'The Present' - Stefan Molyneux in Conversation with Dr Duke Pesta - video Dailymotion

Stefan Molyneux

Professor of Literature Dr Duke Pesta reviews Philosopher Stefan Molyneux's latest novel 'The Present.'  Get the novel free here:  https://freedomain.com/freedomain_books/the-present/  Find Dr Pesta at https://www.fpeusa.org

Transcript

00:00:00 This is the Dr. Duke Show.

00:00:02 - Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Duke,

00:00:07 and I'm joined today with one of my favorite guests.

00:00:11 I really don't get to talk to him as much as I would like.

00:00:14 He's eminently busy himself,

00:00:16 but our conversations usually go on for a long time,

00:00:20 and they delve fairly deep,

00:00:22 and so I'm really grateful to have you back.

00:00:24 This is Stephan Molyneux,

00:00:26 and I know you have a great following

00:00:29 that keeps growing, that you are,

00:00:31 what I admire you about,

00:00:33 admire most about you is that you are a commentator,

00:00:36 you're a personality,

00:00:37 but you are first and foremost,

00:00:40 always you are a philosopher.

00:00:42 And I certainly, I'm a 30 year university professor,

00:00:46 and I don't meet people who are philosophers.

00:00:49 I don't meet people in the philosophy department

00:00:52 at universities who are philosophers.

00:00:54 So to have somebody who can put logic and truth

00:00:59 and the pursuit of truth above politics

00:01:02 and venality and selfishness,

00:01:06 it's a pleasure to speak with you.

00:01:08 So good to be back with you.

00:01:10 - Oh, thanks, I appreciate that.

00:01:11 Great to be back again.

00:01:12 We should try and schedule these more often,

00:01:14 but we'll take what we can at the moment.

00:01:16 - Yes, sir.

00:01:17 I'm all for that.

00:01:18 And so we're here today to talk about your new book

00:01:21 and the arc that got you here.

00:01:24 The title of the book is called "The Present."

00:01:27 And this is the blurb for the book.

00:01:29 "The Present" is a powerful new novel

00:01:31 by philosopher Stefan Molyneux.

00:01:34 As society slides into the abyss of moral paralysis

00:01:38 and economic collapse,

00:01:39 a reporter finds herself drawn to a man

00:01:42 she was trained to despise.

00:01:43 Almost too late, finally she tells the truth

00:01:46 about the evil forces undermining the world

00:01:49 and faces brutal blowback for showing the slightest sympathy

00:01:54 for the underdogs of society.

00:01:57 I gotta tell you, the very first thing when I read that,

00:01:59 I thought of "That Hideous Strength" by C.S. Lewis,

00:02:03 written in the 1940s, a book that is apocalyptic,

00:02:08 a book that is talking about civilizational collapse,

00:02:11 and a book that really does bring out

00:02:15 a theological and spiritual argument

00:02:19 that was much needed in the '40s and is much needed today.

00:02:23 And so talk about these issues wherever you wanna begin.

00:02:28 Where'd you get the idea for the book

00:02:30 and how to get put together?

00:02:32 - Well, sorry, just before we dive into it,

00:02:33 I brought a little prop here because, of course,

00:02:36 we've talked about some incredible literature

00:02:38 over the course of our show,

00:02:40 from Shakespeare to Dickens to Dostoevsky and so on.

00:02:42 So given it's my little humble novel,

00:02:45 I have brought in a helmet so that when the feedback

00:02:50 comes in, I can assume the crash position

00:02:53 because I'm trying to take my place,

00:02:55 little wee place among the luminaries of,

00:02:57 I'm just kidding, all right, so,

00:02:58 but getting feedback from you means a lot to me

00:03:01 and we've been talking about other people's books,

00:03:03 so I'm just aware that in my own small way,

00:03:05 I'm trying to contribute, so.

00:03:07 The idea for the book actually came from my wife

00:03:10 because she said, "I wanted to write another novel."

00:03:13 So I wrote a novel about the future.

00:03:16 So the novel about the present is called "The Present."

00:03:18 My science fiction novel is called "The Future."

00:03:20 I'm not always fantastic at book titles.

00:03:23 I like to think the content is good, but yeah,

00:03:25 so my contemporary novel is called "The Present"

00:03:27 and my science fiction novel set a couple of hundred years

00:03:30 of the future is called "The Future."

00:03:32 And I wanted to, when I published "The Future"

00:03:35 some about two, two and a half years ago,

00:03:37 people got, okay, well, how did we get there?

00:03:39 How did we get from where we are to the world

00:03:42 that you're talking about in the future,

00:03:43 which is a free, stateless society,

00:03:45 and I sort of describe how everything works and so on.

00:03:48 And people said, "Well, how do we get there?"

00:03:50 And so I was mulling about writing a contemporary novel

00:03:52 about how we go from where we are in the present

00:03:55 to hopefully a better world in the future.

00:03:57 And my wife said, "You've never written

00:04:00 "a straight up love story."

00:04:02 And I'm like, "Well, yeah, because with my wife

00:04:04 "and I being married 21 years,

00:04:05 "I'm straight up living a wonderful love story

00:04:08 "and I'd never written one."

00:04:10 So I thought, wouldn't it be interesting

00:04:12 to write about a woman's, because you know, the barriers,

00:04:16 right, this is the basic Kurt Vonnegut thing

00:04:18 with your characters.

00:04:19 You just throw a lot of obstacles.

00:04:20 And to me, the most interesting obstacles

00:04:22 are inner obstacles, vanity, sin, dissociation,

00:04:26 distraction, materialism, all the stuff

00:04:28 that bars us from direct connection with each other.

00:04:31 I'm like, what if we have a character

00:04:33 who is kind of propagandized by the modern world?

00:04:36 And we know, we know, we know that single women

00:04:39 are the target of most propaganda in the modern world

00:04:42 for the simple reason that women who are unmarried,

00:04:45 prop up leftism, they generally run to the government

00:04:48 for safety and security, often at the expense

00:04:50 of the sort of future continuance of the economy,

00:04:52 as we can sort of see from the national debt.

00:04:54 And I really have a great deal of sympathy

00:04:56 towards the women who are very much targeted by this.

00:04:59 You don't need no man, go it alone, independence,

00:05:01 careerism, and so on, it's part of a depopulation agenda

00:05:04 and part of an agenda to just keep people lonely,

00:05:07 to keep people shallow, to keep women in particular

00:05:10 lost in the vanity of youthful beauty and sexual appeal

00:05:13 at the expense of the second half of their life.

00:05:17 When I was very sort of prominent on Twitter,

00:05:20 had like almost half a million followers,

00:05:21 and I remember one of the posts that I made was,

00:05:25 and I think it was voted at one point

00:05:27 the worst tweet in history, which as a philosopher,

00:05:30 it very much is your goal, it's your gold.

00:05:33 And one of them was, "Ladies, you live to be 40,

00:05:38 "and generally you can't really have kids after,

00:05:41 "so what are you gonna do for the next 40 years?"

00:05:42 And then there was another one about Taylor Swift

00:05:44 when she turned 30 some years ago, and I said,

00:05:47 "It seemed to me a very nice tweet."

00:05:48 I'm like, "Wow, I can't believe she's 30,

00:05:49 "she looks so young, I hope that she decides

00:05:51 "to become a mom because by 30, 90% of her eggs are gone."

00:05:54 And I think she'd be a fun mom, I hope she considers it.

00:05:58 Nothing major, but the harpies descended with laser swords

00:06:03 and all kinds of, "Why are you creepily thinking

00:06:07 "about Taylor Swift's eggs?"

00:06:08 It's like, "I'm really not thinking

00:06:09 "about Taylor Swift's eggs, just, you know,

00:06:10 "it's kind of a fact that seems important

00:06:12 "for a woman to be happy."

00:06:13 So I wanted to write a story where a woman

00:06:16 had great temptations for shallowness and materialism

00:06:20 and vanity and living in the moment,

00:06:23 and I wanted to contrast it with a woman

00:06:25 who was still facing the same struggles,

00:06:27 but had gone more the traditional route

00:06:29 with sort of a husband and family and so on.

00:06:33 I also wanted to write a character,

00:06:35 two relationships, right, Arlo and Rachel

00:06:37 are the sort of two core relationships

00:06:39 in the sort of more modernist progressive style,

00:06:42 and then Cassie and her husband Ian

00:06:45 are on the more traditionalist side,

00:06:47 and I wanted to see what it was like

00:06:49 when the man was not, when the man had no authority

00:06:53 in the relationship, which is Rachel and Arlo,

00:06:56 and then when a man had some growing authority,

00:06:58 which is Ian's interest in the men's rights movement

00:07:00 and a more sort of traditional biblical authority,

00:07:03 and then when a man had significant authority

00:07:05 in the relationship, which is the Christian centerpiece,

00:07:09 Oliver, and whether the woman could surrender

00:07:12 to a man's will, because the fact that a man

00:07:14 surrenders to a woman's will is sort of baked into

00:07:17 having kids, going to work, and so on.

00:07:19 And so I was like, will she be able to surrender her vanity?

00:07:23 Will she be able to surrender her will?

00:07:24 And will she actually start telling the truth?

00:07:28 Because what she does, and it's really, to me,

00:07:30 I love characters that are hard to like,

00:07:33 you know, where there's some appeal to them,

00:07:35 but it's just like, oh, you behave terribly.

00:07:37 You know, this is sort of the Dostoevsky,

00:07:39 almost all of his characters are very hard to like,

00:07:41 but very compelling.

00:07:42 And so when you have a character who's very flawed,

00:07:45 you have to find a way to root for that character.

00:07:47 You want them to get some happiness,

00:07:49 but at the same time, it really can't be easy.

00:07:53 They have to be significantly unlikable,

00:07:55 but with some kind of path to redemption.

00:07:56 So I think all of that stuff came together for me

00:07:59 and wanting to write about the concerns.

00:08:02 You know, my Christians friends are sort of saying to me,

00:08:04 "It could be end time stuff.

00:08:05 You know, we've been training for this stuff

00:08:06 since we were born."

00:08:08 And it's like, there is a real accuracy, I think, to that.

00:08:11 And of course, coming out of the pandemic

00:08:13 where Christians got skepticism of science,

00:08:16 skepticism of vaccines, skepticism of government power,

00:08:19 skepticisms of lockdowns,

00:08:21 the Christians got it far more right,

00:08:23 almost infinitely more right

00:08:24 than the secularists and the atheists did.

00:08:27 And you'd think that would be of interest, right?

00:08:28 This is kind of a scientific experiment.

00:08:30 Who was right about being skeptical

00:08:32 about what the authorities were saying?

00:08:34 Well, the Christians were right and the atheists weren't.

00:08:36 And that's a big experiment

00:08:37 that the atheists should have some humility about,

00:08:40 but they didn't.

00:08:41 So I think a lot of these sort of came together to me

00:08:44 to want to write a story about how artificial our society is,

00:08:49 artificially propped up vanity, artificially propped up youth

00:08:52 and how hard is it for us to be grateful

00:08:58 when we're trained in vanity, consumerism,

00:09:01 and materialism and so on, and lack of purpose, right?

00:09:05 I mean, I love this scene.

00:09:07 I've just been listening to the book

00:09:08 in sort of preparation for this chat.

00:09:10 So, I mean, it's a minor sort of interaction

00:09:13 where Rachel is saying her boyfriend, Arlo, is,

00:09:16 okay, he's not specifically Satan,

00:09:19 but he's not specifically the opposite of Satan either,

00:09:21 because he's very materialistic,

00:09:23 lives in a no time, is incredibly vain,

00:09:26 and has no purpose and lives in the moment

00:09:28 and just hides out in the world being pretty.

00:09:30 And at one point, Rachel trying to gain some status is like,

00:09:35 oh yeah, we're going rock climbing.

00:09:36 He's such a fantastic rock climber.

