Q & A 2017 09 September - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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Hi, everyone.
Good to see you.
So I'm a little on that tired side tonight, so I'm going to start with relatively straightforward question.
Somebody asked, What's up with all the Lenin pictures in your house?
And then how is it to look at them every day?
Well, about in 2000 and one In a fit of manic collective insanity, I decided to start seeing if I could find Soviet era artifacts online, mostly through eBay.
I had read a paper by James Pennebaker, who claimed that past events start to become historically significant about 15 years after the after the relevant event.
And so 2001 was 15 years after they fought essentially after the fall of the Berlin Wall are close enough.
And so I started looking on eBay to see what sort of Soviet artifacts might be able to find.
First of all, I was kind of curious about what would be available for purchase, and I also thought it was deeply ironic that the most free market of new call platforms ever devised, which would be eBay could now be used to scavenge communist era artifacts from Russia.
You know, it just seemed like to be someone who was raised during the Cold War, the fact that that that I could buy things like heads of Lenin on even it was just too comical to not to pass up.
And so I started buying things that I had some familiarity with because of what I read historically.
And the first thing I thought was about a three by five silk flag that was awarded to a factory for meeting its five year production quarter.
I don't know what you know about those infamous quotas, but what would happen is that there were Dichter sent down on high about how much factories were supposed to produce and the implied what is the implication was produce or else by any means necessary.
And so two things happened.
Three things happened.
The goods were often shoddy because they were rushed.
There was deception about how much was actually produced, and then people were radically overworked and under supplied.
So it was a bad a bad system.
But it was very interesting to actually have one of these flags and see what they were like.
And then I bought her Plock, a stainless steel clock wind up Clark.
That was a submarine clock and it was bombproof.
So I thought that would be handy if someone ever bought my house and I needed to know what time it waas.
So I bought that.
Then I found this painting that's actually off to my left.
Here it's five Russian revolutionaries, all young stalwart looking, standing on the edge of a cliff with a red soldier or a white soldier off to decide.
They're all shackled together and he's preparing to execute.
That was that was a fairly common Soviet motifs.
And on my right side I have a a decorated Soviet war hero who's working in a steel foundry and like a lot of the Soviet art, glorified, I suppose, the working class.
And I suppose there's nothing wrong without depending on the degree of propagandistic intent and falsification.
But, um, they're kind of like Norman Rockwell paintings, except they don't have the same degree of sentimentality, which is quite interesting.
What's it like to have them around?
Well, pretty much every square inch of my house is covered with paintings and a fair number of mar.
I don't suppose the sorts of paintings that people would usually have in their house there some of them are of the Second World War, some of the Merv's strongly political and, uh, but it's it's well, sometimes people say, Well, I wouldn't want to live in a museum.
I guess that isn't how I feel.
I actually like living in a museum, and I like having this historical artifacts all around.
I really like watching the propaganda and art war in the paintings.
Because many of these paintings were produced by very talented Impressionist artists who were trained in the classical European tradition.
They spent months making these paintings and yet their subordinate, in some sense, to a political ideology.
But what's interesting is that as the political ideology recedes into the past, the more purely artistic elements of the paintings seem to remain.
And so it's cool to kind of watch.
It's very slow process, but it's very interesting to watch.
The art itself emerged triumphant over the propaganda.
And then, you know, these things also remind me of what what I'm interested in, and that's the study of ideology And they reminded me how powerful ideology could be and how many different pathways it can take.
Two two to control, I suppose.
And And it also reminds me of the reality of the 20th century because it was a terrible reality.
If we forget it, then we're likely to repeat.
No, my kids grew up in this Alison.
No, they I asked him about it because I suppose the paintings were fairly heavy and maybe even somewhat frightening, but they really liked it.
People give me a reason to invite people into my house and gives me something to play with him.
All right.
I guess I need things to play with by all appearances.
So that's the story of the of the Soviet paintings.
So please tell us about your ideas of the problem of gender integrated combat units and how it affects morale.
Please talk about the role trans people should or should not serve in combat units.
Huh?
Well, you know, I wouldn't say that I'm exactly an expert in that regard, huh?
I don't know how gender how multiple gender combat units are going to work, but because I'm fundamentally a traditionalist in most ways, mostly because I'm afraid of the unintended consequences of radical change.
I would say that it's dangerous to adjust a system that's working, and it's very hard for me to imagine a situation, especially combat situation, where the women and men can actually be treated equal.
I don't think that the broader society would even want to see that.
I mean, I suppose there are exceptions to that sort of thing.
Like like, um, the situation, perhaps in Israel, although I suspect even in Israel that women take the more the less combat heavy jobs.
No, I don't know that, but maybe I'm just being prejudiced, that answer.
But it just doesn't seem to me to be a very wise idea.
