James Lindsay [00:00:00]:

So a big dividing line here is going to be tribe versus truth. If you care more about tribe than you care about truth, you're in a dangerous place. Because a hallmark of this collective or of this woke thing or the gnostic thing is collectivist. It's not just that you have a critical view of what's going on or that you perceive that there is a power structure that's acting illegitimately, that is intrinsically collectivist. And traditional conservatives tend not to be. They tend to favor tradition, favorite favor that which is closer to them. Be that, you know, family, nation, or sorry, family, community or nation or even faith. But at the same time, they think for themselves still. Right? They don't just inherit their ideas from other people and run around and think the people on our side are automatically good and the people on the other side are automatically bad.

Will Spencer [00:01:00]:

Hello and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast. This is a weekly interview show where we sit down and talk with authors, thought leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world. New episodes release every Friday. My guest this week is James Lindsay. James is an American born author, mathematician and professional troublemaker. He has written six books spanning a range of subjects including religion, the philosophy of science, and postmodern theory. He is a leading expert on critical race theory, which leads him to reject it completely. And he's the founder of New Discourses and is the co author of the new book the Queering of the American How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids. James Lindsley, welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.

James Lindsay [00:01:41]:

Hey, thank you very much.

Will Spencer [00:01:43]:

So a couple Years ago in 2023, you delivered a series of lectures called the Secret Religions of the West. And I found that series of lectures to be profound and inspiring and sort of eye opening to a lot of things that are going on. And in fact, they're more relevant today. So I've been looking forward to this conversation to get into that series of lectures.

James Lindsay [00:02:02]:

Well, thank you. It's kind of exciting. We talked about this briefly before we hit record, but you said that it could constitute something of a book. Actually, for a long time before those lectures, I wanted to write a book and I wanted to title it the Three Religions of the west or the Secret Religions of the West. And I wanted to talk about how we have the Judeo Christian tradition and we have the kind of secular reason based tradition that's two. That's like the handshake between Jerusalem and Athens, so to speak. Ben Shapiro has put it in the past. And then you have this Other thing, this mysticism that's been running a current all the way through, usually disguising itself sometimes as theology, other times as philosophy. So it can play in both of those two domains, reason and faith, and do what mysticism always does, which is create cults and cause mayhem. And it's just one of those things, you know. Of course we know that Satan is the enemy, but time is also the enemy. And so having the time to sit down and write this very deep, honestly difficult to do right book just has never really occurred. And so these lectures you brought up were sort of my. And that we're going to talk about today are sort of my, like, you know, well, you know, we're not going to get. We're not going to get the first down, so let's throw the punt and let's at least get some of the information out there.

Will Spencer [00:03:24]:

Yes, and I think that just right there, you already presented the framework that the entire series of lectures are based upon. You have faith and reason as the guiding traditions of the West. But then you have this third thing that's sort of been running in the undercurrent of both of those, and that's Gnosticism, and that has. And I think the premise of the lectures is Gnosticism is having a greater impact on our world today than I think people recognize.

James Lindsay [00:03:50]:

That's right. That's right.

Will Spencer [00:03:52]:

So let's back up for just a second because I think this conversation is really interesting for another reason. And I want to talk a little bit about your background, because you just put out the podcast, the Woke, Right, New Atheists, or the Maga, as the Woke, Right, something like that. I'm butchering the title. Absolutely.

James Lindsay [00:04:09]:

The Woke, right, is the New Atheist of maga.

Will Spencer [00:04:12]:

Bingo. And so what I think is interesting about that is that you talk about your background, having grown up Catholic, having explored a lot of Eastern mystical traditions, you know, Daoism, Buddhism when you were in college, and then rejecting that for new atheism, which you then repented of. And what's interesting is that I went through something very similar at the same time in the late 90s. Eastern mysticism, religions of the world, things like that. But then I went the other direction, into the pretty hard, into the new age. And so now here we are crossing paths many years later. So maybe you can talk a little bit about your background that you established in the, in the, in that particular podcast.

James Lindsay [00:04:46]:

Yeah, well, like, like I said, I grew up Catholic, and this is. I always joked that I made a deal with the devil. I Don't know if that's a funny joke anymore, but.

Will Spencer [00:04:55]:

No, it's definitely not.

James Lindsay [00:04:56]:

But my deal, when I was 8 years old, so my dad came to me once. I don't know if you've been to Catholic Church or not, but nothing. I went to Catholic high school, okay? Nothing about mass except that it's not fun for kids. Mass is not organized for children, okay? And so I went to, rather begrudgingly with my parents as a child, and I hated it. And I put up a huge fight about it every Sunday morning, as many kids do. I mean, there's even a saying that's very also not appropriate anymore, which was, I got beat once a day and twice on Sunday. And everybody knows why you got the extra one on Sunday. It's because you misbehaved at church. And so I put up the fight every Sunday. And when I was 8 or 9 years old, right around when I got my first communion, my dad came to me one day and said, if you go to Sunday school and you go to mass every Sunday without fighting until you're confirmed, when you're confirmed, you're an adult in the church and you can choose whether you go or not. And I, at like 8 or 9 years old, long gamed my dad. I was like, deal. And so I did. I kept my end of the bargain for four years or whatever it was. I got confirmed right before my 13th birthday. Being very creative, I chose my confirmation name as James, which, you know, put a lot of work and thought into that. And then I immediately, the next week, my dad knocks on the door and he says, are you ready to go to church? And I haven't missed church in four years for no reason, cheerfully go every week. And I'm like, I'm not going. And he says, well, why not? I'm like, well, you said, I'm an adult in the church when I get confirmed and I'm never going to go again. And my dad knew he had been bested by my brother, started throwing a fit because he had to go and I didn't. And it was like the most exciting day ever. And. But I played that game. I did not enjoy being Catholic as a child. I don't know how I would have looked at it as an adult, because I never got there. And so I kind of just generically was Christian through my teenage years in the kind of detached American way that a lot of people are. Culturally, Christian isn't really a thing, but it's really what it is. And so then I went off to College. My roommate's dad was a Presbyterian minister. And so he and I did a lot of, you know, I had no opposition to the Bible. We did a lot of Bible reading together and individually we talked about it. We organized. I became chaplain. I joined a fraternity and became chaplain of my fraternity in my second year. So I was chaplain for three years. I got reelected every year I was there. I led Bible studies. Led to. Actually, there was the one that me and my roommate did that was our own kind of, you know, what I guess, small group or whatever, where we were trying to do it on our own. And then in. For one year, we brought in a professor, a chemistry professor who is a evangelical of some type. I don't know what his denomination was for sure, looking back at it. And we had him lead a second Bible study. So we did two a week. And the one with the professor turned out to be very unpopular because he had a very kind of, to our recollection, strange and strict theology that either didn't mesh with our fraternity boy ways or was actually weird. I don't know, in reflection. But as. As you pointed out, at the same time, I had been studying martial arts and I was, you know, as a lot of people who study martial arts, do you start getting interested in Eastern traditions? So I started looking into Buddhism. A friend of mine in the fraternity gave me a copy of the Analects of Buddha. So I read that and I found it interesting, but not what I was interested in. And I had always been kind of interested in Daoism. So I picked up a copy of the Tao Te Ching and read that, you know, in my spare time on the fraternity house lawn. And I don't know what I did and didn't get out of it. I just figured out that this guy is majorly a libertarian. And there is. I liked this concept of the way, you know, being the kind of the issuing of the extremes of opposites and trying to live your life. The Taoist principle, which I still kind of uphold, honestly, if you had to name what it is, is go according to the situation. Now, a Christian is going to recoil to that because. And I don't think necessarily that they need to, because I think being righteous in the situation is going according to the situation as well. But you do have to accord yourself with the situation and do the best that you can with it. And that's what the dao is. It's actually being righteous. The de in Dao Te Ching is virtue. So it's the virtue of the way. So you' Got to be virtuous as you follow the path that Christians would call providence. So they're not commensurate. I'm not trying to mix them together. I used to read this Christian guy who did try to mix them together and tried to say that Christ was the dao. And I thought that was just crackpot. But eventually, honestly, I got pissed off over. It's sad, but it's actually the church channel cbn. Is that what it's called? It used to be called TBN or something like that. Anyway, I think it was TBN at the time. I don't know what that stood for anymore, but my brother and I derisively called it the Baptist Network, But I think it was not that. I think it was Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Will Spencer [00:10:07]:

I think that's.

James Lindsay [00:10:09]:

Yeah. And so those people who. I'm not gonna lie, I kind of think that was a psyops against genuine Christianity to make Christians look crazy in the American public, but that it worked on me. I was pissed off. I had grown up, of course, Catholic, which meant that I got kind of religious abuse from the Protestants that I grew up around in East Tennessee, which there was almost no Catholics or very few of us, So I was not very warm to these things anyway. But there was a strong Southern tradition that if you don't go to church, you're not really a person. And I rebelled against that. And these crackpots on the TV were just making me angry as I kind of grew into an adult view of the world. And I was like, you know what? I don't actually believe any of this. Now, here's a part of the story I don't know if I told. A lot of people don't know this, and I don't usually drag my kids into it, but my kids were actually like. We tried to make them believe in God, and they just wouldn't. They just absolutely would not. Where they got it, we have no idea. We don't know what media. We don't think it was. It certainly wasn't the schools here in East Tennessee. We have no idea where they got this, but they were adamant about this. And so, in a sense, they became the permission structure by which I was just like, you know what? I don't actually believe this either. And then I kind of went head over heels with it. As I said at the time, even a lot of people, when they're involved in something that they don't. That they feel like is kind of repressing or oppressing them, and I felt repressed, not oppressed because I couldn't speak just plainly. If I wanted to bring up evolution, it was going to be a bellyache for half an hour before I could talk about anything or whatever. A lot of people when they feel that way and they get out, turn around, as I phrased it, and throw rocks at the cathedral. So I got caught up in this current of the new atheism. I finally. A friend of mine had given me a copy of the God Delusion, and when he brought it over to my house, I wouldn't touch it. My wife actually had to put it on the bookshelf because I wouldn't even touch the evil book. And I wasn't exactly a professing Christian at the time, but this is kind of, you know, I was like, that's wrong, you know. And then I finally picked it up and I read it and I thought Dawkins was glib and derisive in certain places, but I also thought he made some really good points in other places. Then I basically consumed the canon, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, the whole thing. And I was like, these guys are making a lot of sense. I can finally find people I can talk to. You get the whole social and emotional aspect. And I got involved in writing about new Atheism and trying. I never actually went to a New Atheist conference, but I started working with a lot of the people who did. I never quite got big enough in it. It was just this stupid little dilettante. And I thought I'd just start my life out in that regard by writing a book which I called God Doesn't We do it got described by a Marxist leftist atheist as the. I got described as the Karl Marx of New Athe. Writing that book, I had no idea why, but the title actually tells you the answer. We don't need to rely on God to solve our problems. We can come together and basically form a socialist program that can solve all of our problems for us, you know. But I wasn't an outright socialist and I was certainly an anti Marxist though, so I didn't believe that. I believed that we should have bigger and more government, but not. Which is stupid on reflection. But not a socialist government that does everything for us. I didn't even go as far as the Nordic countries, as a lot of people kind of have as a way station. I was like, that's a little too much taxes at 60% effective tax rate, it's too high. But I did believe in a, you know, solid tax base, a progressive tax structure and a bigger government that could incorporate to Solve problems. And that's basically what the book is about. So it got me branded the Karl Marx of New Atheism by a lunatic, which nobody took seriously anyway. And so eventually that all started to fall apart. Basically it got attacked by a splinter group that was social justice oriented within the broader New Atheist movement. In the podcast I discuss an important fact, that there were always two movements. One more rationalist and one that was more just angry about Christian oppression or repression, depending on how they saw it. A lot of women, a lot of gays, and a lot of people who grew up in unpleasant fundamentalist homes who are turning around and throwing every rock they can pick up doing a critical theory of religion or critical religion theory. And these two branches were not distinct enough. They were very symbiotic off of each other. And eventually the social justice branch branded itself Atheism plus and killed the host and killed, took over the whole movement, killed all the conference structure, made everything poisonous and it gave a launching pad to a few people, but not a lot of people. And this kind of broader social justice warrior movement, I think it set a lot of the motif for like the blog networks and all of the ways that they would abuse people online. But they never real. None of these people ever actually became prominent as, you know, woke leftists that I can even think of. I mean we knew they were woke, but they were niche woke up. They weren't like the big names like Ibram Kendi or Robin d' Angelo or any of that kind of thing. So anyway, looking back in 2013 or 14, it dies by 15, by 13 or 14 I got involved in 12, so 11 or 12. So I wasn't that long involved in this. I threw my rocks at the cathedral for a while. By 13, midway about two years, about how long it takes say the detransitioners to say it takes them to deprogram from there issues. I decided that, you know, this whole argument about the existence of God, the philosophy of religion, the theology, is actually kind of just a circle that never ends. You can't resolve these issues by arguments and nobody ever will. So what's more interesting is the psychology behind it. So I started to study the psychology of religion using rigorous textbooks that would be taught in, you know, graduate level programs in psychology. And I wrote a book, eventually it published, I wrote in 14, but it published in 15 called Everybody is wrong about God where I just lay out that God is a mythological structure that indicates these psychological and social features that people need in order to, you know, ground themselves in meaning making A sense of control and other stuff. I forgot all I've written without going back to look at it. And that was honestly two of the chapters in that are like, the complete break from atheism. And the atheism is corrupted by this social justice crap. And, like, I'm very clear that, like, atheism is cringe. By 2014, when I wrote the book again, it came out, and I think I submitted it 10 months before it came out. So, you know, by 14, 2014, I'm like, atheism is cringe. And I just kind of. I mean, I kept a foot in the canoe for a while. You know, as you do, as you get out of the boat, one foot's in the boat, one foot's on the dock for a while. And granted, when you're getting out of a boat, it's not very long, but you get the metaphor. And so eventually I started working a lot with Christians. I realized that a lot of what I had been told about Christians through the atheist stuff was total bullcrap. And same thing happened working with conservatives. The first time I went to cpac, I expected it to be this kind of like, clan rally. I don't know why I thought that. And it totally was the opposite. It's just nerdy political people, but across the, you know, gamut, whether it's race or sex or whatever, and a lot of political variation to a lot of conspiracy theories as well. And so anyway, I was really shocked and surprised. I realized I'd been lied to. And so I began kind of purposefully working with a lot of evangelicals, in particular fewer Catholics. But I wasn't closed off to it. It's just who was inviting me, sat down for a long conversation. It turns out that the microphones fritzed, so it never came out with Bishop Robert Barron at one point. So I did have some Catholic interface. And as far as I know, I'm still on friendly terms with them. But at any rate, I came to think, well, if I'm going to spend a lot of time with Christians, I want to hear them. I want to hear what they're saying. I want to understand how they think about things on their terms. I want to understand a scripture. Let's read some of the scripture again more frequently. Then I started getting a lot more serious, serious about it. But I refused at any point to be dishonest about what I believe. I did publicly repent. I said, throwing rocks at the cathedral. I had, you know, issues based on the way that I grew up and the stuff I saw on TV and I threw a fit and it, you know, seemed cool at the time and wasn't cool, it was cringe. And so I've repented of that. I don't know how many times publicly I have to kind of go through this little ritual Every time a Christian invites me anywhere to go speak now where I have to go through. It's like a little ritual where I admit, no, I think it's stupid now and we can't just move on to the subject. But yeah, so that's kind of this like journey. And I've become extremely warm to the point where I did an interview in February with Justin Brierly, who does an apologetics kind of debate podcast. I did, I did a conversation with him, or I even am saying I think that the Bible is anthropologically true. I don't know if it's ontologically true, but I think that at least is the most valuable guide to how to organize an individual life and a society if you want to have a successful society. Of course, like anything, it can go wrong. That's why I have this argument that, you know, we need the handshake of faith and reason in order to overcome where faith can get excessive. Where you start to have basically cults where people say, oh no, God told me this, so we have to go do some crazy thing. Well, reason says, maybe not right? Maybe that's not what that was. Maybe, maybe you thought that up yourself and decided that God told you so that everybody has to listen to you or something. Or maybe you had an episode or who knows? There are lots of cases of people who have verifiable forms of epilepsy, for example, that cause them to have visions and they think that they're veridical, but probably they're not veridical. They're probably weird brain activity. And these people have frequently been the basis for cults. We also know that there are charlatans who come up with entire, you know, self serving cult religious splinters using the Bible as a basis and go off and create the entire thing. So reason says, hold on, buddy, you know, we need. What would reason say about faith? We need rigorous, thorough, originalist exegesis of the scriptural texts to understand what was intended about the belief when it was written by the people who are articulating what it is that you're supposed to believe. And all of these kind of eisegetical or hermeneutical lenses that you start applying to it need to be regarded at least with, you know, sincere skepticism and caution, lest we trip into mysticism. And the same thing's true on the reason side of things. Like the atheist movement, it was always a critical religion theory, but it also just went bonkers into a. Actually what the critical theorists call a what, what he calls what they called the dialectic of enlightenment, where reason becomes unreasoned by becoming dogmatic. You know, they became scientistic is the right word, but not even scientistic. They left the scientistic plantation and went all the way social justice. They went straight commie. And so that, I mean, scientism, that went to whatever the hell, Lysenkoism, I guess. And so anyway, I look back at all that and I'm like, the atheist people are missing the core of what it is to have faith, which is something I literally think about all the time now. And the religious people need to ground themselves not just on their faith, but also on reason or on truth. Like, in my opinion, John 1 indicates that Christ is a logos. And logos means an intelligible ordered world, if it means anything in the original Greek, aside from what's in John. Therefore there has to be reason involved because that's, I mean, logos is the root word for logic. I mean, it's got to be there.

Will Spencer [00:22:35]:

So there's so much great stuff in there. And I'm so glad that you laid all that out, because I think what's important to highlight is that the positions that you're taking, the things that you're saying today, as in today in 2025, are not just a bunch of academic ideas that you come up with. They're derived from a life time of journeying through the worlds of reason and the worlds of faith, and then also in a sense, through the world of Gnosticism, through your study of Marx and Hegel and all that which we'll get into. So I think that it's really important in the moment that what we're seeing, what people are seeing when they're listening to you today, is not just some ideas that you're kicking around. It's 20 plus more 30 years of experience that you've put into a perspective that now seems more urgent than ever.

James Lindsay [00:23:16]:

Which includes a brief stint. And even while we were doing the Bible studies in the college, I mentioned reading Buddhism and Taoism, but I read some New Age stuff too, and I thought it was really compelling. It's actually very inspiring. Not to draw an inappropriate comparison, but in kind of the same way that the Spirit inspires charismatics, it's like this weird, twisted theosophical spirit lights you on Fire when you get pulled into that. And luckily, I realized not very far down the New Age road that it was kind of crackpot, that I've always had this really strong aversion, frankly, to hippies. And I've just coded it as too hippie. I couldn't stand hippies for some reason, basically, ever. So I coded it that way. And it kept me from going too far into the. Into the nonsense. But what the nonsense is, is not nonsense. It's awakening to what they call a Christ consciousness, which is. I mean, we can go real deep on what a Christ consciousness is, but it's. Yeah, absolutely not Christian is what it is the first place. And it's this esoteric, mystic, mystical stuff. So I had a point where I dabbled in that as well. And, you know, it's again, when you get out of the boat, your foot stays in it for a little while, even while the other one gets on the dock. So for a little while, there was just this. Through my 20s, there's just this mishmash of theological and theosophical and scientific ideas. In other words, those three worlds just kind of swimming around. So I have direct contact, for good or for ill, with all three of these worlds. I didn't take the theological world seriously properly as an adult until much more recently. The scientific world was always my anchor. But the theosophical really had a draw on me. And I think I'm fortunate that I didn't get pulled in too deeply. I have friends who actually did get pulled in very deeply into that. And they're effectively crazy now. Like, I know people who, you know, they went down this road they thought they were going, whether it's. I mean, honestly, I read Ken Wilber a long time ago, which is the spiral dynamics thing. And I know people who got pulled into Ken Wilber so far that they ended up attempting suicide several times in a row because they just can't clear the next level or whatever in his program. So they turn around and think something must be spiritually defective about themselves. And it's just. Just really dark stuff. But, I mean, I read all that stuff 20 years ago and found it at least intriguing, if not, you know, inspiring in certain ways. So I have a taste of that as well, unfortunately, or fortunately, maybe.