00:09:37 And Ian, of course, her sister's husband says, for what?

00:09:42 Like, he's not an athlete, he doesn't compete,

00:09:45 he doesn't get paid, like what's all the excellence for?

00:09:48 And he's, of course,

00:09:48 he's trying to gain excellence in his soul,

00:09:50 he's trying to gain excellence in his marriage

00:09:52 and as a parent and so on.

00:09:54 And so the pursuit of excellence for vanity

00:09:57 is really at the cost of moral excellence,

00:10:00 which, you know, from Aristotle onwards,

00:10:02 and Jesus, of course, would say that moral excellence

00:10:04 is really all that counts

00:10:05 and how many distractions are sort of put in front of us.

00:10:08 So those are sort of the major themes

00:10:10 and the idea definitely came from my wife.

00:10:13 And for me, what the great thing

00:10:15 is about writing contemporary novels,

00:10:16 and I usually do historical fiction

00:10:18 and I've done one science fiction book,

00:10:20 but the great thing about contemporary novels

00:10:23 is you don't have to do as much research

00:10:25 'cause you're kind of living the life,

00:10:26 you're living the world, right?

00:10:27 When I had to write,

00:10:28 or when I decided to write about the lead up to World War II

00:10:30 in England and Germany,

00:10:31 the amount of research was staggering,

00:10:33 whereas this one is like things I've noticed,

00:10:35 things I've lived, people I've talked to,

00:10:36 things I've seen, it's just so much easier.

00:10:39 And so, yeah, that was the general idea behind the book.

00:10:42 - Yeah, and there's a lot of stuff to unpack there.

00:10:46 And a couple of things that struck me immediately,

00:10:49 one is for a philosophical mind like yours,

00:10:52 and I've read other of your books,

00:10:55 the deft way in which you communicate

00:10:59 the emotional connections to your characters

00:11:01 was really well done.

00:11:03 I mean, it was, you mentioned Dostoevsky,

00:11:06 writers like him walk a line

00:11:08 when you're writing a book

00:11:10 that is to some degree didactic, right?

00:11:13 You're also warning about things.

00:11:15 Making the characters believable and human

00:11:18 is exactly what sells it, right?

00:11:19 It's that, it's the old Horatian formula,

00:11:22 going back to the Romans, right?

00:11:24 That an author wants to teach and delight, right?

00:11:28 It's one thing to teach,

00:11:30 which is probably the easier of the two things,

00:11:32 but to teach in a way that is artistic and moving,

00:11:37 that's the hard thing.

00:11:39 And I think you manage a nice balance of those things.

00:11:42 And I was very pleased about that.

00:11:43 So it's what made me immediately think

00:11:46 of that hideous strength.

00:11:48 It's all about marriage.

00:11:49 And at the core of this demonic attack

00:11:52 on the institutions of the world,

00:11:56 from the beginning to the end,

00:11:57 C.S. Lewis is stressing marriage

00:11:59 and what that union means spiritually

00:12:02 and how that is a real antidote to a lot of the problems,

00:12:06 both for women and the single women problem,

00:12:09 and for men too.

00:12:10 On the other side of the line there,

00:12:14 unmarried men become just really scalawags, right?

00:12:19 They become like your character you just described,

00:12:22 hanging out, living in the moment, very animal,

00:12:26 very divorced from larger questions of existence.

00:12:31 And so I think both on the male and the female side,

00:12:34 Lewis made that very clear.

00:12:35 And I think you did a wonderful job as well.

00:12:37 And I want to ask you as we move through this to start,

00:12:41 because your thinking,

00:12:42 I know that a lot of the ideas came for your wife,

00:12:45 and I had the pleasure of meeting her once,

00:12:47 and she's a lovely lady,

00:12:49 but the time that I've known you,

00:12:52 I think if we go back, it was 2015, 2016 for you and I,

00:12:56 when we first had our first conversation

00:12:58 about Common Core all the years ago.

00:13:00 And I have seen in you,

00:13:03 and what I see when I read your books

00:13:06 and look at your videos,

00:13:08 but especially in the way we have talked to each other,

00:13:10 an arc that's brought you to a place

00:13:13 where things like Christianity in specific,

00:13:18 and the moral meaning of Christianity,

00:13:22 and the purpose that comes with Christian worldview,

00:13:25 and the prescience to some degree

00:13:28 about what evil is that you don't see.

00:13:31 And one of my biggest complaint about the atheist,

00:13:34 the secular atheist,

00:13:35 is that they have reasoned away good and evil, right?

00:13:40 Both good and both evil.

00:13:42 And so they can no longer recognize them.

00:13:45 And that's where I think

00:13:46 what your great comment about COVID was.

00:13:50 The atheist didn't get it

00:13:52 because it was beyond their ken

00:13:54 that there can be serious forces,

00:13:58 huge forces that are pulling evilly,

00:14:02 that are seeking to hurt, to harm,

00:14:04 to use tragedy and suffering in ways to destroy

00:14:08 and to control, not to ameliorate.

00:14:11 I think that is one of the consequences

00:14:13 of a materialist worldview

00:14:15 that denies any of these higher ways of seeing.

00:14:18 That's also a major, I think, subtext of your book.

00:14:23 And I wanted to ask you to talk to us

00:14:25 a little bit about your arc.

00:14:27 How, in the last 10 years,

00:14:29 you are thinking about religion, about morality,

00:14:32 certainly about Christianity, seems to have expanded.

00:14:35 And I'd like you to talk a little bit about that

00:14:37 and how that impacted this book.

00:14:39 - Well, you know, I was raised as a Christian

00:14:44 and then went through a very strong secular phase

00:14:47 because the surface level of the secular worldview

00:14:52 is we're going to be liberated from superstition.

00:14:55 We're gonna think rationally.

00:14:57 We're gonna think clearly

00:14:58 without all of these murky beliefs

00:15:00 from thousands of years ago and so on.

00:15:02 And so clarity and reason

00:15:07 and a clear-eyed view of reality

00:15:10 was supposed to be the goal, right?

00:15:12 Now, of course, science,

00:15:14 this is particularly true in my view over the pandemic,

00:15:17 that science was used as a golden calf.

00:15:20 It was used as a false idol.

00:15:22 Trust the science.

00:15:24 Well, the scientists say the same thing is true

00:15:25 with global warming.

00:15:26 98% of scientists say,

00:15:27 which is not even true according to the scientists.

00:15:29 But so rather than science liberating us

00:15:33 from contradictions or superstition,

00:15:37 it turned out that science has become a false idol

00:15:40 that is used to bludgeon people into compliance

00:15:42 because we would look at some witch doctor

00:15:45 with a bone through his nose and say,

00:15:46 "Well, that's just crazy.

00:15:47 Why would you listen to that guy?"

00:15:48 But you replace the bone through his nose

00:15:50 with a white lab coat and government funding,

00:15:51 and suddenly it's an oracle of Delphi

00:15:53 that you can never say no to.

00:15:55 And I am the science,

00:15:58 and if you doubt any of this, you're doubting science.

00:16:01 And science has just become this bizarre mystery religion

00:16:04 that doesn't need to explain itself.

00:16:06 And I just did a show about this recently about how,

00:16:09 I mean, when it came to the vaccines

00:16:12 and when it comes to global warming,

00:16:15 where's the source data, right?

00:16:16 I mean, when people were trying to make the decisions, right?

00:16:18 So can we see the source data?

00:16:20 Can we see everything that came out of the experiments

00:16:22 of the COVID vaccines?

00:16:23 Can we, no, apparently they wanted to hide this

00:16:25 for like 75 years, you can't see it.

00:16:27 And it's like, well, hang on.

00:16:29 Christians have access to the source information, right?

00:16:32 Christians have access to the Bible.

00:16:34 I mean, a priest can be enormously helpful

00:16:36 and people can certainly help illuminate the text for you,

00:16:39 but it's not a mystery religion, right?

00:16:41 Like a mystery religion is the priests,

00:16:44 you can't talk to the God, you can't get the rules,

00:16:47 you can't get the facts.

00:16:49 All you can do is ask the priests

00:16:50 and they'll have a communion

00:16:52 or they'll take ayahuasca or something,

00:16:54 and then they'll tell you what it is you have to do.

00:16:56 So that's a mystery religion.

00:16:57 And science has become a kind of mystery religion

00:17:00 in that the massive decisions that are made

00:17:02 that impact people's lives, global warming is massive.

00:17:05 Global warming is trillions of dollars

00:17:07 moving around the world

00:17:08 and scaring the literal pants off children

00:17:12 with endless tales of apocalypse

00:17:15 that is a gateway through which the nihilistic demons

00:17:18 pour into the human heart, right?

00:17:19 You have no future, you're gonna get killed

00:17:22 by plant food and it's all over.

00:17:25 So, you know, when I was growing up, it was nuclear war.

00:17:28 That was sort of the big boogeyman

00:17:29 that was used to frighten people.

00:17:30 There was this atomic clock, you know,

00:17:32 it's three minutes to midnight and you're doomed.

00:17:34 And there were all of these movies that came out

00:17:37 about what's gonna happen after a nuclear war.

00:17:38 It turned out they were actually funded

00:17:39 by the communists in Russia to cripple people's desire

00:17:44 to negotiate with Russia about ICBMs.

00:17:48 But at least that was something

00:17:50 that there was a small chance of,

00:17:51 there was mutually assured destruction,

00:17:53 and I was fairly sure we were gonna make it through.

00:17:55 Global warming is like inevitable

00:17:57 and COVID was a massive disaster,

00:17:58 and it's all under the cover of science.

00:18:01 And to me, it's like, okay,

00:18:02 well, if you're gonna say that you can model the weather

00:18:05 of 100 years in the future,

00:18:07 can a brother at least see some algorithms and some data?

00:18:10 You know, can I just have,

00:18:12 'cause I actually, one of the,

00:18:13 in my sort of past life as a software entrepreneur,

00:18:15 I did modeling in the environmental sphere.

00:18:17 I know a little bit about this kind of stuff,

00:18:19 and modeling is magic, right?

00:18:20 Modeling is like, if you've ever been

00:18:23 in a business environment and it's like, you know,

00:18:25 my sales projections going out five years, you know?

00:18:28 I mean, nobody's gonna say that's money in the bank.

00:18:30 That's just, you know, a finger and a cross

00:18:32 and hopefully some data,

00:18:32 but they'll always wanna see the source data.

00:18:34 You go to any kind of investors and you say,

00:18:36 well, we're gonna make this much money over five years.

00:18:38 They say, okay, well, what are your assumptions?

00:18:40 What is your competitors?

00:18:41 How do you justify this?

00:18:42 They won't give you a penny

00:18:44 if they can't see the source data.

00:18:46 And global warming, they hit the source data,

00:18:48 they hit the algorithms, you know?

00:18:50 Not even many people know that a third

00:18:52 of the data is made up.

00:18:53 Like the monitoring stations are all gone

00:18:55 and they just kinda average it out

00:18:57 based upon what they want.

00:18:58 And so if you control the measuring

00:19:02 and you control the data and you control the modeling,

00:19:05 you can twist it however you want.

00:19:06 There's no truth in any of that foundationally.

00:19:08 And if there is truth in it,

00:19:10 then at least allow the internet autists

00:19:12 those access to the source data and all the algorithms

00:19:14 so that they can puzzle out the assumptions you're making

00:19:17 and what's going on, but you can't see that.

00:19:19 The same thing with COVID.

00:19:20 You couldn't see the data that they used

00:19:23 to claim that the vaccines were safe and effective.

00:19:25 And with the AstraZeneca being pulled

00:19:26 from circulation just yesterday, you know,

00:19:28 those who had doubts or they'd say,

00:19:31 "Well, we know for sure it doesn't come

00:19:32 "from the lab in Wuhan," like I did a whole video

00:19:34 called "The Case Against China"

00:19:35 about all the reasons why it did in fact

00:19:38 come from the lab in Wuhan.

