Speaker 1: This is Jonathan Pegel. Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 2: I recently recorded my interpretation of k P Hop Demon
Hunters and watching that movie and thinking about what was
going on in it and what it meant, and you
know what, with the strengths and the weaknesses of it,
it really made me reflect on the question of self esteem,
self esteem culture and how it you know, the problem
that it that that are in that vision, and how
it is the same and how it is different from
what I believe is kind of the true Christian ontology,
the true Christian way of being. So I thought we
could explore it for this month's patron video. And so
before we start, thank you for supporting what I'm doing.
And it is really through your support that I'm able
to be able to do this. And it's given me
a lot of latitude to start the press to do
all the things that I'm doing. So I truly appreciate it,
and so hopefully these extra videos are worth it and
are fun for you. So, you know, since the nineteen sixties,
there's a really wonderful documentary call The Century of the Self.
It is definitely worth looking into. And that documentary what it.
Speaker 1: Does is it.
Speaker 2: It talks about a shift that happened in the nineteen
sixties that was started a little bit before, where in
some ways Freud's vision was inverted and this idea in
some ways of the repressed person the idea because when
Freud talked about repression, you talk about all these desires
that we had, that we had, he was suggesting that
we had to repress it. He could see that our
desires were being repressed by the by the ego, you know,
and the super ego. But he he said that this
was absolutely necessary in order for society to function. What
happened in the nineteen fifties and sixties that in some
ways this vision got reversed and we started to develop
the idea that you know, you should express those inner things.
You should you should not repress your desires, you should
not repress your your inner identities and your urges and
all these things, but that you should, in fact, you know,
embrace them, express them.
Speaker 1: And so it shifted, it kind of switched.
Speaker 2: It used a very similar structure as the one you
could say Freud was using, but it flipped it upside
down and it turned the idea of you could say,
your desires, your idiosyncresies your differences into something that should
not be hidden, you should not be ashamed of, but
rather that you should put out there and express. And
this transformation is a massive transformation, and it infects Christian thinking,
and it leads us to you know, how can I
say this? Like, it leads us into very strange directions
where Christians don't realize what it is they're embracing, yet
they embrace it nonetheless. Hopefully at the end, I'll try
to explain what I believe is the true Christian understanding
of this. It is in some way a fusion of
the two, or you know, a mix of the two,
of the two understandings, but one of the shift that
happened where all of a sudden, you know, we are
meant to embrace our difference. We're made to embrace our desires,
were made to embrace youto syncrasy and not just embrace
it but express it. Led to all kinds of phenomena
which at first might seem disconnected, but that are all
kind of connected together. Of course, at the outset is
the spirit of rebellion, right, the spirit of rebellion, which
informs things like rock and roll, which informs the hippie culture,
because you kind of understand this vision of rebellion as
a way in which you know, my secret desire, my direction,
the thing that motivates me is being stifled right by society,
is being stifled by the system, being stifled by social norms,
and therefore I have to break free. I have to
free myself from that system, and I have to be
authentic and express myself. But what we mean by authenticity
and expressing ourselves it would be different than what ancient
people would have thought as authenticity. It is rather an authenticity.
Christians believe in authenticity in the sense that you have
to become your true self. But your true self is
not identified with your thoughts, with your desires, with your passions,
with all of that, but is identified with Christ in you.
That is your That is your authentic self, right it
is It is the goodness that you can move towards.
Speaker 1: That's what makes you truly yourself.
Speaker 2: But now we have this change, which is really this
kind of embracing of all your little quirks, your your
your your differences and all of that. So that so
there's that first thing. If you think about the hippie
rebellion and all of that is part of it. But
the other part, which looks like it's contradictory but is
actually the same, is mass consumer culture. So mass consumer
culture is the same because mass consumer culture says, your
desire is.
Speaker 1: You, right, the thing that you want is what makes you,
what makes you you.
Speaker 2: In the old, in the ancient times, you would have
thought that like your identity, in the sense that your
participation in society. You're a man, You're I'm a Canadian,
I'm a you know, I'm an Orthodox, I am you know.
I have these roles, and those roles are the ones
that would confer an identity on me. But when we
move to this weird kind of self expressive self identification,
one of the things that happens is that you have
to embrace your desires, and the embracing of those desires
turns into consumerism. And consumerism this idea that your desires
are who you are is of course related also to
sexual emancipation. These two things are very much in the
same vision of this inversion of Freud's basic idea of repression,
because in some ways the idea, the ancient idea of sexuality,
is that in someone you have to restrain your desire.
Speaker 1: You have to kind of constrain it.
Speaker 2: You have to to bring it together and focus it
so that it serves society in a marriage and having
children in all of that, and that the other aspects,
the other thoughts, the other desires that.
