 Hello my friends and welcome to the 79th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. This is part one of a two-part conversation I had with Dr. Athatius Russell about postmodernism. I've been so excited to talk to Athatius about this. About a year ago now, we almost actually debated on a different podcast. But that didn't happen and so I got the opportunity to talk to him on my podcast. Originally we were planning to have a kind of debate about the philosophy of postmodernism or at least this idea of the objectivity of truth. But as you'll hear in our conversation, we start talking about other really interesting and really important things. So our actual debate about postmodernism is next week, part two. But this week we cover a bunch of different topics like truth and religion and love and people's motivations for their actions and whether or not public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson are accurately criticizing postmodernism or maybe what they're criticizing is something else. Are social justice warriors actually postmodernists or do they appeal to a different philosophy? So I hope you guys really enjoy it and as part of season two of Patterson in Pursuit I'm going to try to do more video interviews when I do Skype calls. So if you're listening to this as a podcast and you want to watch our pretty faces talking, head over to youtube.com slash Steve Patterson and you can watch our interview there. All right, I hope you guys enjoy part one of my conversation with Thaddeus Russell. Dr. Thaddeus Russell, it is a pleasure to have you on Patterson in Pursuit. I've been looking forward to talking to you for about a solid year now. So I'm very pleased that you're finally on the show. Just don't talk, call me doctor though. That's, we're off to a bad start. I hate that. I always hated that when I was teaching I would tell my students not to come. Dr. Russell, doctor this, doctor I just, I find it, you know, just in some ways kind of the representation of a lot of the problems I have with academia and one of the reasons I left it, you know, and it just, but anyway, we're good. Just call me Thaddeus. We're already on the same page here. I know at the beginning of when I started doing this podcast I was, I was really debating do I, do I play along and call people doctor this, doctor that, professor this and like flatter their egos or do I like just say, Hey bud, you know, hello friend, hello peer, let's talk about ideas. But I decided after, after traveling around and talking to people, I'm thinking, okay, it's actually smarter if I want to have a better conversation to start with the formalities, call them doctor, call them professor. And then we can, usually it's like, okay, we're going to have a respectful conversation now. I mean, I would think that if you encountered someone who were offended by you calling them by their first name, you would, you would likely have a less productive and interesting conversation with them. And this is probably, that's probably in general the kind of person you're going to want to, you're not going to want to talk to. I mean, it's not really going to be useful, right? I mean, that means it sort of suggests that they are so deeply invested in this whole establishment and project of academia that they're not going to be able or interested in looking at it critically. So exactly. Yeah. All right, Thad. Well, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. So like I said before we started, I kind of want to structure this in three parts. The first thing I want to talk to you about is one of your projects called Renegade University. And then the meat of the conversation, I want to ask you about postmodernism because right now we're kind of in an explosion of public, let's say, siting of the postmodernists or criticizing the postmodernists with people like Jordan Peterson, who's like this big figure everybody's talking about. He's very, very critical of postmodernists. And I want to know your thoughts on that. If you think that the enemy of postmodernism is accurately identified, and if not, you know, where, where maybe does Jordan Peterson go awry and what he thinks he's fighting against? And then I think that'll slip us into talking about the actual philosophy itself of postmodernism and theories of truth, which is kind of central to postmodernism. So that's the game plan. Yeah. Well, okay. So there have been a couple of different invocations of postmodernism in all that discourse you're referring to. And I do listen quite a bit. I have been listening quite a bit to Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins to a lesser extent, but somewhat, and then sort of like second tier figures like, but who are associated with them, Peter Bogosian and Gad Sad. But so for Peterson's the one who is most, he uses the term most often, and he is the most apocalyptic in his descriptions of it. But I hear two things from these guys about what postmodernism is. First of all, I have to say, not one single time have I heard a specific reference to an actual text by them. Never once. I think Peterson may have mentioned one of Foucault's books and then dismissed it as essentially common knowledge or common sense, which was odd to me. He said, well, of course, everyone knows what he was saying in this book. Anyway, some like why is it the end of the world? But these guys clearly don't know. Anything about the texts that formed what is now being described as postmodern philosophy. That I'm quite sure of because I've been listening to them for a long time, and I've just never heard them refer to anything specific. So here's what Peterson says about it. I think this is fair that it is a claim of relativism, but that it really is simply a way to smuggle in Marxism. He calls it a sleight of hand. He says that people like Foucault and Derrida say that they are relativists and there is no such thing as absolute truth, which, of course, is contrary to Marxism. But really what they're interested in is using this claim to sneak into the academy and then ultimately to society in general this totalitarian ideology of Marxism, which is a funny claim. Now, it was possible. It could be true. I mean, that's maybe what Derrida and Foucault had in mind, that they were intending that. Derrida did say some nice things about Marx toward the end of his career. Foucault never did. And Foucault, as far as I know, was consistently hostile to Marxism. And here's the other thing. Marxists, and I used to be a Marxist, and I used to be around a lot of Marxists, hate those guys, and they hate postmodernism. I mean, really hate it. And so it's a very funny idea. Now, I do think that what's been going on, I think the cause of this uproar, is what's been called the social justice warrior movement. And they are right. Peterson and Sam Harris and that crew are, I think they are basically correct in their analysis of the activists on college campuses of recent years. Yes, the way they describe those particular people is how I describe them, is how I think about them. I think that they are essentially totalitarian. I think that it is a form of Marxism, a very particular form that uses sort of identity instead of class. But it seeks to change the minds of fundamentally of all people. It relies on shaming, public shaming of people. It's very Maoist, really. If you want to get specific, specific form of Marxism, it's horrible. I hate