None the
hi group dos. Hey, how's it going, Jason?
Good man. It's it's the start of a new
month essentially, which means we are scheduled to have a
conversation. Yeah, there's always something
that comes up and we need to talk.
It's a good, it's a good ritual. I think it's a good way to.
Start the month and I enjoy these conversations too.
So do I, obviously. And there we go.
So I brought you on here to talk about propaganda primarily.
There's also, it'd be interesting if we can get to
maybe in the second-half of the show, talk about technology.
We might have to save that for next month because I feel like
you and I can have a polite disagreement about some things.
But I was thinking about this in the shower this morning.
It's like one of the things I feel that that my show does
that's a little bit different than others in our space is I'm,
I, I, I don't shy away from, let's say, having a
disagreement, but, but everyone I bring on the show, generally
speaking, are friendlies in one way or another.
So it's not really about arguing it out and position like this.
You know, I'm right, you're wrong, whatever kind of kind of
positioning, it's more like I, I'm more interested in building
bridges and going, all right, You're, you're coming out of
this from one perspective. I'm coming in from a different
perspective. Why is that?
You know, 'cause I respect you. You're a smart guy, you know,
we, we agree on 99.9% of things. So if there is a disagreement or
if there is sort of like a moment, I want to want, almost
want to figure that out 'cause here's the other thing too,
it's, it does happen occasionally that I'm wrong.
You know, I was wrong about God for 32 years.
So, you know, just just 'cause my batting average has improved
quite a bit in the last few years, doesn't mean I'm, I'm,
I'm perfect, just close to it. So, you know, keep.
That there we go. But we'll see.
We'll see if we get to that. If not, it's not a big deal.
I think. I think the propaganda
conversation is big enough anyways.
But it's. More than big enough.
It's yeah, what the Pete and I, Pete Quinones and I were talking
about this, this topic too, when last time I was on his, his pod
and the, this notion of like first and 2nd order
disagreements that in some sense to have a real conversation, you
have to have a, a shared framework in which you can
resolve the disagreement. Like an understanding of like
how we are going to resolve it, which sources we're going to
appeal to it, the mechanisms we're going to use to resolve
it. Or at least enough of a shared
world view that we're in a sense we're, we're not arguing over
fundamentals. We're we're filling in.
How do we fill in the picture property given that we all share
the same basic fundamental principles?
And you know, a second order disagreement is one in which you
have no shared foundation and no mechanism for resolving your
disputes. And that's the and and this is
the argument that the, the culture war is in essence, the
second order disagreement. And in in the past, you know,
when it's, you know, my God versus your God, the way that
that was resolved is through violent conflict.
And that's often, you know, power solves those those
questions is 1 is defeated and and the other submits.
And so, you know, this idea that you can get on and debate the
libs and so forth is, is really a fallacy because you have no
shared foundation with which to resolve a dispute anyways.
You're just basically getting on, you know, you're going to
how does it put? You know, you're looking for the
kill shot to basically, and that that doesn't really isn't really
conducive to having a discussion is when you're looking out for
the kill shot. And, and I think a lot of people
don't appreciate that, that you literally can't have a debate
with somebody that once you cross a certain level of
disagreement, you can no longer even have a debate with them.
Did you probably you probably haven't seen this one.
I just this was random on my feed.
It was to be seen Jesse Peterson had on David Pak Man recently
and he literally kicked Pac-Man off the show.
He cut him off halfway and he's like, OK, bye, bye.
It was glorious cause Pac-Man was Jesse was asking pretty.
You know, Jesse Peterson is one of those one of those online
characters who his whole thing is he's very direct and he'll
ask very pointed questions and he'll keep asking the question
until he gets the answer until he's satisfied with the answer.
And David Pac-Man has become this this propaganda machine
where he just, you know, when, whenever any questions asked,
he's just goes into rote, you know, and you can see the
program, you know, because he's just, he's got 4x4 index cards
of conversations saved up that, you know, when asked this
unleashed that, you know, and turn the conversation around.
Whatever things that really worked 10 years ago that I'm
finding the my bitter white pill on this is that the, that the
libs have gotten so lazy in their successes and so hubristic
that they're using techniques that I don't think are working
on normies anymore. You know, I'm just, I would just
played the first half of this game called Dust Borne.
It's new. It was actually funded, the
Norwegian studio was funded primarily to the tune of €150
million through a European art fund.
And then we just found out there was a American, probably deep
states cut out that donate another two, I don't know, 200,
fifty, $250,000 or whatever it was.
And playing this thing is, it's it's literally lazy propaganda.
Like it's at one point you have to go around and suck out these
like demons, thought demons from people's heads, right?
That's how they're framing it. And the thought demons are
misinformation. And when you do it, you zoom
over the, the red thing in the people's heads and what you hear
is this chatter. And some of it's like, you know,
don't trust the experts. And I was, I was, I was
expecting to say something about getting, getting vaccinated.
They didn't say that, but it was like all these like, you know,
MAGA conspiracy, yadda, yadda things, right?
And and and you're supposed to like cure them by removing the
information from their head by basically re educating them.
You know, so game about. Yeah.
Wow, that's funny. Yeah, it's it's so disturbing
but so obvious that it's darkly funny.
The bitter white pill here too is is what's great about it is
that no one's buying this game. I think it at at its height, it
had 75 concurrent players. So I did a stream on X with this
just recently played about the first half of it and I got 100
and 5200 people watching it any given time.
Like we have more people watching this than be more
people are than playing it. So there's a good thing.
I think 1000 copies have been sold or something like that.
So it's just A to, to wrap that up.
It's like it's, it's very obvious propaganda.
It's very like everyone knows about it, Everyone's chattering
about how obvious it is and no one's buying it anymore, which
is, I think, a good thing. Well, yeah, yes, yes and no
though like OK, so this example perhaps, but if.
Yeah. This was being very specific
here. Yeah.
Yeah, but if, if you look at the, the more sophisticated
types, you know, people, you know, want to say, like, we got
to harken back to the 90s or whatever, you go back and watch
90s television, like, I mean, go back and really watch like, like
download, you know, go on Netflix and go back and watch
some 90s series. And everything that we're
dealing with now was either a, you know, made into comedy or
part of dramas. Like, and I know this is a
little bit more, but you go back and, and watch say, like Grey's
Anatomy. Grey's Anatomy is, is, is a pure
propaganda piece designed for to propagandize women.
My wife got into binge watching it and I, I tweeted out a long
thread on it like, you know, a year ago or so.
But the, the show quite literally like everything that
we're dealing with in terms of, you know, transgenderism and all
that, they were doing episodes on that show like almost a
decade before it hit the mainstream, you know, and they
were doing it in very sophisticated stories in which
it seemed perfectly natural and plausible.
You know, all the good guys are enlightened, you know,
scientists who, and, and doctors who free people from their, you
know, backwards religious parents and roots and so forth
and, and enlighten them. And it's it, it.
And and you realize then you look across the the whole
panopticon of of. Of.
You know, modern media and modern entertainment and you
realize that, you know, people just simply drown in propaganda
issue. I think they just it, it's
almost where they become numb to the fact that they're being, or
if they even ever realized that they were being propagandized.
They just become numb to the whole thing.
Yeah, there's something I've been saying for a while and a
certain age, it was during the flu season of 2020 to 2022 was
that we make it real. We are we are part of that
process because you have the propaganda, the messaging, the
narrative, right? And you have the intended
outcome, let's say, or the control.
But in between those two events or two, two elements are the is
the audience. This goes into something I'm
kind of fleshing out and to kind of complete McEwan in some ways.
McEwan, of course, is the famous Canadian who came up with the
medium as a message and in reading him and reading media
studies from that time period, it's all based on Agustin
principles of, of common sense and and those elements, that's
where they kind of built up. It's, it was all, you know, it
was back when universities used to be far more religious than
they are now. And I found that really
fascinating. What was always posited in, in
media studies was the audience was considered that they
sometimes you, you, you had a term for it called the phantom.
So you kind of had to assume the audience.
So in the meeting there's a message.
One of the ways you can take back a statement is that, you
know, a radio show, it's specific to radio.
So you can do certain things with the radio show that is
specific to radio. So the medium and the message
become one in that sense, right. And this is different from TV,
which is different from movies at different when you get to
something like the Internet, however, well, what is this
medium? This is a complete medium.
You know, we're I'm presenting video and audio is is it TV?
Is it radio is what what is it? It's all all combined into one.
Podcasting kind of breaks this, you know, especially video
casting breaks this kind of barrier.
The other thing that also happens, and I can just check my
comments right now is I don't have to assume the audience.
The audience is right here. In fact, I can interact with
them, right? So now the medium is the message
is connection and there's your Trinity.
So they're not having to assume the audience connection is now,
which was always assumed becomes an important part of that
Trinity. In fact, I would say it almost
it almost supersedes the other two in terms of importance.
If there's a hierarchy of being because it without connection,
the medium, the message doesn't matter.
If you're not connecting to people, there's no one on the
other end of the phone. You're just talking to into
space. Right.
So as I'm sorry I'm I'm I'm a bit rambling rambling.
We're on it. That's good.
We it it's rambling is fine. Yeah, to tie it up a little bit
and see what you can do with that.
We making it real, I think is a very important part of that
propaganda process. So as you're saying with the
with with Grey's Anatomy, like they can present all these
things, but if, if unless people are taking it in and making that
real and making that effective in their lives, it doesn't work.
So it has to be, it has to cross that barrier of, of desire,
let's say, where people want this to be real, they want to
live in Grey's Anatomy world, if that makes.
Sense no absolutely you you have to tap into desires that are
already there with propaganda. Yeah, the I've you know the the
I found that the medium is the message to be a profound
analytical tool, not just in media studies, but just in
dealing with technique and technology in general.
And I've I've noted this on a number of occasions where and
and This is why understanding the nature of the media that
you're using is is very important right.
So the in the media, like the example that Mcluhan uses is the
light bulb, which he argues is pure content, where that the
medium and the content collapse together into it, into the
single entity. So there there is no content
beyond the light of the light bulb.
So it it, the meaning of the light bulb is its, is its
medium. So, you know, you go into a room
and you turn the light bulb on. And so what's the effect of
being able to turn light on into a room whenever you want it and
it's just there for you. And that's, and so Mcluhan gets
the point is that the the medium itself is more important than
the actual content. So the point of a television is
the television itself and not, you know, whether you're
watching porn on your TV or you're watching wholesome
programming, but it's the fact that you are a couch potato with
a three second attention span, right?
Then that or say, for example, the automobile, the fact of the
mobility of the automobile is more important than anyone
specific trip that you might take with the automobile, right?
