 May 40 here I mean we have built such an amazing relationship such a relationship based around trust and faith and charity and radical love and inclusion and so what I want to do tonight is to challenge us to reinvigorate our relationship so for some people it will be the first time that they're taking this pledge then for other people it's just renewing a gorgeous deeply felt relationship that's already here so please dearly beloved we are gathered here in the side of God and in the presence of these witnesses we've got two viewers right now to join together right love and inclusion radical love and inclusion we're joining together here to create meaning and to reinforce our commitment to our shared hero system right which is commended to be honorable among all men and therefore it's not to be entered into an advisedly or lightly but reverently discreetly advisedly and solemnly so it is truly a blessing from heaven for us to reinforce here and now that what we know is real and true and good and beautiful really is real true good and beautiful and it's not just some artificial construction of what is real true good and beautiful right that we are somehow imposing upon reality just to make ourselves feel better and and to feel like we have some you know special place in the cosmos because as you know we really do have the truth and we really know here that others live in the lie right they live in darkness they are of their father the devil and the loss of their father they will do right we can't sustain our understanding of what is real true good and beautiful on our own right we need each other to create meaning so everything that is precious to us dissolves without reinforcement from society so all hierarchies all standards of right and wrong all values all hero systems are socially constructed but of course no one can live that way we all believe that our hero system is true and real and beautiful and good but if you step back yeah it's socially constructed now we don't want to return to a state of nature that would rob us of everything sacred so verily verily I say unto you this day winter is coming we must all hang together or we shall all hang separately are you with me press one if you were with me right let us speak frankly a different culture an out group is always a menace to us because it is a living example that life can go on heroically within a value framework totally alien to our own right these other cultures right these other ways of life these other hero systems they threaten to invade our thinking and they threaten to reveal the fictional nature of our own culture that maybe what we believe is real true good and beautiful it's just a social construct so these out groups alright they are undermining our hero system and thereby they are reducing us to the status of animals among animals are you gonna put up with that I know I'm not gonna put up with that so when I bring you into the virtual community you're about to possess and when I drive before you many cultures many vlogs many blogs many channels right channels larger and stronger than you and when I've delivered them all over to you and you have defeated them you must destroy them totally right make no treaty with these other live streamers show them no mercy do not intermarry with them do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons for they would turn your children away from following me to serve other hero systems and my anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you so this is what you are to do to them you must challenge their credibility you must challenge their facts and logic you must raid their live streams you must burn down their idols for you are a holy people I have chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be my people my precious my precious I am grooming you but great things so vlogging what we're doing right now it is the promise of hope between two people who love each other sincerely who honor each other as individuals and you wish to unite their lives and share the future together so in this ceremony we dedicate ourselves to the happiness and well-being of each other in a union of mutual caring and responsibility so will you take this live stream to be your lawfully wedded live stream in sickness in health in good times and in bad till death do you part amen right so the critics who dispute the fairness or the legitimacy of our virtual community we will conceptually liquidate them through the counter charge that their criticisms just sour grapes style resentment in the face of their failures to gain entry into our thing as the philosopher Ronnie Goldman teaches us what had been a threat to institutional legitimacy is thereby translated into an affirmation of our institutional legitimacy because the social meaning of their outsider's critique their outgroup critique of us now resides in the chip on their shorter that highlights the desirability of the very thing that they're criticizing so please join together with me taught by our joys by our own sorrows even by our failures that in vlogging and blogging as in all of life who's whoever insists upon saving their lesser goods and their little self shall miss what is greater but who's whoever forgets themselves in devotion to this virtual live stream to their beloved to their precious and in concentration consecration to our common hero system is sure as to find a full and happy life there are no ties on earth so sweet none so tender as those that you're about to assume there are no vows so solemn as those you are about to make there is no institution of earth so sacred as that of the union that we will form for the true home is not only the place in which we will live but it is also the dwelling place where each lives in the heart and mind of the other I mean did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountains green and was the holy lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures scene and did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills and was Jerusalem building here among these dark satanic mills bring me my bow of burning gold bring me my arrows of desire bring me my spear of clouds on forward bring me my chariots of fire I don't know about you but I will not cease for a mental fight nor shall my sword sleep in my hand till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land are you with me well I'm not gonna let like nine members of my my live stream I'm not gonna allow that that intoxication to to blind me to to what we're building here I'm not gonna lose myself knowing that well there are no people listening right now I mean that they just they just took the pledge right and this is a pledge for life you can't get out of this alright so in reality most of us don't really have much capacity to treat the suffering oppression and the legal inequality of individuals or groups who we see as obstacles to our own goals and our