524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism

Jordan Peterson sits down with actor, podcaster, and commentator Russell Brand. They discuss turning to Christ, the benefits of orienting yourself toward a proper center (rather than centering yourself), how Donald Trump has shaken up the world stage, and what it means to cross the “edgelands” and make it back alive. Russell Brand is an English comedian, actor, activist, podcaster and commentator. He first established himself as a stand-up comedian and radio host before becoming a film actor. He presented for MTV UK and made appearances across media and TV (including a stint on “Big Brother”) throughout the 2000s. In 2008, he leapt from British to U. S. film acting, appearing in the hit film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” followed by numerous international successes. In 2013, Brand guest-edited an edition of the weekly publication the New Statesman, launching his interest and later career as a political activist and commentator. Over the years, Brand has changed in his thinking, from establishment advocate to establishment critic. His current podcast, “Stay Free,” sees Brand calling out major news, governments, and corporations for affronts to free speech, expression, and thought. This episode was filmed on January 10th, 2025. | Links | For Russell Brand: On X https://x.com/rustyrockets?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@RussellBrand On Rumble https://rumble.com/c/russellbrand Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If there is a Jesus, you're not Jesus. You are not at the center, and neither is anybody else.

• 0:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  If you're not united by responsibility and by voluntary self-sacrifice, you will be united by power.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  To let you know that the ego's still in here, I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ, but I'm gonna give as best a shot as I can give at being Paul.

• 0:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  If you lose your individual relationship with divine guidance, the only thing that can possibly emerge is either chaos or despotic force.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Elon Musk, in a matter of posts, can disrupt, elevate new potential kings, desiccate them and remove them in a matter of moments.

• 0:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Are you hopeful, and what are your concerns?

• 0:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, I had the opportunity today to once again sit down with Russell Brand. We've talked quite a bit, and we're getting to know each other quite well, which makes the discussions even more interesting and faster-paced. And we started out with a discussion of Christianity, and it's, what would you say?

• 1:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  The challenge that it poses in its fundamental elements to the doctrines of dissolution, so you could say that on the nihilistic side, or, and to the insistence that the only proper centralizing and unifying force is power. And so, well, both of those are very powerful arguments. One, the 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. And the contrary position to that on the side of power is that only the naive believe that unifying forces are anything but the imposition of compulsion and power,

• 1:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  and that, as I said, it's terminally willfully blind to assume that there are any principles other than...

• 2:07Jordan B. Peterson?

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

• 2:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  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?

• 3:12Speaker 00

  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-ing flux, Jordan,

• 3:55Speaker 00

  it seems that a route to eternity is a valuable escape hatch to have identified. So, how it feels... I'm reading Genesis right now. Have you read it? Have you done a course on it? And like, there's, like, even when you're reading about Sodom and Lot, and reading about like, a culture of... Gang rape that precedes the storm of fire. It feels like I'm reading that, then I'm like, you know, sort of scrolling on X and looking at the world and the hills are an inferno.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  And Britain is beset with a rape gang crisis that appears to be being handled in an unusual way bureaucratically. The pillars and institutions are quaking and shaking. Too much intersection, inappropriateness section between the judiciary, the media and the government. Not a lack and not enough proper coordination and interconnection and communication between those same institutions. Because I suppose you want coordination, but what you don't want is conspiracy.

• 5:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  You want agreement in principle, which is very different than like conscious and what would you say incentivized coordination. So this beginner's mind. So I did a course for Peterson Academy on the Sermon on the Mount. And so I thought I would mention something about that in relationship to this idea of like every moment being born anew, let's say. So in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says to focus your attention on what's most high. And so you could think about that, even if you don't exactly know what that means, you could think about that as the attempt to get your intent right.

• 5:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  So insofar 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. And so then you get the advantage of a kind of a distal view, which is associated with life eternal, you might say, and what's important at the pinnacle of all things. But then you get that hyper attention on the moment that makes everything born anew. And you know, psychologists have cottoned on to 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

• 6:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  and the ability to focus in a very intense way. And I think that's associated, by the way. There's an insistence in the Old Testament that the firstborn is to be sanctified to God. And I think what that means is that, imagine that your life is made out of episodes, which is how you would recount your day, let's say. First this happened, then this. And then there'd be a conclusion, then there'd be another event. The question is, what attitude should you use to frame each new event? And the attitude that's put forward as optimized in the Sermon on the Mount is that when anything new begins, you want to reorient yourself to what's highest. So you think, well, how can I make

• 7:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  of this opportunity the best possible event? Like, how can I orient myself so that I would be participating in that? And you do that every time there's a transformation of viewpoint. And, yeah, that way you get to have your cake and eat it too, you might say.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  I'm gonna do it now. Seek the first the kingdom of God.

