. And in fact, as you were speaking, it occurred to me, I mean, so here are a couple of examples of communism. First of all, we have book five of Plato's Republic,

where the women and men are shared in common, et cetera. It turns out to be a highly stratified society where everyone is miserable, essentially, unless you're sort of the top dog. But more important is Aristophanes' play Assembly Women, in which the women take over and establish a communist society. Now, this is very interesting for reasons that you may already have gleaned. That is, the evidence shows that women, far more than men in the United States and in Europe,

Especially if they're young. Far left, right? Yeah, and it's true in South Korea. It's true in Japan. It's true in Australia. So I would suggest that anyone listening to our discussion who's interested in this might go back and look at Aristophanes' Assembly Women, where the men are essentially infantilized. The women run everything. The men are infantilized. And it's a communist society. So you have all these earlier things. But one thing I wanted to say here, and I want to mention before I forget it, is that... So why...

Why? Oh, sorry. Go ahead with that. No, no, please. Well, I'm curious because you said, you know, you said some, you made some statements that elicit questions. So, for example, you studied Plato and then you said, sort of casually, you joined the synagogue and you got interested in the Talmud. It's like, oh, well, that's not necessarily expected. And then you showed...

your deepening understanding of the relationship between today's political scene and these very, very old stories, and are making a case that the political situation is better understood in terms of those old stories, what, arguably, than any other way? I mean, that's kind of what it looks like to me. There is nothing new under the sun. And if we lose touch with those ancient stories, we lose our ability to actually understand—

What's going on? Elijah, you mentioned Elijah. Elijah's foes are the nature worshipers. Right, well, that's kind of relevant in today's society, given the rise of nature worship. Something will attain the pinnacle point. We talked about the man-god. Well, that doesn't look like it works out very well, unless you want to be a slave, and maybe you do. And it's also...

we're also facing the consequences of the rise of Gaia worship, let's say, the rise of nature to the highest place. And that's, you know, Elijah's fundamental realization, which makes him a star of the Old Testament, he's

one of the two prophets that appear when Christ is transfigured on the mount, right? It's Moses and Elijah. Well, why? Because Elijah realizes that God is not to be found in nature. But we have no idea how cataclysmic a discovery that was. Huge. Right? So, God isn't a man-God, and God isn't in nature. Yes. Okay, well, now, one response to that is there's no God, but

we kind of end up with nature or man-gods when we take that route, or some nihilistic catastrophe. Yes. And so then the question... Now, you talked about Greece and the ancient Israelites as constructing up a principle of divinity or sovereignty that was separate from a specific embodiment, like a pharaoh or an emperor, but also not to be found in nature, right? Yes, indeed. Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, so...

Let me make another suggestion here. So you mentioned Marx, and what we see in Marx is an overestimation, a serious overestimation of the power of reason. And now reason understood as a productive and political principle. And, I mean, obviously there's a religious background because it's a secularization of the Christian story, but...

I think there are several elements here. And by the way, this goes back to Plato's Republic as well. We can talk about that. But the idea is that, okay, we're going to have a heaven on earth. We're going to have a paradisical society where all men are brothers and so on. And everyone's needs are met. Right. Whatever the hell that means. But here's the problem.

It is going to be realized by human political productive action. And the difficulty there is – so first of all, it's not emerging organically. It's a political constructivism. So the best society will not emerge organically. Right.

But it's to be brought into being by man. Now, it's to be brought into being by man in a particular time and in a particular place. By a particular man. Right, by a particular man. And when you put those constraints on it, you drastically limit...

the possibilities within that society because it's got to be producible. It's got to be sustainable. It's got to fit the particular parameters, all these kinds of things. Add on to that the delusion that human beings are not in fact human.

let's say, radically local beings who form the most meaningful bonds in particular ways. Marriage, family, town. But we're universal, right? Yeah, right. And finally, you have this kind of divinization of man because after all,

you know, well, we're going to realize heaven on earth. Well, and as you said, we can produce a centralized authority, which falls out of the presumptions that you described, that's going to have the computational power necessary to pull off the task. Exactly. Which is, well, just that claim is preposterous. Right. But I like the way you formulate that, because what you're pointing out is that

For the system that's proposed to make itself manifest, it has to meet a series of increasingly likely constraints. Yes, exactly. Increasingly, sorry, increasingly unlikely constraints. Right. It has to do this. That's already hard. Well, you add four more impossibilities to that. It's like, well... Right. And where I want to go with this is that that kind of hubris about reason... Mm-hmm.

is, I think, well, first of all, it's a characteristic of the modern era because you have Descartes saying we're going to be masters and possessors of nature. And if you read the Discourse on Method, he's... We're going to form our own values. Right, right. But that's sort of the end of the whole kind of decay. But if we go back to the early moderns,

He even suggests in the Discourse on Method that maybe medicine will make all the infirmities of old age sort of disappear, which means we're not gonna die. In which case, by the way, the religious question,

is gone. Like from the, I mean, Descartes writing, he doesn't want his books to be placed on the index, which they were nonetheless, you know. And so they're read and they have to be, you know, the Roman Catholic Church has to look at them. But the fact is that Roman Catholicism is irrelevant if you've got, if we're not going to die, right? I mean, in some fundamental sense, but okay. Well, whatever a human being is, is something completely different than whatever it is now. Right.

