Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland | EP 536

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 yes elijah's foes are the nature worshippers 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 but 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 okay and the question [Music] is so I had the opportunity today to speak with Dr jacob Howland and I wanted to speak with him for a variety of reasons um 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 he's also interested in the interface between modern technology AI for example and philosophy partly 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 u 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 the and at a deeper level less geographically centered the relationship between rationality as such the enlightenment project and science and the underlying metaphysical substrate and it turned out that the conclusions that Dr howland had drawn seem to be very similar to the conclusions that I've been drawing along with people

like John Vervi and Jonathan Pacio for example variety of the lectures that we have on Peterson Academy it it does appear that something really quite revolutionary on the intellectual side is beginning to emerge because the flaws in the enlightenment have become so structural that it's clear that a new pathway forward not only has to be found but is likely already upon us and the appearance of new institutions like the University of Austin like Peterson Academy like Rston are a 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 discussed 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 holland I 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 um I've been involved in Peterson Academy and also Rston 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 cuz 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 uh 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 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 and first let me say I appreciate you're having me on your podcast uh this is a great opportunity um so I uh how far back do you want me to start back away so we can start with undergraduate if you want right sure so uh well I'll start with my parents uh my father was a biology professor at

Cornell University my mother was a writer uh first nine 10 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 uh during that period my mother was a struggling writer and lived in poverty and we lived in Chicago and I had uh uh the unfortunate experience of um being in Chicago public schools in 1968 69 and a lot of tension um uh things became very difficult because my mother was quite poor

and and couldn't sort of make ends meet when were you born i was born in 1959 end of 1959 yeah um so let's see my mother comes from a Jewish background uh her whole family was from Chicago bluecollar my grandfather graduated from the 10th grade and worked with his hands making nuts and bolts in a in a big factory um and uh my father who's not Jewish um actually we're descended from a John Howland who came over on the Mayflower um 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 uh was a genius who graduated from Purdue atif at the age of 17 and was an engineer optical engineer um just had 20 patents um and actually both of those guys are still alive but in any case so as a child I had um strong influences on my mother's side um 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 Toltoy called How Much Land

Does a Man Need and uh my older brother got me up early in the morning and I don't know I was probably four or five he was a couple years older and he finished reading the story to me so we always had she always took us to you know see dance you know ballet and museums and things like this um anyway fast forward we moved in with my father or I graduated from Myiththica High School at the age of 16 cuz my dad said "Uh well I'm going to go on a sobatic leave and I

don't want to take you with me and so you can graduate early." Uh which I did went to Sworthmore College uh took a philosophy course i 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 that's useful to know yeah and I was and I was very um I'm not a mathematician but uh I did very well in mathematics so but I I found that um the physics was frankly too challenging uh and and I took an English

course and some other things and I finally took a philosophy course with a very brilliant man named David Lockerman um and he's one of these people that you know anyone who knew the guy said this is the most brilliant person they'd ever met i was very fortunate to and that was at Cornell no that was at Sworthmore College when I was undergraduate yeah uh and I decid and and so I I so I so I studied philosophy history and English uh 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 um 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 uh and David Lcherman came to Penn State then and that was great because he was on my dissertation committee um my main professor there I suppose besides Lochman was a man named Stanley Rosen who was a student of Leo Strauss uh 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 um I I was the first chairman or the yeah first chairman of the of the department of philosophy and religion they put these two departments together and I had written um a book on plas republic and and then had published my dissertation and then decided I really wanted to get to know my religion colleagues so I started studying Kirkagard um and wrote a book on Kirkagard and Socrates then I also when we got to Tulsa see I had a had Jewish experiences as a child for example I remember