• 7:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Seek the first the kingdom of God. And I'm thinking, I'm in a conversation right now with Jordan Peterson. And how do I orient myself in this moment, in this situation? Now, it feels like amidst the flux that we've earlier addressed, or at least alluded to, it appears that much of what you came to represent as you emerged in public life has proven to be true. It's not like the culture has just shifted. We aren't gonna see so many pronouns in the bios. We're not gonna see an escalation in gender approving surgery. Hopefully, that won't be concomitant with a lack of compassion for people, some people that are different

• 8:31Speaker 00

  and do identify differently. Indeed, one of the things I'm most hopeful about, Jordan, is that with the transitions of power that are taking place and the way that it appears to be bleeding, or at least influencing. Outside of its political jurisdiction, like we're seeing like how American power and in particular the influence of Elon Musk, which is a truly global power. And now, when I said globalism like eighteen months ago, I meant something different to what I might mean when I say globalism now, because it appears that Elon Musk, in a matter of posts, can disrupt, elevate new potential kings, desiccate them and remove them in a matter of moments.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  And it's interesting to see how the old world will reorder itself on the basis of what's emergent now. And the reason that I feel that Christianity is so significant is because it's significant with regards to every single issue. But now that we don't have, as we did with the previous project, an attempt to completely control ideological life through politics. We're not going to be altering language wildly and radically. We're not at war with nature and old taxonomies. We're not seeking to annihilate the principle of God, but we may lay claim to his kingdom. I wonder how these new forms of government may evolve and unfold.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  And I wonder how these new forms of nationalism might develop.

• 10:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, we've been, for this ARC enterprise, we've been trying to wrestle exactly with that issue. And I think your comments about, you know, Elon, let's say, as a globalist force that isn't exactly akin to the previous globalist force is like, well, maybe we've tried to distinguish this technically in our discussions at ARC. Okay, so here's some principles. You tell me what you think about them. Policy that requires force and fear is indicative of, it's at least suboptimal and it's probably tyrannical. So that one of the ways you determine whether a policy is acceptable is whether or not it's invitational. Right, and so it'd be like I make you an offer and hopefully you're on board voluntarily,

• 10:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  which would make you a much more efficient participant as well. And even if you're not fully enthusiastic about it, you can't think of a better alternative that you would lay claim to, right? So it's like, you can imagine if we're going to negotiate reasonably, we might say, "Well, we're going to be duty-bound to accept the best offer we can conceive of." Right? I mean, hopefully it'll be one that also fills you with enthusiasm, but in the absence of that, at least you won't be able to think of a better alternative. So, no power, no force, no fear, right? And then, the other thing that we've toyed with, let's say, or played with, is the idea that not only does the vision of the future have to be invitational, there has to be an element of play about it.

• 11:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because, like, 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. So the sense of play, which is like, direction with variability, right? Because that's play, is direction with variability. That only emerges when the situation, say, of communication and cooperation is being optimized. So then you might say another way that you can tell if the venture is proceeding well is that if everybody engaged in it can engage in a sense of play. And I like the play idea, partly because it's voluntary, obviously,

• 12:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  but also because play implies a fair bit of tolerance for, you know, for deviation along the path.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, the vicissitude. Now, I'm assuming that your experience as a clinical psychologist must be primarily interpersonal, although you will ultimately be dealing with large data sets. But the reason I'm fascinated that you'd bring up play so early in our conversation is because when precisely looking at the posts of Elon Musk and Trump, with Trump saying, "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 puckish 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 Pharisee like certainty of the

• 12:58Speaker 00

  materialist rationalist neoliberal oligarchs who appear now to be being displaced. This play though, I wonder, Jordan, and this is not an assertion I'm making with regard to the list previous listed individuals, I know our audience when it comes to Trump and Musk and stuff, but there isn't there mischief and play in the demonic also. Now, like the reason I the reason I like play, one, I'm a comedian, one, I enjoy liminal spaces and I enjoy the uncertainty that's a prerequisite of play, the true spirit of pioneering discovery that is encompassed within play is it and I enjoy actually, in fact, perhaps much of the Trump phenomena was this politician isn't talking like other

• 13:43Speaker 00

  politicians way back 2015 with Hillary Clinton, because you'd be in jail. That moment, it's like, people don't say that. Like then up against the sort of school mom sort of, the sort of bluster and haughtiness of you come to, like, you know, the sort of the English have bequeathed to the world abundantly, that kind of sort of Victorian certainty glance the not at the piano leg in case you feel a tumescent stirring in the loins, total lack of joy in 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,