But now I want to go back to Leo Strauss, who talks about the permanent questions. And what I've come to understand is the following, that the permanence of the questions arises from the necessity that Athens, so to speak, and now let's just take that to mean reason, like unaided reason, okay, can't be separated, right?

from the biblical alternative, which is the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. How did you figure that out? Well, Strauss writes about this stuff. He writes about, this is not my ideas. He writes about Athens and Jerusalem. But what I'm claiming is this.

In order for reason to function in a healthy way, it must conduct itself in the light of the alternative of religion, which is like you can't understand everything on your own. There are massive mysteries, right? And there's this entire alternative way of thinking about things.

So if you simply separate reason from that, you're going to get totalitarianism and kind of, you know, the lunacy that we see. Yeah, Luciferian hubris. But if you separate religion...

from the alternative that, well, man has reason and man is able to figure things out and there are things that we can understand about nature and the world and science that aren't in the religious tradition, then you're going to end up with, say, Islamic extremism or something. You see what I'm saying? In other words, a healthy human existence is to dwell in the space of the permanent questions, which must be informed by these alternatives. And Strauss is very good on this. He says, there's no philosophical proof

that the Bible is wrong, right? Like, you know, you could, like, you're always making assumptions that are simply going to sort of

prejudice the conclusions that you're going to. So we have to live in this space. And Strauss's claim, which I really think is great, is that the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is the coiled spring of the greatness of the West, that we have to understand that. But now what I've come to understand, this is a kind of moderation, right? Because if you say, no, reason's it. Anything that's not rational, you've got some kind of positivism or whatever,

you're going to go straight to that man-God thing, right? You're going to go straight to that totalitarian. The train's going to stop at the death camp, basically. But if you also say, well, there's no reason, which is one more thing I just want to say about my book on Plato and the Talmud. I've already suggested that Socratic philosophizing begins with this revelation of Delphi, which Socrates takes seriously. Who is Socrates? What is wisdom? But he's convinced that there must be an answer because the God can't speak falsely.

The rabbis, there's a great book called Rational Rabbis by a guy named Menachem Fisch. And believe it or not, he talks about the rabbis of the Talmud. The first 40 pages is about Karl Popper's theory of falsification in science, which is a great, humble theory, right? It's that...

We can't prove laws like the law of gravity. We can only falsify them. We can conduct experiments that if they turn out a certain way, we'll falsify the formulation of the law of gravity. We look for new forms of our ignorance. Right. So then this guy argues that the rabbis are rational. And they are in a sense. They're playing the Socratic game of rationality within the horizon of revelation. Okay.

So they start with the Torah. Okay, I believe, I think we know enough about both psychology and neuroscience now

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to move that from the domain of philosophical theory to the domain of established fact. Because one of the things that people who've studied perception and emotion have come to conclude is that, well, I asked Carl Friston, who's the world's most cited neuroscientist, by the way, I asked him, is every object perception a micro-narrative? Oh.

Oh, that's very interesting. He said, yes, for sure. He said, necessarily. Right, necessarily. That's quite the claim. Because what we've come to understand is that there's no object perception independent of motivational frame. And the description of a motivational frame is a narrative. Okay, now you made a comment earlier that, well, you need to know where you've come from and where you're going. Okay, so let's, what is a narrative? Well, yeah.

There's an aim, there's a starting place, there's a voyage. And then you might say, well, the world's made out of objects and you overlay a value-laden narrative on top of it. But then you might say, well, where's the interface? And so you might say, well, let's look at how perception works. What do we see as objects? Well, we do not see...

We do not see what the Enlightenment mind conceptualized as the object when we see an object. That's not right. What we see, so what it seems to be the case, it's very cool. So once you establish an aim,

And this is in the most trivial of circumstances. The world reveals itself to your perception as a pathway to the aim, okay? As a set of obstacles, that produces negative emotion. A set of facilitators or tools, that produces positive emotion. And that's with every glance you take, because every glance specifies an aim for action, right? Because otherwise, why look? Okay, so...

Aim, pathway, right? So that might be the straight and narrow pathway. Uphill, for example. Tools and obstacles. Positive emotion, negative emotion. On the social front, friends and foes, same thing. Almost everything defaults to the realm of the irrelevant, right? Because if I specify an aim, most things are now irrelevant. So your aim makes most of the world irrelevant. Some things stand out as phenomena.

