Speaker 1: It has nothing to do with the ideology behind it.
It has nothing to do with the idea that, oh,
these religious people, they made this happen and it's because
of religion. Well, if you think that, then you'll be
ignorant to the way in which your own ways of
thinking and your own excesses could bring about the exact
same thing. And sometimes especially now, sometimes worse in both
ways because of technology. Because of the power of technology,
now we have access to way more excesses on each side.
This is Jonathan Peshel, Welcome to the symbolic world. One
of the accusations that you heard from the new atheist
in the past few decades is, of course how horrible
religion is and how religion has done these things like
the Inquisition, like the witch hunts, the witch burnings, the
oppression of difference, the oppression of minorities, the oppression of
other religions, all of these types of accusations that you
hear that religion is part of it. But what if
I told you, or what if we consider that in fact,
all of these behaviors are actually just aspects of human behavior.
They are aspects of the human microcosm of how humans
interact with each other, and that they can be found
everywhere and anywhere at every single time. And so I
think that this way of understanding, which is that there
are certain patterns of being, and those patterns of being
they play themselves out in people, they play themselves out
in societies, and they are just reflections, and there are
reflections of usually the symbolic pattern, which is the way
in which the multiple and the one join together. They
are reflections of how it is that multiple people can
participate and become one at a higher level, that is
a societal level, the same thing in yourself. That is,
how all these thoughts, how all of these body parts,
how they can all join together and be one person.
That most of the things that people criticize religion for
they are simply aspects of the symbolic pattern applied to
different spheres. And so sometimes those aspects they go wrong
or they become excessive, you know, and then they have
to be balanced out with other aspects. And those can happen,
by the way, at both sides. You know, we accuse,
for example, religion of being oppressive and harsh and judging
and witch burning and you know, inquisition and stuff like that.
But you have to remember that the Nietzscheans or that
Nietzsche and Is followers, accuse religion often of being the opposite,
of being too weak, of being too open, being forgiving,
of being, you know, of being this kind of weak
man's vision of reality, of not being active enough and
not being vital enough, and not defending one ourselves enough.
And so which one is it? You know, is it
the one or is it the other? The truth is
that it's both, and that it's both not just for religion,
but that it's both for every single different aspect of
human reality. And so a way to understand it is
think of it as your body, right, And so your
body there are parts, they are aspects of your body
which are there to defend you from the dangerous outside aspects. Right,
They're there that are there to defend you from germs,
from bacteria, from things that could harm your body. But
there are also aspects of your body that are there
to include things from the outside. And so you're eating
stuff all the time, so you're taking things from the
outside and you're bringing it into your body, and then
that those things are becoming parts of your body, and
so your body has to find a kind of balance
between the capacity to engage with the outside in a positive,
fruitful way, you know, for opportunity to manifest itself. And
your body also has to have mechanisms which stop the
bad stuff on the outside from contaminating you and from
killing you, to be honest, and that very structure is
one that happens also at a level of a group,
at a level of society. Now, at the level of society,
there are aspects of that society. And now the aspects
will often become embodied. They'll become embodied in personalities that
will play different roles. Now you those personalities will be
contained in you. So you will also have aspects of
your personality that will be exploratory and that we'll be
looking for new things, that will be trying to figure
out new opportunities. And you'll have aspects of your personality
which will be cautious and will be wary of things
that could hurt you and you know, things that could
endanger you. And so you'll be scared at night, you'll
be scared in the dark, You'll be cautious in places
that you don't know the people. But you'll also have
aspects of you that will be extroverted when you're meeting
new people and will go out to them and greet
them and talk to them and see in them if
there are some precious things that can make your world
more than what it was before. Now, different people will
have different a different balance of these different aspects, and
a society will have different people that play those same
roles in the society. Some people that will be more
cautious of that which can endanger and destroy and contaminate,
and some people that will be more exploratory and more open,
more you know, looking out to see how it is
that we can include things from the outside in order
to make us stronger and to make us more and
that will all these levels, these balances will play themselves
out in a society. That is that sometimes will be
more manifested of certain aspects. Sometimes it will be less.
And sometimes that can go too far. In yourself. Sometimes
you can you can be too cautious, and then that
will have consequences. Sometimes you can be too open, and
that will have consequences, and the same thing happens with
the society. Sometimes societies can be too cautious and then
that will constrict them and close them off. And sometimes
the society can be too open, think of open society
that the George Soros organization, and then you will basically
start to drown or you'll start to you know, you
might see to exist in either one of those excesses.