it. And I hate it just as much as they do. That's the reason that I am even in that orbit, with Joe Rogan as the hub, and then Sam Harris and Peterson, and those guys are kind of revolver. I'm sort of like a smaller planet there. But I am in that world. And I think that's what unites us all is sort of a hatred of social justice, whatever we're called social justice warriors. And I think we share a basic analysis of what they are. So we're talking mostly about 19-year-old college kids. Right. Well, and a lot of their professors, though. So that's the second question. To some extent, no doubt about it. Because I've personally known these people. So yes, it's true. There are professors who think essentially the way that those college kids think. But even though I have extreme distaste for pretty much all of academia and almost all professors, I think it's actually unfair to say that they are saying exactly what those kids are saying. But anyway, so. So let me ask you one thing. Would it be fair to say then that at least the social justice warriors, their actual ideologies are not postmodern in the strict sense of the term. However, they might themselves invoke the name or thinkers of postmodernism. So for example, like I think back to my college education, where this was 10 years ago now, but there still were a lot of these proto SJWs there. They had the intolerant authoritarian beliefs and they would, let's say, cite Foucault or talk about Foucault or say things. I don't think that they were correctly. I don't think they really know what they're talking about. But I think they might even identify themselves as postmodernists. Even if that's it. Do you agree with that? I don't know. I mean, I haven't seen much evidence of that actually. The only thing I've seen in the college, the protests and colleges in recent years that is similar at all to the ideas of Foucault and Derrida is this claim about language being violence. That is a legitimate interpretation of some of Foucault's ideas. Although I'm not even sure he would completely endorse that, we can get into that later. The idea that language is power, discourse is power, that is sort of the central Foucaultian claim or argument, but the thing is, they use that to justify things like speech codes and expelling people and punishing people and putting people in prison even and killing people and doing all sorts of things that Foucault absolutely would have rejected because he's an anti-statist and this is one of the, Foucault is fundamentally an anti-state is politically and barely mentions capitalism, by the way. And this is one of the reasons that some people, a lot of people on the left and Marxist hate his guts is that he's, when he's, when he acts, when he critiques specific forms of power, material forms of power, it's almost always prisons, state mental hospitals, the asylum, police, it's almost all state forms of violence and power. Yeah, this is one of the things I've said for a long time. You probably know this, libertarians should all be Foucaultian. I mean, really, to me, he is the basis of most modern libertarian thought. Isn't there a correlation though, not just with the language being power with the general notion of truth and like the relationship of, let's say, authority, authority figures and what truth is or who declares what truth is, don't you think there's also a correlation between like Foucault, let's say, and the SJWs who might say, you know, there is no such thing as any external reality. That sounds like it's kind of similar. Yeah. Yeah. So are we transitioning into our argument about whether there's truth? Sounds like you're, you're trying to, not yet. No, I'm saying don't you think there is a correlation though. So it's not just that the postmodernists say that language is power, it's that it does seem like in postmodernism, as I understand it, there is a strong skepticism of the externality of truth or the public nature of truth, that there is a kind of relativism underseating their philosophy. Do you think that's fair? Let me, let me, I'm not dodging, let me finish describing what I think of as postmodernism and I think this will actually help get to what you're going, where you're going. So for Jordan Peterson, you know, he names Derrida and Foucault repeatedly as kind of the main figures in postmodernist thought and I do too, and most people do too. So that's where he's not controversial at all. I mean, if you just count the number of citations of Foucault and Derrida in academic work over the last 50 years, I'm sure they would outnumber almost anyone else, including Marx, including Shakespeare, whoever. Foucault is everywhere in the academy. If you've spent a minute in college or read academic scholarship, you'll see Foucault's name probably. Oh, so yes, and I am a big fan of Foucault, basically a fan of Derrida. I'm more a fan of sort of deconstructionism as I understand it, which is Derrida's central claim or argument. I find Derrida very, very, very difficult to read and understand. So I'm not even sure. I'm very hesitant to make any claims about, you know, what he's trying to say. But as I read Foucault, I am very much in alignment with Foucault. And the way that deconstructionism has been described to me by others, the way it is generally described, as I see it, also I agree with. But Foucault's work is really key for me. So those two guys, who everyone agrees are the most important philosophers in the postmodernist tradition. Yeah, they are, I believe, fundamentally libertarian, and they are also certainly relativists in every sense, in every sense, as far as I can tell. Now, there are a bunch of other people who get associated with them and who are also called postmodernists, who I'm not as, I haven't read their work as closely as I've read Foucault's work, but I have a hard time actually associating them with him at all. People like Leotard and Baudrillard and others, Deleuze, Ghattari, who, when I read them, what I see is Marxism. I actually see in them, more or less, what Jordan Peterson is suggesting about Foucault and Derrida, which is kind of an attempt to use relativism to sneak in some Marxist ideas, which is that they have, my reading is that they have ideas about what is good for people. So they are absolutely ethical absolutists and cultural absolutists. They pretty clearly know that capitalism, or they presume really that capitalism is bad, that advertising presents false desires or false needs, doesn't present, sorry, creates false desires and false needs in people's minds, and that there's a better way to live, which is sort of a global egalitarian socialism. That's pretty clear, I think, in their work. And so I call them Marxist postmodernists or really, to me, it's just a different thing. It's really different. Foucault hates all that stuff. He hates any sort of claim of universality, humanism, the idea that human beings all share characteristics and certainly share some fundamental needs or desires, and most of all, that there is any rule that should be applied to all people. That's very much what Foucault is attacking, in fact. So would you say that part of the error that people like Peterson are making is they simply draw the boundaries too large, that the people that they're trying to stuff in there, like Leotard, for example, not really a postmodernist? By what you're saying is if we define what postmodernism is by Deridon Foucault, which are kind of definitely the two biggest central figures, that really it's incorrect to even bring these other people in. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Peterson and Harris never mentioned these other postmodernists. I think I've mentioned maybe Leotard once, but literally just like as a name. Yeah, so he hasn't read any of them. I mean, come on, let's be serious here. I mean, I don't know what he's up to. I think he's, I can only speculate as to why he cares so much about this stuff. But yes, if you're talking about, if what he's talking about is Foucault and Deridon, then his claims about them make no sense to me whatsoever. Okay, so let me put a new theory forward and see what you think about this. What if it's the case that what's going on here is there is a reaction to the popularity of relativism in the Academy in general. And so young minds, let's say the SJWs who are thorough, thorough extreme relativists, look up to other thinkers who they know are relativists. They say, oh, look, Deridon is there, Foucault is there, Leotard is there, and they just kind of grasp onto those. They make that part of their identity. Oh, well, I'm going to call myself a postmodernist, which means that I believe everything is relative. There's no such thing as objective truth, just like these other thinkers. And so what people like Peterson are doing, they're saying, well, the enemy is the relativism, maybe, and we're going to call it postmodernism. Yeah, but there's no, sorry. I mean, I was going to say you called them relativists, extreme relativists. They're not at all. That's my whole point about the sort of whatever you want to call it, anti-racist movement on campuses recently and the anti-sexual assault movement, which are the biggest manifestations, right? That's what's been going on. And then also, by the way, this is what, of course, started Peterson's career, the trans, whatever, movements, right? Those three things, right? All three of those, the way they've manifested on college campuses in the last few years are, they are, they're absolutists through and through. They're making, yeah. But they do appeal in opportune times, I would say, or opportune times, to the ideas of relativism. So I think you're correct in identifying that they're not relativists. You're right, they're crusaders. I would say they are the most extreme religious sect in America would be these people by minus dimension or very close to it. And so that isn't a relativism. But if you asked them, I think they would say very much so that they're relativists. So what about that? Guess who else hasn't read Foucault then, right? I mean, that's my, I don't think those kids have read that stuff either. And so I think it's Peterson and these SJWs are shouting at each other about a text, none of them have read. But you know what this reminds me of? So I grew up in Christian evangelicalism. In my experience, the vast majority of Christian evangelicals are completely unfamiliar with Christianity or like the ideas of Jesus Christ. Really? Oh, absolutely. Christian evangelicals, they're warmongers. A lot of them are warmongers. They're not very loving. I've had very bad experiences with Christian evangelicals. Oh, no, but they read the Bible. No, I would say they've bits and pieces. Yeah, they'll know excerpts. Oh, yeah, the Christian evangelicals, at least the people I grew up around and had experience with for the first few decades of my life are by, if you were like a, if you were yourself a Christian, you would say they're not Christians at all. So it reminds me because I've interacted with a few people who I really think have kind of internalized the Christian doctrine. My mother was one of them. She was like, just love, this, this, this point of love and like very, very accepting. And I thought, okay, she, she really believes in this Christian stuff. And there was a few of them I interacted with and they really stuck out in my mind. And what was universal among them is that, well, all the people that call themselves Christians are 98% of them really aren't. So it reminds me of this postmodernism thing where you actually might be correct in saying the self-described postmodernists are people who, who appealed to relativism have no idea what the heck they're talking about. And you know what the, one of the leading theories on the left about, it's not really, it's more than a theory because there's quite a bit of evidence about Islamic jihadists is, right? Same thing, that they actually are not, they don't know anything about the Quran, that they actually, most of them are new to the religion. In fact, you know, they were raised in secular families in, you know, Europe. And, and when they were 25 and lost their job or their wife cheated on them, then they, they suddenly called themselves jihadists. They found a video about ISIS online and joined up and went and beheaded somebody in Syria. But that, that's, you know, I don't know if you know about this, but that's a lot, there's been a lot of reporting on this, that most of the, the acts of Islamic terrorism in recent years has been performed by people like that who really knew nothing about Islam. And my guess is the extent of their knowledge of Islam probably was all of the verses in their holy book in which it justified their behavior. Right, sure. Just like when you talk to the, the evangelical Christian that I would grow up with, they would talk about how, well, you're, you're, it's a bad thing to get a tattoo. It's like morally wrong. Because it says so, you know, at this, they know the verse somewhere in Leviticus, don't, don't get a tattoo. The verse right next to it is and don't eat shellfish. And they have no idea that the verse right next to it is and don't don't eat shellfish. And they, they themselves eat shellfish. They're just totally ignorant about it. So what, what, what I think unites the SJWs, Christian evangelicals and Islamic jihadists is a preoccupation, a primary concern with obsession with other people's thoughts, other people, other people, their thoughts, their attitudes, their beliefs. And I suppose their behaviors, but mostly they really care about what I think, you know, and they want to change it. And they have all sorts of assumptions about what I think. And they have, they have assumptions about how I should think. And I think that's kind of where it ends in a sense. That's what they most care about. But, and I think this actually will be, this will help us in our conversation about truth and claims about truth, because that's of course what they're doing, right? They're all making truth claims, you know? So back to the trans thing and what Peter Peterson's origins, you know, all this, it just really helps understand, I think, the relationship between the SJW movement and Foucault. Okay, so the whole trans movement began with an idea that was developed by Foucault, but also feminist theorists. And then following on Foucault and feminist theory, queer theorists, people who are called queer theorists, okay, which is this, right, that gender is a social construct. Okay, so we all know that. This is, you know, that that's indisputable that those thinkers created that idea around the 60s and 70s. Although it actually, the cultural anthropologists of the 20s, 30s and 40s, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, those people, I mean, they kind of set the ground for it, but they didn't