• 14:24Speaker 00

  you might see a late night talk show host saying, see, I told you, I told you, they're gonna take over Canada. Or what's Elon Musk doing meddling in British politics? But regardless of the, again, as a Christian, regardless of the, you know, Trump's not God, Musk's not God, they're all human beings that are gonna 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 kowtow, bend the knee, go on holiday to ensure that Murdoch would support his new Labour movement. It was understood that Thatcher required Murdoch.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  It was understood that if Murdoch unleashed an ocean of ink against an opposition party, the government would remain in power. Now Murdoch, he still has some power across the Anglophone world. And, you know, I don't know what Murdoch's power is like now. But what I know is that Elon Musk is 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 manoeuvre 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,

• 15:51Speaker 00

  the economically-led kind of, I imagine Dow Jones-watching sort of traditional entrenched mentality of Digger, or that was the nickname, wasn't it, of Murdoch. You now see this sort of, well, perhaps, again, it's the technology that leads. Because the technology now, diffuse cybernetics,

• 16:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Instant.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  instantaneous systems taking place in the present. Because 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 Weltanschauung. So now, now that we have this instantaneous omnipresent potentiality, maybe everything's changing. So in short, what I'm saying is, is what's happening now entirely unique? 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.

• 16:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you know, I just did an interview with Pierre Poliev, 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, but there's something, so we had to talk about that, because Pauliev 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,

• 17:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  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 gonna 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,

• 18:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  that means that, that might mean the reemergence of something like spontaneity over, 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, and every second on broadcast media cost a fortune, you could imagine that risk minimization was the name of the game, and that every second had to be controlled. But that restriction is no longer present, even at all. And so, what that should mean, what that might mean, and that's what you're referring to,

• 19:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, Poliev could do that, right? He had a conversation with me. He got no questions ahead of time, none. And so, and he was willing to go along with that. But it is really a completely different way of... Now, we've been talking to Democrats, too, trying to get them on the podcast circuit. And the resistance so far has been the utter inability and unwillingness of people on

• 19:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  the Democrat's side to forego their pre-planned agenda with regards to a conversation. Right? Right?

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Some time ago, you said we were entering this era of new kings. I don't know when you started saying it, but you said it to me about a year ago. New kings, you said. And I like, I clocked it and thought it was interesting. And now we're sort of seeing how that's playing out. The boundaries are shifting, kind of a sort of cybernetic gerrymandering as the sort of the space moves beyond geography and into something more conceptual, yet actual, in so much as it can be administrated and it can be controlled. Now, to your point about spontaneity, I wonder if it's in any way ultimately distinct from the sort of Socratic idea that the spoken word had a different, a distinct authenticity.

• 20:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  From the written, yeah, I agree. Well, and it was Socrates who decried that, if I remember correctly, right? He was afraid that if the written took primacy, that the concretization of thought would eliminate... 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. And, see, it isn't obvious to me that you can lie effectively, spontaneously, in a conversation.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  No, not necessarily continually. Now, you remember about 500,000 words ago, 10 minutes ago, at the beginning of our conversation, we both speak relatively quickly, I mentioned... That an ever-present, omnipresent God, if God is the absolute creator, etemporal, aspatial, 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, that there would indeed be narrativisable lessons.

• 21:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  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.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, to detect or divine, to divine. Where is it?

• 21:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, to feel it out, absolutely.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  By that, I see divine as a transitive verb, rather than as a description of sublime. And 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 Guri's book, The Revolt of the Public, that there was an inevitability that independent media and the way that it, you know, Martin Guri saw this much earlier than any of us, he saw like, I think he saw like, whoa, Napster, what that's done to the record industry, how's that gonna play out? Wait a second, and then he saw like, you know, Arab Spring, Occupy movement, Brexit, Trump, like, watching how institutions are unable to adjust to the new thermals and

• 22:35Speaker 00

  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, that it will become so porous as to be, so porous as to be without distinction. And it seems now that what you-

• 23:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  What distinction are you referring to there, exactly?

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Media is this category, politics is this category.

• 23:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh yeah, I see, I see.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Those distinctions will-

• 23:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, Poliev, for example, Poliev, I think, has been, he's certainly been the most effective Canadian politician on this front, but he might be the most effective politician in the Western world at the moment in U. 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, because that's quite divorced from typical politicking. But it is, you know, the thing is, is the intermediaries, in some ways, the intermediaries are no longer necessary between the leaders and the populace.

