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Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace w/John Hill & Jesan Sorrells
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In this episode, the hosts dive deep into Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace, exploring the novel’s themes of sacred vs. profane worldviews, the challenges of re-sacralizing modern Western culture, and how historical shifts in meaning affect society today. They examine the influence of religion, technology, and literature on leadership and personal identity, drawing parallels between ancient struggles and contemporary moral dilemmas. The episode also addresses America’s unique cultural experiment in pluralism, the role of skepticism, and the power of books to transmit ideas across generations.
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In this episode, the hosts dive deep into Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace, exploring the novel’s themes of sacred vs. profane worldviews, the challenges of re-sacralizing modern Western culture, and how historical shifts in meaning affect society today. They examine the influence of religion, technology, and literature on leadership and personal identity, drawing parallels between ancient struggles and contemporary moral dilemmas. The episode also addresses America’s unique cultural experiment in pluralism, the role of skepticism, and the power of books to transmit ideas across generations.
- Book Title: Ben Hur
- Author: Lew Wallace
- Guest: John Hill
- Host: Jesan Sorrells
12:23 Introducing Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace
24:03 The struggle of modern times
38:52 Understanding your target audience
52:36 Why I Avoid Politics Here
55:36 Evolution from Ethnos to Race
01:08:21 Hannah Arendt on the Eichmann trial
01:16:01 Discussing morality without religion
01:34:24 Balancing work, productivity, and purpose
01:36:17 Questioning traditional approaches
01:51:21 Discussing cultural criticism and religion
02:02:44 Discussing sales motivation and beliefs
02:10:01 Gen Z's religious beliefs shifting
02:24:01 Embracing change and personal growth
02:30:05 Meaningful conversations at rallies
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- Opening theme composed by Felipe Sarro - Bach - Silotti - "Air" from Orchestra Suite No. 3, BWV 1068
- Closing theme composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.
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- Check out the Leadership Lessons From the Great Books podcast reading list!
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Creators and Guests
Guest
What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?
Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.
Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and
this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books
podcast, episode number 193.
Before I open on the show today,
do my standard open on the show today, I want to say
something that's a little bit of an addendum. So normally on this
show, I don't get into the deep details of my personal life
or things that are sort of happening to me. Unlike most people
who are on YouTube or doing a podcast or
are spreading themselves around social media, my life is not
content. I'm a big believer in what Frank Sinatra
used to say. The audience gets the performance,
and that's all. I really owe you. I owe you the performance,
but I don't owe you myself. So
with that being said, I'm going to sort of break that rule.
Not sort of. I'm going to break that rule because for the last couple of
weeks, there's been no podcast episode.
Sure. We had our June 6th. Our June 6th D
Day episode that was a rerun from previous year.
And we also had an episode that was released earlier,
the Gulag Archipelago and the Life of
Ivan Dasinovich by Alexandra Solzhenitsyn. That
episode dovetails into some ideas that we're going to cover in this episode
and in Les Miserables, which is coming up next week.
The reason that there has not been an episode for the last couple of
weeks is because I had a death in my family.
And this individual who passed away
very suddenly from a. From a stroke
was. Is my younger sister,
Cristina Sorrells. Cristina hosted her own
podcast focused on the Lord of the Rings. She was a huge
Lord of the Rings fan. And if you have the opportunity to go
listen to that show, go check that out. I know it's still floating around somewhere
on the Internet. She was a creative person.
She enjoyed dance. She particularly Irish dance. She
enjoyed getting together and knitting clothes and putting costumes
together. She was very involved with her local community
and also involved in politics. Now, she and I may not have
agreed on certain political positions, but she was definitely as active
as I am, and she was fundamental in her beliefs.
Cristina, like I said, was my younger sister. I do have
another one who's a little bit younger than. Than. Than Cristina was.
And. And my older sister Sonia is also
floating around out there, not floating around out there living her life.
Now, the reason I'm kind of going into this is
because people have asked me, are you okay? And how are you dealing with
this? And Cristina was 44 when she passed away
a couple of weeks ago. And the answer to that question is
I don't know. And no, I'm not okay.
But I will be okay as we go forward.
I don't know if Cristina was a fan of this show or not, but I
do know that Cristina was a fan of reading and I do know
that she believed that reading was fundamental and is
fundamental to understanding our world and understanding how to
get along in our work. And so she
would think, this is weird, and she would probably laugh at me
and she would probably have something to say. But I'm going to dedicate this
episode, episode number 193, to the memory of my sister, Cristina
Sorels. And if you are a Christian
person or religious person, I welcome your prayers and your prayers for my family
and your prayers for her. If you're not that person, I welcome your thoughts and
your condolences as well. And I do ask that
you donate in her memory, if you would like, to the SPCA
or the Trevor Project. Those are two charities that
she would. That we as a family are asking that you.
That you donate to in her memory.
And so like to dedicate this episode, like I said, to my sister
Cristina. And now on with the show.
Opening up today from our book,
I'm going to kind of pick up a couple of pieces, a couple of
passages that I think will set the tone for
where we are going today. And,
well, we're going to pick it up here with
some, some, some, some men rowing,
rowing in the ocean. And I quote,
at noon that day, the galley was skimming the Sea of Pastum.
The wind was yet from the west, filling the sail to the master's content.
The watches had been established on the foredeck. The altar had been set and
sprinkled with salt and barley. And before the tribune had offered
solemn prayers to Jove and to Neptune and to all the
Oceanidais. And with vows poured the wine and burned
the incense. And now the better to study his men.
He was seated in the great cabin, a very martial figure.
The cabin, it should be stated, was the central compartment of the galley, in extent
quite 65 by 30ft and lighted by
three broad hatchways. A row of stanchions ran from end to end, supporting
the roof, and near the center the mass was visible, all bristling with the axes
and spears and javelins. To each hatchway there were double
stairs descending right and left with a pivotal arrangement at the top to allow the
lower ends to be hitched to the ceiling. And as these were now raised, the
compartment had the appearance of a skylighted hall.
The reader will understand readily that this was the heart of the ship, the home
of all aboard. Eating room, sleeping chamber, field of exercise, lounge and place off
duty, uses made possible by the laws which reduce life there
to minute details and a routine relentless as
death. Then they're going to move on and they're going to describe the
cabin and describe where this, the master of the
watch, is sitting. I'm going to skip through that paragraph and go to this.
The spectacle was simple enough of itself. Along the sides of the cabin,
fixed to the ship's timbers, were what at first appeared to be three rows of
benches. A closer view, however, showed them to be a succession of rising
banks, in each of which the second bench was behind and above the first one,
and the third above and behind the second. To accommodate the six
rowers on a side. The space devoted to them permitted 19 banks separated by intervals
of one yard, with the 20th bank divided so that what would have been its
upper seat or bench was directly above the lower seat of the first bank.
The arrangement gave each rower, when at work, ample room
if he timed his movements with those of his associates. The principle being that of
soldiers marching with cadence step in close order. The arrangement
also allowed multiplication of banks, limited only by the length of the
galley. As to the rowers,
those upon the first and second benches sat, while those upon the third, having longer
orders to work, were suffered to stand. The oars were loaded
with lead in the handles and near the point of balance hung to pliable
thongs, making possible the delicate touch called feathering, but at the same time increasing
the need of skill, since an eccentric wave might at any moment catch a
heedless fellow and hurl him from his seat. Each
oath hole, each ore hole was a vent through which the laborer
opposite it had his plenty of sweet air. Light
streamed down upon him from the grating which formed the floor
of the passage between the deck and the bulwark over his head. In some respects,
therefore, the condition of the men might have been much worse. Still, it must not
be imagined that there was any pleasantness in their lives.
Communication between them was not allowed. Day after
day they filled their places without speech. In hours of labor they could not see
each other's faces. Their short respites were given to sleep and the snatching of food.
They never laughed. No one ever heard one of them
sing. What is the use of tongues? When a sigh or a groan
will tell all will tell all. Men feel, while
perforce they think in silence.
Existence with the poor wretches was like a stream underground, sweeping
slowly, laboriously onto its outlet,
wherever that might chance to be.
Then I'm going to skip a paragraph here and go to this one.
In the labor of the rowers, there was not enough art to give occupation to
their minds, rude and simple as they were. The reach forward, the pole,
the feathering, the blade, the dip were all there was of it. Motions most perfect
when most automatic, even the care forced upon them by the sea
outside grew in time to be a thing instinctive rather than a thought.
So, as the result of long service, the poor wretches became
imbruted, patient, spiritless,
obedient creatures of vast muscle and exhausted
intellects who lived upon recollections generally few but
dear, and at last lowered into the semi conscious
alchemic state wherein misery turns to habit
and the soul takes on incredible
endurance.
In the last few generations, the people of the west have
experienced a profound transformation.
The material and social world that used to be held as a sacred place
descended in the space of 100 years, inogably or ignobly,
depending upon your pronunciation of the word, into a place of the merely
profane. The long story of the long 20th
century, from the killing fields of World War I to the tragedy of 9 11,
is a story of the seemingly random occurrence of numerous traumatic social,
economic, political, and cultural events. The
other dynamic is that the meaning behind those events was never
fully explained, not by politicians,
policymakers, philosophers, religious scholars, or even the materialist
scientists. Not to the people involved in them, and
really not to those people observing those traumatic
events. This lack of a definitive structure of place,
meaning, and significance, or even an attempt to explain the events themselves,
has moved Western humans from a location of centered spiritual
surety out to the edges of spiritual uncertainty and
psychological chaos. This transition was
documented in literary fiction of the 20th century, from Ernest Hemingway
and William Butler Yeats to Joan Didion and Edward Albee.
This was reflected in the movies and television shows that inundated Western man
during the 20th century. It even redounded down to the songs we
danced to and the advertising and marketing we
consumed. This lack of meaning,
however, has led to a wandering and here's a big word that we're going to
focus on today. Desacralization.
Desacralization project in the west during the 20th century led to a direct
led directly to an increase in the moral conundrums we find ourselves currently
mired in. I've said this on the show before. I believe that history
future historians will wonder why we fail to arrest such a
descent into the abyss. They will Wonder that we had
all of the technology, we had all of the stuff,
we had all of the artists screaming for meaning and
significance and yet we couldn't wrap our arms
around it. After all,
we are the most published ordinary people in the history of the
world. And they will use all of our
words and images and videos
to judge us. And I suspect they will find
us wanting. However,
however, not is all lost or all is not
lost. And not all is lost. Right. We in our
time, I think in the year of, dare I say, our Lord
2026, we in our time right now have the opportunity,
the vague outlines of which are buried in this book that we are covering today.
We have an opportunity to arrest some of this desacralization.
Of course we're not going to do it by going backward, we're only going to
do it by going forward. Now this book that we're
going to cover was once described as quote, the most
influential Christian book of the 19th century. And in
our time it stands, and I think my
guests will agree with this today as an anachronistic
throwback to an infinitely more romantic and I think an
infinitely more sacred time.
However, even though it's a throwback and even though it's anachronistic,
there is a line of a lesson, there's a thread that we can
pull from this and use it to weave into what we want to
build into the future. And it does offer us a map to
explore a potential path towards how to recycle
the western world. Today on
our show we are going to be reading, we're going to be
covering Ben Hur by
the great Lou Wallace
leaders. It will take time, probably
a long, long time to re sacralize the western world,
at least I think the remainder of this century. The current
one we're in right now, it's a hundred year long project.
So let's get after it
and back to discuss our book. By the way, this book has never been out
of print since it was originally published. Never been out of print, although you
can find open source versions of it everywhere. And the version that I
have is in basically an open source version of, of the book.
The person that we're going to have discussed this with us today is our
good friend who usually comes along with us on the science fiction episodes of
this show. So I was frankly surprised that he decided he wanted to read this
one with us. John Hill, AKA Small
Mountain. How you doing John? Man, I'm good.
I was also surprised at this book once
I realized what it was because I Just. I was
just thinking of chariots and cool things.
I didn't realize it was gonna have all this depth and.
Yeah, man. And as an aside, condolences to you and your family.
Yeah. I mean, that's a lot. So thanks for sharing and.
Yeah, we'll just keep pushing. So thank you.
Yeah. Now, okay. Because we're talking about this before. Before we hit the record, and
I just need to get one thing, one thing out of the thing here. Like,
I thought I read the wrong book, but the one that you just held up
is the same one that I have. Okay. Now, what's interesting about this
is, like, whenever I started to get into this book, right? It's. It.
It's written in a way
you have to enjoy reading. You have to
really just enjoy the words on the page, I would say, in the different
ways that people can have to tell a story. Right. Because,
you know, if reading a thing like Shakespeare or the Odyssey gives you tired head,
this is probably also going to give you tired head, right. Because of how it's
written. And so that took a little bit of, like, kind of getting used to
it. And so I was worried about the time. And so I was like, okay,
I might. I might hop over to the audio version of this just to make
sure that I can finish it. And I tried
to go and find an. And find an audio version of it, and I couldn't
find it. So then I'm looking around on Spotify and I'm trying to find the
chapter that I was in, and it was, like, skipping around a little bit. It
was such a weird thing. And so then I was like, am I on the
wrong one? And then I just chalked it up as like, okay, maybe Spotify doesn't
have their. Their stuff locked down the way that they should if they're going to
do audiobooks. And so then I was like, okay, we're just going to double down
and make sure that we finish the thing. But then I was looking over the
notes and. And the open source one, it's bucketed
differently as far as, like, books and chapters and these things. And
so I was nervous that I'd read like a. Like a shorter version of
it compared to what you had read, but our covers are
exactly the same. So now I'm not sure what to think. Yeah.
So this is a book that. And
I want to talk about Lou Wallace. I really do. I'm. I'm actually.
So, a couple of things. One, I'm actually fascinated by Lew
Wallace, the author, as a person.
His life Was he was the classic, like, 19th
century romantic guy, romantic figure.
And, and one of the things that kind of gets me to this
idea of desacralization versus. Versus
a sacred world. And I've developed. I've developed some ideas by
another book I was reading at the exact same time, which I'll talk about a
little bit here too, that has influenced how I think about
her. But he was a writer that was
so. No, no, no, let me
frame it this way. We are so
marinated deeply in a post Darwinian
worldview that we don't actually. We actually don't understand those romantic writers
anymore. And, and so,
and, and by the way, I'm not just reading Lou Wallace and Ben Hur.
I'm also in the process of reading Les Miserables, which will be coming in the
next episode. Victor Hugo, a deeply
socialist atheist writer, like all the way over there on the
other end of like Lew Wallace.
Two totally, completely opposite guys, right?
But both romantics in the 19th century in a way that
we don't. You have to. You have to take their. You have to take their
product at its word. And it resists
deconstruction because at a certain point, and
this is what romanticism is, at a certain point, you have to go past the
deconstruction to something else that can't be deconstructed.