articulate it quite that way. Now, that led many people in the 70s, 80s, and 90s to say, hey, I am not the gender you assigned to me, I am another gender, or I'm no gender at all. But that, to me, was a moment of liberation. That's that idea is liberatory, that your body parts don't determine your destiny, that the society that when they check the box on your birth certificate, male or female, does not actually, there's no sort of, there's no relationship between, necessary relationship between that and some objective reality. Okay. And so a lot of people, I think, liberated themselves because they simply did not feel like a boy or a girl or a man or a woman. And it didn't mean that they therefore thought they were the other half of the binary, right? Some of them just were a different thing. And so androgyny became a thing in the 1980s, I think not accidentally, right, which sort of a third gender or a non gender, right? So that's all, to me, Foucaultian. And that's all where I am. That's my politics. And that's how, you know, my reading of this stuff is, that is not at all what's going on with the trans movement now, that wanted to put Jordan Peterson in prison for using the, here it is, the incorrect, their claim, incorrect gender pronouns. And on top of that, how do we know this, that they're incorrect? Because these people were born that way, the way they say they were, right? It is an essentialist claim at the bottom of it. Caitlyn Jenner, what's her whole thing? I was born a woman. That's who I am. Fundamentally, it's in my nature, right? That is exactly the idea that Foucault, the feminist theorist and the queer theorist rejected. So all these people are actually the opposite of postmodernism, the opposite. Yeah. I mean, I hear you, I would say the same thing about the Christian evangelicals. Yeah, these people who are literally, I know lots and lots of them are like, yeah, let's bomb Iran. Just nuke it. Let's make the soil, let's make the sand glow. I'm saying, I'm thinking, what, have you read anything of the words of Jesus, who is the person that you're invoking here? You know, you say you invoke, I don't see the connection. It seems like literally the exact opposite of the case. Yeah. Maybe I should clarify when we're talking, I'm talking about like, the peaceful, like Jesus Christianity, I'm not necessarily talking about like the Old Testament or Judaism, because maybe then you could justify some kind of aggression. Well, Jesus was evangelical, right? Does that, don't you interpret him that way? I mean, sorry, don't you interpret the Bible that way? It depends on what you mean by evangelical. I would say if Jesus were alive in the United States today, he would not be an evangelical. He would be a hippie that would probably be thrown in jail or killed, is my guess. Matthew 28, go and make all nations my disciples. But what evangelical means in terms of denominations is something, it's like a biblical literalist interpretation of the Bible. That there's like a, it's like a, it's a denomination evangelicalism. The strict word evangelical in the sense of go and make all nations okay, yes, but that's, that's, there's not really a, there's almost no correlation between Christian evangelicalism and evangelizing. That's just kind of a nominal thing. Oh, whether they actually take up the Great Commission? Yeah. So it'd be like Catholicism, right? Yeah. The idea of Catholicism is universality, right? Catholic means universal, but that doesn't actually mean that they are, you know, universalists by any stretch of the imagination. Well, but their belief, so there's a difference between belief and then action, right? So they can, but they all, so right, it's certainly true that most Christian denominations have not gone out and made all, tried to make all nations into their disciples, right? Right. But, but don't most Christian denominations believe that Christianity is good and true for all people? Yes, but the actual doctrine itself. So like the idea that, that Jesus, who's supposed to be the central figure in Christianity would approve of, you know, nation building and like going out and making nations Christian by declaration is, is, is like a Foucault saying that, you know, you were born the wrong gender. It's like totally not, yeah. No. Sorry. That, to me, that means that they simply disagree on the means, but their end is the same. They agree on the end. They did, that they need, that it is their mission to, to make the world Christian. Now, the only, the only differ on whether to kill people in order to save them or to just convince them through rhetoric to save themselves. So I'm, there's certainly a strain that would agree with that. I think there's actually a very large strain which would, which would take the essentialist approach to say, well, this is true and this is liberating. And so, you know, maybe all you need is exposure to the truth and you'll realize that it is true. It's not, it's not like you don't have an obligation to go out and be a missionary, that type of thing. Yeah. So this is, this is what I'm working on now. I'm writing the history of American imperialism right now. And that's what it is. So, you know, the Declaration of Independence just says all men are created equal. Okay. Well, big deal. That doesn't mean we have to get in tanks and go invade Iraq. However, however, it turns out if you read all of the founding fathers pretty much and every president since them, they all interpreted those words as the Great Commission to go out and kill and invade and conquer and occupy to make the world America. But what you're doing, you're interpreting the words of politicians as if they're telling you their true philosophy. Just because they say this is the Great Commission, this is our, what we're supposed to do, doesn't mean that's an accurate representation of the theory. Oh, well, then how do we know what? Well, so the question is what they actually believe, right? That's what you're getting at. Like, how do I know that that's what they actually believed? Well, yeah. So I'm saying if just because somebody invokes the words of Jesus, doesn't mean that they're correctly stating the philosophy of Jesus, just like with Foucault, just because somebody talks about, you know, the gender is a social construct, doesn't mean they actually understand what that means. Well, no, I'm not talking about Christianity in this case. I'm talking about its secular version, which is Americanism, or it's really natural. I'm talking about natural law, really. So Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, natural law, right? That all people have all people have these rights given to them by, you know, depends on who you ask the creator or nature. But and so the thing is, as soon as Jefferson's president, what does he do? He invents the United States Marine Corps and goes and invades Tripoli and has and tosses out the king of Tripoli and replaces him with a guy who's friendly to the United States in 19 in 1804. Right. So like immediately after he writes the words, all men are created equal. He goes out and makes disciples of all nations by force of arms. But there's a little there's a there's a sleight of hand there though, because what he's he's he might be citing the idea of making evangelizing. But that doesn't mean he I mean, politicians lie all the time. I mean, what politicians do is they invoke religious imagery and the religious or