Speaker 1: You might have.
Speaker 2: And then we know that everybody has, you know, the
desire that you could have for someone else's wife or
for for someone of the same sex. So for whatever
other weird uh thing that you could you could, uh
could have thoughts over that flighting desires could come into
your mind about. Then those have to be They have
to be dealt with. They cannot be can I say this,
They cannot be engaged in because they lead to dangerous things.
This is will already help you start to see the
difference between the Freudian vision and the Christian vision, because
the Freudian vision is that you have to repress those
You have to basically push them out. You have to
in some ways almost pretend that they're not there. You know,
you have to act as if they're not there and
and kind of put them in the you know, push
them into the unconscious or let them exist in a
semi conscious realm where in the Christian vision.
Speaker 1: That's what it is, the Christian vision.
Speaker 2: You kind of see both in some in some ways,
you have to be able to see them. You have
to be able to identify these thoughts and see them
coming at you, and then you have to let them go.
Then you have to confess them. Then you have to
kind of, uh, you know, consciously move away from them.
And that is very different from repression. Repression is the
semi conscious behavior of like no, no, no, not that, and
then you just try to hold things away from you
and pretend like that's not you and get offended and
react and say, you know, and say, oh, I'm not
you know, I'm not gay, or I'm not this, or
I'm not I'm you know. And then you you have
these thoughts that exist in the piffery that are pressing
on you and you just try to push them away.
Speaker 1: And you can see this if you watch American movies.
Speaker 2: They love to represent the repressed person, especially as we
began to embrace the expressing and the and the embracing
of all these desires. They love to represent the repressed
person as someone who's not realized, and a fully realized
person is someone who embraces all of that and is
willing to kind of integrate it into themselves. This can
be of course formulated in a union sense of integrating
the shadow, of course, which is also not a Christian vision.
Speaker 1: Of how to do this.
Speaker 2: But you can see how all of these things are
kind of playing together, and it leads to a social narrative,
a social narrative that will, like I said, lead on
the one hand, to this worship of originality, you know,
the worship of rebellion, this idea of the consumer, the
consumer human, and then also the liberated sexual person, and
all of these will go in directions that sometimes looks
like they're fighting with each other, but they ultimately are
actually they're actually based in the same vision. Part of
that whole kind of reversal and that whole transformation is
of course the idea of be yourself right and self esteem,
and you have to find your true self and you
have to be able to express your authentic self. This
is something that happens in all the every single movie.
And then the idea that in some ways this true
self or this real self is in opposition to your
family structure. Therefore, the exacerbation of teenage rebellion in society
where we think that teenage rebellion is a is a
normal thing that happens in every in every society all
around the world, the way it happens here, it doesn't.
Speaker 1: That is not actually true.
Speaker 2: There are tendencies, of course, in in in the teenagers,
which is that they in fact do want to become something,
They want to transition into a role. But in many
societies that would be managed through initiations and through incorporation
into society, to giving responsponsibility, uh, to kind of stop it,
not no longer treating the child like a child, but
rather start to treat them like an adult, and therefore
they create that transition and then they become their authentic
and result self. But in a world where we have
this weird inversion of desire and of authenticity that leads
to the pattern of teenage rebellion, which is the teenager
wants to be their authentic self, but their authentic self
is is represented in people like what is it that
you want? And what it is it that you feel?
Speaker 1: And all of these things.
Speaker 2: And of course as a teenager, that is an absolute chaos, right,
it's in a kind of chaos, uh. And so we
represent the family, the social norms, the school, all of
these things as trying to repress.
Speaker 1: The this authentic self.
Speaker 2: Right, the greatest image of this, and it's horrible because
it's a great movie, but the greatest image of this
is the Breakfast Club, where you really get that idea.
You know, you kind of have these broken teenagers that
are all being in weird ways, oppressed by their parents,
oppressed by the school, and now they have to be
willing to express and discover their true self, you know,
and to be free from the constraint of society, free
of the constraints of their family.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: You can add to that, of course, free of the
constraints of religion, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the thing
is that human desires and human thoughts are indefinite. The
things that can go through your mind, and the desires
that you can have, the desires that can capture you,
they are in fact indefinite.
Speaker 1: And once you start to embrace the.
Speaker 2: Idea that all your thoughts, that all your desires, that
all the things that are that are capturing you in
going through you, that those are you, and that are
there are something, there are things that are part of
your authentic self. Then if you follow down that road,
it leads to all kinds of insanity, it leads to
all kinds of problems, It leads to addiction obviously the
first step. It leads to uh sexual degeneracy in the
sense that you know, fetishization becomes part of your vision
and the idea that you have these fetishized desires that
express themselves in all kinds of weird ways, whether it's
the hyper specialization of porn, whether it is you know, kind.