And over the course of the 20th century, this is why I opened up with
this. We've done such a good job,
at least in our public institutions. And by public institutions, I mean higher education, the
media, most of Hollywood,
popular entertainment, even now in business and corporations. We've done
such a good job of saying that brute materialism is the thing that
matters. And this is a post Darwinian worldview. Brute materialism is the thing
that matters. Things, even in our language, our common language that we use, we evolve,
right? We are not sanctified. We. We
adapt. We don't grow. Right?
Even the way the sentences are written in Ben Hur would be. They
even sound like an anachronism coming out of my mouth. And that's because they're coming
out of a romantic sort of ideal
that I think is really
tough for us to wrap our arms around. We think those people were naive or
stupid, and they weren't. They just.
They weren't Darwinians. Well, there's a. There's an
interesting point there because, like, when I started to read the book, I was. I.
Because I did a little bit of research first, because just trying to get the
copy of the book is when I realized, like, oh, okay. This is going to
have a fair amount of religion inside of it. Okay, Interesting.
And it's. It's interesting because I did have a moment of, like, reading it,
and it was kind of like I was expecting it to be written in that
easy, approachable version, and it wasn't. And
so I had a moment of. I needed to decouple the. The
romantic side of writing and making art for these
things, because I was like, oh, this is going to be hard to read because
it's religious. No, that's not. That's not the actual thing.
Right. It was just written at a different time when most people that were
making it were making art for, I think. I think a
certain level of people. Right. And so it did take
me a little bit of time to decouple those
two things. And then I was like, oh, this is just Gladiator. Okay, cool.
Right. Like. And. And then it kind of fell into more kind of like a.
A theme that I'm very familiar with and have seen a thousand times and stuff
like that. So. But, yeah,
personally. And that's where we're gonna talk about this a little bit
later. But the film that was a Charlton Houston, the Charlton Heston film
from, like, the 1930s, the remake of it in 2016,
are two. It's. As I said before, we hit record. It is a. It
is a. It is. I can think of no
greater example of. Of cultural change
that you could see where the. Where the core content, as
we say now, is the same quote, unquote. Everybody's reading the
same words off the book, off the same page,
but the meaning, the significance behind them has
shifted because worldviews have shifted. And I'm not saying the worldview
shift is good or bad. I'm merely saying it is. We can argue about
whether it's good or bad, and we do a lot. That's what we do in
this country. We argue whether that meaning is good or bad. But
we don't. We sometimes fail to acknowledge. I think we fail to
acknowledge that the shift has actually occurred
because, again, I don't think we know what to do with that. We don't know
what to do with the meaning of that. And it feels as if we should
do something with it. And maybe we should. I don't know.
But I think it's important to acknowledge that the shift has actually occurred.
So I have a. I'm curious about this. Yeah.
So you said that we're going to talk about this one word a lot.
Desacralization. Yes. Okay. And I'M
I'm working my way to the point because like. Sure. I'm just curious.
Yeah. What does that mean? Like
what? Like, because I'm, I'm
assuming, right? And this goes back to like the good old days, right? People are
always thinking about the good old days, but if they weren't glorious for you, you're
just, you're just positive about the change, right?
So it's, it's funny because like, I noticed a big
difference, right? Just in like this book wouldn't do very well today if it was
released today, right. Especially not the way that it was written here and everything.
And so I'm curious,
why do you think it's important that we,
I guess, remain a sacred society? Is, is that the, is that the
thing? Is that, is that your. That's one idea.
I actually don't, I actually think, I think
we are going to always lean towards being a
sacred society because of the nature of you
human beings are. That's one assertion that
I make. But then I also, and I think
that we've gotten to.
We were just talking about elon Musk and SpaceX. Not to go into that,
you know, before we hit the record button. Not to go into that again. But
I think that there are,
I think we've hit the ceiling of what the brute
Darwinian materialist, scientific perspective can, can
get us. I think we've sort of hit a ceiling and I'll use a perfect
example of this, or not a perfect example, but a
example of this.
Many, many commentators, not just me,
have wondered why
things, and I don't mean cultural circumstances, but I mean like
technology hasn't gotten any quote, unquote better.
I actually just saw one of these articles flooded to me in my Facebook feed
the other day. Hasn't gotten any better in the last 30 years.
I see these articles all the time. Technology has not gotten better in
30 years, right? Why have things not gotten better now? The things
usually they, they, they start with technology in those articles and, and then
they eventually descended to culture because that's really what they want to talk about.
And the reason I think ties into this
idea of the sacred verse is the profane. But I
also think, or, and I also think that this
struggle is the struggle of the 20th century, right?
And it's been a long 20th century. I, I honestly think the 20th century started
probably in 1860, no, 1865,
and has dragged on to now. It's kind of like the long 19th, the long
19th, the long, the long 19th century, you know, which started in like
1776. Right. With the Declaration of Independence, and
then kept right on going all the way through World War I. Right. Long
period of a lot of change where people
fundamentally didn't understand what was happening. They just knew
the shift was moving. I think we're in that same period,
but I think we're. We're getting ready to exit it. And I
think the thing that will allow us to exit that is an idea
of the sacred. Now, where I get this idea from.
Let me bring up this book, because I was reading this book at the exact
same time, this book called the Sacred and the
Profane by a religious scholar named Mira Shea
Elieida. He was. Oh,
gosh. He was. Well, and I'll talk a little bit about him in a minute
here, but he was writing in
the 1950s about this phenomenon,
and he asserts that.
And by the way, he's a. He's a secular religious scholar. Let me be very
clear about this. The man was not a Christian. Let me be very clear about
this. Nor was he a Muslim, nor was he any of that. He was.
He was consumed by trying to figure out why all of
these religious traditions, all of them, even the paganistic religions, religious traditions,
all tended to create a human being that was
focused more on things that were sacred and outside of the materialism
that he was seeing in the 1950s. Because he's writing post World War
II, right? Post the atomic bomb, which at that point was
like, the biggest materialistic example of, like, boom, we can
put science to this problem and stop this human behavior ever that
anybody had ever seen up to that point. And so he's
writing, and he was. He. He was. He escaped from. Oh,
gosh, I believe he escaped from
Romania during World War II. So he was running away from the
Nazis. He had a whole lot of axes to grind in a whole lot of
different areas. He also wrote in, like, four different languages. It was kind of
amazing. Guy was like. He was. He was a. He
was what we would call a public intellectual. Back before they had the idea of
a public intellectual. He. He was just an intellectual. And so he wrote a lot
of books on the nature of religion, the nature of what myth means,
how myth ties into a sacred worldview.
And one of the points that he makes is that.
And it's right here in the introduction, and I want to read this, he says
this book basically will show the ways in which religious man attempts
to remain as long as possible in a sacred universe. Hence what
his total experience of life proves to be in comparison with the experience of the
man without religious feeling, of the man who lives or wishes to
live in a desacralized world. It should be said at
once that the completely profane world, the holy
desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the
history of the human spirit. Close
quote. So he's writing that in
1557. I
think he was exactly right. But I also think
that we always do chase that. And you're starting to
see signs of re sacralization popping up in
varying places, most notably in
the environmentalist movement. That's been happening since at least the
mid-90s all the way over
to what we're getting ready to see with AI. Like you're already
seeing AI churches popping up. That's already
starting to happen. Human beings want to live in a
sacred world. We just don't have the language to go
back to it. And I think Ben Hur to a certain degree
offers us a map for how to do that. And I think a
sacred world is better than a profane one
because I think it grounds us more. It also allows us to deal with things
that like psychology and behavioral science can't explain.
It also allows us to deal with things that are happening to us that
we can't explain. And I think we can do
that. No, I think we can do that. I think we will do that with
or without an appeal to Jesus. And I know the subtitle of
Ben Hur is A tale of the Corporation Christ. Hyper aware of that, but without
an appeal to Jesus. I think we're good. I think we've always made that appeal.
And by the way, Elada thought we may always made that appeal as well. He
believed it started way back in pagan societies. He goes all the way back to
Mesopotamia and talks about how we've basically been building
up our, our. The. The understanding of what is sacred as
human societies and as human civilizations. And he ties in the
pyramids, he ties in the worship of Greek gods, he ties in
math, all of it.
I think he's got a compelling argument.
Here's where I get stuck with this idea. Yeah,
because like I. And this is such a weird thing to kind of be talking
about here. I was not expecting to talk about this idea. I think that, I
think that people exist in one of two states. Right. You were either
younger, me loved very black or white scenarios and realized that
most of the time there was a lot of gray in the middle in this
situation. I don't think there's a lot of gray. I think that this is pretty,
pretty, pretty spot on.
You either think it's important or you don't.
Right. And so, you know, one of the things that I have to talk about
endlessly with people is like, don't try to sell PCs to people that
want Macs and vice versa. Right. Because you can spend your time trying to change
someone's heart and mind about what's important. Right? Right. But
we're not ever changing core philosophies about what's important in other people.
And so it's, it's in this thing of like. Okay,
so let me ask this question. Is, is a focus on
the environment and it being sacred read a bad thing in your,
in your perspective? No, I think it's a, I think
it's a misordered thing, but I
think so I think that we
are doing a repeat in,
in. Well, let's, let's start with even just the
thinking of the environment is sacred, right? Because it's not a thought. Actually,
the thought comes afterward. We know this from behavioral science. This is
where the science actually helps us. We know that the emotion
appears, then the, then the, the rationalization
comes. We know this from sales. I have an emotional
feeling and then less than 10
milliseconds later, I'm rationalizing that emotional feeling. And by the way, I'm doing this all
day about everything. Right? Yeah, we're doing this in the conversation that we're
having right now. Right. And
so when you say thinking of the environment is
important, I don't really think it's that. I think we're trying
to just like previous pre,
pre Christian, pre Judeo, pre
Greek cultures did. I think we're trying to reach back and find something
sacred in there we can connect with at an emotional level in the environment.
We're also trying to scale it up to a global feeling,
which is really hard, by the way. It's really hard to
scale that up to a global kind of thing. Right? So
there is some, there are some, there's some data that kind of supports what I'm
saying here. So we know that. Sorry, I have a
question. Yeah, so, yeah, go ahead.
This might be overshooting the point, but like, where does just simple
self preservation come into play, right? Because like, you know, there is the
thing of, like, okay, let's keep the planet here, right? And there's some people that
just want to work on the planet in the environment because they feel bad because
they want to leave something great. Then there are other, some, Then there are some
other people who were like, hey, like, you know, maybe we shouldn't be having this
impact at all. But there's just like, a lot of people that
they can also be like, wow, we need a place to live. Right.
Where does. Because I also think that there's a lot of people that are
uncomfortable with the topic of death. Oh, for sure. Massively
uncomfortable with the topic of death. Right. And it becomes easier to
think about parts of this whole thing because you get
to avoid the discomfort of death. Right.
So self preservation as the
motivating focus for these sacred things.
Right. Whether it's the environment or whether it's for the
family. Right. Family's got to be man, wife,
2.5 kids, three dogs. Right. And all this other, like, sure.
It's the thing that I hear. And
please correct me if I'm wrong. You're saying, okay, people are focusing on this bubble,
this bubble, this bubble, this bubble, this bubble. None of that matters because these bubbles
are all connected to the big bubble. So just care about the big bubble.
I'm not saying that none of those smaller bubbles matter. I
think all of those smaller bubbles are in search of the bigger bubble.
That's what I think. I think they're chasing the larger bubble, but they don't have
the. And. And Eliade was
very much consumed with language and. And meaning and forms
and as am I, right? I mean, for God's sakes, we're hosting a literature
podcast. So I think correct language then
orders things correctly. So if we're talking about things
correctly, not even to each other. Let's forget to forget to each
other for just a minute. Just for talking about things correctly to ourselves. Right?
Yeah. Which gets back to an idea that I've often had. I've said on this
show, maybe not with you, but I've said on this show with other guests.
One of the key questions that I've been asking people
for like 15 years now, whenever I get into them with training
and development stuff is. Or topics. Training and development topics is
how clearly do you think. And
you would be stunned. The number of people who raise the hand
to say they think clearly and the number of people in the room who
are confused by the question.
And so from there I go,
okay, maybe my sample size is too small, but let's
use this. Let's use this sample size.
If. If I ask 15 people in a room, how clearly do you think.
And two thirds of them don't understand the question,
John, would you think that there is something going on there? Would you
think there's a challenge there? Because I would. Because
then now in my brain, I Leapfrog from lily pad to lily
pad. I leapfrog from. Wait a minute. I
asked you in a training at 9 o' clock in the morning, how clearly do
you think, okay, maybe you didn't have enough caffeine. I'll, I'll grant you grace. Maybe
you didn't have enough caffeine. You didn't know you were going to run into the
buzz saw known as Haysan Sorels. Maybe you weren't prepared for that.
It's fine. I'll, I'll be nice. I'll back away. I'll, I'll
grant grace, right? Maybe I'll get you better later on in the day. Maybe at
5:30 you'll be clean, thinking clearer. Okay,
my question becomes, how muddy is your thinking on the
environment or family
or the material world or
the news? How muddy is your thinking on
things that I've spent a lot of time thinking about
and tried to put in correct order with correct language,
but you don't understand the question.
And so I look at the little bubbles as being,
for lack of a better term, ceilings that people have to break through. But
I don't know how to do that. I don't know what the tools are to
break people through. And by the way, I don't think it's my responsibility to do
that. I'm not taking all that on. I think that books do that.
That's why we're doing a book podcast and I encourage people to read these books
because books, as I said to another guest a couple episodes
ago, books smuggle ideas across time.
Oh, that's a great line. I couldn't believe
it just came off the top of my head. I just, literally just like. And
the guy was like, that's genius. I'm gonna write that down. Like,
yes, write it down. I'm a genius.
That's the thing you wrote down, I'm a genius.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. And as soon as you're done, you're like, man, couldn't,
didn't want to forget that.
And I'm gonna mic drop and I'm out. You all have a good day.
So. So I think, I think books are the tool that allow us to break
through those ceilings. I think more people
in the 19th century, which was a book dominated century
because there was no tv, radio was, was nascent,
newspapers were everywhere, but everybody wasn't literate. We didn't have the
literacy levels that we have now. They were greater than they had been at any
other time previous to the 19th century, but they still were not at the level
that we have now. The technology
of distraction was not there. Although people
would tell you if you go back to the 19th century and you read what
people actually wrote, they would say that the public readings of Charles, that
Charles Dickens was doing say the exact same things about those public readings that
people say about people doing TikTok videos now.
Literally the exact same language. So there's always
a technology that's destroying something somewhere. And to that point, right, Like
God, what, what was it that I was reading they were talking about how.
