408. Jordan Peterson & Sam Harris Try to Find Something They Agree On

[0] Hello, everyone.

[1] Today I have the opportunity to talk to Sam Harris once again.

[2] Sam and I have spoken many times, and usually publicly in the past, trying to sort out our mutual understanding in relationship to such topics as, well, morality fundamentally.

[3] Both Sam and I are convinced to the core of our being.

[4] you might say, that there is a true and not merely relative distinction between good and evil, although we differ to some degree in how that distinction might be characterized and what the fact of that distinction means with regard to belief.

[5] And so every time I talk to Sam, I'm interested in trying to understand, for example, what he really means by objecting to the religious propositions that he does object to as one of the horsemen of the new atheist movement, so -called, especially given that Sam is also committed to what you might describe as a religious practice.

[6] He's an avid meditator and certainly believes that spiritual experience is not only real, but perhaps the most real form of experience that's available to us.

[7] So we're we're going to hash through that, again, to try to distinguish between dogmat knowledge, to try to distinguish between religious experience per se, or the religious experience that's valuable and a counterproductive totalitarian dogmatism, and to try to lay that all out with forays into the domains of, well, meditative practice and with the occasional description and discussion of the political.

[8] So it's good to see you again, Sam.

[9] And I think the first thing that I will ask you about is I'm just curious.

[10] We haven't talked for, I think, it's almost a year now.

[11] I believe that's the case.

[12] And so the first thing I'm curious about is what are you up to?

[13] It feels like two years.

[14] I feel like our last conversation was in the very depths of COVID.

[15] And I was in some basement layer.

[16] So it's got to be two years.

[17] Things are great.

[18] I mean, it's really a nice time of life.

[19] It's just, it's nice with the family.

[20] It's nice professionally.

[21] It's just a, I'm in a good spot.

[22] It's a, you know, I'm all too aware that things can change.

[23] So I'm enjoying my moment in the sun.

[24] But it's really, it's really a beautiful period of life.

[25] Yeah, so what's good?

[26] I mean, my, my, in terms of just how I spend my time day to day, it's, uh, really has become a, uh, a semi -seemless, machine for producing well -being.

[27] I mean, it's really, I'm doing what I want to do moment to moment and finding lots of people who want me to do it.

[28] So it's just, there's not much distance between what I have to do, certainly professionally, and what I would do anyway just because I want to do it.

[29] So it's, I just, I count myself as extraordinarily lucky to have found my, my path here and that it's working so it's yeah i mean i just have no i have no complaints it would be indecent to complain about anything personally at this point except for the the passage of time and and the implications of that which i which i know all too well yeah well i would say that you look both younger and happier than you did the last time i saw you and you know i got quite attuned in my clinical practice to watching people's faces obviously but also seeing to some degree the way that they're set habitually, you know, and you look, you look very good.

[30] And so I'm very happy to hear.

[31] You said something I think that is a particular interest to me is that you have managed and also attribute this to some degree to good fortune to bring together what you have to do with what you would want to do.

[32] And that seems to me a sign of optimality of function, well, as well as the good fortune that we just described.

[33] And so, What is it that you think that you're doing that's enabled you, I mean, I know that you've been concentrating to a large degree on meditative practice, for example, but what is it that you think you've done to your attitude, let's say, to your patterns of attention that have enabled you to bring what you need to do and what you want to do in alignment?

[34] Well, this has been happening for quite some time.

[35] It's, you know, this is, I would say that this has been, you know, it's taken me 20 years to fully get my, my professional life and my core interests to gel.

[36] And so part of that is having built out platforms where I can just follow my interests as, and follow the needs of the moment, you know, whether it's your journey or responding to something that's in the news or just figuring out what, what I'm most want to pay attention to.

[37] in a given day or week.

[38] So, I mean, as you know, I have both my podcast making sense.

[39] I have the app waking up, which is started at narrowly focused as a meditation app, but it's much more of an applied philosophy app at this point.

[40] It's just expanded beyond meditation.

[41] And it's expanded well beyond my contributions to it.

[42] So there are many other people on it.

[43] And so I can bounce between those two platforms.

[44] however I see fit while superficially they're similar because they're just me pushing MP3 files out to the world they're just audio platforms in the end they're totally unlike one another with respect to the kinds of topics I tend to engage and the kinds of interactions with the world that provokes so it's it's really quite it's almost like I'm living two lives simultaneously because I'm waking up the app I get it's it's it's it's almost uniformly just pure positivity coming back at me you know apart from the occasional you know software glitch that you crashes somebody's phone and we hear about that it's just that there's no distance between what I'm intending to put out and the effect I'm hoping to have and the effect that I in fact seem to be having based on the feedback.

[45] So, and this was, you know, this has been, it was launched, it was exactly five years ago.

[46] So for five years, I've had this look at this kind of alternate life.

[47] It's almost like a counterfactual life to the one I hadn't managed to lead where I could sidestep all pointless controversy and annoying, you know, bad faith criticisms, and just meet people at a place where what I have to give is found valuable by them in precisely the way that I would hope, right?

[48] So it's just, it's like a purely positive encounter with, with legions of people, which, again, because of my experience as an author and as a podcaster, I had to lost sight of that even being a possibility, right?

[49] I had lost sight of the fact that there are people in this world who have careers where they don't get any grief from the world because the world just understands what they're putting out and people like it and they get paid for it and it's just it's a transaction that makes everybody happy.

[50] And so it's like opening a bakery where everyone loves the scones and, you know, it's just, it's, you know, there's just nothing bad about it.

[51] And yet, I find that, you know, as a, and this, you know, I'm sure you feel the same way.

[52] I can't stay merely in that lane because there are other topics of social importance that I feel in need to comment on.

[53] And so I have my podcast and public speaking or books or any other channel by which to do that.

[54] And, you know, mostly I'm doing my podcast for that.

[55] But so I still have a foot in the water of controversy.

[56] And I'm sure we'll get into some of those controversies here.

[57] but to have both is such a a source of sanity because I can I can just swim in whatever waters I want to swim in on a daily basis so it's quite wonderful so why do you just out of curiosity so while there's there's a substantial parallel I would say between the situation you're in and the situation that I'm in given what you just described.

[58] Because one of the reasons that I continue to tour continually, essentially, is because it's completely positive.

[59] And I engage in almost no political discussion, almost no culture war discussion.

[60] Almost all of it is, well, you talk about your waking up system.

[61] And I suppose I'm walking on a parallel line insofar as I'm encouraging people to aim up.

[62] And I don't know if there's any difference between waking up and aiming up.

[63] Perhaps there is, and we can talk about that.

[64] But it is a great relief to be in a domain that's entirely positive.

[65] And then, but then it is interleaved for me, as it is for you, with some degree of combat, let's say, on the more philosophical and culture war side of things.

[66] How, why have you concluded, Sometimes I wonder, Sam, if it wouldn't be just as well to stay in the positive domain all the time.

[67] And I know that you are no longer on Twitter, for example, and so that's obviously one of the places where you've detached yourself from the proliferation of, you might say, unnecessary and polarizing conflict.

[68] But you just did indicate that you feel either a moral obligation or an intellectual pull towards keeping abreast of the, domain of life that constitutes more problems.

[69] And so why do you think that balance is necessary?

[70] Why don't you forego that entirely and stay within the domain of the positive?

[71] I mean, you seem to have concluded that balancing them is actually better for you in some sense or maybe better in general.

[72] So why did you conclude that?

[73] Yeah, well, it's a question I continue to ask myself because, you know, you only have one life or you, you know, I would say you only have one life you can be sure of and so why not live it in the happiest manner possible um but i do find that there are certain moments first of all my interests are are wider than can be encompassed just by things like meditation and and narrowly focusing on on questions about how to live the the most meaningful possible life right it's not it's not all just about maximizing mental pleasure or even one's ethical wisdom moment to moment.

[74] There are just things that interest me that I want to talk about that really don't belong over waking up, but they do belong on my podcast.

[75] So talking about physics, say, right, that's just interesting and I like to do that.

[76] So there's that.

[77] As you say, I deleted my Twitter account, which is an important part of the answer to your first question of just what has gotten better for me in the last 12 months.

[78] That was, you know, I really am embarrassed to say what a life hack that turned out to be to get off Twitter.

[79] You know, we can talk about why I did if you want, but the net results has been almost unambiguously positive.

[80] I mean, there's a slight sense, you know, certainly when the things in the news are really heating up that I'm, I could be missing something or, you know, I'm not party to the conversation that's happening at that kind of interval, you know, where people are responding to things every, every 30 seconds.

[81] But the truth is, I don't have to be because, you know, what I have found is that when you don't have an opportunity to just blurt out your instantaneous response to something that's happening in the news or something you saw in your timeline, and you have to let that, let your response to it cure over the course of days, in my case, because, you know, I have to decide, okay, is this important?

[82] enough for me to actually talk about it on my podcast.

[83] And I might not be, you know, podcasting again for another three days or even a week.

[84] And so many things don't survive that test.

[85] You know, they just, they just, 98 % of things just fall by the wayside because the truth is you didn't have to broadcast your opinion about that thing that happened on that campus, you know, by that, you know, that indiscretion committed by that stupid blue -haired person, right?

[86] So it's just like you didn't have to weigh in and you didn't have to.

[87] to reap all of the attendant poison of having weighed in.

[88] And you didn't have to worry about whether you should respond to that poison and those misunderstandings generated there.

[89] And I noticed in retrospect that, and I dimly knew this when I was on Twitter, but I didn't fully appreciate it until I was off, that it was no exaggeration to say that basically every bad thing in my life, you know, apart from the sickness of the people close to me, was the result of something I had done on Twitter, or something that I had seen on Twitter.

[90] I can relate to that.

[91] That I felt I needed to respond to.

[92] So it was just this kind of hallucination machine that I had invited into the center of my life.

[93] And getting rid of it really modified my sense of, not just what I have to do on a day -to -day basis and what I should do, but just of my own existence, right?

[94] there was something about my digital existence that was claiming too much real estate in my conception of myself as a person, right?

[95] Well, you might have put your, you might have put your finger on it, at least to some degree there, with something like your observation about whether or not you're willing to put time into it.

[96] You know, I've had many discussions with my family about Twitter in particular.

[97] And I would tend to agree with you that much of the negativity that I do run into in my life is a consequence of Twitter.

[98] And so, now, I use Twitter to stay abreast of the sorts of things that you describe that you might be able to get access to on Twitter as well, current events.

[99] And there is that temptation to respond immediately.

[100] But you intimated that maybe a rule, a good rule of thumb, is something like, if you're not willing to sit down and think about it for an hour, let's say, then perhaps it's not important enough to share your opinion with millions of people and reap the consequential, well, and reap the consequences.