own visions right those out groups with whom we feel little affinity we we we don't treat them as real alright we don't treat their suffering as real we don't lose sleep about their suffering for us they are just abstractions or exaggerations and not concrete people right so dominant groups don't and we're dominant right this is an alpha crowd we don't have the inclination or the ability to be fully aware of those we are dominating right dominant groups such as us we don't consider ourselves to be oppressive right we live in a in a society where tolerance for diversity is valued right so whatever we achieve that's just natural and good and beautiful and true and justified right so if if we were to examine our white privilege right if if we are to absorb our dominant group of any responsibility for inequality and therefore from bearing any of the cost of ameliorating inequality right then there's just no motivation for us to question our privilege so people on the left they hold themselves out as egalitarian so demand only universal autonomy and a more equitable distribution of resources but every dominant class in history has sought to legitimate itself through some idealistic framework or another the feudal lord maintained his dominion for the betterment of the serfs the priest exercised his own special privileges for the betterment of the sinners lords and priests didn't view themselves as the dominant class as having privilege they were no less than the peasant they're just simply subordinated to the divine order in which everyone was only playing their own small role so let's talk about the harm principle that's the libertarian position and so held by much the left that the state may only regulate harmful as opposed to merely immoral conduct right this is a trusty weapon in the arsenal of liberalism so let's say the nice bloke next door is regularly having sexual intercourse with his mother now that's not harming you yet i suspect you would find that upsetting and disturbing you would feel that it's doing harm to you but it'd be hard to articulate if the brother and sister down the street are having regular sexual intercourse how is that harming you but you experience it as a harm so conservative defenders say of marriage is being just between a man and a woman they have a hard time articulating how same-sex marriage is harming them right so it's hard to articulate for example how pornography contributes to the degradation of our society so our traditional arguments are generally dismissed by those on the left as rationalizations for moralistic motivations so the harm principle almost always yields to liberal prescriptions now here is the counter argument from the traditional side people get their satisfaction and their happiness from living in a particular kind of community this is a particular kind of community we come here to reinforce for each other what we understand to be true good beautiful what's right and what's wrong right we're dissidents in the larger community we feel the heel of the liberal left jack boot on our necks and so we gather together here to give each other strengths so like everyone we get our satisfaction and our happiness from living in a particular kind of community even when that community is virtual right so any conduct that subverts our community our thing our group reduces our happiness and thereby it inflicts harm upon us and so knowing the guy next door is regularly buggering his mother that reduces my happiness i feel harmed by that it that's like an aggressive mood even if i never see it or hear from it and i can't point concretely to a direct harm it's just incredibly icky it disturbs me yeah i don't want to slide down the slippery slope of degeneracy right and if if a brother down the block is regularly having sex with his sister that harms me it's an aggressive sort of harm even if i never see it just knowing that that's happening on my boss that that icky incest is going on on my block it harms me because i get my joy my satisfaction my happiness and my meaning in life from living in a particular kind of community where that is forbidden so liberals and people on the left think they're so rational right they they are not moved they're not impressed by our traditional premonitions about the erosion or unraveling of the social order which things like same-sex marriage and transsexual rights bring about right so people on the left dismiss our moral urges as an inadequate basis for resisting changes that satisfy immediate needs and urgent desires this is amy wax so our big premonitions of the erosion or unraveling of standards in a society they're supposed to be just symptoms of a lingering pre-modern sensibility right and we simply haven't grown up right and we cannot be permitted to interfere with liberals more tangible concerns with assisting modern fulfillment so just as blackman's dissent in bowers versus hardwick argue that homosexuality in and of itself involves no real interference the rights of others the the mere knowledge that other individuals do not adhere to our value system cannot be a legally cognizable interest but we feel it right we feel it in our guts even if it's hard to articulate right if incest is going on even though it's all consensual and it's among adults and ostensibly no one's being harmed we feel harmed so how do we frame our opposition for example to same-sex marriage right so is it just some kind of Hobbesian annoyance or is it a an important disequilibrium in the order of things so the left-wing philosopher Martha Nussbaum at the University of Chicago claims what inspires disgust is typically the male thought of the male homosexual imagined as anally penetrable so is this the basis of your homophobia that you've got you know feelings of disgust the idea of some of the man getting anally penetrated are you bothered by the idea of semen and feces mixing together inside the body of a male is this one of the most disgusting ideas imaginable all right do you have the idea that the non-penetrability of your anus is some kind of sacred boundary against stickiness ooze and death and so the presence of one homosexual male in your neighborhood does that inspire the thought that you might lose your own clean safeness that you might unwittingly become the receptacle of these animal products so is your disgust ultimately discussed at one's own imagined anal penetrability and oozing us and is this why the male homosexual is regarded with disgust and viewed with fear as a predator who might make everyone else disgusting right so have you simply not grown up and not come to accept the harm principle right there's a male homosexual on your block you know why do you care if he's getting anally penetrated you know why you so grossed out at the idea of semen and feces mixing together in his anus so Martha noose balm wants to expel the language of shame and discuss from the public sphere