What will trans people should serve?
I really can't say I don't have anything.
Any advice about that?
I'm just not informed enough to make it conclusion boat that I think it's very strange.
However, I've talked to some people in the Canadian armed forces in recent months.
I do think it's very strange that this is the sort of problem that our military is actually trying to solve.
You think that there would be more important things to concentrate going, then rapid gender equalization.
Military.
I just don't see why that's such a priority.
But maybe that's just my old fashioned conservatism speaking.
It could be it could be done.
Derek Fake asks.
How do you see love arrows in your general worldview?
Where does love come from?
Well, you guys, yes, possibly hard questions.
Well, I think the truth has to be embodied inside love or embedded inside love.
You know, it's not easy to figure out hierarchy of values of ultimate values.
It was great, the great traditional values of the good and the beautiful and the true.
Let's say, the courageous of that sort of thing.
It's not easy to figure out how you arranged those hierarchically, but it seems to me that truth is likely something that serves a master of one form or another.
At least ethical truth and love is something like the decision that being is fundamentally good or it's the decision to act as if being is fundamentally good.
That might be the right way of thinking about it.
So, you know, I thought about this in relationship to my son when he was little, three years old and unbearably cute.
You know, little three year olds, they're they're fairly easily hurt.
I mean, they're quite robust in some ways, but they're fairly easily hurt.
They can run into traffic and, you know, they skin their knees and they bang their heads One table, you know, they're prone to emotional breakdown.
And they have all these extreme fragilities that make you nervous, I would say and alert and attended as an adult, but that also expose you directly to the fact of the potential tragedy of life, which is, I think, one of the reasons why having Children matures you in a way that nothing else can.
And, you know, I imagined I've written about this in my new book, 12 Rules for Life Imagined that I could remove his vulnerabilities one by one so he couldn't be hurt.
So, you know, I thought, Well, I could make them into a robot.
It was 15 feet tall, made out of metal, and that would remove this physical vulnerability.
You have tremendous strength.
And you know, you could turn him into something like a superhero with all these, with all these strengths instead of these exceptional vulnerabilities.
But when I realized very rapidly was that every time you removed a vulnerability, you removed an essential part of the person right apart that you really love.
Because with a little three year old boy kid, for example, I mean, it's there, it's there.
It's their fragility.
In some sense, that's a huge part of their charm and appeal.
It's not like you wish it on, but it's part of their.
It's part of their value as beings.
I think that reflects something like the is paradoxical situation that the Taoists referred to.
When in doubt check, they talk about the what makes a plot valuable is the empty space inside it.
It's It's what it's not as much as what it is that makes it well.
Actually, first of all, real but also useful.
There's something really profound about that.
In the limitations, I would say limitation is the precondition for being, and it's really I would like to get this right so that you can follow it because it's it's one of the most useful thoughts I think that has ever occurred to me.
The first is that limits are a precondition for being just like rules are precondition for a game like you can't play a game where you could make any move at any time.
You have to narrow the playing field substantially, have put restrictions on what can be done in order for anything to be done.
And so maybe being is this paradoxical state where there's there's just enough limitation to maximize possibility.
Something like that.
And that seems right to be why that would be I have no idea.
But maybe that's something like an answer to Why, why?
There's anything why anything was created or I know I'm speaking metaphysically.
But But I still think it's worthwhile doing so.
Then, well, if if if limitation is the precondition for being, then then that introduces suffering into the world of tragedy.
Because, of course, suffering a tragedy are consequence of limitation.
And so then the situation is that if you want to have the being where possibility is maximized, you have to accept the limitations that produce tragedy.
And so that's maybe the justification for tragedy.
Assuming that such a thing needs to be justified, then the final thought in that three part syriza's well, maybe there's a way to live so that the tragedy that's an intrinsic part of limited being becomes bearable or becomes even something like Celebrate Herbal.
And I guess that would be Qian teaches.
Wish for the eternal return like he thought you should live so that if every moment that you lived occurred eternally, that that would be a good thing.
And so it's a heroic motive being it's conceivable that a heroic motive being that requires the adoption of responsibility gives your life sufficient gravitas and wait and meaning so that the tragedy of being can be withstood without becoming corrupt.
And I would certainly hope that that would be the case.
And I think there's some reasons to assume that it might be.
So.
Can you talk more about the resurrection?
This remains a stumbling block for many of your more atheistic followers who have otherwise embraced your approach to understanding Christianity.
Well, I can only talk about it symbolically to begin with, and that's I think, North sufficient.
But I hope, as I moved through the biblical Siri's that I can zero in on that more and more particularly.
But I mean the idea of dying and resurrecting God is a very old idea.
Um, and it's echoed in such things as the imagery Save the Phoenix, which burns itself up and then miss stores itself to its two.