[101] You know, and Twitter is, although it's a social media platform that facilitates impulsivity, it's also a broad -scale publishing platform, and it's not obvious that you should be publishing all your instantaneous responses to cultural events.

[102] And it's a funny thing for me, because it's not that easy to dissociate that from responsibility.

[103] You know, I feel that I have a responsibility to bring to light, let's say, certain, elements of the culture war that are going on at a deep level.

[104] And part of the reason that I use Twitter the way that I do use it is to do that, but then it does have that problem of intense negativity.

[105] And I learned from walking through airports with my wife, we had this discussion a couple of times.

[106] Airports have bothered me a lot ever since 9 -11.

[107] I review them as they're like the, for me, they're the bleeding edge of the totalitarian incursion into general day -to -day life.

[108] And they've always made me very uncomfortable.

[109] I don't like lining up for the screenings, the theatrical screenings, and so forth.

[110] And that made me very bitchy and hard to get along with in airports.

[111] And, you know, I had a conversation with my wife, a fairly detailed conversation.

[112] And our decision was, if I'm in an airport and something happens that it annoys me but isn't important enough to actually sit down and write about, then I should, I have to just ignore it or shut up about it.

[113] And this has also helped me calibrate my responses.

[114] And it's the same problem with Twitter, right, is that something can be irritating and be genuinely irritating, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the most appropriate way to deal with it is to share your irritation in the moment.

[115] And part of the reason Twitter is so pathological, perhaps, and it's such a snake pit of polarization is because it does encourage that kind of impulsive and immediate response to things that are perhaps of sufficient seriousness so that they should only be taken seriously.

[116] Yeah, it encourages many things that I think are ultimately producing some consequential delusions for us individually and at scale.

[117] I mean, so it is, it provides provides a kind of an illusion of conversation because, you know, you'll tweet something at me, I'll tweet something at you, and we seem to be talking.

[118] But as you know, we're primarily talking in front of our respective audiences, which are largely different, right?

[119] So when I say something to you, you know, it's my audience is at my back and and vice versa.

[120] So so much communication becomes performative, and that starts to degrade the, you know, the kind of the good faith characteristics of a real conversation and people just wind up scoring points on each other and it is so it encourages that that's the kind of thing you know dunks are the kind of thing that tend to go viral um it selects for a kind of dishonesty like there's an ethic where you know there very few people feel a real need and certainly anyone who's any kind of activist politically left or right doesn't feel much of a need to really get their opponent's position correct before savaging it.

[121] They don't mind distorting it, especially if they can use clips of their opponent that have been artfully edited so as to make them seem to be saying something they weren't in fact saying in context.

[122] They will use that as a way of just smearing the person.

[123] You want to hold someone accountable for the worst possible version of what they might have said, however implausible it really is, as long as that can be made to stick.

[124] And people just see what can be made to stick, and they almost never go back and clean up their, you know, apologize for their errors and go back and clean up their mess.

[125] And people do this.

[126] You know, people, you know, when blue check marks meant something, there were a lot of blue check marks who would behave this way, right?

[127] And you have journalists or people who are treated as journalists.

[128] And I, you know, as a point of principle, really have always tried to avoid that.

[129] I mean, whenever I get somebody's views wrong.

[130] However odious I find their views or how odious I find them as a person, I, you know, I apologize for that and correct the record.

[131] But I found myself continually in dialogue with people who didn't play by those rules.

[132] So it's set up to bring out the worst in us and to, and to degrade conversation way more fully than it's ever degraded in person.

[133] I mean, the thing that convinced me to get off Twitter is that I was seeing people behave like psychopaths by the, you know, the tens of thousands.

[134] And I knew there couldn't be that many psychopaths, right?

[135] I knew there were, I knew these people couldn't be this dishonest or malicious in their lives.

[136] And in fact, in many cases, I knew this because I knew some of the people.

[137] I had had dinner with some of the people.

[138] You and I have, you know, have mutual friends and colleagues among these people.

[139] And yet I was seeing the absolute worst in them in terms of how they were engaging on Twitter, not just with me, but with other people who, you know, they felt they needed.

[140] to slam.

[141] I mean, we're seeing some of this.

[142] I mean, I think there's something like this happening.

[143] I haven't really followed it, but over the Daily Wire.

[144] I mean, you're very close to you.

[145] You've got Candace and Ben attacking each other.

[146] I would argue that that kind of thing is not only spilling out onto Twitter, it very likely wouldn't happen but for the existence of Twitter.

[147] And there are many things happening out in the real world that happened, in response to something that's seen on Twitter, but then the, you know, like some of the, many of these protests, these pro -Palestinian protests that, that have become so, such concern to many of us, especially on, you know, college campuses where you have otherwise very educated people expressing solidarity with, with, you know, true ethical monsters in Hamas.

[148] What we're seeing is something's getting provoked by imagery on Twitter, however half -baked and then the response to it in the streets is performative because it is it's meant for the streets but it's really meant to be broadcast back on Twitter right I mean that people wouldn't be doing these things but for the omnipresence of cell phones that can be broadcast back onto social media and so I just think we have built this reinforcement cycle for ourselves this kind of feed forward loop that has eroded our capacity to speak rationally to one another and to have good faith debates and even strong arguments.

[149] And it's produced a machine for amplifying the narcissistic tendency of everyone wanting to just manufacture outrage.

[150] Yeah, well, that's, well, you know, I think there's something, and you're pointing at this, think there's something that's that technically going on, particularly with Twitter.

[151] And maybe it's proportionate to the degree to which a social media communication system capitalizes on immediacy of response.

[152] Like, I'm afraid that we're setting up virtual environments.

[153] They're virtual perceptual environments and communication environments that aren't well -matched to the underlying reality, which means they're delusional.

[154] and the delusional direction of Twitter is in the direction of enabling psychopathic behavior.

[155] Now, there's a research literature that's emerging on that.

[156] So you see the people who are most likely to troll online, so to post things that they know perfectly well will do nothing but cause trouble.

[157] Are dark tetrad types.

[158] They're Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic.

[159] And then, so it does bring those people out of the woodwork to a much greater degree than might be otherwise expected.

[160] But I also think, as you pointed out, that it does the same thing to those fragmentary psychopathic tendencies that exist in everyone.

[161] It's a psychopathy facilitator.

[162] And the degree to which that is driving polarization in the broader culture is indeterminate, I think it might be driving almost.

[163] all of it.

[164] Right.

[165] Right.

[166] Because my online life and my real life are so different that they almost bear no relationship to one another.

[167] And I suspect this is something that you said you've been discovering particularly as a consequence of working in the waking up space.

[168] You know, I mean, all the interactions I have with people in public, in my actual life, are unbelievably positive, with the exception of perhaps one in five thousand.

[169] Now, the one in five thousand can be quite unpleasant, but it's statistically negligible.

[170] But if you derived your expectation of my experience from the online world, you'd expect that, you know, half the people that I ran into would be people that hated me. And simply, the lack of concordance is so remarkable that it does look like, it does look like the difference between a delusion and reality.

[171] I think it's unbelievably dangerous.

[172] We have no idea what it means to compress people to the point where their communication tilts heavily in the psychopathic direction.

[173] We have no idea what the broad -scale social consequences if that might be.

[174] Yeah, so I feel, so I share your experience.

[175] Again, my encounters in public are almost uniformly positive.

[176] I think the, obviously there's a possibility of a selection effect there that the only people who are likely to come up to you or the people have something nice to say, and then you have other people who are recognizing you who are just, you know, holding their tongues and they don't like you.

[177] And you know, we're both controversial figures.

[178] And I have to think that that some percentage of the people who notice us in public are people who are not fans and just don't say anything.

[179] But still, I've seen the effect, you know, I've joined the two groups.

[180] I know what it's like to deal with the same person on Twitter in front.

[181] of their fans versus over dinner and it's you know they're miles apart and i i just see there's um so it's so it is corrosive even when even in the best case when we're not talking about anonymous trolls who are hiding behind you know their anonymity and just savaging you there's a people with real reputations who you you actually know and and i will likely meet again in person And yet Twitter brings out the absolute worst in them.

[182] I mean, for me, the very large, the 800 -pound canary in the coal mine, for me, is Elon.

[183] I mean, look at what Twitter has done to Elon's life, right?

[184] It's just, you know, Elon used to be a friend.

[185] You know, he's somebody I knew reasonably well.

[186] You know, his engagement with Twitter has been catastrophic for him as a person from my point of view.

[187] It's clearly a compulsion.

[188] I mean, he was so addicted to it that he felt he needed to buy the platform.

[189] But it is a, you know, his use of it has been so irresponsible and produced such, I mean, forget about the harm he's produced in other people's lives.

[190] And nothing I'm saying now relates to changes he's made to the platform.

[191] I mean, that's a separate thing that we can talk about.

[192] You know, I've always been agnostic as to whether or not he could actually.

[193] improve Twitter as a platform, and he may yet wind up doing that.

[194] But I'm just talking about the way he has personally used it as a user of the platform and the way he's interacted with people and signal boosted massively the profiles of anonymous Q &on lunatic trolls, right?

[195] I mean, he's been completely cavalier in who he interacts with, all the while knowing that anyone he boosts suddenly gets, you know, a million followers and has a platform that they otherwise couldn't imagine having.

[196] So I look at him and I think, okay, if someone of his talent who has so many other good things to do with his 24 hours in any given day, is this derailed by this platform?

[197] You know, is this, is using it this compulsively to the obvious degradation of his reputation in most circles that count, right?

[198] I mean, he's, you know, he's not, he, he can't be canceled because he's produced so many useful things, you know, and he's just too embedded with things that everyone still wants.

[199] But man, if he, if he were a little less productive, you know, in space and on the ground, we would never, you know, he'd be, he'd be the next Alex Jones in terms of the way mainstream culture would view him.

[200] And it's been terrible to see, right?

[201] It's been very depressing to see.

[202] So, and I, you know, I guess I can blame him, but I blame the stimulus more.

[203] I blame Twitter.

[204] I blame, I mean, for whatever reason, he has found this to be the most addictive thing in his life.

[205] And he's been willing to, totally torch relationships over his use of it.

[206] Yeah, well, it's definitely the case that one of the cardinal dangers of Twitter is its propensity to bring out the worst in people and the worst in the culture.

[207] I mean, I guess it's an open question whether or not Musk's takeover of Twitter will result in the dramatic improvements to the platform that might justify the risk inherent in engaging with it.

[208] So let's leave that a bit, Sam.