she wants us to graduate to a certain level of human recognition right she wants us to move into the psychological foundations of liberalism right and they will be fully realized in a society that acknowledges its own humanity you simply is your homophobia springing from an inability to acknowledge your own humanity right are you trying to hide from your humanity right maybe in a fully realized liberal society will have a group of citizens who will willing to admit that they are needy and vulnerable and might get anally penetrated every now and again right like people who are straight they just they just have anal sex with guys every so often and come down with monkey parks because straight people can get monkey parks too like straight people who you know who are men who sometimes have anal sex with other men I mean largely straight almost always straight except for when they're getting bogged right so do we need to develop a society of citizens who are willing to admit that they are needy and vulnerable and are they willing to just simply discard the grandiose demands for omnipotence and completeness they've been at the heart of so much human misery both public and private private so the psychological foundations of liberalism and this is from Ronnie Goodman's terrific book on conservophobia conservative claims of cultural oppression the nature and origins of conservophobia so what are the psychological foundations of liberalism it's a discipline that we impose on our emotional lives it subdues the symbolic elements that do not reliably track the kind of harms that are cognizant from a non anthropocentric standpoint right so the psychological foundations from the liberal perspective involve the self-discipline to transcend your maleness your anthropocentricity to transcend the ought to human need to embed oneself within an order that would lift one above the mere animal and infuse one with the greater fullness of being so people have traditionally achieved this transcendence through religion and adherence to traditional hero systems but are you willing to expose yourself psychologically to the reality of your animal vulnerability you're willing to disavow the culturally sustained hierarchies of the pure and the impure the normal and the abnormal right that's what the denial of vulnerability depends upon now if you askew these hierarchies you prepare to see the world naturally is simply an agglomeration of vulnerable organisms just making their way in the world and some people need to go to a bath house and hook up with a bunch of randos and come down with monkeypox and other people get married and stay faithful to their spouses and raise kids so are you ready for this kind of natural disengagement allows you to understand disgust non anthropocentrically right just as an evolved mechanism that might have once served as a reliable indicator of bacteria or a reliable indicator of fear of monkeypox but we know that once you get prepped on the vaccine for monkeypox this sense of disgust it now functions as a highly unreliable indicator of genuine threats to our welfare so we get our meaning and purpose in life from a hero system where this kind of behavior is heroic and this kind of behavior is disgusting and this is right and this is wrong and we all play a special role in the cosmos so we depend upon a society regulating social meaning in accordance with these traditional strictures so the traditionalists resist the open inclusion of gays in the military because this inclusion you know threatens our whole sense of meaning it threatens what we have always understood what it means to be a military man right so a military man in history was you know unambiguously male strong disciplined emotionless and heterosexual so the inclusion of gays who get stereotyped as a feminine weak and irresolute that alters the whole social meaning of membership in the military it completely deprives it of traditional connotations so even if no one was compelled to affirm that gays have a rightful place in the military or is kept from a pining to the contrary the open inclusion of gays establishes a new social meaning it establishes a new orthodoxy it alters the background of social meanings in the context of which opinions are shaped and social meanings that we as individuals cannot help but encounter and which we must essentially submit to now the individual might continue to posit the military enterprise is essentially heterosexual but this judgment is no longer built into the intrinsic meaning of our society the way that ideals of discipline and obedience used to be so what is a hero system right a a society is a symbolic action system says honest becker it is a structure of statuses and roles customs and rules of behavior designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism all right we all want to be the heroes in our own story each script is unique each culture has a different hero system and the presence of so many different hero systems in our midst threatens to reduce our allegiance to the hero system that we believe in so anthropologists call this cultural relativity right it's the reality that there are hero systems different hero systems the world over and each culture cuts out roles for earthly heroics so each society cuts out roles for performances of varying degrees of heroism from the high heroism of a Winston church or a Mao or a Buddha to the low heroism of the coal miner the peasant the simple priest the plain everyday earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease though it doesn't matter if our cultural hero system is magical religious primitive secular scientific and civilized right we cannot live without a mythical hero system in which we serve this hero system to earn a feeling of value of being special of having a special role in the universe right that we are ultimately useful to creation and this is what gives us unshakable meaning without a society giving us a hero system we don't have meaning purpose and happiness right so we get to earn this feeling of cosmic specialness by carving out our own place in nature by building edifices that reflect our values a temple a cathedral a synagogue a totem pole skyscraper a family that lasts many generations so we create things that we hope will last for a long time and that they will have meaning and they will outlive and outshine death and decay they will outlive and outshine us so no matter how scientific or secular our society claims to be we cannot live without a hero system we cannot live without hopeful belief that the things that we do count for more the musician in the making in contemporary america must commit himself to music with an emotional intensity that was completely unnecessary 19th century vienna precisely because in the american situation right now there is a powerful competition from what will subjectively appear as the materialistic and mass culture of