Because one of my favorite things is like the generation before always
likes to crap on the generation after from a gatekeeping perspective and everything.
Yeah. And, and it's funny because like they used to.
What, what was it? I think it was books or maybe it was chess.
But they were trying to villainize that. Oh yeah. They were trying to say like,
you don't want your kids reading because that, because that means they're not going to
be out in the field or something like this. Like, and like just think about
that person. Like they think that they're doing the God's work,
right? Of like keeping kids dumb and in the fields and
unable to do anything else like this. Right. But this is, this is one of
my favorite topics. Cause like, because the thing that I have to help people do
is develop discernment around their own products,
ideas, services and to have that in awareness while they're
having sales conversations, right? So my favorite thing was whenever I'm
talking to a founder or a salesperson, it's like, who's this not for?
Right? Because if you tell me that it's for everybody, I know you're not on
the level. Like, and I know you just need time, right?
You're like the CrossFitter just started CrossFit and you think
that everyone should be doing CrossFit. Like, you know, you're not thinking about like,
you know, Kip style pull ups have really, really
crazy tensions on like ligaments and tendons and soft tissues. And people can get
really, really hurt flopping around on a bar because they're not conditioned for it. But
everyone should go to CrossFit. You don't know enough, right? It's the Dunning Kruger, right.
Stuff and everything. And so half the time, right,
there's going to be people, status quo thinkers. I don't want any change at all,
right? And they're, and they're, they're, they're spouting consistency because
the fear or status quo. And then there's,
okay, let's Go try something new. Let's go try something different. Like
how do we parse these two things? Like, I don't
know. That's the God's honest answer. Do you?
I don't know. I know that. What
I do know, though. I do. What I do know is that we tried
to use. We took, we took
the theories of Darwin and we,
we spread them through folks like writers,
right? Like the Huxleys,
that entire family, you know, spread them around, right.
H.G. wells spread them around through his science fiction.
Those are two, two big names that I could just name right there. Then you
had folks that spread them around or, or at least took the conclusions of
Darwin to what they thought was a logical conclusion. So
Kinsey, who did all the sex behavior studies, he was one.
Freud. Well, not Freud, sorry. Carl Jung was another one that took
some of this to its quote, unquote, logical conclusion.
I will also quote from another book.
Ideas have consequences, right? So the
idea that. That evolution has occurred
over a long period of time and that human beings.
Now, let me be very clear here. The idea that human beings are not
created in the image of a divine, transcendent God, but
instead the idea that human beings evolved
over the long course of millions of years from,
depending upon where you want to start, a fish in the
ocean that decided to get out and come to land
or from a, a
simian ape, right, that broke
off and evolved over the course of however many thousands of years. I think up
to 12,000 years now, 14,000 years. Now, whatever it is,
that idea, I'm not talking about the truth or the factual nature of the
idea. I'm not talking, I'm not debating any of that. I don't care. Well, I
won't say I don't care, but that's beyond the pale of this, this podcast and
beyond the pale of this conversation. I merely talk about the idea
itself having a consequence. Oh,
well, I did have this. And that idea, by the
way, that idea. Just, just let me close up here. That idea
then closes the door to guys like
Lou Wallace to writing Ben Hur. Well, it
closes the door gradually, and I don't know that that door closing is
a good thing. Now that's an idea. That's a debate I would
like to have. That's a conversation I'd like. Well, who gets to be in charge
of that, though, right? Because, like, because, because you and I, we're also having
this conversation. There's an audience for everything. Right? Right. So. Right. You
know, you can be, you can be the Lou Wallace who's like, oh man, publishers
don't want to write my book. And. Or you can be the Lou Wallace who
goes out and starts a publishing company because you're not going to let anybody stand
in your way. Right. There's always that shout to out shadow banned on social media.
Like, maybe your content just is garbage. Maybe you're not connected to the right audience
and different things like this. Right. There's always this, this idea that like,
we're being constrained, right. Like, well, Dostoyevsky
self published. Let me be very clear. Dostoyevsky self published his
books, I think all but the Brothers Karamazov, if I remember correctly. Oh,
interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah. So Dostoyevsky couldn't get
a publisher. I mean, like, and that's my kind
of big thing is that like, the big stuff isn't going to be seen in
the main threads and you have to go seek it out. Right? Like, sure, the
old, old, like martial arts thing, Right. The student who won't spend a
year in a horse dance is not a student. Right, right. You have to
want to go find your thing. Now, I did have this very
surreal moment in the book, Right. Because the thing that I did
appreciate a lot, that I never really had much
perspective on was just how much like Jewish
culture, yes. Was like, looked down
upon, just like, as lesser just for people who want to go do their thing
and have their faith and everything else like this, you know? And it was interesting
because I think he does a really good job of just talking
about how the Romans just don't get it.
Right. Like, like he does. He, he does a good job of talking about
that, like, lack of faith makes it so hard to
even understand. Right. But there was this part where he was talking about
how the Romans have all these gods and they just have the one. And how
the sheer idea of that causes a lot of like,
friction and pejorative, like instant. Well,
I'm just going to put this here. You're a snowflake, right? No, you're a
snowflake and everything else like this, right. This idea. And I was struck
by that at first of just like how, how long this
culture of people have just been like, shoved down.
Right. And also. Because I could then appreciate
that. I could also then appreciate this idea that like, the king of the Jews
is coming and stuff like this and what a rallying idea that had to have
been for all of these people who felt underrepresented, walked
on and different things like this, you know, but just the sheer
idea of like imagine having 15
gods and then going and talking to someone and having to do business and
having to build a relationship with someone who only has one, right? Like,
it's because the ideas have been planted through books and literature
and everything. It's so much easier for us to wrap our arms around,
right? Versus, if you've only ever seen it the
other way, it goes back to this other thing. It only seems like magic
because you're not smart enough to get it. So this
is I'm doing. I'm writing, currently writing the script for our shorts episode, which will
come out tomorrow kind of a little bit because of current events. I'm kind of
a little bit blocked up right now in my writing. But
I'll get it out and it'll get out there. Folks, I've got an idea. It's
the idea that John actually just said here. I think
that I'm glad you pointed this out about Judaism, because this
was one of the things that I already kind of knew was going to happen
coming into the book because of my understanding of theology and da, da,
da, da. All these kinds of things, right? But it's really hard
for a person who. And
it's interesting that this book has never been out of print. It's even in print
today.
And so we talk about it being hard to read
and talk about it being difficult to sort of wrap your arms around
the. The assumptions that average human
beings, because ideas have consequences. The assumptions
that average human beings in the west and
even globally. But let's stick to the West. The assumptions people have
about how reality, quote, unquote, should or ought
to work. For instance,
the idea that women should and
ought to have rights. Now, what those rights
mean, how far that goes, we're still negotiating all that.
The point is no one in the west
is disputing that women should or ought to have rights.
No one. Why is that? Well,
the reason that is is because. Hold your, hold
your phone here. The Christians who
came out of a Judaic understanding of women,
of what a woman's quote unquote place was,
which, by the way, descended from the root of
one God, rather than 1500 gods
determining what a woman's place was, which, by the way, weirdly enough, all those
gods determined that a woman's place was to be, as is often slammed about
Christians these days, barefoot and pregnant. Actually, that was more like the pagans.
They actually thought that. But okay, let's just leave that
aside. These kinds of
ideas over the course of 2000 years
have marinated to the point now, where
we have legitimate arguments, not about
should women have rights or should they not have rights. We have
legitimate arguments about what kinds of rights women should have. And we don't even
blink twice about it because ideas have
consequences. I'm not talking about do we believe that Jesus was
the Messiah or not. I'm not talking about any of that.
We don't even have to go there. We just have to go to the idea
that a guy named Jesus walked around,
said it would be nice to be. Is it would be a really good idea.
And I hate to do this, but to reduce everything down, to be reductionist for
a minute, said it would be really nice idea to be really good to the
widow, the foreigner and the weak.
And people took him seriously for 2000 years, people took him
seriously. What was said in pagan,
in the pagan reality. And by the way, the early Christians in the
first like 500 years of the church, this is what Augustine was yelling about in
City of God, which we've read on the podcast before. This is his whole argument
against the pagans in like 300 or whatever. When he wrote that
book, the pagans believed
that women didn't have rights. Not,
not that they, not that they like should. What kind of right should women. No,
no, no, there's none of that. You're just. And you see this by the way,
in Ben Hur, the way that, the way that Ben Hur's
sister and mother are treated.
We, we're shocked by that. Why? We don't ever ask why are
we shocked? Well, we're shocked because of 2000 years of Christianity. That's why
we're shocked. And for us to. An interesting idea. Yeah.
For us to not acknowledge that. And again, you don't have to believe in divinity.
You don't have to believe in resurrection. I'm not asking you to buy any of
that. There are certain
fruits that ideas produce.
And those fruits come from a tree which has
a seed and a root in the ground. A root coming from a seed in
the ground. The seeds matter. Ideas have consequences.
So if we want to re sacralize the world,
we have to look at the seeds of where people's not
only individual beliefs are, but where society's individual beliefs are. And by the way, we
have to question those. And I think the Internet to stand up for modern technology
for just a minute here. I think the area does an excellent job and I
talked about it in terms of a cul de sac. I'm going to go back
to this idea. It does an excellent job of Bringing people who have had these
thoughts before, coming from different roads into the same cul de
sac and then meeting in that spot which increasingly is happening
online and going, oh, wait, you thought that too?
Oh, I thought. I just thought that by myself. Yeah.
Oh, now we can make common cause.
And as I keep going back to, I think, re sacralize the world, this is
where the postmodern environmentalist movement, this is why
it's doing well, because all these people are getting together in the same cul de
sac. Yeah,
Like, I don't inherently see that as a bad thing, though. No, and, and I'm
not arguing that it's a bad thing either. I'm merely saying the, the.
The seating of it doesn't. You're not. We're not going in deep enough. We gotta
go in deeper. We got to go in deeper. And I don't know that people
have the horsepower sometimes
to go deeper. And I think that's fine, by the way. Like,
let me, Let me be religious here for just a moment. I think God gave
different gifts to different people, and I think that
gave different strengths and abilities to different people, because we need all
kinds, you know, every. I'm not, I'm not demanding that everybody have the intellectual
horsepower of Hasan. No, I'm not making that demand.
I'm merely saying we've got
to figure, we've got to acknowledge what the seeds are
so that we can have a common conversation moving forward rather than a fractural
one, a fractured one around things that don't matter.
Like, things that don't matter at all. Like politics. This is why I don't
have political conversations on this show, because politics are misordered. It's all
misordered in the hierarchy. Like, we want to talk about
politics. Politics is downstream from culture, which is
downstream from religion, smaller religion, which is
the sacred of the profane idea, which is downstream from
how you actually, actually think about being and meaning and significance.
We got to go all the way up to the headwaters. How do you think
about who you are? How do you think about your level of significance? How do
you think about your being? And if you've never thought about this before
because you didn't want to take a philosophy class in college because it seemed like
it was really boring, or maybe you didn't have a history of like, talking about
these ideas in your parents house, or maybe you just never. You just didn't think
you had horsepower because no one told you, or you looked at that book and
you were like, I don't want to deal with that, because Kierkegaard seems really complicated.
Why can't I read this as fast as my graphic novels? Oh, because you need
space to sit and think on these ideas like that. That's what I did for
a while. Right? Yeah, I would, I would, I would look over this
fence as I was training martial arts, right. And I'm like, oh,
watts and stuff. And. And then like, occasionally I'd pick
up a book and I would try to like, speed read through it. Like, I
read, like, for entertainment. And then I'm like, who's getting depth out of this thing?
Right. Wasn't even walking into the deep end, you know, kind of
situation, so. Right. That's an interesting thing. Right.
Like, I, I believe that people have different strengths.
And then one inch past the strength is a, is a challenge. Right. It becomes
limiting and a constraint. And, you know,
as long as you're really aware of what, what you're great at and whatnot and,
and not great at and also knowledgeable about and experienced about and not
knowledgeable about and not experienced about, I think life gets a lot easier. But
if you're just running around thinking that because you did it, it was
perfect, you know, and all this other stuff that people get, I think, trapped into.
Right. None of this is a topic worth
getting into, right? No, no. Well, and
you talk about. And I want to, I really want to focus on. I didn't
really want to focus on the Christian. Christian. The, the Jesus sort of aspects
have been her. I didn't really want to focus on that in this conversation. Not
because that's limiting, but because now this is my own
weakness. I go with the assumption that people have heard about Jesus and either to
your point, they either believe or they don't. I, I go with that assumption. Right.
Okay. And again, that's a limiting factor on me,
Right? Because maybe not everybody. Everybody has or maybe everybody hasn't or they've heard the
wrong thing. I don't know. Hey, I don't know.
I think what's far more interesting is, to your point, the,
the. The. And it's really the ethnic. This is what Paul the apostle
talks about in, in all the post Pentecost New Testament books in
the Bible, when he's using the word ethnos, which we substitute in modern
translations, we substitute race for that. But that's not what he meant. He didn't mean
the modern conception of, like, how we think about race. Not at
all. He was much more consumed. And people back in the day,
2,000 years ago, were Much more consumed with
the ethnic groups that people came from and how the
ethnos of those groups, which is different than race by the
way, influenced how people thought about
the sacred, how they thought about the world, how they thought, thought about
reality. The idea of
ethnos continued up until the beginning of the
Enlightenment, probably in the 16th or 17th
century. That's when that started to break down a little bit. And then as the
age of discovery opened up in the 17th, 18th and then into
the 19th century, that really started to break down. Voltaire
was one of the first ones. Actually, we just read Candide on this show.
Voltaire was one of the first sort of skeptical, they called him back in the
day, skeptical writers who sort of breaking down ethnos
and really trying to do the, the conversion to racial
groups. Right. Because now you're, you're taking Europeans
and that's a gigantic monolith word and it doesn't mean anything,
but you're taking Europeans from one place, putting them in the quote,
unquote, new world, interacting with all these people they've never met before.
And now. And they're also importing
Africans, again, a monolith term that doesn't mean anything
model, importing those folks to the New world in an
effort to find a passage to go meet again, a
monolith term, Asians, which included, by the way, China,
India, Japan, Korea, all of that. Right? Yeah. So
Voltaire and the thinkers of the Enlightenment were trying
to break these, the visible differences
that they could see because they weren't blind, nor were they dumb.
They were trying to make that term ethnos fit
with what they were seeing here and make those two things click
together because they were confused. This has been a long project, by the way. Well,
and like, to me, and this is a really cool thing because, like,
we get to go back to another book that we, we did together. Right. A
Stranger in a Strange Land has that one chapter about like Islam. Right.