the religion of their population and say, oh, look, I'm the one that's really implementing these ideas to go over to Tripoli and bomb them. But I saw it. So I don't but I think there's there's a distinction there though, because I don't. Oh, sure. Yeah. So so somebody could justifiably say, look, if you're trying to justify your actions based on, let's say, what what the central figure in our religion said, Jesus, it's a non sequitur. You can't you can't turn the other cheek and somehow interpret that as bomb them if they're really scary or something. Right. It could be a rationalization of some other motive. Right. Yeah. I mean, he could have wanted something else in invading and changing the regime of Tripoli than to make to make it more American. But what would be well, this is we're getting into American history. But you know, basically, then what would be the other what would be the other motivation for Thomas Jefferson? It didn't enrich him. You know, it's what's the motivation for any any war monger or any politician. I think it's self-aggrandizement is probably a big one. Well, self-aggrandizement of a person who identifies as a Christian or an American, right? And then it becomes the more I grandize myself, the more American I make the world or the more Christian I make the world. So it all fits together really nicely, doesn't it? So what's the what's the hard distinction, you know, between self between selflessness and and selfishness here? I think that if you listen to the words of politicians and think that they're telling you some they're giving you some true insight into the nature of their philosophy, I doubt that. I don't I don't think that's the case. I don't think that especially Christianity, George Bush is a good example. Is the man a Christian? Like is it is actually in his philosophy as a Christian? I don't think so. Does he appeal to Christianity all the time? Yes. Is he is like the stereotypical evangelical? Yes. But I think he does as good a job. He does as good a job representing Christianity as the SJWs do representing Foucault. Well, I don't know. What about the neo-conservatives who actually ran his foreign policy and actually gave him all of his ideas about his own foreign policy in the Iraq war, right? Are they they're all Jewish intellectuals? Yes, I understand. But like, I think they're basically Christians actually that they really meaning meaning simply that they wanted to convert the world according to their own idea, not specifically a Christian idea, but it's pretty close to one. But my point is that they're evangelical in that way, aren't they? Or you think what why else would a professor from the University of Chicago want to go to all that trouble and kill all those people, you know, to for what other purpose? How would they be how would they be converting people by killing them or invading another country? Oh, that's just a question of whether it's actually effective to, you know, in that way. But it has been proven in history that it's been very effective in some cases. That's why we have Christians all over the world, Steve, right? Because we invaded their countries and killed a bunch of them. This is very interesting. Yeah, I don't think that I don't I don't believe politicians. I think they're just in general bad people. Yeah, I don't think they're I don't think they have like this worldview philosophy that they're thinking, okay, now I'm on a position of power, now I'm going to spread the good news and invade another country. So I have had that same impulse and instinct that you have had about them. It's really I fight it all the time because I think I have to fight it. I think it's not a good, I think it's not helpful. I think it's not even really accurate. First of all, to say that they're evil, what does that mean? Right? You know, and now I think they are certainly in America, generally speaking, according to my research on them, because I look at their biographies, their deeper biographies, I always go to that first. It looks like they're mostly true believers, actually, that they really do believe this stuff about America being the greatest nation ever, okay, that it is our duty because of that to extend our greatness, because otherwise it's we're just being selfish. If we keep the people from Rwanda from living the way that we do, that's just being selfish. And there are bad people in the world who stop that from happening, namely the dictators of these other countries who keep their poor people under their thumb so that they can't become more like us. And so we've got to take out those dictators, those despots as Thomas Jefferson called them, and not just liberate the people who lived under them, but to welcome them into our world. Interesting. Yeah, no, I mean, to me, that's really a Christian, that is the Christian mission. But I think they're true believers, because you can see it, how do I know this? Because you can see them, if you trace their biographies, saying this stuff from the time they were literally five years old, six years old, and then you can see their parents saying the same things. Why else would you bother setting up all these schools around the world for Filipinos and Indians and black people in the South and Iraqis and Afghanis, which is what they're doing? I don't know, man. I have the evidence for that. It's not conclusive, but it's pretty good evidence that they really believe it. What's the evidence that they're not believing it? Well, I would say they kind of, so politicians have very comfortable lifestyles. I mean, if somebody is seeking status, there's not a lot more status that you can have, or somebody's like, power hungry. There's not a lot more power you can have than being some influential politician that allows your legacy to exist and you kind of flatter yourself and make a statue to yourself. And I think that it's not, it wouldn't be surprising that a lot of these people have Christian upbringings, especially in America. I mean, I certainly did. If you trace my history, I would have said those things when I was 12. My parents were strong believers, but I very much don't have a Christian evangelical worldview anymore. But if I were a politician, I would know exactly what to say. I would know the exact buttons to press. I would know in the almost how to pace a speech as like a sermon you might give on Sunday morning or something. You could use all of those things very effectively, at least in this culture. But couldn't you say that you are seeking power from doing this right now, what you're doing? You're seeking to change the world in your own image, in a way, aren't you? Not really. I'm a bit more selfish than that. Why would you bother doing a podcast then? Okay. So I mean, here's what I say. Here's the bottom of my philosophy of the past few years is I think it's the case that truth is discoverable. We have to be extremely careful in our reasoning in order to get at truth and it's very abstract. And if it's the case that truth is discoverable, it may be that there's a kind of best possible life that one can experience, that one can live. I would say I was fortunate enough to experience it. I had an experience of love with the woman who's now my wife. I fell in love and realized everything else is meaningless except for this. I was kind of a nihilist and then experienced love and thought this is good. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, you were a nihilist? Like an ethical nihilist. I had something to work with. Okay, good. I'm still very persuaded by how I not had this experience. I would certainly still be a nihilist. But then I realized, okay, so from my perspective, the good life is discoverable. And I guess out of the love that I was shown, I want other people to have those experiences. So it might be true that I do want to have an impact on the world if you consider that power, but not in a controlling way. I just want people to experience love. That's kind of my ethical motivation. Yeah, no. I mean, I'm accusing you of what I think that I'm doing. I'm trying to change the world in a way that I think is what I like and it's more like how I think. But no, am I going to hold a gun to someone's head? No, never. Am I going to ever force anybody to do this? No. But I don't think it's really, at the bottom, fundamentally different than Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Crystal. I mean, that they accept that they used different means, but they wanted to change the, they wanted to remake the world in their own image or at least move the world closer to what they themselves are. It's all narcissism. We're all narcissists, right? I mean, we all basically... I don't know if that's the case, though. I think that that actually is a very accurate description of what the Wolfowitz is the world are trying to do. But because I think, I believe in the objectivity of truth and that there really is such a thing as a good life, I think they're doing it wrong, and I don't think they give a rip about love. I don't think they've had love experiences. I think what they want is the kind of psychological thrill of wielding power, and they're very good at it. I don't know about that. So what is this? What happened to you that made you not an idealist? You fell in love? So in summary, yeah, there's not a good language to describe it. It was like a religious experience or a spiritual experience. It was something, it was a way of thinking that I had never experienced before. It was like a connection outside of my control that I didn't have a choice whether or not I loved Julia. And yeah, it kind of reorient, and it was coupled with the kind of knowledge that this is good. Now, whether or not it's that it is objectively good or it's just like subconsciously good, that like maybe my subconscious has some system of ethics that I bumped into for the first time and realized, oh, I actually have these values I didn't realize I have. That's possible too. But it was of sufficient power where it kind of restructured my worldview. So you know, I've had that feeling four times. Maybe. Well, I think so. I think, well, I fell in love four times and was felt like it was completely out of my power to decide whether I was in love with so-and-so. It just felt, I felt like swept away. Like I had no agency. I had to do this. I had to be with her forever. And this is just it. And it was, it felt like a religious experience. I never thought it was one, but it felt like that. It was felt as if there was some external force just pulling me through history. I now think that I was wrong at least three times. Or that there was something else going on three times. Well, we're still waiting, jury's out on the fourth. But although I'd say that my ideas about the feelings of love I have now for the person I'm with now are at least more, I don't know, complicated, you know, and I'm more skeptical, I guess I would say about them. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think it is. I think it's all love. I think actually the neocons do have the same. This is really important and actually really relevant. Really it is. I think they I think love is a very dangerous concept. And it because, of course, Christian love, you know, certainly has been interpreted as making the world Christian. And that's why we have Christians in Mexico. And that's why we have Christians in Argentina and why we have Christians in the Congo and why we have Christians in Korea. And, you know, they went there on ships, the Christians, you know, to spread the love because they loved people. And this is what they said. And I see no reason not to believe them. And sometimes I do, though, I do because I think a lot of those things are mixed with politics. Like I view the church, the established church as essentially a political organization that has a hook on people. So I can see the idea of the church wanting to spread its influence as a state might want to spread its influence through the method of evangelizing ideas. And it just so happens that maybe the head of the church is like the head of state or has the authority of God to make declarations that have like political implications. Yeah. So which, okay, this is about defining love. So which which definition of love matches yours? Okay, so this is such a good conversation. We have to go with it because this this is most important ideas in the world, from my perspective. So when this happened, I had a couple of realizations. My wife also had some some powerful experiences. And the word that we used to describe it was verb, because the word love did not capture whatever we were experiencing. So it's like I love bacon. And like I love others. Women before I've been obsessed with or like been whatever they infatuated with love said I love it ain't what this is. So we called it verb. It was like this some new thing that we need a new concept for. If you could, in my worldview, it is the love that genuinely religious people or genuinely spiritual people of all denominations have been writing about for thousands of years. It's a love so powerful that you you're you're oriented your value system gets totally reoriented where your own life is significantly less important than the object of your love that you're willing to die in the like in the Christian case. Yeah, be a Christian case of love that this guy loved the world so much that he he just died. It was a nail to across that that kind of love that people describe. Right. Yeah. Oh, oh, yeah. Well, so guess how many Christians died in spreading Christianity across the world. This this this was just nothing but war, right? So in wars and all wars, you know, both people on both sides die, right? So missionaries died. Missionaries think about sacrifice. Can you imagine? I mean, it still boggles the mind like the number of Christian missionaries who went from a town in New England or from Sussex or, you know, all the way on boats that were leaking and often sank in the Atlantic or Pacific, right in the 18th century or 19th century and then sailed to places that they weren't even sure existed and then got off the boat in this place where everybody hated them. No one spoke their language. They had to live under trees for years and years and years and tried to convert to these people who couldn't even speak their language to a religion that they had never heard of that required its own immense set of self sacrifices and they starved and were naked and cold and hungry and often were killed killed by people, right? Who lived in those places they were trying to convert. You want to talk about sacrifice? Yeah. Who sacrificed more than Christian missionaries ever, right? They loved those people. Steve, this is love. This is the same feeling you have for your wife. I have a more pessimistic view of humanity than that because I think humans are why is