the rat race so religious training in a pluralistic situation demands a reality accentuation and an intensity that are unnecessary in a situation dominated by religious monopoly so if you want a coherent cohesive society you think it would be easier just to have one dominant religion right because as soon as you have multiple religions it casts into doubt the truth of your own religion right it's natural to become a catholic priest in rome that is not natural in america so american theological seminaries and orthodox Jewish institutions have to constantly cope with the problem of reality slippage and they have to constantly devise techniques for making stick the traditional reality right they have to accentuate reality right you need techniques of reality accentuation to keep going in directions that are not blessed by the society around you so people who are not left liberal secular they need to operate with reality accentuation and that's what this show is all about we're here about accentuating the reality of what is true good and beautiful right the meanings that sustain us that sustain our whole understanding of ourselves of the world of the cosmos of what is true good and beautiful these meanings won't work if they're recognized as simply things that we have made up if they're just fiction fictions of our mind if they're just socially constructed all right then they lose all their power right what we believe in must be upheld as transcendent as you know cosmic divine truth right if our life is based upon the vagaries of human predilection and and human construction then it's not going to hold any power over us right we need our meaning ultimately to spring from spring from the transcendent and from God so we depend upon others to uphold an order of things a meaning system a hero system upon which we all depend right we don't merely entertain an understanding of what is right and wrong and true and good and beautiful we depend upon each other in society to construct that and to share that so our relations depend upon sharing a similar hero system to share a sense of what's significant and what needs to be sustained now deviant voices don't necessarily upset the order of things but they they have the potential to upset us they they eat away at our conviction that what we believe to be true good and beautiful is the way it really is right it's the way we've always taken it to be and therefore we are who we believe ourselves to be our self-identity our meaning in life our purpose our happiness depends upon believing a particular story and the multiplication of stories and hero systems out there will eat away at our belief in the truth and goodness and divinity of the story that we live our life by and so all these other systems on those other live streams guys those other live streams they're eating away at your sense of reality right they if you have an unguarded moment on some other live stream it could call you to reality slip man you'll slip away from what you understand to be true good and beautiful right because these other live streams they might go off script then you might go off script and they might upset the plausibility of the narrative against which you live your life and which gives you an identity and so with all the hero systems out there all the stories out there all right the greater the chances that you'll go nuts right so just like in a movie our identities engross us only to the degree that they fit with a particular story right we need narrative coherence we need a story that works for us and not just works for us that we believe to be true and we need a story that is established and preserved and we need to fight off stories that undercut what we believe to be true good and beautiful right we need story we need narrative coherence and these things provide us with moral order and without moral order then we have no nothing governing our lives and telling us who we are so just as blackman says oh the mere knowledge that other individuals donated here to one's value system you know going out there committing esotomy that presents a very real threat it's not just an isolated piece of information it's a data point that resists our story our narrative that sustains our life so all this deviant behavior out there right all those icky other livestream is there contaminating our story our data set our vital bodily fluids they are eating away at the foundation of our life right one culture bonus becker says this one culture is always a potential menace to another culture because a different hero system a different culture a different story is a living breathing example that life can go on heroically within a value framework totally alien to our own value framework and so all these other stories and live streamers out there and communities right they are revealing the fictional nature of our own story right they are undermining the necessary preconditions of our hero system and they are therefore they are reducing us to the status of animals among animals and you really want to be just an animal among animals so the whole point of culture is to give us identity and purpose and a hero system right we only become acutely aware of this in response to whatever threatens it such as the traditionalists at same-sex marriage the trans movement and other forms of deviancy from traditional morality so we can try to neutralize these threats right through conceptual liquidation we we can say that these threats are an inferior status there not to be taken seriously and so we can translate threats to our story but by using concepts from our symbolic universe right so their attempts to negate our story will just subtly change that into an affirmation of our story so those who dispute the fairness of legitimacy of our story we can conceptually liquidate them don't harm them don't don't lay a finger on their shoulder right but we're just going to charge that their criticisms are just sour grape style resentment in the face of their failure to gain entry into our thing so liberals have their self-image that they're just strategic agents that they have cast off the confining you know ultimate teleological distortions of the past but this is a distortion of what human beings are like right we all depend upon a hero system right we've all been cemented and harnessed to a particular way of life and to a particular story in a particular hero system right so we get a good feeling for what is good and who we are right so imagine that we are contained in the cylinder of our body like an amoeba and we're constantly pushing outside of our body the pseudopods from an amoeba to a spouse to a car a flag a crushed flower in a secret book right I remember there's this woman that I loved when I went back to Gladstone Australia when I was 18 and there was one night I was walking down gondoon street in Gladstone Friday night and I saw this woman that I was crazy