Speaker 1: I hate to say this, but it does feel like
I've been radicalized in some ways, and radicalize, you know,
not obviously to take up arms is to do anything violent,
but radicalize in the sense that I realize that there
are some things which are broken that I don't see
how they can be repaired.
Speaker 2: At this point, you know, we've.
Speaker 1: Reached over the line in ways that is beyond the pale.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pehel. Welcome to the symbolic world. All right.
Speaker 1: It's been a few weeks now since the assassination of
Charlie Kirk, and I wasn't sure I was going to
make a video about this, but I thought that maybe
it would actually be an opportunity to make a video
of course about the event, about some of what I
perceived to be its effects, but then also about politics
in general. You know, I get comments all the time,
people asking me why don't I talk more about the
war in Ukraine or you know, the situation the war
in Gaza, or why I don't talk about you know,
Nigerian Christians being slaughtered, or why I don't talk about
you know, the different political things. And in some ways
the same thing goes with Charlie Kirk. Many people have
written messages and they asked, are you going to talk
about the assassination? And as you've noticed, I actually very
rarely talk about politics. It's not that I don't have
political opinions. I definitely do have political opinions, but at
least in my public sphere, I feel like that is
not my function. I will talk about politics if I
feel that it's insightful and that it's helping you understand
bigger questions. You know, as you've noticed, I started talking
about the end of the World War two consensus, and
it is because I have insight about what is happening
to us can help us understand what's going on, but
then also help us understand deeper patterns and deeper stories
and understand how worlds end, you know, how worlds begin.
All of that stuff now, And you also noticed, maybe
or maybe you haven't, that if I am going to
talk about in a current event, I usually take a
lot of time before I talk about it. I want
to avoid virality and I want to avoid, you know,
getting into the fray and getting those rage bait clicks.
And so these are decisions that I've made and that
we made as a team in the Symbolic World in
some ways they are anti at mention decisions, but just
how it's going to be, because obviously I am very
worried about getting into the cycle of rage and of clicks.
Speaker 2: End of finger pointing.
Speaker 1: Now, having said that, I have to say that there's
definitely something that has happened with the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
There's something very big that is changing, and you know,
I can see it really in myself. I have to say,
you know, because I wasn't particularly a fan of Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 2: You know, I just wasn't paying that much attention to him.
Speaker 1: In some ways, I think his public was much younger
than I was, and his style, you know, and it's
he I'm not an Americans I'm not in American politics,
and his style weren't particularly the type of style that
I appreciate, and and some of his positions were not
my positions, which is fine as well. But but obviously,
you know, when Charlie Kirk was shot, just after, even
before I knew that he was shot, we had a
Symbolic World meeting and there were several people on the
meeting and my friend Jordan Hall was on the meeting,
and so we found out about it during that meeting,
and everybody was kind of shocked and surprised.
Speaker 2: At what was going on. Didn't know. We didn't he
wasn't dead yet.
Speaker 1: We found out that he was dead during the meeting,
and Jordanah Hall said something very wise to us. He said,
now is a good time for network pruning. And when
he met by network pruning was this is big, like
this is something big that's just happened, and it is
a good idea to pay attention to what people are
saying at this particular moment. People who jump in, people
who right away want to express their ideas, because you
will see their hearts, you know. He said, both for
the positive and the negative, you know. And so sometimes
people will say something extremely wise and they it makes
you want to pay attention to them.
Speaker 2: And then on the other hand.
Speaker 1: People will say something very foolish and it will make
you want to remove them from your circles. And I
took that very much to heart, and I watched what happened,
and I think, like most of you, maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2: I was very surprised.
Speaker 1: I was very surprised to see people that are too
close to me, people that are friends of friends, people
that are friends, people that are even going to my.
Speaker 2: Church, who either celebrated his death outright.
Speaker 1: Or you know, before his body was cold, started to
make derogative comments against them to in some ways not celebrate,
but at least justify or excuse or suggest that he
was asking for it, that kind of stuff, suggesting also
that it's not a big deal. Why are we even
talking about this? Who cares? This person is not important,
It's not a big deal. And so it was actually
quite shocking to me, because I think, like most of you,
it was shocking. It was shocking because, like I said,
there are some things that I disagree with Charlie Kirk.