Will Spencer [00:25:54]:

Yeah. Well, what's interesting about the difference in our life paths is the scientific path was your anchor. I went hard into the theological and sort of theosophical path. That was the road that I walked and that God ultimately led me out of. In fact, you write A lot about the snake swallowing its tail. I have this tattooed on my arm. You can't really see it just because of the angle, but I have a tattoo of a snake swallowing his tail in the shape of a figure eight on my arm. And I have an ayahuasca vine on this arm. Like, that was my life for a very long time. And so as you talk about these gnostic concepts, like, that was what I lived. I got delivered from it, praise God. But as you talk about these concepts in your lectures, like, okay, he's really got it. And I think what's interesting about this moment is these concepts are now surfacing in the lives of everyday Americans, people in the West. Just the powerful influence that they have over our institutions, that they have over people's minds. The Gnostic parasite as having latched on to both faith and reason at different touch points. And this is why the path that you've walked to discover these things matters so much, and it's why I wanted to start there, that again, these aren't academic concepts. These are things that you've seen and read and experienced with your own eyes, like they are with me.

James Lindsay [00:27:04]:

Yeah, they're everywhere. I mean, my broad. I'm trying to figure out which of two things to say. I'll say the less important one that maybe has more impact. But like, for example, a lot of people just don't realize that not only is a ton of our entertainment media based off of these gnostic principles and concepts, but like the Oprah Winfrey show, which was enormously influential for 30 years over huge numbers of moms in this country, is a vehicle for delivering something called New Thought to the public. Most of the kind of big religious sounding. They're not religious, they're theosophical voices that Oprah had on her show over and over and over and over again are actually what are called New Thought leaders. They're the leaders of a new age cult religion called New Thought, which I'm absolutely certain that Oprah Winfrey subscribes to. I'm pretty certain that they had the mechanisms and means to build her show to the point where she became a billionaire because she was the vehicle for bringing new thought into our society. So we are utterly saturated with this mysticism at this point. The other thing that I wanted to say is that my thesis ultimately comes down to this idea, the secret religions of the west, that at the dawn of the modern era, which is a fuzzy thing itself, I don't mean modernism as a form of art or politics or philosophy. I Mean the modern era, which stretches back to the end of the medieval era. It kind of is marked by the Reformation, it's marked by the Enlightenments. And I say that very distinctly. Enlightenment plural. There are more than one Enlightenment. The French Enlightenment, the German Enlightenment and the English Enlightenment, for example, with a side shot of the Scottish Enlightenment are not the same things. They had had fundamentally different commitments and they sprawled in some sense from the late 1300s all the way into the early 1800s. So this is a very complicated. And when people, you know, you hear a lot of people come out and say, well, the Enlightenment is ruined. Everything Enlightenment thought, what it's like, what are you talking about? This is like a ton of movements sprawling over a continent over 500 years. Like, which things are you specifically talking about? Because a lot of it was shot through and inspired by mysticism. You might even count the Renaissance as part of this. This was all heavily inspired by mysticism that had been brought in through Marsilio Ficino in Italy. I always mess up his name, but he ended up somehow getting a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum, which is the bible for the hermetic cult. And he. Well, most of it, it's in 17 books and there are only 14 that survive. And we know that there are 17 because the last one that does survive is numbered 17 and it says it's the last one. So he ends up translating this into Latin and spreading it all over Europe, or his benefactor spreads it all over Europe. So there was a huge infusion of mysticism that inspired all this kind of return to all this art and this return to different kinds of thinking and lots of philosophical exploration. This gave rise to ideal and romanticism down the track. But my essential thesis is that we can kind of put a pin in Rousseau and Jean Jacques Rousseau as kind of this, you know, epoch defining voice. And this is French Enlightenment. Right? This is different than say Scottish Enlightenment. In fact, Hume being part of the Scottish Enlightenment, whether you agree with Hume or not, was in a huge fight with Rousseau. They didn't agree about a ton of stuff. In fact, I low key suspect it was a lover's spat, but I won't get into that. I just kind of get the vibe. Right. And so Rousseau inaugurates basically, in my opinion, a new form of mysticism that has not been present up to that point. Which would be, we should call modern mysticism because it's indicative of the modern era. Okay, so pre modern mysticism is very magical. Spiritual alchemy, potions, ghosts, shards of the divine and all of this kind of the 1st century and 2nd century Gnostics, it's all just very spiritual. Well, the modern era is enormously less spiritual in a big way. And so it's much more material. And so now what we end up with is that the Gnostic motifs and the mystic and the occult motifs no longer get interpreted through actual spiritual forces, but get interpreted through socio spiritual forces. In other words, sociology becomes a replacement for the spirit world. And I call this socio Gnosticism because it's. Or social Gnosticism or sociological Gnosticism. Does all three mean the same thing? I don't care which term we use. This is kind of new terminology. And these, this comes in and when people say the enlightenment thinking was the problem, they're mostly talking about this. They're mostly talking about the infusion of a sociological gnosticism or mysticism into continental philosophy. And that's Rousseau, that's the German idealists, many of whom followed Rousseau. And something completely different happened in Scotland, which ended up inspiring America. Of course, Rousseau inspires the French Revolution. A lot of the American founders witnessed the French Revolution just after we had put our own country together. And they're like, not that way Western man. And so they, they codified kind of anti Rousseau in, or anti, if you want to be strict about it, continental enlightenment themes in the American experiment. So this is why this is like there needs to be the three religions of the west, because the American experiment was based off of how do we mix faith and reason. And the continent went off into romanticism, idealism, and all these forms of social gnosticism as a form of transformational mysticism to ultimately all of them have the same goal, whether it's the new thought on Oprah Winfrey or whether it's Karl Marx or Jean Jacques Rousseau, which is that there's an ideal state of man, an ideal state of society waiting for us. And we have to arrange circumstances to drag everybody to higher spiritual levels so that we can achieve it. We've got to break free of the current level in which we are trapped by illegitimate forces which the original Gnostics would have called the demiurge and identified with Yahweh in the garden in Genesis, I guess three, that is two and three. It's one through three really. Because it's the creator God, they say, nope, the fake, fake creator. Demiurge means artisan who builds things. So he built a fake world, denying our true spirituality. And when we tried to discover our true spirituality by eating of the fruit, he was like, oh hell no. And kicked us out into an even worse prison of being where we're going to suffer, have to live by the toil of our brow, et cetera. And so this same motif, it's now whether it's the bourgeoisie, whether it's the white supremacists or whatever, control society, this is the motif that I see having spread through this social Gnostic. But the real goal isn't to talk about the demiurge or to become the demiurge as I actually think they want. It's to complete man and complete society. In other words, it's to facilitate our return back to Eden on our own terms and open defiance of God. Rousseau called it savages made to live in cities. This was handed on to Schiller who called it Alfheben in German, which means to abolish, to keep and to lift up to a higher level of understanding. And that's the basis for Hegel's thought was this concept of Alfheben and how everything is to transform. And that's where Marx got his idea that communism is the positive transcendence of private property as human self estrangement and thus a complete return of man to himself as a social, which is to say human being. How are you returning to yourself through positive transcendence? You're keeping what it means to be man while abolishing the false aspects of our experience through private property, while raising to a higher level of what it means to live with one another that is indicative of the primitives who now get to live in cities. It's the same exact model. And I thought, holy crap, this is just this weird blend. And it kind of veers one way or the other, depending on who we're looking at of Gnostic thinking or Hermetic thinking. And that reflects very heavily back to the first century cults of the Manicheans being very Gnostic and the Sethians having incorporated more of the Zoroastrian and Hermetic traditions into their Gnosticism, it's more transformational. And so, you know, Gnostic is escape the prison of being. Hermetic is transform ourselves to escape the prison of being, or to realize that the prison of being is not real. And that's where Christ consciousness actually comes in. It's the eighth level, which is the level that it's Homath says he's on in Ken Wilber's structure, but he can't break through to the 9th.

Will Spencer [00:36:26]:

Okay. There is so much, so much in there that is so super important. So I want to start pulling out pieces. Because what you've described is, as far as I can tell, a grand narrative of history. I don't mean the Marxist sense, but a sense of you have this underground religion that has existed throughout the west in various forms for a couple thousand years, going back to the Gnostics, the Gnostic heresy. And that had a mystical character up until around the Reformation, the Enlightenment, maybe the Renaissance. And then during the Enlightenments plural, this mystical character took on social characteristics, meaning they stopped worrying about spirits and they stopped worrying about punching through to different levels of consciousness. Instead, they wanted to transform material reality or the social conditions of the world. So Gnosticism adapted itself to the changing societal conditions. And there's a thread of thinkers that this weaves through. So just real quick, when I start talking about these things, I find that people have trouble believing that it's real. When you start trying to explain to people the notions of Gnosticism and just how these secular religions are real things, people's eyes kind of glaze over. And in your lectures you mentioned this book, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, which I ordered on Amazon. And I just started reading the first few pages just last night, just to kind of get a feel of it. And just the first 10, 15, 20 pages are shot through with just how hermetic, just how gnostic, just how secret religions Hegel is. And we're used to hearing about Hegel in this sociopolitical kind of vein, but he was bringing down Gnostic and hermetic traditions into social theory, which again is the point that you're making, that these big spiritual ideas were adapted to social concepts and now they're hiding in plain sight among us, that we think that there's social political theories, but really they're informed by something much deeper. Do I have that right?

James Lindsay [00:38:20]:

Yeah. I got to add one thing with Hegel, which is that Hegel didn't just make it into like with philosophy of Right. He was talking about a political theory, maybe a sociopolitical theory, and then like philosophy of logic and encyclopedia logic, he's actually talking about, effectively epistemology. It's infusing it into epistemology. But more importantly, what Hegel did that often gets missed is that he following people like Swedenborg hammered it into Christianity. So he hammered it into the idea of Christian motifs, which of course Marx picked up but rejected, with Feuerbach being the guy in between, Feuerbach being the grand materialist that informed Marx. A lot of Christians miss this, particularly because they think of materialism as meaning. There is no God, everything's just a material world. But there's a second aspect of materialism that's called sociological materialism. And that's actually what you just described, is that the sociological material conditions replace the spiritual world, not rocks and dirt and trees. But the way that human beings interact with one another is actually the real world version of Spirit. And so Hegel actually had this same idea. This is what he called the Geist. And the Geist was actually kind of the spirit of the society that had been erected by the state, which had been erected in an image of the idea, the best that man could think of. He called, you know, the idea, the absolute idea was his stand in for God. And then it creates this trinity, which is the theoretical idea giving away to the practical idea, which is how you try to. The theoretical idea is your best guess about what the absolute idea is at this stage in history. And then the theory, the. The practical idea is how you try to implement that. And he said the state is a divine idea as it exists on earth. So that's the implementation of your best guess about what God is, becomes the state. And then that gives rise to a society. The organization of the state produces a society because of its, as Jordan Peterson would phrase it, its ground rules or base rules. And that society has a spirit that infuses throughout and for Hegel, the contradictions between the theoretical idea and the absolute idea, which show themselves in practice and look like contradictions between the theoretical idea, what you aspire to, and the practical idea, which is what you actually do, what you get as a conseque doing it, that those two, Those contradictions arise in the Spirit, and so that the Spirit then informs the grand transformation of the entire thing. So now the Trinity is not a static object of 3Co. = aspects of God. It is a process. It is no longer a being, but it is a process of becoming, which is that through the process of going around that wheel of revolution or triangle of revolution, which hold up the book again, look on the COVID the. The triangle of revolution of. Yeah, the triangle of revolution of society that eventually every time you go around and the contradictions emerge in the Spirit, you have a radical reconstitution of society and you have this political idea. But what's happening is that the new theoretical idea that emerges from the resolution of the contradictions through the Alfaben process closer approximates the divine idea. So you get closer and closer and closer to God. So the society itself, and thus the men within it are becoming, becoming godlike. And this is done Intentionally, in this three piece Christian motif, this trinitarian Christian motif, with a father in the idea, a son in the state and a spirit that flows forth from it in very intentional Christian motif. So what you have with Hegel is not just a poisoning of sociology and politics. You also have a poisoning of theology. Marx famously rejected the theology and replaced it with economics, which is much more material. He believed that people are materially determined by their economic and social conditions. That's how he opens the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He says that men make history, but they do not make it under conditions of their own choosing. So that's called material determinism. The circumstances of their birth, of the society when they're born, to limit what they can be, what they can understand, who they are. And the point is to drive the wheel around and around and around until you break free of it over and over and over again. Then when you break free enough times, you reach a high enough level, you have Christ consciousness now guiding your whole society. Now you're at a different level of existence. And this was actually Hegel's project. So you have this weird infusion also into theology as a process of becoming rather than as a voluntary pursuit of righteousness under the absolutely perfect and unchanging law of God, where you are becoming your own God, man in society becoming their own God by actualizing the divine idea on earth in accordance with the Lord's purpose, prayer, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And so they're like, yeah, okay, that's what we're going to do. We're going to force God's will to come to pass here. And so when you look at philosophy of right then and he look at his philosophy of what a righteous political order, which he lists as a constitutional monarchy as its form. When you look at philosophy of right, what you're actually seeing is that you a theological political project that's designed to transform man and society into a godlike state, which Christians recognize what that is. That's Lucifer, that's Antichrist.

Will Spencer [00:44:14]:

So I think the key point that you've made throughout all of them, and there are many of them, but the key point that you've made is that they're trying to actualize God on earth. But they have rejected categorically the God of the Bible. They have a completely different vision of God. God, what Dr. Peter Jones might call one ism, sort of an all is one. Ultimately, at the highest level of reality, they're trying to actualize that all is one God. On earth with themselves as. As its sort of high material priests.

James Lindsay [00:44:40]:

Yeah, that's right. That's. That's exactly right. And again, we can talk about Hegel here. We can talk about Marx, where now it's going to be that the man transcends private property and returns to himself as a truly human being who lives for the species. What Marx called a species being where the individual and the total collect, collective are unified as a single object. Where you have, as he explains, achieved a perfect communist state, but not in the primitive squalor of tribes, but in the sense of having maintained and recovered or kept all of the material benefits of the previous stages of history. That's explicitly what he says communism is supposed to be about, distinguishing it from crude communism. Or we could flash forward and talk about these new thought, new age people or the Theosophists, which are not quite ex. Exactly the same thing, but they. They even have these stupid puns like that. Atonement, which is a very important religious concept, is actually should be pronounced at one mint, because we're all becoming at one when we atone. And so it's like woof. But their idea is actually that humanity is stuck. By the way, Hitler has the same idea. If you read Mein Kampf, he expresses the same idea. Where did he get it from? Helena Blavatsky, the Theosophist.

Will Spencer [00:45:56]:

That's right.

James Lindsay [00:45:56]:

That human beings are stuck at a particular level of spiritual and societal advancement and that we must undergo certain processes to elevate to the next level. This sometimes, like with Blavatsky, is spelled out explicitly with her theory of five root races. There's the bottom two that are basically animals, which includes the Jews, by the way. And then there are the. The third level are the workers, and they are called Lemurians. I don't know why she put picks these motifs. The thinkers are called Atlanteans on the fourth level. And they can do a lot of valuable things in society. But society needs, true, as she calls them, Aryans, fifth root race people. Or it needs what gets called in other places by Hegel, men of destiny or men of history. It needs the Aryans in order to have vision to take humanity first. But then the goal is not to just make things better on earth, it's to break through from the fifth root race to a higher system of organization. That's the sixth root race. And when we get to the sixth level, everything is going to be even better. And like I said, this is for me what Marx is talking about when he's talking about making everybody socialists. You're going to bring them to a higher level of both human, individual and sociological organization, where everybody just shares eternal. Turns out the at one mint state is almost always socialist in its organization. So a lot of people believe, as does Ken Wilbur's sixth state in green, which is environmentalist communism, there's going to be this huge collective endeavor to this huge collective endeavor to share everything and live in greater harmony as one and to recognize our oneness from one to the other. And so Hegel's doing this too, and so is Marx, and so are these New Age theosophists. But the really scary part is when I said that the fifth root race is called the Aryans. And that's actually literally where Hitler got both the term Aryan and the swastika. And the crazy race ideology, he explains in chapter 11 of Mein Kampf, which is where the blood can't be mixed downward or else you'll pollute the race and the whole point. He calls his project the racialist world concept, which is the idea that if the state can purify the race to the sufficient level, then you can advance to the next stage of organization of humanity. That's in the second volume of Mein Kampf. If you actually bother to read Hitler, you find out that he was an occultist weirdo with a racialist word world concept based off of a theosophist. And that the point in every single case, fascist, communist, Hegelian, New Age, new thought doesn't matter. The point in every single case is to elevate humanity to its next stage of organization, which seems to be social, socialist, or for the fascist, it's fascism, which is just a different way of organizing socialism with a total hierarchical society based on exclusion versus the totally un hierarchical society of communism based on inclusion. Same energy, opposite direction there.

Will Spencer [00:49:11]:

So I think what we're seeing play out over the course of history is a theological worldview, a theosophical worldview really, that's seeking to evolve humanity to higher states of consciousness and as a result, higher states of order. And this stands directly in contradiction to the biblical story. Just there is no higher state of evolution. We are in this position as fallen creatures and we repent to God and we live for his kingdom. But we don't try to actualize heaven here on earth in this kind of utopian kind of mode. We understand the limits of our human capability and we act in faith. Faith as opposed to saying, no, we're going to actualize this here on earth and we are going to be the Gnostic ones who have the truth for how to do that. And these, this is why I, this.

James Lindsay [00:49:59]:

Is why I think they hate Christians and Jews so much. Because Christians and Jews are like, no.

Will Spencer [00:50:04]:

That'S right, that's right. Because we don't obey your Gnostic priesthood. We obey scripture. And find that in Scripture. Okay, you have that. Here's this other text. How do you juxtapose these two together? This is a book. Everyone has access to it. There's no hidden knowledge. It's all just right here. Find it for me in the book. And Helena Blavatsky said that the chiefs of the Theosophical Society regard Christianity as most pernicious to their aims. And she identified correctly that Christianity was the enemy of the Theosophical project because it can't digest the Christian tradition, so it sets itself up in opposition to the Christian tradition. But I think what people have trouble understanding is what we currently conceive philosophy today. The history of philosophy actually isn't. Maybe at one point in time it was what I hear you describing as what was once philosophy has been parasitized and has become a very sophisticated form of Gnosticism that uses philosophical sounding language, but to communicate gnostic and hermetic concepts.