about and she called out to me from the other side of the street and I met up with her we started walking we walked down to the harbor and I got her to write down her phone number on a chewing gum wrapper and I kept that chewing gum wrapper for years right it had so much meaning for me now I think she later died in a drunk driving accident but just imagine yourself as an amoeba and everything that's true good and important to you is spreading out over the landscape right okay its boundaries keep extending far from our own center now if you destroy that gum wrapper we have Rachel's phone number on it right you are doing tremendous harm to me right if you tear and burn down the American flag you you're killing me right I'll scream out with soul searing pain right so we extend ourselves to all sorts of things we hold dear and also all sorts of silly things things that we supposedly don't need just artificial things like our car I remember how much I loved my first car was a 1968 Volkswagen bug and I cleaned that and I polished that and I vacuumed that I took such good care of it and then looking down while changing the station on my radio I ran smack into a parked school bus one morning and just did tremendous damage to my Volkswagen and it was just so upsetting I had invested so much I loved so much my first car and then I wrecked it and it was like part of me had been destroyed right and that's normal right we tend to get attached to our cars and not just transportation mechanisms right we tend to get attached to our interior decorating right if you came and you ripped down my posters that my soul would scream out right we get vitally upset by a piece of wallpaper that bulges a shelf that does not join a light fixture that isn't right a sound system that you know has distortions in it right so you'll see someone who you think is high functioning and they'll break into violent arguments or even start crying over a panel that doesn't match over wallpaper that has a bulge right so interior decorators confide that many people have dramatic symptoms and nervous breakdowns during redecorating because it's an extension of us right I've seen a grown a silver-tempered Italian says on his back here crying into the street in his mother's arms over a small dent in the bumper of his Ferrari right that's how we roll right now we call certain people strong if they can you know we draw their suit apart at will from trifling parts of their identity right people who can say oh it's only a scratch on a Ferrari or that uneven wall that's not me the woodcrack is not me right people who can disentangle themselves easily and flexibly from the little damages and ravages to their self-extension but there is this huge discrepancy between our actual lived experience and our cultural self-understanding right the liberal view is that we're just disengaged strategic agents maneuvering within a neutral environment denuded of cosmic and super individual significance and all these preoccupations with bulging wallpaper and disjointed shelves that just quintessentially modern they're just white people problems right but we can't escape that right you can you know strategically pursue modern fulfillment in another man's asshole right but we all have a sensed order of things we all believe in the hero system we all believe in a story and when people damage our story or depicate on our story that rips us up inside right that that's depriving us of the conditions under which we know who we are and under which we can thrive and live and love and and have our being right so it's really hard to withdraw our pseudopods from what seemed like just mere trifles on the outside so in real life we're not disengaged strategic agents right all our calculations and all our planning depends upon our hero system and our story right we're not looking upon an external world through through the windows of ourselves from the isolation of our own ego we're already outside of ourselves we know ourselves by our perceptions of what's outside of ourselves right we're not just in the world we are involved in it that existence is to stand outside of oneself to be beyond oneself this is mountain hide again my being is not something that just takes place inside my skin my being is spread over this entire virtual community over fields over hills over dales my meaning will never fail right our being consists of the entire world that we care ourselves about right this is mountain hide against theory of man of being you could call it the field theory of man we live by our understanding of the world out there and our participation in it so we don't encounter the world as a disengaged strategic agent right without a place in the larger order without a hero system without a story we are unintelligible to ourselves we don't understand who we are we cannot just readily alter social meanings at will when social meanings get altered this is incredibly upsetting our understanding of ourselves originates in social meaning so a meaning is first encountered out there in the world not just in some kind of disembodied you know interior sensation so this liberal ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity is a form of engagement right its contours are structured by what's going on in how we experience reality in our story and reality will either slip or be accentuated on the basis of change and social conditions and chance so the liberal idea of kind of disengaged reflexivity of the strategic agent it produces a sensation that the self resides somewhere inside of one's skin but it doesn't it exists outside of us and inside of us right social meanings constrain us because they give us our story they give us our identity to preserve our identity is to contain our freedom to limit the range of life possibilities that one can seriously contemplate you may think that you just can't contemplate going to a gay bathhouse and having sex with 20 random dudes right to even consider that possibility would destroy your sense of self right this narrow story is the sine qua non of taking yourself seriously and that's what social meaning allows us to maintain if we had social meaning and all these hero systems that we could just choose you know one one day and another another day right that destroys us we're no longer a force to be reckoned with like so hero systems are not idle symbolic luxuries they're not just intangible cultural concerns they are a biological necessity we can't live without a hero system now conservatives are emphatic in their warnings about same sex marriage now it threatens the basic institution of marriage but they've always had a hard time explaining how this should be how does the presence of the same sex couple next door possibly impinge on the stability of one's own marriage so the liberal reflex has always been to dismiss the conservative point of view as just thinly disguised million spiritedness