Passover at my grandfather's house or he'd grab my hand and take me to a schol when they he was saying yard site for a relative which is on 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 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 there were we were lucky to have several very high ranking uh 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 Talmet but the thing is so it so it's it's this massive

corpus there are two Talmuds the main one is the Babylonian Talmud two and a half million words um 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 talment privileges questions privileges question questions most of the time there are no answers or at least yeah I think that's probably fair most of the so 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 over into your plot who gets the tomato then just like Plato starts you know in a dialogue called the Lockis Socrates runs into a couple guys they're saying "Should we have our kids study with this guy with a new fangled weapon?" And in three pages they're talking about what is courage and the Talmud they it can be three pages and they're talking about why

did God create the universe so they privilege questions they have multiple intellectual perspectives the rabbis are never on the same like they're they're constantly debating and and sometimes as in the academy the American academy you know it gets a little heated and contentious um so you have these debates 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 the old joke about you know why why are the why is why is there so much conflict you know and why is it

so heated because the stakes are so small right but in any case um 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 mentioned that is the belief is of 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 um the apology where Socrates uh you know has his friend his friend Kyan goes to the Delphic Oracle says is there anyone wiser than Socrates and the oracle says no right and 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 saying "Yes dreams don't utter falsehoods they're incomprehensible often but they never lie." Well I

like that that's a lot but what I want to say they're voice of nature you could say yes very much so and of course I mean that 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 what you mean by the divine as Yes indeed um Socrates says um that it's impermissible for a god to utter 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 uh moment the shortest revelation in history which is no right no there's no one wiser than Socrates um yeah and isn't that not because he knows what he doesn't know well he knows what he doesn't know but he I think I thought he made a statement to that end like that absolutely okay so the reason I asked that very specific well because you said that the Telmud like Plato's or the Telmud specifically which are like Plato's dialogues privilege questions now the thing about questions is that

questions require they require the recognition of ignorance and that's a form of humility exactly of course humility is the opposite of pride and one of the things I figured out recently we we could talk about maybe this is what we'll talk about in fact mostly um 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 m 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 and so it's a real question i actually want the answer yes i use the time on stage to

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 and the here's a here's a thought you tell me what you think about this

because this this is a terrifying thought i think the spirit of your aim answers your prayers so if you have a question you'll you'll the answer to the question will make itself manifest in your consciousness that's 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 you're 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 to talking on stage it's like I have a question it's a real question thinking okay and I there's a little more to it because I use stories that I know as investigative tools right 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 like one of the things I've thought about too is

that well thought essentially it's got an 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 or and maybe here's another answer so how do we sort that out well we have an internal dialogue which is an analogy 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 or the 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 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 I'd like your opinion on this well was is it Socrates who taught the Greeks to think at least to think critically like literally is is he the first man who determined how to internalize dialogue so okay so that's a bunch of questions very possibly the talent well that's that's right because we don't know when thought itself emerged especially critical thought critical thought's hard success in business isn't just about offering an amazing product or service though that's certainly essential what truly sets thriving companies apart is having

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selling today that's shopify.com/jbp [Applause] you've said a lot so yeah let me reply to a couple of things here um 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 Bourhees have you read any of Jorge Luis Borhees's short stories okay so it seems to me that this man's writing is itself um 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 borches question is this what are the effects of infinity on human beings right because we have stories like finesse the memorialius 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 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 um and then we have for example um uh 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 he seeks death and he reasons that there must be an antidote right there's 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 he can't separate anything out because So is he looking is burgers looking for the advantages to finitude let's say yes exact well let me put it a different way he is 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 in of our intelligence our memory um we are creatures of finitude in terms of our capacity to understand so for example

there's another um wonderful story um it's about a Mayan priest during the time of the concistadors and he's they destroy the civilization they throw him in a underground prison and there are some bars and on the other side is a jaguar and he begins to reme he begins to recall that there's an ancient myth that um 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 his and he's looking for a way to destroy the concungistadors 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 like 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 period uh space and it's inhabited by by librarians and they and they're looking through these books and they're trying to find some meaningm Mhm 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 right so but so anyway um and like the most um uh 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 um proposition of the library is formulated which is that any book that is possible is actual in the library in other words any and you know they can you it's like a million characters or something so any combination of characters exists 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 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 cataloges of cataloges of cataloges 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 or are afflicted by infinity in some way mhm um

