Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism | EP 524

If there is a Jesus, you're not Jesus; you are not at the center, neither is anybody else. If you're not united by responsibility and by voluntary self-sacrifice, you will be united by power. To let you know that the ego is still in here: I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ, but I'm going to give as best a shot as I can at being poor. If you lose your individual relationship with divine guidance, the only thing that can possibly emerge is either chaos or despotic force. Elon Musk, in a matter of posts,

can disrupt, elevate new potential kings, desiccate them, and remove them in a matter of moments. Are you hopeful, and what are your concerns? So, I had the opportunity today to once again sit down with Russell Brand. We've talked quite a bit, and we're getting to know each other quite well, which makes the discussions even more interesting and fast-paced. We started out with the discussion of Christianity and what you would say is the challenge that it poses in its fundamental elements to the doctrines of dissolution. So, you could say that on the nihilistic side, or to

the insistence that the only proper centralization and unifying force is power. Both of those are very powerful arguments. One nihilistic argument is that everything is fundamentally meaningless and fragmented, and that all unity of any sort is an illusion—in this like veil of tears, entropy-ridden veil of tears. The contrary position to that, on the side of power, is that only the naive believe that unifying forces are anything but the imposition of compulsion and power, and that it's, as I said, terminally willfully blind to assume that there are any principles other than the Hobbesian battle of all

against all. Well, is there an alternative to that? Well, the Western alternative, the Judeo-Christian alternative, has forever been something like the proposition that an ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the alternative to nihilism and to power. We tried to sort that out and clarify that more particularly, to investigate that claim and see what it means in the context of relatively formal religious beliefs, say specifically belief in Christianity. With regards to the alternatives, we're definitely at something approximating the end of the Enlightenment; that's partly what the culture war is about. The rationalists and empiricists' account of the

world was insufficient. The postmodernists challenged it with a high degree of success, although they turned to power, and that was a dreadful mistake. Well, everyone is, what would you say, feeling out what the alternative might be, and the discussion we had today is an attempt to further that process. So, join us for that. How's this Christianity thing working out for you? It's a powerful transforming agent; it's beautiful to moment to moment know that if He is the creator of all things, then His DNA is present in every moment—in every moment the continual renewal of the

mind that it talks of in Romans seems comparable, at least, to ideologies that I'm somewhat more familiar with, corralled together loosely under the term New Age. Stay continually present in the moment; die unto yourself; allow yourself to die, as it says in Galatians; be born again, moment to moment. Now, as we enter this period of wild and giddy flux, Jordan, it seems that a route to eternity is a valuable escape hatch to have identified. So, it feels like I'm reading Genesis right now. Have you read it? Have you done a course on it? Even when

you're reading about Sodom and Lot, and reading about a culture of gang rape that precedes the storm of fire, it feels like, yeah, I’m reading that. Then I'm sort of scrolling on X and looking at the world, and the hills are an inferno, and Britain is beset with a rape gang crisis that appears to be being handled in an unusual way—bureaucratically. The pillars and institutions are quaking and shaking due to too much inappropriate intersection between the judiciary, the media, and the government. Not a lack, but not enough proper coordination and interconnection and communication between those

same institutions, because I suppose you want coordination, but what you don't want is conspiracy. You want agreement in principle, which is very different than conscious, and what would you say, incentivized coordination. So, this beginner's mind… I did a course for Peterson Academy on the Sermon on the Mount, and I thought I would mention something about that in relationship to this idea of every moment being born anew, let's say. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says to focus your attention on what's most high. You could think about that, even if you don't exactly know what

that means, as the attempt to get your intent right. So, in so far as you can conceptualize what the good is, even in your ignorance, that's what you're trying to put first and foremost. So, you do that first, and then you attend to the moment. Then, you get the advantage of a kind of distal view, which is associated with life eternal, you might say, and what's important at the pinnacle of all things. But then, you get that hyper-attention on the moment that makes everything born anew. You know, psychologists have caught onto that to some degree

with their discussion of concepts like flow, because if you've got your act together and you're oriented upward, and you're conversing or you're engaged in an activity, that sense of unity with things does emerge. And that involves a lack of self-consciousness and the ability to focus in a very intense way. I think that's associated, by the way, with an insistence in the Old Testament that the firstborn is to be sanctified to God. What that means is that you imagine your life as made out of episodes, which is how you would recount your day. Let's say, first

this happened, then this, and then there'd be a conclusion; then there'd be another event. The question is, what attitude should you use to frame each new event? The attitude that's put forward as optimized in the Sermon on the Mount is that when anything new begins, you want to reorient yourself to what's highest. You think, "Well, how can I make of this opportunity the best possible event? How could I orient myself so that I would be participating in that?" You do that every time there's a transformation of viewpoint, and in that way, you get to have

your cake and eat it too. You might say, "I'm going to do it now; you seek first the kingdom of God." I'm thinking, "I'm in a conversation right now with Jordan Peterson, and how do I orient myself in this moment, in this situation?" Now, it feels like amidst the flux that we've earlier addressed, or at least alluded to, it appears that much of what you came to represent as you emerged in public life has proven to be true. It's not like the culture has just shifted; we aren't going to see so many pronouns in the

bios. We're not going to see an escalation in gender-approving surgery; hopefully, that won't be concomitant with a lack of compassion for people. Some people are different and do identify differently. Indeed, one of the things I'm most hopeful about, Jordan, is that with the transitions of power that are taking place and the way that it appears to be bleeding, or at least influencing, outside of its political jurisdiction—like we're seeing how American power, and in particular the influence of Elon Musk, which is a truly global power—now, when I meant, when I said "globalism" like 18 months ago,