• 23:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, this is something that the MAGA and the Maha types are trying to work out right now from a strategic perspective. It's 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 soundbite, that's gone. And so then Poliev has been very effective at just talking directly to the Canadian public, and that's why he won the Conservative leadership. And it's part of the reason, along with Trudeau's catastrophic failure, that he's going to be the next Prime Minister. But it 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, and I want to go in two directions.

• 24:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  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. And 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 found a kind of bedrock that's qualitatively different from the sorts of orientations that you've had previously? So let's start with that.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  It feels like something absolute has been encountered, which has ameliorated, mitigated, neutralized, and somehow compounded and infused something that was always latent and yet corroming within me. The self, the self as the absolute. I want this.

• 25:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Do what thou will, shall be the whole of the world. 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 Sufiism. And I'll read a bit of Foucault and I'll conjure up my own little pantheon. In fact, it was you that said it to me. That if God is everything, God is anything. And I encountered that more empirically when returning to a kind of new age festival. And I thought, what is this feeling that I'm having here, having since come into Christ in a new age festival? And I don't, you know, I still got the other day is adorned permanently about my body as a reminder. And what it felt like is it's false idolatry. A false idolatry is predicated on a polarity between the self and the idol. Christ replaces the self.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  You die on the cross with him. It's the self that has to go. There is no-

• 26:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  That what self exactly? How do you conceptualize the self that has to go?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  The rustle-ness, the observer, the witness, the rustle-ness.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  By default, inadvertently, I'm always in the service of the centrifugal force around which urges, projections, reflections, the intellect, the memory. They all, like you once said when talking about like the word which might have a bunch of associated words like cat and cauldron and all that. I've got Russell and Russell's memories and projections. I've got this sort of loose sense of a continuum of self. Now, it was very deliberate-

• 27:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  That center should be replaced.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Yes, it's sent before. He was right. We nearly touched upon this before because WB8 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 born out now. The thing is, is before with the narcissism, me being a devotee of the other culture, a devotee of the false idolatry, I worship self. Now, at first it felt like a sort of the pilgrimage was very sort of meekly undertaken. For I was not a robust child athlete, nor was I a high school heartthrob. I was a 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 evolving or growing.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  But one of my teachers would say inflating. It was-

• 27:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Like, I've, you know, it's difficult. If you've felt pretty worthless your whole life and all of a sudden there's a culture queuing up to give you sort of accolades and pat you on the back and there's a sort of a, an endless cortège of fellatio suddenly available, it's difficult not to think that you might not be rather magnificent. Now, the reason I like, as a sort of a counterweight to the feelings of inferiority, I would have been resist, I always knew something about Jesus, I knew something about Jesus, but my odd contemporary translation of that was, I want to be Him. I want to be the Savior. I want to be in direct commune with God. I want to lead. I want to be empowered. And then when, when the desolation came, the desolation and despair, when the grail

• 28:38Speaker 00

  came again, not like the adolescent despair, when you know you've got a whole life and a bunch of hormones about to hit you and elevate you, middle-aged desolation and decimation, desecration, despair, despondency, when that incursion came, when those arrows landed, there was a clarification took place amidst the catastrophic white noise and haze was not just the cross, but the solitary figure, fully man, fully God, to whom we must bow down. Now, they do all they can in the United Kingdom to make astringent, anodyne and banal the

• 29:17Speaker 00

  figure of Christ, the TV shows, the ceremonies and sermons themselves, with some noble exceptions, I have 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 UK, so I'm not being dismissive in a wider sense, I'm just saying sort of culturally, the way that Christianity is presented is somewhat mundane. And then over in this country, the United States where we are now, sometimes they can make, give it so much carnival that it can seem too sequined, glistening and ridiculous. But somewhere within all of us is that He's there, He is there, for that was His gift. He died that we may know eternal life and we may be redeemed of our sins and He bequeathed upon us the Holy Spirit.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Now, what I felt was, again, it wasn't sort of flashbang wallop, the moment of the baptism was powerful, the moment of sort of this slowly, the slowly separating fugue, and as I say, the clarification and emergence of the face of Christ was very real. And I knew what the compromise was, if there is a Jesus. You're not Jesus. You are not Jesus. You are not at the centre, and neither is anybody else. He is first born 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 have wronged, the people that I have sinned against, all of us, just one congregation before Him. My cherished and prized individuality, sometimes that cast me so low, worthless, disgusting,

• 30:42Speaker 00

  worse than everybody else, that sometimes self-rarefication and self-davocation. 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, you know, it would 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 Him as my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, I serve Him.