just the symptom of some acknowledged fear anxiety there's been taken out on those who have nothing to do with the conservatives real problems which are being disguised in a sensible worries about the preservation of the traditional family right this is why the the benign conservative must grow and must must become aware can't just keep living in this benign state needs the vision of the anointed now people on the left acknowledge the destruction of the family is precisely there ain't right the same sex marriage will destroy the family that's the whole point let's be an activist Marsha Gessen taught a sympathetic audience gay marriage is a lie fighting for gay marriage means lying about what we're going to do with marriage when we get there it's a no brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist right marriage equality becomes marriage elasticity with the ultimate goal of marriage extinction right this is Marsha Gessen lesbian activist right from the liberal point of view marriage equality becomes marriage elasticity with the ultimate goal of marriage extinction so Marsha Gessen says I have three kids who have five parents and I don't see why they shouldn't have five parents legally I met my new partner and she just had a baby that baby's biological father is my brother and my daughter's biological father is a man who lives in Russia my adopted son also considers him his father so the five parents break down into two groups of three really I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality and I don't think that's compatible with the institution of marriage so marriage elasticity is all about marriage extinction right and they're not trying to make traditional 1950s style nuclear family criminal but this elasticity destroys the hero system that has underpinned the traditional family it is deprived the institution of its traditional social meaning so the family being targeted by the homosexual agenda it's not the bare practices of cohabitation financial independence and child rearing by legally bound adults it's the hero system of social conservative it's the thick structure of aspirational roles invoked by talk of traditional family values this is what conservatives are referring to when they warn the family is under attack and so the institution of same-sex marriage carries implications for heterosexual couples traditional marriage has become but one possible interpretation of a civil institution it is no longer its intrinsic and uncontested meaning right you really don't want that upon which you build your life to have a contested meaning so in the new order heterosexual marriage constitutes not same-sex marriage constitute not merely an expansion of rights but a whole change in social meaning it upsets social plausibility it disrupts the resonance of traditional understandings of marriage it disrupts the traditional interpretation of marriage so as marriage becomes socially understood it's just another agreement rather than a sacred right a sacrament this value is viewed as residing in individual sentiments rather than in a transcendent dispensation that ratifies these sentiments so traditionalists are threatened with a different interpretation of themselves they're confronted with the possibility of that which they regard as sacred right that this just comes out of their own idiosyncratic emotions and has no ultimate or societal meaning now they can assert whatever they want about the legal status of same-sex marriage but marriages heterosexual traditional marriages like their own you know can still truly count in the eyes of god but this interpretation is now contested and social meanings are challenged and changed so the meaning that traditionalists would like to imbue their marriages with will no longer carry the same meaning in reality they want to imbue a certain meaning into their marriage but the existence of same-sex marriage undercuts that so this is why conservatives worry about left-wing attacks on the family so this is a relativizing of the epistemically objective into the ontological subjective right liberals are trying to dissolve the power of heretofore taken for granted social meanings by highlighting their contingent meaning constructed socially constructed origins in the coordinated meaning generated activities of human beings the recognition of which compels people to take these meanings less seriously once you understand that everything that you believe is contingent and constructed you'll start to take everything you believe less seriously so conservatives respond with outrage in credulity right all right we don't just morally disagree all right we don't just have a different version of the good right so for a left-wing perspective you know we are benighted we are still existing in pre-reflective social meanings so the subtext of liberals outrage is that we can subtract the traditional human experience and traditional social meanings and conservatives are guilty of having failed to do so but this subtraction is impossible it's a cultural fiction so conservatives are vague premonitions of erosion or unraveling refers to the erosion and unraveling of something real something on which human beings depend upon which they do really encounter as an independent object forces to be reckoned with so liberals outraged in credulity about traditional morality is intended to deny this so the purpose of this liberal denial it's not just to condemn conservatives morally but basically to impugn their basic competence as human agents to highlight their failure to realize their human essence as strategic agents liberated from the confining horizons of the benighted past so where the benighted traditionalist speaks of some ethereal social fiber the post-modern sophisticate speaks of social constructions but the underlying referent is the exact same we all have a hero system we all depend on a story we all have socially sustained meanings that fortify us in our identity so this is what conservatives defend and this is what liberals attack so following the lead of Martha Nussbaum liberals dismiss opposition to same-sex marriage as a symptom of a narcissistic fear and aggression working by anxiety about changes that elude our control and loss of control over cherished values now liberals can recognize if they try this same kind of narcissistic fear and aggression is not just unique to social conservatives it is a human constant that works itself out in a great many ways either crudely or subtly and without any overt religious or moralistic trappings so liberals can recognize in theoretical context that are quickly forgotten in heated political ones that conservatives are judged according to ideals or strategic agency that no one would be prepared to apply consistently conservatives have a visceral conviction that liberal culture is holding them down through oppressive dualisms and double standards so liberals urge us