[209] I want to turn my attention, our attention, if you don't mind, to some of the deeper issues that you and I have discussed.

[210] And I have a bunch of questions for you.

[211] So the first thing I want to do is clarify something.

[212] My recollection of particularly our last conversation, and it was one that I found clarified my understanding of your thought to a greater degree than our previous conversations I had, we had, probably because I listened to you more, was that, and so.

[213] So correct me if I get this wrong, because I want to use it as a platform to ask you some other questions.

[214] My understanding after that conversation was that you were driven to search for an objective foundation for moral claims, primarily because you had become convinced of the existence of, for lack of a better term, of evil in the world.

[215] and we're looking for a solid ground to stand on in your attempts to both understand and combat the most malevolent proclivities of the most malevolent proclivities.

[216] We could leave it at that.

[217] Now, is that a reasonable, is that a reasonable conclusion?

[218] Have I got that right?

[219] Yeah, I think my motive will be pretty familiar to you.

[220] This came largely out of the collisions I was having with people after I wrote my first two books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, where I was noticing, you know, disproportionately on the left, specifically, I mean, we've come full circle now to this moment, you know, in the news cycle.

[221] But, you know, mostly in response to my criticism of Islamic extremism and, you know, the kind of the urgency with which I was saying that, The Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are sincerely believed by millions of people and these beliefs have real consequences in the world and they're not good ones, right?

[222] And we should talk about that honestly.

[223] What I was getting mostly from the left was what struck me as pure masochistic delusion, but it was on its own side a very sophisticated philosophy of postmodernist truth claims about the relativity of everything.

[224] which in the minds of its adherence left us with no solid ground to stand on ever when making claims about right and wrong and good and evil.

[225] So, you know, I mean, the point where it became, and this is something that I, this is actually a scene, I wrote verbatim in my third book, The Moral Landscape, which is where I laid out my argument on this topic.

[226] I was at the Salk Institute at a conference that had been organized.

[227] It was either in 2006 or seven, I believe.

[228] And I had said something disparaging about the Taliban in my remarks about, you know, the relationship between moral values and and our growing scientific understanding of the human mind and human well -being.

[229] And I said, you know, something, you know, that I should have been uncontroversial in that context.

[230] And I'm at the Salk Institute, this, you know, preeminent scientific institution.

[231] down in La Jolla, which is one of the nicest places on Earth.

[232] And, you know, with an auditorium filled with, you know, well -heeled people who are here to be enjoying their political freedom and their freedom of speech and freedom of everything.

[233] And I said something about, well, you know, we just know, whatever remains to be discovered about the nature of morality and human value and human well -being.

[234] being, we know that the Taliban don't have it perfectly.

[235] Right.

[236] So whatever the optimal way of living is, we know that the Taliban haven't found it.

[237] We know that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out is not an optimal strategy for maximizing human well -being.

[238] And then a woman academic, and she actually happened to be, or it was later, a scientific advisor to President Obama for medical ethics came up to me and so we that's just your opinion right and so then this this this led me to to realize just how far the rot had spread you know that even here here is someone who is you know a woman academic uh who's enjoying all the freedom of of you know however hard one uh they can be found in western society uh presumably this a person who would be, who would have responded to the, to the Me Too movement and all its moral urgency with, with alacrity, he was still open -minded, at least in the context of talking to me about the treatment of women and girls under the Taliban, right?

[239] And I, you know, I, I, detail our further conversation, again, verbatim in my book, because I literally, I was so astounded by the exchange that I turned on my heels, literally in mid -sentence, walked straight back to my room and wrote down exactly what the two of us had said, because I just could not believe what had happened.

[240] So the moral confusion here is that you have many well -educated people who will make very fine -grained distinctions about moral norms in the context of living in 21st century America.

[241] you know, they'll consider words to be violence and, you know, the misgendering of people to be a profound microaggression, you know, Halloween costumes that culturally appropriate, etc., etc. are anathema.

[242] This is how finally calibrated their moral scruples are over here, you know, in the quad of an American university.

[243] But you ask them to consider whether, you know, someone like Malala Yusufzai was, badly treated by the Taliban and they become tongue -tied and they will even say things like, well, who are we to criticize in ancient culture?

[244] So anyway, so that motivated me to say all right, the smartest most well -educated people in our society have become unmoored to any vision of objective moral values, right?

[245] They have, you know, worse, they have it, they have become anchored to a belief that objectivity with respect to moral values is impossible, and certainly science will never have anything to say about it.

[246] And so they've ceded this ground to dogmatic religion, right?

[247] And someone like Stephen Jay Gould did this when he had this conception of the non -overlapping magisteria between religion and science, right?

[248] So science talks about facts and what is, but religion talks about what should be and the totality of human values.

[249] And I think that's never been a tenable way of dividing the pie, but has this obvious defect that, where people who lose their religious convictions are then left standing on apparently nothing when it comes time to say something like slavery is wrong.

[250] I mean, you literally have professors saying, well, you know, I don't like slavery.

[251] I don't happen to like it.

[252] I wouldn't want a slave.

[253] But, you know, I can't, you know, I can't really say it's wrong from the point of view of the universe, right?

[254] I mean, it's that's not that's not what science does and my point is that morality and this is perhaps something you're going to want to disagree with but in my view morality morality has to relate to the the suffering and well -being of conscious creatures i mean not even limiting it to humans but just whatever can possibly suffer or be made happy in this universe is some is a possible theater of moral concern.

[255] And we know that conscious minds must be arising in some way in conformity to the laws of nature.

[256] I mean, so whatever is possible for conscious minds is a statement about at bottom a final scientific understanding of what minds are and what consciousness is and how those things are integrated with the physics of things.

[257] And so there have to be right answers to the question of how to navigate from the worst possible suffering for everyone to places on the moral landscape that are quite a bit better than that, where there's beauty and creativity and joy of a sort that we can only dimly imagine.

[258] And the question of how to do that and what that landscape looks like, those are, it's a fact -based discussion about science at every level that could be relevant to the conscious states of conscious minds.

[259] So it's a statement, it's a discussion, about genetics and psychology and neurobiology and sociology and economics and any and sciences as yet uninvented with respect to causality in this place.

[260] And so that's, that's my argument that there's, we need a, we need a spirit of conciliance across this, this, this, this, this, this, the domain of facts and values.

[261] And yeah, there's more to say there, but I'll, I'll stop.

[262] Okay.

[263] Well, okay.

[264] Well, so I'm going to, I'm going to pick up a couple of themes there.

[265] So one of the things that you pointed to was the incoherence manifested by this woman and like people in relationship to micro -narratives and macro -narratives.

[266] So you said that it was, in your opinion, that she or the people who she might represent would be perfectly willing to be upset about some relatively minor issue that might arise on a university campus, like the wearing of inappropriate Halloween costumes, but are incoherent in relationship to making broader scale moral claims.

[267] Now, one of the claims of the postmodernists, this was put forward most particularly by, who was it now, who said that there were no metanarratives, the postmodernism is fundamentally disallowance of the idea that any uniting metanarratives are possible.

[268] I'll remember his name momentarily.

[269] It could be Derrida or Foucault or...

[270] Yeah, no, it's not.

[271] He's the guy who generated simulation theory, another Frenchman.

[272] No. Boudreard?

[273] It's a Rogreyard.

[274] Yeah, Boudriard.

[275] It's a rogue gallery.

[276] Yeah, yeah, it's Baudreard.

[277] Okay, so here's the problem with that.

[278] Well, the problem with that, in part, is that there's no united action and perception at any level without a uniting narrative.

[279] So, for example, if I just move, if I pick up a glass to move a cup from the table to my lips, I have to organize all those extraordinarily complex actions, right, which cascade up from the molecular level through the musculature of my body.

[280] I have to organize that into something that's coherent and unified in order to bring about any action whatsoever.

[281] And what that implies is that there's a hierarchy of uniting structure.

[282] And what the postmodernists do is arbitrarily make that halt at a certain level.

[283] So you're allowed a uniting narrative or structure up to a certain level, but beyond that, you're not allowed it at all.

[284] And that's the point at which the meta -narrative emerges.

[285] And those are now forbidden.

[286] And I don't understand that because I think that it's an a distinction between a narrative and a meta narrative is a it's an arbitrary distinction and you can't attend or act without a uniting narrative so now you're you seem to be pointing to something like that so let me walk through your argument you point out to the tell a man I'll add one other which I think is a simpler defeater which is that they the claim is that there can be no universal value right and a universal truth claim for the respect to right and wrong and good and evil and yet they tacitly make the universal claim that tolerance of this ethical diversity is better than intolerance right so so there so the demand is we need to tolerate we need to find some space in our minds to tolerate the difference of opinion offered by the Taliban or Hamas or some other some other group of that sort but that doesn't make any sense that's that's an appeal to tolerance one that they you know the the Taliban and Hamas don't share right so we're tolerating their intolerance but it's it's also the tacit claim that tolerance is better you know tolerance on our own side is the united narratives yeah sure yeah well you see the same thing with the postmodern insistence this is particularly true of people like Foucault that nothing rules but power, right?

[287] Because Foucault saw power making itself manifest everywhere.

[288] And the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there's no uniting meta -narratives, but that didn't stop the post -modernists for a second in making the claim that you could find power relations underlying every single form of human action and social interaction.

[289] So, but this, now this meta -net, this uniting narrative, see, you point to it in a way that I think that, that, that, points out to me a very fundamental element of agreement between the positions that you and I have taken, even though we've had so much apparent disagreement, you point to the Taliban and you say, at minimum, we can say with some degree of certainty that what the Taliban are doing is not optimal.

[290] Okay, and you said that's a claim that's so weak in a way that it should just be self -evident, right?

[291] You know what I mean by weak?

[292] It's like, isn't that obvious?

[293] Well, you know, I started in my investigations at a more extreme point, I would say.

[294] I looked at the camp guard in Auschwitz who enjoyed his work and thought, I don't know what good is, but at minimum, it's the opposite of whatever the hell that is.

[295] And so that was a starting point for me, and it seems to me that partly what you're doing is that you put your foot firmly on the head of evil.

[296] say, well, this is a starting point, and even though we can't define good, we can define it as the opposite of whatever this is.

[297] And so does that seem like a reasonable point of agreement between us as far as you're concerned?

[298] Yeah, although I think this is perhaps a different topic, but it certainly adjacent to what you just said.

[299] I think there's some ethical paradoxes here which would be interesting to consider, because I think most of human evil of the sort of that you and I are now describing doesn't require the presence of actually evil people, right?

[300] I think there are evil people.

[301] I think there are true psychopaths and sadists who, for whom it's, you know, it is true to say that if evil means anything, it should be applied to their their conscious states and their psychology.