• 31:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, it's something you want to do with care, that's for sure.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  So surely, surely. But to let you know that the ego's still in here, I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ, but I'm gonna give as best a shot as I can give at being Paul. That, that's, I'll come down, I'll come down from Jesus.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  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, a new language, here He is, Christ. You know, we even...

• 31:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, okay, so how, okay, so, so let's...

• 31:52Speaker 00

  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, Phil, sorry.

• 32:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so this, this, I want to take apart this idea, two things here. I want to take apart this, this idea of the self.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Yes, sir.

• 32:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  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. Nietzsche pointed to this, by the way, back in the mid-1800s. He said, "Well, when you say 'my,' or when you say 'I,'

• 32:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  you're assuming some sort of a priori 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.

• 33:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  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-

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Don't touch me when you say "psychopaths." Some people think you think I'm one. I'm actually very compassionate.

• 33:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  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. And then you might say, "Well, what's the problem with that?" And the problem is, you gratify whim in the present at the cost of yourself and others in the future. And that's not a sustainable game. So, now, I've been trying, the postmodernists-

• 34:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Essentially presumed that the only uniting story was one of power. Yes. Okay, so then you might say, "Well, what's the alternative to that conceptualization that still allows for the possibility of of union?" Because you could have nihilism versus power, for example. 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, that's... There's a relationship between accepting that as a valid proposition and reconfiguring the notion of the self." Because when when my wife, when Tammy had Michaela, we took our daughter up to northern Saskatchewan when she was about a year old.

• 35:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  And there's a bunch of old people there, and they're all just watching this baby like mad, like she was on fire, you know? They're all 65, 70, 75, and they're so thrilled at this little creature's around. And they're watching her intently. And Tammy said to me that it was such a relief to her not to be the center of attention, that something had become more important to her. And that calmed her down and 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.

• 36:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  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, what that's replaced with is harmony across all the levels of being simultaneously.

• 36:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  From individual, like couple, family, town, society, state, and then all the way up Jacob's ladder, right? So, and that's based on, the argument would be, that's inevitably based on something like the acceptance of voluntary self-sacrifice as an existential necessity. And that seems to be, that's the pattern of Christ's life, clearly.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  And obviously is partnered by the abortive sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, which proceeds, preempt and acts as a prologue to the ultimate sacrifice.

• 36:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, and I tried to take that apart because that's, that's a story, for example, that the atheists like Dawkins point to as indicative of the sadism of God. But I, I think, I, I think what it means is that, of course, you offer your children to God because you can't protect them and you don't want them to be nihilistic. And so what you do is you say their, their service as tools in the hands of the divine takes priority over everything.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  They're not yours, they're his.

• 37:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's right. Well, and 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.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Also, faith, faith demands of us that even though materially and actually you're in a moment where there's a knife above your child, you are, okay then, God, I mean, it just 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.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  My polarity is achieved by my desire, and inverted commas, my, because who is the my? If the false idol is now, has now occupied me, if I am possessed by it.

• 38:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  That makes you a slave to the desire.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  I am, it's parasite, so we have no choice. The only antidote, the only salvation 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 and the Sacred.

• 38:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, you read that? Oh, great. That's Eliad.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, the homogeneity, that you're not even living in a morass of neutralized 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 as just a sort of a set of urges and memories and projections, without their ideal, without the supreme ideal as maximum power, maximum sacrifice, maximum power, maximum service, not maximum power, maximum fulfillment of desire.

• 39:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  That's, yeah, that is the narcissistic paradigm.

• 39:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Not maximum short-term fulfillment of desire, the promise is still something approximating life more abundant. Right? See, part of the reason-

• 39:42Speaker 00

  But only by overcoming self, Jordan, because you're no longer, that the self is no longer the totem at the center of it.

• 39:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, it's that immediate, it's the immediate element of it too, though.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Because it's atemporal, though. It's atemporal.

• 39:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, well, that's what-

• 39:53Speaker 00

  You've annihilated time.

• 39:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's what it means, that's what it means to participate in life eternal. I mean, part of the reason that Christ is the provider of loaves and, 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 holices, see, we have a very skewed notion in the West of what constitutes natural resource. Because there's such, there's such a thing as the resource curse, right? So if you look economically at countries that are blessed with natural resources, they're not rich, not by and large, they're corrupt and poor. And that's because the idea of natural resource is wrong. The only natural resource, the only true natural resource is the principle

• 40:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  that the covenant of cooperative social productivity is predicated on. And that's the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice. If you have that, everything becomes a resource. Everything, that's why Christ is the miraculous provider of the loaves and the fishes. And the water that never runs dry, because if you organize your society on the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice, then everything is abundant always. It's not immediate gratification of whim. It's something much more sustained and productive and communal and upward-serving.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  And would it tell us, Jordan, if our culture is antithetical to that and organized around the exact opposite principle? That the self is the apex, that the family isn't real, that the nation isn't real. And I understand post-structuralism in a way, and I understand the arbitrariness and 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 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,