So the importance of the podcast is the podcast medium itself
rather than anyone particular episode that you are engaging
in. So we have to ask ourselves, you
know, in this regard, say with social media, again, the
Twitter, right, Twitter, the, the point of Twitter is not
anyone particular tweet, but you know, what is the meaning of the
medium itself? And that's really the, the
fundamental question with it. And then you get 2 questions of
and that's this also then helps you to analyse a lot of things
like what is the administrative state?
And we tend to think of, well, we have to capture the
administrative state and put in like conservative policies.
But if you think of the administrative state like
television, that the, the true meaning of the of the
administrative state is the fact of the administrative state and
not anyone particular policy. So, yeah, while it might be
better to have sort of policy, you know, wholesome policies
rather than policy porn, really in the end, the, the decisive
thing is not the policies, but the fact of the administrative
state itself. And that's, and that's kind of
the end. The the the for me anyways, in
terms of the medium is the message the the way that the
tool has become very, very helpful for me in terms of an
analytic. It's also interesting to seeing
where the authority shows. So, you know, and from our
grandparents age was radio. Radio was the first, you know,
getting a radio inside the house was a big deal, you know, 'cause
there are big units and people would, you know, there you have
all those old pictures of people crowded around the radio and
that's where the news broadcast came in.
That's how people learned about World War One and World War 2.
You know, that's how you you got that information that was an
authority presented in the radio and then that transferred to
movies for a bit. You know, in the early days of
movies that then became like TV and TV for the boomers became
the authority. You know, the news came from
from the TV. You could trust the TV.
The TV was trustworthy in ways that, you know, made, let's say,
newspapers or other places where maybe had lost that authority or
had it transferred over. And now it's the authority is in
podcasts. Tucker Carlson has the largest
podcast on Earth right now. It's Eclipse Joe Rogan and those
numbers he's pulling Eclipse every single major news network
by a factor of some, in some cases a factor of 10, you know,
and he's one guy. My producer.
Making some noise in the corner here.
In terms of propaganda though, and this is the interesting
thing is that all of these and this is gets us, this gets us
back to this discussion of of the Louisville and the nature of
propagandas. Maybe it's a good way to
dovetail into this is that propaganda begins with mass
society. So the the one common thread
through all of these media is that they're all mass media.
And propaganda doesn't work in a society that has well integrated
communities where your relationships are person to
person and you have real human relationships.
Those real human relationships need to be broken down first
before propaganda can be affected.
So any place that you have really strong communities where
they're strong person to person relationships, such as churches,
propaganda is much less effective on them.
And then also the other thing is you need to have persons whose
community has been broken down, but they need to live in close
proximity to them. So they have to be in sort of a
a a density. That makes propaganda effective.
So you have to have cities. So people who live out by
themselves, like in the country tend to be much less, much
harder to propagandize, as are people in tight knit person to
person communities. So what happens with with
propaganda and and the radio? Well, it begins actually before
the radio with the newspaper, with the printed, with the
printing press in the in the 1700, you know, sixteen 1700s
when they develop, you know, the new, the newspaper really kicks
off propaganda and but the radio is is really exemplary.
So you have a person who is, you know, either with a group or or,
but they're often listening by themselves to the radio.
So they have this vertical relationship with the person who
is with the broadcaster and the person speaking on the radio,
but they have this sense of feeling that they're part of the
audience so that they're part of a something that's larger than
themselves. So they recognize that they're
part of a group that are listening, but because they're
listening by themselves, they have no interaction with the
group. They're alone and isolated, but
they feel part of a mass. And that's kind of the
precondition that's necessary for propaganda.
So you have to have this, this society that's broken down into
mass man. And then what the propaganda
doesn't and the medium does is it takes these people that are
all broken down and it reconnects them, but it doesn't
reconnect them person to person. It reconnects them via the
propagandist vertically. So your connection with your
with other people is always mediated to you through the
propagandist, through the the voice speaking to you in the
radio. So you feel like you're part of
a community, you feel like you're part of a group.
But that group, you know, I'm a Tucker Carlson listener, I'm a 2
bit podcast listener. So we feel like we're part of
the group, but the person who is speaking to you is not
necessarily person to person, but it's Jason that's speaking
to you, right? And so Jason is the voice that
we all listen to. And then we're all in that, in
that sense, we participate in this nature, in this
propagandation. Now, like you say, you've got
the comments on the side, but the comments in a sense are not
really fully human. It's not like, you know, maybe
if we were sitting in a room together, you know, we could
give each other hugs, look each other in the eye and roll our
eyes at the radio, these types of things that would give you
perhaps more like real, you know, kind of.
But even in those situations where families sitting together
in a living room, they're all staring at the screen or
listening to the radio, they're still not interacting with each
other in a way that they would normally without the radio.
They still are having the even that person to person experience
is still mediated by the voice on the radio that's speaking to
them. And so that that condition of
mass man is what creates the condition for propaganda.
And one of the things that Allul argues is that in industrial
society, because industrial society breaks down those
fundamental relationships person to person, that if you didn't
have propaganda, an industrial society would quickly dissolve
into like all the effects of that alienation loneliness would
bring. So you need propaganda to
reconnect people, but they're not reconnected in a way that's
fully human. They're reconnected in a way
that keeps them aligned to maintaining the industrialized,
liberalized, you know, democratic world going right.
So this is this is the and and this is what Elul argues is that
propaganda is a necessary ingredient of our industrial and
post industrial society. Also in the sense that liberal
democracy requires it as well, too.
So are the whole nature of modern society would dissolve
very, very quickly if it wasn't for the fact that we had
propaganda holding us together. So it is propaganda that makes
modern society work and it's a necessary feature of modern
society. And so you you have to be
propaganda. It's like, like everything about
our life today is just very, very unnatural.
Like prior to industrialization, you know, people worked hard,
but they didn't get up and go to work at 8:00 AM and come home at
5:00 PM, right? They didn't work on a clock.
They didn't have like the 40 hour work week was not a thing.
So all of these things that we get up and do are all maintained
and supported by propaganda. This idea that you have to work
in order to have a fulfilling life is, is part of propaganda.
So there's all of these ingredients, you know, you have
to get out and vote. You have to do all of these
things that that you need to do are all maintained by propaganda
and your social cohesion, your society is brought together and
maintained by society or, or by propaganda.
And so that's the sense that, you know, perhaps the first
thing that we need to understand about propaganda is it's not
merely just, I mean, there is a sense where you have the evil
propagandist who's then trying to manipulate you.
But we have to understand that without propaganda, our society
could not exist or function the way that it does.
And so it's a necessary component of modern industrial
society. OK, before we go any further,
let's do a little bit mid show grift.
Here's a here's an ad for the expat money summit.com.
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wear shorts in public, which makes me an official and ironic
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Go to expatmoneysummit.com and get your free tickets.
And while you're there, go check out their sexy upgrade packages.
I'll be in attendance. Join us October 7th to 11th
Expat money summit.com. Also, if you go down Scroll down
to the description below you will find that we are partnered
with Fox and Sons Coffee, a great company.
Steve Stevens, a friend of the show has been on some of the
shows occasionally. He built a coffee company to
with his sons Great coffee. You can get them anywhere across
the United States. Unfortunately not shipping to
Canada just yet, but working. I'm putting put some pressure on
Steve and then try to get him Diggo International over to
Australia. You can go and use the coupon
code 2 bit and get 15% of off orders of $30.00 and more.
That's foxandsons.com and go get yourself some coffee.
Also, you can now go buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com.
Links are down over there if you want to send some money over.
Anyone who's been following the show a little bit, I haven't
been let this public about it, but I'm starting to become a bit
more public about it. I have some foot problems.
I have nerve problems in both my feet, unfortunately, so we're
trying to work that out, but it's kind of knocked me out from
gainful employment. So so this is not how I wanted
to go pro folks, but here here we are.
So if you want to send me some money and help pay some bills
and people literally keep the lights on.
I appreciate each and every one of you Crypto as well.
We're here in the mid show grift.
Let the people know where they can get some of your content.
Well, just before I do that, I just want to 2nd the the the
endorsement for for Steve's coffee.
Steve Fox is is is a really good guy and and he and I've gotten
to know each other as well too. And yeah, again, because I'm
cross-border to him that the problem is getting the coffee
shipped here is, is, but I'm, I'm looking for, he and I are
supposed to meet at some point and, and perhaps do a hand to
hand exchange for coffee so that I'm looking forward to the how
that would be fun. And maybe get one of those nice
Fox and Sons cups that he's had the mugs that he's got as well
too. But anyways, yeah, you, I mean,
you can find me at, at under score Kryptos on, on Twitter and
then also again to at seekingthehiddenthing.com.
That's where I do most of my serious writing.
Some of it is free, some of it is behind the paywall.
And that, you know, because all of these things, I have a, you
know, a business that I do and, you know, doing podcasting takes
away from that and takes away from family.
My wife likes it that, you know, there is a little bit of a
little trickle of income that comes through that.
So again, I also appreciate your support as well too.
And an upcoming, I'm at noon today.
I'm supposed to be recording my own podcast with that, an
episode with John Slaughter on the the warrior versus soldier
dichotomy today, which is, you know, one of these things that
has, you know, one of these little kerfuffles that has
broken out on our among our circles that way too.
So we're supposed to be talking about that today and you know,
what is a warrior and so forth. So that that should be coming
soon. So if you want to go
oversubscribe, you won't miss that as well too.
Seeking the hidden thing.com? Crup Joe's channels are well are
very well worth the endorsement and the subscription and the
read. We have all of 16 episodes now
on the podcast, so there we go. Start somewhere, man.
You gotta start somewhere. So you know, I believe in you,
kid. You keep plugging away, I think.
I think one day you'll make it to the big leagues, man.
I, yeah, I now I do record the vast majority of my written
articles. So if you'd like to listen,
there's like like 70 some articles over there that you can
burn through and the many of them are like 45 minutes apiece.
So yeah. Let's see what you'll do with
this. Sure.
So I got a term drop in my lap this past weekend talking to
someone who I think maybe I don't know if it's mutual or
not, but more more on that in the future.
It's not a new term, but it's a new term was a new term for me.
But it in terms of our conversation I was having, it
really was poignant. Data is a new oil.
Now this goes back, I think to 2008.
I can call up exactly who first coined the term data is a new
oil was in 2006, British mathematician client Clive Humby
is said to have coined the phrase data is a new oil.
But over the interceding 17 years, what he actually meant by
it that has been rather lost. Like oil, data is valuable, he
said, but if unrefined, it cannot really be used.
Now this kind of triggered off of a series of thoughts for me
because one of the things that in in in investigation of the
PayPal mafia and sort of the technocratic changes that are
happening in our society and certainly people who are who are
on the forefront of that. And I believe they're are
forming a new counter elite and of course, matrix and his from
over king pills has detailed this extensively.