The phenomena that stand out are tools and obstacles or friends and foes. There's also, and I just figured this out this year, there's also agents of magical transformation in narratives. They change your aim. So imagine that every aim brings a set of constraints and rules. So that's like the metaphysics of the aim, the rules. But if you switch the aim, the metaphysics change, and that's a magical shift. And if someone comes along whose aim is for something,

stages higher than yours, we'll say, then they appear truly magical. But the reason I'm making this case is like, there is, I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment, and I think it died like Nietzsche claimed Christianity died at its own hand, because it turns out that there is no level at which what we see are dead objects. Not at any level of perception whatsoever. Every object is actually dead.

You cannot dissociate value from object in perception. It's not possible. In fact, if anything, it's tilted towards value and not object. And there's another terrible plague for the Enlightenment types as well who think the world is...

is a place of objects, is that, well, there's an infinite number of objects because, well, so then which objects? Right, right. Which objects? That's a terrible question because as soon as you say that, you have to prioritize. Well, there's no difference between priority and value. So another way of thinking about a narrative, when you go to a movie, you watch the protagonist, what you are

is your observation of the protagonist's structure of value. You're incorporating that. You match his emotions because you match his aims. And so when we're storytelling, what we're doing is we're exchanging information about the substrata within which rationality has no choice but to operate. So the metaphysics of the Enlightenment were wrong. Rationality...

is at the base because the world's made out of objects and you can calculate your way forward with value-free objective knowledge. Like, none of that's right. Yeah, yeah. So the story's the thing. Now, you said, well, we need a story. We need to know where we've been. Now, that has to have something to do with why you got interested in the Talmud, I would presume. So you said you saw a similarity with the dialogues. Yes, yes. So what else caught your attention? You've obviously developed

extreme familiarity, for example, with the story of Exodus. Why do you think as a philosopher you started to presume or understand that these ancient stories shed light on the world in a way that philosophical theories abstracted away from narrative don't? Well, look, what you just said is very rich and I think very attractive and interesting. So let me start with a question, I guess.

Doesn't this all mean then that we have to find the proper aim? And if we find the proper aim, then our questions are going to be helpful and productive to us as human beings.

So let's go back to the very first commandment. This is why Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, which is a guidebook for revelation, says, okay, how do you pray? How do you orient yourself in the world? Same question. Aim at the highest thing you can conceptualize. That's number one. Presume that other people are made in the image of that highest thing. So now you've set the frame. Now, pay attention.

Having done that, pay attention to the moment because what will happen is if you specify your aim properly...

The proper pathway will appear. The proper tools will make themselves manifest to you. The proper revelations will come to you. Well, that is how perception and thought work. So, indeed, the Tower of Babel is a story of misaligned aim, you know, and it's the engineers who build the tower. Yeah, right. Well, that's a great story, too, because if you read it carefully, they say, let's bake bricks. So they bake the bricks.

And that's fascinating because they break it out of adamah, which is the soil that man is made out of, et cetera. And then they say, let's make a tower. Now, this may be over-interpreting, but first we'll develop the bricks, and then we'll figure out what to do with them. Like the technological thing comes before. It actually reminds me of like the CIA discovers LSD. I mean, they don't discover it, but they're like, we got LSD. So now their question is, what can we do with it?

There's a book about this. And so they say, well, is it a truth serum? So they give LSD to this CIA guy. No, it's not. Well, maybe it's an anti-truth serum. We give it to our agents if they're caught and stuff like that. No, it's not. But this kind of reasoning, right? Like this is potent stuff. This is super potent stuff.

What can we do with it? But anyway, you're absolutely right about the misaligned aim. You know, people end up unable to communicate because the aim gets so misaligned. Words themselves lose their meaning. And that's a reference to exactly what we're describing is that it's you...

If you mess up the underlying narrative substrate enough, rationality becomes impossible, partly because words don't mean the same thing to different people. Well, that's true. We can see that now. Yeah. So what you said about the Sermon on the Mount is anticipated by God in the very first commandment. I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods beside me. Right, exactly. Now what's interesting is that

It doesn't mean that we don't have subsidiary aims, but what it means is that's the highest. That's the highest. For Socrates, what is the highest? Well, he calls these things ideas, justice, for example. And the Socratic, what Socrates is trying to do is a sort of shuttling movement. First of all,

to come to the best possible understanding he can of, for example, the idea of justice, which plays a huge role in his life. But...

You know the cave image. There aren't any signs that say you are now leaving the cave and entering into the full light of truth, right? So there's always a question, have I truly understood this thing? Then the other thing he has to do is to try to live up to the ideas, or if you want to put it the other way, to take the idea into his life as a matter of his existence. It's Jacob's ladder image. Exactly, exactly. So he's trying to do these things. But for him, the highest is...