Speaker 1: Of s and m and all of these these these.
Speaker 2: Types of practices that are you know, the the result
of embracing more and more extreme desires for either power
or being acted upon all of these things. And you know,
you can see all of the weirdness. And then also
the consumerism and so obesity is downstream from the same problem. Right,
this idea of consuming as being real, the idea of
what your desires are, that is who you are. And
therefore to deny your desires and to deny.
Speaker 1: Yourself is.
Speaker 2: To die, right, it is in some ways to die,
to deny yourself. And it's weird because those the people,
you know, it's like the let's say, the kind of
really capitalistic fast food culture person is not necessarily it's
maybe hated by the highly fetishized, you know, sexual deviant,
but they have They are representation of the same basic issue,
which is this weird reversal that happened after World War
Two in the nineteen sixties of what it is that
makes you you you know and what it is that
makes you authentic. This of course the hardest one to
talk about, but it's important that we talk about it
is the mental health issue. The mental health issue is
also downstream from this problem, which is the idea that
you identify with your let's say mental illness. This is
the extreme version of it, and so the idea that
you need a diagnostic, right, and people, these young people,
so many of them are like that. They're looking for
a diagnostic. They want something to name the mental illness.
And then our mental propensities, whether it is to be distracted,
whether it is to be hyper obsessed on certain details,
et cetera, et cetera, and all these panoply of possible
let's say idiosyncrasies. People dive in and then identify with
their diagnostic and then you hear people times like i'm adhd,
i'm ocd, I'm autistic.
Speaker 1: You know, all of these things.
Speaker 2: Now, it doesn't mean that there aren't extremes of mental practices,
and we all have our idiosyncratic mental habits. But the
idea of all of these things now becoming your identity,
what it does is it exacerbates it for sure, just
like it exacerbates sexual desire, just like it exacerbates consumerism,
just like it exacerbates all these other phenomena.
Speaker 1: And it leads to this weird kind of obsession.
Speaker 2: People have with their bugs, with their idiosyncrasy, and in
some ways their desire to you know, identify with embrace
you know, put that forward. You know people who who
put forward there, especially young girls. I've noticed they all
are trying to that. They put forth their diagnostic and
so society and of course the you know, the final
one is of course the LGBT stuff. The LGBT stuff
is in some ways because it's so symbolized, because it's
the rainbow, because it it is a kind of movement,
It in some ways is the culmination of this entire
way of thinking. The entire way of thinking that started
in the nineteen sixties culminates in pride, right, this idea
of being proud of your idiosyncrasy, of being proud of
your idiosyncratic desire, being proud of the way you're different,
the way you're fluid, the way you're not fixed, the
way you're free from any type of gender conformity, free
from conformity. And so the end all of that kind
of rock and roll punk aesthetic ultimately culminates in this,
in this final vision, the solution, you could say, people
see the problems of some of these, right, so in
some ways pride is a solution to the problem. So
people see the issues of you know, identifying with your
mental illness, although they do it identifying with their desires.
Get trapped by your desires, get trapped by your anxieties,
people identify with their anxieties, and just let that, you know,
let that fosters hyper focus on their anxieties, and that increases,
of course, the anxiety when you hyper focus on it.
The solution is something like the image of you know,
taking care of yourself, the image of self self care, right,
this whole obsession with self care, and then ultimately the
idea of self esteem, you know, and the idea of
constantly affirming others in their identity. But their identity is
this like idiosyncratic expression. So it's like, well, I have
to I will affirm you in your thing in order
to help you not be swallowed by by by this,
but not be swallowed by the mental health crisile will
affirm you in it. But all of this is like
a feedback loop, and it all feeds back into each
other and creates, of course, the problems.
Speaker 1: That we're in now.
Speaker 2: It's very difficult to break out of it because even
Christians are taken up by this way of thinking. Even
Christians will talk about and you see that Christians no,
not so much talking about sin anymore, but talking about.
Speaker 1: The fall as.
Speaker 2: Almost like as if we're victims of the fall, as
if we are. You know, we're broken, and we're all
we all have our mental health problems, and we all
have our relationship problems and all of this. In some
ways we are victims and we have to free ourselves,
like Christ says, you know, the truth will set you free.
And therefore, you know, the coming out as becoming almost
a parody of Christian thinking. But the coming out, you know,
this kind of like I'm going to express my true self,
which is actually this weird thing that's different from everybody
else that I'm that I've been hiding until now, that
I've been repressing.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to express it.
Speaker 2: This has totally that's filtered in and it's filtered into
Christian culture. And even people that don't fully embrace the
full pride version of it, they tend to think that way.