that so just to go back here that's Bores's idea that is 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 I mean but there's no escape from the conundrum that we're finite in in and faced with right well and faced with the infinite indeed but the the point I really wanted to emphasize in what you were saying is this become this question becomes a fertile soil for these literary growths you know 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 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 yes okay now but there's a spam haiku archive online so it's only haiku that's only devoted to the lunch and meat there's like the

last time I looked at Yeah it's very funny they're very funny and it's it's ridic the MIT engineers MIT engineers made the archive of course and so there's 50,000 haikus there about spam and but then 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 yes and comic endeavor wouldn't have come into being and so it's it's a very strange thing that there is a genuine relationship between finitude and abundance yes like right so

there's there's a right balance between constraint and possibility that produces abundance too much possibility there's nothing that's B'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." Well do you have

a relationship with the infinite or not mhm you have some relationship maybe it could be a productive one if you could what formulate it 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 um 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 my monodities 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 like the builders at the Tower of Babel and so 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 we want a king and and and see so after all these failures and yes you know the flood and the tower of Babylon 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 mhm we got to give you you know uh um uh 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 can you have a flourishing life well and it's even it's 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 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 around and because that's all you seem to be able to manage." So yes and I'm very interested in this idea of misaligned aim yes because 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're 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 I you know I think this is absolutely crucial and let me say that um there is a question that I know to be absolutely fundamental and I know it to be fundamental because it shows up both in the Hebrew Bible and in Plato okay uh in Plato it shows up in the

very first sentence of Plato's Fedrris 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 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 right we're in an identity crisis obviously

we've cascaded into identity politics 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 that's a full narrative really right so okay so okay so let's just focus on these 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 okay this is crucial no part of it can be answered without the answers to the other two okay right yeah because um 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 I this is just my hypothesis but I think there's a lot to it that there are no really fruitful growths in the future that don't come out of

the soil of the past that is to say a a a rich understanding of the past and we could do this spoken like a true conservative well I mean yeah listen but that's the sort of thing that makes you think in a conservative direction once you realize that well this is well and that's a whole another interesting thing because the fact is that and I' I've shared this with a lot of colleagues and friends I actually think that part of the hostility to studying the western tradition um on the part of those who are you

know antagonistic to the west um 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 right well they're all related well the other the other issue tell me what you think about this I also think that you if you think about the Mauists 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 might you have to say well where did those revolutionary presuppositions come from what they just spring like Athena out of the head of Zeus there's no they have a history too or worse they have a spirit they have a personality and this resistance to studying the Western cannon let's say which which is not even exactly Western when you get down to it right it's much broader

than that yes I think it's a it's a it's 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 yes you can no longer presume that your selfish power mad whims say are of sufficient significance to be the determinants of the future you have to subordinate yourself to the tradition yes 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 cannon 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 uh the little Shinto shrines and things that people had in their homes were replaced by pictures of Mao they worshiped Mao yeah um and at the same time Miles Stalin whoever uh

you know these guys had this notion of a new man we're going to have a new man um but yeah new new but but but here's the thing actually it's all very very old uh so we were talking about Exodus and so let me just throw this out i 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 mhm or you enslave yourself to God now no you can also be lost in the desert well okay that's an alternative okay right but that's the important 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 that's not going to be a very long lasting uh uh alternative but but but yes um but what I want to say here is then the question is well what well what is Pharaoh what does Pharaoh mean what's