[302] But so much of what we consider to be evil, and so much of what produces needless human misery is the result of otherwise normal people psychologically behaving terribly because they believe fairly crazy and unsupportable things about what reality is and how they should live within it so I would by no means ever want to suggest in fact I'm at pains to say otherwise whenever I can remember to that all jihadists or even most jihadists or all Nazis or even most Nazis are psychopaths right I mean the horror of these beliefs systems is that they is not that they act like bug lights for the world psychopaths and you and you attract a lot of people who would be doing terrible things anyway and they just they just happen to start doing it in this new context let's say under the Islamic state um no you you certain ideologies attract totally normal people who would otherwise be totally recognizable to us psychologically and socially as good normal people but for the fact that they be convinced they got convinced that, you know, of whatever the relevant dogma is, you know, in the case of, yeah.

[303] Okay, well, so I would say that's another point of agreement.

[304] We, we, it seems to me that, that the pathological, the systems that produce rapid movement towards social and psychological pathology both facilitate psychopathic behavior and attract the psychopaths.

[305] I would say it's both of those.

[306] You can have both of those operating at the same.

[307] time right and so then what we have our people we have systems of ideas working in the background and those systems of ideas draw people into their orbit and motivate them to do things that under the influence of other systems of ideas they might not be inclined to do seem reasonable yeah yeah and also i just note in pet me you might want to leave this aside but you know your description of a a guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work, I think it's tempting to imagine that that guard is incapable of all the ordinary forms of happiness and life satisfaction that we would recognize in ourselves because of what he is spending his time doing.

[308] And I would say that's obviously not the case.

[309] I mean, so the, and there can be virtues expressed toward evil ends.

[310] I mean, just, just unpack the meaning of that phrase, they guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work, right?

[311] So, like, there's the, do you know the, I think it's just called the Auschwitz album?

[312] Did you ever see these photographs that were taken?

[313] They were found in an attic.

[314] I mean, it's one of the most amazing documents.

[315] Nostalgia for Auschwitz, yes, that's for sure.

[316] Yeah, absolutely.

[317] Well, and I think your insistence that we can, merely write off that pathological behavior as a manifestation of a kind of a human psychopathy is extraordinarily important, right?

[318] Because we have to contend with the fact that these systems of ideas are capable of, I think, possessing is the best metaphor, and that's something I want to get into you with you, that those systems of ideas are capable of possessing people who are in no way indistinguishable from the normal, from normal people.

[319] And sometimes not indistinguishable from people with all sorts of laudatory traits.

[320] I think you mean not distinguishable.

[321] You said indistinguishable.

[322] Sorry, not just yes, yes, yes, yes.

[323] Yeah.

[324] But I would just add one, sorry to keep derailing you, Jordan, but I would just add one more piece here is that one thing that suggests is that mental pleasure though it is often taken as a sign of the kind of moral rightness of our current preoccupation isn't such a sign.

[325] I mean, there's such a thing as pathological ecstasy, right?

[326] You can feel blith and rapture.

[327] Cadism is a great example of that.

[328] Yeah.

[329] And so I would just say that there, so you can imagine the suicide bomber before he detonates his bomb if he's, if like many of them, he's doing that, with the sincere expectation that in the next moment he will be in paradise, there is a kind of exaltation and even self -transcending quasi -spiritual positive affect there, that you just have to grant that the human mind is capable of being pointed in the wrong direction ethically and feel very good about it.

[330] Well, positive emotion of the incentive kind, mediated by dopamine, is associated with movement towards a positive goal.

[331] And so what that means is that false goal produces false enthusiasm, false goals produce false enthusiasm, essentially by definition, right?

[332] And so that's actually, by the way, as far as I can tell, the moral of the story of the Tower of Babel, by the way, is that you can build pyramidal.

[333] structures that reach to the sky that are predicated upon either false goals or false assumptions and the consequence of that is the creation of a state of disunity and misery so comprehensive that people can no longer communicate with one another.

[334] So now these systems, Sam, the reason I brought this up in part is because my meditations on the influence of systems of ideas, I thought about these as systems of animating ideas, that I saw a very strong concordance between the action of systems of animating ideas and archetypes.

[335] And so that's why I started to become interested in archetypes.

[336] And so I would say that the one way of conceptualizing the possession, the ideas that possess people that motivate them in a pathological direction, is that they're possessed by ideas that are archetypally evil.

[337] And so here's the question I have for you.

[338] And my sense is that you, and this is the same as Richard Dawkins, is that you guys identify the spirit that motivates people to act in a pathological direction, the Taliban.

[339] You identify that with the religious, with the religious, religious impulse.

[340] Now, is that a fair characterization?

[341] Well, I would say that it's not exclusively religious, but insofar as it is religious, it gets even more leverage in that context and to worse end.

[342] So, for instance, you know, what is worse about jihadism than, you know, ordinary forms of terrorism, in my view?

[343] It is the religious top spin it has based on the the, it's motivating ideas.

[344] So the fact that it is, is in principle otherworldly, the fact that it is, you know, just anchored to prophecy and belief in the supernatural, all of that potentiates it in the, you know, further in the wrong direction.

[345] So, like, you know, the troubles in Ireland would have been made worse had the Irish Catholics also been suicide bombers expecting to go straight to heaven because there was a passage in the New Testament which said, you know, if you die while killing pagans or Jews or any other non -Christian, you'll find yourself at the right hand of Christ in the next moment, right?

[346] So like that, like, it's better that there's not a passage like that in the New Testament.

[347] And it's better that that, that, you know, quasi -religious, political, source of terrorism in the UK was not potentiated by a clear connection to religious belief and religious expectation.

[348] Okay, so your claim is something like the possibility of religious justification for an unethical act has the side effect of elevating the status of the claim to morality associated with that evil act to the highest place.

[349] So let me put that in context.

[350] So there's a injunction in the Ten Commandments.

[351] It's either the Second or Third Commandment, I can't remember which, that you're not to use the Lord's name in vain.

[352] And it's the same injunction that pops up a couple of times in the Gospels where Christ tells his followers to not pray.

[353] in public and to not be like the Pharisees where their good deeds can be seen in public.

[354] And so the first, the first injunction, the commandment, is pointing out a deadly sin.

[355] And the sin is to claim to be acting in the name of what is most high when all you're actually doing is pursuing either your own motivations or even worse, your worst possible motivation.

[356] and your claim seems to be that the intrusion of religious thought into the ethical domain allows for those claims to be put forward, thus magnifying their dangers.

[357] Is that a reasonable way of putting it?

[358] Well, I think it depends on the specific instance we're talking about, but I think what I'm saying is even more pessimistic than that, It's that given the requisite beliefs, it's possible to create immense harm consciously, create immense harm without even having bad intentions toward anyone.

[359] I mean, it's not that your bad intentions and your hatred of others somehow gets a sacred framing by religion.

[360] I mean, that also happens, and that's a problem.

[361] But in the worst case, you can actually be feeling compassion while creating terrible harms, right?

[362] Like, you can feel nothing, certainly no ill will at all for the people you're killing.

[363] So, I mean, to take the extreme case, there are cases where jihadists have blown up crowds of children, you know, Muslim children on purpose for a variety of reasons.

[364] I mean, there were cases in, you know, where they were, there were Western soldiers handing out candy to crowds of children in the war, during the war in Iraq at one point.

[365] And, you know, a suicide bomber would blow that whole scene up.

[366] And the whole point is, I saw the point is manifold, but it's obviously to kill the soldiers and produce those casualties.

[367] But it's also just to create the horror and apparent untenability of the whole project in Iraq, right?

[368] It's just like, well, this is, these are people who are going to blow up their own children.

[369] What possible good could we do here trying to build a nation?

[370] Okay, okay.

[371] But just to close a loop there, I'm not, I'm not imagining that the people who did that actually hated the children, right?

[372] They just believe, they believe that there's absolutely no possibility of making immoral error here because the children, they know, are going to go straight to paradise.

[373] They've actually done the children a favor.

[374] by the light of their beliefs.

[375] Yeah, okay, so I'm perfectly willing to accept that modification.

[376] So you're basically saying that not only can you use the most high as a justification for your actions, and as a consequence produce all the terrible dangers that are associated with that, but that that can actually twist your moral compass so that acts that are truly highness are seen as manifestations of what's, best.

[377] Okay, so here's the problem, as far as I see it, Sam, the contradiction here that I'm trying to work out is that on the one hand, we have this situation where if there is no reference to a higher good or a lower evil, because I'm going to assume those are basically the same thing, you end up in a situation where you can't do anything but take a postmodernist stance in the face of, let's say, the Hamas atrocities or the atrocities of the Taliban or the atrocities of Auschwitz, because there's nothing higher to point to against which to contrast those patterns of endeavor.

[378] But if you do posit something that's of the highest, then you run into the problem, whereas you just pointed out that you can use your hypothetical alliance with what is now deemed to be highest, to justify your own evil actions, but also to skew your moral sentiments so that you take positive pleasure in the, let's say, in the suffering of others, even the suffering of innocent children.

[379] So, but now, on the one hand, if you drop the notion of the highest good, you end up in the morassive moral relativism.

[380] And on the other hand, if you accept it, then you end up in a situation where you can justify the worst behavior.

[381] in reference to the highest possible good.

[382] Is that a reasonable portrayal of the, of a conundrum?

[383] I don't find it.

[384] I think that's a needle that we can easily thread.

[385] And so the way I would do it is just to say that there's obviously higher good, and it's also obvious that we don't know, we don't fully know its character, right?

[386] So that, like, we know that things can get better.

[387] They can get quite a bit better and quite a bit worse.

[388] And we know that better and worse, maybe that's as multi -dimensional as you want it to be, right?

[389] There's not just one, it's not just a matter of more pleasure, say.

[390] It's not just a matter of more physical health.

[391] It's not just a matter of more love.

[392] It's not just a matter of more.

[393] So we can, you know, extend your list of desirable things as long as you want.

[394] But we know that this universe, offers, in the space of all possible minds and all possible experiences, there are places of unimaginable suffering and without any silver lining, there's no good that ever comes of it.

[395] It's just a functional hell, right?

[396] We know, even within the context, and conversely, we know that there's just experiences of...

[397] of beauty and creativity and inspiration and love and gratitude that we, you know, those of us who have had them, you know, either in meditation or on psychedelics or in other peak moments in life, you know, we just find ourselves tongue -tied in the aftermath trying to capture what was going on there.

[398] So we know that these extremes exist.

[399] We know that there are things that we can do individually and together to maximize the likelihood of one versus the other.