James Lindsay [00:51:06]:

That's exactly how I feel about the vast majority of philosophy over at least the last several hundred years. Maybe even anti. Certainly also even in antiquity to certain degrees. But philosophy, if you actually, actually, I mean, we're going to be pedantic here and do the thing. What does the word mean? Philo Sophia. Love, Wisdom. There's a famous. Plato wrote a famous tract with Socrates where he's asked if he has wisdom. And Socrates, of course, never claims to have wisdom. And he says, that's for the gods only. That is beyond me as a man. So this is an orientation of humility. Philosophy. He says, I can only but love wisdom. And that's where we get the word philosophy. So it's the love or the pursuit. Love includes an earnest pursuit. Right. In a defense of wisdom. So that's what philosophy is supposed to be about. But what the Gnostic thing is about is a pursuit of power. To do what? To transform the idea actually. Whether. If we look at Blavatsky, she's deriving this from the, what is it called? The Mahayana, Is that right School of Buddhism, which is the one that's rather than the Thera Veda one. Theravada is individual. You're gonna go meditate in a cave until you have enlightenment. And it's all about you as an individual deciding to achieve detachment, fine, whatever. I mean, I honestly don't care. And Christians can try to convert them all they want for their theological reasons. I just don't care if that's what they want to do with their life, because they're not hurting anybody. And they generally turn out to be pretty good people. The other school, the Mahayana, I think it's Mahayana school is actually that they have to be the vehicle to bring humanity all together to the next level or in order to save all of humanity. And so this is this weird savior complex that's buried in there that they're gonna. This vehicle's gonna move humanity. And again, how pervasive is this? Not just in philosophy. The United nations since the millennium, at least the Millennium assembly, which is in2020, but I think from its origins in the. In the 1940s, but explicitly since the Millennium assembly in 2000, has embraced this. They say that they are intentionally trying to be the entity that acts as a nervous system for a central nervous system for a global organism. They call it a meta organism. So it's not just about organizing treaties and, or, you know, challenges between countries. They see themselves as the central nervous system for a global meta organism that includes all life and all people and all nations and all institutions. And their explicit purpose in doing this is to direct the evolution of humanity to its next stage. Now, just as a little cookie to throw in, there are numbers to these stages. Blavatsky calls the Aryans the fifth root race. I would say that Marx's view would be that the Communists, because he says this isn't the end or the fifth level. They're the. The ones that have. Maybe it's the sixth level. I should say they're the sixth level. The fifth level are the people who are going to bring us to that higher order of consciousness. So the Aryans are going to lead us to the socialist state. So that's your sixth level, but then there's a seventh level, and then there's breaking free of the. In the corpus hermeticum. There's the seven levels of being kind of trapped in existence. And then you break free, free. And when you break free, what you break free to is Christ consciousness. Christ is said to have been one of the people in history of many who broke through. It could be Buddha consciousness instead, if you want. It doesn't have to be Christ. These are a handful of people throughout history have broken through, not just from the fifth to the sixth, to the seventh, but to the eighth level of consciousness where they've broken free of the seven material planes. This is their esoteric view. And on the eighth level, you have the mind of Christ, which is to say that you have the mind of God. And at that point you have the capacity and their belief to merge back with the totality, the whole, the one which is the true God, not the false God that's in the Bible in their view. And so you have this mission that this, like the United nations has adopted and that is promoted through new thought that was attempted through communism, that was attempted in fascism by different means to push humanity toward everybody, finally achieving Christ consciousness. And if you read what Hegel said about that, that the point is at that point all of man and society, the theoretical idea, the practical idea and the absolute idea will be concurrent. We'll have the perfect man living in the perfect society. And at that point there is merging back into the one.

Will Spencer [00:56:02]:

And all this stuff, I mean, it is, it is super real. You know, from, from me personally, having studied it for years. These are the things that the occult mystery schools teach. This is what I studied for a number of years. This is what's kind of preached around the world. Maybe not always from the same social socialistic United nations kind of posture, but there is that component as well. Alice Bailey, the Lucis Trust. But I think what as there's a.

James Lindsay [00:56:25]:

Tech bro version too, before we go to that. Yeah, please, real quick, quick. The tech bro version is the singularity, right? AI is going to actualize as a, as a kind of God for us, by us that's going to be able to brainwash us, to be completely compliant with the right next step in humanity. And this was the attempt to actualize what the Jesuit heretic called Pierre Terrdon called the Omega point. So the Omega point of humanity is when it finally breaks through from the material plane and goes up into the rarefied levels of Christ consciousness. So the tech bro view of it is actually that we're going to build the AI and the AI and the algorithm are going to be able to control our brains good enough, maybe through brain trips, maybe just through propaganda or whatever, to drag us to a new higher level of organization. They don't say it explicitly, obviously, but when you read the document that the Chinese government published in 2014 justifying their social credit system, they explain that the primary purpose of the social credit system is to create a mechanism by which the people can be trained to become socialists. It is a training tool. In other words, it's to raise people up to that sixth Level of organization, which is socialism. And so there's a tech pro expression too, that's not necessarily the Oprah Winfrey or the Karl Marx or whatever else.

Will Spencer [00:57:49]:

Yes. And this theme, the Gnostic parasite, what's so frightening, and I think I can use that word confidently, is to look at how subtly it manipulates ideas, language, concepts, to drag it step by step in the direction of something that is truly fallen and dark and that takes people over. Because I think we can talk about a Christian posture of yes, I would love to see an evangelized world. Yes, I would love to see. See a Christian world. Absolutely. I would love to see the gospel spread. But it's very easy to co opt Christian language to become, as you described in one of your lectures or the podcast recently, Dominionist, where I think that the dividing line is one of absolute certainty. Once you begin operating with that sort of absolute certainty that I have the answer, that's when you can become aware that you've slid off the path, particularly in Christianity. Because I think the beauty of Christianity is we can never truly be certain of our own intentions. The heart is deceitfully wicked. No one can know it. No, I know in my heart this is the truth. Well, do you? Do you really truly. You have to always be examining yourself to see if you're in the faith. But the temptation, I think, is to grasp onto that certainty, to bring about a project that is conceived not in the mind of man, but the mind of someplace else. And I think it's that wanting for certainty that so many people have, have so many men today particularly have that leads them to misuse Christianity. Like we can long for something, we can desire something, but it begins within our own hearts to be questioning and uncertain of our own motives and to look to Scripture for guidance for how to conduct ourselves, not to simply give ourselves over to this sort of project that seeks to actualize utopia. And it's so subtle the way that this parasite gets in there and wraps itself around men's hearts. And I think this is the root of bitterness that we're warning against, because I think you talk about the Gnostic parasite as latching on through. Is it fear, desperation and one other thing. Talk about that for a moment because when you said that that's the attachment site for the Gnostic parasite in Was it faith? I'm going to go through all my notes here. Infection vectors are the parasitic mechanism. The gnosis attaches to different receptor sites in faith and reason. For faith, mystical experiences, charity, love, theological mysteries for reason, reason, curiosity, open Mindedness, freedom and fair debate. Now, there's nothing wrong with these things, but it can. But the Gnostic parasite can get in through those vectors and become capitalized on fear, desperation, and talk about that resentment. Yeah, yeah, please.

James Lindsay [01:00:23]:

Or hate. Yeah, fine, yeah. I mean, that's really how this all works. When Elon Musk, who did not coin that term, I think Gad Saad was the first person to start calling it a mind virus. But I don't remember for sure who said it first, but Elon Musk has certainly started calling woke a mind virus. Right. Of course, woke actually means woke up to a Gnostic view of the world. I'm just gonna make that real clear. It doesn't mean something different. We say. I mean, I keep saying it means critical consciousness, but that's in the context of, you know, this kind of late modern period that we live in. But it means having woke up to a Gnostic view of the world, which is this kind of split dualistic, spiritual versus material. Everything fallen is awful. We are actually spiritual being beings. A lot of people don't know that. The hermetic, the corpus hermeticum, explicitly in the first book, which is called the Poimandres, explains that you are already God and that you're going through that process of ascending the levels to remember who you are, to recover or recollect who you are. It is not that. So the hermetic belief system has, as the third person of the Godhead, man, and then the second person of the Godhead is mind, meaning the mind of God or knowledge knows. And then the God is the unknowable, perfect, full union of everything at the. The ninth level, I guess. But I digress. So what happens for a lot of people is that life isn't going perfectly. There are the contradictions, as Marx named it. Things are kind of, you know, unfair. And sometimes they're unfair for bad reasons, right? Sometimes they're unfair because of corruption. Corruption. Sometimes they're unfair because of really bad luck, right? Like you have everything going. Just imagine, because we had really rough weather last night. I'll use this as an example. Nothing bad happened here, but. Or at least at my house, but. I don't know. But, you know, you have everything going. You're about to start your business, everything's, you know, set. And a tornado hits and destroys, you know, a bunch of your property, maybe the stuff you needed for your business, your amassed initial inventory or whatever. And yeah, you got insurance. But this is a huge setback. And maybe it's just enough to make break the whole project, you know. So you can imagine just really bad luck also being this impediment. Well, it's hard for people sometimes to, to accept that they, that sometimes it's their fault and sometimes it's bad luck and it's just how the cookie crumbles. And it becomes much easier to be able to point the finger and blame. Well if the, you know, FEMA or whatever actually did good storm stuff or the insurance company did what it was supposed to, this wouldn't even be a, a problem. Or if society was organized differently, this is the general socionostic perspective, then I wouldn't be in this losing position. So it's easy to get the resentment aspect rigged up especially when you start thinking in class based thinking like there are, you know, those people. So racial minorities get affirmative action. So that sucks for me as a white person. So I would have a way better job if it wasn't for, for affirmative action. And there wouldn't be affirmative action if there wasn't black people. So I would have a way better job if I, if there were a, of bunch black people. And you can get into this resentment based class oriented thinking very easily based on the challenges and struggles of your life. This is why Marx called religion the opium of the masses. Because he said that your real challenges and struggles, you go numb to them by believing that there's providence and there's a, there's a divine order for this and that this is or even just fate. And so you won't do anything about it because you go numb to it. So with the Marxists or the noxious Gnostic, incentive is with resentment is to come along and say there's something you can do about it. And if you understand that society's organized differently, there's the gnosis part. Then you know who your enemies are and you can figure out who your friends are from there. And there's your Carl Schmidt friend enemy distinction which is also the same splitting you see from the woke. They just don't call it the friend enemy distinction. And you can mobilize oppressor versus oppressed with the oppressed being the intrinsic valorized side. And by teaching them what is called critical or class or whatever consciousness that they are victims because well, their bad circumstances make them victims and they are victims because of an unjust system that if they gathered together their power they could actually do something about. But what that requires is having this thinking theory. Then this is the Gnostic. I called this in another place the Gnostic temptation. The way the Gnostic temptation works is everything you think you know is partly true, but there's more and you've been lied to to keep you from knowing more. So you might be at level three or four of the understanding of what you know things are really supposed to be, but there's a higher level understanding. Come with us. And that's the, that's the temptation. And so when you feed into that resentment and you start telling them that there's this dichotomous power struggle in society and that you're the one who's losing because of it, you can then say the reason that you haven't been able to understand this or do anything about it is because you actually have to have a better understanding of the circumstances that you're in, your so called real conditions, as the Marxists called it, to be able to do something. So we have to teach you the way that you're supposed to see the world world. And that's where they can introduce the Gnostic dualistic thinking and feed off of that resentment. Another way that they do, and this is particularly poignant I think, on the right more than on the left as it skews, is they generate fear and despair. They make you think that the world is. Although Herbert Marcuse did this in Repressive tolerance, very explicitly, he did it also in One Dimensional man and Essay and Liberation and Counter Revolution Revolt. So it was a big theme on the left as well. We are at the cusp of calamity. The apocalypse is around the corner and it's mostly the fault of the other side. And if we don't do something, we have two choices, which is to fall off the cliff or to, you know, completely change everything about how we do and how we think. And so they feed into this fear and this despair. Because existential crisis demands a kind of solution. But, well, Gnosticism is itself an existential crisis, right? They get you to believe that the spiritual tradition or spiritual circumstance you find yourself in is a lie. And so now you're going to be damned by falling. For if you take Gnosticism literally in the first century sense, you have the Demiurge who's a demonic false God, who's tricked you into thinking he's the real God. Well, what's going to happen to you if you worship a demon instead of God? You know, you're Dan. And so they then can start using that fear and despair or this existential dread to feed in. But actually the whole story is different. You're worshiping this demon, but you don't have to, because there's a higher God behind him that he doesn't want you to know about. But we have the secret scriptures that tell you what that actually is and which secret practices that you have to engage in in order to be able to achieve the higher level spiritual gnosis. When you achieve the gnosis, that's the hidden knowledge of self that allows you as self, as divine actually, by the. The way, that allows you to escape this prison that this false demon has put you in. And you can therefore be liberated or emancipated from your bondage and your suffering under the false God by coming along with us. So that fear and despair can be existential in the spiritual sense. It can also just be society's doomed, you've eaten a black pill, as the kids say, and that the only thing that you can do about about it is join this radical movement where we collectivize our power to do something about it. The Marxists did that under the brand name of solidarity. The fascists did that under the brand name literally of fascism, which means to bind together like a bundle of sticks which they then set the head of an ax in. That's what they call the fasces, an axe that's on too small of a handle. So they bundle sticks around the handle and tie it with thongs to make it strong, stronger. And so they literally call it fascism. So, you know, the right tends to be a little more on the nose about what it does than the left in a sense. So they call it solidarity on the left and on the right they call it fascism. But it's a binding together enacting in solidarity or collectivism in order to now break free. And we're back to the Mahayana Buddhist model of that we assume escape our collective punishment by binding together as a collective unit seeking collective liberation or elevation. And so I think that those receptors are both present and fed by the Gnostic parasite. They come along and tell you you have reasons for existential dread and it's the enemy's fault. They come along and tell you that you have reasons to hate the system you're in and it's the enemy's fault. And so you end up getting this again, friend, enemy distinction, where you have the us versus the world. It's not us versus them, it's us versus the world mentality which lends itself to an elitism. Because if it's us and everybody else, then we must be elite by virtue of knowing that we know what we know, which is the Gnostic, another part of The Gnostic temptation. You're in the in crowd. Who knows what every, you know, what there is to be known where all the other sheep are asleep and don't know it. But who does Jesus say? You know what, what, what is the motif in the Bible or the, that that Jesus always uses is that his followers are the sheep. Right. That he is the shepherd of people who've not decided to go off on some, you know, wild tangent or whatever. But, but the, the, the, the, the, the generally gentle follower. It's a very different, it's a very different model. And I don't want to like lose the lion, obviously, but the point is that the Gnostic come along and say everybody's sheep, but Jesus is like, you're my sheep.

Will Spencer [01:10:29]:

Right.

James Lindsay [01:10:30]:

And so there's a metaphor there that's I think, powerful to understand in terms of how the Gnostic people tempt people out of the flock and to run with the wolf.

Will Spencer [01:10:41]:

Absolutely. And in one of the lectures you talked about how there's a different set of Morales for people who transcend. So talk a little bit about that because I think that's the phenomenon that is most easy to mark. People who have taken the bait is that they begin operating being able to sacrifice their moral character to do things, but it's not wrong if they do it. So talk a little bit about that.

James Lindsay [01:11:03]:

Yeah, there's a lot of phrases that people, I just want to throw out a handful of like kind of cliches or phrases that people may have heard that will latch onto this. You've probably heard when we talk about the left over the last few years, it's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy. Right. So the left operates. You say, well, they're hypocritical and whatever and, but, but the, the reason there is they're not actually hypocritical. They're reminding you that they're better than you, that the rules don't apply to them, but they do apply to you. Whether we call that, you know, liberating tolerance or whether we call that two tiered justice system, that's fine. Another phrase that this one's less well known as wisdom is knowing when to break the rules. Fools. This is weird because it's simultaneously true and simultaneously very misleading and dangerous. Especially if you think you're wise and you're actually a fool. That kind of taps into this energy. I had another one, but I'll just go on without worrying about it. But yeah, so the idea is that I'll give you Nietzsche Actually first. So Nietzsche writes, thus spake Zarathustra, which is like the hardest thing in the universe to read, read. And it's like this kind of allegory for his overall philosophy, which essentially is a critique of morals, right? It's a critique of morality. It's the idea that morals are the things that actually hold human beings back from being the uber munch, the Superman. And so if we are to break free of morals, or in other words, if wisdom is knowing when to break the rules, then you can step into a situation where because of your elect or enlightened status, status, you know which rules apply and to whom and to when. And there are no universal rules anymore. All of a sudden all the, everything's relative, right? The, the moral relativity comes into the picture and the relativity is, is if you are a person in good standing in the elite group or the elect group, then you can operate on a different level because you have a higher level of understanding. That's the Gnostic part. And if you're not, well you're not. So there's, you know, one set of rules for the, for the rule for what is it? One set of laws for the set of laws for the people. Right. And this is how they actually operate. The Gnostics believe that they have this higher level understanding so that most of the rules that have to apply to the dumb sheep and like Hitler called the folk stupid repeatedly throughout Mein Kampf, for example, and the Marxists believed that the proletariat was too ignorant and working class and dumb to be able to do to, you know, socialist theory. So the vanguard would have to lead them. That was Lenin's entire model of elite theorists would have to lead them. And so you have this same mentality, but the, the elites, therefore in the Gnostic, the elect, I should use the Gnostic word for it, which is the elect. I just don't want to like piss off Calvinists who happen to use the same word for something else, like me. Yeah, but I don't mean it in the Calvinist sense. I mean literally the Gnostic in the first, the Gnostic cults in the first century called the people who had Gnosis the elite elect.

Will Spencer [01:14:11]:

Right?

James Lindsay [01:14:11]:

Okay, so you were elect if you had Gnosis. So they believe that they understand the world on different and better superior terms. So therefore the rules are ultimately arbitrary to them. But like I said, this breeds moral relativism. If you're one of us, these rules apply and these other ones don't and they become actually increasingly arbitrary. I guess the higher Your consciousness goes. And then if you are not, then you have these very strict rules. And so this is, like you said, a very indicative feature that you're with dealing, dealing with Gnostics is that all of a sudden, oh, the other phrase I was going to say is ends justify the means. All of a sudden that the, the ends of advancing whatever the Gnostic agenda is justify whatever means, the rules go out the window. So this is where you end up seeing Christian pastors, I think they're pastors or Christians anyway, sitting down and having a podcast discussion saying that there needs to be a better political strategy among Christian conservatives that includes lying and Machiavellian. Machiavellianism means morals don't matter. Anything to gain power is moral. So the pursuit of power is moral. This is a. You know, we hear it in Machiavelli in very philosophical terms. You can put it in much more plain terms from Harry Potter, where J.K. rowling actually boiled down the essence of the psychopath to the perfect expression in Voldemort's motto, there is no, no good or bad, only power in those too weak to seek. It might be good or evil, I don't know. But no, only power. So the pursuit of power becomes intrinsically good. And so you can see how this becomes what the Gnostic game actually becomes about. But it's a place where, because they think that they are enlightened, that they have the capacity to exempt themselves from the rules rules and apply rules viciously to other people that they don't hold for themselves. So there's this kind of inbuilt hierarchy as hypocrisy. The tricky part with the other expression, and I just want to mention it briefly, is when you know, okay, so wisdom is knowing when to break the rules. I said that's true and dangerous because I've already explained how it's dangerous because you can think you're wise when you're not. But I think the right expression of that is that you should be able to be as free as you can be responsible for. But that all of a sudden loops in all of the responsibility you're called to through your faith. It brings in material responsibility, like if you want to go out and have a bender and go drinking one night really heavy, is that a sin? Well, maybe, but probably not. If your intemperance doesn't cause any harm because you've arranged the circumstances, you've got a designated driver, your kids are taken care of, nothing is likely to go wrong. It's possible something could go Wrong, but it's unlike likely and you've assessed the situation. And if something bad happens, you're more than willing to bite the bullet and clean up after yourself for your mess. And you can, you know, so to speak, hold your liquor. Is it really wrong to have been intemperate here and there? No. Does that mean wisdom is knowing when you can break the rules of temperance? Yeah, but what does wisdom mean here is that you're within your capacity to take responsibility for the mess you're making. And so I think there's a truth there. But the truth lies, lies in understanding what real wisdom is. And the gnosis passes itself off as superior wisdom when it's actually just the Machiavellian coveting of power which expresses itself as nasty hypocrisy in practice.