If anyone is watching this and isn't watching Matt, I don't
know what's wrong with you. Go go, go follow Matt
immediately after the show. What really hit me with this is
that I think people are people can take that statement and go,
oh, it's like valuable, like oil, like it's that's valuable,
but it's it's beyond that. I think where data is the is
what's going to be running the system or what has been running
the system for a bit and now is going to be much more formalized
as the the the the resource that runs the show.
And I say that because when you get into things like World Coin,
which I passed your way, Kryptos, which it gets really
creepy when you get into what a lot of these guys are doing and
what I even think elections have become.
They're these data harvesting events that are both putting out
information, messaging propaganda, and then watching
how people react. And during an election is
perfect because you basically have an AB testing with this
messaging going up as a constant pipeline and you can do it
completely legally above board. The big tell on this was
Bloomberg in 2020 ran that campaign, put up almost a
billion dollars into his campaign that fizzled out in I
think 6 months or some of that. And what we've, what Matt and I
found out was that Bloomberg had also set up all these secondary
companies that were, you know, here today gone to more kind of
kind of shell companies that seemed to only be in business to
collect data there. There were basically made
metadata sites. So I'm putting all this forward
and letting see what you do with it.
Because in terms of the conversation with propaganda, I
think we're we're shifting into a new phase.
Or may I, I'll say, I'll say new, but new, relatively new.
Where the medium is the message is the data harvesting to a
weird degree. And it seems to me like the the
real, the real conflict between the elites, at least on a
technological level, is you have the group like Elon and maybe
his cadre who want the raw crude.
And then you have the and I'll just use Davos as a stand in for
whatever right, the vase who seem to be OK or want almost
that synthetic, artificially created, manufactured,
manipulated kind of data. And those two sides seem to be a
conflict. And this seems to be the the
real conflict of the age. And that to me is really
interesting, especially now that Elon has X, which is, you know,
I mean, it's it's kilometer 0 for propaganda, for messaging,
for narrative, whatever you want to call it.
Narratives are born and brought into the real world on X.
It's it's it's a magic box. So anyways, that's a lot.
But what do you, what do you think about that in general?
Where do you, where can you pick that apart anywhere?
Where would you like to start with that?
OK. So I, I would have a the idea of
data as a new oil. So I think there there has been
this love affair that we've had with the information age and I I
had my thoughts changed on this by a very pedantic and boring
book, but very deep and profound.
It's what did I let me get so I can get the I'm just going to
look it up. The title is In Praise of Hard
Industries. So in praise of hard industries,
why manufacturing, not the information economy, is the Key
to future prosperity. And it's by Amon Fingleton.
Just a wonderfully vibrant name there.
Amon Fingleton's In Praise of Hard Industries.
Why manufacturing, not the information economy, is the key
to future prosperity. So no.
Early life check required on that name.
Yeah, that's right. So here's here's the thing.
So what he's like, he's. Like noticing him.
He's like noticing himself with that name.
Sorry. Go ahead.
Oh, yeah, no, I it's so So what Fingleton does and he breaks us.
Now this is very early in the information age, but they're, if
you remember with the whole push, you and I are old enough
to remember the push, you know, with opening up China and the
the promise behind the scenes of of offshoring was this idea that
we in North America could be the innovators and the ideas guys,
right? And then we could take this, the
troublesome business of manufacturing products, just
ship that overseas and have cheap foreign labor, just make
the stuff. And what Fingleton does is he
breaks down the, the notion that the idea is this sort of, you
know, the, the whole notion that you would, the, the people
struggle with when they're, you know, say if you have like a,
your operating system or a program on your computer, right?
So you remember you used to buy ACD and then you'd have this
disk and you plug it into your computer and then you would
install the program. And your brain thinks it's
because I have this disk, I own a copy of this disk, and I can
do with it as please, I can install it on as many machines
as I want. And then the manufacturers
figured out this is what people were doing.
And so you had to have keys. And what people didn't
understand is that even though they had a disk, the disk was
merely a vehicle or conveying a product that they didn't own.
Buying that disk didn't mean that you own the software.
It just means that you had permission to use it on your
computer. Computer.
It was like buying a license. And so then they just dispensed
with the disk and now you have to buy the licenses.
And so this is this idea that you would license ideas and the
ideas and then somebody else would make the product.
And what Fingleton does, he breaks it down and says that in
any manufacturing operation there are a limit to, even with
sophisticated intelligence, is there's a limit to how much the
machine can do in terms of of making things.
That that within any complex manufacturing process, there is
a certain degree of intuitive knowledge that is carried within
human beings that enables manufacturing to work.
And once you ship that knowledge away, it just disappears and
then? And it, it then transfers to the
new place. And he says the the easiest part
of the whole process actually with manufacturing whatever to
to hack and to steal and to reproduce is actually the ideas.
So this you see now with the Chinese, the Chinese have been
stealing the ideas, the information behind the ideas and
using it to make the machines themselves.
They don't have to innovate. They basically steal all of our
ideas because those are the things that are easiest to hack.
And in many ways, what Fingleton actually argues is that the
Wizards of Smart saw the ideas as being the most important part
of the process and Finkelton actually argues that they are
the least important part of the process.
It's actually the hard manufacturing, the guys who know
how to make stuff and the factories with embedded
knowledge that are the most decisive part of the
manufacturing process. So now if and So what he argues
is that by shipping it overseas, you are fundamentally and
perhaps irreparably damaging your not only just your economy,
but also your nation as a whole. Because once that knowledge
slips away, people lose their sense of purpose.
And so and you see this with like the fentanyl crisis and so
forth, people lose their sense of meaning because really in in
any society, only about 10% of people can even hope to be in
that innovative ideas guys crowd anyways.
The rest of the people need to have jobs where they work at
machines and factories in an industrialized economy.
Anyways, So now get to get back to the question of, you know,
the the data as the new oil in in many ways, our society still
runs on having to make things. And this was very apparent
during COVID. You know, antibiotics, even some
of the simple things like why couldn't you get a diet pop in
North America? Well, because aspartame is made
in China. And then with the shutdowns, you
know, you couldn't, nobody knew how to make aspartame or they
couldn't make aspartame over here in North America.
And so we have this, this global supply chain that is really
dependent upon, it's not dependent upon data.
It's dependent upon, you know, the the US having aircraft
carriers in the Middle East and all of the things that maintains
it. So what data represents is, is
control. And so data in in the
surveillance state is the panopticon is it is it like in
the Chinese state with it with you think about the social
credit systems. So the more data, and this is
part of, of the, the, the whole goal of technique and, and the
technological society is being able to engineer society towards
perfection. And so the promise of AI is that
you can take the fundamental liberal promise of engineering
society towards its perfection. But doing so now having the,
the, the data access to control people finitely enough that you
can then manipulate them in the ways that you finally need to
manipulate them in order to perfect society.
So in a sense, oil still remains oil manufacturing still remains
manufacturing. You have to make things.
Our economy is dependent upon cheap energy.
It's dependent upon manufacturing.
It's dependent upon these now global supply chains.
But what data gives you and, and, and the, the processing
power that that's possible with these, you know, large
algorithm, I hate to call it artificial intelligence, but
these, these, these large algorithmic data, you know,
processing and so forth, 'cause they're not even really
learning, they're just. Got a language language?
Language models? Large language models, yeah.
Yeah, the, the LLMS that the, the, the real thing that they
give you. And in this sense they are the
propagandist's dream. Because you can like let, let's
say you marry this data to, you know, having a camera in every
corner like you do in England. And then you, you're processing
everybody's data in real time with all of these real time
images. And what this gives you is, and
that's the thing about propaganda, it's supposed to be
an all-encompassing environment. So you have this now, this
all-encompassing environment that's monitoring everything,
that's processing the data in real time.
And then it's keying off algorithmically on, on key
phrases, create actions, key whatever, you know, interpreting
photographs, the, you know, the algorithms then then, you know,
do analytical work for the break it all down.
And what it promises is a kind of control of society that a
propagandist 100 years ago could only dream of.
So in this sense, if you say that, you know, big data is, is
the new oil, Yes and no oil still remains, you know, the new
oil. But really what this is, is now
propagandistic control at a level that, you know, was
heretofore unimagined, because now you can generally use the,
the social credit systems and, and these sort of things to, to
quote UN quote, nudge people into correct behaviors so that
they believe that they're, they're simply doing it.
And that's part of the whole thing of propaganda is people
believe that they're acting under their own free will, but
they're being manipulated. And propaganda really isn't
about changing how you think, but it's changing how you act.
And then your thoughts will align with your actions.
Propaganda is concerned more about orthopraxis than it is
about orthodoxy. And there, there's numerous
examples that you can give where people think and behave in one
way in certain parts of their life, but in the key aspects
that the propagandist needs them to act correctly, they act
correctly, right? So you take for example, most
PMCS, they get married, they have families, they stay
married, they save their money. They do all of these things that
you would think are very, very conservative things, right?
But when they go to the ballot box, they vote Democrat.
And when you need them to come out to a peaceful demonstration
for BLM, they come out to a peaceful demonstration of BLM
and raise their fist. When you need them to speak out
in a meeting to clamp down dissenting voices, they speak
out in a meeting and clamp down dissenting voices.
They do all the things that you need to do.
But at the same time, in many parts of their lives, they act
and behave as conservatives. So if you were to separate them
off from the from the propaganda and begin talking to them person
to person, you can get them to discover that much of the way
that they live their lives and the much of the way they behave
and think is very conservative. But in all the key areas of the
propagandist wants them to be aligned with the system.
They get up and go to work every day.
They do all the things, you know, they vote in the right
way, they support all the right policies.
You know, they're all gung ho in the committee and when they're
in a meeting room with their at the office, they're the ones
that say, hey, listen, we have to support Israel.
We have to support Ukraine. We have to make sure that we're
for trans rights. We, you know, BLM and, and we
have to be for diversity. So on all of the key metrics and
areas that you need them to be aligned with the system, They're
aligned with the system, but they in in many ways how they
live their lives and kind of things they do.
So and they live like conservatives in many ways,
which is that you saw they have these bizarre dichotomies.
And so it really isn't about them being brainwashed
automatons, it's about them acting in certain key ways that
support the agenda of the system where, you know, the, the key
metric of, you know, how do we achieve human progress?
And so the people are aligned to act in a way that the, you know,
in a sense the, the, the key managers, the, the, the
propagandist has decided is this is the way that human progress
is achieved. And and as long as they're
acting in that accord, then they're fine.
Yeah, I think there I think to go back to the data is the new
oil analogy. What I found interesting about
it is if you think of oil as the the resource that basically
created the the the industrial revolution that you know, is the
thing that they the resource that really put it on OverDrive.