[400] And so if good means anything, if right and wrong mean anything, it means navigating into this space of better and better possibilities, or not just individually, but together.

[401] And so what I would say is that we don't need to know exactly what the highest possible good is.

[402] We just have to know directionally that it's, you know, the implications of moving right, left up or up or down, right?

[403] So if I told you, well, there's a button we could press now.

[404] We have a new technology.

[405] It's a button you can press that makes some, excuse me, we'll just make everyone on Earth a little less happy, right?

[406] With nothing good ever comes.

[407] There's no silver line to this.

[408] It's just everyone just gets a little crankier, a little dimmer, a little less satisfied, a little less creative, a little less appreciative of their good fortune.

[409] You just go down the list and we just decrement all the good things just by a little, right?

[410] Now, we just know that it would be bad to press that button, right?

[411] That would be a bad thing to do.

[412] If we could engineer some neurotoxin to spread all over the world that would make people a little bit less good in all kinds of ways and a little bit less happy, a little bit less intelligent, a little bit less creative, okay, that would be a bad thing, right, directionally, right?

[413] And we don't have to know the ultimate negativity or the ultimate positivity.

[414] We don't have to know just how good human life could ultimately get without any possible residue of, improvement.

[415] We just know directionally that, you know, from where we stand, the Taliban are making things quite a bit worse, even though they think they're making them better, right?

[416] So, like, we know that it's possible to look at a specific human project, right, standing on the outside of it, and say, okay, these people don't know what they're missing, right?

[417] And by extrapolation, we know that there must be someplace to stand to look at our current projects, by which it would be valid to say, okay, these people, you know, now talking about you and me and all of our most enlightened friends, these people don't know what they're missing, right?

[418] There's something, there are things that they could be taught, that they could learn, technologies that they could invent, intuitions that they could suddenly have, epiphanies that they could have, that would orient them in a direction that would be propitious, that would make things better in ways that they have not even begun to imagine, right?

[419] And so I think that the horizons into which we need to press, again, individually and collectively, so as to make those ethical and psychological discoveries, they're all, you know, they're all around us.

[420] Again, this is a multivariate landscape, but I just think we don't need to know what the perfect looks like or even that the perfect exists to know directionally that claims about better and what.

[421] worse are real and that they matter.

[422] Okay.

[423] Okay.

[424] Okay.

[425] So let me take you up on that because I'm having, now I'm having a hard time distinguishing some of your claims from what I would regard as fundamental religious claims.

[426] So let me ask you a couple.

[427] And I'm not, I said, you know, I'm trying to make things clear.

[428] I'm not trying to push you into a corner.

[429] I don't want to do that at all.

[430] So I actually think that we agree on a lot more than we disagree on and that we've come to very similar conclusions from very different directions.

[431] Okay, so let me ask you this.

[432] So, you know, there's this medieval idea that God is the sum of all good.

[433] And I don't think some is the right qualifier.

[434] I want to ask your opinion about this.

[435] You listed, you made two claims in your last speech, in your last bout of response.

[436] I think one claim was that.

[437] that you listed a variety of attributes that were morally good.

[438] And then you made the claim that even if we don't know what the good is in the final analysis, we do have a strong sense of directionality.

[439] And so one of the things I've suggested to my audiences, for example, is that there are some things that you are doing, and you don't know whether they're bad or good.

[440] So you can just leave those in abeyance for the time being.

[441] But there is a subset of things that you're doing that you know full well are not to be done, that you could stop doing, and you could just stop doing them and see what happens.

[442] And I've never met anyone who doesn't have some knowledge of that latter category, right?

[443] You said you had it, for example, with Twitter.

[444] You know, you noticed that consists.

[445] Okay, so, all right.

[446] let's go after the first claim that you made you listed positive attributes so i might say that do you believe that there is a implicit unity underneath a list of positive moral attributes so that if you took beauty truth love gratitude you'd mentioned love and gratitude for example and beauty if you if I said well is there something in common that unites beauty truth love and gratitude what and it wouldn't be the sum right it's more like the gist it's more like the essence it's the commonality of goods that like and it seems to me sam that merely the fact that you can use a category like good or bad or good and evil within the category of good are things united by their participation in the good.

[447] And so is there anything about that claim that you find off -putting?

[448] Well, I would, there's some analogies we could use to capture it.

[449] I do think of these things as almost facets of a single jewel, right?

[450] And so the facets are different.

[451] It's talking about, you can talk about beauty and not talk about love in the same conversation.

[452] And you can have a coherent discussion of beauty without reference to love.

[453] and vice versa.

[454] But when you're talking about the conscious states that maximize one's appreciation of all of these things and participation in all of these things, it's easy to intuit that there's a common structure to the whole picture.

[455] And so, yeah, so a jewel with its facets is one analogy I would use.

[456] But I would also, but just, but I want to subvert that for a second because I, you know, my view of the moral landscape is that, it's very likely a landscape with multiple peaks, right, and multiple valleys.

[457] And so this can sound like moral relativism in the sense that, you know, you and I might be, you know, climbing the same peak over here as homo sapiens in a, you know, Western 21st century context.

[458] But, you know, at some great distance from ourselves, there are possible minds and perhaps even real minds that, you know, could exist in another galaxy or, or, or, you know, that we could create, you know, artificially, et cetera, that are organized on very different principles and yet have conscious states that admit of, again, right and wrong answers with respect to the variables of suffering and well -being, you know, and you can conceive of those as capaciously as you want.

[459] But there could be possibilities of happiness and creativity and amazement that we can't imagine because we don't have the requisite minds, right?

[460] Like there's just nothing about our current minds or even the likely path we're going to take when we augment our minds technologically or genetically in the future.

[461] We're just going to miss these spots on the landscape and yet these landscapes, these spots have the same peak and valley structure.

[462] And there could be peaks that if we were more omniscient than we are or ever going to be, we would be able to compare these two peaks and say that it's better to be, you know, one is higher than the other with respect to certain variables.

[463] Which is, I just don't think it's all random.

[464] I think there is structure there among possible experiences, given whatever the natural laws are that determine the nature of experience in this or any universe.

[465] But the most relevant thing for us is what does our local, region look like?

[466] What is an obvious mode of dissent into pointless horror for us?

[467] And how do we avoid that?

[468] And what is an obvious local peak that we should be aspiring to get to?

[469] But even this analogy begets some troubling possibilities, which I take as at least potentially real, which is that it could be true to say that there is an adjacent peak to the one we're currently climbing, which is quite a bit better than the one we're attempting to climb, quite a bit higher with respect to well -being and insight and creativity and everything, every other good thing.

[470] But the only way to reach it from where we currently stand is to descend into some valley that's quite a bit worse in order to climb that adjacent peak.

[471] That at least is, you know, I'm not recommending that we spend a ton of time thinking about that, but that's at least conceivable to me. No, I think we could, I think we could, spend a fair bit of time thinking about that.

[472] So, you know, there's, well, there's a line of mythological speculation that's very tightly in keeping with the process and the vision that you just laid out.

[473] Okay, so first of all, you made the case that you used the metaphor of a jewel, and then you said, I would rephrase, I'm going to recast this in somewhat symbolic terms, and you can if this is a metaphor that captures what you were expressing.

[474] You could imagine that there are jewels of a beauty and value that are as of yet unknown to us, right?

[475] So we could agree that there is a unity of good that's transcendent and ineffable, and that the goods that we see arrayed in front of us are proximal echoes of that ultimate vision.

[476] now your point is that now and then we may be somewhat diluted in the specifics of what we're pursuing and that might blind us to a higher order transcendent reality then you also added an additional twist which is well maybe now and then a dissent is necessary in order to make the next ascent possible okay so a couple of things on that so there's an old alchemical idea by the way that the philosopher's stone is a jewel in a toad's head.

[477] And the idea there, yeah, well, the idea there was that, and this is one of the central alchemical dicta, by the way, it's insterquilinus invinator, which means roughly in filth that will be found, or to elaborate slightly, means that that which you most need will be found where you least want to look.

[478] And that's a reflection of the idea that you had that now and then, to get to the next pinnacle, there has to be a dissent.

[479] Now, that's associated with something even more fundamental.

[480] So there's also, of course, you know this idea is central to hero mythology that dragons hoard treasure and that the larger the dragon, the larger the treasure.

[481] And the idea there is that the more daunting the unknown territory that you are presuming to traverse, the more possibility there is for discovery and that the proper attitude is therefore the one that enables you to encounter that source of unknown wisdom in the most forthright and courageous manner possible and so then that there's a variantal not too which is that let's see how would I put this is that the most valid source of the most valid pathway towards discovering that jewel beyond compare is a pathway that's marked out by the voluntary willingness to confront suffering and malevolence in all of its forms.

[482] Now at that point these ideas to me these ideas start to become indistinguishable from religious presuppositions and so So there's a dovetailing here.

[483] I mean, you are hypothesizing that what's good has the metaphoric quality of a jewel.

[484] It's multifaceted, and the things that it reflects are more tangible experiential phenomena like beauty, truth, love, gratitude.

[485] They're all reflections of a higher order good.

[486] You made the case that that higher order good may be higher order to the point where in its extreme, for extreme forms it's ineffable right it's beyond our ability to comprehend and describe you made the case that we may be able to approach that in something approximating fits and starts and some of those fits and starts may involve a dissent well the religious injunction you see this in psychotherapy too is that the dissents that are the precondition for a more profound assent have to be undertaken voluntarily right because you see this in exposure therapy for example you know if people are stressed accidentally by something that they're phobic of, their phobia gets worse.

[487] Right.

[488] But if they voluntarily expose themselves to the stressor, then their bravery grows and their fear decreases in a commensurate manner.

[489] So one of the things that I've been, well, so I guess the first thing I'm going to do is ask you what you think about that.

[490] So there is a, here's another example.

[491] Sam, you tell me what you think about this.

[492] So there's a story, this is derived from the tales of King Arthur and the knights of the round table.

[493] So King Arthur is sitting with all the knights at the round table, and they decide they're going to go look for the Holy Grail.

[494] And the Holy Grail is the container of the ever replenishing liquid.

[495] That's a good way of thinking about it.

[496] So it's either the glass that Christ uses to represent his blood at the Last Supper, or it's goblet that catches his blood on the cross.

[497] That's the background story.

[498] Now, of course, the knights of the round table and King Arthur have no idea if the Holy Grail exists, which is a reference to its ineffability, let's say, or of where it's possibly located.

[499] And so each knight leaves the round table and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him.

[500] And that's where the quest begins.

[501] And so there is an idea lurking in these stories that if you want to envision that jewel, the metaphoric jewel that you described, then the pathway to that is through the darkness.