I meant something different from what I might mean when I say "globalism" now. It appears that Elon Musk, in a matter of posts, can disrupt, elevate, new potential kings, desiccate them, and remove them in a matter of moments. It's interesting to see how the old world will reorder itself on the basis of what's emergent now. The reason that I feel Christianity is so significant is because it's significant with regard to every single issue. But now that we don't have, as we did with the previous project, an attempt to completely control ideological life through politics, we're

not going to be altering language wildly and radically. We're not at war with nature and old taxonomies; we're not seeking to annihilate the principle of God so that we may lay claim to His kingdom. I wonder how these new forms of government may evolve and unfold, and I wonder how these new forms of nationalism might develop. Well, we've been at this ARC enterprise; we've been trying to wrestle exactly with that issue. I think your comments about, you know, Elon, let's say, as a globalist force that isn't exactly akin to the previous globalist force—well, maybe we've

tried to distinguish this technically in our discussions at ARC. Okay, so here are some principles: you tell me what you think about them. Policy that requires force and fear is indicative of it's at least suboptimal, and it's probably tyrannical. So one of the ways you determine whether a policy is acceptable is whether or not it's invitational, right? It would be like I make you an offer and hopefully you’re on board voluntarily, which would make you a much more efficient participant as well. Even if you're not fully enthusiastic about it, you can't think of a better

alternative that you would lay claim to, right? You can imagine if we're going to negotiate reasonably, we might say, "Well, we're going to be duty-bound to accept the best offer we can conceive of." Hopefully, it'll be one that also fills you with enthusiasm, but in the absence of that, at least you won't be able to think of a better alternative. So, no power, no force, no fear. Then the other thing we've toyed with, let's say, or played with is the idea that not only does the vision of the future have to be invitational, but there

has to be an element of play about it. I studied play fairly deeply, neurophysiologically, and play is a really interesting motivational state because it's very fragile; it can be disrupted by almost any other motivational state. The sense of play, which is like direction with variability, only emerges when the situation—say, of communication and cooperation—is being optimized. You might say that another way you can tell if the venture is proceeding well is that if everybody engaged in it can engage in a sense of play. I like the play idea partly because it's voluntary, obviously, but also because

play implies a fair bit of tolerance for deviation along the path. Yes, yes, yes—the vicissitudes. Now, I’m assuming that your experience as a clinical psychologist must be primarily interpersonal, although you will ultimately be dealing with large data sets. But the reason I’m fascinated that you’d bring up play so early in our conversation is because when precisely... Looking at the posts of Elon Musk and Trump, with Trump saying, "You know, make Canada the 51st state, or we're going to reach all the way down to Panama," or "We're having Greenland," or Elon Musk's sort of, um, puckish,

uh, pugnaciousness in dealing with his detractors on his own platform—doesn't have that kind of haughtiness and piety that we remember. That kind of, um, Pharisee-like certainty of the materialist, rationalist, neoliberal oligarchs who appear now to be being displaced. This play though, I wonder, Jordan, and this is not an assertion I'm making with regard to the previously listed individuals. I know our audience when it comes to Trump and Musk and stuff, but isn't there mischief and play in the Demonic also? Now, like the reason I— the reason I like play: one, I'm a comedian; two, I

enjoy Lial spaces, and I enjoy the uncertainty that's a prerequisite of play. The true spirit of pioneering discovery that is encompassed within play is— and I enjoy, actually, in fact, perhaps much of the Trump phenomenon was this politician isn’t talking like other politicians. Way back in 2015 with Hillary Clinton, "Cause you'd be in jail!" That moment— I like people who don't say that, like, up against the sort of school of bluster and haughtiness. Have you come to—you know, the English have beat to the world abundantly that kind of sort of Victorian certainty—glance at the piano

leg in case you feel a turgid stirring in the loins. Total lack of joy and play now. Isn’t it interesting to see that tool of play wielded now by the truly powerful—by Trump and Musk? It'll be interesting because, you know, their detractors continue, like, you know, you might see a late-night talk show host saying, "See, I told you! I told you they were going to take over Canada!" What is Elon Musk doing meddling in British politics? But regardless of the, again, as a Christian, regardless of the IND, you know, Trump’s not God, Musk’s not God.

They’re all human beings that are going to come and go. And perhaps I've been thinking this about Elon Musk somewhat lately: Is there a point where order of magnitude alters essence? I.e., is not Musk just a reiteration of Murdoch? Because, you know, Tony Blair used to cow-tow, bend the knee, go on holiday to ensure that Murdoch would support his New Labour movement. It was understood that Thatcher required Murdoch. It was understood that if Murdoch unleashed an ocean of ink against an opposition party, the government would remain in power. Now Murdoch still has some power across

the Anglophonic world, and I don’t know what Murdoch’s power is like now, but what I know is that Elon Musk’s like a version of a media magnate, at least when it comes to the social media aspect of his vast enterprises. But when it becomes not a 20-minute perusal of some rag but an ever-present mirror reflecting back an ongoing conversation, the ability to maneuver and censor that, as well as the manner in which he's conducting that conversation—again, not the sort of what would appear to be, and perhaps I'm being naive, the economically-led kind of, I imagine,

Dow Jones-watching, sort of traditional entrenched mentality of "Digger"—that was the nickname, wasn't it, of Murdoch? You now see this sort of, well, perhaps it’s the technology that leads. Because the technology now—diffuse cybernetics, instantaneous systems taking place in the present—because, um, our systems for understanding God were mechanical in the Industrial Age. They were agricultural at the advent of that significant seismic shift in our kind's Velton Shong. So now, now that we have this instantaneous, omnipresent potentiality, maybe everything's changing. So in short, what I'm saying is, is like, is what’s happening now entirely unique? Because, and because

it is temporal, because of the temporal component, because of this instantaneous, immersive ability to alter conversation, maybe it no longer is even paradigmatically the same. Jordan, well, you know, I just did an interview with P.O.V., who’s going to be the next prime minister of Canada in all likelihood, and he chose to speak with me in depth instead of talking to the legacy media, let’s say. And it was actually rather comical from my perspective because all the legacy media outlets in Canada had to play catch-up, which I contemplated with some degree of, you know, inappropriate satisfaction.