00:19:39 That was misinformation.

00:19:40 And they said, "It comes from the pangolin."

00:19:42 And of course, you know, years and years later,

00:19:44 they haven't found any animal to human transmission vector.

00:19:48 So it just because, no, scientists say,

00:19:50 and now scientists say it has just become

00:19:52 this mystery religion.

00:19:53 And to me, that's blindingly obvious

00:19:56 and not having access to the source data

00:19:59 of massive moral decisions, because, you know,

00:20:01 government force, which is involved in the pandemic,

00:20:04 it's involved in global warming,

00:20:06 government force requires massive amounts

00:20:08 of moral justifications.

00:20:10 And if you can't see the source data,

00:20:12 you just have to kneel before the guys in white coats

00:20:15 who are thoroughly compromised by threats and bribes, right?

00:20:19 If you don't go along with the narrative,

00:20:20 you're gonna lose your job.

00:20:21 And if you do go along with the narrative,

00:20:23 by the way, here's a $5 million grant.

00:20:25 So they're bribed and threatened.

00:20:26 They are utterly, utterly compromised.

00:20:29 And yet we must kneel before them

00:20:31 and accept what they say when they won't even tell us

00:20:36 any of the methodologies by which

00:20:39 they came to their conclusions.

00:20:40 And that's the exact, trust science is an absolute oxymoron.

00:20:43 So just to end up, 'cause I know I could do this rant

00:20:46 all day, but what bothers me is when I was growing up,

00:20:49 what was I told?

00:20:51 Well, you know, faith is just, you know,

00:20:53 you gotta have proof, you gotta have evidence,

00:20:55 you gotta have facts, you gotta have,

00:20:56 it's all the experiments need to be reproducible

00:20:59 and you've gotta share knowledge and share all of the data

00:21:03 and share all the methodologies.

00:21:05 Otherwise, you know, it's just faith.

00:21:07 And it's like, okay, so faith in a personal being

00:21:10 or being that you can personally talk to

00:21:12 that you have direct experience with if you believe

00:21:15 and you pray and you get answers.

00:21:17 So there's that faith where you get the source data.

00:21:20 But what is more faith?

00:21:23 Is it believing in God?

00:21:25 Is it believing that Jesus performed miracles

00:21:27 when there are contemporaneous examples?

00:21:28 And of course, a lot of people ended up being fed by lions,

00:21:31 which you don't do for some sideshow charlatan or trickster.

00:21:35 So is it more faith to believe in Jesus

00:21:37 or is it more faith to believe in scientists

00:21:39 who won't show their source data or prove anything?

00:21:42 And so given that there's more faith required in science

00:21:45 at a much higher cost,

00:21:47 because it is the cost of your personal liberties,

00:21:49 the faith that people had in the scientists

00:21:51 regarding COVID and lockdowns

00:21:52 was at the loss of significant personal liberties.

00:21:55 And families broke up based on faith,

00:21:59 based on faith in science.

00:22:01 Like families wouldn't get together for Christmas.

00:22:04 They wouldn't get together for Thanksgiving.

00:22:06 They wouldn't get together for birthday parties.

00:22:08 And you couldn't go and see grandma dying

00:22:12 because of faith in scientists.

00:22:14 And I've never been punished for skepticism from Christians,

00:22:19 but by gosh above was I punished for skepticism

00:22:23 in the mystery religion called science

00:22:24 that demands infinitely more faith

00:22:26 because it hides all of its arguments.

00:22:28 So I just was really repulsed

00:22:30 by what happened in the realm of atheism and science

00:22:33 and the fact that atheists should have been

00:22:35 the most skeptical and were lining up

00:22:37 like lambs to the slaughter.

00:22:38 - You know, that's a lot to process.

00:22:41 And I go back to what I admire.

00:22:45 Obviously I'm a Christian and I am a humanities professor,

00:22:48 but I've always admired science because of one thing.

00:22:52 Real science starts with skepticism.

00:22:55 And this is what you're pointing out

00:22:57 that the purpose of science up until recently

00:23:01 was when somebody says, here's what's happening,

00:23:03 here's a claim, here's something I've researched,

00:23:06 then other scientists immediately try to debunk it.

00:23:10 That's healthy.

00:23:11 Science without skepticism is like you say,

00:23:15 it is pure faith and it is a warped faith.

00:23:18 The other thing that I think people don't realize,

00:23:21 every serious Christian thinker I know,

00:23:24 and that includes in books,

00:23:25 we mentioned Dostoevsky for instance,

00:23:27 every serious Christian thinker I know

00:23:30 realizes that there can be no faith without doubt.

00:23:34 At one point, Dostoevsky wrote about his own experience.

00:23:39 It was not as a child that I learned to believe in Christ

00:23:42 and to confess his faith.

00:23:44 My belief, my faith came out of a huge furnace of doubt.

00:23:49 Everything Dostoevsky wrote, C.S. Lewis is another one.

00:23:55 That Lewis was like you just explained,

00:23:57 a complete skeptic who World War I turned into an atheist

00:24:02 until he realized what we just said,

00:24:04 that real faith in God requires the same kind of skepticism

00:24:09 to some degree that science does.

00:24:11 Now it's ironic to me that there are many aspects

00:24:15 of Christianity that are skeptical,

00:24:17 but we're not talking about the belief of the unthinking man

00:24:22 who just goes because he was raised Christian.

00:24:24 I'm thinking about thinking Christians.

00:24:26 Doubt is the razor flip side of the coin, right?

00:24:31 Dostoevsky makes it so clear that the greatest non-believer

00:24:38 is on the most specific cusp of the greatest form of belief.

00:24:43 If you can believe so deeply in nothing,

00:24:47 you are closer to believing in anything

00:24:50 than almost anybody else.

00:24:52 And so when skepticism, as you pointed out, leaves science,

00:24:55 it becomes an ogre and a monster,

00:24:57 and one that has more practical evil

00:25:01 than the typical Christian can unleash

00:25:03 on anybody at any time.

00:25:04 And so this, I think, is a wonderful revelation.

00:25:09 Can you explain a little bit about how you work that theme

00:25:14 into your book?

00:25:15 - So one of the things that I wanted to explore,

00:25:19 and this, I've just finished a book on peaceful parenting

00:25:22 where I did a lot of research into daycare,

00:25:24 and I've been talking about daycare for many, many years,

00:25:26 just how toxic daycare is for children.

00:25:29 And in my experience,

00:25:32 this goes back to the atheist and Christian divide,

00:25:34 that atheists put their children in daycare,

00:25:38 and Christians in general keep their children home

00:25:41 and love and nurture and teach and instruct them, right?

00:25:44 And one of the questions is, okay,

00:25:47 well, why would atheists put their kids in daycare,

00:25:50 and Christians in general keep them home?

00:25:52 Because atheists don't have anything in particular

00:25:54 to teach their children, and Christians do.

00:25:58 And so for an atheist, it's like, okay,

00:26:00 so it's a mechanistic thing.

00:26:02 My child needs to be taken care of.

00:26:05 My child needs to be kept warm and comfortable.

00:26:09 My child needs food, and my child needs interaction.

00:26:12 So it doesn't matter if I do it or some, I don't know,

00:26:16 person from a foreign country

00:26:18 who can barely speak the language.

00:26:19 It's just human being.

00:26:21 It's just human being.

00:26:23 It's like looking at galley slaves or something,

00:26:26 like in the rows, row, row, row,

00:26:29 and it's like, doesn't particularly matter.

00:26:30 One guy's kind of indistinct with them.

00:26:32 Maybe he's slightly more strong than the other,

00:26:33 but the men are kind of interchangeable.

00:26:36 And there's this terrifying interchangeability of people

00:26:40 in a lot of the sort of secular world.

00:26:43 And I think that this really interferes with pair bonding,

00:26:46 because of course, in the Christian world,

00:26:47 it's two souls uniting under the will and morality of God.

00:26:52 And so there is a real, one flesh, right?

00:26:56 Now, of course, the one flesh,

00:26:58 the atheists say, well, what are we, Siamese twins?

00:27:01 Well, one flesh, two people with two ideas

00:27:04 and two arguments.

00:27:05 And so the economic efficiency of daycare,

00:27:10 well, I'll go and make money.

00:27:12 And if I like doing that,

00:27:13 and I make more money than I'm paying in daycare,

00:27:17 yeah, it's okay, right?

00:27:18 And so the two main females, of course,

00:27:21 Rachel and Cassie,

00:27:23 Rachel, I may very, very clearly say that,

00:27:25 and it's confronted in the family

00:27:26 in the middle section of the book,

00:27:28 Rachel's a daycare kid and Cassie was not.

00:27:31 And I actually, I know families where this has happened.

00:27:34 The little experiment between two siblings has gone on.

00:27:36 One sibling was in daycare, one sibling was not,

00:27:38 and it has a big and significant difference

00:27:41 in how things play out.

00:27:43 And so connection is how we mature, right?

00:27:47 Connection with our parents,

00:27:48 connection with morality, connection with purpose,

00:27:52 and eventually connection with each other, right?

00:27:53 So you leave your parents' house and you cleave,

00:27:56 right, the biblical language, you cleave to your spouse,

00:27:59 you cleave to the mother or father of your child,

00:28:02 and that bonding is how we grow up.

00:28:04 And when we look at sort of the eternal adolescence

00:28:06 of young people, you know,

00:28:07 a girl still going clubbing in their 30s

00:28:09 and guys still living at home,

00:28:11 playing video games in their 30s, why?

00:28:13 It's because they can't bond with each other

00:28:15 to the point where they want to start families.

00:28:17 And why can't they bond?

00:28:18 Because they didn't have a strong bond with their parents

00:28:20 and they're avoiding that.

00:28:22 And, you know, the criminality

00:28:23 that comes out of the daycare kids,

00:28:25 Rachel at one point when she's looking at the riots

00:28:26 says, "They're daycare kids."

00:28:28 And she confronts her mother,

00:28:29 "Why did you put me in daycare?"

00:28:30 And the mother says, "Because of propaganda."

00:28:32 And she doesn't want to talk about it

00:28:34 because she's ashamed of it.

00:28:35 And so to me, just the interchangeability of people,

00:28:39 the lack of moral training that atheists have,

00:28:43 you know, to raise someone to be moral

00:28:46 is a very deep and powerful challenge,

00:28:48 especially when, you know, social media,

00:28:50 the internet and the world sort of pulling them

00:28:51 in the shallowest direction possible.

00:28:54 So I really, really did want to

00:28:58 have Rachel's journey,

00:29:00 it's a little bit of a spoiler, right?

00:29:01 But Rachel's journey is from hedonism

00:29:04 to sacrifice for the good.

00:29:06 Because in the beginning, she's like,

00:29:07 "Oh, look how pretty I am.

00:29:08 Look how great my ass looks in this mirror.

00:29:10 Look, you know, my boyfriend is so beautiful."

00:29:13 And she has this vainglorious career

00:29:15 that's not really going anywhere

00:29:16 because she gets to say, "I'm a reporter.

00:29:18 I'm a change agent," without actually doing that much.

00:29:21 And then she runs into Oliver, who has a depth and purpose

00:29:24 and his whole family is with him

00:29:26 and they homeschool their kids and they have,

00:29:29 you know, I can't even tell you how long

00:29:30 I put off writing that scene with Oliver and his family.

00:29:34 Not only was it technically difficult

00:29:35 'cause I got like 50 people in a scene,

00:29:37 which is one thing in a movie,

00:29:39 and it's quite another thing in a novel, but it's painful.

00:29:42 It's painful to see people so connected.

00:29:44 It's painful to see people so dedicated to their children

00:29:46 and to their elderly.

00:29:47 It's painful to see people whose elders have wisdom

00:29:50 as opposed to some of this boomer,

00:29:52 endless trips to Alaska narcissism

00:29:54 that goes along with burning up the inheritance

00:29:56 for their own vanity.