Pharaoh pharaoh is a man god by the way aside from the 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 desperatism everyone else is man gods i mean the Persian the emperor the you know Egyptians etc right um so that means that those societies apprehended a p principle of sovereignty abstracted beyond the the most powerful man yeah right right that's a very sophisticated view of and and and you know I mean in for example Escalas's Persians um which is about

the defeat of Xerxes army in the second Persian war uh Xerxes can't be held to account because he's divine yeah right right okay so the buck stops there but what's interesting about Pharaoh is that first of all it is the mo and I not only the most technically advanced I would even call it a technological civilization uh if you've been to Egypt as I have you you you know you 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 uh you know 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 sar you know the the burial site of King Tuton who who knows what the tomb of Ramsy's had in it um they these massive granite obelisks and all this stuff the entire society was dedicated to the elevation and the monumentalization and the memoriz you know memorialization of the of the pharaoh okay um so it's the exaltation of the man god well and and

and 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 it's discontent about how modern man is a prosthetic god right like we we equip ourselves with all these tools and things like this um so that's a huge temptation but the suggestion of the Bible is if you go in that direction you're going to have um a kind of totalitarian society and and and to be a slave this dynamic between potentate and slave yes exactly But

there can be lots of slaves right so for example in in Persia um the emperor whether it was Xerxes or Das or Cyrus everyone else was known as the king's slave including the members of his family so you have that you can do that but the alternative then is bowing down to God and being a slave or if you want to put it a softer way a servant to God and the Moses tells the Pharaoh right he says "Let my people go." Yes so they may worship me in the wilderness right it's not anarch anarchy

it's not exactly it's not hedenist it's not hedonistic freedom of the sort that the golden calf worshippers turn to right right it is it's it's what would we call it ordered freedom I think is the general phrase are you ready for a fresh start after the holiday indulgence make 2025 your healthiest year yet with balance of nature those Christmas cookies and holiday feasts were great but now your body's craving something different that's where Balance of Nature comes in the perfect way to reset your health this new year getting your daily fruits and vegetables has never

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bottle of fiber and spice that's balance of nature.com promo code Jordan for 35% off balance of nature promo code Jordan for 35% off your first preferred order plus a free bottle of fiber and spice so so if we fast forward again to middle of the 20th century ideological tyrannies and this includes fascism obviously um you this is like there's nothing new under the sun it's a retelling of the feronic tyranny essentially but 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

you want to sustain the illusion that well I think that's part of the loose the spirit of lucifer It's like the the radical types who were trying to produce the new man they assume that if they had been Stellin or Mao the promised utopia would have come and that is an elevation of the intellect because one of the so I interviewed a guy recently unfortunately I can't remember his name who uh wrote a book about Marx and Satanism and he looked at Marx's early writings before he became political and uh 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 as 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 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 are and men you know are shared in common etc 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 are left 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 Aristoph assembly women where the men are

essentially infantilized okay the women run everything the men are infantilized and it's a communist society so you you have all these you know 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 please well I'm curious because you said you know you said some some you made some statements that illicit 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 oh well that's

not necessarily expected and then you 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 it is 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 worshippers right well that's

kind of relevant in today's society given the rise of nature worship is 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 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 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 so let me make another suggestion here um so you mentioned Markx and what we see in Markx is a um an an overestimation a serious overestimation of the power of reason yeah yeah and now reason understood as a productive and political principle um and I mean obviously there's a religious background because it's a secularization of the Christian story but I think there there are several elements here and

and by the way this goes back to Plato's Republic as well we can talk about that but okay 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 so so first of all it's not emerging organically okay it's a it's a political constructivism so the the best society

will not emerge organically uh 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 particular men right by particular men 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 um human beings are not in fact let's say radically local beings who form the most

meaningful bonds in particular ways marriage family etc But we're universal right and finally you have this kind of divonization of man because after all you know um well if we I mean we're going to realize heaven on earth so well and as you said we can produce a centralized authority which falls out of the presumption just described that's going to have the computational power necessary to pull off the task exactly which is well that just just that claim is preposterous right but but I like I like the way you formulate that because what 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 um where I want to go with this is that that kind of hubris about reason uh is I think well first of all it's a characteristic of the modern era because you know you have de cart saying we're going to be masters and possessors of nature