But there's something—so we had to talk about that because P.O.V. had expressed some doubts about his performance in the discussion. He said there were many topics he didn’t get to, and so we talked about that. And I said, well, you know, the long-form podcast format can't be manipulated a priori successfully because if you come to the podcast with a set of talking points and you stick to your script, you're going to get—first of all, no one will watch you. And I've seen this with political figures; this isn’t a guess—I know this is the case. No

one will watch you, and all the comments will be negative. You have to come there knowing where you stand but ready to follow the thread of the conversation wherever it goes, and to do that, you have to sacrifice the pre-planning. Okay, so then we might look into that more deeply, and we might say, well, now that video is predominating, let’s say, over the written word, that means that that might mean the reemergence of something like spontaneity over propaganda. Like, that could be the case. Because the new media forms do prioritize spontaneity instead of preparation. Now,

you can see that as a technological shift, you know, back when... Bandwidth was staggeringly expensive; every second on broadcast media cost a fortune. You could imagine that risk minimization was the name of the game and that every second had to be controlled. But that restriction is no longer present, even at all. So, what that should mean, what that might mean—and that's what you're referring to—is that an entirely new form of political discourse might emerge, and that people who are capable of generating a certain degree of perspicacity and wisdom spontaneously are going to be prioritized over

those who have a bent towards incentivized or instrumental manipulation. I mean, PV could do that, right? He had a conversation with me; he got no questions ahead of time, none. He was willing to go along with that, and it is really a completely different way of doing things. Now, we've been talking to Democrats too, trying to get them on the podcast circuit, and the resistance so far has been the utter inability and unwillingness of people on the Democrat side to forego their pre-planned agenda with regard to a conversation. Lent is approaching; those meaningful 40 days

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era of New Kings. You said—I don't know when you started saying it; you said it to me about a year ago—"New Kings." I liked it; I clocked it and thought it was interesting. Now we’re sort of seeing how that's playing out: the boundaries are shifting, kind of a sort of cybernetic gerrymandering as this space moves beyond geography and into something more conceptual yet actual, in so much as it can be administrated and controlled. Now, to your point about spontaneity, I wonder if it's in any way ultimately distinct from the sort of Socratic idea that the

spoken word had a different, a distinct authenticity from the written. I agree. Well, and it was Socrates who decried that, if I remember correctly, right? He was afraid that if the written took primacy, the concretization of thought would diminish. I mean, I think Foucault wrote about that, as a matter of fact, in favor of Socrates' proposition that the spoken should take priority over the written. But it does have something to do with this paradoxical relationship between propagandizing and pre-preparation. It isn’t obvious to me that you can lie effectively spontaneously in a conversation—not necessarily continually. Now,

you remember about 500,000 words ago, ten minutes ago, at the beginning of our conversation—both of us speak relatively quickly—I mentioned that an ever-present, omnipresent God, if God is the absolute Creator, a-temporal, a-spatial, outside of the limitations of space and time. It struck me the other day, as I was having one of these kind of transcendent experiences that I've been having since becoming Christian, that God would be present in every moment and discernible in every interaction. There would indeed be narrativized lessons. Discernment is the right word there because that's what discernment is for: discernment is to

find the path where the sacred manifests itself in each moment—to detect or divine where it is. Divine, as a transitive verb, rather than as a description of the sublime. What I—so when—to your point about how now you said that thing about new sovereigns ages ago—and I said ages ago after reading Martin Gur's book "The Revolt of the Public"—that there was an inevitability: the independent media and the way that it—you know, MG saw this much earlier than any of us. He saw, like, I think he saw like who knew what that had done to the record

industry. How's that going to play out? Wait a second. And then you sort of like, you know, Arab Spring, Occupy Movement, Brexit, Trump—watching how institutions are unable to adjust to the new thermals and the new contours that emerge with this sudden impactful and incursive instantaneous communication. I said, like, as an occupant of new media spaces like yourself, how long is it before inevitably the independent media and a new form of independent politics coalesce, align, and emerge? We're seeing it now. It will become so porous as to be without distinction. It seems now that what—what distinction

are you referring to there exactly? Media is this category; politics is this category. Those distinctions will—dis—po—example: PA, I think has been—he's certainly been the most effective Canadian politician on this front, but he might be the most effective politician in... The Western world at the moment is using New Media, so one of the things he's done, for example, is write and produce 10-minute documentaries to educate Canadians about economic reality. He's done that very effectively; they're very high-quality documentaries, and he told me that he writes them and narrates them, which is, you know, quite an interesting skill

set. That's quite diverse from typical politicking. But the thing is, the intermediaries— in some ways, the intermediaries are no longer necessary between the leaders and the populace. Now this is something that the mega and the Maha types are trying to work out right now from a strategic perspective: like, "Oh, we now have the opportunity to communicate directly to the public at indefinite length," right? Because also the technological constraints that made everything compressed into a 30-second sound bite are gone. And so then P.V. has been very effective at just talking directly to the Canadian public, and

that's why he won the Conservative leadership. It's part of the reason, along with Trudeau's catastrophic failure, that he's going to be the next prime minister. But it is a sea change, and it is driven, you know, in large part by this technological transformation. Now, you've been down; I've got two questions for you that I want to go in two directions. The first is regarding the question I opened our conversation with in relationship to Christianity. You're a very open person, and your interests flash all over. Do you have any faith in the stability of what you've

newly found, or do you think that there's a risk or a possibility of your attention, given your open nature, shifting to something else? Or do you feel that you've found a kind of bedrock that's qualitatively different from the sorts of orientations that you've had previously? Let's start with that. It feels like something absolute is being encountered, which has ameliorated, mitigated, neutralized, and somehow compounded and infused something that was always latent and yet core-ing within me: the self, the self as the absolute. I want this: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

And the problem with the New Age, the problem with "I'll have a little bit of Buddhism, and I'll have a little bit of Sufism, and I'll read a bit of Foucault, and I'll conjure up my own little pantheon," is, in fact, it was you that said it to me: "If God is everything, God is anything." I encountered that more empirically when returning to a kind of New Age festival. I felt, "What is this feeling that I'm having here, having, you know, since coming to Christ at a New Age festival?" And I don't, you know— I've

still got the other day a sword permanently about my body as a reminder. What it felt like is it's false idolatry. False idolatry is predicated on a polarity between the self and the idol. Christ replaces the self. "MH, you die on the cross with him. It's the self that has to go." There is no "that self." Exactly how do you conceptualize the self? That has witnessed the russl—the observer, the witness, the russl. By default, inadvertently, I'm always in the service of the centrifugal force around which urges projections, reflections, the intellect, the memory; they all, like

you once said when talking about the word which might have a bunch of associated words like "cat" and all that—I got Russell and Russell's memories and projections. I got this sort of loose sense of a continuum of self. Now, what was very deliberate is that the center should be replaced. Yes, Cent. Before, he was right, and we nearly touched on this before because W.B.H. was right: the center cannot hold. And that's what we're experiencing with the emergence of the Hydra. The sovereign is unfolding; the seed is cracking open; the wheat is being born, it's being