00:29:58 So it's painful, painful for me to write that

00:29:59 'cause I didn't grow up with much extended family

00:30:01 because they're all, you know,

00:30:02 destroyed in the second world war.

00:30:04 So having that sense of connection,

00:30:06 which goes on in that family, she's really drawn to that.

00:30:10 And, but the price of trying to achieve that connection

00:30:13 is to give up vanity.

00:30:14 So vanity or thinking that other people want to be you

00:30:18 or admire you or not for your morals,

00:30:22 but for your looks or whatever, right?

00:30:23 So wanting to be admired usually by strangers

00:30:26 and usually by very unwise people

00:30:28 is the poor substitute for an actual bond to virtue,

00:30:32 to others, to self-respect from morality.

00:30:36 And that's why Rachel is like,

00:30:38 she's the very first scene, she's right walking in

00:30:40 and she's observing herself in all the sliding squares

00:30:42 of the mirrors over the bar and how good she looks

00:30:45 and you know, how her figure looks.

00:30:47 And she's all just about how she looks.

00:30:50 And trying to provoke envy in others

00:30:53 is a very sad substitute for falling in love.

00:30:55 And so she has to find a way to get out

00:30:58 of this sort of mirrored maze of vanity

00:31:01 to actually connect now with someone.

00:31:03 Now, the fact that society is kind of falling apart

00:31:05 around her means she can't afford the indulgence

00:31:08 of a silly shallow man boy like Arlo.

00:31:10 She actually has to have a guy who understands reality.

00:31:13 She has to have a guy who's kind of tough

00:31:15 and we can see Oliver is pretty tough, you know?

00:31:17 I mean, he does not take any of her lies.

00:31:21 When she lies to him, he just hangs up on her.

00:31:23 He stands up to his mother when his mother demands

00:31:26 that into their Eden they allow a new kind of woke snake,

00:31:30 right, which is the woman Jada and her mother.

00:31:32 And so he's a pretty tough guy and she's drawn to that

00:31:35 but doesn't even really know why.

00:31:37 And it's that looming sense of danger

00:31:39 that has women start to cleave towards men

00:31:42 who can be safer and the massive avoidance

00:31:46 of any kind of risk that is sort of modern femininity,

00:31:48 like if you get pregnant out of wedlock,

00:31:50 hey, no problem, we'll give you free healthcare,

00:31:52 free education for your kids,

00:31:53 a welfare and free dental care.

00:31:55 And like there are no consequences.

00:31:57 So without any danger,

00:31:58 women tend to move more towards shallower, prettier guys,

00:32:03 you know, like the pinup guys

00:32:05 rather than the guys who can actually protect and provide

00:32:07 'cause they don't need any protection

00:32:09 and the government's providing for them.

00:32:10 So there's a certain shallow part even of Rachel

00:32:13 as she sees the resources society will provide to her

00:32:18 begin to slip away,

00:32:19 she has a very strong unconscious drive

00:32:22 to get to a place of safety, which is not Arlo

00:32:26 because Arlo cannot protect her.

00:32:28 And this is in the deplatforming stuff

00:32:29 that happens in the middle of the book,

00:32:31 he's very clear about that.

00:32:33 And so he can't protect her, but society's falling apart,

00:32:35 which means risk is rising.

00:32:36 When risk is rising, you need protection

00:32:40 and she can't get it from Arlo.

00:32:43 So she's drawn more towards Oliver,

00:32:44 but the price of getting all of his protection

00:32:47 is to stop lying and stop manipulating

00:32:49 and stop just making stuff up

00:32:51 and actually connect with him.

00:32:53 And that's a tough road for her, man.

00:32:56 And anybody who's, I mean,

00:32:57 I think we all fight vanity to some degree

00:33:00 and it's a tough battle

00:33:02 because it really is one of the worst curses in the mind

00:33:05 to preen rather than become strong.

00:33:08 - Yeah, I mean, we go back to the Old Testament

00:33:11 to keep our theme going here.

00:33:13 The preacher in Ecclesiastes, right?

00:33:15 Vanity, all is but vanity

00:33:18 when it comes to separation from God,

00:33:20 when you are purely materialistic and secular,

00:33:24 everything becomes vanity.

00:33:25 That's a wisdom that is 4,000 years old.

00:33:28 And I also remind, I'm reminded again,

00:33:31 and not to belabor this

00:33:32 from what you just said about your novel,

00:33:34 about that hideous strength by C.S. Lewis.

00:33:37 In there, you have a wife, a young wife,

00:33:40 who is not committing to her husband, a newlywed,

00:33:45 because she's afraid of his masculinity

00:33:47 and she's afraid that she'll lose herself

00:33:49 and her career in him.

00:33:51 And at one point, the main figure in the book, Ransom,

00:33:54 says to her, ultimately he says to her,

00:33:56 you do not fail in love because you do not love.

00:34:01 You fail in love because you will never consider obeying.

00:34:06 And he says, he goes on to say something

00:34:08 kind of like what you just said,

00:34:09 that you must realize that the higher you get,

00:34:13 the closer you get to God,

00:34:15 you're going to experience masculinity

00:34:17 in ways that are more real,

00:34:19 that the closer we get to God,

00:34:21 the male and the female become more exclusive,

00:34:25 not more the same.

00:34:27 And you see these natural roles play out,

00:34:31 and like they do in your book quite nicely.

00:34:33 I think, I don't know if you've meant to do this,

00:34:37 but one of the main things your book left me feeling

00:34:42 is how really important is marriage, right?

00:34:45 How marriage is not just a contract,

00:34:48 it's not just something that a judge can bang a gavel

00:34:52 and give you a piece of paper,

00:34:54 that there is a bond here that, for lack of a better word,

00:34:57 has to be metaphysical for marriage to be real.

00:35:00 That should where it start.

00:35:01 That's not what you build up to.

00:35:03 That's where the beginning is,

00:35:05 that marriage is this spiritual and metaphysical union

00:35:09 that then explains everything,

00:35:11 including things like obedience that comes after it.

00:35:14 And so I got a very profound sense

00:35:17 that the necessity of marriage,

00:35:22 how it is good for society, of course,

00:35:25 and for culture, of course,

00:35:26 but even as individuals becoming aware of who they are

00:35:30 and what the truth is, you really need that as well, too.

00:35:34 - Well, and the book end of the book for me is,

00:35:39 the start of the book is Rachel's bottomless vanity,

00:35:42 which comes out of the, society comes out of the culture

00:35:45 and comes out of the daycare experiences

00:35:47 and the lack of connection she has with people.

00:35:48 So the vanity, the physical vanity,

00:35:50 look how pretty I am, look how sexy I am,

00:35:51 look in, and all, she just works on her body,

00:35:53 she doesn't work on her soul in the same way

00:35:55 that I'm constantly reminding everyone

00:35:58 that her boyfriend is doing leg lifts,

00:36:00 he's doing sit-ups, he's going to the gym.

00:36:02 You know, I say that when he's climbing the mountainside,

00:36:05 his calves are so muscular,

00:36:07 they look like fat pink tadpoles, you know?

00:36:09 Like, so it's all about the physical.

00:36:12 And when she starts to go through a crisis of conscience,

00:36:14 realizing how empty and shallow her life is,

00:36:16 her boyfriend literally grabs a banana,

00:36:18 dances around like an ape and tells her to shake it out,

00:36:20 man, relax, you know, just don't worry about it,

00:36:22 you know, just, we're going to have fun.

00:36:23 And she's like, well, what's your life?

00:36:25 What do you want to do with your life?

00:36:26 He's like, well, I want to go surfing in Bali

00:36:28 and I want to become a yoga instructor in Indonesia

00:36:31 and I've never been arrested in Belgium.

00:36:33 And you know, like all of these things that just consume,

00:36:36 it's all sense-based, it's all the body,

00:36:38 the body, the body, he is the embodiment of the body.

00:36:41 And she's just physical, outside in, outside in,

00:36:44 all she cares about is how she looks.

00:36:45 She doesn't care about what's good.

00:36:47 Now, at the very end of the book, again, minor spoiler,

00:36:49 but very end of the book,

00:36:50 when she says basically, take me to Oliver,

00:36:54 she looks like hell.

00:36:55 You know, she's been attacked by dogs

00:36:58 and was this too subtle?

00:37:00 My friend, was this too subtle?

00:37:01 That so, so she's constantly into the physical

00:37:04 and so on, right?

00:37:05 And, and, and away from danger.

00:37:08 And then she ends up trapped in this convenience store

00:37:10 chased by a pack of dogs and she's in a cross position,

00:37:14 right, because she's on a beam

00:37:15 and the only way she can stay up is,

00:37:17 is to be in the, in the cross position.

00:37:20 And she's now terrified of the flesh,

00:37:23 of the hunger, of the material, right?

00:37:25 And, and then of course a bearded man sacrifices himself.

00:37:29 Anyway, so that's a whole other thing.

00:37:30 It's very, very, very subtle stuff.

00:37:32 But at the end of it, she's, she's, she's run from the dogs.

00:37:35 She's, she's had no sleep.

00:37:36 She's literally been crawling through shrubbery

00:37:38 and bushes and trees.

00:37:40 And she looks like hell.

00:37:41 She hasn't done her hair.

00:37:42 She's got no makeup on.

00:37:43 She's scratched, she's bleeding, she's tired, she's hungry.

00:37:45 She's got dark circles under her eyes.

00:37:47 And she says, take me to Oliver.

00:37:49 Now that's in the humility

00:37:50 that she has something to offer Oliver

00:37:53 that's not just physical attractiveness.

00:37:55 And that's really what he's been looking for.

00:37:57 He's been looking for a woman with a quality of spirit

00:38:00 rather than the prettiness of form.

00:38:02 And so leaving the material behind

00:38:04 and going to the place somewhat subtly named New Eden,

00:38:08 that she is willing to say,

00:38:10 she doesn't say, I got to clean myself up.

00:38:12 I got to prepare.

00:38:13 I got to look good.

00:38:14 She's like, no, just demand, take me, take me to Oliver.

00:38:16 I need to talk to him.

00:38:17 And the fact that she would show up looking like that

00:38:19 compared to where she was at the beginning of the novel,

00:38:22 to me, the biggest character arc that you can possibly get

00:38:25 and still stay believable.

00:38:26 You know, like the serial killer

00:38:27 doesn't get become Mother Teresa.

00:38:29 So the biggest character arc that you can make

00:38:31 that stays believable.

00:38:33 And, you know, again, my boy Dusty Esky

00:38:36 does this all the time, right?

00:38:37 Raskolnikov from beginning to end.

00:38:39 And so to me, I've always been like

00:38:41 the farther you can shoot that canon of character arc

00:38:44 while still remaining in the physics

00:38:45 of reasonable psychology, that's the thing.

00:38:48 And I think, you know,

00:38:50 I think I did a fairly good job of that.

00:38:51 It was fairly well.

00:38:52 It's one of the few books that I plotted out

00:38:54 actually chapter by chapter to make sure

00:38:56 that it was all gonna hang together and make sense.

00:38:58 But yeah, that journey from vanity and lack of connection

00:39:02 and just the material.

00:39:04 And she doesn't believe in anything.

00:39:07 She doesn't believe in anything.

00:39:08 She doesn't even believe in her own career,

00:39:10 but she won't admit it.

00:39:11 And then what she does,

00:39:13 and then what she does is she shows some sympathy

00:39:15 towards men.

00:39:17 And that's sort of the men's rights thing

00:39:18 that's going through there, the sympathy towards men.

00:39:21 And the fact that she finally thanks her own father

00:39:25 for his 30 years of incredibly hard work

00:39:28 in a work environment where he was abused.