The data is a new oil is a new resource for this new industrial
revolution, say this new technocracy, this new
technological push and that I the way I see with AIAI is this
intermediary. It's like if you take the human
beings create raw data, crude and AI then becomes the
refinery. So we feed that data into the AI
or the AI then selects all this data and transmutes it into
other images, other data, right? So you have data, creating data,
creating data. One thing Matt Erickson
mentioned on the Peter Thielfrender fed that everyone
should go watch if you haven't already, the is that when you
plug AI into AI, in terms of, you know, AI is talking to AI to
create, to create images, it goes psychotic.
It's like it. Doesn't get weird results like
very very weird results. Right.
Whereas so the human component is absolutely necessary even
with the prompts. So that to me is, I find, I find
really interesting, you know, when you're looking into and in.
In in many ways, it dovetails into just sort of interrupted.
It dovetails into Fingleton's point that like even in an
automated factory, you need human input to keep that factory
going, right? And so in a sense, AI is the
same thing. It needs human input to have to
have property ordered results. Right.
And then then we get into if you start looking at insert
Girardian models, what gets really interesting is that well,
well this OK, before we do that you send me a quote from Kamal
Harris. I mean, we can cover this and I
think we have I don't know how long we have you on for I've.
I've got I'm actually good for time, so as long as you're OK.
Yeah, yeah, we're good. So 'cause I think this, there's
another part of this conversation about how the right
wing gets suckered into using to being progressives or the right
wing within the liberal frame are.
Progressive and we can talk about, yeah, it just comes down
to the fundamental nature of propaganda, right, In a sense
that way that I think a lot on the right don't understand.
So I'll just read the quote here.
This is from from Kamala Harris's official ex profile.
Our campaign is not just about US versus Donald Trump.
It's about two different visions for our nation.
One focus on the future, the other on the past.
We fight for the future. Yes.
And that that in a sense is so this gets back to propaganda as
a a sociological phenomenon. So most people don't understand
that modern technological Western society is at its heart
fundamentally liberal, right? So that that, or let's say this
liberalism is fundamentally aligned with the general
cultural ethos of modernity. Liberalism is its natural
political philosophy. So what Alluul argues is that
for for propaganda to work, it has to take root or it has to,
it has to work with what is there within the person.
So in this regard, he says to This is why propaganda requires
a lot of scientific involvement approach because you need to
figure out, you know, how do people think and you know what
makes them tick. And so you, you do all of that
sociological and scientific research so that way you can tap
into the key things. Now what Elul argues is that all
propaganda has to be because it's a sociological phenomenon.
In other words, it it's necessary to make modernity
work. Is it?
It has to be based on the key myths upon which modernity is
built, right? And so, and This is why in many
ways, the Christian, the traditionalist are the true
Christian like, who really understands their faith and, and
understands the, the, the core theological premises.
And, you know, recognizes that modernity and Christianity are
incompatible. And, and in this way, you, you,
you stand outside of this and, and propaganda for the, for the
true conservative, propaganda becomes a thing that you can't
even use. So he argues that there are 4
foundational presuppositions or myths of the modern world,
right? So the first one is that man's
aim in life is happiness. So again, you can see this with,
you know, you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. So this is this is a key
fundamental Dr. within within modernity is to find happiness
within this life in the material world.
OK, The second one is that man is naturally good.
OK, so you dispense with the doctrine of original sin.
And this is the fundamental divide between right and left in
my mind, is this divide over, you know, what do you think of
the, of the, the condition of man?
Are man born as blank slates or are they or, or good or are they
born fundamentally flawed? And a lot of things are
downstream from this. And then third, that history
develops in endless progress. OK, so that the, the, this is
the point of, of human history is, is progress.
So and you know, cosmologically evolution is, is the
cosmological frame that that justifies that.
So we have our own origin. So modernity has its own origin
story, just like the Genesis story we had.
You know, modernity gives us the evolution story that justifies
human progress because, you know, what is evolution but
progress on a cosmic scale, right?
And then finally, the fourth thing is that everything is
matter, that there is nothing beyond the material.
There's no God, there's no spirits, there's no afterlife.
There's, you know, so your 4 fundamental myths, man's aim in
life is happiness. He's naturally good.
He develops an everything in endless progress and everything
is matter. So he says, you know, the basic
myths of the modern world are, you know, science and scientific
progress helps achieve that. And that again this, this idea
of history, that history is moving forward in progress.
And then he says from these are derived the fundamental or you
know, orientations that propaganda is built on.
So he talks about the myth of work and we were, we've
mentioned this, this idea that, you know, because because we
have to build our future, work becomes a central component.
You have to do the work right of, of building the future.
Again, the myth of happiness, which he says is not the same
thing as the presumption of happiness.
He also talks about the myth of the nation.
It's just another fundamental idea upon which propaganda is
built. Again, the myth of the youth and
the myth of the hero. So the propaganda is forced to
build on these propositions and to express these myths, for
without them, nobody would listen to it, right?
So here's here's a quote from a lul.
So a propaganda that stresses virtue over happiness and
presents man's future as one dominated by austerity and
contemplation would have no audience at all.
A propaganda that questions progress or work would arouse
disdain and reach nobody. Propaganda must also follow the
general direction of evolution, which includes the belief in
progress. Right?
So he also then says this in in in this regards, politically
says because the left is aligned with these fundamental myths, he
says the political left is respectable.
The right has to justify itself before the ideology of the left
in which even the rightists participate.
All propaganda must contain and must evoke the principal
elements of the ideology of the left in order to be accepted.
And that's why I, I, I pointed that quote out to or that that
tweet out to you from Kamala Harris because I'm like, that's
that essential, the essence of that principle right there in
like 240 characters basically of like, that's the fundamental
propagandism. We are for the future.
We are for human progress. So you vote for us if you want
to be free because our opponents are for the past.
Therefore that you know that world of dominated by austerity
contemplation and you know the questions progress and you know,
hinders program. And so you see this OK, so a
really, really good example of this, you know how basically
everybody is a progressive in in the modern world.
So Rush Limbaugh, everybody's favorite conservative.
We all grew up listening to Rush, but if you remember the
debates over the environmental movement, right, how did Rush
frame this at the time? So for him, the anti
environmentalists, they were the people that wanted to stop human
and economic progress, scientific.
So here we are, we on the right, we're advancing, we're the right
is about their progressives. But they're like, say you might
call them economic progressives. So the the battle is not really
over. Should we or shouldn't we have
modernity? Should we or shouldn't we have
human, you know, this idea of human progress, but how best to
achieve this thing that we all want, which is human progress?
So on the right, they argue, well, you know, progress is best
achieved when we get rid of government intervention.
We allow the economy to to flourish.
Everybody will be prosperous and happy and free and they'll have
all the things they want. So the anti environmentalist,
what they want to do is they want to stifle innovation, They
want to stifle the economy. And So what we need to do is we
need to get these people off the backs of our of of our
scientists and our economists. Just let the scientists go to
work and they'll figure out ways to make money off of cleaning up
the environment. And that's when the environment
will get cleaned up. And, you know, that was that was
Rush Limbaugh. And and, you know, we have a
hard time to leave because, well, Russia's a conservative,
but Russia was actually a progressive and just a certain
type of progressive. And most of the people on the
right today are a certain type of progressive.
So let's say, for example, if you believe like you have DEI
versus the meritocracy, right? Both of those are fundamentally
progressive, right? So DEI says that equality is the
way that we achieve. The utopian future that we all
want, right? Whereas the meritocrat, he says,
no, the way that we achieve greatness in the future is by
striving for excellence. Then we can create the techno
future that we know will liberate us, give us happiness
and give us that bright future. So both the meritocracy and DEI
and both of these are technical apparatus, and they're both
basically fundamentally the same.
They're using technology to orchestrate a future.
Both of these are fundamentally progressive ideas that deal with
human progress, right? Neither of them is conservative.
So when you look at, you know, our political battles, you
basically have conservative progressives and you have
liberal progressives, or you have economic progressives or
you have social progressives. And throughout our economy, we
have basically even even the debate over abortion today, this
whole debate over abortion, like abortion absolutism, even these
are framed and, and are thought up in terms of, of
progressivism. So in other words, the
progressive future is a future free from abortion.
So therefore we must use the administrative system in the
system of law to impose it on the nation, right, to impose
this law in the nation. Because if we impose this on the
nation, this is how we obtain the progressive future of a good
and moral and upright society. All of the visions that we have
for politics, every single one of them are essentially a
progressive. It's just battles over which
form of progressivism is going to dominate.
And This is why like even the in the right and left battle.
So if we have a propaganda battle on in our politics today,
it's not a battle between a true conservatism and liberalism.
It's a battle for which form of progressivism is going to
dominate. So one of the reasons I started
this podcast early on, one of the things that happened to me
in 2020 and that had a cascade effect was I'd became, I wanted
to break the liberal frame for myself and then for others.
And in my quest to break this frame, and it wasn't to destroy
liberalism or anything too grandiose.
I needed to free my brain from it because I became very aware
of how all my thinking was caught in this box and I
couldn't out think the box like I, I had to get free of the box
in order to go what, what is this?
Like, what is happening? Why, why, why are all my
preconceptions wrong fundamentally?
And that's, I mean, I had a religious experience that, that,
that, that promoted this kind of project in the end, when I
became, it's a very simple explanation that, and I'll
explain my way. I'm using these terms and you
tell me if you agree with them or not.
Modernity to me is the removal of God from the hierarchy.
Once you remove God from the hierarchy and you put man
instead in there, so you take out Christ and you put in man.
The problem with putting man in there is that man then becomes
indistinct, becomes this unmanned, this, you know,
progressive man, but this, this liberal man.
But that liberal man keeps changing constantly.
And as you, as you're, as you're saying, it's, there's a, a
conflict between conservative liberal man and, and progressive
liberal or, you know, liberal, liberal man, however you want to
how you want to dictate it. This is the Ubermensch.
This is the, you know, whatever term you want to use, but the
Ubermensch is not Uber. He's retarded.
And in order to break the frame successfully, you need to
reinstate God into the hierarchy, because what's
happened is that it becomes this cascade effect.
So you remove God from the hierarchy, then all of a sudden
you have to remove the king, then you have to remove the
father, and then you have to remove the mother.
So now children being brought up in this current state of affairs
have no models. All their models are either
corrupt, like literally corrupt, or they've been told that their
models are corrupt. And so then you get to the
troons and this kind of phenomena, it doesn't seem weird
to me anymore. It's like, well, of course you,
you, you are distrustful of your own sense of being because if
you're a man and you've modeled your father or you're you, you
see your father in you and yet you're told that your father is,
is evil and a problem just by being a father alone.
No, nothing specific about him. Then you have to question your
own self. Then your identity becomes at
question. And that's where these models
begin to break apart. So the only way to break liberal
frame is to put God back in primacy and then to restore in
some ways the desire, at least for a king.