borne out now. The thing is, before, with the narcissism—me being a devotee of the other culture, a devotee of false idolatry—I worshiped self. Now, at first, it felt like a sort of pilgrimage was very meekly undertaken. For I was not a robust child athlete, nor was I a high school heartthrob; I was sort of a broken and wounded little trickster in the world. And when I became empowered at puberty, and attractive and potent, and then famous, and it all was—I felt I was evolving or growing. But one of my teachers would say, "Inflating." It was

inflating like—it's difficult if you've felt pretty worthless your whole life, and all of a sudden, there's a culture queuing up to give you sort of accolades and pat you on the back, and there's a sort of an endless cor of fellatio suddenly available. It's difficult not to think that you might be rather magnificent now. The reason I liked—like as a sort of a counterweight to the feelings of inferiority I would have been resisting—I always knew something about Jesus. I knew something about Jesus, but my odd contemporary translation of that was, "I want to be him.

I want to be the Savior. I want to be in direct commune with God. I want to lead; I want to be empowered." And then, when the desolation came—the desolation and despair, when the Grail came again— not like the adolescent despair when you've got a whole life and a bunch of hormones about to hit you and elevate you. Middle-age desolation, and decimation, desecration, despair, despondency—when that incursion came, when those arrows landed, there was a clarification that took place amidst the catastrophic white noise. Haze was not just the cross, but the solitary figure, fully man, fully

God, to whom we must bow down. Now they do what they can in the United Kingdom to make A.R. stringent and bare the figure of Christ. The TV shows, the ceremonies, and the sermons themselves, with some noble exceptions—I've had some brilliant English Christian teachers: J. John, Father Dave, although he's just become a bishop and he's certainly not a Catholic minister; Father Julian at Brompton; loads of people out of the U.K.—I'm not being dismissive in the widest sense. I'm just saying that, sort of culturally, the way that Christianity is presented is somewhat mundane. And then over

in this country, the United States, where we are now, sometimes they can give it so much carnival that it can seem too sequin-glistening and ridiculous. But somewhere within all of us, He is there—for that was His gift. He died that we may know eternal life, and we may be redeemed of our sins, and He bequeathed upon us the Holy Spirit. Now what I felt was, again, it wasn't sort of flash-bang wallop; the moment of the baptism was powerful—the moment of, sort of, this slowly separating fugue, and as I say, the clarification and emergence of the

face of Christ was very real, and I knew what the compromise was: if there is a Jesus, you're not Jesus. You are not Jesus; you are not at the center; neither is anybody else. He is the firstborn among the dead, and the rest of us— we're all lined up before the throne as sinners. The people that have tried to destroy me, the people that hate me, the people that I've wronged, the people I've sinned against—all of us, just one congregation before Him. My cherished and prized individuality sometimes casts me so low, worthless, disgusting, worse than

everybody else. There is sometimes self-reification and self-deification: I am so spectacular; I am so marvelous—all of it now just sort of eased into: I am as He made me; I am as He would have me. Now, I don't know that I might not, you know—it'll be for someone as, as you say, open, peripatetic, intellectually and capricious as I have sometimes been—perhaps it would seem audacious to claim that I belong to Him, but that I surrender to you as my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I serve you. Yeah, well, something you want to do with care,

that's for sure. So surely, surely, but to let you know that the ego is still in here. I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ, but I'm going to give as best a shot as I can at being Paul—that's it. I'll come down; I'll come down from Jesus, but only so far. Oh no, sorry, Lord. Sorry, Lord. Paul's just a man like us; Paul's just a man like us. Acts is full of men like us; Ephesians written by a man like us; Galatians a man like us. And now, amidst these tectonic shifts and

new and emerging kings and new paradigms and new language, He is Christ. You know, we—okay, so how? Okay, so let's come and have a drink, please, because that was real life as well. I ran with it because spontaneous, spontaneous—don't stop, don't stop—film. Sorry, okay, so this—I want to take apart this idea; two things here: I want to take apart this idea of the self you said and like the narcissistic self, let's say, and then I want to contrast that with this alternative self that's a consequence of the acceptance of something like voluntary self-sacrifice. And I

kind of want to do that technically because I've been trying to work through the relationship between power and hedonism. So as far as I can tell, there's not much point in power apart from the sadism without hedonism because power needs to serve desire, because why else have it? Okay, so then the question is, you might say, "Well, the power serves my desires," but then there's a problem there—N pointed to this, by the way, back in the mid-1800s. He said, "Well, when you say my, or when you say I, you're assuming some sort of prior unity

that's transcendent that isn't self-evident, even though you think it is." So you might say, "Well, I want my desires to be requited," and that's a focus on me. But what you're doing is you're identifying the I, or the me, with the desire, and what that means inadvertently is that you're replacing I or me with the desire. And what that means is you're actually possessed by the desire. And so what narcissism actually means—and I think this is true, clinically—narcissism means subjugation to a series of possession by fragmented whim. And then people say, "Well, I'm getting what

I want." It's like there's no I there; you're a battlefield of whims. And then you might say, "Well, if your whims are being met successfully, why is that a problem?" And it seems to me that the fundamental problem is it's actually self-defeating. Like one of the things we know about psychopaths, for example, is—let me say psychopath; some people think, "You think I'm one?" I'm actually very compassionate. No, I was thinking about you being one of the people who are talking about psychopaths. Yeah, yeah, that's a very important distinction. So psychopaths betray themselves as badly as

they betray other people. So psychopaths are completely unable to learn from experience, which seems to mean that they don't give any consideration whatsoever to their future self. So they give no more consideration to their future self than they give to other people. Say, well, what's the problem with that? And the problem is you gratify whim in the present at the cost of yourself and others in the future, and that's not a sustainable game. So now I've been trying—the postmodernists essentially presumed that the only uniting story was one of power. Yes, okay. So then you might

say, well, what's the alternative to that conceptualization that still allows for the possibility of union? Because you could have nihilism versus power, for example. Well, I think what the biblical stories are pointing to is an ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice, right? And that is actually the antithesis of power. And then you might say, well, there's a relationship between accepting that as a valid proposition and reconfiguring the notion of the self. Because when my wife, when Tammy, had Michaela, we took our daughter up to Northern Saskatchewan when she was about a year old, and there were a