and if you read the discourse on method teach you we're going to do form our own values right right but that's sort of the end of the whole kind of decay but if but if we go back to the early moderns Um he even suggests in the discourse on method that maybe medicine will will make all the infirmities of old age sort of disappear which means we're not going to die in which case by the way the religious question uh is gone like from the I mean Deart's writing he doesn't want his books to be

placed on the index which they were nonetheless you know um and so they're read and they have to be you know the Roman Catholic Church has to has to has to look at them um 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 and whatever a human being is is something completely different than whatever it is now 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 unaded reason okay can't be separated 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 idea he writes about acids in 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 Yeah the alternative of religion which is okay so so you know like you can't understand everything on your own there are massive mysteries right um and there's this entire alternative way of thinking about things so if you if you simply separate reason from that you're going to get totalitarianism and kind of you know the lunacy that we see luciferian hubris 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 there's like you know you could like you're always making assumptions that that are simply going to sort of you know prejudice the conclusions that

you're going to yeah so 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 like don't because if you say no reason reasons that anything that's not rational you got some kind of positivism or whatever you're you're going to go straight to that man god thing right you're going to go straight to

that totalitarian yeah you know the train's going to stop at at the you know at the desk camp basically but if you also say oh there's no re which is one more thing I just want to say about the my book on plato on the town but I've already suggested that socratic philosophizing begins with this revelation of delelfi which talk 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

manam fish and believe it or not he talks about the rabbis of the tal the first 40 pages is about Carl 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 will falsify the you know formulation of the law of gravity look for new forms of our ignorance right so then this guy argues that the the rabbis are rational and they are in a sense they're

playing the Socratic game of rationality within the horizon of re of revelation so they start Well that's okay i believe I think we know enough about both psychology and neuroscience now 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 Fristen who's the world's most cited neuroscientist by the way i asked him is every object perception a micro narrative oh that's very interesting they 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 mhm okay now you 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 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 it 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's

produces negative emotion a set of facilitators or tools that produces positive emotion and so 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 okay positive emotion negative on the social front friends and foes same thing almost everything is defaults to the realm of the irrelevant right because if I specified aim most things are now irrelevant so your aim makes most of the world irrelevant some things

stand out as phenomena that 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 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 four stages higher than yours we'll say then they appear truly magical but the reason I'm making

this case is like and and and there is I think we are we're at the end of the enlightenment and I think it died like Nietze claimed Christianity died at its own hand because it turns out that there is no level at which what we see are dead objects yes not at any level of perception whatsoever every object is actually 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 a place of objects is that well there's an infinite number of objects because Yes 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 yes so another way of thinking about a narrative when you go to a movie you watch the protagonist what you are embodying is your observation of the protagonist structure of value you're incorporating that that you 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 r within which rationality has no choice but to operate see cuz 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 valuefree objective knowledge like none of that's right so so the story is 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 Telmmet I would presume so

you said you saw a similarity with the dialogues so but 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 what does the future hold for business ask nine experts you'll get 10 different answers bull market bare market inflation up inflation down can someone please invent a crystal ball well until then over 41,000 businesses have futurep proofed

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are going to be helpful and productive to us as human beings so let's go back to the very first commandment i am this is why Christ in the sermon on the mount for example which is a guide book 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 okay so now you've set the frame got it exactly exactly now pay attention right having done that

pay attention to the moment because what'll happen is if you specify your aim properly the path 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 in the the Tower of Babel is a story of misaligned aim you know and it's the engineers who build the tower yeah right it's I mean 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 adam which is the the soil that man has made out of Adam etc right and then they say let's make a tower now if you 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 come it actually reminds me of like the CIA discovers LSD they don't discover it but they like we got LSD LD so now their question is "What can we do with it there's a book about this." And so there's they say "Well