It's early, Sam and I think, speaking purely psychologically.
That idea of the dying and resurrecting savior is something like a reflection of the fact that in order to progress psychologically, you have to let go, especially in the face of obstacles.
You have to let go of those things that are impeding your progress that might be very dear to your heart.
You have to let go and let them die, and then you have to let a new part of yourself be born.
So because when you're wrong, you have to let the part of you that's wrong die and then a new part spring to life.
In some sense, it's a new part that's partly a union of your mind and the union of the information that's contained in the error that you committed.
It's like the birth in some sense of a new spirit, and so you could say that there's this idea that you have to have faith in Christ because Christ is the way in the truth of life and no one comes to the father, but through but through him.
What that means symbolically, as far as I can tell, that is that you have to embrace the process of volunteer death and rebirth in order to continue moving forward properly in your life.
And it's also that process of death and rebirth that rejuvenates the father.
And it's also that process of death rebirth that produces the father to begin with, if you think about the father is the symbol of of culture.
So at minimum, the idea of the resurrected Christ is the idea that you should identify not with that part of yourself, that stagnant and dead and that already knows but is prone to error.
You should identify with that part of yourself that's always stretching beyond what you currently no and has the faith to let go of old certainties so that new patterns of being can be brought into place.
And so no, that's a purely psychological explanation.
I think I've made the case in my biblical lectures that I'm striving for a psychological interpretation at the moment.
My experience with the biblical stories is that there are layers of depth in them that are sufficiently profound, perhaps because of that staggering hyper linking of the text and its association with almost the entire carpets of Western literature that, as you keep digging, you find more and more.
So, um, I don't know what to make of the more metaphysical planes, you know, but I'm gonna leave it at that because I don't know.
It's only speculation.
Um, See, I guess it is that we don't I really don't believe that.
We understand consciousness, and we don't understand its rule in the cosmos.
It could be that consciousness is Justin Epatha nominal materialised processes.
But there's a couple of things to me that seems to mitigate against that explanation.
The first is that we don't have an account of consciousness that's that's useful.
We have no idea how the material substrate of the brain produces this, this awareness and self awareness that seems to be crucially important in the existence of the cosmos.
In so far as if there's nothing to experience something, it's very difficult to say in what way that it exists.
You need a viewer, an observer, scientists sort of Jerry Mander, that by positing hypothetical observer when they talk about cinnamon where there is no actual observing and so consciousness could be just a Napa phenomena.
But it could also be something central to the nature of being and certainly mythological stories presented that way, that there's there's nature that would be nurtured from a scientific perspective.
And there's the social world that would be the great father from the mythological perspective.
And and that's all there is from a scientific perspective.
But from a mythological perspective, there's active consciousness, and that's associated with the idea of the logos and the logos.
Seems to be something like If you think about it as consciousness, it seems to be this thing that encounters the potential of future being and then determines, at least in part, how to shape it.
Obviously, we're constrained in many ways.
You can shape things in any old way, but we can certainly advance in the direction of our imagination and quite a staggering and compelling manner.
And then you might say, Well, is that really is is the idea that we have a consciousness and that it's free in some incomprehensible sense and that it plays a role in constructing the cosmos.
Is that really and then I would say, Well, it depends on what you mean by really, but I would also point out that you act as if it's real and that are functional.
Legal systems like the legal system's off on the West are predicated on the acceptance of its reality, and it was an idea that took many, many thousands of years to to emerge, you know, First of all, the only sovereign was well was the king and God.
And then the nobles became sovereign, and then men became sovereign.
And then, with the Christian Revolution, every individual soul became sovereign.
That idea of individual sovereignty and worth is the core presupposition of our legal system and our cultural systems.
And so we all walk around acting as if every one of us is a divine centre of logos because we give each other the respect, um, of individual citizens who are sovereign and that are equal before the law.
And the funny thing is, this if someone doesn't treat you that way, treats you as if you're free Will is an illusion, or refuses to regard you as someone who plays active part in choosing outcome of their life.
Then you get very, very annoyed.
And so if it's an illusion, perhaps it is.
We don't understand an alternative to it, and it's unbelievably, it's unbelievably functional.
So okay, so back to love.
Well, um, it we'll make the case that oh limitation is necessary for being, And then we could make the case.
That tragedy is an inevitable consequence of limitation.
Then we might say, Well is being worth the tragedy.
And I think the answer yes to that is love.
And the answer no to that is the opposite of love, because when you when you love someone, you love them in spite of or even because of their vulnerability.
Not that you don't want them to transcend that, because you do, but and I think that love is the acceptance of the price of being.
It's the way you manifest your acceptance of the price of being because if you love someone, you know they have their vulnerabilities, like every human being.