Will Spencer [01:17:39]:

I would say, if I may, that a Christian perspective would say, yes, the intemperance is still a sin, regardless of whether you can potentially control for all potential negative external consequences. That still the intemperance, still the drunkenness. We're called to be sober minded. The Scripture explicitly. So even if you're getting wasted alone in a padded room, that would still be sin in the eyes, in the eyes of God. And I think a Christian perspective. And I don't mean this as like chastisement, but I would say no, no, no.

James Lindsay [01:18:08]:

I would actually agree with you in the sense that if you're a Christian and you're holding to that Christian, that Christian principle, that, that your understanding of sin, and I shouldn't have used that word, I suppose, but your understanding of sin therefore constrains your level of your understanding of responsibility. Responsibility. So you have to be responsible spiritually as well, which means that you must take your, your efforts not to sin. I mean, this is what James 4:17 says. He who knows the right thing to do and does not do it is the sin. So you have to be aware of, you know what the right thing to do is. And when you know what the right thing to do is, you have to stay out of, out of that. So being spiritually responsible, you're right, would be remaining within boundaries of temperance for sure.

Will Spencer [01:18:51]:

Yes. And I think to tie it back to the Gnostic view, the Gnostic view would say, well, we have this higher knowledge, so we have the ability to break the rules. We have enough wisdom to break the rules. And I don't see anywhere in Scripture where it's like, you know what, like this commandment right there that has an asterisk. If you have secret knowledge, like you get to Break that one. And I don't know, it's not there at all. And so Scripture calls us to a higher standard of faith. Please, please, go ahead.

James Lindsay [01:19:16]:

Yeah, the fact is that most of them are not responsible for the, for the mayhem they're causing either. So even if you were to take a secular perspective based in responsibility, a lot of it is, I mean, the generation of externalities around a lot of this misbehavior and creating excuses for doing more misbehavior, it's just generally not there. Because these people are. The right word, whether we like elect or not, is elitist. They're elitist, which means they believe they are themselves elite and that they have different rules that apply to themselves as elites, whereas all the plebs have to follow stricter rules. And the grossest expressions of this, by the way, which you can actually read and say, maybe Symposium from Plato, certainly the Phaedrus, if I'm not mistaken, on which. No, maybe it's Timaeus, I forget which one other piece of Plato. So I apologize for the lack of citation being accurate here.

Will Spencer [01:20:08]:

That's all right.

James Lindsay [01:20:09]:

Good luck. They're both huge. Go figure it out. But you actually see that the. I know in Symposium the expression is that the road to higher culture through the right love of boys. And so what you actually had happening in the cults in antiquity was very frequently that the elites gave permission to themselves for both homosexual behavior and pederasty, that they strictly withheld from the degenerate masses that didn't have the wisdom. So the point I'm making is that there are even historical precedents for, for. And by the way, Marcuse quotes Symposium on that in Eros and Civilization, which I take as an explicit indicative, because that's a sexual liberation book. And so I take it as an explicit endorsement that the elites should have access to pederasty and in fact that it should set up a blackmail ring. Because the road to higher culture, the gateway through which you pass is having done this, and then everybody in the elite circles knows you've done it, and then you're trapped and you're controlled, you're compromised. But I actually think that the, the point I wanted to make is that when it comes to these rule excusing things, there's no limit. And we of course see that with queer theory. We see it with the pride parades, the drag queens in classrooms, that the enlightened people who know who is actually a trans and not a trans are at such a level that they can get away with literal acts of sexual perversion and pederasty even in public. And everybody's supposed to turn a blind eye because it's for liberation, because they understand something called queer theory that we all don't. And so there are in principle. No, my only point is that in principle there are no limits to this level of rule breaking. For the self enlightened fool that considers.

Will Spencer [01:22:01]:

Himself wise, that's the Gnostic that sets himself up in opposition to faith and reason. Just to tie a bunch of threads from the conversation together before we move on, this Gnostic knowledge has set itself up in opposition to faith and reason which shook hands and built Western civilization. Now you have this intrusion of Gnosticism which has been hiding in the shadows now has occupied so many socio political terms beginning with the Enlightenment and on the Enlightenments onwards. Now Gnosticism is kind of the way that we do things without recognizing it for what it is, but we see it paraded around us on the streets every single day. This I have higher knowledge and I'm the priest of higher knowledge. So therefore I get to do things that you don't get to do because I know better than you. And how often do we see that in the world today?

James Lindsay [01:22:47]:

Constantly, literally constantly. We also got to see the handshake of faith and reason just a moment ago with the discussion about responsibility and spiritual responsibility or spiritual obligation because you know, it's very easy to fall off into a Gnostic self decadent self justifying track and say, well, I can be really responsible for things that I actually can't be. And faith is a saying, actually you can't. So the intemperance itself is not an arbitrary limit. You actually need to keep some limits. And then on the other side we can see it as a form of spiritual responsibility. And so you actually see the handshake of faith and reason is the thing that we are talking about as the principle that excludes the Gnostic temptation.

Will Spencer [01:23:40]:

That's right, that's right. I have notes here about the question of political authority, like faith's answer for who should have political authority. This is from your I believe this. I'm not sure which lecture this is. I'll just read it. Faith's answer for who we should, who should, who deserves political authority. Faith says nobody really. God alone has authority. Humans can only serve. Reason's answer is nobody. Authority must be provisional, limited and earned. And we can see that in the American experiment. But Gnosis's answer says we deserve political authority. Authority. Those who know deserve authority over those who Don't. And there you have the expert class. And then you have people who can violate from the UN or whatever or the World Economic Forum who are telling us all to decarbonize. But don't mind me and my private jet. I don't have to decarbonize because I'm the one who knows.

James Lindsay [01:24:26]:

Exactly. That's exactly right. And I think that that's one of the key foundations of the handshake, right? Whether you believe in God or whether you do not believe in, in God, what we have is that political authority is, I mean, you could just say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the, the, the fact of the matter is that God alone, the, the, the comprehensive statement is God alone, if he exists, has authority over men. And this is the essence of all men are created equal. It doesn't mean that you and I can run as fast, lift as much weight, do as many calculus problems in five minutes or whatever else. It doesn't mean we're equal in every possible conceivable ma. It doesn't mean that men and women are the same. It doesn't mean anything like that. It means that in terms of political authority that is intrinsically granted upon us, we all have the same amount, which is zero. So the faith answer to this is whoever is the most faithful servant is probably going to be the most apt to rule or to lead under the provision of his service. Not even rule. If you read through the Old Testament, you know, the Israelites demanded kings, and God was like, you don't really want those. And then they were like, yeah, we do. And then it's like book after book of, of tragedy. Because no, you didn't really want those because God is sovereign, God is the king. The king is not the king, right? Or we could say Christ is king and be edgy here, right? And so within reason, it's the idea is who, whoever can demonstrate their competence through, you know, whatever set of parameters we think matter, they should get to lead. But in both cases, power can go to your head. Having an absolute power or authority, a king. We just talked about the Old Testament part of that. And of course, Jesus being king, Christ as king indicates that people are not king. When you have those two things, you have this idea that none of us really deserve political authority, but we can serve from the faith perspective, perspective in faithful service. And we can not borrow, but be granted temporarily right to authority through demonstrated competence. And when you put those two things together now, you get some serious magic sauce, right? So you have people who are faithful servants who are bound by their faith, but also have the unbinding through their faith of knowing that they're pursuing a higher authority, not their own authority authority, which means, like, when the attacks come, they don't necessarily fold under political pressure because their eyes are on what God wants. So they're not just serving other people, they're serving something bigger and higher that's transcendent to everybody. Then when you mix in, yeah, we hope they're competent too. Right. It's not just that we want a very faithful, religious, godly man in a position like, you know, I don't know, Secretary of Defense. I'm not saying anything about Hegseth. I just needed an office. I was trying not to say the. The president. It's not just that we want somebody who's righteous. We kind of hope they can do the job too. So when you put those two things together, boom, you have magic sauce. Now what happens when you have a situation where there's a secret formula that if you subscribe to the formula, then you get to be in charge because you know, and nobody else knows the Gnostic path? Well, what happens is, number one, as Peterson would put it, you just enable people who are not competent. Competent or servants, they want to be rulers because they're elitist and they are not competent in actually doing something necessarily. What they are competent in is the power games set up by the Gnostic program. So they can rise through the power games through Machiavellian tactics, rather than good and faithful service in both senses of the world, both to word, both to the people in the world and to the higher authority of God. You also end up with Grifter Palooza, because it turns out it's not hard to pretend you understand the secret knowledge, especially when 90% of what having the secret knowledge is, is liking the right things, liking the right people, hating the certain things, and hating the certain people. And all you have to, so you can rise through the ranks literally in a Gnostic program just by taking whoever the cult has decided are best people and bullying the crap out of them all the time. And so you can become an important and prominent person just through the harassment and harangue of designated enemies to the cult who are going to be the people who are calling the cult out, by the way, most of the time, or the people who refuse to join the cult, say, for example, per our earlier discussion, Christians and Jews. And so you have this. You have this. This really poisonous way to sort of certify illegitimate authority, and we can Be very biblical about this because there's Godly authority, whether that's in the special revelation of God himself in the faith sense, whether that's in the general revelation of competence in the world. You can either have that or you can have. Well, in some sense I think I'm God already. So you have to listen to me and you can. It's that which is satanic authority. It is what the Bible calls worldly authority. And this is why it's so important to realize that within at least the Judeo Christian and then within the broadly reason based paradigms, that what we have is this idea that nobody's intrinsically deserving of any authority whatsoever in Christianity. Everybody's fallen, every single person. So nobody deserves to be in charge. But the Gnostic idea is we have the secret knowledge that makes us not fall in anymore. Right? And so we deserve to rule. And of course it's based on a lie. That lie can come in a lot of forms. God hath not said is kind of the most famous of the forms in Genesis. But it can come in the form like you see in the. I don't know if you've ever seen this really crazy book. You probably have a course in miracles where, where the general idea, the lie that it tells is that in fact, fact no fall ever occurred at all, that Adam ate of the fruit and went into like some kind of a drug induced coma. And everything in the world is inside his drug induced fever dream or something like this. And so there was no fall. And so since there was no fall, there is no diminishment of human beings to fallen status. Therefore we are all as gods. And that's why we can at will learn to perform miracles. That's the idea of the book, of course, in miracles. And so it can take different, the temptation can take different, different forms. It can also be, you know, as it's said these days, that you know what time it is, you know, will, you don't know what time it is. But I know what time it is. So I have to direct you. And you know, I know what time it is because I ate a bunch of black pills and decided that our legal system and the Civil Rights act can't stop DEI or something really stupid. So therefore what we need to do is, you know, white power, let's go on a crusade. And that's literally why I call them okra. Right. And obviously people don't like that. But it can come in a lot of forms is the point.

Will Spencer [01:31:28]:

Yeah, And I definitely want to get to the subject of the woke. Right, quickly, two things. So another way to rise through the gnostic power structure is through mastery of language. It doesn't matter whether you actually believe it. If you can communicate all the right words in the right orders, then you can. Then you can appear to demonstrate competence versus trust, which is earned over time in actual developing a skill like, no, you've mastered the language so that we know you're one the of us. And so fake. It's super fake. And it's really easy to game, actually. And it's almost begging to be game. Go ahead.

James Lindsay [01:31:56]:

Which is why let's say let's just pretend, because I am pretending this is not true, but let's just pretend that every queer theorist and activist on the left is totally on the up and up. And zero of them are pedophiles. It's not true. Lots of them. Are you sure? By what they write. But it's all just theory. It's about being attracted and not about, you know, acting on it or whatever lie they tell. Let's just pretend that they're actually telling the truth. And zero of them are pedophiles. The program that they instantiate, like you said, is so easy to game that all the pedophile has to say is, oh, I'm attracted, but I don't act on it. That's not a hard sentence to figure out. Right. And they have literally zero filters now to keep that person. Person. They could go to a school, an interview, and they say, well, you know, where are you on the P axis? Right, the pedophile axis. Well, I'm attracted, but I'll never act on it. You're hired. They have no filter to be able to exclude. So it's extremely easy to game is extremely important. And this is why it's Grifter Palooza. It turns out that it's also fedapalooza because it's not hard for assets and plants and you know, that kind of thing, Feds to basically, I mean, everybody's seeing this thing. Glenn Beck just interviewed him. The guy that was on the insider documentary about the outlaws, the FBI guy who infiltrated the biker gang and, you know, whatever. And he's telling his story everywhere. Now. That guy pretended to be something he wasn't in order to get inside, to rise through the ranks, to be able to bust it. It is. That's that he was doing it for law enforcement. But that's the grifter activity. Right? And so. And that's. And he is literally a fed. So the feds and grifters will infiltrate and rise high up in these gnostic paradigms. Because at the end of the day, like you said, it's all a matter of mastering certain linguistic, behavioral, aesthetic motifs. Right. You know, what kind of joke to tell and when to tell it, and, you know, this and how to play it off and everything else. But at no point do you actually have to build something that works. Right?

Will Spencer [01:34:06]:

That's right.

James Lindsay [01:34:07]:

And so the test against the world or the test against reality never actually arrives.

Will Spencer [01:34:13]:

Lives.

James Lindsay [01:34:14]:

And of course there are tons of Bible prophet stories about that, like Elijah coming and be like, yeah, if your God is here, send down, you know, here's, here's the offering, take it, nothing happens. And then, you know, we know the rest of the story.

Will Spencer [01:34:27]:

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's a really great point that they're never forced to build anything that works like, okay, write a book. Like, don't just do a podcast. Don't just, don't just, you know, don't just show up and create, you know, 20 minutes of digital content. Actually sit down and go through the process, process of writing a 250, 300 page book. Demonstrate your competence at the highest level, at the standard that we've held in the west for hundreds of years, thousands of years. But they're never forced to that standard. They can hide behind a mask of anonymity, parrot the right phrases at the right time, and competence, it appears, a mask of competence. Please, go ahead.

James Lindsay [01:35:02]:

Yeah, no, I mean, unfortunately, some of them do write books. And then what they write though, is a. What boils down to a spell book.

Will Spencer [01:35:09]:

Correct.

James Lindsay [01:35:10]:

Take you through those narratives of grievance or those narratives of resentment, or those narratives of fear, those narratives of. On the other hand, the weird critical hope is what it gets called in critical theory, which is that you could envision the better possibility outside of this demonic, awful, fallen world that they've painted a picture of if only you follow them and if only you get on board with their program. So, you know, you can tell the difference, difference subtly by a. Seeing if there's a clear agenda, but also by seeing if. And this is the hard work of checking something like that. Or their 20, 20 minute, you know, YouTube video is go check their sources and does the source that they quoted actually say the thing that they say that it says? And eventually the Gnostics almost always lie because they're, they have a very instrumental use of information and other people and everything. Everything else. Hegel phrased it, history uses people then discards Them. So a great sign that somebody's not doing that is that they're presenting the original sources themselves and asking people to investigate those and not take it on their word. But I wish they didn't write books because I have to read them all day.

Will Spencer [01:36:25]:

But at least. Yes, correct. But at least the book provides something concrete. Concrete as opposed to I'm just bloviating off the top of my head on a podcast. Like, write a. Write it, please. Go ahead.

James Lindsay [01:36:35]:

Well, I mean, think about when they're in an organization, right? What happens when they build an organization? There's always corruption, there's always grifting, there's always infighting. It always falls all the pieces. If they come into, say, an organization like a church or. Or even a company, it turns into a huge fight over, you know, power dynamics and all this. So they're not building a cohesive. Cohesive.

Will Spencer [01:36:56]:

That's right.

James Lindsay [01:36:56]:

Structure that can actually accomplish something in the world. Because they're not actually interested in building something in the world. They're interested in grabbing power from existing things. Which is why I called it the Gnostic parasite, in part. Not just because it parasitizes these systems and looks like one and grafts onto them and gets in, but also because as parasites, what they do is latch onto a host and drain it of its resources. And so you can. I mean, the Bible covers this is judge them by their fruits. Their fruits are columny and division and fighting and squabbling every single place they go. Which of course is also itself complicated because they can outsource that onto the people that are saying something about it. And this is. You know, Jesus talks about that a lot through the Gospels, by the way. You know, they hated me before they hated. And, you know, I didn't come to bring peace, but a sword and all of this kind of verbiage. It turns out the truth is divisive, but the fruit is what you're supposed to be looking at. It's. Is the fruit this awful chaos, or is the fruit something that's. That's pointing toward things that actually work? The best way to tell if they actually work is if they are based in truth, if they're based in goodness, if they're based in justice or pursuing fairness of truth treatment in the honest senses. And also if you implement them into a project, does the project do something productive or is it just power games where people are jockeying for position?

Will Spencer [01:38:33]:

This makes me think of what you talked about, the confidence game analogy and then the wizard circle. I think those two are very Apt to this discussion. So you talked about things like trust building and exploitation and asymmetric risk especially maybe let's talk about the confidence game first because that's maybe. Is that a sense of praxis, of what's going on for a lot of this?

James Lindsay [01:38:55]:

Is this where I called them con artists?

Will Spencer [01:38:56]:

Yes, I think so, yeah.

James Lindsay [01:38:58]:

Okay, so the con, a lot of people don't know that the con in con artist is, is shorthand for confidence. So it's a confidence artist or confidence man is what con man actually means. So it's somebody who comes along and builds, builds your trust through projecting confidence in their view. Now with the Gnostics they actually this is, this give them a weird advantage. It's a short term advantage. There are different ways to build confidence with the Gnostics. They come along and they just tell you that they're right. Why? Because they're absolutely possessed. That they know the secret truth and that it's good for everybody. So they have tons. They're brimming with confidence. Right. And then on the other hand, people that are operating more legitimately in the world have to demonstrate competence, which is often a slow and challenging process. The circumstance we find ourselves in the world right now is really bad and favors this Gnostic stuff because our credentialing apparatuses, institutions have largely been corrupted by the leftist Gnostics. So now we don't know how to tell. Like having a degree, does it really matter? You know, having a job of a particular kind like a judge, does it really matter? Are they corrupted or are they not? It used to be that you could to a degree expect that when somebody had a credential or a prestigious title or position that they probably knew what they were talking about. They might be wrong, but they were coming from a place of due diligence and now that's all up in the air. I think it's not as bad by the way as people think it is. I try not to eat black pills. I would guess that our credentialing system is actually not more than 10% corrupted, but it feels like it's totally corrupted. Like you're probably not that worried about your average engineer building something that you're going to drive on in reality. So it's not as bad as people actually think. If you actually go to an engineering school, yeah, they have to take some DEI crap, but most of their stuff is still calculus and mechanics. It's like pretty legitimate still. But we have this perception that it's very illegitimate and this gives the Gnostic Concept con artist, a ton of opportunity because he comes along very boldly and very brashly. One of the things that I get accused of all the time with my fight against woke, I think it's pretty clear I'm competent on talking about woke and I can like quote their stuff from memory and I've taken a very serious study of it for a very long time. But what they say is James has no solutions, right? So they're very confident they got it good enough and they have solutions. James has no solutions. So I hear this all the time. So they project this conflict, confidence. It's not just that they understand it, which they kind of don't actually, but it's that they know what to do about it. Where in reality, if you want to demonstrate competence to know what to do about it, you can't just go on these like wild quests tilting at windmills. You actually have to be able to figure out things that put results on the board, right? And these legal fights are complicated. They're challenging legislation is, I think, honestly mostly useless except to set up better legal. Legal fights. And it's complicated. It's very easy to get all that backwards. You take the example of the Stop Woke act in Florida, right? That was the first big legal strike against woke. It actually encoded social, emotional learning into Florida schools while it was supposed to be stopping the thing that it encodes. And so it's like, it's really easy to mess that up, very easy to mess it up. But the confidence artist comes in or the con artist comes in and just says, you know, this is the way, this is the only, only way we understand it. And it's time to go right now. It's an emergency, we have to do something. And this is something, let's go. And everybody else, they then decry as, as being waffling or half measures, that was Hitler's favorite word for it, half measures, weak, whatever. Whereas in reality, demonstrating real competence and thus generating genuine confidence in what you have to offer offer is a slow, painfully difficult, very fragile process. You have to be, if you're in a business, you have to deliver for your clientele for decades to get a strong, strong reputation. And all you have to do, say you're a dentist, is really hurt somebody one time once in all that 30 years of competence and confidence you built up is shattered. It's a very difficult and fragile thing. And so this gives the gnostics a advantage when they're willing to attack any failure, no matter how unfair or unjust, and project total Confidence for themselves. And I think that that's born out of their maniacal belief that they alone possess the truth and everybody else is operating under a false consciousness that looks weak and slow by comparison. Comparison.