Frankly, I mean, you can call it the beautiful as per the symposium. You can call it the good as per the Republic. But of course, the good is analogized to the sun. And the sun, in a way, has no form or no... Like if the soul, if the mind is compared to the eye, then the mind is destroyed by looking directly at the sun or at the good, right? So that's the connection between...

Plato and the Talmud because, because that upward aim, it's this upward aim now. So if you have that, would it be fair to say that Plato would Plato consider the highest good as the, whatever the commonality is between the true, the good and the beautiful, let's say, because, I mean, I think, you know, he moves back and like, yes, he, he, he gives different perspectives on that. Right. So we have the beautiful in the symposium. We have the good, obviously the true is absolutely fundamental. Um,

But one thing I want to say is, you know, you mentioned earlier attention. And I am convinced, I've heard several people say this or read it, that attention, proper attention is an act of worship. Yeah, right. And so... That's a definition of worship, actually. Because you pay attention. Worship, the act of worship is attention.

It's indistinguishable from paying attention. Yes. Because what you're doing when you attend is you're prioritizing the objects of attention. Right, exactly. Well, to worship is to prioritize. Yes, right. And so this is what's so stunning about these sequence, let's say, of discoveries in neuroscience. It's like, oh, I see, every glance...

Whether you know it or not is an act of worship. Now the question comes up. That's very interesting. I see where you're going with that. That's for sure. That's very interesting. It's like, oh, what are you worshiping? Yes. Well, nothing. It's like, well, then your eyes are closed and you're asleep. It's like, no, there's no escape from this. There is no escape. Yeah. I just ran a class for some applicants to my university.

And we were discussing David Foster Wallace's This is Water, Kenyan graduation speech. I don't know if you know this, but anyway, it's great. And at some point there, he says, you know, that everybody worships something, right? And that in fact, and he makes this case, he says, you know, whether it's Jesus Christ, whether it's Yahweh, whether it's some extreme, you know, the good, something like this, if you aren't

If you don't bow down to those highest things, then your life is going to be miserable. Well, you could be a pagan and a polytheist, and you could be a worshiper of your own whims. This is another thing I've been trying to take apart, particularly in the last couple of years. It's like, especially because I started to understand more deeply the golden calf story. It's like, well...

I don't worship anything. Okay, well, let's take that apart. Okay, because it's about me. Yes. Well, or it could be about nothing, because you could be nihilistic, but then you're like suicidal and dead if you take that, or worse, if you take that pathway. Okay, so let's say there's nothing superordinate to you. Okay, but then when an ugly question comes up, it's like,

Well, what do you mean by you? Do you mean the higher you that's in service to your wife and your family for the long run? Or do you mean the you that's at the strip club with like a Jack Daniels? Golden calf. Right, exactly that. And then if the you that you are prioritizing is what you want, what you're actually saying is that

the momentary whims that seize you are your God. Exactly. Well, and then you might, you could easily ask and should, it's like, what makes you think that those whims, why is it self-evident to you that you're identical with your whims? That just means you're possessed by something low. Yes. So completely that you don't even know that you're possessed. Like,

Yes, right, right. Once you start to open up the question of what is the you that you're serving if you're selfish, let's say, because it's not self-evident that you are your selfish aims. Indeed. Especially because they change. So there's no escape from the problem of prioritization. Right, right. So if you have the proper goal...

And let's just, I mean, let's not try to define that, but let's say it's transcendent. Yeah. It's... Whatever's at the top of Jacob's ladder. Right. That's a great way to put it. It's a lovely way of putting it. Yes, yes, yes. Because you climb up and it keeps receding. Yes, that's good. C'est la vie. So then your attention can be rightly focused. And the questions...

are the right ones. That's the important thing. And we go back to your earlier statement about quest. The questions are the right ones. And that becomes very exciting because... Okay, why? Why does it become... That's a very trenchant observation because I mentioned earlier that...

People think that the purpose of their life is happiness, but it's not. That's shallow. It is indeed not. So then I think, well, maybe the purpose of your life is adventure. And that's different than happiness by a lot. Well, and where's that to be found? Well, an adventure is a quest. And the quest is to be found in the questions. Now, you just said you get the questions right, and that's very exciting. Yes. Okay, so...

Well, the first question would be, why is it exciting to get the questions right? And what does the fact that it's exciting signify, even neurologically, let's say? Because that excitement signifies the discovery of something of import. Yes. Okay, so why is the right question exciting? Well, I can speak to that from the perspective of a scholar or a reader, a thinker. If you have a book in front of you and you're trying to make sense of it,

We all know this. A question, a good question, can reveal depths of meaning and understanding in everyday life. To come to understand what the question really is can reorient you and can again reveal depth.

I'll just use the same phrase, depths of meaning in your own existence that you simply weren't attending to. Moses is on a quest when he encounters the burning bush. And depths of meaning are revealed to him as a consequence of his pursuit. That's what transforms him into a leader. It's a question that takes him off the beaten path.