bunch of old people there. They were all just watching this baby like mad, like she was on fire, you know—there were all 65, 70, 75, and they were so thrilled that this little creature was around. They were watching her intently, and Tammy said to me that it was such a relief to her not to be the center of attention, that something had become more important to her, and that calmed her down. It gave her purpose. And so then you might think the true self, rather than the hedonistic, self-defeating self—which we axiomatically assume as the self—the

true self is actually found in the consequences of voluntary self-sacrifice. Because then you get—you sacrifice, you get to be married; you sacrifice, you get to have friends; you sacrifice, you get to have colleagues and people who are voluntarily participating in your endeavors. You multiply your force, and then the self becomes like—it’s the short-term psychopathic and manipulative whims that are sacrificed, that you reflexively identify with the self. And what's that replaced with? It is harmony across all the levels of being simultaneously—from individual, like couple, family, town, society, state, and then all the way up Jacob's ladder,

right? So, based on the argument, that would be inevitably based on something like the acceptance of voluntary self-sacrifice as an existential necessity. And that seems to be—that's the pattern of Christ's life, clearly and obviously, as evidenced by the abortive sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, which precedes, preempts, and acts as a prologue to the ultimate sacrifice. I tried to take that apart because that's a story, for example, that the atheists, like Dawkins, point to as indicative of the sadism of God. But I think what it means is that, of course, you offer your children to God

because you can't protect them and you don't want them to be nihilistic. And so what you do is you say their service as tools in the hands of the Divine takes priority over everything. That's right—well, remember, Abraham gets him back, right? And there’s a lesson there. It’s like if you’re willing to devote your children to what’s highest, they return to you also. Faith demands of us that even though materially and actually you’re in a moment where there’s a knife above your child, you are okay then, God. I mean, this doesn’t look good from where I

am, but I know that my perspective is just a set of interlocutors of fragmented desires; that transubstantiation is being taken anyway. You are taking the body, and the word you used was “possessed” by the false idols—by the desires continually. The transubstantiation of desire is continually taking place. I am occupied, I am occupied by desire. I locate myself here in this desire. My polarity is achieved by my desire, and inverted—come, as my 'cause'—who is the 'my'? If the false idol has now occupied me, if I’m possessed by that, it makes you a slave to the desire.

I am its parasite. So we have no choice; the only antidote, the only self, is Him. He is the only salvation. It’s only by dying on the cross with Him that I can neutralize it, because otherwise I will be possessed again. Now, elsewhere in that, you talked about something that I picked up while reading that book you gave me, told me to read—Profane in the Sa. Oh, you read that? Oh, great! The homogeneity—that you're not even living in a morass of nuclal space, but arbitrarily scattered fragments—and those desires that you just talked about, those desires

of which you become the temporary host, you become puppeted by and parasited by if you don’t have a—if you don’t have within you the fortitude, that is just a sort of a set of urges and memories and projections. Without the ideal, without the supreme ideal as maximum power, maximum sacrifice—maximum power, maximum service, not maximum power, maximum fulfillment of desire—that’s—that is the narcissistic paradigm in America today. Over 60% of all abortions happen through medication pills that can be legally mailed to any state in the nation. These pills not only end the baby’s life but also carry

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medical equipment in women's centers where it's needed most. Join us in this crucial Fight for Life! Call pound 250 and say "baby" — that's pound 250, keyword "baby" — or visit pre-born.com. Not maximum short-term fulfillment of desire; the promise is still something approximating life more abundant, right? See, part of the reason we are overcoming self, Jordan, is because you’re no longer the self. The self is no longer the totem at the center of it. Well, it's that immediate element of it too, though it’s atemporal, though it’s aoral; you've annihilated time. That's what it means to

participate in life eternal. I mean, part of the reason that Christ is the provider of loaves and fishes — endless loaves and fishes — is because there is no more stable economic covenant than one that's founded on the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice. So if you found your whol — see, we have a very skewed notion in the West of what constitutes a natural resource, because there’s such a thing as the resource curse. Right? So if you look economically at countries that are blessed with natural resources, they’re not rich. Not by and large. They're corrupt and

poor. And that's because the idea of natural resources is wrong. The only natural resource, the only true natural resource, is the principle that the covenant of cooperative social productivity is predicated on — and that’s the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice. If you have that, everything becomes a resource. Everything! That's why Christ is the miraculous provider of the loaves and the fishes and the water that never runs dry. Because if you organize your society on the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice, then everything is abundant — always! It’s not immediate gratification of whim; it’s something much more sustained, productive,

communal, and upward-serving. And what do we tell us, Jordan, if our culture is antithetical to that and organized around the exact opposite principle — that the self is the apex, that the family isn’t real, that the nation isn’t? I mean, I understand post-structuralism in a way. I understand the arbitrariness, and I understand the nature of those arguments. But in the same way that C.S. Lewis observed that something that is foreclosed against and forbidden continually in scripture — usury and debt-based culture — has become the economic foundation of the West, that's something that is scripturally forbidden

becomes essential, is an indication that Paul and John, and our Lord — I'm not talking about the Beatles; I'm talking about the New Testament — were all right when they said this is the dominion of the evil one: that you fight not against flesh and blood. And I’m interested in what you think about this occultist component, because you are a genius when it comes to clinical psychology and using that set of tools to dissect something which I think is part of the mysterium tremendum and therefore not subject to that particular analytic — not ultimately. Not

ultimately. These are secondary. This is a secondary discourse. If we — if scripture is the absolute; if this is the word of God; if this is Him — then that which flows out of it, even if we do take the branch of Jung and afford ourselves the ongoing mystery, we are acknowledging the continuing with the unknowable, supernatural, preternatural, aspatial, atemporal component of all this. So I wonder, because I don’t think we are going to be able to get — I feel that what has been happening for the last — you know, I don’t know if

it was 20 years; I don’t know if it was the last 50 years; I don’t know if it’s beyond time — but certainly it seemed to me it was a result of materialism, rationalism, and individualism, and the natural conclusion that flows forth from materialism is that all that is real is the self and the desire. And what you just described there — that you may as well just have a mosaic of desires lining up — prophesied that at the end of World War II, he said that the logical conclusion of Protestantism would be that everybody