Will Spencer [01:43:48]:

And meanwhile, they don't have to demonstrate that same level of competence. They can sit back and merely critique someone who are people who are actually producing and they themselves aren't being held to the same standard of okay, produce something.

James Lindsay [01:44:02]:

Yeah, that's the. I was wondering what, what you went out at the asymmetric risk. And that's. That's what it is. This is why they participate in a critical theory. Their objective is actually to gain power. And their hypothesis is when we're in power, power, we know how to make it work, so we'll make it work so they don't have to build anything. In the meantime, all they have to do is crap on the thing that's not working to perfection so far. So that's sort of what I was actually talking about with the, you know, you have no solutions and all this. So they get to project this, not just this confidence, but they get to remove themselves from having to demonstrate competence in the world because their theory is a critical theory. Their critical theory does not, by definition, does not have to paint a picture of a better world. It only has to. Has to demonstrate how the existing system isn't adequate. And so they get to sit aside, my friend, and this is a colorful phrase, sorry for your podcast, he calls it sitting aside from the thing and shitting on it. And so they get to sit aside, distance themselves from it. They have no skin in the game and just peck at things. And it turns out, psychologically, being a cynic, actually, for whatever reason, people perceive you as smarter than you are by a lot if you're just being cynical. So if you. Their. Their method by definition is cynical, what they do is that they point at something that's not working perfectly in the thing. They want to critique the organization that they're targeting. Let's say maybe it's, you know, a company, so something's not going perfectly right. So they point at the thing that's not going perfectly right. And then they just blurt out that if they had the woke understanding of the world or the gnostic understanding of the world, the world, they wouldn't have made that mistake. They wouldn't have got this wrong. This is because they fell for the tricks of the demiurge. This is because, you know, they have a materially determined limitation on their thought. As Marx would have it. This is because they have false consciousness and obviously we don't. And so they don't have to demonstrate anything because, well, all they have to do is critique and say we don't make those same mistakes because we know better. And they at no point do they demonstrate what they can actually do. Because the promise is give us power and then we'll show you. It's exact the same, by the way. It doesn't matter if it's right or left. It's exactly the same as when the Democrats say pass the bill and we'll tell you what's in it.

Will Spencer [01:46:22]:

Yep. Yeah. And another facet of that is the scam that says, well, it'll only work if we all do it. It'll only work if one please go ahead.

James Lindsay [01:46:32]:

No, that's totally right. You know, we got to get everybody on board. It'll only work if everybody's on board. So with communism, the belief is that communism can actually only work when every single person has transformed themselves to have transcended private property. So when it doesn't work, the communist just has to go out and say, well, this guy over here, Joseph over here, still believes in private property too much. Look, you can tell because he has an apple. And so his capitalist tendencies, his bourgeois values are actually the problem. So we're going to take Joseph off to prison and we're going to re educate him. Or if we can't, we'll just get rid of Joseph because his values are what's stopping him. Because it'll only work when we're all on board. So there's this collectivist element, right, that's the fascist is a little bit different than the communist. Communists want transformed consciousness. The fascists want total obedience. It's a completely different approach to doing the exact same thing. There's a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. And if everybody is obedient, then we're going to be able to succeed. But if everybody doesn't do the same thing at the same time, then it's not going to to work. Whereas that's not just. How did I want to phrase this? It's not just that that's collectivist and in fact totalitarian in the end, it's that they get to have that scapegoating mechanism for anything that's not working. So it's like they can point and say, well, these guys the reason and this will happen, by the way, with both Woke left, woke right, woke up anything. When it doesn't work, it's always going to get Blamed on the people who didn't do it enough. Right. And so they can say, well, we have this great plan. Let's say it's these guys right now on the woke. Right. For example, and Trump's in power. And Trump is not succeeding at everything he wants to do. He's accomplishing some things, but he's not succeeding at everything he wants to do. Is certainly not succeeding with its Congress. Right. It's passing virtually nothing and people are noticing. So what are they going to say? Are they going to say it's because we're a bunch of wackadoos who are pushing this crazy extremist stuff and the American people aren't really having it and the Congress isn't going to pass wax wackadoodle stuff and there's this conflict there. Or is it that the Congress is this or that. No, they're going to say that the people who oppose our agenda are stopping us from doing this thing. This is what the Democrat. We can take it out of the right. We can put it back in the Democrats that there was the House Republicans in the, in the Biden administration who stopped everything. It's a dirty House Republicans and the. Their basket of deplorables. And if we didn't have this, we would be marching off to the glorious future. And so they're going. It gives them the ability it will only work when everybody comes with us. Gives them the ability to say that when it doesn't work for any other reason, that it was actually because not enough people came with. And so they can do a redoubled commitment on their cult members and get them to start blaming, scapegoating and attacking people who are not adequately committed even before the fact that failure comes.

Will Spencer [01:49:34]:

And now we can take this confidence game, total obedience. And now we can put it together with the sort of spiritual gnostic aspects, because we've gotten into the social and the political, we might say the material aspects of it, but there is also a theological and spiritual aspect to it, as demonstrated by Hegel and plenty of others. And this is where I think we get the idea of the wizard circle, the idea that a hyper reality has been drawn around people. So maybe we can start unpacking that to show there's more going on going on than just the material aspect.

James Lindsay [01:50:05]:

Sure. What we were just talking about actually manifests explicitly spiritually in the Mahayana sect of Buddhism. Right? Right. We're all going to get salvation or else we're going to fail and nobody is. And so we all have to go together. This is the same as Blavatsky saying that the Aryans are going to lead us to the birth of the sixth root race and into the New Age, which is the Age of Aquarius. If anybody doesn't know what the New Age and New Age refers to, yep, it is the Age of Aquarius, where everybody's in harmony because Aquarius symbolizes some kind of socialist bullcrap. And so we're all going in harmony together. So we're going to have to be led together into this. So we all have to move together in that way now, the way that they do. This is the term, I did not coin this term the Wizard Circle. I'm trying to remember where I got this term. I think I got it from Eric Foglan. Yeah, yeah, Fogland. And so Fogland refers to the set of kind of mystifications, the misinterpretations of reality, reality that the Gnostics give to try to confuse people. They point to various facts about reality and then use them to mislead people about the state of affairs. The communists would give you a structural power interpretation, so would the fascists. A structural power interpretation of how these facts come together, to point out that there's a system of power keeping people like you out. Right. The Gnostics might blame literally the tricks of the Demiurge or bad spirits or whatever, the archons keeping people from the true knowledge. In fact, the hermetic belief on some expressions is that as you rise through the planes, you have to meet the Archons on different levels and answer their question. Basically like the Sphinx, I guess, to defeat them, to show that you have the high enough level of spiritual development to progress to the next plane. So whether it's bad spirits or whether. Whether it's the Demiurge himself as the imposter God, whether it's socio and political entities, the idea is that they put you in a state where you perceive reality only through the terms of the cult. What I termed in other times as a. This is fancy terminology, parology and paramorality. Parology means para logy, Para means paralogue. Parallel logi means logic, a parallel set of logic. So you have the real logic of the world and then they make a fake one next to it. And so they get you to play in the fake sandbox of how reality works. And that's what we call being woke, by the way, is being in that sandbox, or being Gnostic is being in that sandbox. And they set up a logical structure that trains you that if you're Thinking along those lines, which by the way is rooted in consensus, that's what everybody around you affirms is true. Then it's very difficult to think in other ways. That's being in the wizard circle that way. The other way they do it is by setting up a paramorality. Same thing, parallel morals. This is where we were talking about the hypocrisy aspect earlier. They have different morals for within the cult. And if you play along with their. More the. The ethics of every one of these Gnostic cults, by the way, is that which advances the cult is good and that which hinders the cult is bad.

Will Spencer [01:53:19]:

Period.

James Lindsay [01:53:19]:

That's the entire higher ethical framework. So you talk about it being simple and gamble. That's their whole morals, their whole system of morals is that which advances the cult is good and that which hinders the cult is bad. And so the Marxists say that explicitly about Marxism, by the way, that that is literally the Marxist ethic. That which advances Marxism is good and that which hinders it is bad. So they get you trapped in a moral confusion and a logical confusion so that you can't see the world accurately. And this is what we being woke. Actually you have a distorted lens that you see the world through. This is what the. The wokies call it, theoretical lenses. I literally for once have them. It's like putting on a pair of glasses and you see the world differently when you have your glasses on. Imagine they're colored or something. Okay, so Fogelin characterized it differently. He characterized the con men at the heart of the Gnostic religion as well. Wizards, literally called them wizards and says it's like he cast a spell or a distortion field that's a circle. That he describes it as a circle and that it makes you misapprehend reality. And I think it's both in the logical and the moral domains by. By their abuses of language, by their false constructions of what's happening, by their secret hidden knowledge interpretation of everything. And that when you're in that wizard circle, he says you're lost. So rather than thinking of it, you as. As long lenses. Imagine it being like in, you know, some magic video game where they put a spell on you and you're in a bubble, right? So inside the bubble, when you look through the surface of the bubble, the world looks all funny. And that's basically the same idea. But you could also, I mean other words that that means is hermeneutics or lenses or eisegesis. These all refer roughly to the same thing, though not perfectly so. The idea then is that they cast a spell on you. That's why he uses the word wizard to get you to misapprehend reality both logically and morally. And when you're stuck in that circumstance, he says, you're lost, you're in the wizard circle. And you're lost because everything within the circle is self referential. So when say I'm in the circle and you're not and you come to have an intervention with me and say, James, brother other, I need you to look at this differently, I probably will attack you because, or I'll be completely confused or something like this because all of the self referential logic of the, of the Gnostic cult environment rejects that. And eventually at some point I've learned that people who try to get me out of it are enemies. And so the argument that I gave is that what we have to do to help people who are captured by this Gnostic wizard circle is that we have to create kind of gaps in the distortion field, like a crack or a hole where they can see reality clearly. You do that by pointing out places that they're being lied to or contradictions in the cult explanation of the world versus the real world. A big one for me historically was the Very Fine People hoax with Donald Trump. I finally watched the entire video at the request of a trusted friend who said, would you watch more than the 17 seconds or 14 seconds of, or whatever, would you watch the 2 1/2 minute clip? And it had that the sentence before Donald Trump made the infamous very Fine People remark had him repudiate the white supremacists and all of this explicitly. But the argument was that the wizards were casting from CNN and MSNBC and everywhere else, and the Democrats and every liberal that I knew, and me included, was that Trump now never actually denounces white supremacy. And there he said, they're very fine people on both sides. And as it turns out, the next video the guy sent me was a super cut of Trump denouncing white supremacy publicly on video something like 50 times over the course of like, you know, a couple of years or whatever. He does it all the time. And I'm like, all of a sudden I had a crack in the distortion field and like Trump, derangement fell apart for me, me in probably a matter of days as a result of that. So I was in the wizard circle called Trump Derangement Syndrome based on the Gnostics who had decided that Trump is the avatar of all evil for their progressive left cult. And I was caught in the distortion Field and I would have argued with you until I was blue that you know, Trump's a bad guy. He might be a closet fascist, who knows? I don't think he's a Nazi, but he's terrible and all, all of this stuff. And he said there's very fine people on both sides. And I would have just totally run with it. And then all of a sudden I saw reality for what reality was. There was a hole in the wizard circle and it's almost like the guy reached his arm through the hole and pulled me out. And that's what we actually have to do. It's not actually waking up and it's not going back to sleep, it's coming out of the dream.

Will Spencer [01:58:19]:

Yes, it's hard because the language has been so cool, co opted wokeness or awakening or whatever. There is a component of like eyes open. All this language has been, has been co opted to explain a very real phenomenon where you recognize, you know, that, that whatever false paradigm the wizard circle you've been operating in, that's based on con men, that's based on manipulations of language, that's based on the distortion of truth. Two layers of morality. There's morality for, for you and morality for me. All these things like you kind of snap out of it and recognize the inherent contradiction at the center, center of it. And that's the key point is you have to identify where that contradiction is and then just push on it really hard. Not like I'm going to show you the true truth, I'm going to show you the contradiction that lies at the heart of your worldview. And I think that's the very difficult thing to do for people that are trapped in this because they have to be willing to accept information that contradicts their worldview. And that's true for everybody. Like I don't just mean to say there's one particular set of people that needs this more than anybody else. We all go forward with contradictions in our worldview and we all have to learn to rest, remedy them. And I would say that we need to remedy them with scripture, with God's truth. And that's where we can find a whole worldview that locks together in a way that actually supports prosperity and peace and all these things through redemption in Christ. But guiding people out of their own self contradictions is the essential part. And I think you also talked about in one of the lectures the iron law of woke overreaction. Maybe put that together and then we'll take a step beyond.

James Lindsay [01:59:50]:

Okay, so yeah, I have Four iron laws of woke behavior that are pretty diagnostic. I mean I'm sure other people do them sometimes and I call them the iron law of woke projection that they're always blaming on others what they're actually doing or telling you ahead of time what they're going to do. So they're projecting in one of a couple of different ways the iron law of woke corruption, which I think explains itself. If you see woke people in a position of power with might money involved, something bad's going on, somebody's embezzling or something, it's almost always true. You always find these self serving deals because they have a higher morality where they get to do self serving deals and it's okay. Then there's the iron law. This one's cute. It's the iron law of woke cosplay which is that everything formative, okay, they're all performing an act, right? That's the con man thing actually in a sense. But like the statement for that for on the left is the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. But it's a lot of it is exaggerated forms that don't have any real content. Right. They pretend to be these kinds of, you know, they put on these performances to kind of make a, make a statement or whatever. But it's virtue signaling I think is the way to really explain that. And then there's what you asked about the iron law of Woke overreaction, which I originally called the Woke flip out test. If you say something and they, and they flip out, you've probably hit something, something important. But it's what it is is, it's that the gnostic has a very heightened sense of his own importance and his own absolute correctness, both morally and logically. And when you poke at that, you reveal something, you show the man behind the curtain as the wizard of Oz thing goes, or you pull the mask off a little bit. They have to absolutely use the only tools at their disposal which are to absolutely freak out. They will kind of explode with weird rationalizations and excuses. They will frequently double down like crazy and they will almost always go viciously on the attack that there's something either intellectually, morally or psychologically wrong with you for having dared to expose them or point out a contradiction or something like this. So you know, other expressions for this is you take the most flak when you're over the target. That's roughly the same idea. So when you expose them, they will flip out. The biggest hallmark that you have hit a point where you're Experiencing the flip out or the overreaction is. As my friend, I think he's still my friend. Brett Weinstein said years ago, you know, that you've said something important. When you get rapid criticism that's from one person to the next, self confidence, contradictory. So one guy says, for example, you're absolutely irrelevant. Nobody pays attention to you. And somebody else says you're paid millions of dollars by the Jews to put this out or whatever. Those are contradictory claims. Right. You cannot be irrelevant and highly paid at the same time. Right. Or you're absolutely irrelevant. You're cooked. Nobody listens to you. And you know, you're misleading everybody. You're not misleading anybody if you're. You're irrelevant. These are contradictory claims. And when they. When all of a sudden, you know, you say something and it's like you hit the hornet's nest and the hornets are flying all around and everybody's mad and some of the hornets are saying one thing and some of the hornets are saying the something that is wholly contradictory. You've hit a overreaction point. You know, that they're just trying to. It's like they got napalm off them. They're just trying to get it off of them in any way that they possibly can as fast as possible. And it doesn't matter what they do, but because again, they have their own set of reasons, rules. It doesn't matter if they're telling the truth. So when they reply to you, some of them can say this one thing like that you're paid by foreign adversaries or whatever, and the others can say some other thing that's completely contradictory to that, like you're absolutely washed up and broke and nobody would give you money for anything. And it doesn't matter because it turns out in most cases neither one of those things is true. And they're just saying things to make the bad thing go away way.

Will Spencer [02:03:56]:

Yes. And that you can feel that when it happens. I was listening to you talk to Jordan Peterson about that, about just that, that. That wave of impact when it hits, like the insults and the shaming and the, the mockery, like being prepared for it. That's how you know. Which I know you've been subject to quite a little. Just a little bit lately.

James Lindsay [02:04:14]:

Just a little bit. A few times, actually, through these, through these many years.

Will Spencer [02:04:19]:

Yeah, but I think, I think all, everything that we've talked about today. This is great, by the way, because what I wanted to do was I wanted to start surface all these different gnostic, hermetic aspects of kind of wokeness and land it in a discussion of the woke. Right. So I have a lot of people that are really down with a lot of things that you say and I think listening to this, they'll be even more down with it. But I think they want to carve themselves off from a phenomenon that you're describing that I think we're both talking about. That is a very real thing that we are not that, but that sometimes the term can conflate both of them. So I just a specific question that I, I have right here that I want to read just to clarify it. So in your lectures you describe reactionaries as quote, gnostics with a hardline conservative looking mindset. How do you distinguish between traditional conservatives and what you would call the woke right. The woke right being, I think a lot of things that we've now been describing with this kind of gnostic worldview that used to be on the left, but now in short order, well, maybe in the past year, but it's been seeded in the underground for a long time, has now reared up its ugly head within the right wing pretty much since the election. So how do we draw distinctions between these phenomena that we've been talking about and people who are just traditional conservatives? And I don't mean this in like the NeoCon, you know, GOP kind of sense. I mean people that have traditional conservative. Yeah, I don't know that I could say enough about his philosophy to say yes to that. But you know, I think there would probably be be middle Americans, you know, who, who want to work hard and be rewarded and have an, and have their measure of prosperity and not see the government sell away pieces of their children's inheritance to whoever it may be, whether it be immigrants or inflation or whatever people like that, I think is what I'd be saying. More traditional conservatives maybe rooted in Christian values. How do we separate people who are like that from the phenomenon that we've been describing that seems to have attached on onto it?