And how, yes, the language around Islam colors
how you perceive Islam, if that is your mother tongue. And
that's like. And I think about that, like a lot. And I was thinking about
that as I was reading through this like, book because, like, in that moment of
like, you know. Well, well, well, yeah, like, you know, some people have
many gods, some people only have one. And like, I us appreciate that that's going
to be a little bit weird. Well, I can only appreciate that because of the
environment that I live in, you know, and so I,
like, I was, I was just kind of struck by that, like the Language has
a lot of impact on our perception of
whatever it is. Right, so exactly. The other thing they're talking
about was just like. And I had no idea, just, like, during this time,
like, how far, you know, Judaism had,
like, spread, you know, because they're talking about these different kinds of Jews and everything
else like this, you know, and, like, I. I just think that.
So that idea was. Was cutting through for me. Right. That it was more about,
like, what do you believe? And not, like,
where are you from? Kind of thing. Right? Yes,
yes, yes. Because in a time where the
Greeks were philosophic and Greek
philosophy was thought of as. Even
Paul kind of degrades this a little bit. And Paul, you know, Paul
was a highly educated Jew. Highly educated. He was actually trained
in the synagogues by Gamaliel, I believe is the
rabbi's name. And so the synagogue system that Paul
was educated under before he had his Road to Damascus moment
and, you know, became a huge evangelical person for
Jesus. The system that Paul came out of, a lot of people don't
know, this had been built out by the
Sanhedrin and by the Pharisees in
order to. This is interesting, preserve
literacy among the Jewish people.
And that was being built in tension against this
idea of the Temple, which the Sadducees were
building as a physical representation of God on earth. And they
wrapped Herod and the Herodians into that. And so that
tension was existing in Jewish. He doesn't get into any of this, but that tension
was existing in Jewish society at the time. And so Ben Hur
is clearly in this book. He is clearly a
product of the Temple system, or not. Temple system, sorry, of the synagogue system.
So the synagogue was the folks who were trying to go out and
basically give scrolls to people and explain to them, like, these are the first five
books of the Bible. This is what. Well, what we think of as the Bible,
the Pentateuch, this is what Moses is. And they were
writing this down. So I heard this from a Jewish theologian, a
podcast I listened to from a Jewish theologian, like, a couple of years
ago, did a whole year on that podcast, and he explained a whole bunch of
this stuff and a whole bunch of different things that I didn't know. But in
Judaism, that synagogue system is
what has maintained Judaism over the course of the last now
2000 years. Because the temple's gone. The temple disappeared in
67 A.D. because the Romans, like Masala,
finally decided they were just going to be done with these people and just. They
burned the Temple to the ground and scattered the Jews. And that's
where the Jewish Diaspora began. That was then.
The door was then closed on that in the 1940s, with the creation
of 1948, with the creation of the state of Israel.
This is what people don't understand about Judaism. The
tension between the synagogue system and the temple system was
a main tension when Jesus showed up. And so Jesus
was a product of. He was a product of the synagogue system,
not the temple system. That's why in
all four of the book. Well, except for John, but in four. All
four of the books of the. All three of the four books of New Testament,
when. When Jesus says, I will tear down the temple and I will rebuild it
in three days, the Sadducees got all
upset. This is why. And they were like, who are you?
You're gonna. The temple, it's been. Take. It took us like 40 years to build
this temple. How are you going to tear it down in three days and rebuild
it? Now, the disciples tied that to the
crucifixion in their eschatology and in
their theology much later on. We just accept that idea
as de rigueur now from 2,000 years later. But back in the day,
that was a revolutionary idea. That was hugely
revolutionary because that goes beyond just the widow and the
childless and the poor. That's saying that. Think
about what that's radically saying. It's not just that.
And there were a lot of people who were claiming they were the Messiah running
around during Jesus's time. There were a lot of folks claiming that, to your
point, messianic worldview was very hot among the
Jews. Very hot. But.
But Jesus said something radical or made it. Made an
illusion that people at that time definitely understood. And the illusion
was, and you get this in Ben Hur too, the illusion was
that the temple system of man that's
being built to be this glamorous thing. And by the way, this is reflected also
in the Book of
Kings. Yes, the first part of the Book of Kings, when David dies and
David wants to build a temple. And if you go through that first part of
that book, God is sort of silent on whether or not David
could build the temple. And it's one of those, like, shocking things that like most
people don't see in the text. And then his son Solomon goes off and builds
the temple after he's gone. But David, David is the
one that initiates the building project, not God.
So the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees were arguing about this during
Jesus's time. And Jesus was a
product of the Pharisee system. And by the way,
he was with the Pharisees for three years, and he told them, you have
everything except for mercy
and grace. You have everything else you need except for
mercy and grace. And that's. And by the mercy and grace extended
to people that we now think extending
their mercy and grace is a natural thing. The widow, the poor, the childless,
or the children. Right. The weak. Right. Well,
that was radical for his time. That was hugely radical. Now,
the Romans didn't think that was radical. The Romans were
like, you're just another weirdo in a backwater
running around with no job. Like, aren't you a Carpenter?
We have 1500 gods. We're Rome, for Pete's sake.
Which is why I opened up with the galley. The galley rowing
scene. Because that's Rome. We will press your body into
slavery because we can. Force of will.
To the previous conversation we were having before we hit record, ultimate force of will.
I don't. I mean, with the exception of the benefits of technology
over the last 2,000 years, we don't really see
states behaving like that. Or. Or we do, but it's less and less and less
tolerated over the course of time. I also think that's a Christian assumption.
Like the fact that we question whether or not America should be
bombing Iran for 40 days. We think that all comes out of
Vietnam. No, Our skepticism around
Vietnam. No. I mean, there was skepticism around World War II. There was skepticism around
World War I. There was skepticism around the Civil War. There was skepticism around
the Revolutionary War. Need I go back any further?
There's been skepticism. And that skepticism comes from
ideas having consequences that go all the way back 2,000 years.
And so when I. When I talk about making it sacred, I'm just saying just
acknowledge that it goes back 2000 years. Let's start with that. Let's just start with
that basic acknowledgment, and then we can move forward. Dude, it's so
funny because, like, I
was. I was in training during, like, 9 11, right? And so, you know that
that was my birthday. I think you and I have talked about this. And so,
yeah, I joined as a reservist, and I joined the military for all the wrong
reasons. Right? It's funny now because, like, I'll have parents and they'll come talk to
me, and they're like, hey, will you talk to my kid about joining the military?
I'm like, what do you think I'm going to tell them? First of all, I'm
not gonna talk him into it or out of it personally. But I remember
going in like the next day, right. And tensions are running
hot. Right. I mean, I mean, we're, we're, we're in job training for the
military. Right, Right. And everyone is so excited to go turn it into a
parking lot. Like that. That was the exact wordage
that was being used. Let's just nuke them all. Turn it
into a parking lot. And me, like, me being
me, like, I'm like, that doesn't make us any better
than them, you know, of course, which wasn't heard. And now I'm
the bad guy, you know, in the platoon and everything else like this, you know,
because, like, we're not even allowed to have this conversation or talk about it or
anything else like this. It was such like a weird moment, you know, and so
it's, it's weird because like, you know, the thing that is
like there is, you know,
like human life in and of itself is something like
worth protecting. Right? Not just right for our side or for
our beliefs. Like, like in general, like, I kind
of don't care what you believe. If you're not doing harm to another human being,
you're allowed to believe whatever you want. Right?
Yeah. And so, yeah. And this is,
this didn't come from nowhere. And it, and by the way, it would be an
absolute shame. And this is where this is the thing that,
like I said this before on the show, and then we'll go back to the
book because we've wandered way far afield, but it's. Okay, good. This is a good
conversation. The challenge that I had with the
Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II.
So the challenge of Nuremberg was not.
No, was how do you create. In
1946, 47, 48. How do you create
a post war order?
And M would, would, would, Would
appreciate this. How do you create a post war
order based on a. A desacralized
world? Because how can there be the sacred in the firebombing of
Dresden and the, the two nukes dropped at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, we've now desacralized the whole
thing. We are now deeply in a profane world. How does
a profane world or people with a profane worldview, even though
they may mouth the words of the Bible,
how does, how do those people judge.
Judge German atrocities?
Nuremberg. Yeah. So
Hannah Arendt talked about this in her great book
Eichmann in Jerusalem about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, a
book we've covered on this show. And
I mean, Eichmann was The person who signed off on all the orders
that transported the Jews to the concentration camps.
And he just made it more efficient. And
Hannah Arendt, who barely got out of Germany ahead of the
Nazis, was hired by the
New York Times, I believe it was, to go and cover
the trial, because the Mossad did what the Mossad is
going to do, and they went and snatched that guy up in Argentina in, like,
the 60s and put him on trial. And Hannah Aaron made
a point that the same problem that
the. The Jewish people who were only barely like half
a generation away from the Holocaust, so there were people around
who still had that in their historical memory. I mean, they'd lived through it. Yeah,
those people had trouble not
convicting Eichmann, but figuring out on what
basis to convict Eichmann. And so
the basis to convict him, Hannah Arendt pointed this
out, she thought would have had more power
if it appealed to something sacred rather
than something profane. And
she thought that the basis of convicting Eichmann on
the basis of a profane materialistic. And by profane,
I don't mean ugly. I just mean materialistic or
brutally. Yeah, not godly. Rudely focused in the world. Right. Rudely rooted in the world
was a reflection of what had happened, of the failures at
Nuremberg. Because. So let me. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, go ahead. I think. I think that what I'm hearing. Right.
And this is. This is interesting. Right. So let me work through this. Yeah, yeah.
Like, so they. People that had gone through that
had. Had had the question of, like, okay, do
we really have the right. Right. Or what gives us the right? You know, because
of all these other people that have been hurt and everything. And so the. Think.
So. Oh, did it become like a. Like a vanity metric? Right,
Because. Because just killing one person, we've. We've all done this thing. So look
at the sheer number of people that this person has killed. So. So we're not
gonna be outraged by the death anymore. We're just gonna be outraged by the amount
of death that this person has caused. That was
Stalin's critique of Nuremberg. Oh,
interesting. Stalin went there.
That's a. Interesting.
It's a hell of a critique. That's what it is.
Well, I mean, like, you kill one man, you're a murderer. You kill 30 million.
It's a rounding error. It's fine. That was Stalin's critique
of everything that he saw. Because if Stalin had gotten
to Hitler's bunker, which is a great what if to kind of run in
your head, what if Stalin had gotten to Hitler's bunker before the Americans did.
Well, I know what would have happened thinking about it.
Oh, Stalin would have pulled Salah, would have pulled Hitler right out of that
bunker. He would have, number one, put him in a cage,
taken him back directly to Moscow, dried him out from the
amphetamines, and then put him on trial
because Stalin wanted to yell at Hitler in the dock. Dock.
And he wanted to see Hitler in the dock. And then he wanted to hang
Hitler in Moscow. That's what the Russians would have done because there
were 60 million dead Russians to get
that guy. And Stalin, though, he didn't
care about the 60 million dead Russians. What Stalin cared about was
Stalin's ego. And he wanted to match his
ego because going back to the. The.
What was it? The. The ribbentrop, the tree that was signed with
ribbentrop that split Poland. He looked at Hitler's
actions as a political violation because he
was an atheist. He wasn't appealing to a God. There
was no God then, no God in Russia other than Stalin. So go
get that guy, dry him out, put him in the dock, and
let's have a fight. And that's what would have happened
if the Russians had gotten to the bunker and Hitler had been alive.
Now, that's interesting. Counterfactual to run. That's counterfactual history, because it didn't
happen that way. And that's not what. That's not what occurred. But, but, but if
that had happened, Nuremberg would have looked totally
different. So would Eichmann's trial later on. Gosh,
almost 20 years. Well, not even 20, 17, 15, 16 years
later in Jerusalem would have looked different.
Totally different. As it was, the Western
leaders tried to. To. To split the. Not split the baby, but they tried to
walk a line talking about numbers and
morality. Well, guess what? Eichmann's
defense was that he was doing a moral thing. And
this is where the idea of just following orders now comes in. I was just
following orders. I was trying to advance in the Nazi higher work. And this is
how you advance. There is no morality attached to this.
Yep. Which I say that
out loud, and it even. It irks me to say it out loud.
Like, I'm getting like. Like there's little things in my body right now. Like, I'm
having a physiological response to this because my spirit,
the. The thing that's inside of me that knows this is wrong is like, this
is terrible. This is a terrible thing. Like, I'm having
trouble even just saying this out loud, but it is the. It's the Truth of
the thing. Well,
and I don't. We,
I don't, I am, I don't say normally I'm deathly
afraid because I don't like to live in fear. I don't
trust. I'll frame it this way. I don't trust the human beings can't wind
up back at that cul de sac with better technology
and more ability to kill more people. I don't trust that
we're better. I don't, I don't trust that we're not evil from the beginning in
our hearts. I don't trust that we.
I don't trust that we. Yeah. I don't trust that we have to learn how
to be good because it's just so much easier to be bad. Oh
yeah, I like I'm with you on these things but we're
every person I know who, who, who, who lives in the south, right? And
if you're not, if you're not a church going person down here in the south,
right? Yeah, every person, right? Because, because we're, we have
this little book club. We don't tell all you guys, but all of the, all
the, all the atheists and the agnostics, right? When you guys, when you guys are
church. We don't go to church, but we do hang out and we, and we
share the cancellations. Right, but we just don't hang signs, right, with,
with, with, with recruitment totals on them and stuff that like, like. Yeah, no, it's
cool, whatever. Go have the meetings. Everybody should have a meeting.
Go ahead, go ahead, get together, sign. Oh, go ahead. Sorry,
but every person I know and myself included runs into the thing of
like, okay, okay, so like you're not religious, so
how could you have morals, right? The presumption that morals
are an alien
thing because you don't, you
know, go to church and have the belief that until you accept
Jesus into your heart, you don't, you're going to be damned. Right. And go to
hell. Right, like sure that you know, I don't think it
has to go that far. But, but, but that's a very
interesting thing of the idea of like, so like was that guilt? Like,
like they felt so bad that they had to make it about just like the
sheer. Because even from a volume driven perspective, like I would wager
those two bombs, I mean you gotta be somewhat,
you know, just from a body count perspective, right?
So I think that they couldn't,
I think they couldn't square the circle in the light. In light of what? Himmler.
Himmler's defense from the doc.