But your basic judgment is that despite the fact that they have these vulnerabilities that air even fatal, and there certainly tragic that it's better that they were than that they weren't.
And that's and I think that's the right attitude to have towards being itself.
It's it's It's an optimistic attitude, and I think it has to be predicated on faith, because I don't think that you could necessary derive that conclusion by by looking at the available evidence.
The available evidence is kind of 50 50 in many situations, but But I can tell you, if you don't the other attitude that being is unjustifiably than that leads you down a very, very dark road.
And then you soon start to work in a way that makes things far more intolerable than they should be.
So that so that's my answer to that.
Any tips on avoiding booze?
Yeah, that's a really tough one.
Well, I would say a couple of things.
There is a drug.
If you're a binge drinker, there is a drug called naltrexone that you could consider, and you take naltrexone every day.
It doesn't really have any psychological effect on you, But if you're a mail truck so responder, what will happen is that it will dampen your positive response to Elko.
So some people who are alcoholic, many of them have a very pronounced opiate, an opiate effect from alcohol.
It looks like it's mediated by beta endorphin, and now Truck's owner is an opiate blocker.
And so, um, what Nell tricks always seems to do is dampened the positive response and the positive response, which would be opiate and then Doberman.
Ergic is the same response that makes you want to keep drinking when you start drinking.
So if you're one of those people that has a drink and then has to have another one, then has to have another one.
And you know, soon all your money's gone, then the probability that you have an opiate response is pretty high.
And now trick some help with that.
Generally, when people take mail trucks on the keep drinking they try to control.
But they keep drinking, and they learned over time that the alcohol doesn't have the same punch.
Still pleasant but doesn't have the same overwhelming punch that did it at one point.
So that would be one suggestion, and it's worth trying.
The other is like make a plan.
I would say, Do the future author program, you know, because it isn't that you're trying to avoid booze.
Exactly.
It's that you're trying to restructure your whole life, you know, because if you're a drinker than all your friends are drinkers and and you're used to drinking at every social situation and the places that you go to socialize are places that drink and like it's really built in as a whole set of habits.
And so what you have to do is kind of redesign your life, and you have to think of things.
You can't just stop drinking.
You have to figure out what you're going to start doing.
Instead of drinking, there's a hole that you have to fill in.
And, you know, the future authoring program will also help you figure out what your life could look like in the absence of alcohol and what kind of hell you could end up in if you keep drinking it.
And it causes all the problems that it can cause.
And I think you really need to like you need to think through the hail that can occur, and you have to think through how your life could be valuable without alcohol so that you could be motivated enough to to try them to regulate it.
And I would also say, if you fail in slip.
Don't break yourself and beat yourself up.
Just start quitting again because, you know, if you could cut your alcohol intake down 75% that's a hell of a lot better than zero.
And often people go all or nothing, just like they do when they're putting cigarettes and you know they'll quit for a month and then have a cigarette.
Will say, Oh my God, now I'm now I've broken the pact and then they'll smoke old packing smoking again.
You don't have to do that.
You could just decide that you slipped and that you're gonna get back on the wagon again and you know, it could take a long time.
But I do believe that you need a better vision of life, right?
You have to find something to do that's better than alcohol.
And that might take some some real consideration, especially if alcohol is, Ah, very potent drug for you.
I would also say Don't hesitate to try the new tracks on It's It's got a pretty decent clinical history and it's it's basically harmless, so I've listened carefully to your cane enable lecture, but waves of contempt for existence itself keep coming.
There's a part of me that revels in riding these waves waves, but can I harness them for good God, you guys, you asked the hardest questions waves of contempt of exists for existence itself.
Keep coming.
Well, I guess what I would say is it's probably time for a little bit of individual psycho analysis.
I don't necessarily mean that you have to go and find a therapist.
I would say you're generalizing, You know, you say waves of contempt for existence itself keep coming.
But I don't believe that.
That's exactly right.
And I'm certainly not accusing you of being deceitful.
It's It's more like low resolution.
My suspicions are, is that there's a set of experiences that you've had that are characteristic to your own personal life, that have caused you to to cause you some bitterness and resentment and that those haven't been thought through and usually thinking through means, at least in some part trying to take as much responsibility for those for altering the conditions under which those things happen.
Going forward into the future as possible.
The purpose of memory is to stop you from doing the same stupid things in the future right?
That that's the purpose.
And so if you've had experiences that have made you bitter and resentful or are still engaged in experiences that are doing that, then you need to do a careful micro analysis of what those are and see if you can see if you can flip your attitude in some matter.
You know, I'm not saying this is easy, but the first thing you could do is at least figure out what those memories are.
I might recommend trying the past authoring program, because what the past authoring program does is ask you to break your life up into six Feet parks and then to identify the emotionally significant occurrences during each of those e pox.