that? Humans will do all kinds of crazy shit for all kinds of crazy reasons. I mean, I could say the exact same thing about any other crusaders or even in my perspective, a lot of people in the military in the US military, you could describe their experiences as being great sacrifices, being caught up in prison camps in Vietnam or Korea. I don't view that as love. I just say, well, people are crazy. They have some crazy ideas. They're very manipulable and if you're a politician who wants to expand your influence, well, if you can mix religion in with politics and say, you're going to get a lot of prestige and esteem if you do as I say and go fight these people, maybe that's why we see the proliferation of what you might call imperialism or things like that, whether it's religious imperialism or political imperialism. In Paul's Epistle to the Romans, another book everyone should read immediately, this is where he lays out the doctrine of Christian asceticism and which he says that we should sacrifice our own pleasures, our own identities, essentially is how I read it for God. This is at the heart of Christian, most Christian doctrine, I think, since then, which it's this idea that we sacrifice ourselves for God and to make the world into God's community. So this is the other part of when you asked what type of love. This is the other part of the experience. I realized as well that a lot of my rejection of Christianity, Christian evangelicalism was based on, I think, a misunderstanding of Paul would be an example because up until that point, I had interpreted Paul as being prescriptive. This is the thing that you're supposed to do. If you, you should love, which means you should act in this way. I didn't like that very much at all. But then I realized it's not, at least the parts that I'm familiar with that I've read. It's actually not prescriptive. It's descriptive. So when it's, you know, there's this, there's this part where it says love is patient, love is kind. It doesn't give in, give into anger. It has all this like flowery praise for love. I realized, oh, that's not prescribing a way to act. That's describing how one acts when one is in a state of love. So I thought, okay, so this, this Paul guy that I thought was full of shit before, actually, maybe he was describing the same love experience that I had, that I had or something like it. Okay. So Paul is, Paul is in love with God, right? He's talking about a relationship with God, not a relationship with a wife. Yeah. So, so with the metaphysics of it, right? I think that a reasonable way of conceiving of God in this context, which would be totally heretical, is not like necessarily, to say you love God is kind of a weird way to phrase it. I don't know if the original like Greek thing. I agree. I agree. Sorry. But he is talking about, he's talking about serving God. Forget love. Oh, that's the most bitter word. Yes. Serving God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Here's why. Because that's selfless, right? But it's not a choice. So it's not prescriptive. It's not you should be a servant. Screw that. Nonsense. Who's that guy to tell me what to do? Okay. It's descriptive. It's that when you are in that loving state, we'll serve that loving state. Yeah. So, right. So he says that one who is serving God never has sex and never drinks. But who says that? Well, ascetics do. Christian ascetics. Paul didn't, though. Well, I mean, Christian, that doctrine has certainly been interpreted, you know. People who label themselves as Christians, perhaps. Well, you're right. So I'm okay. So, let's see. Two, if you say one who is serving God does XYZ, right? How is that different than saying one should do XYZ to serve God? Because, well, at least for people like me who are independent, I have no interest in taking orders or listening to what anybody has to say. Like, I don't believe people. I don't trust people. I'm kind of trying to sort through these things myself. So it would mean nothing to me. Now, if somebody wanted to have power, what they should do is phrase a religious doctrine as you should do this. You should do that. You should eat this or not do that. But if one views religion or spirituality through a philosophic lens, it's pure explanation. So it's as much of a difference as saying, you know, you have a brain inside of your skull versus you should have a brain inside of your skull. It's like, well, that's a totally different thing. But it's also an absolute moral claim, though, isn't it? No. Well, so this is, again, my own personal interpretation, I'm working through spirituality and love myself, but this is what I'm getting. I don't think that there's any room for prescriptive anything in ethics or spirituality. Now, in practice all over the world, it's all prescriptive, but I don't care about it. I think they're all wrong. I think that all carefully articulated religious philosophy or spiritualist philosophy is a description of what happens when you are in a loving state of mind. And if you want to do that, that's your choice. To the extent that you can choose to be loving, that's your choice. If you don't want to be loving, that's okay too. Do you think there's a better way for me to live? So I have reason to believe that in my case, there is definitely a level of contentment, which I didn't know was possible. There's a type of experience which I didn't know existed, which is, for me, the most powerful experience and mindset that I've ever experienced, and that's what I want. So for me, there's definitely clear as day, that's my meaning of life or my value system. For other people, I don't know because I'm not in other people's minds, but based on my conversations and experiences with a handful of people that have had similar experiences, I do have reason to believe that other humans have a similar structure. Now, I have no, I say nothing prescriptive, but something that also motivates me is if I can phrase things in such a way that people would be persuaded by or keep an open mind or like myself, let's say 10 years ago prior to this love experience, I'm kind of talking to myself or trying to open the mind of my 17-year-old self and say, hey, keep open to these experiences, maybe there's some truth to be found here. So I don't want to persuade anybody of anything, I just want to explain things and then if that allows people to more readily have a love experience, then I feel very good about it. Are you saying that you suspect that some people might benefit it, according to their own values, by adopting some of the things that you have practiced? I wouldn't put it that way. I would say, so there's a quote from Leo Tolstoy where he says, it is not given to man to know his own needs. And I remember encountering that very shortly after I had this love experience, and I thought, oh, wow, that actually fits my experience. I thought, I thought I understood my value system and I was choosing them, but then I bump into this and I think, oh, crap, there's something, apparently I value things in a totally different way than I realized I did. So to answer your question, I think that there are lots of other human, it might be a universal human thing, I don't know, but my guess is that there are lots of other humans who have values and needs that they don't even know they have. And if they had the experience that I had, they would realize how important love is. If they had the experience that