It might be what is beyond well-adapted shepherd, let's say. Yes, right. Right, right. Way out beyond the wilderness, right? Yeah, exactly. And this – well, and so this relates to Socrates saying, you know, wonder is the beginning of philosophy. There's a –

So let's go back. I agree. Happiness not only is not the proper aim. In Vasily Grossman's wonderful book, Life and Fate, there's a little chapter where this guy has written a little letter in the Gulag. And he says something like, happiness with a capital H has been the cause of the greatest evil in the world. Okay.

And I think this is right. And you read it elsewhere. You read it in the Deschamps-Mambelstam's book, Hope Against Hope. In the name of happiness, the greatest evil was committed. Well, and Solzhenitsyn points out that happiness disappears with the first blow of the jailer's truncheon on your apartment door at two in the morning. Indeed. It's like if happiness is the purpose, as soon as you're not happy, which is going to happen? You're lost. Trading shouldn't have barriers. When Robinhood started, it was built to make trading more accessible.

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I imagine you would agree with this, but I propose that what is far more important is meaning. And meaning is the deepest and richest things are the most meaningful and the highest things.

That's a definition again. Yeah, I think... That's right. You can find what's inexhaustible. That's like the well that will never run dry. Inexhaustible. And so in human life... That's why Christ is the miraculous provider of fish and water. Because there's an orientation that makes, that has...

that provides limitless abundance. That's the reason. Yeah, and so, and the quest for meaning can take many forms. So, for example, we're having our students read Marco Polo. Very interesting. So Marco Polo, his uncle and his father actually journeyed to see Kublai Khan before Marco Polo ever did. Incredibly arduous and dangerous journey from Italy to Mongolia. And they go all the way out there

and they get to the con, who's not going anywhere, by the way. But the con turns out to be a brilliant guy, and he also wants to learn about the world. So this is the spirit of adventure you were talking about. They go there. By the way, the con says to them, oh, this Catholicism you talk about is very interesting. Go back, talk to the pope, get some bishops, bring them back to see me, and if I like what they say, we'll all convert to Catholicism. It's very interesting. So we have these two people who are explorers, right, and they're finding meaning. And

In the story of Marco Polo, you know, he's just utterly fascinated by this completely different world. It's so fulfilling for him to see these things. Okay, so we have that kind of example. That's one version. Now, intellectually, you know, think of the great books. Think of the Bible. Think of Shakespeare. Yeah.

Depths beyond depths. You ask the right question, you find these things. But then also just in everyday life. I mean, one of the good things about getting older is realizing the futility of so much that is esteemed and so many things that I myself chased. And then to begin to realize that, you know, the love...

of one's spouse, of one's children, the opportunity to help them. Let's say, sure, people want esteem, but to be esteemed by people that in your estimation are truly worthy. You get the fans you deserve. Yeah. I mean, just like all of these. So God offers Abraham an adventure as the covenant.

Right? And he says that one of the consequences, he says, if you accept this mission, this mission impossible, you'll be a blessing to yourself. Well, that's a good deal. Yeah, right. You'll be esteemed for valid reasons. Right. So the esteem, like there's almost nothing that people will chase more than attention from others. And there's a very positive aspect of that. Yes, yes. But...

So that's not going anywhere. But then you might say, well, are you esteemed because you're an actor, because you're a phony? Or are you esteemed because the pattern of your life brings abundance to everyone, which is also another offering to Abraham, right? You'll establish, four, you'll be a blessing to yourself if you have an adventurous life. You'll be esteemed for valid reasons,

You'll establish something of incalculable permanence. And you'll do this in a way that will bring abundance to everyone. That's a hell of an offer, man. Now, you know what's so interesting about this? To pick up a couple of themes that we mentioned earlier. You talked about humility. Somebody like Abraham, and this is the trick, and we see it in Socrates, we see it in Abraham, we see it in all the greats, is confidence. How do these two things go together? That is to say...

What do I mean by Socrates' confidence? Okay. I don't have knowledge. I have some, to the best of my ability, justified beliefs that I take to heart. For example, the soul is more important than the body. Justice is more important than everything else. Yeah.

But at the same time, humility. Now, the humility... That's an easy thing to have faith in if you're honest, because your ignorance is boundless. Your ignorance is boundless. And that's truly something self-evident.

I don't know enough. It's like, yeah, you can go to the bank on that. Yeah, and that's Socrates. And that drives the question. And the beautiful thing about humility, it's connected with wonder because the unhumble don't wonder because they already know. They know. Right? They're also afraid of wonder. Like they're afraid that wonder will be that sword that bars the path to paradise that cuts every which way and burns. Yes. Because...