is it a truth serum?" So they give LSD to this CIA guy no it's not you know 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 right but but anyway you're absolutely right about the the misaligned aim yeah well and 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 if you if you mess up the underlying narrative substrate enough rationality becomes impossible partly because words don't mean the same thing to this to different people well that's true right well we can see that now yeah i mean and 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 you know 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 you know justice for example and the Socratic uh what Socrates is trying to do is a sort of shuttling movement okay um first of all to come to the his 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 you're 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 Jacob's latter 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 um 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 or or or at the good right so so that's the connection between Plato and the Talmud because because it's that upward aim it's this upward aim now so if you have that so would would it be fair to say that Plato would Plato consider the highest good as the whatever Whatever the commonality is between the true the

good and the beautiful let's say because yeah 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'm I am 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

worship the act of worship is it's indistinguishable from paying attention yes because what you're doing when you attend is you're prioritizing the objects of attention exactly to worship is to prioritize right and so this is 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 it's like oh what are you worshiping 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 I just uh ran a a class for some applicants to u to my university uh and we we were discussing uh David Foster Wallace's this is water u Kenyon graduation speech i don't know if you know this but anyway it's great and and at some point there he says you know that we everybody worships something right and and that in fact and he makes this case he says it you know whether it's Jesus Christ whether it's Yahweh whether

it's some extreme you know 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 is going to be miserable well you can be pagan and a polytheist and you could be a worshipper 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 but then 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 in your hand golden calf right

exactly that and then and then and if the if the you that you are prioritizing is what you want what you're actually saying is that the momentary whims that sees you Yes 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 once you start to open up the the question of

what is the you that you're serving if you're selfish let's say it's it's because it's not it's not self-evident that you are your selfish aims indeed especially because they change so there's no escape from the pro the problem of prioritization right right so so so so 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 it's transcendent it's it's it's 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 yeah because

you climb up and it keeps receding yes that's good sailor Ve so then then you you can you can 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 um and and that becomes very exciting because okay why why does it become that's that's a very trenchant observation because I mentioned earlier that there's 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 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 a question why is the right question exciting well I can speak to that from the perspective of a scholar a reader a thinker uh if you have a book in front of you um 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 um in in everyday life to to to come to understand what the question really is can reorient you and can again reveal I'll just use the same phrase depths of meaning in your own existence

that you simply weren't attending to right so the question Moses is on a quest when he encounters the burning bush yes right and depths of meaning are revealed to him as a consequence of his pursuit exactly right that's what transforms him into a leader right it's a question that takes him off the beaten path it might be what is beyond well adapted shepherd let's say right 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 there's a um so let's

go back i agree happiness not only is not the proper aim uh in Vosi Gman's wonderful book life and fate there's a little chapter where this guy has written a little letter in in in the goolog and he says something like h happiness with a capital H has been the cause of the greatest evil in the world and I think this is right and you read it elsewhere you read it in the desam's book hope against hope in the name of happiness the greatest evil was committed well and Soulja Nitsson points out happiness disappears with

the first blow of the jailer's trenchon on your apartment door at 2 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 right right right so 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 and that's a definition again yeah I think that's 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 I mean that's why Christ is the miraculous provider of fish and and water right because it's there's an orientation there's an orientation that makes that has that provides limitless abundance that's the reason yeah and so and and the the quest for meaning can take many forms so for example in we we're having our students read um Marco Polo very interesting so Marco Polo uh his uncle and his father actually journeyied to see Kubla 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 Khan who's not going anywhere by the way but the Khan turns out to be a brilliant guy and he also wants to learn about the world um so this is the spirit of adventure you were talking about they go there by the way the Khan says to them "Oh this Catholicism you talk about it's 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 he's he's it's just this it's so fulfilling for him to see these things um okay so we have that kind of example um that's one version now intellectually you know think of the great books think of the Bible think of Shakespeare 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 and then to begin to realize that you know the love of one's spouse of one's children the opportunity to help them you know um let let's say sure people want esteem they but to be esteemed by people that in your estimation are truly worthy you get the fans you deserve yeah and I mean I mean just like you know when when God when God offers Abraham so God offers Abraham an adventure as the