I don't I'm a Canadian. I don't necessarily agree on
his position on guns. I don't agree also on his
position on Israel, for example. But basically, apart from that,
this guy's just a basic conservative. And I understand that
there is there are people that have been seduced by
lies and let's say reframing of the things that he
said by the media. But even that makes it alarming
as well, is that, first of all, so many of
the things people were saying to let's say, excuse his
killing or to you know, kind of say, well he
was kind of it or was asking for it. Was
usually things that Charlie Kirk had actually not said that
we're reframed in tortuous ways that were light about. Like,
for example, there was this famous thing about how Charlie
Kirk said that now he has to think about I'm
not going to phrase it exactly right, but now he's
going to have to wonder if a black pilot is qualified.
And people said, well, that's racist, but it was weird
because the quote is actually anti racist. He was saying,
if you hire people only because of their skin color,
you're forcing people that are taking the flight if they
see someone who's black to now ask the question was
were they hired for their their capacity or where they
hired because of their race and they're not capable? And
so he's saying, no, let's not be racist and hire
people for the color of their skins, because what it
does is it creates the opposite of what you think.
It actually can encourage racist thoughts in people because now
they're thinking, well, why was this person hired? You know,
if I knew they were hiring for equality, and I
see a pilot that is of a different skin color
or you know whatever. I'm like, well, they know what
they're doing or what they're hiring qualified people. So that
was just one example. There's so many examples of people
that were deforming it. So that was already obviously something
that we've seen. Obviously I saw with Jordan Peterson, that
we saw with Donald Trump, that we saw in so
many of the right. We saw Gavin McGinnis get destroyed
because of people lying about what it is that he
actually said. There were so many of that happening, And
in some ways, how can I say this, like it
felt like this part of the problem was being taken
care of, Like it felt like in the past few
years we in some ways have been able to break
through and to avoid the media misrepresenting figures in ways
that are.
Speaker 2: Extremely damaging to them. But it seems like we haven't.
Speaker 1: It seems like we haven't, and that this is still
going on, and so that there are people use lies
in order to misrepresent others and to stoke hatred against them.
But even if those the lies had been true, even
if the things that people said about him had been true,
the fact that this would lead to people diminishing his
assassination or diminishing or celebrating it, or thinking he had coming.
It's very telling about the state of our culture. Hello everyone,
we are finally announcing our Paradiso class. We have done
two already. We have the Inferno, we have the Purgatory,
and now we are moving to Paradise.
Speaker 2: That is right.
Speaker 3: Dante himself says Inferno that we prefer hell to Paradise,
and similarly, most of us prefer to read Inferno. But
when we come to reading Parodis, so we're very confused.
So we're going to be actually taking you through that
poem line by line like we with Inferno Purgatorio, and
actually looking at how Dante very carefully reconciles some.
Speaker 2: Of the.
Speaker 3: Contradictory traditions about the heavens in the Christian apocalyptic tradition
and does that through the persons of the saints.
Speaker 1: And so this is truly important for us right now,
with the re enchantment of the world happening, we have
to be able to look at those that that did
it in the most powerful way that we're able to
reconcile the ancient pagan traditions with Christianity. With his modern
understanding the most modern understanding of the cosmos that he had,
and so this is the work that we need to do,
so we need to learn from Dante. So the course
it starts November fifth to December third, right, is that
what I've got five weeks two to five on Wednesdays.
Speaker 3: So the cost is going to be one hundred ninety
dollars US. But we do have an early bird sale
through the month of October, which bumps it down to
one hundred and sixty one. You can use the code
early Paradiso and that is good through the end of October.
Speaker 1: And the Inferno and the Purgatorial class are also on
sale at the same time, so you have fifty percent
off during the month of October Code Dante fifty And.
Speaker 2: You know that means you have no excuse.
Speaker 1: So if you haven't taken the first classes, now is
the chance to scoop all that up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And if you don't want to watch live or
it doesn't work for your schedule, you'll be able to
follow along at your own pace. Just like with all
of our courses. You'll have access to lecture recording, slides,
additional readings, and you can still ask questions and interact
with your fellow classmates in our circle forums.
Speaker 2: And so join us.