00:39:32 We talk about the screamer

00:39:34 and also where he had to, to some degree,

00:39:38 compromise some of his morals

00:39:39 'cause he works in this T-shirt printing factory

00:39:41 and some of the stuff he had to print

00:39:42 went against his ethics, but he still sacrificed himself.

00:39:45 And the fact that women get a lot of appreciation

00:39:49 in society, which is great, I mean, it's wonderful.

00:39:51 But the fact that men are starved for appreciation,

00:39:53 like you have women literally on a subway saying,

00:39:56 we don't need men.

00:39:58 Okay, well, who dug the subway tunnel?

00:39:59 Who made the subway?

00:40:00 Who provides the electricity?

00:40:01 Who provides, like who's the farmer?

00:40:04 Who's the truck driver?

00:40:05 Like, so this lack of appreciation for men

00:40:09 is something that is, it's a secular value

00:40:12 because men were respected and treasured

00:40:14 as the head of the household in Christianity

00:40:17 and in the secular world,

00:40:18 because women can go and marry the state

00:40:21 and they don't need to provide any thanks

00:40:23 or appreciation for men.

00:40:24 That's another thing that if men feel expendable,

00:40:26 they can't pair bond 'cause it's not safe enough.

00:40:28 If you're expendable, I mean, the whole point

00:40:29 of pair bonding is ride or die.

00:40:31 Like we're together forever, no matter what, right?

00:40:34 That's, and if you're just, if you don't feel

00:40:37 that you are loved, treasured, and respected

00:40:40 as your gender, rather than just as an individual,

00:40:43 how can you pair bond?

00:40:43 And if you can't pair bond,

00:40:45 then you can't transmit any cultural values

00:40:48 to your children because, sorry, go ahead.

00:40:52 - No, no, you're exactly right.

00:40:53 I was gonna follow up with that.

00:40:54 We started this conversation talking about

00:40:56 how you made some comments about motherhood

00:40:59 and Taylor Swift, and I think this comes right back to it.

00:41:03 It seems to me that we were made this way,

00:41:06 and this is the Christian worldview as well,

00:41:08 that to some degree, it is vanity for women

00:41:12 not to have babies, right?

00:41:13 The idea that choosing the world over a child

00:41:20 in the context of marriage is a kind of deep vanity.

00:41:24 It's also sterile.

00:41:25 It's ultimately something that comes back for many women

00:41:28 once they can no longer have children.

00:41:30 It becomes a major point of regret.

00:41:33 It's why we're having women, because of science

00:41:36 and technology, having babies into their 50s now.

00:41:39 So there's a sense in which women produce from inside,

00:41:44 right, I mean, not to say that women can't be business women

00:41:48 or artists, but they do their master creating internally.

00:41:53 To reject that is the worst kind of vanity,

00:41:57 much more than the self-body expansion stuff.

00:42:00 Men, on the other hand, because they look after women,

00:42:03 they don't create internally, physically that way.

00:42:07 Men conquer the outside.

00:42:08 So your argument there about the subway is right.

00:42:11 That's what men do.

00:42:12 They build subways and computers and airplanes

00:42:15 and houses and guns and safe rooms.

00:42:18 They do that to allow the woman the venue,

00:42:22 the safe space in which to do her form of creation.

00:42:27 And our entire society destroys both of those.

00:42:31 So you have this weird dichotomy

00:42:33 that runs through all of this.

00:42:35 And your comments too about your long philosophical

00:42:42 reflections on the family and about men going their own way.

00:42:47 Men going their own way is in many ways a attempt

00:42:51 to reclaim that outer space, that space outside of them,

00:42:56 which they were made to have to bring on the heel

00:42:59 and largely so that you can then support the wife

00:43:02 who is bringing the children in the best possible world,

00:43:06 not farming the children out to outside agents,

00:43:09 but bringing it up holistically in that family.

00:43:13 Christianity had that right.

00:43:14 And nothing we've seen is better than that.

00:43:18 And we're now really reaping the consequences

00:43:21 of the attack on that form of marriage and family.

00:43:24 - Yeah, yeah.

00:43:25 I mean, I think you sort of ask about the character arc

00:43:27 with regards to atheism.

00:43:28 I, of course, went through a very disorienting

00:43:32 and bewildering phase some years ago regarding atheism

00:43:35 in that I have worked very hard to create

00:43:38 a rational proof of secular ethics.

00:43:40 And, you know, I mean, it's very much in line

00:43:42 with the 10 commandments, right?

00:43:44 Rape, theft, and assault, murder, all banned,

00:43:46 and property rights are all affirmed

00:43:47 by this moral framework I call

00:43:49 universally preferable behavior.

00:43:51 Now, of course, morals come from God

00:43:55 in the Christian universe.

00:43:57 There is no ought in the is, right?

00:44:00 This is the Humean distinction.

00:44:02 There's nothing inscribed in the nature of atoms

00:44:04 that say you have to do or not do.

00:44:06 Now, the law of physics say if you push a guy off a cliff,

00:44:09 he'll fall and he'll die.

00:44:12 But it doesn't say whether you should or shouldn't, right?

00:44:14 There's, you can't get the ought from the is,

00:44:15 and that's sort of been the mainstay.

00:44:17 And that's, to me, okay, let's say you're skeptical

00:44:21 of Christianity and you say, well, you know,

00:44:22 it's just a sky ghost and all of that, right?

00:44:24 So there's no God in reality.

00:44:26 It's like, okay, but you know,

00:44:28 we can't have a civilization without morals, right?

00:44:30 Like, you know that for a simple fact.

00:44:33 So if you're gonna say, let's, you know,

00:44:38 wet finger snuff out the candle of the source

00:44:40 of all of our ethics in the world.

00:44:43 There's no morality, no benefits to truth,

00:44:46 no benefits to integrity, there's nothing.

00:44:49 It's just atoms and space, like the, the,

00:44:53 Ponce's, right, the terrifying thoughts.

00:44:55 All I see out there is atoms and space,

00:44:58 and which is why people are interchangeable

00:45:00 and it doesn't matter where they come from

00:45:01 and people can just move in and out of countries

00:45:03 and they're completely interchangeable.

00:45:05 They're just like, why would you care

00:45:06 about one white Lego block versus another white Lego block?

00:45:09 It doesn't make any sense, right?

00:45:10 So if all there is is atoms and space,

00:45:12 then you have just wet fingered the candle of morality

00:45:15 that has been the entire source of our civilization

00:45:17 and the maintenance of our civilization.

00:45:19 Civilization, as you know, can only work

00:45:22 if there's only a tiny minority of amoral people.

00:45:24 Like most people have to self-regulate

00:45:26 and we can see this happening

00:45:27 with the court system at the moment.

00:45:28 Like there's just so much wrong that's going on.

00:45:31 The court system can't handle it.

00:45:32 So you get these terrible plea deals

00:45:33 and they bribe you with five years of your own life

00:45:36 in order to get you to plea to something

00:45:37 you maybe even didn't do.

00:45:39 So, okay, so you've just wet fingered out

00:45:43 the entire candle of morality

00:45:45 that is the entire basis of your civilization.

00:45:48 Okay, maybe, just maybe, what you should do

00:45:53 is try to find a way to have it without God.

00:45:56 'Cause if you get, like, is the atheist worldview

00:46:00 there for science or hedonism, right?

00:46:04 That's sort of the big question I've been wrestling with

00:46:06 for the last number of years.

00:46:08 And I keep accumulating more evidence

00:46:10 that leans towards the hedonism argument.

00:46:13 Because I produced and I've debated this topic,

00:46:17 my sort of system of ethics.

00:46:19 I produced it, I've written an entire book,

00:46:20 tons of articles, presentations,

00:46:22 I've done live presentations,

00:46:23 I've done endless debates with people about it.

00:46:25 And it is, it is, it holds firm, it is absolutely true.

00:46:28 Okay, so it's kind of like,

00:46:30 you come across a guy in a desert

00:46:33 and he's been crawling across the desert

00:46:34 for like days and days and his skin is parched

00:46:38 and his teeth are falling out

00:46:39 and he's just, I'm so thirsty, I'm in it.

00:46:41 You're like, oh, here's some water.

00:46:42 And he's like, I want that.

00:46:44 It's bewildering, right?

00:46:46 So it's like, well, by getting rid of God,

00:46:49 we got rid of morals.

00:46:51 And it's like, okay, so unless you want some Mad Max

00:46:54 beyond the Thunderdome fallout scenario,

00:46:57 you better find a substitute.

00:46:58 Like it's one thing to say,

00:46:59 oh, there's this terrible storm,

00:47:01 there's hailstones as big as your head coming down,

00:47:03 but I think that the church is poorly designed

00:47:05 and you destroy the church.

00:47:07 And it's like, now people are naked to the elements.

00:47:09 It's like, shouldn't you build something that's a shelter

00:47:12 before you say, we don't need this shelter anymore?

00:47:15 'Cause now people are just getting pummeled and killed

00:47:18 by the hailstones and the storm

00:47:19 and you got babies out there and you can't survive.

00:47:23 So I was, you know, one of the things that I did

00:47:25 was I say, okay, well, so no God,

00:47:27 there's no morals in the way that we would understand it.

00:47:29 So we really, really, really better come up

00:47:31 with some morals here or everything's gonna go to hell.

00:47:35 Like we're not gonna have to wait to die.

00:47:37 We're gonna go to hell in the present world without morals.

00:47:40 And so I was, oh, so young, naive and pretty.

00:47:44 So what I did was I said, oh, wow, you know,

00:47:46 these atheists have been crawling across this desert

00:47:48 without morals.

00:47:50 Oh, look at this, from first principles,

00:47:52 can't argue, fact-based, morality-based,

00:47:55 reason-based, evidence-based,

00:47:57 predicts why communism doesn't work,

00:47:59 predicts why marriage is important,

00:48:01 predicts why capitalism works,

00:48:03 predicts all of these wonderful things

00:48:05 and allows you to go back through history

00:48:08 and apply this lens and everything pops into focus.

00:48:11 Boy, the atheists are gonna be thrilled about this.

00:48:13 You know, there's a guy in the desert, man, I'm here, man.

00:48:15 I got the whole water card, I get bubbled water,

00:48:17 I don't care, you want flavored water,

00:48:19 I got the whole thing.

00:48:20 And he's like, oh, gross, I don't want any of that.

00:48:23 And so the thunderous lack of interest

00:48:25 from the atheist community in the proof of ethics

00:48:29 was wild to me.

00:48:32 I wasn't expected to be paraded through

00:48:35 like the Pope or anything, but it was just like,

00:48:37 oh, wow, you solved the problem of ethics

00:48:39 without gods or governments.

00:48:41 That's kind of been the Holy Grail of philosophy

00:48:43 for thousands of years.

00:48:44 Thanks, man, I'm really thirsty,

00:48:47 and you hear, infinite supply of water, woo, good.

00:48:50 And it was just like, no, they got mad,

00:48:52 they ignored it, they put it down, they insulted it,

00:48:54 they strawmaned it, and I'm like,

00:48:57 so basically you don't want morality,

00:48:59 and the way that you don't get morality

00:49:03 is you disprove God.

00:49:04 And it is about hedonism, and it is devilish.

00:49:09 Because if you say, well, the price of getting rid of God

00:49:13 regretfully is getting rid of morality,

00:49:14 and then I come along with the proof of morality,

00:49:16 and people are like, oh, gross.

00:49:18 I'm like, okay, so you don't really care about God,

00:49:20 you just wanna get rid of morality,

00:49:22 and if I come back with a secular morality

00:49:24 that you can't disprove, well, you don't want that,

00:49:27 'cause what was the point of getting rid of God

00:49:29 if you can't also get rid of morals?

00:49:31 And yeah, that was a fairly tragic,

00:49:35 being dragged through the bramble bush backwards naked

00:49:38 kind of process of really understanding

00:49:40 what the secularists, the atheists are kind of all about,

00:49:44 'cause this should have been the oasis in the desert,

00:49:46 and they just fled.