I tend to think that way. It's like, it's very
difficult because this is the way. This is the world
we live in, this is the world we've been raised in.
You know, we want our children not to be ashamed
of their idiosyncrasies. We want our children to be to
be to have self confidence and to have self esteem. Right,
you know, you think of that word self esteem, it's
really interesting. It is really is not a Christian word.
And so what is the solution? What is the Christian solution?
And so the Christian solution is interesting because it's humility,
and humility isn't the same as you could say anxiety,
and humility is also not the same as self the
kind of self deprecation that leads someone to suicide, for example,
Humility is not the same. Humility can never lead you
to suicide.
Speaker 1: Why is that?
Speaker 2: Because the problem with a lot of the self abasement,
the or the kind of feeling of that people have
of having a bad self esteem is because they think
they actually are great.
Speaker 1: That is, they or they think that they should be.
They're disappointed in their faults, like they're disappointed in the
way that they're broken, and they can't stand it, Like
people can't stand to realize that they're not what they
think they are.
Speaker 2: Right, They're not the hero, they're not the super person.
They're not and therefore that leads to a disconnect between
what they think they should be and what they truly are.
And that is the self esteem problem, right, That is
the that is the problem that can lead someone not
one of that the only problem. It's one of the
problems that can lead someone through self deprecation to a
kind of mental illness or a type of suicidality that
is very different from the type of humility that the
Fathers teach, that Christ teaches, that the Bible teaches that
type of humility is rather not owning anything, right, you
don't have self esteem. You try to focus your attention
on that which is above you. You try to focus
your attention on the play from which you've received, the
gifts that you have, and you are honoring of that right,
the idea that you abase yourself and say this doesn't
come from me. Whatever I have is given to me
from heaven. Whatever quality I have, whatever uh you know,
ability I have is given to is given to me
from heaven. And hopefully, by God's grace, I can submit
that to a higher good. And if you take up
that position, your vision of yourself and your humility will
be very different from the kind of self hating teenager,
because this form of self hate, or this form of
not wanting to attribute, not being proud of my thing,
it orders everything properly. And therefore you can see when
you do that, what qualities you have that are in
service of something higher and can be in service to
something higher. And you also see in that stance, you
could say, humble stance, what qualities are, what characteristics you
have which are leading you astray, which are leading you
towards misery and leading others towards misery as well. And
therefore humility is Christian. Humility is a right position. It's
a right positioning, and you have you actually have to
stop thinking about yourself.
Speaker 1: If you really didn't care about yourself.
Speaker 2: In in the real way that that humility teaches you
to do.
Speaker 1: Why would you kill yourself?
Speaker 2: But because if you do care about yourself or do
you not care about yourself?
Speaker 1: Because if you care about yourself.
Speaker 2: But you're not what you think you should be, that's
when you really want to commit suicide. But if you
if you don't really care about yourself and your eyes
are focused on God, then what happens usually is that
you know you find your right place.
Speaker 1: And you you you.
Speaker 2: Know, you are thankful for the opportunities you have, for
the skills you have, and you you try to do
the best you can with that which you have. You know,
knowing that you can't do it on your own, knowing
that you don't own anything, knowing that you will fail,
that you will make mistakes. Uh, and you you're not
proud of your mistakes. You're not proud of the things
of the things that you mess up, but you know
it's going to happen, and every time it does, then
you become humble again and you ask for forgiveness and
you continue on. And that creates a completely different mindset, right,
a completely different mindset from the self esteem mindset. You
could say, but it is difficult to embrace that. It's
difficult to engage in that way of thinking. You know,
I like Breakfast Club, right, I grew up on it.
I have, of course the natural tendency to do that,
and I have to constantly remind myself what is the
true position and how our humility should be a joyful
gratitude for the gifts we have and a desire to
put those in services of others and in the service
of God. So hopeusiness was a good exercise to help
you disambiguate our world. And you know, as the Kpop
Demon Hunters video is going to come out, you'll see
treat that and how in fact in that video, in
that movie, this is where the mistake is, right. The
mistake is that they understand that these ideas of demons
and possession and soul taking is related to attention. It's
related to singing in the sense of pattern making and participation.
In pattern participation, bodies towards towards, you know, towards single
points that bring us together. But they reduce that to
self esteem and to celebrity and to the celebrity culture.
Speaker 1: And so because of that it.
Speaker 2: Comes to the door, and then it doesn't it doesn't
actually deliver on what it could be. So so thanks
everybody for attention, and again thanks for your support and
I'll talk to you very soon.
Speaker 1: How Hi.
Speaker 2: If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to
the symbolic world dot com website and see how you
can support what we're doing. There are multiple subscriber tiers
with perks. There are apparel and books to purchase, So
go to the Symbolic World and thank you for your support.