• 41:53Speaker 00

  "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 goes in clinical psychology and using that set of tools to dissect something, which I think is part of the mysterium tremendum, and therefore not subject to that particular analytic. Not ultimately, not ultimately, it's a secondary discourse. 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 young and afford ourselves the ongoing mystery.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  We are acknowledging the continuing, the unknowable, supernatural, preternatural, a-spatial, 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 national conclusion, natural conclusion that flows forth from materialism is that all that is real is the self and what you just described there, that you may as well just have a mosaic of desires lining up chronologically through life.

• 43:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  You 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, right? 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?"

• 43:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, Jung knew this. This is why he regarded Christ as a symbol of the self, right? He believed that the... He believed that the central unity of spirit that would, in some ways, naturally emerge as these underlying complexes or motivational states aggregated, would take on the appearance of the self-sacrificial passion. And it has to be that way. Like, I... This is... I believe, because if you're going to orient yourself towards the future, you have to sacrifice the present. Like, obviously. And if you're going to orient yourself towards other people in a communal relationship, you have to sacrifice the immediate demand for the gratification of your whims.

• 44:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's what kids learn between two and four. Like, they learn to... For example, when they learn to take turns, which is like a predicate for having friends, right? 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 mature future-oriented communal orientation is self-sacrificial. And then you'd say, "Well, what's the pattern of that?" And Christ's insistence, right, is that He embodied the pattern of the prophets and the law that was already extant in the Old Testament and embodied it.

• 45:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that embodiment is the ultimate demonstration of voluntary self-sacrifice. I can't argue my way out of that. It just seems like... That just seems... I can't see an alternative to that view.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  It's interesting. When we pursue it rationally, of course, it makes sense, because... Elsewise, in some ways, what would be the point? That like, I can empirically say that having tried to live a life at times that was 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? Oh, 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-

• 46:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, what do you mean? I don't follow that exactly.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  You can do what you want, but if you do do it, you're being unhappy. Rather than it being, "I'm gonna kill you if you have sex with loads and loads of women." Go have sex with loads and loads of women.

• 46:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  And find out for yourself.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  See how you go. "Told ya."

• 46:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  "Told ya that that won't work for you."

• 46:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that is what you do, to some degree, if you're a reasonable parent of adolescents, for example.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  One of the things you do is, is say, "Go make some mistakes and find out for yourself."

• 46:52Speaker 00

  It is required.

• 46:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's, I suppose, that's the, well, you would associate that theologically with the granting of free will. Like, right, why not make everyone just into a slave of divine command?

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. And, but what we have to do is actually, Jordan, is not pursue it, I don't, I believe, not entirely down the 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.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  So, to sort of like go, "All right, so God came to earth in human form, lived a life as a normal person with genitals and fingernails." And farts and picked stuff out his teeth, then he died because somehow there had to be absolution for sin. Somehow, some, I can't even when I try to put it in rational language, some frequency had to be erged, some template, some portal, some opening, some new milieu. Something had to be done, a transition had to be achieved. I can't rationally unpack it. But when through despair, that set of, that, that, that mosaic of traits and recollections

• 48:21Speaker 00

  that I, and urges that I call self, when it is annihilated and when it implodes. There, when that becomes inutile, 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

• 49:03Speaker 00

  and regard to be ordinary life, fame, celebrity, materialism, rationalism, commodification, commerce, all of that. When I'm 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 am, 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'll 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.

• 49:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so you're saying that it can't just be grounded in a more enlightened form of self, of what we'd say self-service? Yeah, okay, so, okay, so.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  It's not technique.

• 49:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep, got it, got it, got it. So, well, some of the things that were occurring to me when you said that, so. 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 immensely 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 that disappeared into the ineffable was what was protecting him from, like eternally so to speak, from plunging into the abyss.

• 50:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  And one of the things you're making reference to is the fact that because you're finite, let's say, and not omniscient, that your conceptualizations are always going to ground themselves out in something that is truly ineffable. Now, the same problem obtains in science, right? Because if you pursue, if you pursue your investigations into the micro world, you ground out in the quantum world, which no one understands, and then if you pursue your investigation temporally and you encounter the Big Bang, you're stuck with a miracle at the beginning of time. And I think part of it is, and you made some reference to this, is like if you're finite and bounded in your intelligence and your apprehension, there's a cloud of like mystery

• 51:17Jordan B. Peterson?