was their own church, right? Because there’s no end to the fragmentation. And that’s associated with, let’s say, the worship of a diversity for its own sake. But the problem with that is fragmentation and entropy, and also the narcissism that goes along with every single person being the center of the world. And, you know, the complex — one of the complex problems that’s associated with that is exactly the question of, “Well, if it’s not you that’s the center, once you understand that the you that you presume is actually an aggregation of immature whims in its default

form, then what is the you that should be paramount?” Now, Jung knew this; this is why he regarded Christ as a symbol of the self. Right? He believed that the central unity of spirit that would in some ways naturally emerge as these underlying complexes or motivational states aggregated would take on the appearance of the self-sacrificial passion. And it has to be that way — like I believe, because if you’re going to orient yourself towards the future, you have to sacrifice the present, like obviously. And if you’re going to orient yourself towards other people in a

communal relationship, you have to sacrifice the immediate demand for the gratification of your whims. That’s what kids learn between two and four; like they learn, for example, when they learn to take turns, which is like a predicate for having friends, right? Because sometimes it’s you, and sometimes it’s me; otherwise, we’re not going to get along. That’s obviously sacrificial, because to do that, you have to sacrifice you taking the first turn every time. And so, I don’t see any way out of the... Argument that a future mature future orientation is sacrificial and that a mature future-oriented

communal orientation is self-sacrificial. And then you’d say, "Well, what's the pattern of that?" Christ's insistence, right, is that he embodied the pattern of the prophets and the law that was already extant in the Old Testament and embodied it. That embodiment is the ultimate demonstration of voluntary self-sacrifice. I can't argue my way out of that; it just seems like, I can't see an alternative to that. Interesting. When we pursue it rationally, of course, it makes sense because, otherwise, in some ways, what would be the point? Like, I can empirically say that having tried to live a

life, at times, that was motivated by self-service, like, "Well, why not take loads of drugs?" Oh yeah, that's what happens. "Well, why not just have sex with everyone who's around you who wants to have sex with you? Why not do that?" All right. Oh, I see; that's what happens. So, in a sense, those prohibitions, those edicts, those sanctions were, in a sense, compassionate at the point of origin. But the mistake: how do... So what do you mean? I don’t follow that exactly. You can do what you want, but if you do it, you’ll be unhappy.

Rather than it being, "I’m going to kill you if you have sex with loads and loads of women," it’s, "Go have sex with loads and loads of women and find out for yourself. See how you get told—told you that that won't work for you." But, well, that is what you do to some degree if you're a reasonable parent of adolescents, for example. Yes, one of the things you do is say, "Go make some mistakes and find out for yourself." It is required. I suppose that's the—well, you would associate that theologically with the granting of free

will. Like, "Right, why not make everyone just into a slave of divine command?" Yes, exactly. But what we have to do is actually—Jordan—is not pursue it, I believe. Not entirely down the lines of rationalism, i.e., "If you sacrifice this now, things will be better in the future if you are cooperative with your peers." Because, in a sense, that’s no different than the kind of evolutionary biology that comes out of Pinker and your man Dawkins and all of the atheists. "Oh, we can rationally even love; we can describe love." No, there is something that is beyond

reason. There is something that is beyond our understanding, beyond our ken. Now, first, we must enter into an alternative state. That state is belief. Like me, I’m pretty clever, so to sort of like go, "All right, so God came to Earth in human form, lived a life as a normal person with genitals and fingernails and farts, and picked stuff out of his teeth. Then he died because somehow there had to be absolution for sin. Somehow, some—I can’t even, when I try to put it in rational language, some frequency had to be or some temple, some

portal, some opening, some new more—something had to be done. A transition had to be achieved. I can't unpack it. But when, through despair, that set of traits, recollections, and urges that I call self—when it is annihilated and when it implodes, there—when that becomes null—who is there amidst the archetypal morass and miasma? Is there some form, some figure? Now, if I believe in him—if I go, "Jesus Christ, you are my king and my Lord and my savior," something happens. So, I believe we have to go beyond—like, even though I have personally experienced, if all you do

is narcissistically pursue pleasure and power and the privileges of the false cathedral of the evil one that we now have normalized and regard to be ordinary life—fame, celebrity, materialism, rationalism, commodification, commerce—all of that. When I broken out of it by an Almighty slap from the heavenly father, I don't re-enter into it with the kind of idea that, “Oh, this will be good for me and this will pay dividends one day.” It’s like I—I—I live only in you. "Allow me to become a living sacrifice, continually renew my mind, live in me, my heavenly father. Now I

will change and I will become absolutely what he wants me to become." But it isn't in order that I... because if it is absolutely in the moment, it is right. So you're saying that it can't just be grounded in a more enlightened form of self-service? Yeah, okay. So, okay, so not—te, yep, got it, got it, got it. So, some of the things that were occurring to me when you said that: there’s a dream that Tolstoy had and recounted at the end of his "Confession." He was in a kind of suicidal despair, and he had a

dream that he was suspended on a bed and he was looking down—like, way up high above the Earth—and he was looking down into this abyss that he could fall into. And then he looked up and he could see a rope that connected him to heaven, but he couldn't see what it was attached to. But he understood that that rope, which disappeared into the ineffable, was what was protecting him from, like, eternally, so to speak, from plunging into the abyss. And one of the things you’re making reference to is the fact that, because you’re finite, let’s

say, and not omniscient, your conceptualizations are always going to ground themselves in something that is truly ineffable. Now the same... The problem exists in science because, if you pursue your investigations into the micro-world, you end up grounding out in the quantum world, which no one understands. Then, if you pursue your investigation temporally and encounter the Big Bang, you're stuck with a miracle at the beginning of time. I think part of this, and Jung made some reference to it, is that if you're finite and bounded in your intelligence and apprehension, there's a cloud of mystery that

surrounds that, which is dreamlike. There's something akin to the miraculous around that, and that serves as the buffer between the finite and the infinite. I think you are making reference to that when you talk about the danger of reducing religious faith to the rational, even if you're assuming future orientation and communal orientation as a better rational orientation than present whim gratification. I believe that's correct. I think that's partly why Orthodox Christianity is exerting a fairly powerful attraction on people at the moment, because it's quite good at using architecture, ritual, and sound to fill the gap