James Lindsay [02:06:17]:

Yeah, that's an important question. And the vast majority of conservative people are not woke in any regard whatsoever. And a lot of people think that. Well, I mean, there's a myth out there in alignment with what we were just talking about with a flip out or the, the overreaction that I'm naming all conservatives and all Christians or anybody to my right as woke. Right. And there's. None of this is true. Woke means something very specific. It's a little technical. It means having a, having woke up to a critical conscious Right. So that's the ultimate test. But that doesn't help a lot because people don't really know what it means. And it's abstract in its own presentation. So the first thing I would say is the traditional conservatives are not radicals, right? They have very little interest in tearing up the existing system by the roots. In fact, if we look at Burke, there's a little bit of a conflict because this is, of course, a European tradition of conservative conservatism in America is a fundamentally different thing. But there is a thing called the American tradition. It is rooted in the American Constitution and its other founding documents and its founding spirit and ethos. And the American conservative probably doesn't want to pull up the American tradition because the Burkean view is that the tradition itself is the guiding factor for a people. And so that any modifications that you make, especially as technology comes along and requires you, should be gradual, should be carefully thought out, should be minimal. So radicalism doesn't fit into that picture. So you can be radically conservative and want to rip the constitutional, classically liberal system out of America, that's one thing. But if you are not radical, if you believe in the Constitution, want to maintain and enforce the Constitution, you're probably not woke. Although of course the woke people are going to be able to clothe themselves in the Constitution and make it sound like they are talking about that. So it's actually very, very difficult to pull apart. Another factor is that while traditional conservatives may be a bit clannish, they have what J. K.D. vance, you know, controversially talked about as the ordo amoris. To some degree, they will tend to favor their family and kin and then their community and all of these things over other people. So there's a closeness of kin that matters. They will also, you know, put God first and then, you know, have the ordo Amoris, as J.D. vance talked about. Most conservatives are not collectivist identity people. They're not going to hole up in a collective identity, especially one based on something like race or genetics or even political. It's the. So a big dividing line here is going to be tribe versus truth. If you care more about tribe than you care about truth, you're in a dangerous place, right? Because a hallmark of this collective or of this woke thing or the gnostic thing is collective truth. It is that it's not just that you have a critical view of what's going on or that you perceive that there is a power structure that's acting illegitimately and is in many ways corrupt. Those things can be perfectly true. It's not just that you are using. It is actually just that you're using a critical theory. But part of using a critical theory is that collectivism, it is intrinsically collectivism. Traditional conservatives tend not to be. They tend to favor traditional tradition, favor that which is closer to them, be that, you know, family, nation or, sorry, family, community or nation or even faith. But at the same time they think for themselves still, right? They don't just inherit their ideas from other people and run around and think the people on our side are automatically good and the people on the other side are automatically bad. So that's a diagnostic. I'm not. It's very tricky because the diagnostic is do you have a critical consciousness? Have you split the world into us versus everybody and that the whole system is corrupt and therefore we have to band together to seize power and impose a radically new order on it. If you have that, you're woke. If you don't have that, you're probably not woke. But these other things that I'm talking about are diagnostics, right? In psychology, if you look at schizophrenia as a list of stuff symptoms and if you have like maybe it has nine listed and if you have five of them, they diagnose you as schizophrenic. So these are things that would be kind of diagnostic. I think the identity politics, which is collectivist politics, is highly indicative, however, of having adopted this kind of cult mindset that is at least being taken over by the woke. A victimhood mentality, I think, is actually a big diagnosis. Diagnostic criterion here too. That's what it plays off of. If, if your view remains that if you work hard in a fair system, you have every right to expect that you'll probably do well, barring bad luck, then you're not woke. You can say that the current system is not fair and that we need to challenge that. But if you believe that the system itself is holding you down and people like you, because there's the identity of politics and so we need to band together to fight against it, you are probably woke. That is pretty close to what woke means. So this victimhood mentality, the despair, the black pill is the invitation. I think if you're just despairing that there is no solution except a complete radical break from everything that's diagnostic woke. This is a little harder because it doesn't fit the. It does fit the Gnostic thing. But I don't want to spend all the time unpacking how woke people favor outsider knowledge. They believe that the inner. Well, it's easy to do The Gnostic thing, the inner knowledge is like the demiurge. It's the. It's set up by the false power structure of society or by the false demon that's posing as God. And you're supposed to stay within on the plantation of how you're supposed to think according to that captured view of reality. And so anything that falls outside of it that challenges it is probably, probably true. So there's two components to what I just said, that which falls outside and which challenges it. So what you'll usually see is stuff like this. We're just asking questions because they want to have the asymmetry of risk. They don't want to take responsibility for the thing that they're actually saying with their question or. You're not allowed to talk about this. You're not allowed to ask this question. Now, it's fine. We all just went through censorship. We all understand that there is censorship and that there were things you were not allowed to talk about. You were at least not in certain ways. You were not allowed to talk about the vaccine in particular ways on YouTube. YouTube would cancel your account for it. Okay, so you were effectively in. So other social media platforms, you were not allowed. I'm still permanently banned from Facebook for making a joke about the Canadian Medical Assistance and Dying suicide program. So there are certain things that you were not allowed to talk about that were actually true. But if you believe that, they don't want you to think this, therefore it's probably true. That's woke thinking. That is actually called in the woke literature, and I quote, a preference for subjugated knowledges. And so. Or the less fancy term that we've all heard is other ways of knowing. So if you believe other ways of knowing are superior to established ways of knowing, you are probably tilting toward woke. And that's a very, very, very important, important one because it's, it's ultimately the whole Gnostic construction is right there. We're being lied to completely about the world by an alienating power, by an alien power that is alienating us from who we really are. And if we discover the secret truth that they, that the alien power doesn't want us to know, then we can liberate ourselves from its tyranny. That's the Gnostic motif right there. So this preference for marginalized or subjugated or other ways of knowing, other knowledge, knowledge is. Which by the way, is a form of relativism and is highly indicative of being woke. So traditional conservatives don't buy any of that. From everything I know Traditional conservatives are realists. They strongly value individual liberties and their fundamental rights, like property rights, like their rights to life and liberty. They do not necessarily all think the same. They believe in something I think we would agree is called common sense. Now that doesn't mean that, you know, it's just stuff everybody knows. That means that we can, we can ascertain a lot of truths about the world. That's the sense part. And that the ability to do so is common to everybody. That's the common part. We have a common sense. In other words, Christians call this general revelation. Everybody has access to general revelation. You can just go out and look at the world and experience the world and experience general revelation, revelation. The Gnostic, on the other hand, has special secret knowledge. They have to tell you how to interpret the things that you see. You cannot go figure it out for yourself. Common to everybody. So that's the, the secret marker. Like you held up the Bible earlier and said, here's the scripture, show me where it is in the book. Right? So with legitimate exegesis of the actual text, you can determine what the author's intents were to pretty good degrees of certain uncertainty. You can know what's there. We can go out in the world and do a physical experiment and it doesn't matter if, like, let's say we're going to find out how fast the ball drops if we let it go, right? Basic physics experiment. It doesn't matter if you do it. It doesn't matter if I do it. Let's say that we mix, you know, sodium this and acetate that and we get some chemical, chemical reaction. And it doesn't matter if you go by the chemicals and pour them together. If I go by the chemicals and pour them together, the same thing happens. So there's this universal to the aspects of general revelation, which is to say there is a commonness, everybody has access to it, to a sense perception of the world that requires no special insight, knowledge or interpretation. But the Gnostic view is when you read that verse in the Bible, it says this word, but that word actually can secretly mean this instead. And then when you compare that against this other, another verse, it secretly means this. Well, where does it ever say that it secretly means that? Oh, you just have to understand that it's written in code. Okay, so that's where you're starting to apply an eisegetical lens to your reading of Scripture now that you're reading Scripture to extract certain facts from it. And this is where you end up with something like the social Gospel where Walter Rauschenbusch read the Gospel and with a bent toward Jesus being a social reformer, and extracted the story of a social reformer from it through his isegetical lens. That's Gnosticism. It is not a fair and accurate reading of the text. It is a purposed reading of the text. And the same thing within physical reality, although maybe not a basic physics or chemistry experiment, maybe more of a sociological or political thing, is that there's a correct way. You know, here's a great symptom of that. James said X, but what he really means is Y. And if you look at it this way, here's a perfect example of that. Our friend will call him. Our friend RN McIntyre at the Blaze back in January put out a video claiming that I called for the assassination of J.D. vance, who is the vice president. That's pretty extreme. How did he arrive at this conclusion? Show me the tweet, show me the post, show me the video. Where have I ever done this? Well, he said you have to do the math. And he pulled up a tweet where I said that JD Vance is advancing the same definition of fascism or same definition of nationalism, but that the fact fascists used therefore some math, this is the secret knowledge of James, is always wrong. So he said, if you do the math, that means I call JD Vance a fascist. Did not call JD Vance a fascist. Never did call JD Vance a fascist. Then in another tweet, completely unrelated, there's a lot more math. It's a lot of two plus two equals five. Over here, over here. In another tweet I said, this is a Bonhoeffer man moment. What happened with Dietrich Bonhoeffer was he was obviously standing up against the Nazis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer was accused, probably falsely, I think legitimately falsely by the Nazis of calling for the assassinations of high level Nazi officials, which he eventually got imprisoned. And I believe that's what he was executed for, even though I don't think it was legitimate. And so somehow our friend RN McIntyre at the Blaze puts together the math that I said that JD Vance was a fascist, even though I never did. And then in a completely unrelated tweet weeks later, I said this is a Bonhoeffer moment, which he misinterpreted to mean totally against my intentions, although my intentions were not written in the tweet, obviously to mean that I am secretly calling for the assassination of high level fascists. Therefore, when you do the math, the gnostic math you come out with, or the propagandist math in this Case you come out out with James said that he wants to assassinate J.D. vance, which I never said. So this is a really great symptom, right? This is a really good telltale. The secret knowledge of what I actually meant has been divined. So I used Arin McIntyre divining my secret hidden intentions, even though I never said them. But we're all familiar with that with the left. You know, you said whatever you said and somehow it was racist, right? You said I'm going to go get ice cream today. Well white people prefer ice cream, so obviously you're racist, right? Or you just don't want black people to have ice cream. They were able to read your mind and come up with these awful explanations for what you didn't ever mean, right? And they called it all dog whistling and all this other things. So we're all very familiar with this gnostic mind reading from the left. They did it and I mean the exact same thing. So traditionalists don't do that, right? Traditional conservatives don't do that. Traditional conservatives ask you what you mean because they're people, people who are curious to find out what you actually meant when you said something and then to the degree that they feel like they can trust you will take your word on it or will measure other evidences like the fact that I've never called for the assassination of anybody to try to, to, to try to understand, you know, what was actually being said, which in this case I just explained. And obviously most people are not racist either. And so you know, most of the time when people say they want to go get ice cream, there was not some secret hidden, coded racism buried within it. And the leftist mind reading is also suspect. But that's the Gnostic thing. Not only do they have their own rules, but because they know everything that's really going on in society, they can read the intentions of other people. Here's another example, I love this example. So if a 7 year old kid goes to school in California and tells their teacher, I think, say it's a little boy, I think I'm a girl, right? So now the kid is trans according to the rules of the Gnostic transit transgenderism, okay, the teacher is going to believe them. The parents are now required by law to affirm this right, to pretend and go along with it and on down the line to medical establishments. It doesn't matter where you take them. The child is presumed by the Gnostic cult of queer theory to be telling the truth, right? So they can tell when the child, when somebody, somebody says that they're trans. This child is telling the truth. Now, take another example of somebody who might say that they're trans. We can use a funny example that I prefer, and I'll give you a real one afterwards. Donald Trump could walk out on the balcony of the White House this afternoon and say, I've been thinking it over. I've always wanted to be the first woman president. I didn't want Hillary Clinton. I didn't want Kamala Harris. It'll never be a woman. I'm a woman today. Today, for this day only, I'm a woman. The most tremendous woman to ever be in the White House. First woman president. It's a tremendous accomplishment. He could come out and what would they say? Would they say Donald Trump is transgender? No, he would say. They would say he's mocking transgender people. Why? Because they get to know his secret intentions. They know the child's intentions are totally legitimate, and they know that Donald Trump's attention, not that he's confused or he's seven or he saw something on TV or he's got brainwashed. Nope. Child telling absolutely the truth. Donald Trump absolutely lying. And this actually happened Zone Zubi. A lot of people know who Zubi is. I don't know Zubi's last name, so I just have to call him Zubi. Zubi's a cool guy. Zubi at one point did identify as a woman for five minutes on video and went and lifted a deadlift. That would have been the woman's world record at his weight class or whatever. I, I don't know who these women are, but he lifted a 1 rep max world record deadlift, you know, as a woman. And then he's, when he finished doing it, he says, I've set the world records a woman, and I'm not a woman anymore. And nobody believed him. Nobody believed his self identification counted. So that's indicative of the Gnostic. The Gnostic knows your real intentions no matter what you say. And those real intentions always come from the Gnostic or woke worldview. Traditional conservatives do not do this now. They know that Zubi's playing a joke. But if President Trump wandered out and said he want to be the first woman president, maybe that's what he wanted to do today. I don't know.

Will Spencer [02:23:52]:

There's a component of plain speaking that happens here. And I think as I go back to sort of scriptural interpretations, I think that the real struggle is pulling into light the interpretive lens that someone is using. So looking at this moment, like, okay, what grid are you viewing this through Are they willing to confess it in the open? Are they willing to say these are the lenses that I'm wearing to interpret reality? And when someone won't actually tell you what their secret knowledge is that gives them this interpretation of reality. That's the clue that you're dealing with someone who, that's a clue that you have a problem. That's a clear, a clue that you're dealing with a gnostic mindset versus someone who says, yeah, these are my interpretive grids, this is how I see the world. They're not willing to own their perceptions, let's say.

James Lindsay [02:24:38]:

Yeah, another actually big one then that ties to that is everybody does this bad thing, so we have to do this bad thing, bad thing too, right? So the WOKE generally believe that all, all forms of raising a child, whether it's church, whether it's family, whatever, whether it's school, is all brainwashing of one sort or another. Therefore they need to do brainwashing the right way in schools, right? And they argue, you know, well, there's no value neutral territory. That view in his philosophy is called constructivism. There's no value neutral territory. So everything is value laden, nothing is objective and therefore we are perfectly justified in being subjective in propos our values as I guess, the only values. And you see this on the woke, right, picked up, you don't see this in traditional conservatives. They've picked up the idea that nothing is value neutral, that there is no objective position and that, well, you know, the left is doing all these bad things so we have to be able to do these bad things back or else we're going to lose. And so those are, those are all bad signs. But the gnostic worldview is that in fact everything in our reality is the same kind of corruption. So we can either do a it right or wrong. And the idea is if we do it right, we get to break free of the whole corrupt worldview. So entrust us to lead you in doing that. I hear this all the time with we're going to pick up Marxist tactics. We're going to pick up, even if it's cancel culture or other vicious, you know, bullying things that we're going to, you know, use the Gramscian infiltration model into the institutions. Somehow they think they're going to pick up all this Marxism without picking up the Marxist worldview, which is the oppressor, oppressed dichotomy and the conflict theory and all this other underneath it. And they're fools for thinking that they can do that. I mean this is the whole allegory of the one Ring and Lord of the Rings. You can't use the ring without doing the evil the ring was made to do. And so you see this. This argument a lot and where it attaches to what we just. What you just said is that there's this trick. The fact is I can't be objective, so I can put my lenses on. On the table, right? You can't be objective because you are a subject. So you can't be objective. I can't be objective. We all bring our biases, so obviously everybody's biased. Right? That completely leaves off the concept that we can develop that we can do better and worse at describing the thing that we're looking at and that we can develop rigorous methodologies that help us understand better. It's not that every methodology is actually equal. If you go do an experiment and I go do an experiment completely independently and we get the same result. Result, that's called replication. There's a very strong reason to believe that the result is more likely to be true than if just one of us had done it. And if you do it and I do it and somebody else does and somebody else doesn't, somebody else doesn't, somebody else does. And it does the same thing every time, we have a really good reason to believe that that's objectively what's happening. Right? It doesn't matter if I'm Buddhist and then you're Catholic and this, and it doesn't matter. And if you write your interpretation, what happened still happened. The same thing can be true for exegesis of the Scripture. It doesn't matter whether you're a Baptist or a dispensationalist or whatever you are. There is that this book was written in particular languages at particular times by particular people who we can know something about. We can understand those languages accurately. We can know what the word, you know, angel, as we translate it, actually means in whichever. Whether it was in Hebrew, whether it was. Whether it was in, you know, coining Greek or whatever it happened to be. And we can derive a pretty good set of guesses about what that means. Now, The Bible has 860,000 words in it, and it's 66 books with tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of stories. So there are a lot of ways that you can try to figure out what the total message of all these stories are. And there's a lot of room for debate in that. But. But you can lay on the table, this is where I'm coming from. This is Why? I think that. And like you said, the Gnostic won't do that. The Gnostic has. No, no, no, here's the secret meaning that you didn't understand. This is the secret code. We have the interpretation. And it really helps, by the way, if you've read this other book called the Gospel of Thomas or whatever that really sheds a lot of light on all these things that you just aren't getting in the, in the canon. They. It's very different because with rigorous methodologies, especially where things aren't as cut and dry as a physics or chemistry experiment, putting your methodology out on the table very clearly is extremely powerful in leading us to be able to get closer and closer and closer guesses and approximations to a correct reading of what's objectively written as it was intended to have been written.

Will Spencer [02:29:25]:

Yes, that's right. And the power of scripture in the same with checking reality against itself, is you can check scripture against itself to see if your interpretation agrees with other statements in scripture. You can use the more clear passages to interpret the more obscure passages, for example. So it provides a very powerful lens. But the people who won't do that, who won't actually say what their interpretive lens of scripture is, who's like, oh, you know, I'm being based, I don't need to worry about the fruits of the spirit, like, okay, what's your interpretive standard? You know, based quote unquote. What's your interpretive standard so that you get to discard those words from Paul? I have. Go ahead.

James Lindsay [02:30:00]:

Yeah. My favorite meme of this so far is, you know, it shows a soul burning in hell and it says, but I was anonymous.

Will Spencer [02:30:06]:

That's right. Yeah. Or but I was based. Right?

James Lindsay [02:30:08]:

Yeah. Right. And yeah, guess what, that's not an excuse. Having occupied a worldly superior. No, self superior. Having occupied a self aggrandizing worldly position does not justify you acting like a jerk. It just simply can't do it. But then we're back to the hierarchy, not hypocrisy, where there's one set of rules for me and one set of rules for rules for the mentality that the Gnostic carries.

Will Spencer [02:30:44]:

And we're back in the wizard circle. We're in the confidence game, right? We're in the hyper reality, we're in the two tier society where all of these different things come into play as people getting sucked into these online communities. And you watch a shift in their character as they start adapting the secret knowledge and they start parroting the right language to move up the gnostic hierarchy. And we can see it happening in real time. And I think the thing that makes this discussion so challenging for so many people is that it's happened so quickly. Like, it's just. It's essentially just been since the election that all of this has exploded into the public in the way that it has. It was always there. I've seen it percolating in the underground of the Internet for many years. Many others have as well. But suddenly, post November 5th or whatever day it was, it seems to have just erupted into Elon's version of X. And it's kind of a little bit. At times it feels like the fog of war trying to identify, okay, who's where and who's what. And you must, you must see that this firsthand now.