[502] Now, you also said, and you correct me if I'm wrong about this, that your journey to whatever enlightenment you've managed to find and distribute was a consequence.

[503] of, in some ways, of entering the forest at the darkest possible point.

[504] I mean, you were grappling with the problem of evil and looking for a solution to that.

[505] Is that, and is it not possible that that's a reflection of this underlying idea, that it is the case that you retool your conceptions of morality itself by contending with the things that most trouble and, that are most troubling and distressful, be tragedy and malevolence, the things that are in that realm.

[506] Does any of that seem reasonable to you?

[507] Yeah, so you raise a few separate points there.

[508] So first, on the notion of exposure therapy being an example of a descent into a valley so that you can ascend some other peak.

[509] So I think that, speaking individually for a person doing that, that sounds totally plausible to me. There are all kinds of things we do that make us uncomfortable, but under a larger framing, we understand that they're good for us and they're leading us to grow in ways that we'll that will redound to our advantage in the future.

[510] So, yeah, so that's a, there are dozens of things that people do and should do that make them less than comfortable in the present, but they're nevertheless good for them, you know, whether it's a medical treatment or it's just getting in good shape or dieting or whatever it is, right?

[511] So there's that.

[512] The place where I break from religion, I mean, certainly a religion like Christianity or Judaism or Islam, it's just in the, it's on many points, but the crucial point is just on the claims about the unique sanctity and divine origin of specific books, right?

[513] I mean, the moment you're going to talk about all books as the products of human creativity and ingenuity, then they're all, then we're just talking about the utility of specific books and specific ideas in, in whatever context, you know, attracts our interest.

[514] And so we can talk about the Bible, we can talk about the Quran, we can talk about the wisdom to be found in those, in those books.

[515] And we also can talk about the barbaric injunctions that we want to ignore in those books.

[516] And we must talk, we must evaluate the wisdom or the, or the barbarousness from, but by using our own 21st century intuitions about what constitutes wisdom now, given all the challenges we face and what constitutes obvious barbarism that we want to leave behind us.

[517] And so the crucial, the thing that makes me an atheist from a Christian point of view or a Muslim point of view is that I am unpersuaded by the textual claims that anchor those two faiths and that any real adherent to those two faiths has to make, in my view, and in the views of most, you know, adherence.

[518] And, but I would totally grant you that there are great stories in, you know, in a thousand different books that we might want to use, uh, to, uh, inspire us to be wiser than we tend to be, right?

[519] So you know, the, the King Arthur literature, that's, it seems totally worthy of our attention and there are there are many other good good sources on that's on that particular shelf but no one is taking the king or no one no one is uh practicing suicide bombing or uh fully deranging their politics over their close reading of the the king arthur material right But it's just the literature is not doing that kind of mad work for us.

[520] And I think that's a good thing.

[521] And so I want to live in a world where we recognize that all we have communally is the possibility of having a conversation that can be more or less persuasive, more or less enlightening.

[522] And it's a conversation not just in the present, you know, with the living minds that are available, but it's a conversation with reference to.

[523] to the greatest minds that preceded us, that, of which we have some record.

[524] You know, there are many great minds, presumably that are totally lost to us because, you know, they burn the library at Alexandria.

[525] But we have this residue of past wisdom and past insight, which is, you know, the world's literature.

[526] And we should, we should avail ourselves of it to our heart's content all the while recognizing that this is a, these are just human beings having a cross -generational conversation about important things and none of these books is beyond criticism and beyond beyond ignoring right that's the crucial well you're you're well you're your fundamental criticism and this is actually what i'm trying to pin down in our conversation is that you're you're pointing to the misuse it's like the dogmatic misuse of the traditions, as opposed to their proper use.

[527] So there's a scene in the Gospels.

[528] This is a very interesting scene.

[529] This is one of the things that gets Christ crucified, by the way, is that he accuses the Pharisees of being the same people who put the prophets upon which their faith is hypothetically predicated to death.

[530] Right.

[531] And so they don't take that insult kindly.

[532] but he's making the case, the same case you are, as far as I can tell, which is that it's possible to use the wisdom of the ages as a justification for the use of force.

[533] Let me give you another example of this.

[534] This is so cool.

[535] You tell me what you think about this.

[536] I just did this seminar in Exodus with a bunch of people.

[537] We released it on Daily Wire and on YouTube, and there's a scene in Exodus that's extremely interesting.

[538] So Moses is put forward as the spirit that eternally delivers from tyranny and slavery.

[539] That's a good way of thinking about it.

[540] So you could imagine Moses as the embodiment of the force that wells up within you that inspires you to speak out when the tyrants hold sway.

[541] And it's the same voice within you that calls you on your own slavish behavior.

[542] anyways Moses embodies that and he's led his people in a rebellion against the tyrants and now he's trying to lead them out of slavery and they're in the desert while they're trying to work this out that's one of those dissents before an assent right so they left tyranny which was an inappropriate mode of organization they fell into the desert which is an intermediary period that's not the least bit pleasant and they're heading for the promised land right which is the next place on the moral landscape, you might say.

[543] Now, Moses has been leading them along, you know, in a very admirable manner.

[544] And so this is what happens when they get on to the border of the promised land.

[545] So they're right there.

[546] They're still in the desert.

[547] They run out of water yet again.

[548] And Moses goes and talks to God and he says, you know, well, you've led us this far.

[549] And we're right on the threshold of deliverance, so to speak, but we're out of water.

[550] And God says to Moses, tell the rocks, ask the rocks to bring forth water.

[551] And so he points out the rocks.

[552] And then Moses goes over to the rocks.

[553] But instead of asking them, he hits the rocks with his staff.

[554] And his staff is a symbol of tradition, of tradition and authority.

[555] And it's the famous staff of Moses.

[556] And what he does is he commands, he uses force to compel the rocks to bring forth water instead of convincing them to do so verbally.

[557] And he is punished very severely for that because God tells him that because he used force where he could have used the logos, he could have used linguistic communication, he can't enter, he'll die before he enters the promised land.

[558] And so it seems to me that your objection to the religious is fundamentally, given your belief in a transcendent good, given your belief in the reality of evil, given your notion that we do have an intrinsic directionality, given your idea that we need to believe in the genuine existence of a moral landscape, is that your objection is in the, it's something like an objection to dogmatism per se.

[559] Yeah.

[560] And then we might ask yourself, well, and that dogmatism is the willingness of people to use the tradition to what, to drive their own benefit, to justify themselves without making the moral effort?

[561] Like, how do you think, how would you go about defining that inappropriate dogmatism?

[562] it's also an attempt to make the ineffable fully comprehend it right because the thing about a religious totalitarian or a totalitarian of any sort is that the totalitarian will tell you that they have the truth in its final form right that's the really the totalitarian claim so what is it about how do you think characterizes that fundamental dogmatism well first i would point out that it's only in religion that the concept of dogma is not a pejorative.

[563] In fact, I mean, in the Catholic context, it's explicitly a good thing.

[564] I mean, there's no embarrassment over their reliance on dogma.

[565] I mean, it's a Catholic term.

[566] But everywhere else in our lives, we recognize that it is intrinsically divisive and not an incapable of tracking the truth.

[567] Right?

[568] But something that's held dogmatically is something that is held, a belief that is held in spite of the fact that there's no good evidence for it, or in fact, in...

[569] Right.

[570] But held why?

[571] But held why?

[572] No, but I just want to nail this particular point down because this is the crucial thing to recognize in my view.

[573] We understand in every other area of our lives that this is not...

[574] That this is intellectually not only not pragmatic and not helpful and not plain by the rules.

[575] It's actually indecent, right?

[576] It's the antithesis of what we admire intellectually.

[577] Immunity to counter evidence, no matter how compelling, is not a good thing intellectually and ethically in any secular context.

[578] So if I say to you, listen, I believe.

[579] believe X, and there's nothing you can say to convince me otherwise, and the more you, no matter how good your evidence gets, no matter how good your arguments get, I'm not, I'm not going to want to hear it.

[580] And if you press the case, I'm going to get angrier and angrier until the possibility of having a conversation about anything fully erodes, right?

[581] That is the status quo with respect to religious sectarianism across the world.

[582] It has been that way for thousands of years, and it is still that way.

[583] Every Muslim, Christian, Jew, Mormon, Hindu, every true religious person of any, you know, any denomination to the degree that they really are truly religious, you know, and it's a faith -based enterprise, has said in advance of any conversation on any topic, listen, there are a few core things I believe and that my children believe and I have taught them to believe.

[584] And I don't want you meddling in any of that stuff, right?

[585] And I'm going to get pissed off to the point of violence, or at least I will be tolerant of the violence of my co -religionists if you push too hard on this particular door.

[586] The conversation is over where these core principles of faith start.

[587] You're going to tell me you don't think Jesus was born of a virgin and we'll be coming back to raise the dead.

[588] I don't want to fucking hear it, right?

[589] And that is our politics, even in America in the 21st century.

[590] We've got something like 45 % of Americans who are sitting there on their Christian fundamentalism, right?

[591] And yes, we can play nice on other topics that don't strike a tangent to those core beliefs.

[592] But when you really begin to push, when you really say, listen, mom and dad, when we educate your children in our school, we're going to be telling them things that is going to make this claim about the divinity of Jesus seem more and more and more spurious and more and more ridiculous and more and more at odds with everything we know about biology and engineering and everything else that we've learned in the last 2 ,000 years.

[593] And you are going to look like fools in the eyes of your kids for believing these specific dogmas, right?

[594] that's that's what's at stake here right and people feel it and they are resisting and they're resisting with medieval tools right um and and everything i just said about fundamentalist christianity in america is much much worse in the muslim community in a hundred countries right um you know there's there we're dealing with the christians of the 14th century now i'm not talking about all Muslims, but I'm also not talking about just one percent of Muslims.

[595] We're talking about many, many millions of people who hold to their religious dogmas like it's a life preserver in a killing storm, right?

[596] And this is something we have to overcome.

[597] This, we need a non -sectarian conversation about the deepest ethical and spiritual and scientific truths that available, which is a non -divisive one, one that is truly open -ended, where we're not making adversarial recourse to rival, incommensurable claims from centuries ago.

[598] We're actually putting forward the best arguments and the best evidence in real time, resorting to all the best ideas that can be translated from every language instantaneously now.

[599] And it's a conversation very much in the spirit of science, very much in the spirit of medicine, and it's not to say that we have all that worked out, as you know, we just went through a global pandemic where people couldn't agree about what the hell was happening and whether vaccines are safe or good or worth inventing, et cetera.