You have to substitute wonder for certainty. And if you've staked your soul on your certainty, then wonder is your enemy. Yes, exactly. And you will pursue it. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. And look out. Now we're getting down to a deeper thing because wonder, you know, when you wonder, you enter into what Socrates calls aporia. And the Greek word literally means no way out. It's like you're stuck. Maybe that's not the right way to put it. Let's say this.

You know that the more you think and the more you ponder possibilities and the more you know you don't know, you feel like you're on this sea. I mean, it can really be overwhelming, okay? There's got to be a prior assumption that makes wonder worthwhile, that allows you to feel that you're going to remain afloat on this sea. That's Job's conclusion, I think. Because Job ends up

and barren in the most dismal way possible. And he makes, he proclaims two axioms that he won't abandon. One is that despite the evidence, he's fundamentally valuable. Okay, so he's not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of being a man, especially if you're one that's trying to aim up. So he's not going to abandon that. And he's going to make the presumption that

The spirit that gave rise to all things is good, even if he can't see how. So those are the two you've anticipated me exactly. Let's go with that good thing, especially that the world is good, that reality is good. And what do we, now we can even say, well, what do we mean by good? Well, there is good.

some kind of sustaining structure let's say and the reason i put it that way like in other words intelligibility yeah but more than that yeah probably more than that but let's let's take intelligibility just just for a second here um one of my favorite books which i'm now listening to i read it 30 years ago is the making of the atomic bomb by richard rhodes and what's so great about this book is i mean it has many wonderful features it's a great work of history it's a great work of

sort of explaining physics to educated amateurs. But what it focuses on is theoretical physics in the first half of the 20th century, which was an almost an academic paradise. You had all these great physicists and they're working together and they're discovering things like, so they have the atomic theory at the beginning of the 20th century, an atom, this uncuttable thing from the Greek, it can't be cut.

And they don't even know, they don't know anything about it, right? And so now they're discovering the nucleus and electrons and protons and neutrons and all this kind of thing. And they're just going around, you know, I mean, the reason I say it's an academic paradise is you go to Cambridge and they say, oh, go to, go to see Rutherford at, you know, this other place. And you go there. Niels Bohr has the, and so they're all collaborating. But they're convinced that

That there's a there there, right? And they're convinced that... And that their quest is worthwhile. And that their quest is worthwhile. And then, of course, all of a sudden it's driven into overdrive because now we're in the war and now there's possible application.

But, you know, so there's this kind of faith. There is a faith. Yeah, well, you know, I talked to Richard Dawkins about that. Yeah. I said, because he's an enlightenment mind, let's say. I said, well, you bring to the scientific endeavor a set of axiomatic presumptions. Yes. One is the world could be understood. Yes. The second is that trying to understand it is good and will bring good. Yes.

Those aren't scientific theories. Those are starting points for being a scientist. And so then the question is, well, what's the validity? How do you ground that metaphysics that gets science itself off to a start? Well, I mean, look, in the case of the harnessing of nuclear energy, you have, let us say, a proof of concept. That is to say, this is to me...

probably the most dramatic and persuasive indication that science has the capacity to know something fundamental about reality. So, yeah, you know, I mean, their faith paid off in this instance. But I think this is really, really important because if you don't start with the notion that

There is a reality, and the reality is good, that it has some kind of intelligibility, etc. Oh, but actually, now I'm interrupting myself. Let me just say this. Niels Bohr, here's the humility. Niels Bohr was like the man, incredible physicist. He never spoke of the laws of nature, never spoke of them, because he was humble. And people use the word laws of nature, but the fact is,

There's no proof that these are laws. I mean, first of all, our horizon is tiny. Are the same laws 10 billion light years away? You know, whatever. Okay. But second, he spoke about regularities of phenomena, right? So here we have someone who's genuinely understanding, you know, nuclear physics, which, I mean, we're talking about, you know, 10 to the minus 23rd or something, just like stuff that you, I mean, you can't see these things. You can see the effects of them and so forth. Um,

And so he's making advances, but he has this humility. So, but anyway... And that also, that humility, you know, because there's another metaphysical aspect to this too, which is extraordinarily... I learned this from Carl Jung mostly, I think, at least initially, which was, well, what spirit seizes the scientist's curiosity? It's like, so let's say...

The world's intelligible. The pursuit of that intelligibility is possible and good and could bring benefit. But then that begs the question. The question is, well, does that depend on the orientation of the scientist? So like I read a book at one point that was written by an ex-KGB officer, and he made the claim that there were labs in the Soviet Union in the 80s, I think, in the 80s, where they were trying to

hybridize Ebola and smallpox and aerosolize it. Oh, how lovely. Well, that's a perfectly reasonable scientific question. Right? Can that be done? If you live in a world of valueless objects, that's just as good a question as any other. And you can even imagine spin-off benefits from it. But you might say, well, isn't there a better question you could ask? So then you might say, and this is a weird thing too, that

The goodness of the world is predicated on the aim of the investigator. The alchemists kind of knew that. I got very interested in Jung's analysis of alchemy because the alchemists...

the pre-chemists, insisted that the aim of the investigator had to be pure. Yeah. Right. And so they were beginning to understand that the secrets that matter revealed were dependent on the

investigative tools that were put into play in the investigation. And that was actually a moral endeavor. So are you actually trying to aim up? Yes. Right, right. So we're looking at the substrate of science, right? Saying, well, there are values that have to be held for the scientific enterprise itself to emerge, to proceed, and to be beneficial. And now we're getting down to some really fundamental questions.