00:49:49 - You know, you mentioned Dostoevsky a number of times.

00:49:52 He said it very succinctly in his words,

00:49:55 if there is no God, then there is no morality,

00:49:58 and everything is permissible, even cannibalism.

00:50:02 I mean, that was as far as he saw that.

00:50:05 And I've always made a distinction between morality,

00:50:08 which requires God, and when we say God,

00:50:10 when I say that morality requires God,

00:50:13 what I mean is there has to be an anchor for your morality.

00:50:17 There has to be an absolute that justifies you

00:50:20 believing one thing over another,

00:50:22 and that's what God is just as a placeholder.

00:50:26 It's better if you believe in that God.

00:50:27 It's more sincere, it's more efficacious,

00:50:30 but you don't need it.

00:50:31 But then the ethics is the other thing,

00:50:34 and then Dostoevsky, like you in your book,

00:50:36 also make this point subtly.

00:50:39 If there is only ethics, and ethics is guaranteed

00:50:45 by reason, not by God.

00:50:47 It is rationalism, not revelation that you have there.

00:50:51 So to begin with, it's not authoritative,

00:50:54 completely like God would be if he exists,

00:50:56 number one, and number two, the problem with reason,

00:50:59 and this is the purpose of the Brothers Karamazov,

00:51:02 the entire book, his greatest work,

00:51:04 is that when reason is the only anchor

00:51:06 we have for our beliefs,

00:51:07 there are all kinds of reasons to kill,

00:51:10 all kinds of reasons to do utilitarian things

00:51:14 to people that are horrible.

00:51:15 And there's no logic behind Christianity,

00:51:19 which demands the strong have to bow to the weak,

00:51:23 but the strong should make their life's mission

00:51:26 the uplifting of the weak, not the exploitation of it.

00:51:29 Reason can't get you there,

00:51:32 and I've had many people try to argue,

00:51:34 there's rational reasons why the strong

00:51:38 should care for the weak,

00:51:39 but they're all as thin as paper,

00:51:41 and even the people making the arguments

00:51:43 don't believe it themselves.

00:51:45 You're right, your desert analogy is 100% correct.

00:51:50 So let me ask you this then, on the basis of what you said,

00:51:53 and both for your novel, and I suppose for you too,

00:51:56 the question then becomes,

00:52:00 knowing what we know philosophically,

00:52:03 does that mean then that we have to believe?

00:52:06 Does that mean then that,

00:52:08 for lack of a better way of stating this, Stefan,

00:52:13 is it at the point where we have to believe in God now,

00:52:16 or is there still a degree where God can be useful,

00:52:21 but not true, that you would argue is the truth here?

00:52:25 I guess what I'm asking you is,

00:52:27 where are you now with regards to belief?

00:52:30 - Well, I have too much respect for the idea of deity

00:52:35 to say that I can consequentialize myself into that.

00:52:38 Well, it's practical, and it's useful,

00:52:39 and it's productive, and it's positive,

00:52:41 and it's necessary.

00:52:41 It's like, no, no, no, that's not love.

00:52:44 If you look at your wife, you look at your husband,

00:52:47 and you say, well, practically it's positive,

00:52:49 and we get to share expenses, that's not love.

00:52:51 So I can't get to love from practicality.

00:52:56 I can get to love from morality.

00:52:58 And so I'm obviously hanging in dusty,

00:53:01 iffy square of space, little square of space.

00:53:04 Hey, I'm out of the bathroom, but the spider,

00:53:06 so that's a plus, but I'm still in the square of face,

00:53:09 because I cannot warm my heart with consequentialism.

00:53:13 And you're right about, so again,

00:53:15 if we go back to atoms in space, atoms in space,

00:53:17 and biological imperatives, right?

00:53:19 This is Darwinianism, right?

00:53:20 So one of the most powerful commandments to me,

00:53:24 if not the most powerful commandment,

00:53:25 is thou shalt not bear false witness, right?

00:53:27 Don't lie, don't lie.

00:53:28 And this is what Rachel is trying to learn.

00:53:30 Rachel takes the path of least resistance, why?

00:53:32 Because that's what animals do.

00:53:34 Animals take the path of least resistance.

00:53:37 And even if you say, well, but the birds fly out

00:53:39 and get all the worms for their babies,

00:53:40 it's like, but that's because they're compelled to do that

00:53:42 by their biology, evolution, and hormones.

00:53:44 They're still taking the path of least resistance.

00:53:47 So Rachel goes from taking the path of least resistance,

00:53:49 and that's the question of,

00:53:50 am I gonna write about the men's rights movement?

00:53:53 Right, am I gonna write?

00:53:55 'Cause that's not the path of least resistance.

00:53:57 Now she has a cause that is not hedonistic,

00:54:01 and she knows that ahead of time,

00:54:03 because everybody, even her aunt,

00:54:05 who's a famous reporter, says, don't do it.

00:54:09 And I love the bit, and some of the dialogue to me

00:54:11 when I was writing it was kind of surprising,

00:54:12 'cause you want the characters to be as alive as possible.

00:54:15 When Arlo says, Rachel, you can't write about this.

00:54:18 You know how photogenic I am.

00:54:20 And she's like, what?

00:54:21 And he's like, well, pretty people doing bad things,

00:54:24 like, that's what the world lives for.

00:54:26 And he's like, he's right.

00:54:27 He is pretty, and there'll be all over,

00:54:29 and pretty people doing bad things

00:54:30 is like the Kardashians, all this kind of crap, right?

00:54:34 So thou shalt not bear false witness.

00:54:37 She goes from taking the path of least resistance,

00:54:39 which is animals.

00:54:41 Lions don't chase for exercise, they chase for food.

00:54:43 And when they're full, well, they lie around.

00:54:46 They're lying around, they're lions, right?

00:54:47 So they just lie around,

00:54:49 and they take the path of least resistance.

00:54:51 My daughter keeps ducks,

00:54:53 and ducks are not the most seductive creatures

00:54:55 in the known universe.

00:54:55 They basically just rape each other.

00:54:57 And, or I guess the males rape,

00:54:59 the female dolphins do it too.

00:55:00 So how do you get your seed into the female's eggs?

00:55:05 Well, they don't, you know,

00:55:06 if not taking the duck or the dolphin out for dinner

00:55:09 is how it's gonna work, then that's what you'll do.

00:55:10 Just path of least resistance.

00:55:12 Thou shalt not bear false witness.

00:55:14 Nature is founded on falsehood, right?

00:55:17 Nature is founded.

00:55:18 I mean, the lion pretends to be just,

00:55:19 I'm just grass here, man.

00:55:20 I've got the stripes.

00:55:21 Don't worry about me, man, I'm just grass.

00:55:23 And the sharks, you know, with their dark tops

00:55:25 and light bottoms are trying to stay hidden.

00:55:27 And the cuckoo is laying its eggs in other birds' nests.

00:55:30 And it's all just deception.

00:55:32 And the butterflies look like different creatures.

00:55:35 And so, and the snakes try to camouflage themselves

00:55:38 and the trapdoor spider sits under the sand

00:55:41 and only jumps.

00:55:42 It's all about deception.

00:55:43 Hey, there's nothing here, man, no predators.

00:55:44 I'm gonna stay upwind and hide in the...

00:55:46 So nature is all about deception.

00:55:48 Deception is how you survive.

00:55:50 It's how you survive.

00:55:53 It's how you live.

00:55:55 And there's no other way to do it.

00:55:56 If you had some lion saying, "Okay, I'm hungry."

00:56:00 Okay, if you guys could line up like youngest

00:56:02 and oldest and sickest first, man, that would be great.

00:56:05 'Cause it's really hot out here

00:56:06 and I really don't wanna have to run.

00:56:07 So if you could just do me a solid

00:56:08 and just get where I need to get,

00:56:10 like just give me a buffet of zebra butt.

00:56:13 That's all I'm looking for.

00:56:14 It would die, it would die, would not survive.

00:56:17 So nature is founded on deception and so is Rachel.

00:56:22 Rachel is founded on deception, right?

00:56:25 She says, well, I mean, it's kind of funny to me.

00:56:27 She says, well, I work more on my butt than my stomach

00:56:32 because I can suck in my gut,

00:56:33 but I can't push out my butt, right?

00:56:36 So even that's a form of deception, right?

00:56:37 Her makeup is a form of deception.

00:56:39 Everything about her is a form of deception.

00:56:41 The other thing too, Arlo's value to her

00:56:43 is that he makes her look good

00:56:45 because he's more handsome than she is pretty.

00:56:47 He's a 10, she's like an eight or a nine.

00:56:49 So she's like, and she says this explicitly,

00:56:51 I get the radiant glow of his beauty

00:56:54 that makes me look better.

00:56:55 So she's with Arlo to a large degree

00:56:58 because it makes her look better.

00:56:59 And so they look cooler and they look happier than they are,

00:57:02 which is like lifting the lid on the Kardashian hellscape

00:57:04 of like, well, I guess you look pretty,

00:57:06 but your life is hell itself.

00:57:07 So even she's entirely about deception, right?

00:57:12 And she says, you know, they lied to me about my degree.

00:57:15 They said, oh, here are all of the standards for journalism.

00:57:17 And it turns out the exact opposite is how it plays out.

00:57:20 If they say, and this is also when she starts talking

00:57:22 about wanting to do the men's rights thing,

00:57:23 she throws one scrap of sympathy

00:57:25 into the men's rights movement and nobody wants to touch it,

00:57:27 even though journalism is supposed

00:57:28 to all be about balance, right?

00:57:30 And so, and she gets deplatformed

00:57:32 for having something mildly sympathetic towards men.

00:57:36 She is a non-person, she's completely deplatformed.

00:57:39 It's great to be able to write from vivid memory myself,

00:57:41 having gone through that myself.

00:57:43 And I just consider it now all research

00:57:45 and very vivid research I might add as well.

00:57:48 So, you know, like when Jonah wants to write

00:57:50 about the inside of the whale,

00:57:51 he doesn't wanna just pick up a textbook, you know,

00:57:53 go get swallowed and hold up a candle and make some notes.

00:57:56 So it's all about deception.

00:57:58 So when atheists say, all is nature, all is atoms in space

00:58:03 and evolution is why we're here,

00:58:07 what they're saying is deception is survival.

00:58:11 And then they say, well, don't lie.

00:58:14 And it's like, what are you talking about?

00:58:16 If the only reason we're here is because of lying,

00:58:19 I mean, how many times did someone walk up

00:58:22 to somebody else pretending not to wanna fight them

00:58:24 and then hit them on the head with a club?

00:58:26 They're lying.

00:58:26 They're not coming up and saying,

00:58:27 hey man, I'm gonna hit you on the head with a club, right?

00:58:30 How, you know, if deception is why we're here,

00:58:34 according to evolution, how do you suddenly draw a line

00:58:38 when there is only evolution and say, well, you shouldn't lie

00:58:42 like based on what now?

00:58:44 Christianity answers that question, like it or not,

00:58:48 like faith or not, it does answer that question.

00:58:50 You shouldn't lie because God says it's wrong

00:58:54 and God is all perfect.

00:58:55 And you can make the practical arguments,

00:58:58 but the practical arguments are,

00:59:01 if it's advantageous for you to lie,

00:59:03 nature says and evolution says you should lie.

00:59:06 Now, what atheists do is they say,

00:59:08 well, I can think of situations

00:59:09 where it's not advantageous to lie.

00:59:11 That's not an answer.

00:59:16 You know, thou shall not kill.

00:59:18 Unless you're a hit man, you're being really well paid.

00:59:19 Like there's no asterisks, right?

00:59:21 And the atheist saying, and how on earth?

00:59:25 And this, this comes back to the pair bonding.

00:59:27 So she moves from the secular world to the Christian world

00:59:29 and she's capable of pair bonding, why?