covenant right and he says he says that one of the consequences he says if you accept this uh 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 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 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 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 mh that's a hell of an offer man now now you know what's so interesting about this to to pick up a couple of themes that we mentioned earlier you talked about humility somebody like Abraham and 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 you know for example the soul is more important than the body justice is more important than everything else you know um 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 and that's sort of that's truly something self-evident i don't know enough it's like Yeah yep you can you can go to on that yeah and that's Socrates that and that drives the question and the beautiful thing about humility to go it's it's connected with wonder because the unhumbled don't wonder they already know they know right are you tired of being held back by oneizefits-all healthcare of having your concerns dismissed or being denied that comprehensive lab work you need to truly understand your health i want to tell you about Merrick Health the premier health optimization

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five rating on Trustpilot you know you're in great hands the best part is you can get 10% off your order today just head to mealth.com and use code peterson at checkout that's mehealth.com code peterson for 10% off stop guessing and start optimizing your health today with Mer Health because your best life starts with your best health they're also afraid of wonder like they're afraid that they're afraid that wonder will be that sword that bars the path to paradise that cuts every which way and burns because you you have to substitute wonder for certainty and if

you've staked your soul on your certainty then wonder is your enemy and you will pursue it yeah exactly and now look out now we're getting down to a deeper thing because um wonder you know when you wonder you enter into what Socrates calls aporeia and the Greek word literally means no way out it's like you're you're stuck um 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 it can do it can really be overwhelming okay there's got to be a prior assumption that makes wonder worthwhile that that that that that that that allows you to feel that you're going to remain afloat on the sea that's Job's conclusion I think cuz Job ends up a drift in the and barren in the most dismal way possible and he makes he he proclaims two axioms that he won't abandon one is that despite the evidence he's fundamentally valuable despite the EV okay so he's not going to lose faith in the

essential goodness of being a man yes especially if you're one that's trying to aim up yes right 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 those are the two you've anticipated me exactly let's go with that good thing especially that that the world is good that that reality is good and what do we now we can even say what do we mean by good well there is some kind of sustaining

structure let's say and the reason I put it that way like in other words intelligibility but 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 Rhodess 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 uncutable thing from the Greek it's 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 Neils Boore has the and so they're all collaborating but they're convinced that there's a there there right and they're convinced that and that their quest is worthwhile 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 there's possible application but you know that there so there's this kind of

faith there is there's well you know I talked to Richard Dawkins about that I said what because he's an enlightenment mind let's say I said well you bring to the scientific endeavor a set of axiomatic presumptions one is the world could be understood the second is that trying to understand it is good and will bring good like those aren't scientific ific theories those are starting points for being a scientist and so then the question is well what's the validity like how do you ground that metaphysics that gets science itself off to a start well you're

you're well I mean look in the in the case of in the case of the uh the harnessing of nuclear energy you have um let us say a proof of concept right that is to say this is to me probably the most dramatic and um persuasive indication that science has the capacity to know something fundamental about reality okay um so so yeah you you know I mean their faith paid off in this instance uh and but I think this is really really important because if you don't start with the notion that you know 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 neils Boore here here's the humility neils Boore 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 are the same laws 10 billion lighty 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 the minus 23rd or something just like stuff that 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 um but anyway is that also humility you know because there's another metaphysical aspect to this too which 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 a 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 XKGB 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 smile 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 could 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 yeah the the alchemists kind of knew that i got very interested in Yung's analyst analysis of alchemy because the alchemists the

pre-chemists insisted that the aim of the investigator had to be pure right and so they were they were beginning to understand that the secrets that matter revealed were dependent on the investigative tools that were put to play in the investigation and that was actually a moral endeavor you know so are you actually trying to aim up yes right right so so we're looking at the substrate of science right saying well it's there are there are values that have to be held for the scientific enterprise itself to emerge to proceed and to be beneficial and now