And so I'm going to take a little shift here. Douglas Murray's book, The War on the West, he's got this wonderful passage where he says, you can stand in front of a painting and you can look at it and you can say, hmm, I'm

this peculiar blue pigment, was that sourced from some country that was in poverty? Was the apprentice who stretched the canvas paid? Are the fibers, did they get... So you can, in other words, you can, to use a, this isn't quite the right word, like deconstruct. In other words... Close enough. Yeah, you can, and what I realized in reading that passage is,

There's no end to it. I mean, I can look and say, no, you know, you're wearing this suit, Dr. Peterson. It doesn't mean anything can be taken apart this way. And blood soaks everything. Yes. Right. So if you look enough, you'll find a problem. You'll find a problem. Or, Douglas Murray says, you can rejoice in the picture that Raphael has painted of the Virgin ascending to heaven. And what I realized in thinking about that is,

Here's the really fundamental premise or the, like what distinguishes these two approaches? And I think it is the view that the world is good or not. In other words, if you start from that and say there's goodness here, then

then you're going to look for the goodness. And there's beauty and there's truth. You're going to look for that. And you may also find it. And you may find it. And if you don't,

then everything follows from that. And I've been thinking about this a lot. Yeah, it'd be pretty weird if it turned out that the world was constituted so that you find what you're looking for. Seriously. And I kind of think there's some truth in that. Well, yes, indeed. And if you're not looking for it, you're not going to find it. But to me, then this becomes, maybe it's a psychological question. Because if that's the fundamental question, right? You've got these folks over here who want to burn down and destroy, right?

and wreck and repudiate. And these folks over here who want to build and want to solve and want to progress and want to repair. And if the difference between them is that fundamental premise, the world is good. You know what Marx's favorite quote was? What?

It was from Goethe, and it's a very specific quote. I knew this quote before I found this out, because I read Faust 1 and 2, and there's a line in there, Mephistopheles. Goethe is trying to characterize Mephistopheles, who's the spirit of rationality, or the spirit, the Luciferian spirit of the usurper. Mephistopheles' Credo was repeated twice, once in Faust 1 and once in the second part.

Everything that lives should be eradicated because of its insufficiency. Now I'm paraphrasing and I'm paraphrasing badly, but the basic idea is that the suffering that's attendant on consciousness is indicative of a flaw in the world so profound that the best possible solution is the eradication of everything. - Wow. - Right? That's Marx's favorite quote. - Wow. - Right?

That's very interesting. I did not know that. Yes, it's extremely interesting because that's only one sentence in each of those plays. But it's Mephistopheles' revelation of his motivation. It's like all that suffers should die so that suffering itself will cease.

and the antinatalist types for example they believe exactly that yes yes right so and yes so yes this is something it's very interesting here because we're we're also verging on a definition of faith so in job like job makes a decision and and the decision is the act of faith it's not belief in some idiot superstition yes job says okay i got two pathways here i can act as if

The world in its essence is good. I am, and so is the spirit of being. Or I can forego that and do what my wife suggests, which is curse God and die. And all the evidence at hand suggests that cursing God and dying is the right, is the rational conclusion. Yes.

And Job says, I refuse to forswear my faith. Right, and so, and I see that partly as a prodroma to the passion story, which is an extension of what Job suffers and concludes. But the axiomatic presumption, well, maybe there's three, right?

The spirit that underlies being is to be regarded as good. The essence of man, despite his flaws, if he's aiming up, is to be regarded as good. And the answer that you seek is dependent on the aim, right? Because that brings the morality of the investigator into the picture. And so this is part of the reason, for example, why scientists need a class and engineers, maybe even more. Yes.

to solve the problem of alignment, let's say. Yes. They need a classical education that's grounded in a deep... Okay, so you've already come to that conclusion. I agree completely. So is that part of, I guess, probably what we're going to talk about on the Daily Wire set, because we're unfortunately approaching the end of this. Yes.

is more practical consequences of this. I want to talk to you more about the University of Austin and what you're aiming at, but now I've kind of fleshed out the metaphysical territory. And so, yeah, we're grounding people in their aim, right? And