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

• 51:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  and ritual and, and sound to fill the gap between the rational and the irrational, right? And it's not argumentation, any more than ballet is argumentation, or fine art is argumentation. It's, it's more like, it's a phenomena that, and that means to shine forth, right? It's a phenomena that indicates that there's something beyond what you normally apprehend that's there and that a relationship with that is necessary. And I do think that's... Now, you associated that discovery in you with despair. So, like, can you fill in the gaps between the despair and the discovery of that? What would you say? It's partly humility.

• 52:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's partly apprehension of the necessity of accepting things that are beyond your rational reductionism.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  Perhaps in our own fractal reality, in my little personal cosmos with its own hierophanes, I see, I did read that book.

• 53:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  I have encountered, in various ways, those edgelands. Now, any genius, whether it's in a scientific discipline, a sport, or arts, are trying to find that edge. And in so doing, occasionally in their renderings, will come up with some concert, landscape, portrait, or rhyme that is indicative of the perfection that underlies observable reality, that there is an absolute. Now, me, while, in relationship, if the sort of culture is telling you, you know,

• 53:53Speaker 00

  become, don't be in this ordinary world of Greys Essex with its sort of endless tedium and its sort of trash glamour and its post-proletariat denim bleed into nothing. Aspire you to the upper echelons, to the great Vatican now in flames. There you will find salvation. But we know what prophets and what idols speak from those hills now incandescent.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  And when you get there, and if you had experience with all that stuff, if you sort of sleep around, like, most people, probably Jordan, that sort of like live a lot, I don't know about most people, some people maybe, like, they're like, you know, I live a pretty chaste life. But, you know, 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?

• 54:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Have you been presented with any temptation to resist?

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Have you known that temptation? And like, and when you are, and it's sort of, it's not, it is the false defibrillation of his kingdom. You can achieve something there in the false light, in the false light of the Enlightenment, that built out that new template where man sits at the apex. Lucifer himself, 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.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  That is the, that's where, that's its germ and germination.

• 55:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's selfishness, it's selfishness replete with the most sophisticated of all possible rationalizations. So it's the, it's the, what would you say, supreme intellect as handmaiden of the passions. Right, right, right, right. So it's, it's, it's that grip of instantaneous motivation allied with, this is Foucault to a, to a T, as far as I'm concerned. He put his entire intellect at the service of his, of his warped passion.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Diabolical.

• 56:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Diabolical, and he's very good at it, like, he's very smart, he's very smart.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Great sophistry in this.

• 56:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Marx did the same thing, Marx did the same thing.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Why, why not? But like, you know, the reason that I spoke about that, the despair as being the rupture. As being the point of epiphany is because I suppose I've been taken to the very edge of it. You know, my own person, I'm not claiming this is objective or absolute. I'm claiming precisely the opposite. It's entirely subjective, of course. But I went as far as I could go, not only with the hedonism, 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. And it's all sort of, I've tried all of it. And then somehow lurking in the past, those two serpents that I had adored my own personal bar and Moloch fame and sex turned.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  When I was trying to live, even within the purview of the culture, a somewhat truthful and honest life, hey, this pandemic don't seem right. They're not telling us the truth about the origins of this. Well, I don't think you can trust these people. What's the relationship between the media and these organisations and da, da, da? And you can't try, and liberalism itself is a kind of godless ideology. This was when those two serpents turned. Now, I already felt that I was kind of an awoken, an awakened person. I kind of felt like I were kind of clever. I'd not long but held a festival where rather brilliant people like Vandana Shiva and Wim Hoff and Kali Means, you know, brilliant people had come, turned up and I had marched

• 57:42Speaker 00

  about the grounds, holding a staff, chant in Ragnarok with a bunch of pagans down there by some river, the river, in fact, that serves as a border between Wales, the Celtic Wild, and England, the stable centre. 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, sin, in self, the sans for self, self, the sibilant serpent self, in self. Now, because my background is in addiction and chemical dependency and behavioural 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 a black mass of transsubstantiation, placing desire where

• 58:26Speaker 00

  the centre should be, no wonder it cannot hold. But whilst as a kind of a cardinal of that dark worship.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  While considering myself to be awakened, of course, because you know, you have to normalize these things, you have to deify this, no one's going around macabre claiming, "I am evil." Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. It's either banal, it's either the banality of evil, or the celebration of the evil, of evil, or the invisibility of evil because it's so immersive and absolute and so far-reaching. So with the, my identity fell apart, my identity fell apart peculiarly, at the exact same, because it's like Russell, you know, Russell Brand is not a famous womanizer, Russell Brand is a famous rapist. That's what Russell... What? What? Look at him standing on stage, making these jokes. What? What are you talking

• 59:15Speaker 00

  about? What are you talking about? Being able to direct people's will is not the same as overcoming their will, or ignoring their will, or coercing them, it's precisely the opposite. Having the ability to direct people's will, or charm, or seduce, or enchant, these are all sort of shamanic, magical kind of qualities. But 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,

• 59:55Speaker 00

  like, I mean, what's going on? This is, it is, I was 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 in a half hour.