James Lindsay [02:31:43]:

I feel like it's a blitzkrieg, actually. It's like, I feel like, like you said, it's the left stewed for years and they kind of broke into the public in these like, kind of moments, these stages. One of the big ones being, you know, the blm after, after. What's his name? Michael. Michael Brown. Michael Brown, yeah. Was shot in Ferguson, Missouri. And then the. Another one bi. Obviously the huge eruption during Trump's first tenure in office and the very fine people thing. But then primarily, of course, George Floyd and you know, it erupted. Yeah, yeah. And so it erupted into the public eye. But had been stewing for 50 years. This thing has been stewing. The woke right has been stewing for a long time. They used to call themselves the alt right. Then the left picked up the term. People say, james, why don't you just call them the alt right? Well, it's because the left ruined that term by calling grand alt right. They called everybody alt right. So now you don't know what it means. So we, we needed a new term. And it turns out that alt just says that they're alternative to the other right. It doesn't say what they believe. Woke tells you how they are alternative to the other right. It's that they have woke up to a gnostic understanding of their set of circumstances. But yeah, my interpretation is that they began in earnest to lay tracks to, to, to make a bid for power probably four years ago. They've been stewing around for about 10 before that. But they started laying real tracks for a bid for power. Like started to organize in 20 and probably 21. Really. They really started to begin to try to put infrastructure, get money behind them and so on, and to start collecting influencers and promoting and growing influencers and so on. And this kind of slowly built. And I think that it wasn't the election. I think that they came out of the gate roughly at the beginning of October. October, right before the election. I think that they had a two pronged purpose. If the election had gone to Kamala, I think they would have pushed for a civil war and agitated in that direction. And if as Trump won, the other plan was to, you know, basically try to take over MAGA as fast as possible and ideally to control Trump or get rid of him. And I don't know if it's an op, that's a containment OP to make it so that Trump is not going to be as effective because he's got all these radicals. I don't know if it's a discrediting op, I don't know if, if it's a actual bid to try to claim tyrannical power for themselves. But I perceive that you're right, that it basically exploded in the lead up to the election and around the election. I also pulled a mask off of them with my hoax of American reformer in early December that forced them to just kind of double down. There was a lot of iron law of woke overreaction happening, happening then. You know, it's so not like Marx that nobody could possibly tell on the one hand and other people screaming, Karl Marx was great. He was a great writer. He had an important analysis of liberalism. And it's like, okay, we see that today.

Will Spencer [02:34:41]:

We're seeing that today with people saying maybe Karl Marx got a few things right.

James Lindsay [02:34:44]:

Like to this day, lots of them, lots of them. This is their two plus two equals five moment. Actually the so called right wing guys defending Karl Marx and socialism is their two plus two equals five argument moment. The left did that in 21 with two plus two equals five. And now we're just here we are, you know, Karl Marx was great, I guess. And so no. 1 the conservative case for Karl Marx. And so this has I think been very, very fast for people. But I think it's a blitzkrieg. My current analysis is that over the last four years they have engaged in what is called elitist capture of the influence of tier of the movers and shaker, tier of maga. And they feel like that was mostly complete. And now that they have shifted and we all see it much more visibly, they're actually trying to take over MAGA at large. They're using roughly the same techniques that the left used in 2015, then 16 to take over the entire Democratic party. But I believe that that is what we're actually seeing and that their model is a blitzkrieg to go as hard and fast and take as much ground as, as they can, either before they're stopped or until they win. But I think that that's the shift you're perceiving. It didn't come out of the ground. It had built its, it had built its phalanx in the influencer tier, what I call elite MAGA over the course of the last four years. And then they decided now is the time for the offensive and they launched their phalanx into MAGA at large and are either cutting everything down or trying to transform everything into their alignment, which is a carrot stick incentive structure, rewards and punishments. And so we're now going through what amounts to a coup within maga and they use all these excuses, well, we don't have any power, so we have to be able to do this. And it's like, first of all, you have tons of power in MAGA even if you don't have power out there outside of maga. And second of all, you're still answering evil with evil, so it's not okay. And third of all, you're just being evil. Some of these people like that you're, that they go after, haven't done any evil. They just disagree with them. Like I see conservative Christians all over the place that have stood up to this. Joel Barry at the Babylon Bees, very prominent, but there's others. Carrie Smith. There's a woman who has to stay anonymous because the attacks on her have gotten so bad. But a lot of people know who she is. So I won't even mention who she is, but there is one. And a lot of people know who I'm taught will know who I'm talking about. They have basically just been absolutely wrecked. And these aren't people that are somehow, you know, some weird enemy or whatever. They just opposed this woke crap on the right, including outright racism and outright anti Semitism. Which the second, if you say any of that, they say, oh, James called people racist. He's the shitlib. And it's like, no, actually you can still be racist. Like that's still bad, right? Like, did we. You didn't. Nobody forgot that. Except these guys who have a different set of rules because they're based or whatever.

Will Spencer [02:37:47]:

Yeah, and I think, I think this makes me think of the fear, hate and desperation as those being signature characteristics that you can kind of say, you know, because there's, I think what we're talking about is there's a There's a Christian or conservative or a traditional way to talk about the these things, and then there's a gnostic way to talk about them as well that often uses some of the same language. And the way to kind of begin to discern the difference is by saying, well, what's the emotional tenor of this? Is it fear, hate and desperation? How am I feeling in response to it? It doesn't mean feelings are facts. It doesn't mean they're objective realities. But I think our intuitive sense can give us more information than I think we often let on. And the trick is to sort of say, you know what? I don't exactly know what that is, and I know it's using language that I'm supposed to agree with, but I don't like what's happening there for some reason, so I'm just going to back away. In fact, I think you talked about that in your lecture about using Christians picking up on missing people who use their language, but being able to pick up on the language that others are using. Talk a little bit about that.

James Lindsay [02:38:52]:

Yeah. I mean, so a lot of people, like, if these parasites come in and attack, say, Christianity using Christian language or Christian scriptures partly in context or completely out of context or whatever, a lot of Christians see Christian stuff and they're like, yeah, I agree with that. Right. That's a Christian thing. Christ is king is a great example. So do you mean Christ is king, praise the Lord, or do you mean Christ is King, you dirty Jew? Right, right. Which one do you mean? And it can mean both. And they tried to deny that it can mean. And then the evidence came out that, nope, it meant both. And a lot of people were using it like pretty hostilely. And so, you know, there was a huge controversy because a lot of Christians latched on to Christ as king. Yeah, of course it is. And James hates Christians for saying that this isn't what we should be doing. But I was seeing that both uses were happening at the same time. And it's. That's hard to discern for people. So if it had come in instead under the guise of secular liberal liberalism. Right. So we need to have radical equality in society or equity. And Christianity creates a lack of equity, so that's bad. And so we're going to do all this stuff dei in order to achieve equity, because it's outside of that and it's pushing for a different, you know, value structure, which in this case is. Is DEI or equity. It's a lot more visible. I think I gave the example that I was talking about, about that when it appeared. When Mist assist appears in a Jewish context, a lot of people can't determine the difference between it being. It's a further step from what I just said, sort of. But they can't discern the difference between Judaism and Jewish mysticism, which are not the same thing. And Jewish mysticism can be just as gnostic and nasty as any other gnostic thing. And so they see Jewish mystics doing gnostic manipulations and they say that's the Jews. But that's a lack of discernment because. Because religiously observant Jews don't act like that. In fact, every conversation I've had with a religiously observant Jew about what I'm. I'm seeing says at some point in the conversation, that's the exact opposite of Judaism. They say that it's the exact. Well, of course, maybe they're just lying. Of course that's what we have to believe. Every time they say something, they're lying. That's the woke view because, you know, they're saying secret motivations. But the same thing's happening with the other example I gave with Equity, Radical equality. You'll see a lot of the guys will say that secular liberal values, in other words, that the state is not interfering if we get strict about it, that the state is not interfering with your religious beliefs, including the ability not to believe if you choose, that actually is the same thing as communism. And you're seeing that argument everywhere. That's not the same thing as communism. Individual rights versus collectivism are not not the same thing. So when it's not your set of values, you lose the ability to discern. You might pick up that something bad is happening, but you'll probably blame the wrong thing. Jews or liberalism being the two examples I gave. But when it is your set of values where you should be the most attuned, there's too much. I don't know if it's sentimentality, if it's tribe over truth, if it's just the blindness that comes with your own good intention dimensions, right? So if you're a good, healthy Christian and you've said Christ is king, you probably never once thought it could be used to hurt Jewish people. So you don't even know that any Christian would possibly do that. Not realizing that you literally have these guys out arguing to be more Machiavellian in their approach to pushing their values. So as it turns out, it's harder to see when it's your own thing. But that's how Parasites work. That's why I was of kind calling them gnostic parasites. The idea, like when you get bit by a mosquito every now and then, you feel it because whatever. But it's supposed to have its like saliva which makes you itch is like anesthetic, so you don't feel it. When it bites you, you don't know you got bit. That way it can bite you again and again and again, same thing. If you've ever had the distinct pleasure of getting in a pond and picking up a leech, you never felt it happen. Or if you've ever had a tick, it's buried its head in your skin, you never felt, felt it happen. And. Right. That's how parasites work. If they're detected, they get removed, they get stopped. So they're, they try to be undetectable. So you can do this within that Christian context this way just as easily by manipulating what the verses mean, by manipulating Christian values or impulses. Like, you know, we want more Christians in society. That's obviously part of the Great Commission. We all know that having more believing moral Christians in society would be a net benefit for society. Or at least every Christian agrees with that. I also agree with it, but every Christian certainly agrees with that. And so you come along and say we need a Christian nation. And all of a sudden they're like, yeah, but they don't know that it might actually mean something else too. Right. So there's this difficulty of discernment when it's in your own house, in a sense, is, I think what I'm saying. And then when it's outside your house, you're more apt to blame the wrong thing for the discernment you actually, actually have.

Will Spencer [02:43:59]:

So, so it's easier. So you can't spot it in your own house, but you can easily spot it in someone else's house and scapegoat or make that person the enemy while being blind to the fact that you have a, you have just as much of a parasite in your own house. And then I, I can see that working both ways. Like everyone's pointing at each other. It's like, well, maybe we should look at our own house and actually try to get these parasites out that have latched on to some. Something good.

James Lindsay [02:44:24]:

Yeah, it's, I mean, that's such a radical idea. Especially when you know they're, they're dangerous. It's like that if you have a, if you have a parasite, you probably don't need it and probably don't want it, and it's probably not Benefiting you. And these aren't actually like leeches or mosquitoes, by the way. These are like face suckers. Like, these are.

Will Spencer [02:44:40]:

Yeah.

James Lindsay [02:44:41]:

Or cordyceps is actually the right parasite, the fungal cordyceps, which takes over the brains of insects and causes them to go basically like plant themselves or that other one that gets birds, they crawl up to the top of the grass, birds to eat them. It's like mind control parasites.

Will Spencer [02:44:58]:

Now, how can someone begin to discern if some of these ideas have taken root in them, in their heart? Because it does ultimately begin with the individual to be discerning about the ideas that they're absorbing, the individuals that they're following and their own emotional tenor and character. If someone's like, oh, wow, if they're listening to this, like, I think I might have gotten myself into a bigger bit of mud. How can they start to know if that's kind of like within them as well?

James Lindsay [02:45:23]:

I think that the emotional tenor is the most. The easiest one in many respects, but maybe the most important one. Another one is of course, to see, like, if you can take a step back from your favorite influencer and see more of what they're saying. And they said something really bad and you're like, I have to defend him. Like, that's a sign that something is off. Like, if you have an influencer and he does a show and he literally starts talking about how National Socialism might be the right answer, and you're like, yeah, but he's on the right. He's on our side. Like, you probably got to step back. The emotional tenor is if you are really being motivated by, like we said, fear, desperation, resentment, grievance, victimhood, like, you're in. You're at least in danger. Right. Speaking of stepping in the mud. And you really have to try to try to fix that. Now, Christian, this is the handshake of faith and reason again. Because what is it that actually drives out is a good word, but it's not even. It's not even correct. The more I think and feel about this, where there is faith, there is not fear. It's not even that it drives it out. It's like the. It's like turning on the light doesn't drive out darkness. It's like it fills the space. Instead, it's something different. And so if you're coming at this from a place of fear, then you have come from a place of lost faith. Right? And so that's bad. And then same thing. Are you being reasonable or unreasonable? The example I just gave, are you Being unreasonable to defend somebody on your tribe when they've said something objectionable or indefensible, well, probably you're being very unreasonable. So if you're losing the path of that handshake of faith and reason, if you're acting from fear or tribalism or anger or wrath or the desire just to feel better, which is called catharsis, you're probably at least in danger. And it's a good time to just take a step back and say, man, am I messing up? And the Christian ideal, which in this case I definitely hold to and have articulated many times, is that if you repent, you deserve. Not deserve in the cosmic theological sense, but from brother to brother, forgiveness.

Will Spencer [02:47:31]:

That's right.

James Lindsay [02:47:32]:

And so, I mean, the idea is that nobody deserves forgiveness, but God in his mercy will still grant it to those who repent as well, to the best of their ability. And in earnesty. So it's like that becomes this ideal model. And so it's fine if you're messing up, right? This is the most frustrating part, is everybody's like, James hates all these. And it's like, no, it's really, it's okay, you're messing up. It's a huge psyops. There are probably billions of dollars behind it, tons of actors. We're seeing all the Qatari stuff getting tied into it right now, actually coming out live. The whole point of these things is to trick people and getting. Get them to act the wrong way. That's the point of playing political warfare. Just take a step back, say you messed up, and move forward. If, if you're unwilling. So this is a great diagnostic, to step back and say, man, I messed up. But you have to analyze because you might be right and you might be wrong. But if you messed up and you feel like you just can't say it, you're acting in pride, you're in a bad place, and you're susceptible to that gnostic circumstance. Or maybe you're already part of it because that's what it really is. If you think you're already God in a sense, that you have different rules that apply to you because you're elitist and superior to everybody. That's pride. That's. That's toxic, pathological pride. So those are good diagnostics. For what it's worth. People say, james, that applies to you too. You messed up with this woke right thing. And it's like, I have pored over this again and again and again and again and again. I am not coming from a place of fear. I am not mad at anybody? Well, a few people actually. It's a little hard. But you know, I'm seeing what I'm seeing and I think I can articulate it very clearly. And so if in the event that I realize that I'm wrong, I will eagerly repent of it is the best I can give you right now and that I honestly assess this all the time. But I believe that I have the correct diagnosis for what's going on. So I understand that that's where people are also going to be. But again, what are your motivations? My motivations are not fear, anger, despair, resentment, envy. I don't want what these people have. I don't care. I just want to get back to us fixing the country and getting leftist exploitation out of it. Like I don't want to be the guy on tv. I don't want to be the guy going to all the DC parties or whatever the hell they think I want. That's not it. My motivations are I'm telling the truth to the best of my ability to understand it and know it as earnestly as I can, including if it costs me. So I have a hard time knowing what it is. I mean if I'm wrong, I'll say so and I'll repent of it. But other than that, once it. Once it's proven to me, but other than that, I don't have those motivations. So check your emotional tenor, check your tribe over truth.

Will Spencer [02:50:28]:

Would you say you're operating with a measure of faith?

James Lindsay [02:50:31]:

Yeah, actually all the time. I don't know what the faith is in. That's the agnostic part. But like the idea that, I mean I've been given all my public talks for the last few weeks have been that I've given, over the last couple months have been preaching this exact idea is that believing that if you do the right thing that better things than worse will happen is I think really a pretty operational definition of faith. And that means being able to try to ascertain what the right thing is to do and to take the risk of doing it. Not knowing if it'll work out, not knowing if it'll bring consequences or even knowing it'll bring consequences because it's the right thing to do anyway. That's Daniel Penny example. He did the right thing on that train knowing that there could be consequences, knowing that he could get hurt, knowing that somebody else could get hurt, hurt and then faced tremendous legal consequences for it and public opinion consequences. And to me it's like what faith boils down to is acting to do the right thing anyway, pursuing the truth anyway. And trusting. That's the trust part. That's your Hebrews 11. Trusting that when you do that, that not that it'll be rewarded. That's like two selfish. That things, better things than worse things will happen if you do that.

Will Spencer [02:51:59]:

Are you surprised to find that the faith that you grew up with and that you explored in college has come around to a new degree of relevance in your life in this moment?

James Lindsay [02:52:11]:

I don't know. I don't know that surprised is right. I don't know if I have time to be thinking about it in the those terms. I certainly have a more mature view of these things than I did at the time. And so what I would actually say is I don't think it was relevant then either. So there was not like this return to relevance. There was more of this discovery of relevance.

Will Spencer [02:52:33]:

I think say more about that.

James Lindsay [02:52:38]:

So a while back I started, speaking of projects I never finished, I started writing a book about political warfare and propaganda. And I don't know, it's not very long. I think I wrote 14 or 15,000 words on it. And I came up with this whole list of principles that I had intended to fill in and write out, some of which I've done podcasts about, some of which are just sitting on this file as a, you know, bullet point list, some of which I've written out. And I just kept noticing that like a whole bunch of them, I'm like, I was kind of like, frankly, I was like, damn it, this is in the Bible. Damn it, this is in the Bible too. Damn it, this is in the Bible. Three, you know, and it's like I was having this kind of like Jordan Peterson moment where, you know, he's like, well, you know, his whole argument right now is if you were to figure out a society and how it's going to work and write the book, it would end up being the Bible, you know, and it's like, yeah, it's kind of right. And it's like, okay, so this is sort of how I ended up coming to the belief that at least whatever's written there is anthropologically true. And what I mean by anthropologically true is at the very least stripping all theology out of the Bible because of the agnostic perspective that I have. I don't want to use that. I'm willing to entertain it, but I just, for this argument, I want to step away from it. That the Bible records a three or four or five thousand year history. I'm not Exactly. Sure of the timeline of, we'll say, 5,000 year history of a people.

Will Spencer [02:54:07]:

Yeah.

James Lindsay [02:54:09]:

And that people is brought into a covenant, it believes with God that gives it a set of laws. It says if you behave this way you will be blessed. And if you don't behave this way, it's not going to go so good for you. So that could be a result of divine punishment and reward, or it could be a result as the Bible actually depicts, or it could merely be if you live according to these things, then things are going to work out okay through natural consequences. And what I, you know, the least I can say about the Bible is the least I can say about the Bible is that these people that wrote this book down were writing a chronicle of basically, hey, look, here's how we screwed up and here's what we did to fix it. And here's how we screwed up again and here's what we did to fix it. And it always came back to when we followed these principles that were these kind of core founding principles, the law as given in the Torah, things got better. And when we deviated or forgot them or whatever, things got worse. When there was calamities, if we kept our faith, then we got through it, and if we didn't, then we didn't, you know, then bad, well, they never actually fully lose the faith. That's the whole point of the Bible and so on and so forth. So you get this document tracking a peculiar set of values that shows up very rarely anywhere, anywhere in the world. The voluntary pursuit of righteousness on an individual level, the wrestling with God that means Israel. The voluntary, by the time you get to the New Testament of acceptance of Christ's sacrifice and grace or rejection of it, and you have this whole set of principles that for whatever reason, divinely inspired or because it happened to work for a people that survived a lot of trouble, tells you a great way to live. And so that's what I mean by anthropologically true. I don't know why it is true. It could be theological, it could be divine inspiration. It could merely be that you have a really tough people who had the right set of principles that guided them through a lot of good and bad and they articulated what it was that made it work and didn't. But either way it's stunningly relevant to living in ordering a good life and a good, good society, and intriguing on at a minimum that level. So that's, I think, what I mean by discovering more and more of its relevance. But the other part is when I was a Kid. It wasn't relevant. It was boring. It was stupid mass. It was boring. And when I was in college, you know, I was in college, I had other priorities. We were doing Bible studies, but it was just kind of like, you know, interesting. And I was in this mishmash of spirituality stuff. But mostly I was a college guy in a fraternity trying to major in physics, which is kind of this weird mix of things.