to recognize the human constants that undermine the dualisms that this disingenuousness has facilitated right now this is conservatives to recognize the symmetries that go unacknowledged by liberal culture so for people on the left it's a great mystery why do so many people in america still vote republican so why do voters subordinate their substantial material interests to symbolic interests right this has been a decisive factor in left-wing critiques of the of republicans since the nixon years when republicans first began invoking symbolic concerns in the appeal to southerners and to working class voters so liberals are exasperated with conservatives preoccupation with intangible and merely symbolic goods like national honor the moral fiber of society and so forth so we have this sharp dichotomy between the symbolic and the substantive according to liberals this is a way of articulating the subtraction account inspired contraposition between superstitious pre-moderns to self indulgently succumbing to the allures of inherited teleological regimes and self critical moderns with the discipline to resist these temptations and direct their attention toward natural causality and its bearing on fulfillment so conservatives from a left-wing perspective are governed by the passions while liberals are governed by their interests but this whole ethos of disengaged self control and self reflexivity is not in vote when it comes to liberals own merely cultural preoccupations so liberals have no difficulty recognizing the serious of the symbolic in the context of multiculturalism so here it is conservatives who reduce the symbol some kind of socioeconomic frustration to free-floating self-indulgent identitarian preoccupations uprooted from the harsh truths of everyday life in the real world so thomas sol observes the world of the anointed anointed is a very tidy place so every deviation of the real world from the tidiness of their vision is considered to be someone's fault so unfulfilled yearnings and chafing inhibitions have no place in this tidy world of the anointed where even an inadequate supply of group heroes and historic group achievements is someone else's fault so people on the left are always talking about oh you know lack of role models for minorities when the left does this they're recognizing we all need hero systems we all need a story and somehow this lack of heroes for this and that minority group is the fault of the historians so the left understands that reality is socially constructed and therefore can be deconstructed and reassembled to one's heart's desires so if the number of black scientists and inventors acknowledged in high school history textbooks is of sufficient importance to the self-esteem therefore the long-term life prospects of black students as to qualify as substantial rather than simply symbolic then why should the question of whether america was at its inception a christian nation be dismissed as a distraction from the bona fide substantive interests of religious conservatives is it not a double standard here of course there is the line between the symbolic and the substantive appears to have been drawn in the service of liberal ideology that why is so many liberals obsessed with whether there is prayer at a school graduation or whether the local town hall has a christian creche what possible harm is being done well the liberals object because placing a crash in town hall is purely symbolic but it's a symbol that the left wants to remove so what the left keeps talking about is merely symbolic is really the particular range of cultural preoccupations associated with conservative claims of cultural oppression so when conservatives have the upper hand on a cultural issue then liberals insist that only bread and butter issues are the serious issues but when liberals are on the offense it's all about racial quotas the mainstream of gay culture scrubbing the public square of christianity and other explicitly cultural ambitions so sometimes liberals and conservatives both deny symbolic cultural grievances and they are tangible only when they are voiced in the terms of ordinary americans or when they celebrate it as idealism or insight when conveyed in the professional lingo of credentialed academic elites so symbolic cultural grievances are not real when they are voiced by ordinary americans but they are real when they are celebrated as idealism and insight when done in the professional lingo of the academic elite so liberals have been projecting their own vices onto conservatives so they are trying to deny their own status as symbolic animals seeking cosmic specialness through a socially sustained hero system that's what we are we're all symbolic animals we are all seeking cosmic specialness through a socially sustained hero system and therefore we find it painful when our hero system is undercut so the whole fabric of our experience is structured by a socially sustained sense of transcendence the modern liberal identity is just another hero system in disguise it is a social practice that celebrates certain identities while denying and discrediting others it strengthens the hypothesis of this being about jealousy and rivalry i didn't realize that if you list if you go to wikipedia uh and see who it says the three people it says do get the most credit not that they deserve the most credit but the three people who do get more credit than him for uh the the the covid vaccines um one of them is co-founder of Moderna which did the one big mra vaccine and the other and one of the other ones is a vice president at bioNTech which collaborated with Pfizer to produce the Pfizer vaccine so it really is his most intense rivals for getting rich and famous i mean one of these is this woman who is probably gets the most media attention as an as inventor so i didn't talking about this anti-vax science i realize how closely uh his his rivalries align with the vaccines themselves so it's not it's not that he is falsifying his role in inventing the vaccines it's that he has a legitimate role and that just makes him all the more jealous well yeah what i said at the end was you know people are acting as if malone acts as if uh you know you should believe him on this subject because he really did make this super important seminal contribution his detractors seem to agree that the question of his credibility is related to the question of his credentials in the sense of how seminally was because they keep trying to undermine the claim i said they both may have it wrong and maybe the reason you shouldn't trust him is because he really did make such a seminal contribution that this thing is driving him fucking nuts i think it works that way sometimes i mean you know all the seminal contributions i have made not gotten credit for and how that has driven me crazy right uh all too well um so uh um i think you're holding together very well given really