And I don't necessarily mean a man sitting on the throne, but a
leader who, who is in the traditional sense of a king, the
king. We're not even talking about a,
you know, supreme power on that stuff.
That's, that was actually a, an enlightenment idea, But the,
the, the old form of the king where the king was actually the
center of culture. So the, the king would project
earthly power and, and presence and people would model the king
in their own way. So they would model God and
Christ. And then the king, who's being,
who's being directed by the church.
And then the, so that your father is, is trying to fulfill
all these different levels of, of, of the hierarchy.
And maybe he succeeds me, he doesn't.
Maybe he's a good representation, whatever, But
then you're modeling your father.
And this is again, going back to my idea of, of, of the way out
from the, from the vengeful son spirit that we're, we're
experiencing. I think what we'll be
experiencing much more in the coming years is to model the
prodigal son is to return to the father to be, to repent in
humility, to then and then be redeemed so that we can then
turn around and start redeeming our dads.
And it's in a sense redeeming the 20th century.
And the way we do that, I think, is by doing what they could,
they did not or could not, which is get humble, you know, stop
with this prideful assertation that cause, along with
progressivism, is this pride that we have the answers that we
can change these things into something good and beautiful.
And the good and the beautiful and the true can be can be
created a whole hawk out of these ideologies.
And we're watching these ideologies fall apart in front
of in front of us. We're seeing that, as I've said
before, and sorry, I'll end with this and throw it back to you.
I feel like we're the, the meta crisis cause crisis is now the
buzzword. But the, the meta crisis I think
we're in is, is a, is a crisis of, of consequence.
I do not believe and no one is ever going to convince me that
planes falling from the sky was part of the plan.
I just don't believe that, right?
I don't believe that our that these elites and these, you
know, the men behind the curtains and all that stuff are
know what they're doing anymore. And I think that their plans
were watching this happen live in Britain, you know, where
cursed armor just seems to be determined to to turn the entire
world against him in in in one week.
It's pretty it's pretty stunning.
I don't think that's part of a plan.
I just think that they they've they've run out of room and the
contradictions that are created within the liberal frame
eventually drive you crazy. Now the problem is that when
some of these guys are driving crazy, they also have the
mechanisms of power and they can make your life pretty miserable.
But I also, again, another bitter white pill is that I, I
feel that we're, we're going to breakthrough this, whether it's
tomorrow or next week or in November or next year or in 60
years, I'm not sure. But I feel that there that the
the current state of majority is falling apart and it it's going
to get replaced by something different.
I'm not saying that's better, but it's going to be different.
What do you think about that? Well, there, there's a lot
there. OK, so.
I drop, I drop a lot on your plate, Sir.
That's kind of how. I go, yeah, that's how we.
Roll well. I respect you.
I I know, I know you. You're you're intelligent enough
to figure out my Wizzle Wazzle so.
Yeah, there we go. How?
How much have you read Murcia Eliade?
0. Zero.
You should read the the myth of the return or no?
What is it? Is it the myth of the eternal
return? I got to Google this again.
Mircia Eliade. Now there we go.
Books. Yeah.
The Myth of the Eternal Return, 1949.
So Eliade is a histories of religion guy and with some, you
know, dubious mid century associations in Romania, I
believe it was. He ended up coming and teaching
at the University of Chicago. And yeah, no, no, but he's good.
That's OK. So that's Eastern Europe.
That's that's that's Eastern European ick.
That's just, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's internal.
Internal kind of. Yeah, there we go.
Yeah, Well, the inside joke, right?
Yeah. The the greasy.
This is like. The OK so so.
You smell like trout. It's weird.
Yeah, there we go. So with Eliade, he one of the
things that he argues with, and I find this again with, you
know, in our conversation with Walter Ong, one of the the
things that authors like Ong and Eliade are very helpful for is
to get us out of our framework for understanding the world
through the lens of the modern and helping get us into how did
a pre modern think about the world and how, you know, in
terms of how was their frame different from ours.
And so Eliade looks at this notion of time in regards to the
ancients and then the Christian notion of time and the modern
notion of time. So we're all familiar with the
idea of the cyclical history, the, you know, and that's sort
of the myth of the eternal return, that history is
archetypal, it's cyclical, but the same archetypes keep
manifesting themselves over and over again.
So in this type of world and frame, meaning is out there in
the world, OK, The world inherently has a, a structure of
meaning and it manifests itself in cycles.
And so one of the ways that you, you in a sense grow or fulfill
yourself as a person is, you know, let's say, and, and the,
the old biblical stories very much are archetypal and they
manifest this idea of recurring themes and recurring archetypes.
And there's a lot of this, this secular notion of the of, of
eternal return even within the Old Testament Scriptures.
So, and this is how a man like Josiah, a king like Josiah gets
framed as a second David, that type of thing.
So if you wanted to become a man, you become a man like the
person in the great story. So you live into the stories and
you become a great man, or you become the good king, the great
king, these types of things. So the archetypes are out there
and then you live into them. You become the great warrior,
you become the farmer, you become the housewife, you become
the wise with all these different archetypes that are
out there and you live into the archetype.
Now they wouldn't call them archetypes, they would just be
part of you live into the stories with the Christian
world. We generally, people generally
say that, you know, Christianity introduced linear time, which is
both yes and no. And this was a fundamental
insight and Elliotti really helped me understand that.
And Elliotti argued that the Christian understanding of time
was in the biblical understanding time was that time
is a a static architecture. So in other words, the events
that we experience in this sense belong to God's plan.
So we as human beings live under this architecture of God's plan.
So it begins with God and his creation.
Then there was this fall, and then in the center of God's plan
there is Christ, and he redeems creation, and then there's the
return. And so the, the significant
events in world history all happen because of God's
initiation. It's God's, God's doing, God's
event. And I forget, you know,
sometimes you pick things up and you, you wish that you had made
note of it because you didn't realize it would be important 30
years later. But I read somewhere that there
was a kind of psychic break that occurred at the end of the year
1000, that much of, you know, the Renaissance modernity and
everything was kicked off. Humanism became a thing
following the year 1000 when Christ didn't return as many
expected him to do. So they created a kind of
psychic break in culture. Now, if you tie this into your
Spangler, Spanglerian, you know, view of the world that, you
know, the West really begins around the year 1000, it kind of
makes sense. So there is this sense that
because Christ didn't return, people didn't right away
abandoned their faith, but they stopped looking heavenward in
that sense for the meaning of all the events around them.
So up until this time the world was fairly static and so you fit
yourself into events. Just to jump in for a second,
people forget their herring of Haiti's story.
A lot of Christians kind of skip over that, especially in the
Western tradition, because one of the things that happened in
the heroin of Hades is that Christ locked up this locked up
Satan for 1000 years. So.
Yeah, there you go. Dates matter.
Dates do matter. So and and this is also why
Orthodoxy, even if you're not Orthodox, that Orthodoxy does
matter, right? So it's the so prior to this,
there is this idea of of like sort of the hierarchy of being.
So because history and world events belong to God, the way
that you ascend and better yourself is vertically by
ascending the hierarchy of being, by directing yourself to
God, perfecting yourself. And in this way too, you know,
there's a lot of talk these days about, you know, the warrior
spirit and Christian, one of the things that Christianity does is
it takes this idea that the the warrior is not first of all,
like the great man is not first of all the one who conquers his
neighbor. Although because we live in a
violent world, you know, we kind of accept because we're not
trying to, they're not trying to perfect the world.
They just simply accept the fact that the world is a violent
place and that violence is sometimes necessary.
But that what happens is in this Christian framework, violence
becomes contained within this notion of a hierarchy of being.
So even the night with all of his violence is trying to ascend
the ladder of being towards God in the same way that that, you
know, the professional priest or the monk is trying to do the
same. And so everybody in society is
trying to ascend the ladder of being, to draw themselves closer
to God and the way that you, you conquer the world, so to speak,
you turn it inward and rather than conquering your neighbor,
you conquer yourself. So this is in a sense where the
knightly virtues come in. So the knight is a sense trying
to frame himself within this this context of virtue.
And in so doing, he also ascends the ladder of being.
So everything becomes framed and and so you're conquering
yourself. So the year 1000, this breaks
and all of a sudden people realize that wait a minute,
they're not necessarily abandoning their faith, but a
shift occurs. Now we're no longer waiting for
God. So people think that.
So we're have this new humanism comes about where man is at the
center of things and and or, you know, it doesn't happen
overnight, but it begins to shift and then the religious
vision becomes one of we have to imminentize the eschaton.
This is that sort of imminentization.
So we have to now realize God's heaven on earth through human
progress. So this we're no longer waiting
for Christ to return because he didn't return in year 1000.
So we do it in history. So the output of that or, or the
the end result of this, this is what Eliade argues is that now
we take on God's burden of history onto ourselves.
And so we take on the burden of history and it becomes up to us
now to instantiate utopia. And so this is again, it doesn't
happen overnight in the year 1000, but beginning with
humanism, there is this slow unfolding events.
And then you can see this now too, is that if you interiorize
it, as now you combine this with like with nominalism and so
forth. And you know, because nominalism
cuts you off from that world of metaphysics, because if we can't
prove that there's a connection with these underlying
metaphysical realities, they must be just a projection of our
mind, right? So nominalism says that that all
of the ideas and the concepts that are out there are just
merely projections of my mind onto the world.
I'm creating that order. I can't prove that they're
there. I just simply have to accept
that I'm the one that's that's creating this order.
So if I'm creating this order and I'm going forward, right?
And then you get into sort of the romantics and this notion of
personal genius, you get to a point where you have like the
transgender person or the transgender person is merely
taking on to themselves the burden of history of creating
their own identity, right? So I'm going to now create my
own utopia, right? So I believe, as you know, if
I'm like a man and I believe that I'm a woman, I'm going to
create my own history. I have the burden of my creating
my own identity. And now we finally have the
power of science. We can, this is that same
version right across the side. The power of science is going to
help me realize my vision of utopia, my own personal vision
of utopia, which is me as a a man who believes he's a woman
who can now realize who he is perfectly.
I can instantiate my own utopian person.
So you think to yourself like, oh, this transgenderism, this is
weird. And I think no, it's a perfectly
logical outworking of modernity. Like this is modernity worked
out to its end and this is kind of instance like we take the
power of technology to work out my own and it's this whole thing
I need to find myself, what's my purpose in life and all these
kinds of things. You know, transgenderism, it's
just basically all of that. And it's it's it's this this
notion of the burden of history just worked out on a personal
level with the power of technology to back it.
There's nothing bizarre about transgenderism, once you
understand the fundamental philosophical understandings of
modernity, that that transgenderism is really its end
result. One of the things I figured out
in the first year after having my spiritual transformation was
the crushing weight of the atheist.