And you can kind of tell if something needs work from the memory perspective.
If if it occurred more than about 18 months ago and when you remember, it's still causes like a wave of sadness or anger or really any kind of negative emotion, because what that means is that your brain is still targeting that experience as threatening and un explored.
And what that means is that in some sense, part of you are a part of the that could exist is still stuck in that memory because you could go back and do it.
Careful causal analysis of the events that led up to the unfortunate circumstance and try to map out your role.
Even if your role is minor, there's going to be things that you could have done differently to avoid it.
And that's what you need to figure out for the future.
I would say you try toe shed all your personal resentment.
Part of that, too, is to knock that not take things too personally.
You know, like one of the advantages of developing what I regard as a mythological centered view of the cosmos is that you understand that the reason there's there's nothing personal about the fact that terrible things happen to you unless you're directly causally involved.
As it says, I believe in the Old Testament rains on the just and the unjust alike, and you know there are.
This is an existentialist motif.
The tragedy and difficulty and even the confrontation with evil are built into the structure of existence, and it's not aimed at you personally.
Well, as I said, it may be the price that we pay for existence itself, and you can say well, that prices do high to pay.
But well, as I mentioned, if you start thinking that way, then you make everything much, much worse.
It seems better to shoulder your cross voluntarily and stumble forward towards the light.
That's that's the best strategy.
And I would say that just because it's the best strategy doesn't even necessarily mean that it's always going to work like this is no optimistic scenario like a dragon fight is no optimistic scenario.
Confront the dragon and get the gold.
Get the girl, bring it back to you to share with the community, the gold.
And you know that sounds all well and good.
But after all, it is a dragon, and many people get eaten by them.
So but the myth basically says, while your best bet is to open your eyes and speak the truth and look forward, forthright and confront the things that are hydrates that are raising their heads and their tentacles constantly to frighten you and stop you, and to fight the tyranny of of of the social structure when, when it's oppressive, you unduly yeah, and that's and that's what you have to do.
But I would save if that contempt is there, man, that's really worth digging into because that would also be the source.
That would be the place where you discovered Union Shadow because you would discover that contempt is an unbelievably destructive force.
Contempt is a particularly destructive force, and it would be useful for you to try to think about you can use fantasy to do this is like Okay, if you let that contempt manifest itself fully and like a dream or a daydream, and you let it go on a rampage like What?
What's the vision exactly?
I mean, is it the destruction of the town?
Is the destruction of the country You want the entire world to blow up late, or are there specific people that you're angry out?
Or maybe you're angry at yourself like you need to figure out those waves of contempt are unarticulated elements of experience, and they're part of your shadow.
So can you harness them for good?
Well, I think the more you understand your dark urges, the more likely you are to be able to regulate and control them and use them as part of your power.
I mean a person or authority.
Let's say a person who has authority is someone who's integrated the dangerous parts of themselves.
And that's part of what gives their words gravitas and wait.
And so, yes, I think you could.
You could harness them for good.
It's and I think that's the right thing to do.
But it will involve a fair bit of painful soul searching.
So okay, let's see what else we got here.
Can you hazard a guess where Europe is clamping down on speech, critical of Islam when Islam is causing lots of problems with rape, gangs, terrorism and generally being a menace?
Why?
Well, I suppose if there was, um, let's say if I was going to oppose that statement, I would say, Well, perhaps it's a propagandistic Oh, what would you call it?
Conspiracy to blame What's happening in Europe on Islamic immigrants?
I guess part of the problem is, is that at least a sw far as I can tell, the news has become sufficiently unreliable because it's so polarized that we can't really tell what's going on.
I mean, I think the reason that Europe is clamping down on speech critical of Islam is partly the same reason that the entire Western world is clamping down on speech.
That's critical of anything that is associated with group identity, which is pretty much any set of ideas that unites people.
And it's It's a consequence of the collective decision that we made that egalitarianism and conflict avoidance constitute the two highest virtues, and they trump everything else, including free speech.
Now why that's happened is very, very difficult thing to say.
I suspect to some degree that it's a consequence of women becoming involved in the political system, which is something that we've never experienced before.
Women are more agreeable by nature than man and variable people are are compassionate towards those they see a suffering, and that seems to include any minority, especially when you combine that with the kind of neo Marxist doctor that claims that anyone who has an advantage swiped it.
And I think in the Islamic situation you get riel conflict there because it's obviously the case that many Islamic practices are not commensurate with postmodern neo Marxist feminism.
Let's say, but they seem to get a free pass, and I guess that's because the idea that all cultures are equal trumps the requirement for human rights for women.
And maybe the other thing that's even darker is that there's a fair bit of revolutionary fervor in the more radical end of the left political spectrum.