I think that in the case of Eichmann, they couldn't square the
circle with Eichmann's defense from the doc. Because while it's
not a robust defense, if
you're, if you're, if you are disconnected from the sacred
in a way where you can't explain why a human being
has value and then how 5 to how that
scales up. If you can't explain the why and how to
enemies, that means you can't
explain it to yourself. I agree with that. And
so Eliada in the Sacred of The profane in
1957 is noting that the
lack of ability to explain is the reason to write
the book. Because he's, he's thinking. It's just an issue of give you the
ability to explain. I'll give you the language. I live in
2026, as we've already talked about, with clear
thinking. I think the language is long gone.
I think the language is long gone. I think it's been forgotten. Like the opening
of Lord of the Rings. You know those got a great movie which
I just, just watched Fellowship of the Ring with my son. Right. You
know, things have been long forgotten because there are none now alive who remember them.
I don't think we have people around who remember that. I think we've, we've gotten
carbon copies of carbon carpet copies of carbon copies of carbon copies of that
language now. And to re. And this is why I said
to re. Sacralize. The west is going to be a hundred year long project
because we have to rediscover the language. And again,
language away from
religion, capital R. Religion. Right.
That's why I picked on the environmentalist movement or use the environmentalist
movement as an example because it's the easiest sort of one to use.
Right. But
I also see where we are beginning to
sacralize our technology
and we don't like to use those terms, but we do.
So for instance,
how many folks, when they wake up in the morning, the first thing they do
is turn on their phone.
Like the very first thing. Like even before you say good morning to your kids
or to your, your husband or your wife or whatever your situation is, your dog,
the phone goes on, or maybe the phone didn't even go off at night.
So the term worship is of course loaded with Christian assumptions.
But when you strip away all those, worship just means what you pay attention to
at the bottom of it. So even
folks like Elon Musk and others, Jonathan Haidt pointed this out in
his book on the Righteous Mind. And then later on in his social media
research on, like, what that's doing to teenage girls and sort of how that's how.
Well, all that's going. Both of
them make the point that we're already cyborgs.
We just don't have the thing embedded into ourselves, though. That is
the next step. The transhumanists would like to take that next step and go
directly to the embedding because we're already
doing the worship part. Well, I hear that as a person who.
Yes, okay. Pointing my full cards on the table, yes, his capital are
religious, and no, I'm not trying to convert John. I could be friends with people
of all different kinds. Okay, it's fine.
But as a person whose capital are religious, that scares
the heck out of me. That actually checks me. I'm not looking to check John.
John can check himself. I'm not looking to check. Check my lip. Y' all do
whatever it is you're going to do, but it checks me. It's like, oh, yeah,
how often am I looking at that thing? Rather than doing these other
things? How much of this do I need to shift? Where do I need to
shift My. My. My worship to my attention
to. So instead of. People ask me, how. How do you read all the
books you read? Well, I just don't watch Netflix or
I watch less. Yep. Like,
I'm in Kung Fu, Right. Because. Yeah, because. Because people will be like, dude, where
do you find the time? Well, okay, after work.
This is what I do. What do you do after work? Well, I sit on
the couch and I watch and I drink beer. Okay. I make. I make
other choices. Right, right, right. Not finding a
well of time that you don't have access to. I'm just using the. The
absolute well of time that we all have a little bit more intentionally than
you are. I often say this, and this is the
crack up line. Kim Kardashian and myself,
and I'll throw Lewis Hamilton in there. Lewis Hamilton
and the guy from Game of Thrones and
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, we all have the same 24 hours. I
don't care how you think about any of those people. Not one of them is
getting an extra hour in the day. Not one.
Nobody that you know, not from the Pope of Rome to the
homeless guy on the street is getting one more extra hour in the day. It's
24 hours the same way for every single one of us. Now,
what Kim Kardashian does with her. Her 24 hours and what the homeless guy does
with his 24 hours are fundamentally different. I love the framing of that. Right.
Because, like, at this. At this stage, right, when you become someone
who just does things, right, and you put things out in the world and everything,
and they don't always see the time and the effort and all this stuff. Right.
Especially if you do things like books and things like that. Yeah, it's. You know,
but I love that framing that, like, let's look at all these people.
Not a single one of them is going to find another hour in
the day itself. What they spend, like,
such a beautiful way of talking about it, right? Because. Because this is like one
of the things that I talk about with everyone is there, like. And it's.
It's so wild because, like, I was this person, right? They're just stuck in.
I call it being stuck in the land of should. Right. Should I have to
work this hard? No, no. But don't want
more than you're willing to work, right? Like, if
you want. If you want an easy job and you want no stress, don't expect
great pay. Just not how it works. Well, and
I'm also worried about. Because I'll throw this in as well, because we're way off
our script. It's fine. Oh, yeah, we're way off.
But this is. This is why I love doing the show, because I get to
have organic conversations and it just goes.
I worry that the promises of our material
technologists of. We will deliver
you universal basic income because of all the robots and the AI, and we're going
to do that at some unidentified utopia in the future. And you will
never have to work. You will merely. As Dostoevsky wrote
about in Notes of the Underground, you will merely hang around
and have grapes falling into your mouth and only have to concern
yourself with the propagation of the species. Or as Nancy
Pelosi's. Because we've been able to. Income.
Yeah, because that's gonna work. Or as Nancy Pelosi said, with the passing of the.
Of the. The Affordable Health Care act back all those years ago
now, she was like, oh, well, people will have extra time to make art and,
like, do things.
And now they're saying you don't need. Who was it? There was some
there. Oh, the guy who makes the music. The music AI engine
thing. He was like, well, it takes a lot of time to learn how to
make music. So now you don't have to spend that time. You can go do
something else with it. Like, you idiots.
But again, if you have a sacred
understanding of the world, though, this then translates into a sacred understanding
of work. So work no longer is just
a thing I do, a rude thing that I do to make money so I
can sit on my couch and drink beer and I don't have to go do
kung fu because I just made enough money to sit on my.
My couch. Now work becomes elevated to something
else. So, like, entrepreneurs call that a calling, or we
talk about the drive or all that purpose, passion, drive meaning. Right.
Those words are great. And I think they only get you
halfway there, because for the 5,000
years, for the vast majority of the 5,000 years of human history, until about two
minutes ago, human beings actually
worked the land, which is where nature. Nature
worship, frankly. Intrinsically motivated. It was easy to be intrinsically
motivated. Plus, it was also easy to see that there were things bigger than you
that were in control that you were in control of. Oh,
dude. Yeah. So I don't. Right. So I don't.
Right, Right. Seasons. And like, I
raise chickens. I raise chickens and turkeys. Small
anecdote. The other day, I was feeding my chickens.
I was throwing out some scraps and whatever. I went and checked on them, and
it's a whole thing I got to do because of what we got set up
to protect it from predators, okay? So. But I go out
and I had three turkey pullets, three young turkeys. Now, turkeys and
turkey chickens are fundamentally different. Turkeys are actually dumber than
chickens. Most people don't know this. They're stupid. And it's hard
to keep them alive in general. But once they get to a certain level of
maturity, then they just take off like a rocket, and they go. And then they
don't care about you, so the dumbness stays. But then they have,
like, huge survival instincts. They're too big for hawks to take. They
fight other animals. It's kind of ridiculous. And then they go perch high up in
a tree, and they can get away from things. It's kind of amazing. But you
have to get them there first, right? So we had. We had five
turkey babies. Two died at
young. Just two died. Matter of fact, my son,
one died in his hands. He was like, well, and he's nine. He goes, well,
it had to decide whether to live or die.
Only your kid, right? Like this bumping.
No. I went, whoa, whoa, dude.
Whoa. Your wife is just mad. No, she was out of town. She was
out of town. She didn't. She didn't hear any of that. And I was like,
oh, dude. Oh. Game over. Go, go. And then he went and watched a
cartoon on Netflix. He's Like, I'm just gonna watch. There's
that moment of like, okay, did this ruin you? Did this ruin you? No, I
want to watch cartoons. Okay. Thank God. Okay, like. Like, go. Go do
the thing. He's gonna go watch Scooby Doo. It'll be fine. Yeah. Oh, my
gosh. He's 16 and he hates you when it. What I need you to remember
is that it's probably due to this and you didn't give him the right output.
I've already told this. I've already told my children, when you get to be 30,
I'll pay for your therapy. But it's at 30. I'm not gonna pay for it
right now. That's the real measure of. Are you
successful as a parent is like, how much therapy does your child need
in an adult state to function? Like, I don't want to have a
conversation with you about report cards or AB on a roll. No, like,
let's talk at 30, and let's talk at 30. You bring your kids
therapy bill. I'll bring my kids therapy bill. That's right. See, we'll see
how. We'll share the receipts. We'll see how this all goes.
Yes, but I went into a kid willing to go to
therapy. Means you're winning. Like, I'm just gonna go out there too, right? No, it's
fine. It's like, just holding it away from them and telling them that only. Only
sissies, like, talk about, oh, God, no. They never go, no.
Oh, God, no, no, no, no, no, no. Go ahead.
But you just gotta wait till you're 30. You gotta save it all up. Otherwise
you'll have nothing to talk about. You gotta justify the expense.
Like, you don't have enough at 16. You really don't. Like, you think you do,
but you really don't parent. You sound like. You sound like my mom whenever I
was a kid. Because, like, sometimes, like, Like, I'd be upset about something and she
like, you want something to cry about. Like, that's what you sound like. Right. Know,
Right? That's what my mother told me, actually.
Oh, yeah. I'll give you something to cry about. And you're like, oh, wait, no,
you up the ante. Oh, I don't want any of that. Yes, yes,
yes. So you want someone to talk to. Let me give you enough so you
need someone to talk to.
Oh, my gosh. So I went into the. I went
into the chicken bin, right? And one of the turkeys. For some reason, I'd
been in the chicken pen all night. The night before, my son was like, oh
yeah, it's fine. We checked on him. It was fine. Well, I walked into the
turkey pan or walked through the chicken pen and the turkey was, was dead.
No visible signs of an attack inside the pen. The
pen is predator proof. No predators getting in.
And clearly. And it was, you know, it hadn't. Rigor mortis hadn't yet set in,
so it had been dead only for a little while, but it was dead long
enough to where flies were starting to like, you know, begin to make homes.
And so I of course, picked it up and took it out and did the
whole thing, disposed of the body and all that. I'm saying all
that to say this. I have no idea why
that turkey died. And that was three days ago.
That's a small, tiny sliver of
what people experienced for the last. For 4,500 years
with the land and nature and crops and animals,
just animals randomly dying. And you have no. You don't know why.
A storm comes out of the sky, hail takes away a third of your crop,
and that's it. You ain't eating for the rest of the year. Or if you
are, you're eating at subsistence level. Human beings. And
Eliada makes this point in the Sacred and the Profane. And Lou
Wallace gets to this in Ben Hur. Because in the middle of the 19th century,
they're just beginning to get out of this. This. They're just
beginning to start having the kinds of things we consider to be just normal
things like the way we live now,
light years away from the way people lived over the course of the last
5,000 years. So it's easier for a human
to be close to the sacred because they have to be.
And as we've gotten further away from that, and I'm not the first person to
say this either, we've become less consumed with that. This is what
Eliota was talking about in that one paragraph that I read. We've
become more. That's why he says. That's why he says the desacralization process
is something that's relatively new in human history. And he's right.
So we have all these terms that we use for meaning and significance, but
we don't. They're grounded in different things. They're grounded in
industrialization, or they're grounded in Darwinian
evolutionary theory, or there are grounded in socialism, or they're grounded in
capitalism, or they're grounded in communism, or they're grounded in fascism, or they're
grounded in geography. Geography, or they're grounded in race, not
ethnos, race. Or they're grounded in economic condition
or class structure or Marxist theory or
critical theory or whatever they're grounded in. And those
things, I look at all those groundings and I go, you push on
those just a little bit. All of them, right, left, center,
whatever. You push on them just a little bit and they crack. And we can't
figure out why. We can't figure out why those things crack. And I
assert they crack because the thing
that, that grounds them is not grounded to
even at a very bare minimum, the land. Just a
bare minimum, the land. Right. So I have a. I have a thing that. I
do not think that I do, but we, we have a homestead. Right. And so
I've been able to meet a whole bunch of people who are doing homesteading all
across this country. And homesteading people,
I don't know what their politics are. It doesn't matter. Most of them, I think,
are libertarians, probably anarcho libertarians, probably way
over there. But we don't even get to that point because we're too busy talking
about, hey, how do you make sure your turkeys don't die? How do you make
sure you don't lose three of your five turkeys because you like to eat at
the end of the year? That's a
real, like, that's a real, in real life, grounding,
consideration. And
so, yeah, I'm not ashamed to admit, Yeah, I pray over my animals. Absolutely. Are
you kidding me? Because I can't. There's so many things around
my control. Yeah. I can feed them, I can optimize their conditions. I can do
all the sciency stuff and we do all the sciency stuff, but at a certain
point, the turkey's just going to die in a chicken coop. And I have no
idea how it happened.
And I have no way to solve that or predict for that. And this is,
again, this is something that people dealt with for 5,000 years. And how did they
deal with that uncertainty? Well, they dealt with that uncertainty by,
by working inside of the concept of a sacred
world. Starting with pagan worship. Right. Starting with worship
of the elements, starting with worship of weather, starting with worship of,
of nature and of circumstances, and then
gradually moving up the hierarchy to worship of divine beings
and all these other kinds of things. Now we're in a space where
we sort of said, to the higher that hierarchy. That's
interesting. But we could control for all these things now.
And to me, that feels a little arrogant. Well,
okay, man. Such a cool topic. Oh, my
gosh. Because I've shifted on this a lot. I used to
be the guy. I mean, after the
military, I was, it was so weird because
like, before the military, like I, I thought I was too good to weigh tables.
After the military, I'm not too good to do anything, right? But then I start
to figure some things out and I'm like, you know what? I really hate mowing
the yard. God, I really hate mowing the yard. Like, how much does it cost
for me to hire someone to like, mow the yard? I could find some kid
in the neighborhood, pay them 20 bucks, and then lo and behold, I have an
extra two hours, right, that I, that I get to use for whatever I want,
right? And so the thing I go back to is that turkey dies,
okay? Which is crazy, right? And a couple of years ago, you
and I did an episode where I was in the, in the mysterious Southwest, right?
I was, I was in a situation to where like, I mean, I'm driving around
through New Mexico and it's so big and open and you see this cloud and
like it's the only cloud in the sky. It's creating this like, shadow and everything
is so big and it's, it's, it's easy to be in awe of the
majestic of the land and every. I mean it's called the land of enchantment for,
for God's sakes, right? But here's,
here's where like it hits the road for me because I do think that there's
something around being busy and being productive. Now don't,
don't ask me to go toil and don't expect other people to go toil and
think that you're doing something good because just because it's your idea of a passion
and purpose, if you're doing it badly and looping people into it,
I think you're still on the wrong plane, okay?