sliding by history a lesser man a lesser man would have gone on the joe rogan show but i've said no joe i'd love to i'd love to but i don't want to you know it's not about credit i'm i say and i've said this to joe the less you care about credit the more you'll get done in this world i said that to joe but you didn't cite ronald riggan that's the usual um ronald sure i said i mentioned i talked i talked to ron about this it's he said to me before he said it publicly ron got this from me you know i don't get enough credit for me he um it's weird how the vex has now become anytime anybody dies everybody thinks uh did he just get a booster shot they say that about bob sagan uh they said that about betty white i had a friend who died and uh it was my second thought was we had all these people just gotten boosters i think maybe sagan had betty white they said the answer is i don't know actually but would they tell you if they would be helpful data i mean if you're gonna try to do a probability assessment here um anyway um i learned something about bob sagan oh the comedian turned out he he was a nice guy but his fellow comedians thought he was way too dirty and not funny because he was too dirty and they didn't understand why he was so fucking dirty i they didn't like the his stick in the aristocrats either his stick is sticking the aristocrats as i think i said last week unless i told you this afterwards his version of the joke was so revolting and he kept laughing when i saw the movie i guess i said this last week when i saw the movie i thought there was something pathetic and desperate about him like trying to be one of the cool kids um you know because he he was burdened with this with the kind of the opposite image he was a good guy he was the host of america's home videos and he's here to chuckle with america's families and he's host of this benign show whatever was called full house i mean i mean he's in this show full house and i thought the aristocrats was his attempt to compensate for that i don't think it wasn't like miley syris trying to counteract her disney image by by you know twerking or whatever she did um it's uh it apparently i think is his love of filth uh long predated his appearance in full house i think he's just always like uh disgusting humor you know nice guy they all said he was a nice guy i'm gonna try to track down my grievance about american journalism that's related to bob saggett because i think uh i'll be i'll be i'll be working on this while we speak uh um you um i didn't realize you had grievance on american journalism my grievance my grievance today is that all the publications that i might agree with on the right i can't read because they're written in this completely biased overdone propagandistic fashion designed to appeal to only people who agree with them the classic thing is american greatness if i see a i see an article from american greatness like this my heart sinks because it's it's you know it's not gonna be written in a way to persuade the unpersuaded right people to be unpersuaded who puts out american greatness i don't know but there are a bunch of them like that and they're all like that town hall they're all well it's a problem on the left too yes but everyone's preaching to the converted in the modern media environment except for you and me and we're that's because nobody's watching but it's not um you usually see it directed at the left and i don't know okay i got my grievance it's a cnn piece but it purports to be new okay let's see what uh tucker calls us to say so the economy goes south and you want to know what's going on so you look around for an economist to interview and somehow you find the single most absurd most discredited economist in the world paul krugman of the new york times the guy who told us the internet would be less important than fax machines but the unic over at cnn brought him on because like only the worst and here's what he said can we dispense with the recession debate real quick are we in a recession and does the term matter uh no we aren't and no it doesn't i mean the one sentence that was it huh yeah that was it yeah shut up and eat your bugs blake masters is one of the people who'll change the united states senate if he gets there he's running from arizona his primary by the way is tomorrow he joins us tonight blake master yeah no we don't care what politicians have to say hey police there are arresting people for quote causing anxiety to politically protect to groups they don't care about your anxiety but the people they do care about must be protected at gunpoint from anxiety this is video of police in the uk arresting an army veteran for posting criticism of trans activists on social media this which helps the police would realize how ridiculous this is it is of course i'm trying to come to this what what do you what do you what do you what do they need to come to tell me why you've escalated it to this level because i don't understand i posted something that he posted you come to arrest me you don't arrest him why is it come to this why am i in cuffs because there's something he shared then i shared because someone has been caused obviously anxiety based upon your social media keep in mind the guy who got arrested didn't hurt anybody he called those activists fascists so to prove they're not fascists they stood by and laughed as he was arrested for making fun of them because they're not fascists right laurence fox is the man who shot the footage you just saw he's an actor and leader of the british reclaim party he joins us tonight laurence fox thanks so much for coming on is there anything that we're missing here did the guy who was arrested physically attack anybody is there context that we don't know about good evening tucker no not at all uh the great tragedy here is that uh british army veteran with a long service record who served in iraq and afghanistan proudly served our flag is is now being arrested for not worshiping at the altar of the holy pride flag and um it's appalling uh arrest by the british gestapo which is what's the british police force has become i don't think that's an overstatement at all so the activist groups on whose behalf this was done did they applaud it did they lodge a complaint did they defend the guy who was arrested for making fun of them no not at all what we what we did was once we heard of this gross horribleness being meted out on this man was that we decided that we'd surprise the police and give them a dose of their own medicine which we did and we offered them a conflict resolution form where they could pay some money to us so we could teach them the law but alas the british police have fallen they're much too interested in virtue signaling and bowing at the altar of wokery i hope you fight back savagely i think everything's at stake laurence fox i appreciate your bravery and your willingness to come on tonight thank you