That radical fervor is devoted towards tearing down the patriarchy.
And, of course, that's basically Western civilization.
And so if because Islam isn't part of Western civilization, then it could be seen as an ally in that in that attempt, that's what it looks like to me.
I also think you know that ignorance and and all of that contribute.
It isn't obvious that people who are afraid of such things is Islamophobia really understand anything about Islam.
I wouldn't say I understand anything about Islam, even the white bread, a fair bit about it.
It's very difficult to put yourself inside a different belief system.
I'm somewhat apprehensive about Islam because it looks to me like it's a total izing system as well as a religion, and it's a total izing system because everything has to come under its purview, including law and everything that goes along with that, there's no separation between church and state and so I don't see how that's commensurate with the Western moment of existence.
And I don't think people want to have that conversation because they want to say, Well, no everyone diverse as they are and important as the diversity is apparently such that everyone has to be represented equally.
The diversity is really of anything about anything fundamental, and we can all get along without a problem.
Um, I'm afraid that that's extraordinarily naive.
And then I suppose there's also an element of something like Western guilt, I guess, perhaps, for what has been described as our imperialist past.
Um, me.
There's been a very long term assault on on these.
What would you call moral?
On the morality of the West?
We're often viewed as the rapers and pillagers of the world, and that sort of goes along with the environmentalist e thoughts.
And so I think we do have a fair bit of guilt about that, whether it's warranted or not.
I mean, history is a bloody nightmare, and it doesn't matter where you look.
And I would say at least the West has brought advantages along with its disadvantages, and I think that our attitude towards individuality is fundamentally correct and absolutely vital.
And I would also say that the only countries in the world that are essentially worth living in in any real sense are the ones that are predicated on the Judeo Christian tradition and manifested in Western, the Western body of laws.
So but there's still plenty of guilt.
And there's plenty of people who, well, we're what, contemptuous of being as we discussed in the last question and also angry with the political system because they're powerless.
Or maybe they'd be hurt by male authority figures.
That happens very frequently, and so they have no trust in a higher in hierarchical structures.
And there might add to that to a certain amount of laziness, because the thing about higher structures is that they impose values on people, and then in order to progress in that value structure, you have to discipline yourself and work hard.
And many of the radical leftists happen to be very low in conscientiousness, and so they don't believe in hard work.
Then they don't believe that people get to where they're going by hard work.
Then, well, one other thing.
There's a group of people I think who were basically personality disorder.
Those are the ones that have never had a positive relationship with anything that was masculine.
So whenever they see anything masculine, that has motive, power, and that would include authority and confidence, not just power.
They assume that that's tyrannical.
It's part of the postmodern assumption that all power higher all hierarchies are hierarchies of power when the truth of the matter is, is that hierarchies in the West are usually hierarchies of authority and competence, and they're like they're oriented towards getting a certain task done.
And they actually do get the task done so but were dubious about our own ethical.
Um, what would you say?
Integrity.
And I guess that's also why it's of particular importance for people to try to act honestly, because if you don't act honestly and then you start to doubt your own integrity and then when people come after you, you're gonna be weak, and that's a pretty bad idea.
So how's the online personality test coming along?
Can't wait for it.
Well, it's coming along pretty well.
We have all the reports written, and we have the, um, the underlying computer architecture finished and at the moment, we're just polishing it up.
Essentially in.
We're hoping that you'll be able to get a very detailed description off all five of the Big Five traits, right?
Extra version.
That's a positive emotion dimension that's that will break down into enthusiasm and assertiveness and neuroticism that breaks down into withdrawal.
Like if you're in a state of withdrawal, then you're frozen with fear and and don't want to do anything.
You're afraid to go out.
You're you're afraid to engage in any complex task because you might fail.
You doubt yourself intensely.
That's withdrawal in neuroticism and then volatility is that kind of impulsive touchiness that people often develop when they're in about move.
You know where.
If you reach for a girl to touch them, they'll flinch and maybe slap you and there over sensitive to small slights.
And they don't have much of a sense of humor, um, and agreeableness that sub divides into compassion and politeness, and the liberal types are more compassionate, and the conservative types of more polite politeness seems to be something like acting in accordance with the social norms governing interpersonal interaction.
Where is compassion?
Seems to be the proclivity to side with the weakest party.
Something like that.
And I think it's the primary maternal dimension because perhaps along with higher levels of negative emotion, because it's obviously the case that when you're dealing with Children, especially infants, that you should take the side of the weaker party pretty much, no matter what, the logical argument is right, because an infant who's crying is always right, especially if it's under a year old.
There's no logic to it.
It's an a priori fact that a crying infant is correct.
And so we don't know how that translates into the political sphere, because the most direct translation would be complaining.
Person is always right.