But by that same token, if
every moment is spent under duress of like, are we going to have
turkeys? Is the crop going to come in the right way? Like, does my kid
have measles and everything? Like, if all of our bandwidth, right, I go back to
Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's really hard to think about, huh?
Am I really self actualized if all my effort has to be extended to keep
the lights on, right? And food on the table, right? So
I'm a believer in work. Like, like, I think, I think I'm a big
believer that work worth doing is worth sweating about. Like
thinking about toiling under. I think that that's meaningful, you know,
but if every
moment is allocated towards struggle, community, just trying to make it through, to try,
trying to make it through. Maybe a doctor
comes, right? Or a vet comes by and says, like, oh, what happened to your
turkey? Oh, I have no idea. Well, do you want me to take a look
at it? We might be able to keep it from happening. Don't have time, man.
Don't have time. It's God's will. It's just gonna happen again, right?
And maybe, maybe the doctor can cut up in this turkey and realize like,
oh, maybe they, maybe there's this element in your chicken
feed that is just really, really bad for turkey. I'm not saying that this is
a thing here, but if we don't ever have the, even the space to ask
the question because it's sacred,
then everybody has a lot more turkeys dying because
no one is, no one is doing the research on these turkeys because you
know what, like, why would you waste your time doing these things? It's in God's
hands. Like, just let God handle it. And then we're not asking these questions. We're
not seeing that germs have a, a much
bigger impact on morbidity rates than like the
reputation of the doctor and stuff like that. Because we have decided
to stay at such a low level of manual effort, there
is no room to ask any higher questions, right? So there is
no room for innovation. There is no room for
anything, right? How do you, how do you balance
these two ideas? Or do you so
these two ideas. I think the
I. Well, so I think that we have become
overbalanced in one direction over another. So you're right. I could call the
vet, which. Why would I do that? It's a
25 cent turkey. Like it's not worth it for me to go get a 500
an hour vet. But to your point, I could, I could absolutely go call
a vet. That'll cut up the turkey. That'll do a whole bunch of different things
on it, figure something out. Although that turkey is probably half eaten by now. Some
scavenger got it. So it fed somebody. There fit something already, so it's
fine. But like it. You're right. The vet would figure that out. And
you're correct. We've created systems and this is the prom. This was
the promise of industrialization that actually worked out. So the
promise of industrialization was you will have more
psychic time. This is the Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor
promise, right? We will optimize your productivity and your work inside of a
Factory box and you will have more time to be.
And actually, the way they framed it was in very materialistic terms. So
you'll have, you'll have, you know,
a white picket fence and a little yellow house. And to your point earlier,
2.5 children. That was the promise of industrialization.
And the promise really started in the 1920s in America and
really started in like right after World war. World War I. Well, just
before World War I. And then World War I kind of ground a little bit
that out of Europe. But they got, they got right back on board, particularly
in England. Got back on board. And by the 1950s, when
Eliada is writing the Sacred of the Profane, we were
so far away from the Ben Hurlou Wallace
sort of concept of what good could be, because good
had exploded in comparison to what it had been. So the people
that lived in the mid 20th century
remembered not just one turkey dying and it being kind of,
okay, it's 25 cents, it's not going to cost me anything. They remembered
whole swaths of turkey dying. Yeah. And having to deal with that, that was in
their historical memory in 2020, 26.
I talk about a turkey dying or the 16 some odd
chickens that I've got, and everybody goes, oh, well, you're clearly rich because you're
raising chickens.
Weird, right? Like, this is, this is the weird. That is kind of a unique
perspective, right? Yeah, right. That's interesting. And so, like, I
don't have to go to the store for eggs because, like,
I'm making them at my house. Oh, well, that means you're wealthy.
Okay, sure. Yeah, right. I, I sigh and I just gotta go.
Okay, sure, sure. Because you know what? The Industrial
revolution promises that you won't have to raise eggs.
Instead, eggs will be raised in some farm factory somewhere
with a bunch of chickens that never get to whose feet, never get to touch
the ground. And all they do is make eggs all day. Then we'll bleach them,
will ship them, they'll sit in a warehouse for however many days, and then they'll
sit on the, on the shelf underneath lighting for however many more days. And then
you'll get an egg and it'll be, and I use this in air quotes. Good
enough. And by the way, we'll put a thing on the box that says this
is nutritious or organic.
Right, right, right, right. And it's not just the eggs. It's everything in our food
system. Right. Which is where you get folks that then
turn to homesteading because they're like, what the Hell, but
the fact that they're able to turn to homesteading is seen as a sign of
a slough off, an after effect of this great wealth that
was produced through industrial revolution. And the technologists who are
promising us all kinds of wild promises with AI are looking at
industrial revolution and saying, oh well, the same thing will work out with the technology
from AI and robotics.
Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, wrong. But right
now the only working out they have
is not. You're going to have a, you're going to have a
house and 2.5 kids, for God's sakes. Fertility rates are down everywhere.
People aren't having kids. We have more
prosperity than ever before in the west and people are not having kids.
You would think that's another inverted sort of logic thing. You would think
that you have more free time, you have more available income, you have more wealth
because of the promises of the industrial revolution. You would have more children because you
don't have to worry about your turkeys and your chickens and your eggs. Somebody else
is worrying about that. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is
people are having fewer kids and things are inverting. Now, whether or not that's
a temporary thing we have yet to see, but things are inverting where
people are having fewer kids, fertility rates are down, and what are people doing with
their extra money and their extra time? And this is where I
get back to, is man's heart evil
or good? Which one is it?
Are we. And by the way, as entrepreneurs, we always say this in business,
we always say, oh, well, people are. We say this in sales. People are inherently
selfish. They only do what's. And we just sort of saw that off. Right? Yeah,
well, people aren't just inherently selfish when you're trying to sell them a widget. They're
inherently selfish about a whole lot of things. Oh
yeah, for sure. Like a whole lot of things.
And so I don't know, this is a long way
around to saying the answer to your question. I don't know what the mechanism is
to move people back to less
selfishness, but I know the mechanism isn't having a
love in with everybody. Like the boomers tried that.
That didn't work because the boomers all went off and became capitalists.
I also know that the answer isn't, yeah, I also know that the answer
isn't let's just bomb them all and have God sort them out. We tried that
for 20 years, that didn't work. I also know that
the answer isn't, let's just allow
people to come in in an unfettered manner or an unvetted manner,
and maybe, hopefully they'll all become Americans. I know that's not an answer
either. That hasn't worked either. Maybe if we just leave them to their
own devices and we let them, quote, unquote, rule themselves,
they'll magically discover how to be good to each other. But murder rates in
Chicago, Miami, New York City, Louisiana, San Francisco,
well, New Orleans. Need I go on prove that that's not
true either? The facts, the data, if we're going to be scientific and
materialistic on the ground, prove that, that those outcomes don't come
from just giving people the utopia that we think
they want. By the way, this was hopefully, I hope that people would have learned
this lesson from the French Revolution because it didn't work out there either. They
were going to create a utopia on Earth. They wind up with
Napoleon.
So these, all these things all come together
and if we want to, if we want to, if we want to
move away from Christ and God, okay, cool, let's move away from Christ and God.
The core question becomes can, how can we be materialistic?
Can we have more of our material needs provided for while being
disconnected from the source of those material needs being provided for and
yet still stay sacred?
That's the core question of the 21st century.
And I don't know what the answer to that is, but if
I look at history over the last 200 years, I don't think the answer is
a good one. Well, I mean, so I cut this a
little bit differently. Like, I'm with you for the mo or for the majority of
this. But like,
my big question is, because
in, in the, in the way that you're talking about, if we go back in
this direction, things get better. Is your, is your kind of a. Is. Is the
thing that I'm hearing from you? Okay, but sure, we can. Okay,
yeah, yeah, right. I think if we look at, I think if we look at
attempts where religious rhetoric
was used positively or negatively, there's just as much
negative output of, well, hey, our
religion is the right religion and everyone else is bad and wrong
stuff like this, right? So like, for me,
now we're past the tipping point, right? Like, like, you know, because, like, I think,
I think moderation is probably like the answer. Like, we're too far
connect. We're too far removed from like, core work. Most people don't have a job
that they have any passion or purpose about. They just Took a job because they
just went to school and just did this thing because that was the thing that
they were sold on. And so if you don't have any work that you care
about at all. Okay, great. I can, I understand
why clock punchers just want more money. I
get it, I do. Right?
But man, I just think about how many, how many,
I mean, how many other religions are we not
talking about because of the big R religion that's just like
steamrolled and said, we're right, you're wrong, therefore.
So I'm fine with having all of the other big R religions
battling in the public square. I'm fine with all of that. Matter of
fact, I believe that America fundamentally, this is why I don't
worry about things like, well,
I don't worry about Mayor mom dummy in
New York City, you know, having the Muslim call to prayer go out from the
top of the Empire State Building,
although the World Trade center would be too rich for words, but going out from
the World Trade center in the next, you
know, however many years of his administration. I'm not actually
worried about that. Although a lot of my fellow Christians are. I'm not worried about
that. I'm actually not worried about the
Hindus building ma, building temples and,
and, and building temple communities and, and doing things with other
Hindus in Dallas. I'm not worried about that.
I'm not worried about the potential for a Hindu
mayor being elected in Los Angeles, which
may indeed happen. I'm not worried about that.
I'm not worried about a Hindu governor of California. Not California,
sorry, Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy. I'm not worried about him being a
Hindu. I, I, that doesn't, that doesn't bother me because,
and the reason it doesn't bother me is not because of the
idea of the state shall make no church. That's embedded into
our Constitution, which, by the way, that's what it says, the state shall make no
church. I'm not worried about that.
I'm not worried about all these other temples and churches and synagogue. I'm not worried
about any of that. Have the Muslim called prayer go out in Dallas. Sure, go
ahead, go ahead. Because what I know
is I know something that the
Muslims don't know, and I also know something that the
Hindus don't know. And it's something very
specific about America. I wouldn't say this if I was in the uk. I wouldn't
say this if I were in Germany, and I wouldn't be confident saying it if
I were in Spain, because those countries have A different historical background with a
different historicity, historiosity attached to each one
of those. Those religions that I named.
But America,
I don't worry about it. And I don't worry about it because
of people, quite frankly, like you, John. People like you
are going to give the Muslims fits.
And the reason why you're going to give them fits is because of.
Is because of people. I think of the people who were in the new atheist
movement in the early 2000s, the Christopher Hitchens of the world and the Richard Dawkins
and those kinds of things. Folks. Folks who very loudly, because of our
freedom of speech, basically proclaimed all religions to be
dead and useless.
They specifically went off on a dragon against Christianity. But
now Dawkins, even, because Hitchens is passed
and Sam Harris is even on this thing about Islam now,
they're now turning their sights to Islam.
And Islam has no answer for that level of atheistic
skepticism. The only answer Islam has is
shut up or we kill you. By the way, they do that in Europe
a lot. If you make fun, if you do this, if you do that, you're
gone, you're done. This is something that does actually happen.
Salman Rushdie can actually testify to this. Someone tried to kill him
two years ago because he wrote some new books that basically
slams Islam.
Didn't work, and he lost an eye. But, I
mean, why is he doing this? Well, he's doing it because he is in
America. This is the thing. America is the
last, I think, pardon my use of
language here, the last, best hope for freedom of speech that
actually exposes the big R religions
to skepticism, to analysis,
to having their. Having their.
What do you call it? Their. Their superstructure pulled apart.
And the reason that I know America works this way
is because in America, we did this with Christianity.
We are way less of a Christian culture than we were
even in my mother's lifetime. And my mother's going to be 80 pretty soon here.
We are way less Christian than we were 80 years ago. Way less. And I'm
not just talking about. In our public pronouncements. I mean, privately,
you give us 80 years against. Is against Islam,
Hinduism. It'll take us two generations to pull that stuff
apart. So does that. Because of our skepticism and our agnosticism,
does that mean that,
like the thing, the thing that I'm thinking about as you're talking about
this, it's a fascinating concept. Like, I think about, like, bloatware, right?
Like, I think about, like. Like back in the day
when I sold phones, right? And Android was just coming Out. And
Samsung would always put their stupid version of Touch Whiz, right, Which is
their, their, their bettering version of, of
Android on their phones. And everybody hated it, right? And computers now come with
bloatware. All this stuff that like you don't even know that's on there, it's running
up, it's taking up systems space and everything else like that. So in your
opinion, if, if, if a thing like,
like Islam is going to get picked apart by our culture, does that
mean that the, that the faiths have too much bloat or
that our, that our culture is too,
too cynical? It could be both.
Could be both and it could be both.
And, and honestly, I think it probably is both and. But
the, the Pepsi challenge. Islam's never
really faced the Pepsi challenge from, from America. I mean, now,
now, now there will be people who will listen. Let me be very clear about
this. There are people who will listen and they will say, well, we've been bombing
them for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, okay?
Military engagement against people of a particular
religious belief or ideology is not the same
as cultural engagement with no bombs.
And it is fallacious for us to believe that those two things can even
be, can even be compared or be
analyzed. So does that, the, the thing
that you said there, I'm trying to parse and make sure that I understand. So
does that mean that we shouldn't have just been making every bad guy in an
Arab and a red and a red like bandana for the past, like
25 years of, you know, action movies? Is that, is that the core kind of
thing that you're trying to talk about here? Yeah, yeah, sure. That, that's, yes,
that's a, that's a very, it's reductious, but yes, it works. Yeah,
exactly. But the fact that we did that is not a bomb.
A movie's not a bomb. A movies can bomb. Don't get me wrong. Like
Ben Hur 2016 bombed. Yeah, movies can bomb. But
a movie in and of itself is not a bomb.
Not a bomb that destroys physical things.
It is. And this is where the ideas have consequences idea comes
back. Yeah, the ideas underneath that
movie are the bomb. So we argue about those
ideas in an American context from, again,
Christian assumptions about the sacredness of human beings.
We don't reference those because we've, we've dechristianized
America or actually, I hate to even use dechristanized,
desacralized America. So now we can have these
conversations in a space that's, that's more Profane.
Right. More materialistic, but in
Islam. And we saw this with the Charlie Hebdo killing. So I don't know if
you remember this, but this was, gosh, back in the mid-2000s, there was a cartoonist
named Charlie Hebdo who basically drew a bunch of cartoons that were
published, I believe it was in England or might have been
France, and that were anti Islamic. And this was during the height of
the Iraq war. And it was some satirical thing and
basically the guy got his head cut off in the street.
I think that, not. I think
the, the ways in which America
works. I'm not going to say they don't allow for that sort of
response from the fundamental radicals in Islam, which,
by the way, it is the fundamental radicals in Islam that engage in that behavior.