and now we're getting down to some really fundamental questions um 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 hm um this peculiar blue pigment was that sourced from um some country that was in poverty uh was the apprentice who stretched the canvas paid are the fibers did they get?" So you can in other words you can you can to use a

this isn't quite the right word like deconstruct In other words in other words close enough yeah you can you you can and and what I realized in reading that passage is there's no end to it i mean I can look and say "Now you know you're wearing this suit Dr peterson um you know where it doesn't anything can be taken apart this way." Or 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 m and what I realized in thinking about that is here's the really fundamental premise or 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 you're going to look for the goodness and there's beauty and there's truth you're going to look for that mhm and you 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 be pretty weird pretty weird if it turned out that the world was constituted so that you find what you're looking for seriously like that and I kind of think there's 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 cuz if that's the fundamental question right you've got these folks over here who want to burn down and destroy 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 mhm and if the difference between them is that fundamental premise the world is good markx's favorite quote was what it was from Gerta and it's a very specific quote i knew this quote before I found this out cuz I read Foust one and two and there's a line in there Mephostophles so Gerta is trying to characterize Mephostophles who's the spirit of rationality or the spirit the Luciferian spirit of the usurp mephostophle's credo was repeated twice in F once in F one and

once in the second part um everything that lives should be eradicated because of the because of its insufficiency now I'm paraphrasing and I'm paraphrasing badly but the basic idea is that the suffering that's attended 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 like that's only one sentence in each of those plays you know but it's it's it's Mephistophles's revelation of his motivation

it's like all that suffers should die so that suffering itself will cease and the antiatalist types for example they believe exactly that right so and 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 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." M or

I can forgo that and do what my wife suggests which is curse God and die right and all the evidence at hand suggests that cursing God and dying is the right is the rational conclusion and Job says I refuse to forear my faith right and so and I see that partly as a prod 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 CL and engineers maybe even more to solve the problem of alignment let's say yes they need a classical education that's grounded in a deep okay so okay so you you've already come to that conclusion well is that part of I guess probably what we're going to talk about on the Daily Wire side because

we're unfortunately approaching the end of this um 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 have they're just like babes in the woods when it comes to the

political activists absolutely and it shows that their 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 had no philosophical anthropology had no understanding of the human body we we know what happens we see it we see uh what

was they invent they invent uh devices that cause um serious depression and mental illness in teenage girls and and and everyone loses the ability to communicate cuz the aim is wrong right and they 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 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 uh creation invention is that it's ice everyone's frozen the ice yeah isn't Isn't this like today um 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 ft 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 gas and cashius

these traitors and all these people are frozen in the ice and they're completely isolated no one can speak not Even Lucifer's mouth is full no speech no connection with each other an eternity of atomization this is this is the effect of you know 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 allseeing eye of Sauron yeah right well you get the allseeing eye of Sauron as

a substitute for the divine if the state has to intervene in every decree exactly right so so he's an image of this state that's just chewing 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 is it's as if well before the election I was just had a sense of dread because I saw the way things were going and now I I I have a hope that we've sort of gone through and realized everything was upside down cuz 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 is it's the sort of sewer in which all the polluted streams of the earth flow and you know you've got to rem be being punished but that reorientation is absolutely essential we've got we've 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 well that's a really good place to end and so we can we'll continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side um 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 it's like dsioski and nse in a sense right the the ancient Hebrews use narrative as an investigative tool and and uh and the philosophers use philosophy and you can see that dynamic with niche and dsvki too which is quite interesting but both of them have their role and but the narrative role is more fundamental it's more fundamental and I think that's been established so 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 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 like that vein that was good and and uh 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 right 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 yeah and it's already there with Babel and it's already there yeah right and Pharaoh exactly yes definitely that That's right there's nothing new under the sun that's for sure even 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 very weird all right everybody so join us on the Daily Wire side um and thank you for your attention today and thank you very much for coming to talk to me and uh we appreciate you people who are watching and uh 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 [Music]