00:59:31 Because Darwinianism and pair bonding are antithetical.

00:59:36 Because if someone says, well, of course I'll tell the truth

00:59:40 when it's advantageous, you can't trust that person.

00:59:45 How can you trust that person?

00:59:46 Because they'll lie when it's advantageous.

00:59:48 It'll be, well, you know, I guess I'll have an affair

00:59:51 if I can totally get away with it.

00:59:53 And you know, my wife's unwell or whatever it is, right?

00:59:56 But you can't trust people, you can't pair bond

00:59:58 with people who have in their list of things to do,

01:00:01 lie through their ass.

01:00:03 Like you can't pair bond, the pair bond

01:00:04 is based on the trust.

01:00:06 And there's zero trust between Arlo and Rachel.

01:00:08 And that comes out in this Valpergasnacht,

01:00:11 this, you know, this horrible scene

01:00:15 between the two of them when their lack of trust manifests

01:00:17 and they pierce through the shell of physical attractiveness

01:00:20 and get to the hellscape of the actual foundations

01:00:23 of their relationship, which is contempt and hatred

01:00:26 because they're trapping each other in vanity.

01:00:28 And the only way they can break out is through,

01:00:30 I've sort of had these echoes of, you know,

01:00:32 some absolutely terrifying plays,

01:00:34 like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is one,

01:00:37 "John Osbon's Look Back in Anger" is another

01:00:39 where people just tear each other to shreds.

01:00:42 And that is because they don't have a commitment

01:00:44 larger than the interest of the moment

01:00:46 to anything positive.

01:00:48 And you contrast that with Oliver

01:00:52 who is able to resist her charms

01:00:55 and who actively resists and rejects her when she lies.

01:00:59 She calls him up and the moment she starts manipulating,

01:01:02 he's like, "No, I'm out."

01:01:03 And he senses it and he's very strict about it.

01:01:06 But because he's Christian, when she starts telling the truth,

01:01:09 what does he say to her?

01:01:11 He says, "It's nice to hear from your soul."

01:01:14 Because her body lies, because it's Darwinian.

01:01:19 And he says, the moment she starts

01:01:20 really telling him the truth, right?

01:01:23 So that when she first meets him,

01:01:25 she gets a call from her boyfriend.

01:01:26 She turns the phone over, doesn't say.

01:01:29 Later she says the truth.

01:01:31 And he says, "It's nice to hear from your soul

01:01:33 because the soul is thou shall not bear false witness."

01:01:36 Which goes against all the Darwinian imperatives

01:01:38 for falsehood and manipulation.

01:01:40 And he accepts her when she's honest,

01:01:47 when her soul speaks to him,

01:01:48 not the manipulation of her Darwinian body.

01:01:51 I hope that makes some sense.

01:01:53 - No, it absolutely does.

01:01:54 And to reify what you said,

01:01:56 if there is only nature and there is only reason,

01:02:00 then survival, living,

01:02:02 carrying on is the highest imperative.

01:02:07 And so therefore lying and cheating and even killing

01:02:10 is logical, right?

01:02:12 In many times.

01:02:13 But Christianity and religion generally,

01:02:15 Christianity gives you something

01:02:17 more important than existence.

01:02:19 There is something more important than survival.

01:02:22 And that's what this is, right?

01:02:24 And that's where there's no way in my mind

01:02:27 that the atheists can replace that,

01:02:30 what God offers if he does exist.

01:02:34 - Well, I'm sorry, I just wanna interrupt real briefly.

01:02:36 And the purpose of the removal of Christianity as well

01:02:39 is so people won't make any sacrifices

01:02:41 to maintain their freedoms

01:02:42 because to survive is all that matters.

01:02:43 So if you get threatened, you'll just comply.

01:02:45 Sorry, go ahead.

01:02:46 - And as you see now,

01:02:47 Christian virtue is now considered evil.

01:02:50 Bible-believing Christians have been rebranded

01:02:54 by the atheist left as Christian nationalists, right?

01:02:59 In other words, the great sin of Christians

01:03:02 is to believe what the Bible says

01:03:04 and not what the atheists say.

01:03:06 And so now we're turning this into a kind of fascism.

01:03:09 But what struck me about Rachel, your character,

01:03:12 one of the great lies of material evolution

01:03:17 is there's not really a good example or a good reason

01:03:20 or in any other animal besides man, an example of free will.

01:03:24 What Rachel does is she engages

01:03:26 in a radical act of free will, despite her prettiness,

01:03:31 despite the gorgeousness of her husband, her consort, right?

01:03:35 And the shallow, vain, material world they live in

01:03:39 to choose to move beyond that is,

01:03:43 it's to me, it's the major point of your book

01:03:46 is that is a huge act of free will.

01:03:49 And this begs that question, doesn't it?

01:03:52 If we indeed do have free will,

01:03:54 and only if we have free will,

01:03:56 the mother bird, as you say,

01:03:58 will defend the children from the owl,

01:04:02 but notice what the mother bird never does.

01:04:04 She never lets the owl take her, right, and fly away.

01:04:09 She lives to fight another day.

01:04:12 She lives to have another brood if she needs to.

01:04:15 So there's that survival imperative of nature

01:04:20 that even won't be violated,

01:04:21 but the ability to choose something other than yourself

01:04:24 and to choose something radically different

01:04:27 than what you have been acculturated to, that is free will.

01:04:31 And as I point out to my university kids

01:04:34 with regards to free will,

01:04:36 if there is a God like we're talking about,

01:04:38 the Christian God, for instance,

01:04:40 then what makes us human is our free will.

01:04:45 It is that ability to choose for ourselves.

01:04:47 And you talk about the hellscape that she runs away from.

01:04:51 Hell is that divorce, right?

01:04:54 To surrendering to the imperatives of the body

01:04:57 and downplaying, I love how you phrased it in your book,

01:05:01 it is nice to hear from your soul.

01:05:04 It is an acknowledgement that free will and the soul

01:05:08 are effectively one and the same thing.

01:05:10 And then up until now, anyway,

01:05:13 reason and nature and science has no answer for this,

01:05:17 and Christianity does.

01:05:18 - Well, and the scene that for me was very powerful to write

01:05:22 and I think like most people,

01:05:24 I have had some bad experiences with dogs.

01:05:25 When I was in Africa, my father and I were chased

01:05:28 by packs of rabid dogs and we had to kick and fight

01:05:31 and so I was getting endless research

01:05:33 from all this kind of stuff.

01:05:35 But the scene where Rachel is hunted by the dogs.

01:05:40 So to me, why that was so powerful for me

01:05:45 is she treats herself as a piece of meat.

01:05:49 She's a piece of meat.

01:05:50 Her boyfriend is a piece of meat.

01:05:51 She only cares about the looks.

01:05:52 She only cares about the flesh.

01:05:53 She sculpts her flesh.

01:05:54 She is a piece of meat, right?

01:05:56 And then when the dogs treat her as a piece of meat,

01:05:59 she realizes how horrifying that is.

01:06:02 That if all you are is atoms in space,

01:06:05 then being food for dogs is perfectly apt.

01:06:09 She's just a piece of meat.

01:06:11 - Let me tell you why that was so wonderful for me too.

01:06:15 Something you haven't mentioned yet is

01:06:17 not only are the dogs primal

01:06:19 and they're an example of dog eat dog, right?

01:06:22 It's how you survive.

01:06:23 But dogs are animals for about a million years

01:06:27 that human beings have trained to love us, not nature.

01:06:31 And so I think your choice of dogs was absolutely brilliant

01:06:35 because even an animal like a dog

01:06:38 that for a million years has been bred

01:06:41 and evolved to worship us,

01:06:44 we know that dogs go feral all the time.

01:06:46 And we know that dogs are really wolves still.

01:06:49 There's always in every dog a little wolf.

01:06:52 So I thought that was a brilliant illustration

01:06:54 by using the dogs that all of our scientific ability

01:06:59 to even influence evolution only goes so far

01:07:04 because you can't completely erase the wolf from the dog.

01:07:08 - Right, right.

01:07:09 And then she has her vision,

01:07:11 her religious vision occurs when she smashes a clock

01:07:14 and she goes, she has to move beyond the material.

01:07:15 She has to move beyond being a piece of meat

01:07:17 and she has to move beyond time, right?

01:07:20 And the contemplation of eternity is utterly denied

01:07:23 by the material worldview because we are merely mortal.

01:07:26 And when we die, everything's gone.

01:07:28 She has to smash the clock.

01:07:29 She has to move beyond time.

01:07:31 And through that, she's able to get out of the city

01:07:34 which is the artificial environment and get into nature.

01:07:37 And to me, also a fascinating thing as well,

01:07:39 she lies constantly, compulsively, repetitively,

01:07:43 obsessively throughout the course of the book.

01:07:46 And the only time she escapes

01:07:48 is when she tells the police officer the absolute truth.

01:07:52 She does not manipulate him.

01:07:53 She does not bat her eyes.

01:07:54 She's just like, I'm desperate to get out.

01:07:56 Here's what's going on in my heart.

01:07:58 So she speaks honestly from the heart, from the soul

01:08:01 and she actually gets what she wants.

01:08:03 All her manipulations in the past

01:08:05 got her nothing she wanted.

01:08:07 And she does exercise free will.

01:08:11 And everyone else, when society begins to collapse,

01:08:13 the government says, stay home.

01:08:14 And everyone's like, well, we'll just stay home.

01:08:16 We'll wait, we're just gonna hang out

01:08:17 and someone's gonna come, someone's gonna come and save us.

01:08:21 And her salvation is not coming from outside.

01:08:23 And this is everyone in the book as a whole,

01:08:27 except for Oliver and his family and clan and Rachel,

01:08:30 everyone just waits.

01:08:32 I mean, this is the secular aunt, Crystal.

01:08:36 She waits, she just waits until she's too weak to leave.

01:08:39 And the fact that she says,

01:08:42 I have to find my way against reason,

01:08:44 against the passivity of waiting,

01:08:47 against any external salvation,

01:08:50 I have to find my way past the meat to the soul,

01:08:54 past the dogs to New Eden.

01:08:57 That's very powerful because it's hard to make that case

01:09:00 for from just a secular standpoint,

01:09:02 the question of sacrifice

01:09:04 and the fact that she wants to start creating life.

01:09:07 Because as you point about the women who don't have kids,

01:09:09 it's like, they say, well, my life is too great.

01:09:12 And it's like, but your life is only great

01:09:14 because your parents had a kid.

01:09:17 And so the idea that you would take the greatest gift

01:09:20 in the universe, which is human life, human consciousness,

01:09:23 and hoard it all yourself is like an inheritance

01:09:26 that has been growing for billions of years

01:09:28 or hundreds of millions of years.

01:09:30 You just squander it all yourself

01:09:32 and don't pay it at all forward.

01:09:33 It's kind of incomprehensible to me.

01:09:35 Again, if you have the possibility,

01:09:37 if you don't, you can do the goodbye Mr. Chips thing

01:09:39 and you can teach and help other kids

01:09:41 and then be part of life cycle that way.

01:09:44 But to just be selfish, hedonistic,

01:09:47 neither train nor teach nor mentor nor instruct

01:09:50 nor have children, I mean, it's like watching a snake

01:09:54 eating its own tail, thinking it's getting a meal.

01:09:57 - Let me magnify what you said about the clock

01:09:59 because I noticed that immediately.

01:10:00 I think it was a really great symbol that you used

01:10:05 because time is a concept that only matters to man, right?

01:10:09 Animals don't worry about it, plants.

01:10:12 The only creatures as far as we know in the universe

01:10:14 that are aware of time are human beings

01:10:17 and time is the problem, right?

01:10:19 Time is really the problem that we're talking about here.

01:10:22 The believer, the Christian, the person who believes

01:10:26 in something bigger than reality or materialism,

01:10:29 they have an answer to the question of time.