I'm not going to say that it doesn't allow for that. What I'm going to
say is the American sense of
that's not how you respond to this is going to kick in
and those people aren't ready for that response.
And this is where you're going to see, I think you're going to see the
good old boy Christians that meet on Sunday and the good old
boy atheists and agnostics that, that meet on Sunday but don't put out any signs.
Somehow they're going to find each other and go, no, no, that, that
can't happen. The culdesac again, that culdesac thing. That can't happen here.
One bad guy. One bad guy. That can't happen here.
You got to calm down. And by the way, you got to calm down.
We're gonna get your kids. Well, yeah, right, because like, because like, the crazy
is, the crazy thing is, is like, it's like, oh, yeah, you hate them too.
Yeah, yeah. We're not fans of this either. Okay, great. You know,
let's, let's, let's all come together. Come to the meeting at the church,
right? Yeah. And bring your kids. We're
gonna have a, we're gonna have a special little thing over here for the kids
at the church. So, so make sure that you bring them because we're all united
in this faith in, in this one drive against these, like, heathens, right.
You know that, you know that's how it's going to go because they've already got
the gathering places,
right. And, and, and, and those people are going to be like, inviting
people like me, right? While. While at the same time, like loathing
trans people, gay people, right? Like, like anyone who,
anyone who's too far from Their version of what is right.
They're. They're probably, like, demonizing and hating and probably
even trying to fund politicians that will push legislation that aligns with
these ideas, right? But since we're all united in this one fight,
and this is the thing that. So that uniting piece.
Once I figured out doing this podcast, I figured out a
lot of things, and I read. I read a lot of books, talk to a
lot of people on the show, have a lot of insights from it. And
this is. This is the secret.
And I don't mind saying it out loud, because people listen to the show all
over the world. They're not going to figure it out. This is the secret.
This is the secret for America. Now, what they have figured out is, okay,
if we just fragment these people through cyber
nonsense and the very online people, we could create fake bot accounts and do
spamming and trolling and all this other kind of stuff. We could separate these people
because the 20% of people who are online, they think represents all
330 million people in the country. Oh, yeah,
that's a. That's a mistake. And I don't care if your
bot farm is in the Philippines or your bot farm is in
India, or your bot farm is in Tehran, or your
bot farm is in Hamburg, Germany, or your bot farm is in
Nairobi, Kenya. By the way, I've named places where there are bot farms, farms
where people are. Various organizations are funneling money in
to create bots to gin up crap in the United States because they think
the fragmentation is the way. What they don't get
is the minority of people who are very. Online are the ones who are
fragmented. And all those people have to do is just
turn off the social media, just turn off the machine.
Then there's all of the people who are not on
those platforms and have no idea what's happening there.
And by the way, when their Muslim neighbor moves in,
go get the dolly and help their Muslim neighbor move in
and go help their Hindu neighbor move in and go help their atheist neighbor move
in and go help their Christian neighbor move in. Like the good.
The good people. Yeah, the people driven by fear.
No, right, like in the. In.
This is wild, man. Because, like, this is. This is a. I mean, I'm a
white guy living in Texas, you're a black guy living in Texas, right? So, like,
you know, there. There is that situation to where, right,
the community comes together. But, man, there's always going to be those people that don't
come together, right? Like, oh, yeah, there's always going to Be your Patrick Henry.
Go away and leave me alone. I'm going to go in the Appalachians. I don't
want to be bothered. People. People, yeah, absolutely. There's always going to be those people.
And by the way, I am guilty. I thought during COVID that all those
people. Up until Covid, I thought all those people had wiped out. I did. I
really thought that all of that had been oppressed and repressed and that we were
all sort of monoculture going along. And
what Covid really made me realize, I, you know, I made a
couple of bad assumptions in my life. Right. Was the range apparently
is still there. And on the one hand, the range is a
weakness. On the other hand, the range is a strength. And
which side of the knife, which angle of the blade you get hit by.
To your point earlier about gathering at the church, because they have all the buildings,
depending upon which angle of the blade you get hit on, it can either cut
you or it can cut somebody else. We're the best country in the world
to date because no other country is replicating this model. They don't want to
run. Nobody else wants to run this test. Not even the Canadians
want to run this test. And they could, but they don't want to run it.
And the. The Chinese and the Russians don't want to run this test. Oh, hell
no. We're running
this test here. We're running this. We're running this simulation
like. Like Multiple faiths, under 1. Can. Multiple faiths,
multiple ethnicities, multiple classes.
Can they.
Meaning all those folks I just named, can they actually
live together in a republic
smaller or larger, depending upon where you believe we are,
can they live in a Republic Relatively. Not
100%, because there's no absolute, but relatively peacefully.
Can that happen? Can it? Yes or no? Well,
that's been. That's been one of the grand sort of questions of running this
thing for the last 250 years. And so far.
Look, I said this the other day to a different group of people and they
all laughed at me, but I was like, no, I'm serious. Only one civil war.
And I said, only, Only one. We should have had multiple
civil wars. Are you kidding me? We should have had
multiple fragmentations and civil wars, and we should have. Have that. And the question
no one asks is why? Why is it that we have not
had that? Why have we had enough people who bought into the idea
that this could work? Why? I'm fascinated by the why of that.
Why did we decide that this is the thing? Why do people get up every
Day and do work. And to your point,
I go to work with people who are all over the map politically and ideologically.
Forget the other classes, just politically ideologies, allegic, all over the map.
I'm not. I don't. I have zero interest
in yelling at any of those people. Oh, same.
Yeah, not any of it, but because why. You made it
your mission, though, right? And so, so, so, you know,
a. A good client of mine, I've known them for a very. I mean, I've
known this. I've known this woman for 12 years, right? And she's. She's.
She's capital R, right? And
for the, Like, I. I have much respect for anyone who's capital R, but
that capital R is for them. They'll talk about it, right?
There's. There's an open invitation. But. And this is weird because it's
coming from the sales guy. Don't try to sell me on your capital R.
Right? Just don't. Yeah, like. Like, let it be known, right? But
this idea of your.
Your. Your goal. Goal is to go off and
convert other people. Like, Like, I always have this, like, this,
this concern, right? Because I work in sales and I think about belief and where
do people get motivation from and everything else like this. Like,
do you need to convert me so you feel better about your decisions?
Because that's not a me thing, right? And so
my. My whole big thing is, is like, I am in sales, right? I have
a job to do, right? And I do believe in planting the first flag and
raising. Raising your hand and saying what needs to be said, expressing yourself.
But when it's a no, it's a no. I also firmly believe
that, right? So, you know, just the other day, she's like, hey,
just got to put it out there again. Do you know that Christ is the
way and all things go through? I'm like. I'm like, I. I know you believe
that. Like, and I. And I respect that for you. I really do, but I
just don't think it's for me, you know? And she's like, well, I just. I
just really want to see you there. There. And I'm like,
okay, okay. Like, that's not. Yeah,
right. And so it's. It's that,
like, that push, you know? And this is. This is really, really
interesting. My. My daughter goes to a charter school, right? Not one of the big
isds. Sure. And so they're always underfunded. They're always in kind of like,
makeshift buildings and stuff like this. And so
for a choir Concert, right? Her choir director goes to a church,
and so he reaches out to the church like, hey, could we do this thing
at. At your space? Because it's really great big acoustics, blah, blah, blah. And the
church is like, yeah, of course. So we go in and it was
so funny because, like, I'm there for this performance of a high school
choir. And in the background, they've got these, you know, like, when you go to
like. Like a. Like an event or a trade show, and everyone's got their little
flags right now. And now they make it really easy, right? You can stand
on one side it and it. And it puts up and you just like, kick
the leg in. It's like. It's like the easiest version of a really bad tent,
you know? Yes. They have these things up there, and it's their
recruitment goals, right?
Talking about. Our goal is to. Is to guide X. And I
don't remember the numbers. I took a picture of it because I was so, like,
astounded of like. Of like. Our goal is to bring X number
of godless families to God, right? And there was
a number on it, like. And you and I both know the
power of goals and the power of a quality goal and everything else like this.
And so, like, of all the things you could be thinking about, this is the
thing you want to put top of mind in the back of your. Of your
sanctuary that everybody comes forward into. Not go help, not
give back. Not. Not even like, hey, fund this program so we can send
more people out and abroad, bring people here so we can work our
magic on them, dude. I was like. Like,
I had to take the picture and send it to everybody else in this club
that I'm in because I was like, oh, my God, can you believe this? And
now every one of my friends is just like, oh,
man, that's a little rough. That's a little rough now because I'm me and I've
got a broad network. I also sent it to some people who were capital R.
Like, what are your thoughts on this? Right? They were all just fine.
They were all just like, well, that's what they should be doing. That's what they
should. Like, I don't think that that's what you should be doing.
I think you should be going out and, like, doing your works in line
with your morals, values, philosophies, and thinking. But the minute your
agenda becomes about, you need to, like, sway other people to the
like. Like, I had a guy come knock on my door,
right? And I was like, hey, did you not see the sign? There's a no
soliciting sign. And he was like, he's like, it's like, I'm not selling anything. And
I was like, I didn't ask for this man. Right.
Didn't ask for you to come knock on my door. Didn't ask for any of
this thing at all. You were taking positive action to come knock on the door
of a stranger because you feel like this is important. Where
does that come from? Right, right. And that's where I think it
goes too far when you have a recruitment goal.
So I will say that. Well, I will say that
the, the other big Rs
haven't faced that kind of dynamic yet that you're talking about
what was like so that me, who doesn't have a problem asking hard questions.
No, no, no, no. Well, yes, that's part of it. Absolutely. That's the
American part. No, no, absolutely that. But the dynamic of
we will chase this number. So Islam
doesn't say we will chase a number. They say we will get
everybody eventually. Oh, yeah,
that's. That's bad as well. Like, I'm not. That's bad as well. Right, right, right,
right. What I'm saying. But what I'm saying is when you go from when you
hit when, when, when, when true Islam hits America,
the, the, the barrier they're going to run up against. Again, this is why I
don't worry about it. The barrier they're going to run up against is
folks like you that will be skeptical of the goal. No. Yeah.
Huh, huh. But then also they will run
into the consumerist culture where that
goal comes out of. And I don't know anything about this, this, this, this church
that you're talking about. I don't want to presume anything on them. Sure. However,
a banner like that is a signal to me
of consumerism as a position
versus something else is a position. Yeah.
And this is a war, an interesting war that's been going on in the, in
the American capital Sea Church for at least the last
30 years. This is an interesting war that's been going on for the last 30
years. And so
you have dynamics and, and
it's. I saw it most ball baldly when I moved to
the south because it's also, you have to divide it up by region. So in
the north, you wouldn't see that at all.
Oh yeah, I agree. Like, at all. But in the north,
Islam makes easier inroads because
weirdly enough, this is the dichotomy. You don't see things like that.
So it looks at it as an open field. Islam looks at
folks like you as an open field.
I'm gonna go to your house, gonna knock on your door, I'm gonna start. You
haven't really been solicited until you've been solicited by an imam. Like that's,
I've actually had that happen to me before. That's, it's kind of interesting
anyway, so, yeah, so you get, you get that, you get that experience,
right? Yeah. The Hindus haven't
really faced that either because there's cultural, and by the
way, this is in Hinduism and in Islam, there's cultural presuppositions that go along
with those religions that Christianity has long since abandoned
because Christianity, to your point, is a global evangelizing
religion to everybody. But it's been that way
from the root. Whereas Hinduism and Islam have
had to sort of, for lack of a better term, weld those pieces
onto the, onto the machine. And the welds
aren't that strong to begin with. So, so
there are those dynamics. And at the root of them, also
to your point earlier, is at the root of the, the thing that will dilute
those is the cynicism and the skepticism
that exists in people who just don't want any part of that.
Now, when people don't want any part of that. Well, one other point. When people
don't want any part of that, my concern is like the GK
Chesterton concern. Do people go and just believe in, we know people don't go
and believe in nothing. They, they put their attention, their
worship to something else. And are all those things going to be
strong enough to resist
other blandishments from other areas, other pitches from other areas.
And if we look at the young folks, the gen zers, the 18 to
34 year olds, there's a growing, you know,
growing atheism among all of them in that, in that particular
space. But among those who are, who do identify
as religious, interestingly enough, they're moving more and more towards,
and I say this to my, to my very,
my very well meaning Baptist brothers and sisters,
they are moving more and more towards more orthodox forms of Christianity,
which by the way, you tell that to a Baptist and they get all itchy
because it's got to be hard. It's got to be like ascetic. Correct?
Am I saying that right? AE yeah, yeah, you're right. Ascetic or.
It's the difference between, I'll put it in martial arts terms, it's the
difference between the karate dojo that's handing out black belts to
nine year olds and the karate dojo that's handing out black belts to 35 year
olds. Well, I mean,
and this is where we're at, by the way. This is part of that interseed
warfare piece. That's where we're at 100. So. Okay, I have a question for
you, right? And this might be a weird way to think about it because you
said something about like how Islam is more about like would when we take over
the world, when everyone believes as we believe. Right. Do you think,
because you also said this line that that's mostly about the fundamentalists,
the over the top people. Okay. Do you think
when we look at the bucket of Christianity versus the bucket of Islam,
do you think that there are more fanatics that hold
that idea in Islam than in Christianity?
Do you think that the percentage of fanatical. No,
you must believe whether they're aware of it or not because there
are some people out here who are just so awash with the idea that this
is godly and good. And so therefore, like, like it's
absurd to think that you wouldn't want to do these things. Like, like that's a.
Sure, that's, you know, another level of this. Right. Do you think that that
percentage not count because obviously Islam is, you
know, significantly huge. Do you think that that percentage is
more or less the same?
I think 20 years ago I would have said yes, it's more or less the
same. Now I don't think
so. And I don't think so because of things I see inside of the capital
C church. So what are you. So, so
you're not saying that they're the same, but you're not really saying what you are
saying. What are you saying? Right, so what I'm saying is without
knowing the deep interior of Islam,
right? I know some of the interior, but not the deep interior.
I can't say how many fanatics, percentage wise there might
be as a sample size. However, I can say that
the ones who get the most coverage are the fanatics.
Well, that goes for everybody, right? And that goes for everybody. TV time, right?
TV time, media time, whatever. Now I can compare media time
there versus media time for capital C, Christians.
And those two things don't even match up.
Okay, hold on a second, hold on a second. Okay,
so you're saying that. Okay, okay, hold on a
second. Because what I want you to pay attention to for just one
second. Guys like Kenneth Copeland have their
own broadcast networks. Yes, I was waiting for you to bring him up I was
waiting for you to bring up Kenneth Copeland. Go ahead. Are we, Are we really
holding that in a like, for, like, situation? Or are we saying, well, we see
a lot more about bad things on the news from. Is like, like,
is it. Are we holding that with some, some
discerning thoughts and opinions? So I will say this.