• 1:00:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, one of the strange things, I think, about your situation is that, you know, you were, God, maybe, this is probably right, is that you were, just like Richard Dawkins is the exemplar of the atheistic enlightenment, you're kind of the success story of the hedonistic liberal, right? I mean, you got, like, assuming that would work... What you got, was it working? Okay, so then the question is, well, if you get what you asked for, like if it's magically granted to you, as it was in your case, what's the consequence of that? And you're outlining the consequence. So you said, well, there were practical consequences which, that had inverted on you. But I'm also interested in the psychological consequences, you know, because it, the question, well, why not take

• 1:00:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  uh, pleasure enhancing drugs like cocaine? Why not sleep with everyone who presents themselves as an opportunity? Like, that's an actual question, right?

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  This is a good question.

• 1:01:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Generally, the reason is, well, generally, the reason is, well, you can't. Right? You just don't have the opportunity. But then let's assume that while you-

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  You actually can.

• 1:01:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that, let's just-

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  I did it.

• 1:01:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay, and then, but why? Can you be more specific about why that didn't work psychologically?

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  I can, but it's in the despair holds the key, because I believe that was the communion and the communication. But simultaneous with that, like while, you know, people were, you know, like friends and enemies, recalling 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 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

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  and concocted storm, which no doubt I provided the raw material for by being the poster boy of liberal hedonism, it's 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, because 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?

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  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 preening 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 were able to distract yourself from it so marvelously. So psychologically, what happens is a massive rupture. And you realise also, by the way, because in your Great Ormond Street, when the most important thing in your life is happening to you, that your son is undergoing surgery and he might not survive the surgery.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  So is everyone else's kid, so is everyone else's kid.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  Who do you think you are? Because when, when it came in the, when it came in the scan, you know, at twenty 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 wires, 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 he takes it away from you. And he shows you who you are really and what you are here to do really.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  So what it's like psychologically, what it's like psychologically to experience heavenism is it's a slow burn of knowing that he 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, the, the, the wise man built his house upon the rock. I've missed the fundamental lesson, the literal foundational lesson of that, that he's there all the time. When you're there in sort of five star hotel rooms and they're asleep on the bed now and you're looking out the window. Pondering and lonely and empty, the sort of hollowness of it.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  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, Eliad there, it's not even just a homogeneous, without the same, 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.

• 1:05:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, 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, what, imposition of structure? The more the top-down stubborn imposition of structure, the more likely that that response to crisis will be pathologized and that the plagues will emerge. It's like, yeah.

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  Maybe that's where them post-structuralists and Yefuko 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 a society.

• 1:06:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, but what they, well, 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 Pharaohs are tyrant, but they're slaves. And they're calling out for the tyrant. And so if you, if you call out for the tyrant, power will emerge as the uniting force. And then you might say, "Well, why not?" And the answer is, "Well, it's self-defeating."

• 1:06:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's not, it's too rigid to be adaptive, and it's fundamentally self-defeating. And so that's why not. I mean, there's more to it, as you pointed out, because there's the fact that the imposition of the king is a violation of the principle of the divine, right? Because if you're following the divine, you don't bloody well need a king, which is what God tells the Israelites over and over when they're clamoring for a king.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  But, yeah, yeah. All right, Russell, I think we're gonna stop on this side. I think what we're gonna do on the Daily Wire side is talk about, you've been down in Florida, and you've been having some association with the MAGA and the Maha types, strangely enough. And so I'd like to delve into that a little bit, and tell me what you've seen, what your hopes are, and what you're concerned about. Because you know, you're, you're a strange character in this mill, you too, because, well, you come at it from the left and from the liberal side, and now you're watching these people who are part of this more conservative movement, kind of, conservative libertarian movement, and I'd be very curious to hear, you know, what you've concluded as a consequence of your observations. Okay. So, obviously, you've been made welcome, which is extremely interesting and bizarre.

• 1:08:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, yes, it's so preposterous, it's all so preposterous. So, let's do that on the Daily Wire side. Anyways, thank you all for your time and attention. Thanks, Russell, it's always a pleasure talking to you.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  Thank you.