And, you know, I see that manifesting itself.
I would say quite clearly in the politically correct domain is that you always side with the person who's manifesting negative emotion, and you always assume that there's an external reason that needs to be rectified in order to, um, to deal with that.
And, you know, it isn't obvious to me that agreeableness as an ethic is something that's transform a ble into the political or the adult landscape.
But, um well, you know, we don't know these sorts of things, and we can't even talk about them because people automatically assume that that's sexist, misogynistic or even though you know there are agreeable man as well as agreeable women, because manner quite maternal, for for the kind of large apes and mammals that we are.
But we need to take these sorts of things seriously because it isn't obvious to me that an ethic of agreeableness can govern a complex.
Politi looks to me more like conscientiousness is something that needs to govern arms, late transactions and that sort of thing rather than treating everyone like kin.
But you just can't do it.
You don't have the energy anyways.
The test will also associate conscientious or assess conscientiousness.
That's orderliness, which it seems to be associated with disgust, sensitivity and is a good predictor of conservative belief and industriousness, which is something like the well, it's what it says exactly.
It's the proclivity to engage in effortful work towards a defined goal in a reliable matter, and it's the second best predictor of long term life success.
After I Q and then the final thing it'll upset, assesses openness to experience, which is more or less have creativity in half interest in ideas.
And so if you take the test, you'll get a boat.
It's about a 10 page report, and it's quite detailed, and it tells you where you fit on a percentage basis and what your strengths and weaknesses are going to be as a consequence of, we're gonna produce a couples version so that two of you can take it.
And then you'll get a report that tells you how your similar and different and where you're likely to have disagreements and agreements where it's going to be difficult to negotiate the consensus, not be where your white widely different from one another.
One trait.
Look.
It's hard foreign extroverted, an introvert to come to an agreement about how much socializing they're going to do because the extroverts says, Well, let's socialize all the time in the introvert says.
Well, you know, once a year would be plenty for me, and those aren't opinions right there were built in preferences that air far beneath the realm of opinion.
If you're high and openness and your partner's loan openness like you're gonna be interested in the theater and arts and and literature and philosophy and and talking about ideas and and going to museums and not sort of thing in your partner.
Some sense it will be like they're color blind.
They just won't find that sort of thing engaging and interesting at all, and you might be able to shift someone a little bit too hard.
Degree of openness.
But it's it's it's not an easy thing to do.
So we think the literature seems to indicate that you should be fairly well matched on most of your traits with your partner.
With the possible exception of neuroticism, because it isn't obvious that two people are hiding, your audit could get along.
Eroticism is a pretty good predictor of marital unhappiness, just like it's a good predictor of every other form of unhappiness.
So Benjamin would says, My room is a den of iniquity.
Well, congratulations.
That's not an easy thing to pull off.
I guess it might be asking yourself, What's that student for you?
Obviously you're being funny.
That's just fine.
So what advice would you give to someone looking to quit porn?
Well, I gave some advice a little earlier about quitting alcohol, you know, and I would say it isn't that you're trying to quit porn.
It's not the right way to think about it.
The right way to think about it is that you're trying to figure out how to have a better life.
And so you have to figure out Well, I would say, Do the future authoring program and keep your porn addiction in mind and think so in the first part of the future program, it asks you a bunch of questions about what your life could be like in 3 to 5 years if you took care of yourself, like you or someone that you cared for.
Um, And then it asked you questions about your friends and your family and your career in your time, outside of work and your health.
And you know, the important dimensions of life.
And it asks you to spend, um, 20 minutes writing about how good your life could be in 3 to 5 years if you got your act together and did what was good for you, and then announced you to write about the hell you could be in if you didn't And so I would say you really need to do that because porn isn't the issue.
The issue is that you're not living your life the way you want to, so you need a vision of life that's more compelling than the porn, and you need a counter vision to.
That frightens you, you know, because otherwise porn is obviously extraordinarily gratifying in the short term.
But but you seem to be suffering from the medium to long term consequences of its use.
And so you need a story that you tell yourself that's really deeply thought through about why this is not appropriate for you.
What's what.
It's how it's hurting you and how it's minimizing you and perhaps making you embarrassed and ashamed and more socially isolated and all of that.
So I would say I think about it as cleaning up your psyche and your behavior rather than merely start stopping stopping porn.
You're also might want to write down, and you could do this in the negative vision part of the future off program.
You write down everything bad that you think porn is doing, too, because obviously you have some suspicions that this is not good for you, right?
That it's it's actually harming you in some important way, and so you need to be fully cognizant of what those ways are and then take them seriously and decide if that's the pathway through life on which you wish to travel.
And so and then I would also say Good luck to you.
You know, it's it's a very good idea to identify one of your weaknesses and work on it.
You can.