So the atheist has to take on all of morality, history,
reality itself upon their shoulders because they they are
what? Essentially saying that they are
the arbiter of reality. There is no higher order this,
you know, they might have been inheriting a tradition, be it
Western or law fair or whatever have you, but essentially
morality has to rest on them. And this is the weight of the
cross. So they're they're they're still
bearing cross, but they're bearing the full weight.
The one thing I realized by accepting Christianity again was
how again, going back to that Christ story of Christ bearing
that cross, and how that story transformed and converted entire
Pagan cultures. Because at no, this is and this
is unique and this is something Gerard really strikes home with.
It is that there is no other mythological story of a God
humbling themselves the way that our God did.
And when you really try to get through your head what the
weight of the cross upon God would would be that you're
talking about an Immaculate being who could just, you know,
change it if you wanted to. But he didn't.
He went through. With, and this was Gerard's like
really like for all of the insights Gerard's had, you know
that, that, that central idea that you can take memetic
violence, you know, this, this sense of like, you have
something that I want and I want to take it from you or there's a
problem in society. So we must find a scapegoat.
And I must put that, you know, I, I have to sacrifice you in
order to restore order to the society that Christ in his
sacrifice is able to take the weight of all of that
scapegoating, all of those memetic desires.
You can cast them on to Christ. He dies and yet lives.
And that, and in the sense it's the dying and the living that
really it's not, it's not that you just cast them on him.
He's dead and he's gone and you have to do this again.
But because he, he dies and he lives, you then have the power
to break the cycle of memetic violence that you, you no longer
have to scapegoat your neighbor because you can, you can give
the problem over to Christ, you know, sort of cast it on the
cross and allow Christ to take that over.
And also you, you can then direct your desires to Christ
and you no longer have to envy your neighbor and potentially
kill him to take his stuff because you can cast her.
And, and it when, you know, when, when I first read her, it
was just sort of it's, it's an insight so profound that you
realize, look, how did I not see this before?
You know? And and so that's that is really
yes. Well then, and then, and then
you go ahead and read Saint Piezo's or some of some of the
Orthodox Saints and you realize that the Orthodox Church has
been talking about this since, since, you know, year 1
essentially. And even in the West where where
they in the West, we have talked about this as well too.
Sure, sure. But.
And but I think sometimes it just, it takes somebody saying
it in a new way to really kind of just, Oh yeah, that's right,
that this is really what we believe kind of thing, you know,
to saying it in a fresh way. Yeah, giving suffering context
is extremely powerful. Why it not being woe is me, but
oh, is me. Oh, oh, I OK, now I have this
suffering. What can I do with it?
Like how where where's my responsibility lies?
Or even if it's not my responsibility, you know,
something happened. You it's you can't control it.
OK, well, what do I do with it now?
What, what, what, what new opportunities does this
suffering open up to me? You know, is it just exposing
the distance I have between me and God?
And you know, what do I need to do to close that distance in
some ways, which is all very powerful stuff.
Well, and it was also like, you know, for, for, for how his star
has fallen, you know, Jordan Peterson and even in his
biblical in terms of, for the many flaws that people have
pointed out in his, his mythological approach to
interpreting some of the, the, the, the Genesis story, there
was some really good insights that he had.
And one of those ones was the Cain and Abel story of, you
know, the sense of what do you do?
And, and this is one of the things I think that a lot of
people don't appreciate that up until the point that his
sacrifice is rejected, there's no real hint in the story itself
that he's done anything wrong. But what happens when you do
everything right and your sacrifice is not accepted right?
You don't succeed. What do you do with that right
in Cain? The story of Cain is you know,
and, and, and, and in many ways, you know, God then approaches
Cain and says you've got a problem.
You need to deal with this sin crouches at the door and you
need to master it. And this is the fundamental
thing. And but Cain in a sense doesn't
master. He lets his bitterness and
resentment that his brother's sacrifice was accepted and he
kills his brother and, you know, reenact that kind of Gerardian,
you know, scapegoat that the brother must be at the fault
because I didn't, you know, God didn't receive my sacrifice.
And God, you know, God never tells him.
It's just like maybe there was something in Cain that he saw.
But there's, you know, in the story, you know, once the
sacrifice is rejected, it's no longer about the sacrifice,
Cain. It's about how you're going to
deal with, you know, how are you going to respond to, to the
rejection of the, of, of, of your sacrifice?
And are you going to let resentment grow and are you
going to let bitterness grow? And so there's a, there's a, a
profound lesson there. And this is basically the second
story right after the fall into, you know, and you think to
yourself how, you know, the 1st, the 1st 11 chapters of Genesis
are in many ways, not so much even about the past, but help us
to understand why things are the way they are today.
Like why does bitterness and resentment and the Cain and Abel
story seemed to reenact itself throughout society over and over
and over again. And like, you're like, well, OK,
this is like a fundamental reality of sinful world, this
bitterness and resentment. And then, you know, you dovetail
that into to into what Christ does through the the lens of
how, you know, Gerard helps us understand that.
And you realize that, well, the way to get rid of that is just
to cast that resentment onto God and then to refuse the, you
know, the temptations that that the evil one will put forward to
you, to dwell on your bitterness and to take it out on your
brother. Yeah, I mean, one of the one of
the ways to think about time just to to button that hole that
you mentioned earlier, and this is again coming from a more
orthodox framework, is that these things are all layered.
So all these things are happening all at once,
perpetually. So the garden is still
happening, the fall is still happening.
The end times, the actual real Esquitan.
What's happening? You're happening.
All these things are all happening all at once.
Now we're experiencing our segment, our our sliver, our
plate of time in our in our lifetime.
But all the things that have that have happened before hang
on pause for the cause. The oh, there we go.
Oh, there we go. Yeah, the the producer is going
to bed. So a little 1 needs to be tucked
in. There we go.
A hug from Daddy. All righty.
She's cute. Thankfully she's cute because
she wouldn't get away with a lot of stuff otherwise.
So, yeah, so all these things are happening all at once, all
all the same time now. So the past obviously is
informing us because we can experiences the past and through
history and learn about it and so on and so forth and
incorporate our lives. The future is happening.
The future is happening at the same time as well, but at at
almost a different philosophy. And this is what revelations
are, is that we are through our news, right?
That this consciousness and we've gone completely off
propaganda, folks. Oh yeah.
Well, I mean, we can get back to it too.
That's that's fine. Welcome to the two bit podcast.
This is this is how we roll. OK, we'll get back.
We'll we'll find a way back by this one point.
So if you can imagine that the end times has always been
happening that it will that it's happening in our parlance in the
future, but it's happening. But we're seeing the, we're
getting the, the, the data, right.
The data stream is trickling in from the future, let's say, but
at our news, because we're, our consciousness is not in the
body, it's from without the body, right?
So what we could say is that the, the news in the, in the
Orthodox tradition is, is sort of our faculty for understanding
revelation. And the revelation is that,
let's say the God's frequency is, is, is giving us this
information and we pick up on it and we translate it.
And through discernment, we, we try to understand what these
things are. And some of us are better at
than others or better at at different times than others.
So this, this information in some ways is, is not of us.
Let's say this is divine propaganda.
If we're going to try to wing this back around and I'm trying
not to veer into heresy, but you know, we'll try our best, but
that would be the almost the best way of understanding it is
that when you get these intuitions and sometimes it's
not from God, it's from the other guy.
So you have to be able. To discernment.
Discernment is very is very key. Go talk to a priest.
But once you discern that it's from, from God, then that's the
interesting thing, right? Because then you have to do,
then you get to deal with a whole bunch of really
interesting stuff, which nine times out of 10 is just get
humble, stop being prideful, bear witness and, and get
yourself good with that. And then all these other things
kind of don't matter anymore. They matter less and less and
less. You know, I find myself becoming
much more agnostic on the material realm about these
things where I view them as out of interest.
And obviously they, they have the ability to affect me on a
physical level. So you got to, you got to pay
attention. But in terms of overall interest
in, let's say, involvement, I'm getting more and more detached
because as I commit more to, to, to, to God and religion, the
less a lot of these other things really matter to me.
It's more like, huh, well, that's huh, they're doing that
now. Oh, well, that's cool.
Like, why were they doing that? Oh, this Kamala character is
pretty funny. Let's let's have some chuckles.
But I mean, I'm not that worried about things anymore.
No, it it's it's one of these there there are probably two
ways that we could go. And one is to talk about, you
know, the relationship between the Christian faith and
propaganda and then maybe dovetail back into, you know,
the the notion of like the the material in that regard.
But Alluul notes that there's a dilemma for.
Christian, let's, let's, let's do that.
Let's, let's do relationship with Christianity and
propaganda, 'cause I think for a lot of a lot of my audience,
that would be a major, a major point of interest.
I'll be right back. The, the, the, The thing is, is
that you can't really do propaganda in a sense in good
faith. So you're, you're caught in a
dilemma. And this is, it's, it's too
difficult to reach people one at a time.
This is sort of the whole thing. We have to, you know, you have
to convert people kind of one at a time or whatever, right?
But The thing is, is that the propagandist, to be a good
propagandist, can't believe, they can't believe in the they,
they have to remain detached because the propagandist has to
recognize the propaganda is essentially about control.
And this gets back to sort of the, the AI question, right?
And, and AI is, is more about control than it is about in a
sense, powering the industrial world with oil.
So it's how do you control people?
So that this whole notion of control, I think so you can't
reach people one at a time because it's just, it's a thing.
So you think to yourself, maybe we as a Christian can use
propagandist techniques. But the problem is that if you
use propagandist techniques in order to reach people, you
essentially give away the gospel because you materialize it and
you become manipulative and it fundamentally cuts you off from
God and fundamentally alienates you from each other because you
have to, in order, in order to do propaganda.
Remember we, we talked about this, that you need sort of the
masked man. So you have to actually
breakdown community to do all of these kind of things.
So if you then though as a, as a church, say, well, OK, we're not
going to do propaganda the, the, in a modern world.
The problem is, is that the moment your people go outside of
the, the church environment, they're being propagandized by
society and everything else. And this is one of the things,
so they're being inculcated into how to act by the propaganda
that they drown in everywhere else.
They come into church and you're expected to connect them to God
in the brief period of time that you have.
And then you think to yourself, well, maybe what I should do is,
is use propaganda to get to my people.
This is in some ways the the, the secret church model, the
mega church model kind of does that.
Then the only problem is is that in order to do that you have to
adapt the gospel to modernity. It has to then become about
happiness, that people are basically good, that it's about
human progress, and that everything is matter.
But where does God fit into a world where everything is
matter? So church becomes about making
people happy, and it's about life fulfillment.
And so you do it though in a gloss of God language.