between the rational and the irrational, right? It's not argumentation any more than ballet is argumentation or fine art is argumentation. It's more like a phenomenon that shines forth, indicating that there's something beyond what you normally apprehend that is necessary. Now, you associated that discovery in you with despair. Can you fill in the gaps between despair and the discovery of that? What would you say? It's partly humility; it's partly the apprehension of the necessity of accepting things that are beyond your rational reductionism. You have something of genuine value to offer everyone else. Discovering your true purpose

is daunting. That's precisely why I've developed the Mastering Life Collection for Daily Wire Plus. We've designed this collection to aid you in your upward endeavors, tackling some of the essential questions of life. You seek a meaningful course; aim is everything. Real tools for dealing with the darkness within? Face the world as confidently and bravely as possible. Hearken to the call of adventure and climb the confidence hierarchy. Life is not a game; we each have a destiny. I've seen time and time again how people transform when they're offered the appropriate tools. This is the distillation of

everything I've learned about helping people face life's challenges. It's the direct result of my life's work as a clinical psychologist and as a teacher. So, if you're ready to pursue something deeper and more sustaining than mere happiness, if you're willing to face life's challenges head-on, join me on Daily Wire Plus. You described how, on the observable plane, the smallest material components of reality and the largest expanse conceivable of time—the origin of time as we might understand it—are enshrined in an unknowable, ineffable mystery. Perhaps in our own fractal reality, in my little personal cosmos with its

own hierophanies, I see. I did read that book. I have encountered in various ways those edge lands. Now, any genius, whether it's in a scientific discipline, a sport, or the arts, is trying to find that edge, and in doing so, occasionally in their renderings, will come up with some concert landscape, portrait, or rhyme that is indicative of the perfection that underlies observable reality. There is an absolute. While the culture is telling you, "Don't be in this ordinary world of grays, essences, with its endless tedium and its trash glamour and its post-proletarian denim bleeding into nothing,"

aspire to the upper echelons, to the great Vatican. Now, in flames, there you will find salvation. But we know what prophets and what idols speak from those hills now, incandescent. When you get there, if you have experienced all that stuff—if you sort of "sleep around" like most people, probably—Jordan, that sort of like, "I don't know about most people; some people may be like, 'I live a pretty chased life.'" But, as we have discussed before and as you've touched upon on innumerable occasions, "Well, have you ever been offered, did you receive an offer to the banquet?

Do you know what it's like? Have you been presented with any temptation to resist? Have you known that temptation?" It’s not the false defibrillation of his kingdom. You can't achieve something there in the false light of the Enlightenment that built that new template where man sits at the apex—Lucifer himself. If the original sin of disobedience is knowledge apart from him, or them, depending on how you see it, Lucifer is cast out and falls from heaven like lightning precisely because he sees himself as a competitor, opponent, and alternative to the Divine. Now, I believe that is

the archetype of selfishness. That is where it germinates. It’s selfishness, replete with the most sophisticated of all possible rationalizations. So, what would you say? Supreme intellect aligned with the passions. Right, right, right, right? So, it's that grip of instantaneous motivation allied with this—Foucault to a tee, as far as I'm concerned. He put his entire intellect at the service of his warped passion. Diabolical. Diabolical. And he's very good at it; like, he's very smart. Smart. Great. So, this is Marx's history. Did the same thing. Marx did the same thing. Why? Why not? But like, you know,

the reason that I spoke about that, um, the despair as being the rupture, um, as being the point of epiphany, is because I suppose I've been taken to the very edge of it. You know, my person. I'm not claiming this is objective or absolute. I'm claiming the precisely the opposite. It's entirely subjective, of course, but I went as far as I could go—not only with the hedonism and the Epicureanism, but also with the, "Oh, look, you've got a family now and a dog and a thatched cottage, and you live by the river." It's all—I’ve sort

of tried all of it. And then somehow lurking in the past, those two serpents that I had adored—my own personal Baal and Moloch: fame and sex—turned when I was trying to live, even within the purview of the culture, as somewhat truthful and honest. "Hey, this pandemic doesn't seem right. They're not telling us the truth about the origins of this war! I don't think you can trust these people. What's the relationship between the media and these organizations?" And you can’t try—you know, liberalism itself is a kind of Godless ideology. This was when those two serpents turned.

Now, I already felt that I was kind of an awakened person; I kind of felt like I was clever. I had not long held a festival where rather brilliant people—like Vandana Shiva and Wim Hof and Cie means—you know, brilliant people had come. They turned up, and I had marched about the grounds holding a staff, chanting Ragnarok with a bunch of pagans down there by some river, the river in fact that serves as a border between Wales, the Celtic wilds, and England, the stable center. And not long after that, everything fell apart, and I was exposed

to so much sin. And sin—I think here’s a good near acronym in IN: S stands for self. Self—the silent serpent. Self in self. Now, because my background is in addiction and chemical dependency and behavioral dependency, I can see that what you do is, as well as that sort of mosaic that we keep referencing to, of a kind of black mass of transubstantiation, placing desire where the center should be—no wonder it cannot hold. But whilst as a kind of a cardinal of that dark worship, while considering myself to be awakened, of course, because you know you

have to normalize these things—you have to. Dy. No one’s going around mably claiming, "I am evil." Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. It's either banal; it's either the banality of evil or the celebration of the evil of evil, or the invisibility of evil because it’s so immersive and absolute and so far-reaching. So, with that, my identity fell apart. My identity fell apart peculiarly at the exact same time. Because it’s like Russell—you know, Russell Brand is not a famous womanizer; Russell Brand is a famous rapist! That's what—what? Look at him standing on stage making these

jokes. What? What are you talking about? Being able to direct people's will is not the same as overcoming their will or ignoring their will or coercing them. It is precisely the opposite. Having the ability to direct people's will, or charm, or seduce, or enchant—these are sort of shamanic, magical kinds of qualities that, yes, I now see where they lead. Thank you for the lesson, Lord. I now see where they lead. And I also now know absolutely—and look at what's happening in my country right now: falling apart with a kind of an extraordinary, extraordinary, subterranean, potentially

barbarian culture of gang rape. Like, what’s going on? This—it is like Old Testament stuff. So, my despair came when the—what I had built, what I had made for myself, my false idol—not, you know, like over my life I’ve carved this thing, this image of Russell. And look at it—it can be destroyed! It can be destroyed! Hour one of the strange things I think about your situation is that, you know, you were God. Maybe this is probably right: you are just like Richard Dawkins as the exemplar of the atheistic Enlightenment. You're kind of the success story