You can strengthen yourself substantial, but I do.
Is there a way to take any of your classes online?
Will you be establishment online university?
Well, there's no way at the moment to take any of my classes online for credit, which I presume is what you're asking you.
All the lectures that I've done for the classes are, oh, online on YouTube for many of the classes, so you could get the information and you could do the reading.
Oh, but you can't be accredited for it.
And that's part due to University of While the University of Toronto hasn't set up the university to make that a straightforward thing yet, the accreditation problem is a big one.
Will you be establishing an online university?
Well, you know, that depends.
It depends my health is being uneven for a substantial amount of time.
And when it's down as it is right now, I'm probably only 5% as productive as I am when it's what I'm functioning at full bore.
I seem to have developed a series of or discovered a series of food sensitivities that I shared with my daughter, and it's very, uh, reaction to eating the room thing is extremely vicious, basically flattens meal for a month.
I can't think properly, and I can't organize my actions.
And so I would really very much like to pursue this idea of an online university, and I've talked to many people about it, but it's a very complex project, and to a large degree it's going to be dependent on the state of my health.
When I'm healthy.
I could do a very large number of things simultaneously, and I'm very enthusiastic about that, very efficient.
But when I'm not, it's it's.
I really wonder if I'm even going to be able to keep up.
The minimal responsibility is necessary to keep my life in order.
That's actually very terrifying thought, so I'd love to do it, you know, and I would also say I'm starting it to some degree because I believe these biblical lectures are crucial to the establishment of something like an on line humanity's university.
Because I believe that, like our culture is made up of strata of stories, that that might be a good way of thinking about, like, higher levels of stories.
And the base story is definitely the stories that are laid out in the Bible, for better or for worse.
And in order to understand our culture, I think you have to have a grounding.
You have to be grounded in an understanding of the Bible, and I'm trying to make that as a religious in some sense as possible, not necessarily because I believe that an a religious approach to the Bible is the most appropriate, but because I want to investigate it with the least amount of metaphysical baggage possible.
And I'm hoping in that way to help people stabilize their identities, to illuminate the idea of the development of the divine individual, which I think is Western cultures, glorious contribution to human civilization and the thing that lifted us all out of slavery and and and pen Yuri and Serfdom and and all of those subordinate rolls into the society of relatively free and autonomous individuals that we are today.
We can't let that go.
And I think it will go unless we have something very strong metaphysically at the bottom.
I think we're weak without it because we fraction ate and everybody believes 1000 different things.
And it's sort of like, you know, you saw what happened to that, Um, Wall Street protest occupy Wall Street, right?
I mean, it's no wonder people were irritated about what happened in 2008 although periodic financial collapses are pretty common and it isn't always obvious who to blame.
A lot of that was innovation driven, as it turned out a lot.
You know, some of it was corruption, but some of it was just unbridled innovation because, like the mortgage trenches were very brilliant in some sense.
But they have unexpected consequences.
But in any case, you know, there was a protest against the fact that well, the bulk of the catastrophe seemed to fall on the poor, which is of course, always the case.
But the result organization whatsoever on the side of the Wall Street occupy Wall Street protesters they believed such a wide variety of things that they were unable to to organize themselves in any effective manner.
And basically, as far as I can tell, all they did was go out and indicate that they were displeased.
But that's not a very effective strategy, because if you're displeased and even if you're displeased for a reason and a valid reason, you still need to have some sense of what it would be that would rectify that.
Because otherwise there's no there's no movement forward.
So anyway, so part of the reason I'm doing the biblical lectures, which I think are perhaps the most important thing I'm doing and I hope to continue because of that is because I want to do whatever I can to give those stories.
They're due credit and to investigate very thoroughly the manner in which the literary imagination of Western civilization, the Judeo Christian tradition, manifested itself to produce the idea of the autonomous and valuable individual.
Because that's our magic idea, man.
That's at the basis of everything that we do.
So I guess I'm going to be contributing to the online university in that matter.
I'm going to try the other, but I can't promise anything for the reasons that I already indicated we were thinking of one tactic.
I don't know what you guys think about this, but I was thinking a very interesting first course might be like a five hour introduction to the history of the cosmos.
And so I was talking with my brother in law who would be willing to fund some of this along with me and maybe with some crowdfunding we'd like to host a competition, you know, so and the competition would be for the best five hour summary of the history of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the present.
And we would lay it wide open for people with regards to what sort of technology they wanted to use, whether it was animation or lecture or readings or whatever, and to offer, like a $10,000 1st prize and a $5000 2nd prize in a $3000 3rd prize, something like that.
And then maybe get people to vote on which, um, you know which production was of the highest quality and because what should happen with the online university, I think, is that we should set up a way of funding creative content producers instead of maybe focusing on the conten