Scientists and engineers might think, well, that's unnecessary given the importance of our pursuit. But you can also see how absolutely susceptible they have been to the ideological mob in the universities, right? The scientists, they're just like babes in the woods when it comes to the political activists. Absolutely. And it shows that their metaphysics is so underdeveloped that they have no understanding or defense against the...

deconstructionist mob. Well, and look, I mean, you know, now we're in the age of AI. And this is an incredibly powerful technological force. And imagine, you don't have to imagine, unfortunately, what would it mean for experts and technicians with, you know, comprehensive capabilities to use AI and implement it and make it stronger to

Had no philosophical anthropology. Had no understanding of the human mind. We know what happens. We see it. We see, what was it? They invent devices that cause serious depression and mental illness in teenage girls. And

And everyone loses the ability to communicate because the aim is wrong. And they devolve in their ignorance to their science fiction metaphysics that they adopted when they were 13 without even understanding that that constitutes a religion and are unwilling completely to look beyond that. Exactly. Yeah. And you know my image for this.

I started thinking about the Inferno as a kind of political text. Oh, yeah. And the fact is that, you know, you get to the Ninth Circle and Dante's beautiful creation invention is that it's ice. Everyone's frozen in the ice. Yeah. Isn't this like today? Yeah.

where or at least i mean now the ice is melting and maybe we've gone through that center of the earth and come out the other side but you have lucifer who towers up like a thousand feet and because he's come from the other side of the world and jammed into the middle and he's compared to like this mechanical like a windmill and he's chewing on brutus and gaius and cassius these traders

And all these people are frozen in the ice and they're completely isolated. No one can speak, not even Lucifer, his mouth is full. No speech, no connection with each other, an eternity of atomization. This is the effect of the social media and the, and by the way, Lucifer has three faces, right?

And he's way up high. He can look down. He can spy. He can survey the kingdom. It's just this incredible political image. It's like the all-seeing eye of Sauron. Yeah. Right? Well, you get the all-seeing eye of Sauron as a substitute for the divine if the state has to intervene in every decision. That's exactly right. So he's an image of this state that's just chewing. Yeah. Now I feel like, and I'm talking about, frankly, after Trump's election, there's a lot of chaos, but it's as if, it's as if...

Well, before the election, I just had a sense of dread because I saw the way things were going. And now I have a hope that we've sort of gone through and realized everything was upside down. Because remember when they go through, now they're going up and above them is purgatory and above that is heaven. Now they're rightly oriented. But so the misorientation...

of, well, Lucifer, whose head is pointed the wrong way, but pointed to the world above, right? So, I mean, in Hades, you know, or hell, I should say rather, it's the sort of sewer in which all the polluted streams of the earth flow and, you know, you've got to be being punished. But that reorientation is absolutely essential. We've got...

We have to break the ice. We have to learn how to speak. We have to connect with each other. And we've got to reorient ourselves and figure out what is above us and what is below. Figure out what is north and what is south. And that's the most important task at this point. Right, right. Well, that's a really good place to end. And so we'll continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side. Right.

Well, I think we could do two things. We can flesh out what it might mean to aim up, because part of what you see in the biblical corpus is an attempt to characterize up. And, of course, Socrates, Plato are doing exactly the same thing, right? They're doing it... It's like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, in a sense, right? The ancient Hebrews used narrative as an investigative tool. And...

And the philosophers use philosophy. You can see that dynamic with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky too, which is quite interesting. But both of them have their role. But the narrative role is more fundamental. It's more fundamental. And I think that's been established. All right, so we'll talk about that. And I think we'll talk about attempts...

that are being made now to reorient the academy. Sure. God, that problem. And so if you want to continue with the discussion, join us on the Daily Wire side. And so, well, there were many more things that we could have talked about today, but I liked that vein. That was good. And it's interesting to see

It's interesting to see how you were drawn to the conclusion that there was something in these ancient narrative texts that was, well, of incalculable and necessary value. And that it's particularly relevant given the technological transformations of the age. That's a very strange thing, right? Because you'd expect that as technology advances, the more ancient the text, the less relevant it would be. It turns out to be exactly the opposite. Right.

And it's already there with Babel. And it's already there. Yeah, right. And Pharaoh. Exactly. Yes, definitely. That's right. There's nothing new under the sun. That's for sure. Even in this...

time when so strangely there is so much new. Yes. Right. The old patterns are even more obvious and people can see that at the bottom of the identity crisis, there is a spiritual crisis and a spiritual war and the contours are becoming obvious. So as the technology mounts and the rate of transformation increases, the archetypal contours actually become more clear. Yeah. Yeah.

Very weird. All right, everybody. So join us on the Daily Wire side. And thank you for your attention today. And thank you very much for coming to talk to me. Thank you. And we appreciate you people who are watching. And if you are inclined to toss and support the Daily Wire way, come and see the rest of the conversation there. Good to talk to you. Great to talk to you.

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