you had, they might know how valuable love is or they might just be happier or what is the outcome, possible outcome? So it might be that they would discover. It's not just knowledge, right? There's some, are you describing happiness here? What's the benefit here? So while I'm not pitching it as benefit, I'm saying I'm just kind of stating what I think is the case for people who are interested in discovering, there's maybe the values of their own subconscious that they don't know they have, but I guess I would say I have reason to believe that people would be much happier if they experienced what I have experienced. Yes, definitely. Some people, you're saying. I don't know how many. It would be a hard question. I have a suspicion that it's probably a lot. I think love is something that's so powerful, a lot of people will be persuaded by it and kind of maybe even reorient their lives around it because it's that good. It is possible that some people, maybe all people, maybe you're saying, would, would you say, would be happier if they experienced what you experienced? Is that it? In the abstract? Yes. So in current terms, if more people could experience love as I had experienced it, I think the world would very likely change in a positive direction. Yeah. So you know, this has got to be really precise here with the link, right? You know what I mean? Because with just the addition or subtraction of a single word or even a single syllable sometimes, that's the difference between sitting in your house by yourself for the rest of your life or like getting in a tank and going and driving across the desert and shooting people. Absolutely. Right? Okay. The way, so the way I just phrased you is fine with me. If, because that, do you agree that that particular phrasing is not an absolute moral claim? I, so I'm very persuaded by ethical nihilism. I say I'm an ethical nihilist with one exception. It's kind of a big exception. So everything is meaningless, except for love. And because love for me and my own system is the most important thing in the world is a meaning of life. That gives value to life for me. It may be the case that other people have a similar kind of structure, even if they don't realize it, like a similar ethical structure. But yeah, that's my position. Have you ever read histories of love? No, never heard of it. You should. No, there are several. I mean, there are many people who have written the history. Oh, I think there is one actually. And there have been courses I've seen taught on the history of love, meaning the history of the concept, right? Yeah. History of the word, history of the concept, the history of the meaning of the concept and the meaning of the word. And you might not be surprised to learn that it has changed quite a bit, you know, over time and over space. So, you know, in the United States of America, in California, you know, over the last 50 years, it's changed. And then, you know, broaden it to say the United States over the last hundred years or, you know, take the whole globe and all the ways in which love this thing you're talking about has to been described. But it's not going to change. You said love this thing you're talking about. My position is I doubt that most people have any idea of what I'm talking about, because I didn't have that. Most people, when I talk to them about this, if we talk about this, they're like, they look at me like I have two heads. Like, what the heck are you talking about? Do you have some religious experience? They have no yeah. What? Hold on. So, you now, now you're saying that you believe that you're the only person who's ever experienced this? No, no, no, I didn't say that. Oh, I said, I think that most people, at least that I engage within this culture have not had this experience. I have every reason to believe in reading, writing from thousands of years ago that the people who are lucky enough to experience verb are massively changed by it. But I don't think most people experience it. I don't think and I'm not exactly sure the reason for that. I think it has something. I have some theories on that. But from what I see when I look around, I don't think that most people have experienced verb. Yes, you know what I think. I think you are the only person who's ever experienced what you've experienced. Okay, fair enough. I could agree with that. You should have guessed that. That's right. I do agree with that, actually. All of its unique facets, yes. Oh, wait, hold on. You do agree with that? If we're being very strict in terms of the concreteness of the experience, yes. In fact, right now, nobody has experienced this moment except from my perspective. That's why I was pointing you to histories of love, because you used that term to describe your experience. I said, well, millions and millions and millions and billions and billions of people over millennia or centuries at least have used that term and used that concept and they've used it in infinite ways. In infinite ways. You will never find two that match. You will never find two that match. See, this is where I think you and I will have a very interesting discussion about postmodernism and language, because I actually agree with that. I think that's the case, not just with love. That's pretty much the case with every word. I think that everybody has their own kind of network, their conceptual network of what they mean by certain things and you can get really close. You can really close like concentric circles, but I think in general we all have slightly different definitions, even for things like cat or a dog. That actually means something different to me than it does for you. I imagine that's probably something you're partial to. Oh, yeah. Okay. Wow. Then guess what? I love you because that's what I think. I mean, I don't know how do we differ then. Oh, we differ so fundamentally. So here's the question though. This has gone totally on a side track, which has been fantastic, but I don't know if we have enough time anymore to talk about where we differ because as much as we might agree with a lot of things I think we do, we're going to disagree so much when it comes to the objectivity of logic. I don't know if we can stuff it in. This might be a nice way to end this interview and we'll have you back on to talk about where we disagree. I'll do whatever you want. I mean, I got 40, 45 minutes or whatever you want to do. I'll tell you what, how about this? Yeah. How about we end the interview here and I'll just hit record and we'll do like a hard change and we'll just say this was part one and next week's going to be part two. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Okay, cool. All right, that was my conversation with Thad. So if you want to hear us talk about the philosophy of postmodernism and debate about the status of objective truth, make sure to tune in next week. If you guys have been listening to the show at all, you know I am a big proponent that the truth is objective and discoverable. And in fact, I wrote a book called Square One, The Foundations of Knowledge, which makes the case that we can have access to a very limited scope of certain truths. We can make those truths objective if we're careful, but this is kind of the antithesis of the postmodern relativist philosophy. So as you can imagine, we had a fantastic debate about it and you don't want to miss it. So that's all from me today. Enjoy the rest of your week.