Will Spencer [02:57:02]:

But you still have this long experience with the book. It's not like you're just opening it for the first time right now. It's something that you grew up in. And maybe it wasn't relevant to your life as a kid and maybe it wasn't strictly how you, you know, how you organized your life in college, but you still have this deep familiarity with it where you're quoting verses throughout this entire interview, which has been. I've been pretty, pretty impressed by that. You have this intuitive knowledge of it. And now here it is sitting in front of you, this moment where like you need this now more than ever. I would say we all do. But in a moment it's like this is providing you the framework in a way to understand a lot of what's happening in the west right now.

James Lindsay [02:57:35]:

Yeah, it's been a real blessing actually to get to work with so many Christians who the woke, right. Say that I hate speaking of their secret mind reading powers because one of the things was that I figured if I was going to be stepping into that domain, I definitely am not a haughty person person, I don't think. I wasn't going to come in and be like, listen here you chuckleheads, you primitive screw heads or whatever it is from army of Darkness and I'm going to tell you about the woke and then leave me alone and all this crap, or I'm going to argue atheism with you or any of this junk. I purposefully entered into the Christian environments that I was invited into. Grateful, I should say, for the invitation and happy to listen. I genuinely wanted to understand the perspective of the people I was listening to, not just from, for the reason that it helps me communicate to them, although that's also relevant, but just to understand this perspective properly, which I had kind of never bothered to do. And it's been a genuine and true blessing to have spent most of the last five years working with so many Christians who have been gracious also with their time. Sometimes they get a little apologetic with me or like weird about it, but most of the time they don't. And you know, know they speak this language. And so I want to know what they're talking about. I talked to my pastor friend John, and he's telling me about, you know, the mercy and grace of. Of mercy and justice. I'm sorry, perfect mercy and perfect justice of God. And I'm like, you know, I want to know more about that because I get the ideals and I don't. It's. I understand how it's challenging. And he's like, well, it's the book of Galatians. So it's like, well, let's go study that and let's try to. Try to figure out. And then it's like, oh, wow, this is really profound and interesting. And so, you know, I've taken that opportunity, I guess, very seriously, you know, contrary to what a lot of my critics, and I don't know if they're opponents, I don't know how to describe them. People who don't like me have characterized me as. I've really taken these. These opportunities seriously. And it leads where it leads. And it leads where it leads. How it leads. I mean, you're Calvinists. You know the deal. It's not up to them.

Will Spencer [02:59:49]:

Yes and no.

James Lindsay [02:59:52]:

So anyway, I'm grateful for the opportunity. And so I've taken it very seriously. And I haven't, I don't think, wasted it.

Will Spencer [03:00:00]:

I think that you were telling the story of the history of a people group, you know, who have these principles that when they adhere to the principles, principles, they have a good life, things go well for them. And when they deviate from the principles, things don't go so well. And that sort of anthropological view. And then in them you have the person of Christ who embodies the principles perfectly, you know, who comes down like I am in this very real embodied sense that sort of provides this sort of theological, supernatural appearance of the law amongst the people as an invitation. Invitation into living in this way and being sanctified, towards being able to live that way throughout your life. And what a great turning point that is in the middle of that story, in a sense, or towards the end of the story, depending how you look at it, I suppose, or wherever. But this idea.

James Lindsay [03:00:49]:

Three quarters.

Will Spencer [03:00:50]:

Yeah, exactly. But there's a sense where it's like this story is about this people, but it's also about something so much larger where the law becomes embodied in reality, condescends to become embodied in reality, and sort of what happens as a result of that for the people who reject that law and then the people who follow it. And I think the story of the west is in many cases, in a very real sense actually the people who choose to follow that law and make that profession and say, yeah, no, this is reality. This actually happened, this historical event actually happened. And we follow in the things that teaches what a gift that's been to our civilization.

James Lindsay [03:01:30]:

Yeah, I mean, both there in the New Testament, but also with the law in the Old Testament. It is ultimately a voluntary choice to righteousness. And of course a voluntary choice to righteousness is the moral and religious people that John Adams was referring to that he said the Constitution was written for, because the entire project of self governance relies upon that. But again, I say that that's the handshake of reason, faith, because you have to have both reason to operate within general revelation. You have to have faith to trust that what you're doing isn't all in vain or you know, that, that it's actually worth it too in order to, you know, to do many of the things that, that you do. So it's, it's this individual volunteerism that's tucked in there is also, I think, crucial whether it's in the Christian context or whether it's in the broader experience. Acceptance of these. Well, the law as it's phrased in the Torah, but of these principles that defined how these people were going to organize themselves and hold themselves. Plus the examples of course, of people who are doing it wrong, whether that's the Pharisees or whether that's when they get degenerate at different points. You know, you come down, Moses himself is on the mountain talking to God himself and bringing down the tablets of the core of the law in itself, comes down to find Aaron building a golden, or have. Having built a golden calf. No. And then he lies about it. Oh, he just took all the gold and threw it in the fire and the calf came out and everybody just got real excited and it's like, what a stupid. I get worked up about that one.

Will Spencer [03:03:00]:

Sure.

James Lindsay [03:03:01]:

But yeah, but yeah, it's the, the, this, you know, the, these are people. Also the Bible talks not just about like how great everything is, like they messed up a lot. And that I think is really important too. I mean that's what a lot of Paul's epistles are. He's like, listen here, you primitive screw heads, pretty much almost all the epistles. It's like, it's really, it's a story about the challenge of, you know, taking up righteousness so that you can operate in self governance and choose to have voluntary association rather than enforced association, which is a radical Departure from every other system that the world has ever kind of come up with.

Will Spencer [03:03:46]:

It's very different and it's about a changed nature because Paul himself was one of those quote unquote primitive screw heads when he was Saul. You know, God comes and he changes us. He makes Sauls into Paul's and Simon's into Peter's and he makes us able to live in alignment with that law. And so in that sense reason and faith again change, shake hands and say like I can read this rationally and I can understand what it says. Faith binds me to it and helps me live in accordance with it. And that produces a righteous society. And not in any Gnostic sense. There's no secret knowledge, it's all just written right there. But are you willing to sacrifice your pride, you know, your self righteous pride to do it God's way instead of your own?

James Lindsay [03:04:27]:

Yeah, the Gnostics are the, are the false teachers that get warned about again and again and again and again. They have the secret teaching of what it really means. Come with me. And you know, I mean to a degree, I guess it's not quite the same, I was going to say the Scribes and the Pharisees, I mean, but it's like they've just, those are people that have just lost the track. They're not really necessarily Gnostic, they're just too wrapped up in the particulars and in the surface. But the false teachers are a real problem and this is why the Bible warns about them so many times, whether it's in Jeremiah, whether it's in Ezekiel, the Gospels do it again and again and again and again and again. It's an incredibly important theme to watch out for. False teachers.

Will Spencer [03:05:09]:

If you don't mind me asking. So you've taken a lot of these ideas into the public square and you've gotten a ton of force feedback, let's say about some of these ideas are unwelcome and yet you persist and I hear you persisting for the right reasons as you articulated. What do you hope for through this, we'll call it campaign. We've talked about the blitzkrieg and so maybe there's a counter campaign. What do you hope hoping for the result might be, if you can articulate.

James Lindsay [03:05:34]:

What that is, I mean a very abstract sense is that the truth and what is right will prevail and that the faithful, even if they're only a remnant, will therefore be able to inherit the fruits of the society we're trying to defend in a more prosaic sense what I actually hope for is I see a radical coup attempt against MAGA happening. I think it is a splinter. My personal belief is that it is a losing campaign, a purposefully losing campaign that will re empower the left. And I am hoping to stop that from taking place. I would love to see MAGA flourish. I would love to see it become an epoch defining movement for America. I would love to see Trump's presidency succeed and him to have a strong success who can help lead us back to being this kind of shining city on the hill, beacon of freedom for the world that, that I've grown up knowing and loving about my country. So I want to try to stop everything that I think might foil that, whether it comes from the left overall or from the right. Honestly, I actually think that both woke left and woke right are the same project. It is, you know, rope them. It's not rope a dope, it's the, it's the old one, two, right? You, you get them with the, the left and then when they're like reeling, you whack them with the right. Yeah. And then the left comes back and finishes the job. And so I think that that's, I think that that's actually what's happening. And the way I've described it to a lot of people is I saw a train coming. I've seen the train, you know, hooking up cars and gathering steam for a few years, but I saw the train hit full throttle, come barreling down the tracks end of summer last year. And I thought, well, I can't stop a train. I'm not Superman. Maybe I can derail the train. What do I have? And at the end of the day, what I figured out that I have is basically me. And I was like, well, I'll throw myself on the tracks and see what happens. If I can get the wheels off, then America survives. Cool.

Will Spencer [03:07:44]:

Praise God. Do you think you're being successful in that effort?

James Lindsay [03:07:47]:

Yeah, pretty much. It's not pleasant, though, and I don't know how it works out for me in the long term, but I've decided that I don't care. You know, I mean, again, speaking biblically, Abraham was asked to put his child on Isaac on the table, and he was faithful. And then he was blessed with, you know, many children. So maybe it works out and maybe it doesn't. Job had a, a rough go.

Will Spencer [03:08:14]:

Worked out for him. Worked out for him, though.

James Lindsay [03:08:16]:

It worked out for him too. Yeah, but it's, it, you know, it's, it's, it's tough. So I don't know if it'll work out for me, but I think I am being successful. I think I have largely exposed the coup attempt within. I've kind of tiered out maga. I see it in three levels. Elite maga, which I already told you, I think is captured, and then middle MAGA and then Normie maga. And I think that Normie maga, or, sorry, middle maga, I think middle MAGA is starting to wake up very quickly to there being a serious problem. And since they are the overwhelming workhorse of the MAGA phenomenon, not its celebrity tier, I have a feeling that there will be some kind of a rupture later. But rather than it tearing MAGA apart, as I previously feared, I think what it will be is that the kind of elite woke right bubble will separate and go off and pop. I think that that's been kind of the best I can hope for. And every time I mull it over, don't tell anybody or pray about it, I just keep thinking, keep going, keep going, keep going.

Will Spencer [03:09:25]:

Do you think that the Trump administration is aware of this threat? I presume that they probably are. But can they see it with this level of clarity and resolution?

James Lindsay [03:09:32]:

They are, I think, aware of it to a degree. I don't know if they know how serious it is. I do not think they have a high level of clarity about it or precision about it. I have very strong reasons to believe that they are aware of it and that they are at least concerned by it. It's best that I not talk about those reasons. But it's certainly also the case that I'm still completely blacklisted from the White House, so it's not like they're inviting me over over for meetings.

Will Spencer [03:09:58]:

Well, if someone in the administration should happen to listen to this interview and you could give a message to them about this, because I agree with your analysis and I agree with your assessment. What would you have to say to them?

James Lindsay [03:10:11]:

I am very afraid that all this radicalism is in a. We're at a very dangerous point. First of all, what I would say is there's no easy way out. We've waited too long to speak up about. This will cause a, you know, bomb to go off, basically, that will fragment the movement, the MAGA movement. At this point, there's no way for that not to happen. It's been too big and too entrenched. But hopefully with savvy act, you know, savvy action, and it has to be done earlier rather than sooner or rather than later. It has to be done as soon as possible. Because the midterms put a deadly stopwatch on this whole whole thing. The administration is going to have to start setting very clear tones and very clear indicators that it is not with these radicals without necessarily pushing down the plunger on the dynamite and just blowing it all up. So how that's to be done with savvy, I'm less clear. But it's going to have to actually be very clear to start distancing itself from the radical radicalism that's already done so with the anti Semitism obviously, but with the, the racialism, the, the rampant us versus them mentality, it's going to have to start setting some lines. It's going to have to do it in a savvy way. Like I said, the longer you wait, the worse it's going to get. And the closer to the midterms you get, the more likely you are you're going to lose them completely. We are rapidly approaching the date. I don't know when that date is where one of two things, there are two dates actually. One of the dates is where you're going to going to win the midterms. Republicans are going to lose badly and there will be no saving it after some point. And secondly, you're playing a game of chicken against the clock right there. The secondly, there's a things happen so as we saw with that Shiloh woman who called the child by a racial slur and became a cause celeb through the woke right in other parts of the right. And it kind of very ugly way in order to defy the left allegedly. But it was clearly not just to defy the left. There were many people who were making it about being racist as well. Sooner or later, I mean that's like Breonna Taylor dying with the left back in 19 or 20 whenever that happened. And they were looking for their George Floyd. And so trad Floyd is coming. So some event is going to happen at some point that's going to cause the woke right to go absolutely ballistic the way that the left went ballistic after George Floyd. The energy is there, the consolidation of power is there. That's how you take the revolution in stages from stage two to stage three and consolidate power over the entire movement and jettison everybody else. And so that moment is coming. They are looking for. That moment I think is what the Shiloh story proves. And when it comes, if we are unprepared for it, MAGA will be ripped to pieces and everything will be be in disarray and it would be very, very Wise for people, especially even in the administration, to have thought about and prepared for that contingency, which they will not likely be able to control the timing of because it will happen off of some event that's more than likely organic. So tough times are coming, tests are coming, and the administration should. And also everybody around in MAGA should be aware that these things are happening and that these threats are looming and they are real. And if we sleep on this, that we're going to find ourselves in trouble.

Will Spencer [03:13:45]:

Yeah. If the assessment and the diagnostics that you provided throughout this whole conversation are real, what you're describing is the logical conclusion of that. I think the tricky part is, and maybe you can speak to this, is how to back away from these elements without being like you're attacking to the left. Because that's what happens as soon as you try to back away from the more radical elements on the right. You get accused of going left, which technically is true, but not in an objective sense.

James Lindsay [03:14:09]:

No, actually you can just be standing still. You can even actually move right technically while still opposing radicalism. I don't. I think that the way that you have. We have to do this is by appealing to the founding principles of the country. I kind of see three paths. You could say there are four, but there are really three. But I'll say four paths. And these paths are, you can firmly advocate for the founding principles of the. Of the country. You can weakly advocate for the principles of the country. You can go left, or you can watch the right take over and the radicals. I mean, we can either go radically left or go radically right, or we can weakly or strongly articulate for the. And defend the principles of the country. Weak is not really an option. That's why I said there's three, but not four. If you. To. To just be weak about it is to pick whichever one of the right or left is stronger. In this case, I think it's the left. So you can't weakly articulate the principles of the country. You can stand firm in them, or you can watch everything bend left, or you can watch everything bend radically right. And I think that the necessity for people who want to keep the country on track is that we have to firmly articulate the principles of the country. That means we have to learn them if we are not familiar with them, we have to know them, we have to feel them, we have to have faith in them. We have to believe that they were founded on the right things, right about humanity, and that they are the right thing to do and to stand for if you're demoralized or despairing of them, you can't do that. And those people turn radical one way or the other, depending on their dispositions.

Will Spencer [03:15:44]:

Yeah. We have to recognize what it was that actually founded us. The synthesis of reason and faith. And the exclusion, perhaps not intentionally, but the exclusion of gnosticism and protection protect against that.

James Lindsay [03:15:56]:

But you're also just going to have to bear getting called names that aren't true. And you're going to have to re articulate and rearticulate and re articulate and re articulate your positions and why you're being misrepresented, which is frustrating, tedious, exhausting and every other thing. You know, we went through it with the left, we can go through it with these guys too.

Will Spencer [03:16:15]:

Just one final question. If someone is listening, has listened to all this and has been skeptical of all, like, okay, you know what? I like these guys, but I'm not sure I'm going to trust them as the authorities, where would you point them for sources outside of say, the two of us, where they can begin to get a little piece of perception of what might be going on?

James Lindsay [03:16:32]:

Well, I mean, if they're interested in the gnostic stuff in its relationship to modernist politics. You held up the book. It's not an easy book. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. You can see that case. Another very hard set of books are written by Eric Fogland who make the case that Marx was a Gnostic. If you're interested in that side of the the debate, I encourage people to do the following experiment. If you want to find out about the woke. Right. At least if you have enough following, just go on social media, on X in particular, and say, especially if you say it where I get to see it and I can retweet you. I think James Lindsay is right about some things. You don't have to commit to anything or I think James Lindsay makes sense some good points and just see what your experience will be for defending or agreement. There's been a number of people who've stood up and defended me in the last week who got absolutely mobbed. So you can go see for yourself that there is a campaign to make people not want to listen to what I have to say coming from the right right now. So check it for yourself. Go on. If you don't want to engage that way, go on my X. Read my. Read the replies to to anything I say. Just read through them for an hour, see how you feel, see what you're seeing. I'm not that fat. I could lose a pound or two, maybe ten. I'm not Jewish, I'm not gay. I mean, we can go down the list of all the things that you're going to read that I'm not. And of course, I'm not cooked either. So that's one thing. I read primary Sources. So if you want to see what Marx said, don't take my word for. For it. Go read Marx. I'm sorry, it's hard. You're more than welcome to use the resources that I've produced. You're welcome to use resources other people produced. But if you want to see what Marx actually said, you need to read Marx, and it is challenging. If you want to see what the critical theorist said, I encourage people to read Repressive Tolerance for themselves. Just see what they said and see if. When you read Repressive Tolerance, you're seeing the same behaviors backwards from the right, for example. These are the kinds of things that you can do to Check me. If you think I'm reading the sources that I cite incorrectly, go read them and challenge me. Go read Mein Kampf. I'm reading Mein Kampf again. Again. Again. It's horrifying me how many of the arguments I see from the woke. Right. I don't know if they've read the book or not. I don't think they have. But they're the same argumentative structure, the same exact points being raised. See it for yourself. Go read. That's why most of my podcasts, by the way, Will, is just me reading sources to people most of my episodes, not all of them, but most of them are me reading primary sources to people. So go read Primary Sources and see if it lines up. Listen, maybe less to influencers who are basically the fake news. Now, this Qatar stuff should be alarming for people, for example, and that's a tip of an iceberg. So, you know, be healthy in your skepticism, but be skeptical of what you're seeing. But check primary sources. There's nothing better.

Will Spencer [03:19:38]:

Yeah, read the Corpus Hermeticum. Read Hegel. You know, like the. The Secret Religions of the west lecture series that we've been talking about is just. You just have quotes through it. The. Through the entire thing. You can read Freire. You can read all this. And that's the thing is this isn't. This isn't about James Lindsay. Right? It's not. It's not about you. It's about the picture that you can see that people can go look and discover this. It's not for themselves. They can read these primary sources and see is James doing his work. Check James's work against what you're seeing. And then it doesn't have to just be about a man. And I think that's the really important thing.

James Lindsay [03:20:13]:

Yep. Thank you. That's right.

Will Spencer [03:20:15]:

Yeah. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation. I think we've been going for three plus hours. I appreciate your stamina. I appreciate the thoroughness, miss, that you communicate all of these ideas and different teachers. Teachers, but different philosophers and their ideas. And I just really appreciate the commitment that you've shown to this information because you delivered those lectures in 2023 at a church, of all places. And so here in Phoenix, where I live. And so, like, how did I miss this? So thank you so much for your commitment to all of this.

James Lindsay [03:20:44]:

Well, thank you so much. That's very kind of you to say. And thanks again for the invitation and the opportunity to talk at the this much depth.

Will Spencer [03:20:51]:

You're very welcome. Where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do?

James Lindsay [03:20:55]:

New discourses.com that's the website. New discourses.com. go check it out. That's newdiscourses.com I'm on social media at Conceptual James, my company, where I publish everything in the podcast and everything is New Discourses. It's called the New Discourses Podcast and its social media presence is at New Discourses. It is more places than I am because I'm everywhere in except Facebook, and it didn't get kicked off Facebook when I did.

Will Spencer [03:21:22]:

And I'll be sure to link those lectures in the show notes to this interview.

James Lindsay [03:21:26]:

Great. Thank you.

Will Spencer [03:21:27]:

Thank you, James.