And that is really the way to kind of understand it.
And so so for example, like when it's funny because
you know, in the nineteen sixties, for example, they're there,
the people in the in that time, they accuse the
religious people of being pearl clutchers, right, and so this
idea of trying to protect what's a pearl clutch or
pearl clutchure is someone who grabs their pearls and is
afraid of losing them, right, is afraid of losing this
precious thing and has a kind of gut reaction to
to protect their their precious thing in order to prevent
it from being destroyed or being taken or being stolen
from the outside. And so the let's say the hippie
secular types accused the religious people of being pearl clutchers.
That is puritans, moral you know moral puritans, you know,
people who are just trying to protect their values, protect
their their moral codes, even if they don't totally understand them.
And that there's an excess in that because of that,
they're prude, they are they're kind of you know, they
have this kind of finger wagging aspect to them, and
they have, you know, a kind of judgmental attitude towards
everything that is around them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Now what's funny now is that, of course we see
that now it's the secular people that are doing that,
and the same types of behaviors are appearing in the
secular world. And so you have people that are canceling
others because of purity motifs, who are trying to protect
our group from it from a kind of infection of
ideas that would be uh, you know, that would destroy us.
And so we have the same type of pro clutching
motif We have the same kind of puritan behavior. So
the people that go online and cancel others, the people
that go online and accuse everybody of you know, you know,
the excesses for example, of the of cancel culture. These
are actually the same kind of people that were accused
of being finger wagging puritans in the religious sphere before.
They're just modes of being and so they're now the
same types of people. You know, the vegan that what
I remember a few years ago, she kind of disappeared.
I remember the vegan teacher. You know, she was a
Sunday school teacher. She was the cliche of the church lady.
And so the vegan teacher and the church lady are
the same. You know. It's like this that you know,
this kind of uh this this like being annoyed and
judgmental and trying to moralize people into certain behaviors. All
of this is just modes of being. And so you
can see the same, for example, in the kind of
openness aspect as well. And so you could say that
the the you can also accuse, for example, certain aspects
of our society today of being too open of including
so many things that you're drowning that you're basically self destroying,
because if you drink poison, you know, if you take
too much alcohol, or you take too many drugs, or
you're not careful of what it is that you put
into your body, it can lead you to death, you know,
And so this can manifest itself at different level, you know.
And so if you think about I don't know, some
Irish village two one hundred years ago, where everybody was
too drunk, and that this was seriously causing problems in
this in the society. You know, now we have people
on fentanyl, you know, like fentanyl zombies in our cities,
and you know, an excess of homeless people, and that
it's it's encroaching on the capacity for the cities to
hold together. And so the patterns will manifest themselves in
the same way at different levels. And then some people
will say, you know, back in the days of that
little Irish village, I say Irish. It could have been
any place, but say this little Irish village. Some people
have said, you know, like their life is hard. You know,
a hard man's working hard. Just let him be like,
let him have his little pleasure. You know, there's no
point in finger wagging them. You know, life is difficult enough.
Let them live their life. And therefore continues, and then
you would have in the same town or in the
same city the finger wagging lady or the finger wagging
guy who's trying to impose a rule or a moral code,
and that person is neither good nor bad. Sometimes you need,
you know, a vegan teacher type in order to bring
things back to order. Sometimes it's annoying and that person
goes is excessive and pushes too hard and then tries
to take all the fun out of reality. And that's
when you want there to be a kind of dance.
And that's really the way to understand how it is,
is that all these different aspects of the world you
know from the person that the canceler, because sometimes you
actually do need to cancel people, you know, that's what
jail is for. That's what when someone breaks the rules
you have, there has to be consequences, and for all
intents and purposes, that's a kind of canceling. When you
put someone in jail, you're canceling them from society for
a certain amount of time. Now, that is absolutely necessary
for any society to exist, and you need that in
yourself too. You need you need the discipline you need
sometimes to be able to say, you know what you know,
now's not the time to just hang out and to relax.
Now's the time to get up and do the dishes,
to you know, clean the house, or to or to
get to work, to answer those emails or whatever it is.
But then you also need someone at some some aspect
of yourself at some point say all right, now that's enough.
Now go sit down with your friends, now have a drink.