There is a show on HBO I was just told about
that satirizes Kenneth Copeland.
And I was told about it from a person who goes to church every Sunday
and is a Christian. Oh, interesting. And he thought it was hilarious.
Okay, there's no such show that satirizes an
imam in London because just like Salman
Rushdie, you would have a problem one.
But does absent or, or
does. Does proof of absence mean, like, like absence of proof. Right. Because, like,
just. Because we can't, like, I mean, because, like, look at Borat,
dude. I know. And right. And look
at Sasha and Sasha Bar Cohen can't even go back to that country. They've already
said they're going to, like, whack him if we find him. Okay. I mean, I
mean, fair, but, like, he also doesn't have to go back to that country.
Right? Sure. Yeah. You know, so it's like. Well, so. So I
will say this. I will say this. Hollywood. If we're going to use Hollywood,
as are not even Hollywood, the media, let's use the media broadly, not Hollywood
in particular. The media will always,
For lack of a better idea, they'll always hit low. They'll. They'll. They'll
hit below the belt. They always will. Yeah, here's a. They'll hit all pile
on. Yeah, right. And they'll hit below the belt. Where
there's, where there's the least pushback of
resistance. Oh, yeah. 100. The smaller.
The smaller the sample, the more of a demon we can make them because. Because
they're not going to stand up to it. Correct. So
you're not. So let me tie this to fanaticism, then.
The fanaticism that you see that gains the media
attention, particularly in a
European context, not an American context. Because again, I want to separate these two
contexts. Right. So earlier I was talking about the west broadly. Now I
want to talk about specifically America and specifically Europe. Okay. Okay. So
in Europe, you see a lot of media reports about the
results of fundamentalism, because right now
the European continent
is struggling with Islamic
integration, for integration, immigration from Islamic states.
And how do we turn these people, for lack of a better term,
into, you know, Englishmen,
Frenchmen, Germans, Spanish, how do we do that?
And if there's no history of how to do that, how to. How to integrate
the immigrant. Well, the less of a history there is, the more of a struggle
you're going to have. Agree. Yeah, that makes sense. Which is why
you'll see, like a buddy of mine, he. He traveled to London, he used to
work in Dubai, worked in Dubai for years, went to London all the time.
He no longer does that live in America, whatever. Went to. Went to London
a few years ago. And he was talking with me about it, this is probably
about late last year. And he said, dude, the number of
like, it's like exploded. It's like London is like little. It's like little Dubai
now. Like, he's like the number of like Alfred Romeos and
Mercedes and like the number of Muslims you see running around. He's like,
it's ridiculous. And he didn't mean ridiculous in like a bad way.
He made it in like, this is a good thing. That significant, because London's significant
shift. Right? And that's been. It's been like 15 years since he went back. So
in the course of 15 years, less than a generation, there's been a shift in
London. Okay.
The English are going to have a real problem with this because England has not
fully gotten its arms around what it means to be English since World War II.
This is one of those long trailing sort of results from that last
apocalyptic world war. And
the reason why they haven't gotten their arms around what it means to be
English is because of colonial,
because of the war, because of
Margaret Thatcher, because of all these kinds of things that have
happened. And they've had to integrate all this. And they don't. They don't know how
to then take that story and give that to new
immigrants coming in in a way that's effective and makes them feel as though they
are. And they've even said this out loud. They don't know how to do this.
What the challenge for England, and I'm just using them as an example, the
challenge for England is what makes England English,
what makes you English. They can't even figure that out. I mean, they've been struggling
to figure that out on their own continent for years, but even more sharply after
World War II. Okay.
In America, it's fundamentally different. Why is it fundamentally different in
America? We never asked that question. Well, the reason it's fundamentally different
from in America is because everyone here is from someplace else
with the exception of the native peoples who were here for 10,000 years before
anybody showed up. Yeah, most people don't Admit their home coordinates.
Right. Exactly. Like my.
If you trace back my genealogy, there's a slave ship somewhere in it.
Yeah. If you say. If you chase back your genealogy,
I'm sure there's somebody getting on a boat somewhere coming. Yep.
This is the dynamic of America that America has always
struggled with. What does it mean to be American? Who gets
to be an American? How do we define what an American is? We've
been struggling with this all the time. So
is the recipe, let's just go in and smush down indigenous peoples to the point
to where like, like when, when they're like a minor footnote
and everyone is here on bar borrowed things like, like then no
one has a home term or like, like a home team advantage because we just
removed all those people. Is that the, Is that the recipe? No,
I have no idea. This is what we're running.
I don't know. But these are the, these are the
dynamics on the ground. And so the reason
we struggle, not struggle with immigration
from south of the border is not because the immigration is
coming from south of the border. It's who gets
to be an American. It's who
gets to be an American. And so if you go and you look at the
ethnicity of a lot of the ICE agents currently working to
deport people, and we're not going to get into the policies, all that, but they're
just the act of actually happening. Most of those guys
have Hispanic and Latin American and, and Mexican last
names.
Now you could talk about the social injustice of all of that and internalized
racism and all these kinds of terms that we use to kind of color all
this at the bottom. The seed that I was talking about
like an hour ago now, or maybe an hour and a half, the seed of
that is at the end of the day, there
is no one way because we're all. Yeah, that's right.
That's interesting. And then you import, import. Then
people come over from countries where
the theocracy is the thing.
And it's been theocratic, not
to put the two fine a point on this, but it's been theocratic since Moses
was in short pants. And they come
here and they run up into all of this.
And so on the one hand, this can be looked at as weakness, which is
how a lot of it is looked at from other places, because it's just
seen as division, division, division, division, division. But
again, on side of every, on the other side of every weakness is a
strength. Y. This is where the idea that diversity is our greatest
strength, while mocked by people on the political right and
while embraced by people on the political left is actually a
truth of reality of this thing we're running
I think now to get
bring halls way back because we've wandered away so far from Ben Hur. Let me
say this for the book. Read the book Ben Hur. You will get into all
of this. This will, if you're a thinking person, this will, this will, this will
activate you. Yes, there's a great chariot race in there. There's.
There's a great galley slave ship crash, which is kind of amazing.
There's also the dynamic of the relationship between, which we didn't talk about all today
between Ben Hur and Masala, which is
huge. I mean, that's the whole driver of the book is the relationship between these
two guys and the manipulations that other
people want to do on them to serve
their own ends and also. Yeah, to serve. To serve. To
serve them, to serve themselves. And so everybody's manipulating everybody. It's
actually really quite postmodern book. Everybody's manipulating everybody else for their
own internal reasons. And then through all of
this and it only happens what, like four times, Jesus shows up four times.
Yeah. And it's, it's one of, it's what's called a. Oh, a
theophany. That's the, that's the religious term where, where God or a
divine being basically peeks through reality and puts his
thumb out and says, hey, I'm here, and then pulls back that the term is
called theophany. I believe that Carl Jung didn't
coin it. He actually picked that up from. I believe it
was Augustine or Aquinas, some of you
will correct me, it was one of those Catholic writers back in the early
church that coined that term. But it's this idea of a theophany where
like God appears, goes hey, I'm God, how about that? And then just
disappears from history again. So there's also that in Ben Hur.
That's just my quick pitch for Ben Hur. Go read the book. Even if you
don't believe anything, it's a great book. And you're hearing this sort of person who
just admitted to being atheistic and kind of having non meeting meetings on
Sundays. So like even he said it's a great book. So I mean, there you
go. The, the thing that I think is important for everyone to kind of think
about is like one of the things that I do try to put a lot
of thought and effort into is just our ability to change. Right? Because I think,
I think it's super easy to like
be against change because of fear more
than rhetoric or religion or anything else like this, right? And
so what I think that, what, what I think is very interesting is in that,
is in that first back and forth between Ben Hur and
Masala is like just the appreciation that he's a
different human, right? Because like as a human that has gone through things that is
fundamentally changed me, right? Like,
you know, big or small, like if you go to college even for
a semester and people around you don't, you're going to come back different. If you
go join the military, you're going to come back different. If you decide to spend
15 years training in a martial art, you're going to be different if you decide
to read. And so what I, what I really enjoyed
about that book before he starts making terrible decisions around his status and his
agendas and the limitations of other people was just like, ah, they spent
time away and doing their own paths. And that time away is going to kind
of forge you a little bit. It's going to make certain things.
You know, the concept of trade offs is like one of my least favorite,
one of my favorite philosophies to talk about with people, but it's the one that
gets misunderstood, misconstrued the most, right? But if
you can't see that there's another, another way for the market
marble to roll, you're probably a little too idealistic,
right? You're probably a little too excited about your own thing. And
whether that's religion or whether that's your business idea,
like you got to be discerning, right? Because if you're not discerning, we're
not going to be able to change anybody who is discerning, right? And this goes
for religion or business or anything else like that. And so you
gotta, you gotta know enough so that way you don't. And I think a of
lot like this, one of the things that I used to call this is like,
you can't come across as the feverish Alcoholite. You can't,
right? Because you're just going to get written off as, as just another one of
these dudes trying to, trying to be the Messiah, right? Like, you know, and everything
else like that. You got to be able to speak with distinction, you know. And
so that part of it I was like, I was like, oh, what a cool
way to just kind of talk about how people grow apart and their experiences have
a profound impact on them and everything. And then it starts doing like really
bad, stupid, questionable stuff for his status and his, and his wealth and everything.
And, and I mean, that's where I can't go with anybody, right?
But you know, I was with my daughter
a couple of this might have been last summer. We were walking around downtown
Fort Worth, right. And there was an event going on which always has
protesters of various types. And there were some people there with some
very, very, very vivid messages messaging around like abortion and stuff
like this. Right. And they were religious, right? And, and so my, my daughter
read it and it was, it was pure,
very hateful speech, right? And she, and she says this thing
and she's like, she's like, I can't believe that they're saying that. Right. And
it was super weird because like, I have to come out of my thing of
like, yeah, you know, I can't believe it either. But it's like, hey, I don't
believe that. But like, I think it's important that they have the space to be
to. Able, able to say that because I want the space to be able to
say the things that are important to me, you know. Yeah. And trying to impress
that upon, you know, a 13 year old that,
you know, we need to give people space for their beliefs
and their thoughts, even if they're not like ours, because you don't want
anyone coming around trying to like limit your space.
And that also that idea right there is, is
key to this whole experiment in America that we're running.
But we've gotten there over 250 years
of hard arguments. We didn't
wind up here because it was easy. We wound up here because
it was hard.
And we wound up here because the passionate people
pro ancon and the people in the middle
and the people who don't understand the question and the people who
aren't paying attention and the people for whom
the whole entire issue, whatever the, the issue capital I issue might be
of the moment, is just not interesting to them
because these other things over here are interesting. I think
of the term this. We live in this wildly
shambolic country.
Wildly shambolic. What does shambolic mean?
Sort of rambling and put together and cobbled together. Think the
image you should have is like Frankenstein controlled by like Pinocchio
screen. Pinocchio string. Correct A
diy. We're the BASF of company of countries.
We didn't make it. We didn't make getting together a country. We just made
getting it together as a country better.
This is.
To John's point.
I am so glad I can live in this country
not because of the Eagles or The flag or
any of that trash. Not because of.
Exclusively because of the Constitution or even the Declaration of
Independence. I'm glad, because
we. We. I'm living in a country where. And John's living in a country where
we're free to run the experiment. We're free to run
the experiment. And we've sort of put all of our.
You'll appreciate this as a poker player. We put all of our chips on that
thing. We're gonna run it all on that thing.
And the thing is going to be. There's wildly
inappropriate signs at a.
At a. At a rally around an
issue that creates a lot of
emotional upheaval.
And a man and his daughter are going to be able to walk past those
signs. And instead of the man and his daughter
being assaulted or being sucked in, they could
walk past that thing and go, okay, let's have a meaningful
conversation about this and figure this out. I'm not saying you can't
do that other places. I'm saying that for right now, for my money,
this is the best place to do that, period. Full stop.
And I'll take the Pepsi Challenge. I will. I will absolutely take the Pepsi Challenge
against any other place. I think this is the best.
That's why I'm. That's why I'm. That's why I'm not
proud. Glad to have been born in this country.
Because pride goes before a fall. Careful. Glad to have
been born in this country. And. Yeah, look, hey, people with. With my
skin tone did a lot of work for
free to be able to get us to here, but so, quite
frankly, did a lot of people with John's skin tone, they did a lot of
work to get us here. They did. Whether that work was easy or hard,
that's a different thing altogether. Whether that work was paid for or unpaid, that's a
different thing altogether. We did the work. And the work is not just in the
fields. The work is in the conversations, and the work is in the relationships,
and the work is in the communities and the work is in the neighborhoods. And.
And that is the kind of work that's going to take us
if we are so blessed, for the next 25 years
or maybe even for the next 50 years. And
I'm 47 this year. It'd be really interesting to
be alive in the year 2076.
I don't even want to contemplate that
for the 300th anniversary. What? You'd be 98.
I'll be 97. 96. Going
on 97. Maybe I'll still be
doing the podcast at that point. Because, like, why not episode
1763? We're with John Hill
yet again. Yet again.
I hope, I hope, I hope in that thing we're like in like the Futurama
and we're just like. Like our heads in the. On the shelf. Right.
Like that. Just want to get Tank. If, if,
if Future can be like Futurama in any one way. I
want, I want. I want disembodied heads that can still talk.
I'm gonna get Nixon on the show because I gotta talk to that guy.
Think of the guest you could get. Oh, my gosh. It'll be insane.
All right, well, we're. We gotta wrap up. We gotta close. This is a wildly
shambolic episode. We. We kind of went all around,
but pick up a copy of Ben Hur by Lou Wallace, by the way. Didn't
even get to talk about Lou Wallace. He was born
1827 and died in 1905. And he was a
lot of things. He was. He was a governor of New Mexico. Of New
Mexico, yeah. He was. He was involved in the American
Civil War. He was an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
under Chester A. Arthur. The man lived a romantic
life. And all of that shows up. He did writing as a
way to relieve his stress and his anxiety.
Yep. By the way, that's a. That's a. That's a pitch for writers, too.
Writing can help you when you're just wildly all over the place.
And he was. I mean, but going all the way
back because you said that one of your first episodes was. Was
Marcus Aurelius. He wasn't ever intended to publish any of that
stuff. They were his journals. Yep. That he
wrote in for his own own solace for
writers, in my opinion. If you're going through anything, grab a journal and start getting
the ideas out of your head. Amen. Absolutely. I recommend
writing for Every leader as a pleasure house for your
soul. It's a gem. All right.
With that, well, once again, thank you, John. And with that,
well, we're out.