01:10:32 The great truths that we've received from God

01:10:34 are timeless, right?

01:10:36 We talk about how can you believe

01:10:39 this 2,000-year-old sky God because whatever else he was,

01:10:43 he gave us an argument that allowed us to defeat time.

01:10:48 There's an answer to time.

01:10:50 The God we worship is a God who created time.

01:10:53 He's not limited.

01:10:55 This is the problem with paganism, right?

01:10:57 And here's the thing, and I think I know you know this

01:10:59 because we've talked about it.

01:11:00 We're not filling the world by denying God,

01:11:03 monotheistic God, we are not creating more atheists.

01:11:07 We are repaganizing the world.

01:11:10 And the big problem with paganism is

01:11:12 all the gods of the pagans were trapped in time.

01:11:15 The Greek and Roman gods knew that they would be outlasted.

01:11:18 They replaced the Titans,

01:11:20 and they knew something was gonna replace them.

01:11:22 Odin in Norse mythology knew that the time

01:11:25 of the Norse gods was subjected to time,

01:11:29 that all the pagan gods,

01:11:31 including the new secular pagan gods,

01:11:33 you mentioned science.

01:11:35 Science is one of those pagan gods that you just mentioned.

01:11:40 And so consequently, paganism is bound by time.

01:11:45 God is, the monotheistic God liberates us from that,

01:11:50 and that's the difference.

01:11:53 Philosophically, it opens every door.

01:11:56 Without it, everything remains speculative,

01:12:01 even from the best reasoners that we've had in human history.

01:12:04 So basically then, the problem with time

01:12:06 is that there is no solving it.

01:12:09 That there is no way to solve it, right?

01:12:12 Even the pagan gods we've created bow before time.

01:12:16 But what we have in Christianity

01:12:18 and the monotheistic religions is an escape from time.

01:12:23 One psychiatrist, I can't think of his name,

01:12:26 I think it was Bruno Bettelheimer,

01:12:28 he said that all psychosis, all neurosis,

01:12:32 is nothing more than the human animal

01:12:36 having to come to grips with the fact

01:12:38 that it's the only animal knows

01:12:40 what time is going to do to it, right?

01:12:42 That if we were foxes and death for us

01:12:46 was five seconds in the jaws of the tiger,

01:12:50 well, we wouldn't worry about it.

01:12:51 There wouldn't be these psychological stresses,

01:12:54 but time provides that issue.

01:12:55 And one of the reasons I became a professor

01:12:57 of Renaissance literature,

01:12:59 of all the areas that I could have picked,

01:13:02 is because the period of Renaissance literature

01:13:06 is the most fascinating study of time.

01:13:11 If you read "The Fairy Queen" by Spencer,

01:13:13 you read "Milton's Paradise Lost,"

01:13:15 you read many of Shakespeare's plays,

01:13:17 over and over again, the great poets of the,

01:13:20 people like Hooker and John Donne,

01:13:25 they're deeply, deeply concerned with time.

01:13:28 How do we create, Shakespeare's sonnets,

01:13:31 how do we create a love that outlasts sickly time?

01:13:35 And that is the big modern problem.

01:13:37 And so the image that you had of Rachel breaking the clock

01:13:42 and literally turning a corner

01:13:44 had very, very metaphysical suggestions to me,

01:13:48 because what she was rejecting here

01:13:51 is the very limited worldview

01:13:53 that imprisoned her to begin with.

01:13:54 It was very nicely done.

01:13:56 - Nice.

01:13:56 And the last thing I wanted to mention,

01:13:57 this is people, I've got a lot of feedback

01:14:00 about the ending of the book,

01:14:01 because she says, "I'm here for Oliver."

01:14:06 And then you turn the page,

01:14:08 does the couple you've been now listening to

01:14:10 and reading about for a long time,

01:14:12 do they get together?

01:14:13 And you don't know.

01:14:15 Now, I think right choice, wrong choice,

01:14:17 a very conscious choice.

01:14:19 So I don't want it to be right for her to do what she do,

01:14:24 or do what she does if she gets the guy,

01:14:27 because that's consequentialism.

01:14:29 I'm then bribing women to do the right thing

01:14:32 by saying, "You get the hunkasaurus Christian guy,

01:14:34 who's gonna save you in a world of chaos and decay."

01:14:37 Right, so what matters is that she wills,

01:14:41 chooses, abandons vanity, and stops lying.

01:14:46 Now, whether she gets the guy or not doesn't matter.

01:14:50 It doesn't matter, because if you say,

01:14:53 "Well, I'll do the right thing

01:14:55 in order to get a good effect,"

01:14:57 that's not doing, I mean, this is back to count, right?

01:14:59 I mean, if you get some personal benefit

01:15:01 out of doing the right thing,

01:15:02 then you're not aiming for morals,

01:15:04 you're aiming for a benefit.

01:15:06 And so, I mean, in my view, she gets the guy,

01:15:09 but I didn't want to write the scene about that

01:15:11 where he enfolds her in his arms, you know, Fabio style,

01:15:14 and it all works out and so on,

01:15:16 because that's to bribe people with a positive outcome,

01:15:20 and that's why they should do the right thing.

01:15:22 So to me, the story is that she gets there and says,

01:15:26 "I'm here for love.

01:15:28 I'm here for pair bonding.

01:15:29 I'm here out of passion.

01:15:31 I'm here out of honesty.

01:15:33 I'm here out of authenticity."

01:15:35 What comes out of that?

01:15:37 You know, my entire career has been,

01:15:39 regardless of consequences,

01:15:40 I'm gonna tell the truth as far as I see fit.

01:15:42 And, you know, I've alienated Christians in the past,

01:15:45 now I'm alienating atheists, I've been deplatformed,

01:15:47 and it's like, because if I was working

01:15:49 for consequentialism, I'm not a philosopher,

01:15:51 'cause the whole purpose is to tell the truth.

01:15:53 You know, this is how I was raised.

01:15:54 I mean, and, you know, I take a little bit of,

01:15:56 you know, moral praise for the integrity,

01:16:00 but I was raised like, "Thou shalt not bear false witness,"

01:16:03 and tell the truth and shame the devil

01:16:05 was another thing that was really deep for me.

01:16:07 And there was another thing which really

01:16:09 rejected consequentialism that I was raised with,

01:16:11 was tell the truth though the skies fall.

01:16:15 Tell the truth though the skies fall.

01:16:17 To heck with consequentialism, it's the virtue that matters.

01:16:21 And when you get out of consequentialism,

01:16:23 you get out of time, because time is calculation

01:16:26 of benefits, short or long-term,

01:16:29 whereas telling the truth is an eternal act of virtue

01:16:32 that has to exist independent of time,

01:16:33 'cause the moment you start calculating time,

01:16:35 then you've gotta start self-censoring

01:16:37 for fear of negative consequences,

01:16:38 and then you're back in the cuckoo clock

01:16:40 that Rachel smashes.

01:16:41 - Yeah, and I like the ending.

01:16:43 You think about how many great works of literature

01:16:45 end that way.

01:16:47 Think about Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure,"

01:16:49 where she's got to make a choice,

01:16:51 but you don't know what choice she's gonna make.

01:16:53 The Brothers Karamazov ends that way.

01:16:56 So I think, go back to my comment about free will,

01:16:59 which is one of those things that really defies

01:17:03 the atheist, secularist position.

01:17:07 I tell this to my university kids.

01:17:09 Isn't it interesting that the farther

01:17:11 biological science goes, the more it insists

01:17:14 that we don't have free will?

01:17:15 Now we're processed, our biology, our genes,

01:17:18 our genetics, our chromosomes.

01:17:20 Now you not only do you have scientific determinism,

01:17:23 you also have cultural determinism.

01:17:26 What little freedom that may be left, right?

01:17:29 Your environment, your education,

01:17:33 your economic circumstances, social determinism

01:17:37 swallows up any free will you might have had.

01:17:40 And so the more science progresses,

01:17:42 the more it tells us we're just animals.

01:17:45 And civilization tells us, no, we are least like animals

01:17:50 than we ever have been in our civilizations,

01:17:53 our creations, our ability to replicate life,

01:17:56 to create life in test tubes, to get to the moon.

01:18:01 So it comes back again to me at the end of your book.

01:18:06 It's a great act of free will that breaks Rachel free

01:18:09 from the box of materialism.

01:18:12 And at the end of the book, she's left with the choice.

01:18:15 We don't need to know what happens then

01:18:18 because the resolution is not the hug or the kiss

01:18:21 or the marriage or the baby.

01:18:23 The denouement, as far as I read your book, is that choice.

01:18:28 So I think it's a nice place to end it, right?

01:18:31 - Beautiful. - It could go anywhere,

01:18:33 but choice is the key.

01:18:34 - Well, I appreciate that.

01:18:35 And I, of course, encourage people to check out the book.

01:18:40 You can get it at freedomain.com/books

01:18:43 and just scroll down to the fiction sections,

01:18:44 a whole bunch of books there.

01:18:46 It's free, it's a Mobi and EPUB format.

01:18:49 The audio book is free and I hope that people will,

01:18:53 you know, my original training was as a writer.

01:18:55 I was a playwright and I've written a bunch of novels.

01:18:58 The philosophy stuff came later

01:19:01 because I couldn't quite figure out

01:19:02 why novels I considered pretty good

01:19:04 were having a tough time getting published.

01:19:05 And then it's like, oh, that's right.

01:19:07 The leftists are in control of the means of production,

01:19:10 so to speak.

01:19:11 So that's why I went the philosophical route,

01:19:12 which I think was better for the world in the long run,

01:19:15 but I've never lost that love of novels.

01:19:17 And the great thing about writing novels

01:19:19 is you are so close to the characters

01:19:21 that you know them so well and it's a really intimate,

01:19:25 it's a kind of weird, intimate kind of thing.

01:19:27 So I hope that people would check out the novels.

01:19:28 Also wanted to mention, of course, fpeusa.com

01:19:32 if you wanted to mention to my listeners

01:19:33 the work that you're doing as well.

01:19:36 - Thank you and we are Freedom Project Media,

01:19:39 Freedom Project Academy, fpeusa.org.

01:19:43 Check us out if you're looking for a good way

01:19:44 to educate your kid or to help you partner,

01:19:47 educate your children.

01:19:49 And I wanna close by saying what I really like

01:19:52 about what you've done is you've taken a lot of thought

01:19:55 and you've crafted it into art that still thinks.

01:20:00 And that to me is the mark of a novelist,

01:20:04 not just a teacher, using tropes, right?

01:20:08 Plato's a great thinker, but his dialogue,

01:20:12 his stilted dialogue is kind of transparent.

01:20:15 You've told a story and it's storytelling ultimately

01:20:20 is the way that people who aren't logical thinkers learn.

01:20:24 Taking philosophical ideas, giving them exciting stories

01:20:28 that are interesting, that's what the,

01:20:31 that's why I think the novelist, at the end of day,

01:20:34 at the end of the day, the novelist is more important

01:20:36 than the philosopher because he gives the philosophy

01:20:42 with that teaspoon of sugar that everybody can swallow,

01:20:46 not just the philosophical minded.

01:20:49 That's why I became an English professor, not a philosopher.

01:20:52 So I appreciate that in what you've done

01:20:54 and thanks for this talk today.

01:20:55 I too urge your audience, please get a copy of "The Present".

01:20:59 Download it, read it.

01:21:00 I think if you do, if this is the first book of yours

01:21:03 that people read, I know they're gonna wanna read more.

01:21:05 So I hope that happens.

01:21:07 - Yeah, I appreciate that.

01:21:08 And thanks a lot for your time today.

01:21:10 It's always a great pleasure.

01:21:12 and a really fascinating experience to talk about something I wrote.

01:21:14 So I really appreciate that.

'The Present' - Stefan Molyneux in Conversation with Dr Duke Pesta

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