So if you try to reach people by means of propaganda, what you
end up doing is emptying the gospel of its power.
But in a sense, if you don't use propaganda in a modern society,
you're caught in a dilemma that the moment your people have any
contact with the the world and then there's very hard to avoid
contact with the world, they drown in propaganda and all the
messaging in life undercuts their relationship with God.
So it's it's very, very difficult in the modern world
because of the sociological necessity of propaganda for
people to have a vibrant, dynamic, living relationship
with God where they're able to meet God and connect with him.
Because everything in society with the propaganda that we're
immersed in undercuts that and undermines.
That Xavier Olivia and then Chad says, how do you propaganda
prove your people? Let's put a pin in that.
So I think we're kind of moving towards that.
And there's a there's a way we can we can combine this with
sort of anti memetics, which is something popularized by Luke
Burgess, who's a very interesting guy, who's a
Gerardian, I'll say scholar who wrote this book wanting, which
is a good book to pick up if you want to, let's say a modern
primer on Gerard. But here's a, here's some way to
think of it. And again, I'm, I'm trying to
not skirt my way into heresy here.
But if we think of the Sermon on the Mount, let's, let's, let's
put this term out here, divine propaganda.
And I know propaganda has a negative context in our circles.
So let's just separate it from good, bad context.
And so the the, the the Sermon on the Mount in many ways was is
divine propaganda is a way of being is is God literally
talking to you us throughout time, explaining it, saying this
is the way forward. If you wish to live a good life,
if you wish to model Christ and therefore model God, understand
the the essence through the energies, then this is the way
to do it. And that that positive ISM that
that again, reinstating God into the hierarchy and and not doing
it out of some sort of you can't ironically pray, you know, you
can't cynically get married. There's, there's certain
processes that, that, that that break this modernist mold
because even in, in the Jesus prayer, which is in the Orthodox
tradition, what St. Paeos has said about it was
like, it's basically taking all the gospels and combining into
one prayer, which is Lord Jesus Christ unto God, have mercy upon
me, a Sinner, right? A.
Sinner. Yeah, and that is the synergism
of the Sermon of the Mount. The entire Gospels, the entire
New Testament is contained in in those lines.
So and, and that in a sense, if you want to take it into a
modernist terms, is propaganda because it's literally informing
you how to be, how to, how to Orient yourself in the world.
But it's doing it in a way that is without resentment, without
it's a cure for it, right? Because I feel that liberalism
in general, and I've said this and Matthew said this and a few
others, is that liberalism is a resentment factory.
It, it, it, it resides on resentment.
The, the entirety. This is why I say liberalism is
Luciferian to its core, because it's concept of through it's
it's birthplace and nominalism on through is is this this this
desire to liberate yourself from all restrictions right to to be
God. To take one's place as God, not
to be one with God as in as, as in with theosis, but to become
God itself himself. And in that prideful desire to
liberate yourself from all bounds to.
And so you can see this with the elites where this transhumanist
idea, which is well, if, if we are to be gods, then we must
think like gods and act like gods and eat like gods and all
these things. So we will not eat of animals.
We will eat of only of bugs and plants and vegetarianism and all
this crud, but which again is anti scripture and anti God and
anti Bible and anti Christian and all the other all the other
things that doesn't seem to matter the so to to break
propaganda and I'll just from my perspective and see what you do
with this Kryptos is to be anti propaganda is to be almost anti
mimetic in a modernist sense is to remove this unmanned from the
hierarchy that they're asking you to model yourself against
this nebulous being, this ubermensch that doesn't exist
and is never well defined anyways.
That seems to change with the times, you know, through the
spirit of the ages and to realign yourself back to the
rightful model, which in a Western tradition and let's say
even an Eastern tradition is Christ.
And once you re establish that for yourself, then you can re
establish that with others and you start building communities
around that concept. And that's how you break this.
That's the only way I for it I can say.
So I have like four thoughts on this.
So the first is you have to understand and accept the fact
that propaganda works and that you are, if you grow up in a
modern Western context, you are already at the baseline a highly
propagandized person. So if you you have to accept
that the propaganda works and it has worked on you and that you
are not immune and that you are already acting in line with the
system already, you need to accept that.
Then the second thing is that understanding propaganda, and
this was something that that Mirlu, Yos Mirlu in The Rape of
the Mind underscored that one of the keys to resisting
brainwashing, and this is specifically on brainwashing, is
to understand that they're brainwashing you and to
recognize that you're being brainwashed.
And so if you understand that you're being procurangandized,
if you understand the processes of propaganda, how they do it,
why they do it, what they're doing to you, you can begin to
resist it, right? So, so understanding propaganda
is a key. So I would recommend to
everybody get out of Loole's book and read propaganda, right
Is it's so then it's the other things though, too.
Now would be from a practical perspective is stop paying
attention to the news seriously, because one of the foundational
elements of propaganda is the news.
All propaganda starts with current events, right?
And so the more focused you are on the news, the more vulnerable
you are to the propagandist. So the more that you get
integrated into, because what happens is, is that you become
sensitive to current news. And so the the news cannot
permit time for a thought or reflection.
A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of events.
He's carried along in the current.
There's never any awareness of himself, his condition of his
society. For the man who lives by current
events, one thought drives away another.
Old facts are chased away by new ones.
Under these conditions, there's no thought.
In fact, modern man does not think about problems, he feels
them. A man's capacity to forget is
limitless. So if you are somebody who
focuses on the news, you are somebody who is immensely
vulnerable to propaganda to it, and you're caught up in the
day's events. So that's the thing.
And then I would say finally, and this is perhaps the most
significant and this is the most difficult is first of all,
prayer, reconnecting yourself to to God, but then also
reconnecting yourself to a real living.
And I would say Christian community is, is important.
You have to have a real relationship with people that
are unmediated by the propagandist.
That there isn't like you're sitting in the radio, you know,
where the propaganda speaks to you and you're part of that,
that that mass crowd, but that you're real people talking with
each other. OK.
And then I think in and amongst that, what we have to do is
resist the modern idea that you are at the center of events, the
nominalist idea. So in a sense to embrace the
notion that meaning is out there, that part of, and this is
a sense, the basic like the 10 commandments, you know you do
not. The goal is not to be true to
yourself, but real meaning is found in fitting yourself into
God's ways. So you live according to God's
ways, you behave according to God's ways.
You fit yourself in in that regard.
And so you resist the old or the this new idea that you have, you
must create yourself. But there's a certain acceptance
that you don't have to create yourself, that you're given
certain roles in life. And now today, I mean, it's much
harder because all of that architecture, I mean, it used to
be that you basically did what your father did.
You were a farmer because your father was a farmer.
So you fit into, you were a king because your father was a king
and all these sorts of things. But there is this sense that,
you know, there is no special plan for your life.
God does not have a special plan for your life, right?
And, and these things and you do, you are not at the center of
history, right? And your church does not have a
special vision from God. You know, all of these types of
things that that we generally that we anchor ourselves on in,
in modern life because we are not at the center of history.
God is at the center of history and we live, you know, under
that static architecture. So the idea is that then you in
community ascend the ladder of being.
And that is in, in a modern context, you are setting
yourself apart, you know, disconnecting yourself from from
the news, living in community, living with God.
And then from there you just basically do the best you can
'cause you're going to drown in it everywhere, anywhere you go
anyways. But I think this idea of sort of
self consciously understanding that meaning is out there, that
part of it. And this is that that passage in
John 5, 19. I'm not actually going to look
it up right now. I'm just give me a second
because I think this is very, very decisive.
And, and it, it really undercuts a lot of, you know, people ask
me all the, you know, how do I find out God's purpose for, for
my life? Well, you know, the truth is
that God doesn't have any purpose for your life, you know,
in, in the sense of the, the modern sense that where you are
at the center of history and there's two kind of decisive
passages. So, so here we are John 519.
So Jesus gives, I tell you the truth, OK, the Son can do
nothing by himself, OK? Even for Jesus there was no plan
for Jesus life in that sense. You know Jesus did not have a
special plan, right? He can only do what he sees his
Father doing, because whatever the Father does, the Son also
does. For the Father loves the Son and
shows him all he does. And yes, to your amazement, he
will show him even greater these for these.
For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life,
Even so the Son gives life to whom he pleases to give it.
So there is this sense that God is at work all around you in a
sense. There's the architecture of
being. There's God's movement and
Christian and what you need to do your role in this is to open
your eyes to what God is doing and then like Jesus, join God in
what he's doing and make God the set and God's action the center
of your life. You know, so you think about,
you know, what is it like to, you know, act in regard to to
God's light? So there there's this wonderful
little passage in Acts, you know, what does it mean to
follow the will of God in this regard?
And we, we often don't think of it because our lives become so
structured. So, you know, we get up, we go
to work, we have our schedule, we have our agenda, and we don't
often think about, you know, So what does this mean in a sense
in a day-to-day life that you're keeping your eyes open for what
God is doing, right. So Philip and the Ethiopian,
there's a wonderful little story here and there's a there's a
bunch of things. So now an Angel of the Lord said
to Philip, OK, go South on the road, the desert Rd. that goes
down to Jerusalem from Gaza. So you're thinking, So what does
it mean to do the will of God, right?
Well, Philip was in prayer, the Angel of the Lord.
So God speaks to Philip and says, Philip, you know what
you're going to do? What's my will for you?
I want you to go out and take a walk.
I want you to go out and take a walk, right?
So he started out and on his way he met an Ethiopian, an
Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the
treasury of Candace, queen of The Ethiopians.
This man had gone up to Jerusalem to worship and on his
way home was sitting in his chair reading the book of Isaiah
the prophet. OK, so here, what's the next
thing that the will of God says to him to do?
So the Spirit told Philip, go to that chariot and stay near it.
So you're just going to go, here's the will of God for you.
I want you to go over that and just kind of hang around and
just be there. That's the will of God.
Just go over there and just hang around, you know, put your hands
in your pockets and just right. So Phillip ran up to the chariot
and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet.
And then basically now the opportunity is there, right?
So God was already at work with the Ethiopian official.
And now Phillip, by listening to God in the moment and sense of
going to a walk, standing where he was told to stand right, was
able to see what God was doing in the moment and how he was
working in the, you know, and he was able to ask the decisive
question, you know, do you understand what you are reading?
And then from there, everything, you know, falls up.
So Philip aligned himself with where God was acting, and then
God was able to use him. And this really, I think,
underscores this idea of, you know, in a sense, there's no
grand plan that God has for your life in a sense like you are not
at the center of history. You do not carry the burden of
history. God is out there working.
That's that's who's at work. And your role is to adapt
yourself to what God is doing in the moment.
And I think this up from a propaganda perspective, if you
know, this in many ways fundamentally breaks so many of
those core Western presuppositions, the myths upon
which propaganda is built, right?