Speaker 1: After all of this suffering through inferno and purgatorio, the
symbolic world finally goes to heaven.
Speaker 2: Yeah, join us.
Speaker 1: And so in some ways, I hate to say this,
but it does feel like I've been radicalized in some ways,
and radicalize, you know, not obviously to take up arms
is to do anything violent, but radicalized in the sense
that I realize that there are some things which are
broken that I don't see how they can be repaired.
Speaker 2: At this point, you know, we've.
Speaker 1: Reached over the line in ways that is beyond the pale.
And you know, and you see this with the kind
of celebration of assassination and the desire for assassination for
the president of the United States. You know, how people
celebrated the what is his name, Manjoni, the guy who
killed the CEO. All of this is very disturbing, but
at the same time, it is not that disturbing. It
is not that disturbing because the notion that violence is
not a part of politics is a very recent thing,
and it's a great thing. I'm happy that we have
kind of come to the conclusion that violence should not
be part of the national political discussion. But the revolutionary thinkers,
I mean, revolution means cutting the king's head off, folks. No,
that's what revolution entails. Revolution means violence. And so it
is not surprising that the people that are on the
that's a further left, are celebrating or at least seeing
that this is normal fair for political action is to assassinate,
to bomb, to do the things that the revolutionaries have
always done. And at the same time, you will see
that this goes both ways.
Speaker 2: It just does.
Speaker 1: This is how it works, is that there is also
a kind of celebration of let's say, authority violence that
comes from the other side. And so the right in
general tends to think that violence is legitimate if it
comes from the source of authority and is there to
protect and exclude, and the left thinks that violence is
legitimate if it goes against authority and it is there
to remove authority in order to free us from tyranny
and fascism in all of these types of things. Now,
I am obviously more conservative. I tend to think that
there is a legitimacy of state violence that is inevitable.
You know, you put people in prison, you arrest them.
All of these things in some ways are inevitable. And
you know, for a very long time, you know, we
have the death penalty for certain things. This is something
that is I think more normal than revolutionary violence. But
you can understand the story and how as people on
the right, you know, are celebrating arrests, are celebrating deportations,
are celebrating you know, these gestures, then the people on
the left start to and I'm saying one is the
cause of the other. I'm saying these two are kind
of happening simultaneously, and we're seeing a desire for revolutionary
violence and a desire for assassination. I mean, you know,
the former head of the FBI, for goodness sake, you know,
suggested on social media that we should assassinate the president
of the United States. It means that assassination culture is growing.
And I want to point out something. You know, my
brother Mattur is preparing to write his next book, and
he recently put out a video. We can link it
in the description where he was interviewed by a Spanish interlocutor.
Because his book has been translated into Spanish, which is
great for all you Spanish speakers.
Speaker 2: You can get a language of creation in Spanish.
Speaker 1: But I think Matsieur my brother, had one of the
best takes in terms of the Charlie Kirk assassination. He
had the wisest take, and he mentioned that debate is
something like the role of opposition within a society. That
is that within a system, within a family, within a country,
you know, within whatever body that you can imagine, there
are means by which to express opposition in order to
make ourselves better. Right, so you need an opponent inside
a system to tell you when you're doing something wrong
so that you can improve yourself. And we know, you know,
as that's happening, that we're all nonetheless working for a
higher goal, you know, for the unity of the nation,
for the unity of the family, or whatever group that
you're participating in. And you know, my two points out
that in some ways debate is a friendly version of that,
where we accept certain rules, we accept that we're going
to duke it out in words, and the purpose is that,
you know, we understand that we are not enemies, actually
that we are kind of opponent in the sense of
opponent processing. Really that John Raveki talks about this need
for check and counter check in order to get better
and to align ourselves properly. That if you transform that
into violence, then you are creating the true Satanic relationship.
Right so now the opponent is outside. Right now, the
opponent wants to kill me. Now the opponent wants to
devour me. And so it is, you know, political assassinations
are ways to cause civil war, are ways to provoke
true physical conflict in the country. And so I thought
that his insight was very wise and that we should
really pause and think about it and consider this as
we move forward and as we see this happening, and
once the problems that once this is breached, once political
violence starts to be acceptable in the.
Speaker 2: World, it is hard.