of the hedonistic liberal right! I mean, you got—like, assuming that would work—what you got was it working? Okay, so then the question is, well, if you get what you asked for—like, if it’s magically granted to you, as it was in your case—what's the consequence of that? And you're outlining the consequence. So you said, well, there were practical consequences which had inverted on you. But I'm also interested in the psychological consequences. You know, because the question—well, why not take pleasure-enhancing drugs like cocaine? Why not sleep with everyone who presents themselves as an opportunity? Like, that's an

actual question, right? Generally, the reason is—well, you can't, right? You just don’t have the opportunity. But then let’s assume that can. Well, let—okay, okay. And then—but why? Can you be more specific about why that didn’t work psychologically? I can. But it’s in the— the despair holds the key. Because I believe that was the communion and the communication that, simultaneous with that, like while, you know, people were—friends and enemies calling me—and you among the friends, like, you know, let's say, like, "God, are you okay? This is crazy!" What was also happening is we were taking our

son, who was 12 weeks old, to have his body carved. Almost in half, his heart taken out of his body like that, that was happening at the same time. So it was like, well, for all of the Sturm und Drang and the meteorological operatics of this conjured and concocted storm, which no doubt I provided the raw material for by being the poster boy of liberal hedonism, it sort of— the Lord showed me this is meaningless, this is meaningless, and I'll show you it's meaningless. Look, look what's actually happening right now. Look at your son; look

at the rain falling on his gentle face as you push the pram to Great Ormond Street. Look at his tiny smile; look at the breast milk coming through his mother's T-shirt because she can't feed him 'cause he has surgery in a few hours. So you tell me, what's real? What did it do for you? Where did it get you? What does it mean? And there he is, Jesus Christ; and there he isn't, Russell Brand. What did—what good did he do you for all of your worship, for all of your effort, for all of the poetry,

the prose, the posturing, the pining, and primping? Where did it lead you? Nothingness. Welcome to the annihilation. What you learn in crisis is true anyway; it's true anyway, but you just ignored it. With all of the ornamentation and pageantry, you are able to distract yourself from it so marvelously. So psychologically, what happens is a massive rupture, and you realize also, by the way, because you're in Great Ormond Street when the most important thing in your life is happening to you—let your son is undergoing surgery and he might not survive the surgery—so is everyone else's kid.

So is everyone else's kid. Who do you think you are? 'Cause, well, when it came in the—when it came in the scan, you know, at six weeks prior to his birth, you know, I was like, I'm not having that, Laura. I'm not having that. I'm not having some kid with tubes up his nose, and I'm not going to Great Ormond Street. But when you get to Great Ormond Street through surrender, who are you saying? Oh my God, something says, something says, who are you to not go to Great Ormond Street? Who are you? Who do

you think you are? You're not who you think you are; you're not who you thought you were. And the trials and the tests are not punishments but lessons as he strips it all away and takes it away from you and shows you who you are really and what you are here to do really. So what it's like psychologically, what it's like psychologically to experience Evanism is it's the slow burn of knowing that it was always there. When you're watching TV as a kid and Christianity is tedious, when you're singing, "The wise man built his house

upon the rock," I've missed the fundamental lesson, the literal foundational lesson that he's there all the time. When you're there in sort of five-star hotel rooms and they’re asleep on the bed now, and you're looking out the window, pondering and lonely and empty, the sort of hollowness of it, it's there, or he's there all the time. The threads are always there in every moment, in every moment, because in the end, like it says in your man, um, Eliade, there look, it's not even just a homogenous— without the say, if you live entirely in the profane,

you will sanctify profanity, and the culture will sanctify profanity, and a priest class will emerge in order to sanctify the profane and to set up false idols. But it's not even just a homogeneous endless space; it's worse than that. It's endless, chaotic fragmentation with order imposed on top of it. It's diabolical and dark and berserk; it's havoc and hell. And in the end, that hell will show itself not only to you as an individual—that's the Pharaoh and the slaves—and the consequence of that is the plagues. Like, yes, absolutely, that's what happens. The more dissolute the

society, the more the unconscious longing for top-down imposition of structure; the more the top-down stubborn imposition of structure, the more likely that that response to crisis will be pathologized and the plagues will emerge. It's like, yeah, maybe that's where them post-structuralists and you, Foucault and whatnot, are right, because in that the presupposition is that it's not free will and self-sacrifice; it's the imposition of order under the continual threat of violence that creates society. What they—yeah, but look, absolutely, there's no doubt that power is a unifying force. I mean, that's why in The Lord of the

Rings, it's the ring of power that unites all the rings. If you're not united, let's say, by responsibility and by voluntary self-sacrifice, you will be united by power, right? That's the rule. And that's why, you know, even the Israelites who are slaves under Pharaoh, like, they're part of a dynamic— sure, the Pharaoh's a tyrant, but they're slaves and they're calling out for the tyrant! And so if you call out for the tyrant, power will emerge as the uniting force. And then you might say, well, why not? And the answer is, well, it's self-defeating. It's too

rigid to be adaptive, and it's fundamentally self-defeating. And so, that's why not. I mean, there's more to it, as you pointed out, because there's the fact that the imposition of the king is a violation of the principle of the divine right, because if you're following the divine, you don't bloody well need a king, which is what God tells the Israelites over and over when they're— Clamoring for a king? But yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, Russell. I think we're going to stop on this side. I think what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side,

yeah, is talk about how you've been down in Florida and you've had some association with the MAGA and the Maha types, strangely enough. So I'd like to delve into that a little bit. Tell me what you've seen, what your hopes are, and what you're concerned about. 'Cause, you know, you're a strange character because, well, you come at it from the left and from the liberal side, and now you're watching these people who are part of this more conservative movement, kind of conservative-libertarian movement. I'd be very curious to hear, you know, what you've concluded as a

consequence of your observations. Okay, so obviously you've been made welcome, which is extremely interesting and bizarre. So yes, it's all so preposterous—it's all so preposterous. So let's do that on the Daily Wire side. Anyways, thank you all for your time and attention. Thanks, Russell. It's always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. [Music]