Now let's have a nice time to get this play game.
Let's do that. And so you need that in your
in your world, and so the the and you see,
it's like and it's and it's kind of annoying and
like I've probably played that game before where people say
Spanish Inquisition, you know, the Spanish Inquisition, this horrible time
when the society was completely against these these people that
didn't fit and you know, accused them and murdered them
and did all these things. And it's like, yeah, you know,
and then people say, yeah, but it's nothing compared to
the Gulag. You know, the Gulag was the worst, and
now it's nothing compared to the to the Nazis, and
the Nazis that put people in concentration camps. And it's
like and then other people say, well, it's nothing compared
to the American prison system, where it's like one percent
of the population is in prison and etcetera, etcetera. Like
you know, the truth is that these patterns exist all
the time everywhere and that and then we have this
balancing act. And for example, the very fact that in
certain quarters of society we only see especially now, we
see that like it can tell help you see where
we are in the world. We only see the moments
when there was constrict on the outside, like we only
see the moment when the society became very strict and
tried to exclude people from it. We only see that
as negative, and we for some reason can't remember or
can't see the moments where the opposite was true, the
moments where things were let loose way too much, and
that you know, people stopped having children, people started to
work only to do only things in order to have
pleasure or to you know, to kind of and moments
when society pulled apart, like at the end of the
Roman Empire, of course, but there are different times that
that happened as well in our society. Some of those times,
you know, are very close to the moments where we
consider things like the Spanish Inquisition. You know, it's like
the Renaissance courts, for example, or even later. You know,
some of the Enlightenment courts were very chaotic, you know,
and we're very open and anything was possible, and they
let all kinds of behaviors into their courts kind of
immoral and dangerous behaviors which led to the breakdown of
the cohesion of the society. So there are many times
when there have been excesses of one or the other
on each side. But it's mostly important to be able
to understand this as a structure. And why is it
important to understand as a structure, Because we want to
be able to recognize when it is that certain behaviors,
the finger wagging lady, or the canceling or the putting
people in jail is a necessary part of society and
when that's okay, and also be able to recognize when
that goes too far, and when it becomes a prison
prison state, when it becomes a kind of totalitarian type
of regime. And we also have to be able to
see that it has nothing to do with the ideology
behind it. It has nothing to do with the idea that, oh,
these religious people, they made this happen and it's because
of religion. Well, if you think that, then you'll be
ignorant to the way in which your own ways of
thinking and your own excesses could bring about the exact
same thing. And sometimes especially now, sometimes worse in both
ways because of technology. Because of the power of technology,
now we have access to way more excesses on each side,
both the kind of dangerous cancel, destroy, destroy people's lives side,
you know, with the with surveillance, and also I mean
we haven't seen it in a while, but you know,
the idea of a of a of an extermination policy
that would happen today would be very easy to implement
compared to you know, in the Middle Ages. Uh, with technology,
and so the same with the kind of openness and
this capacity to engage in behaviors that tend to that
tend towards pleasure, that tend towards openness and to exploration
and all of that. Now there's way more possibility of that.
And so we have to be attentive and see how
these are just modes of being in society. And it
is not very useful to simply point out the ones
that are in the camp that we don't like to
simply point out that, you know, the inquisitional types that
are religious or a religious you know, or the kind
of decadent type that is either you know, the decadent
popes of the sixteenth century or whether it is the
decadent you know ditty party types that exist now that
they have nothing to do. Like I said, with the
world in which you're involved, there are just modes of
being that can become out of control, and so we
have to be attentive to that in ourselves, in our
societies and all around us, and hopefully that will also
first of all make us more perceptive of what's going on,
and it will also hopefully make us more humble, because
you've got that inside you as well, and you have
these different aspects of being inside you, and you have
to be careful not to let one or the other
take over, you know. And so it's like there's not
much difference between a you know, between an inquisition person
in terms of a society and your OCD you know, obsessions,
and there's nothing there isn't that much difference between the same,
like the tendency in the society, the kind of more
pleasure seeking or exploratory aspect of a society. And you're
also desired to kind of explore new things, into see
new things, but then also sometimes to let yourself go
and not be not be disciplined. So I hope this
was useful. Thanks again for your help, Thanks for your attention,
don't forget. You can go to symbolic world dot com
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So thanks everyone for your attention and I'll talk to
you very soon. Bye bye,