[600] But we know we can dimly see in that context where we need to go, which is we need more evidence, more argument, better incentives, an acknowledgement of what we don't know when we don't know it.

[601] And we need to, we need the conversation to simply continue.

[602] And we know when we look at it over our shoulder, we know we have made progress.

[603] We know we're not suffering for the most part, you know, people being paralyzed from polio, right?

[604] Like we, like, there was once a time where polio was, was terrifying families everywhere and for good reason.

[605] And now that is behind us, except for a few cases that have emerged of late because people are afraid of vaccines of all types.

[606] But we know it's part.

[607] to make progress in medicine, right?

[608] We know that progress is not a matter of half of our society saying that they're going to stay put with the medicine of the seventh century or the first century BC.

[609] And so it has to be with ethics.

[610] So it has to be with spiritual experience.

[611] I mean, we're, you know, we're having this conversation in the context of a, you know, short period of time where research on psychedelic drugs, has come back after more than a generation of ignoring the promise of these compounds, who knows what possible benefits exist if we explore that technology and that research in the wisest and most judicious possible way?

[612] We know we can create immense harm by doing it badly.

[613] We know in the 60s just broadcasting these compounds onto the population without any real safeguards was, you know, while some people's lives were improved, but many people were harmed too.

[614] And it was the thing to which the backlash of the last 40 years responded.

[615] And then we lost more than a full generation of actually doing research on these compounds.

[616] But we're only at the beginning of understanding what is possible for us individually and collectively as human beings.

[617] And understanding consciousness itself, not even just human consciousness, but consciousness as it is integrated with the physics of things, is among the most important things we could do.

[618] And it has implications for everything we're now touching.

[619] And the guidance is not going to come from the Bible.

[620] And it's not going to come from the, you know, from Camelot either.

[621] It's like we need new stories and new insights because we're confronting new things.

[622] I mean, like just take the take, we don't have to spend any time on it, but just I'll plant a flag here.

[623] Take artificial intelligence, right?

[624] If we don't know how consciousness arises in this universe and if we don't know whether or when it arises on the basis of information processing, we are not going to know whether we build conscious machines, right?

[625] I think we're going to almost certainly we will build machines that seem conscious to us before we know whether or not they are conscious.

[626] And we will lose sight of, many of us will lose sight of whether it's an even interesting problem to wonder whether or not they are conscious, right?

[627] They're going to pass the Turing test with such flying colors, especially when we're in the presence of humanoid robots that look human and that are truly general AI, that we're just going to treat them as conscious, helplessly, because you're going to feel like a psychopath doing otherwise, and yet we're not going to know whether we've built machines that can suffer, and we're not going to know whether we're committing a murder when we turn off a machine, et cetera.

[628] These are ethical problems that seem totally speculative until you imagine the possibility of inadvertently building machines that can suffer even more than human beings can suffer, right?

[629] That would be a monstrous thing to do, and that is a possible thing to do And it's something we might just stumble into by not knowing what we're doing in informational terms.

[630] So this is all just to say that questions about the well -being of conscious creatures are questions that we need to address with all of the tools available in a way that is truly universal.

[631] that gets beneath the accidental differences of a country of a person's origin.

[632] You know, it doesn't, it shouldn't matter where you were born or what, what religion your parents were.

[633] That should not be the thing that constrains your thinking about the deeper truths here.

[634] And so, yes, if I don't deny that the world's religions indicate something about the possibilities of human consciousness, past and presence, and even the possibilities of a transcendent good to which we should all orient.

[635] But it's absolutely clear that we need a truly universal modern conversation about those truths that ultimately ignores sectarian cultural boundaries.

[636] And it's the sectarian cultural boundaries that I worry about.

[637] Well, you and I have been trying to have those conversations, you know, with some degree of success for quite a long time.

[638] let me ask you a specific question here that how how do you distinguish we've already agreed that there's a problem when wisdom is transformed into authoritarian dogma but here's a question like how do you distinguish between you've already put forward a set of hypothetically axiomatic presuppositions, right?

[639] And one of them is that there is such a thing as evil, and another is that there's such a thing as its opposite good, and that good has an ineffable quality in its final analysis.

[640] You could think about those as, you know, there are conclusions from the conversation that we've had so far, and from all the work that you've done, obviously.

[641] Now, you could imagine that those conclusions could be turned into, well, they are axiomatic in some ways.

[642] You could imagine they could be turned into a kind of authoritarian dogma in no time flat.

[643] Like, how do you, and you know we can't progress out into the world without having a certain amount of faith in our already extant knowledge, how do you think it's possible to conceptualize the distinction between knowledge as such or even necessary knowledge and dogma?

[644] Well, it's, well, dogma is clear in the sense that it is truly inflexible, right?

[645] There's no, there's a stated commitment to not revising this particular belief or set of beliefs no matter what happens, right?

[646] So for instance, for Christianity or let's say the Catholic Church, you know, the divinity of Jesus is just non -negotiable, right?

[647] It's like, it's not, there's not, it would no longer be Christian.

[648] Now, I'm sure there are a few groups of Christians that would want to, want to push back here.

[649] But generally speaking, I mean, it comes directly from Paul, you know, if Christ be not raised your faith as vain, right?

[650] It's like, there's a miracle at the bottom here.

[651] And if you are going to dispute that, well, then really, you're playing a different language game.

[652] This is not, you know, this, we're not interested in that kind of innovation.

[653] So Christ was the son of God.

[654] you struggle to make sense of that if you want to, but something like that has to be true.

[655] He died for your sins.

[656] He was resurrected.

[657] He did not.

[658] If you found his bones somewhere, that would be a problem.

[659] These are non -negotiable tenets of the faith, and Islam has its versions.

[660] Unhappily for the prospects of interfaith dialogue, one of the core principles of Islam is that Christ was not divine.

[661] right and to believe he otherwise is is polytheism and that's a killing offense right so right there there's a zero -sum contest between Islam and Christianity so so it's something like it's something like it sounds to me that it's something like allowance for doubt so I could imagine you can imagine a situation like this because because there's still a confusion no one thing it's not it's not just allowance for doubt it's it's just that it's so so there are there are things we believe believe that we can't imagine not believing because of how fully we are persuaded of the legitimacy of the method by which we arrived at those beliefs, right?

[662] So there was a methodology that got us there.

[663] Now dogmatism is the antithesis of methodology.

[664] Dogma is not a statement of how good the method was.

[665] Dogma is just, we didn't have a method, but this is so, right?

[666] It says so in the book.

[667] The book is perfect.

[668] How do we know is perfect?

[669] Because the book itself says so, right?

[670] That bites its own tail.

[671] That's not a method.

[672] That is dogmatism.

[673] And in my view, totally illegitimate.

[674] But there are other things that we believe, right, that we wouldn't say are dogmas, but we would also say, I'm not going to waste any time worrying that I might be wrong here because I just don't see how I could possibly be wrong.

[675] Now, we know that in the context of those beliefs, it's still possible to be wrong, right?

[676] So there was a time where human beings would have said, listen, I've studied Euclid, I understand geometry, you know, you're talking about the possibility of more than three dimensions.

[677] It's obvious to me that doesn't make any sense because I'm standing here and I can't figure out where I would point that isn't some combination of up, down, left or left or right or front or back, right?

[678] There's just, there's three dimensions.

[679] And my finger, my pointing finger is all the proof I need of that, right?

[680] So you could imagine someone being absolutely confident, right?

[681] But you could also imagine that given the requisite conversation with that person, you could introduce them to the geometry of Riemann and say, okay, space, imagine space is something that could conceivably be curved, right?

[682] And it would be curved in a dimension that is not just some combination of up, on left or right or front and back, et cetera.

[683] So there's a large, so there can be fundamental changes in our view of things that are surprising.

[684] And, and, and so we can't, we can't rule that out in general, no matter how confident we are of specific.

[685] I mean, so one, for me, there's one thing that I can't see any way around.

[686] and I just don't, you know, I would admit that it's possible that I don't know what I'm missing, but I just don't see how it would be possible, so I'm not wasting time on it.

[687] But for me, consciousness, what I mean by consciousness, you know, the fact that anything seems to be happening at all is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion, right?

[688] So there's nothing you can say to me about how wrong I am about anything that puts, the challenges this, fundamental belief of mind that consciousness is the ground truth of everything epistemologically, right?

[689] So you could say, well, actually, Sam, you're psychotic, you know, well, okay, so I'm wrong about everything except the way things seem, that demonstrates consciousness just as much as sanity would, right?

[690] Like, this is, if I'm asleep and dreaming, and I don't know that, well, still, this dreamlike experience is what I mean by consciousness.

[691] If the universe is a simulation on an alien supercomputer, right, and everything we think about physics is wrong because we're not in touch with the base layer of physics, right?

[692] We're just a simulation.

[693] Still, what seems to be happening in our case is what is meant by consciousness in my sense.

[694] So to say that consciousness itself might be an illusion, right, is, it makes absolutely no sense because any illusion is another case of seeming.

[695] It's a false, it's a false one by reference to some other picture.

[696] So I can't get outside of consciousness epistemologically.

[697] And therefore it's, you know, so anyone who would say, so someone might come to me and say, well, you're being dogmatic in your assertion that consciousness can't be an illusion.

[698] It's not the same as being dogmatic.

[699] I can't, I just can't see what to do with my intuitions so as to even entertain the alternative thesis.

[700] That's not what any religious fundamentalist, It's not the position of any religious fundamentalist who's asserting, you know, the unique divinity of the Quran or the book of Mormon.

[701] They're asserting an unwarranted omniscience.

[702] They're asserting a claim that is in contact with many specific facts we know about, again, you know, real history or, you know, terrestrial physics or anything else.

[703] and I mean just you know these are points I've made before you know you know to the consternation of many religious people but like you know the belief that Jesus rose from the dead and and bodily ascended somewhere and will be returning to earth at some point be the historical person Jesus not some you know not some analogy to that person but that's that's not just a religious claim that is a claim about biology.

[704] It's a claim about human flight without the aid of technology.

[705] It's a claim about history.

[706] It's a claim about, there are many claims.

[707] It touches everything we know or think we know about science at some place.

[708] And so it's, and that's why it's, it seems quite unlikely to be true, right, if you're, if you're considering it dispassionately.

[709] And I mean, the other reason, I mean, just to, now that you brought it, you've poked this atheist and you're getting, you're getting the full file.

[710] The real, the simplest reason why I am effectively an atheist with respect to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, despite all of the other things you think I agree with that make me a good candidate for being sympathetic to those traditions, is that the claim about the books is so preposterous, given how easy it would be for an omniscient being to have proven his omniscience in those books.