So that, you know, if you in a sense reject the burden of
history and you reject all of these fundamental and you live
fundamentally different, I believe that it inoculates you
to the messaging of the propagandist because his
messaging is built upon these fundamental Western myths.
One, you know, key among them is that you know you're good.
You are at the center of history.
It's about human progress, it's about your happiness, it's about
you feeling fulfilled and all of these things.
You know, this notion that no, it's not about you.
You are not at the center of history and, and it's not about
making you happy. You know, no, it's about God and
what God is doing and you're just supposed to fit in.
It's not about you feeling authentic or living an authentic
life. It's not about you being true to
yourself. It's not about you, you know,
living your inner truth. It's about you in the moment,
seeing what God is doing, opening your eyes to the
metaphysical and spiritual realities that are all around
you. And the way to do that is in
prayer and in community and then adapting yourself to the
metaphysical and spiritual reality.
And like, what is God doing and what's God's basic structure of,
of created order? And if you adapt yourself to
that, then I think you go a long way towards being able to resist
the, the, the messaging of the propagandist.
So I hope that's a long answer for, yeah.
I think that's absolutely brilliant and we're up to.
Two hours now, Jason, this is. Yeah, let's let's wrap this up
'cause you got another show to do at noon.
And I actually, I do, yeah, I do too as well, so.
And I feel like we've covered, we've covered a lot of ground,
more ground than many would suspect.
We've, we, we, we brought it back around folks, and that's.
We spent maybe 30 minutes specifically talking about
propaganda, but I think there's a lot of good.
Like the stuff we did talk about I think was really, really good
and and I think we got into like the core ideas of it.
I look, I, I and I feel you're going to go around the horn with
this anyways. I know you'll speak with Pete
and and others about this and, and maybe, you know, get into to
more of the nitty gritty aspects of certain things.
Like, you know, what I always said about the show is that we,
we go where the conversation goes, you know, and, and the
conversation went to, went to God and, and, and Christ.
And thank you for everyone in the chat, by the way, not me,
not you. I, I'm not picking a fight with
a mate. I just think you're wrong.
If you're approaching the gospels and the similar amount
is a story, you're it's not a story.
And I know you, you think that's me being obtuse or being just a
belligerent, but I'm not, it's, I'm saying this out of love and
out of care for you. It's not a story.
And once you accept it, that's not a story in the story sense,
you can move forward. But if you're stuck on this, I
think as being a story and you can come up with any rationale
you want for it, it's it's not a story.
You can't, I'll give you this example.
You don't build civilization on the story.
You don't even the old myths, you know, Ramis and Remus,
although those were stories in a sense, they were live realities
of the people. People believe that they built
entire structures of being based on that story, right?
So it's no longer a story. Now mythological structures are
slightly different than what happens with Christianity
because Christ actually breaks the myth structure and that's a
whole different show. But but you have to understand
that these are not stories that no one lives Harry Potter like
some people do, like they dress up and they whatever.
But you don't build civilization on even Tolkien or whatever.
You just don't. Tolkien is a reflection, is a
story about Western civilization.
But you need Western civilization to to exist, to
have Tolkien to write Lord of the Rings, you understand?
That and even even somebody like even somebody like Peterson who
is an evolutionary psychologist, even Peterson makes the art
like, and this is the thing too, like we tend to think of story
and myth as like that means fake that they're not, they didn't
really. Have.
They're fables, right? They're just like a quaint sort
of somebody made it up sitting around the fire and everybody
liked the story, so they kept retelling.
Those those those dumb goat herders didn't know what they
were, what what these things were.
So they made-up stories about the sun and the moon and the
these things and morality and and also just happened to build
entire civilizations based on this Wizzle wazzle bullshit.
Like that doesn't work. That doesn't.
Happen no, and and so you can
look at a story like like the story this way.
So now is this a videotape of the original event?
No, like that's not be dumb, right?
But these stories, and this is something that even like a
Peterson would argue these stories are based on.
And and this is so if you're looking at it from, say, a
purely like evolutionary kind of perspective, these stories are
based on an event or a series of events that are then picked up
because people say this story is significant.
This event is significant and it has it's revealing meaning
that's out there in the world. And so the Torah story gets told
and retold and refined in a way that explicates and, and makes
that and and and captures many of the depths, the nuances and
the revelation and allows the story to be revealed in all of
its its depth and its hiddenness and all these.
But let me try. To do this, sorry, let me let me
try to do my best, Peter. It's true on, on all levels, on
multiple levels, on on multiple levels of of fragmentation and
examination. It's true on all these levels.
It's true up here. And down there it's revealing.
It's look, you, you, you see it here and you see it there like
it's, it's, it's God. Look at bucko.
I know you look, bucko. Yeah, it's it.
And so when you, when you look and, and the, the fundament, and
This is why in a sense, Scripture is not rational.
It's not a sense of like systematic.
God didn't just give us systematics because the stories
have power. But these stories, even if
they're not, yeah, even if they're not video recordings of
the event thing, they are all rooted.
And this is, I guess, a fundamental claim, and you can
either accept it or not accept it.
But a fundamental claim of those of us who are Christians is that
the stories in the Scriptures are revealing the essence of the
meaning of real events, that these things actually did
happen. Now, did they happen in the in
the video recording way that we would like with modern history?
Well, that's the wrong question because you're trying to impose
a category of meaning onto it that the scriptures really they,
they don't care about that. They don't care about your, your
video recording notion. They care about the meaning of
events as they revealed. So they, they, they, in a sense,
they see God at work in these people.
They see fundamental realities being revealed in these stories.
So what's important to them is not that they preserve an
accurate, you know, video account of these events.
What's important to them is that they preserve.
The key archetype and, and, and metaphysical and sort of divine
movement aspects of this story that these are then captured and
revealed in the and, and revealed in the telling of the
story, because that's really what's significant in the event.
And so sometimes the order of the events change because those
that changing the order of the events.
So you see that in the Gospels brings out certain aspects of
the, the meaning of the fundamental realities better
than leaving them in the other order.
It allows you to see things differently.
So there's all these ways, but the, the, the story just said,
well, they're stories in a sense.
They're just kind of made-up thing to think is in a sense to
dismiss what the texts are actually claiming of this stuff.
They're saying no, that Jesus was a real person.
This is what he did. But I'm telling the story in the
way that I'm telling it and I'm recounting the speeches and the
things he said. And I'm doing so in a way that
allows you to see the meaning that I saw in Jesus.
Like they say the the author of Matthew, Matthew saw.
And is this, you know, God gave him in a sense, a certain
insight. I saw in Jesus a certain
meaning. And now I'm going to tell the
story in a certain way that allows you to see the meaning
that I saw and more. And and so you go back to the
story of Adam and Eve, right? Well, Adam and Eve is telling a
story about the nature of God's creation, that God, that that we
were made intentionally by God and, and, and then the fallen.
So there's all these ancient stories, you know, sort of, I
mean, because history really doesn't, you know, God's quote
UN quote saving history doesn't really begin until Abraham.
That's when, you know, the call of Abraham is sort of the
beginning of divine history. And then the prehistory in a
sense lays the foundation for in a sense of why is the world the
way it is? You know, why is it that we are
all, you know, that evil exists and we're fundamental?
Well, God created us good and we fell into sin, right?
So there's all the answers, you know, why do I resent my brother
for being successful? Well, we have Cain and Abel, you
know, why do people build cities to reach the heavens, right?
Well, we have the story of Babel, all of these types of,
you know, and, and so these stories then allow us to
understand and frame and give meaning to to the events that we
see. And so it allows us to recognize
God's at work out there in the Creator because we can see from
the stories and then we go out into the world and now we can
see the things of the story out in the world.
And that allows us, as we were talking about, to live into
those stories. Yeah.
The benefits of a good theological education.
Well, you know, I've, I'm making up on time.
I, I spent a large chunk of those 32 years.
I hate reading the Bible and, and, and other religious texts.
So in a weird way, I did a lot of study.
I just did it in the wrong with the wrong intention.
Now that I'm reversed that intention, I still have a lot of
work in front of me. But it's it's conversations like
these that help help me level up faster.
You know, even though we don't share the same faith, we do
share the same. Well.
We don't share the same Yeah, we don't share the same.
Sorry, We, we should say this. We don't share the same
religion, but we we share the same faith and we, I think we
share the same belief in mankind and I think.
Well, and I and I think too like the difference.
You know, people have asked me like, why don't you become
Orthodox? And I said, well.
Why don't you? Well, in part because I'm
joking. Well, yeah.
No, no, no, it's a good question.
It's because I'm part of an, an, an ethnic church community.
And in a sense that for all of my appreciation and love of the
Orthodox and even to some extent, even the Catholic
community, that, you know, fundamentally my, my basic
understanding of the world is reformed, you know, with a
strong layering of, you know, insights from the Orthodox
community. So I don't feel, you know, but
it, it, there's certain things that, you know, as a good
Calvinist that I struggle with. I, I, I understand the arguments
for icons. I get, I, I don't think that
they're incorrect, but you're just not going to find me
kissing icons. It's just the way you know,
it's, it's just I do have AI do have a prayer, like a prayer,
like a prayer chain and I pray that.
Jesus prayer, I know you. I know you have a cross
somewhere in your house. Wow, Yeah, it's actually right.
You've seen it. It's right behind me in my
office, Right. So it's right.
So but it it. You know you're, you're you're
you're, you're an icon too, right?
There we go, made in the image of that.
I know I just. But you're not going to come
over and kiss me though, Jason. So there we go.
Not not not anytime soon, but I mean 2025 I'm, I'm planning a
hopeful North American tour. We'll see.
We'll see how that goes. So if that happens, you might
you puck her up. Baby, We're, we're due, we're
due for, we're due for a beer. Yeah, that would that that we
can do, that we can do. But wow, we are up over 205.
Yes, Sir, this is good. All right.
Yeah, I know. And gentlemen, yeah, we can.
Thank you so much. You're very welcome to where
they can get your get your work Kryptos before we sign up.
Seekingthehiddenthing.com and at Under score Kryptos on Twitter.
We're going to play the outro. Thank you very much, folks.
Again, send me a copy. The links are in the channel
below. I'm without day jobs, so any and
all contributions are greatly appreciated and or sign up to
the friend or feds membership support the show anyway any
which way you can. I know times are tough for
everybody. So even if you just like
subscribe, subscribe, share, put it out there.
These conversations. I, I listen to a lot of shows
and, you know, I always say that some of the best conversations
happen on this show. And that's not just, it's my
show. I just think it's, it's true.
So again, Kryptos, thank you so much man.
Well, you're very welcome. It's a pleasure.
I'm going to put the outro, give me two seconds and we'll talk
briefly afterwards The.