[711] I mean, if you just think of how good a book could be, had an omniscient being written it, all the things that wouldn't be in there that would be embarrassing now, like, you know, advocating slavery.

[712] Like, the creator of the universe certainly could have anticipated that we at one point would have found slavery to be wrong, right?

[713] and given us moral guidance on that point.

[714] But he failed to do that.

[715] But even more importantly, it would be trivially easy for an omniscient being to put a page of text in there that would even now be confounding us with its depths of inspiration, scientifically, ethically, in every other sense, right?

[716] So let me ask you about that momentarily.

[717] So I'm going to throw a spanner into the works.

[718] Maybe we'll see.

[719] Well, I've been spending a lot of time writing in the last three years again.

[720] I'm writing a new book.

[721] And I've been trying to extract out the gist of the biblical corpus, let's say.

[722] So I have a proposition for you.

[723] And you tell me what you think about this.

[724] So as far as I'm concerned, what the biblical corpus points to is a practice of it's a practice of of sacrifice devoted to atonement and so the idea we've already talked on about this a little bit sam is that you know there are often things you have to give up in the present in order to make the longer term more functional that's a sacrificial offering you might say and so and that's the same theme in some is that dissent we talked about prior to an ascent.

[725] And so there's a pattern of sacrifice that emerges as the biblical corpus progresses.

[726] And the pattern of sacrifice culminates in a proposition.

[727] And the proposition is this, that salvation and redemption as such are dependent on the voluminance, voluntary willingness to confront the worst of tragedies and the deepest of possible acts of malevolence.

[728] That that's the universal pathway to salvation and redemption.

[729] And that's exemplified as far as I can tell in the passion story.

[730] So I'll give you an example.

[731] So I went to Jerusalem with Jonathan Pazio and we walked the stations of the cross.

[732] And that culminated with a trip to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which in principle, at least in tradition, is erected on the site of the crucifixion.

[733] And so what seems to be happening psychologically, and I think this is something that you can assess multidimensionally in a conciliant manner, is that the passion story walks people through the necessity of encountering the worst forms of tragedy that can beset you in your life.

[734] And so that would be, the worst form of tragedy is unjust suffering fundamentally.

[735] And the worst form of unjust suffering is the most vicious possible punishment delivered to someone who's the least possibly deserving.

[736] And, you know, the times in your life, Sam, where you'll suffer the most, I would say, and you can dispute this, but you can tell me what you think, is when you're going to be bitterly punished even for your virtues.

[737] And if that's accompanied by betrayal and the baying of the mob, so much the better.

[738] And so the passion story is a representation of the proposition that in order to move towards discovery of what's highest, you have to voluntarily accept the conditions of unjust suffering that constitute human existence.

[739] And then there's a mythological correlation, to that.

[740] So, of course, death by crucifixion is a particularly unpleasant form of death, especially when it's brought about by betrayal and at the hands of tyrants and the mob, which is what the story encompasses.

[741] But there's also an insistence that the pattern that Christ acts out involves the harrowing of hell, which is confrontation not only with tragedy, but with malevolence itself.

[742] And so the idea there is that, and maybe this is what's asserted dogmatically if it's understood, is that there is no pathway to redemption and salvation without being willing to hoist the world's tragedies onto your shoulders and to confront evil.

[743] And so I'm, I mean, that's the conclusion that I've derived from walking through these stories and trying to understand what they might mean.

[744] And that's pretty damn compelling that idea.

[745] And I actually, I actually, think it's in some ways in keeping with your experience because you, and I mean it's taken me a long time to understand this, repeated conversations with you, but it seems to me that a huge part of your motivation has been a consequence of your willingness to contend seriously with the reality of evil and to try to set up, what would you say, at least to investigate the nature of a morality that might mitigate against that.

[746] So, well, I leave that at your feet.

[747] for the time there.

[748] I mean, I'll give you a response which will indicate, I think, the, what I consider to be the provisionality and perhaps even mistaken nature of that, the Christian framing you just gave.

[749] But I think it's possible and perhaps even more useful to view evil.

[750] And it's unavoidable to talk about evil, you know, just as a matter of shorthand in talking about current events.

[751] And I think we don't want to lose the term because I think it's, I think moral outrage is the kind of fuel we need in certain moments.

[752] And that's invoked by, by, you know, framing things in terms of good and evil.

[753] But I think it's at least plausible to think of evil at bottom as being more a matter of ignorance than anything else.

[754] And this certainly would be the Buddhist framing of evil.

[755] I mean, Buddhists don't tend to think about evil.

[756] And certainly the Buddhist teachings about this weren't really a matter of evil versus good.

[757] It's more a matter of ignorance versus wisdom.

[758] And even, you know, Greek philosophy, you know, Socrates, I believe, made this point that, you know, no one consciously or very, very few people consciously do evil.

[759] I mean, but you have a lot of people thinking they're doing good in their own way, despite how much harm they're creating.

[760] So the deeper problem may, in fact, be ignorance.

[761] And one way of seeing this, you can ask yourself, do you take a quintessentially evil person?

[762] Do you have a candidate for like the most evil person you can think of?

[763] Psychologically?

[764] Can you give me a name?

[765] Stalin, Stalin's kind of.

[766] Stalin would be up there, I would say.

[767] So you take Stalin.

[768] Now, at a certain point in his life, he was just a little kid, right?

[769] He was just this, you know, the four -year -old Joseph who was, in my mind, view, I mean, he could have been a psychopathic kid.

[770] I don't know enough about his biography, but, you know, presumably he wasn't a psychopath.

[771] Doesn't seem so.

[772] Yeah.

[773] Presumably he wasn't a terrifying infant, you know, but at a certain point, you know, at a point young enough in his timeline, you have to just acknowledge that he really is unlucky.

[774] I mean, he's the kid who, for whatever reason, you know, genetic and environmental, is going to become the evil monster Joseph Stalin, right?

[775] And so at what point along the way does he actually become evil?

[776] Well, that's hard to specify.

[777] I mean, there'll be moments in his story where we can recognize, all right, he's now not a normal, much less normative personality, right?

[778] He's treating people sadistically.

[779] And so I don't know when that started.

[780] But there's a point before that where you think, well, listen, if there'd be any way to have helped this kid not become this evil monster, we should have helped him, right?

[781] We would have helped him if we could.

[782] And that would have been the right thing to do, right?

[783] So merely hating him and killing him would not have been the ethically normative thing to have done there because he's not yet the person who created all the harms he goes on to create.

[784] But I would say that even if you go forward, even if you get him in his truly malevolent, form, you know, toward the middle and end of his life.

[785] Imagine what it would be like.

[786] We had Joseph Stalin at his worst in custody, and we had a much more mature science of the mind available to us, and we actually had a cure for evil.

[787] Just imagine what it would be like to deliver this cure.

[788] We can actually just modify all of the receptor sites and densities and connections in the brain so as to turn this malevolent sociopath into an entirely normal person with the normal pro -social attitudes, et cetera, et cetera.

[789] But keeping intact his biographical memory and the other aspects of his identity, right?

[790] So imagine being able to engineer the following experience for Joseph Stalin, where you deliver him the cure for all that ails him ethically.

[791] and but he still has a memory he has a he has a knowledge of what you're doing you've told him what you're doing and he has the memory of all the stuff all the malevolent stuff he did in his past imagine what it would be like for him to to wake up from the dream of his sociopathy and experience for the first time what it was like to be a normal well -intentioned decent human being right Imagine what that would be like.

[792] Imagine if you just woke up tomorrow recognizing that you had in this fugue state of psychopathy over the previous year, you had killed, you know, 60 million people and done other, you know, odious things.

[793] Just imagine, imagine, one, the feeling of regret to have been at all entangled with that causality, however little purchase you have on it in the present because again you're no longer evil but to imagine the gratitude of feeling of just being rescued from that the kind of mind that would have been so cavalier about the deaths and immiseration of millions of people right so that the fact of this is even possible this thought experiment that at some future date will have a way of curing evil people and that it would make no sense ethically at that point to go to go into our prisons and say, well, we're going to withhold the cure because as punishment for all the evil stuff these people did.

[794] It's like, you know, that's like withholding the cure for diabetes from, you know, diabetics the moment we get it because, you know, of all the bad things they did when their blood sugar was too low, you know, it just, it doesn't, it wouldn't make any sense ethically.

[795] But that suggests a kind, that ignorance is more of the problem here.

[796] It's like evil people because of the brains they have, because of the lives they've had, because of the, if you want to add a religious dimension to it, because of the souls they have, the souls they didn't pick, they're unlucky to be evil and unavailable to much of the human goodness, you and I experience.

[797] And if we could change that, they would be standing with us in a position of astonishment that they could have ever been those sorts of people.

[798] And so I do think at some level the question of good and evil is amenable to a different framing, which is more along the lines of wisdom and ignorance.

[799] You don't know, people don't know what they're missing.

[800] That's that across every possible dimension of both intellectual and ethical and relational.

[801] And whole societies don't know what they're missing and figuring figuring out what's missing and what we're missing is all of our work.

[802] Yeah, well, I would say we'll have to leave that for a different discussion.

[803] I would say in response to that, two things, I guess.

[804] One is, I think this is from the Gospel of Thomas.

[805] Christ said to his followers, The kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, but men will not see it or cannot see it.

[806] depending on the translation.

[807] And then the other germane comment might be with regard to ignorance, this is one of the things that complicates it morally is there are none so blind as those who will not see.

[808] And I mean, I agree with you, by the way, Sam, is that the intermingling of ignorance and malevolence is a very thorny problem, right?

[809] And which precedes the other is very difficult thing to determine.

[810] So we're going to have to stop.

[811] I'd like to talk to you.

[812] The next time we talk, Sam, maybe we could concentrate more on issues pertaining to free will and ignorance.

[813] That might be very interesting.

[814] Yeah, happy to do it.

[815] All right.

[816] So, yeah, well, that'd be good, Sam.

[817] So for everyone watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

[818] I'm going to spend another half an hour with Sam behind the Daily Wire plus paywall.

[819] And so if you're inclined to join us there, please do.

[820] That gives you the opportunity, I suppose, to throw some support in the direction.

[821] of the DW Plus people who are trying to put forward, you know, a functional platform for new forms of entertainment and for the continuance of free speech.

[822] So hypothetically, that might be worth supporting.

[823] Mr. Harris, it's always good to talk to you.

[824] It's been a pleasure getting to know you over the years.

[825] And I'm glad we've been able to continue our conversations.

[826] I really am.

[827] And I appreciate what you had to say today greatly.

[828] And until we meet again.

[829] And thank you again for everyone.

[830] You bet, man. All right.

[831] Ciao.