Speaker 1: It is going to be hard to stop it, you know,
because the problem with political violence is that it works
like it does what people want it to do, especially
if what you want is to accelerate the conflict, you know,
and you know, it's very difficult to deny that terrorism works.
It actually does the things that it tries to do.
I mean, look at at Muslim terrorists, Like Muslims kill Christians,
they bomb, they create acts of terror, and because of
those acts of terror, people are afraid to criticize Islam,
and they don't, and they justified in all kinds of ways,
but really they're just afraid of violence. And so this
is of course a frightening time when they when we
see this happen. But one of the things that I've
appreciated and that I've been in some way surprised about,
is that the reaction from many of the right leaning
pundits has been to appeal to christ right, appeal to Christianity,
and appeal to forgiveness, appeal to you know, an understanding that.
Speaker 2: In some ways Charlie Kirk is a kind of martyr.
Speaker 1: Obviously he's not a martyr, you know, in the strict sense,
but he in some ways acts as a kind of
martyr for the for the Conservatives, for the right, and
instead of using this only as a battle cry, is
to see it mostly as a way to unite their side,
and to unite their side under a banner of debate
and honor and also forgiveness. So if that holds, I
think that we will we might have something powerful that
is coming downstream. But we'll see it's a very fragile
thing because for the past few years, the conservative movement
or the right wing, especially in America, has been very
divided over the question of Israel, and so, you know,
and so that's why you can see, like it's interesting
mythologically to watch it happen. What you can see is
that you know, this man dies, is killed, is assassinated
in public, you know, as a kind of human.
Speaker 2: Sacrifice type gesture.
Speaker 1: And then what you see is you can see the
faction of the right be united immediately and say, all right, who,
all right, let's this bickering, Let's stop it, let's let's
not let's not fight over these secondary things. Let's focus
on the fact that you know, we have people that
are trying to kill us, and that we have to
rise up and be better. But then also what you
see right away in the second wave is you see
faction of the right trying to claim the martyrdom for themselves, right,
and so what you see is people trying to posit
certain positions that Charlie Kirk had in order to.
Speaker 2: Align the martyr with their cause.
Speaker 1: And so we have to be very attentive as we
see that happening, because it is a it's kind of
inevitable that that will that that will happen.
Speaker 2: But it's good to notice it, to notice that.
Speaker 1: That's why there's this whole discussion now about you know,
this letter that Charlie would have written to Netanyahu about Israel,
and others saying it's not the real letter, it's a
it's a fake letter, uh, and that in fact it
was a letter that's.
Speaker 2: Critical of Israel.
Speaker 1: All of that is in some ways people on the
right trying to kind of claim the martyrdom for their
side of the of the debate right, and so to
continue to act as if this is uniting us, but
to want to frame the unity in their side. So
pay attention to that, you know, in terms of watching
things happen, it's worth it's worth noticing.
Speaker 2: But you know, but I have to say that.
Speaker 1: I've been very affected by this, like not because like
I said, not not of course, a father.
Speaker 2: Being assassinated in front of his children. I mean, it's
a horrible thing.
Speaker 1: But I think it's because of everything surrounded surrounding it,
you know, everything surrounding that event that is making it
remarkable and worthy of paying attention to because it's exposing,
it's exposing things about our society. You know, my friend
of mine, Winston Marshall, who I've done interviews with. He
went to the vigil in New York a few days
after the after the death Right, you know.
Speaker 3: And.
Speaker 1: He said that Antifa came and they were all dressed
in black and masked and holding their phones, and they
were laughing like little demons, he said. And they were
creeping through and like putting their phones up in people's
faces and coming right up to people, to people's faces,
laughing and giggling as they were remembering this man who
was just like two or three days like three days before,
who was assassinated, you know, because of his political opinions.
And so you can understand how that has an effect
on people. Yeah, And so I would say, you know,
to everyone who's watching, I would say, to watch your hearts,
to make sure that your hearts are aligned properly. It's
okay to have a political side. It's okay to have
political opinions, but of course we always have to couch
those political opinions into higher truth and if you're an American,
into a higher unity and to if you want to
preserve the unity of your nation, you have to be
very cautious in formulating the other side of the political
aisle as an absolute enemy, because if you do that,
then that at some point will yield, that will yield
civil war, and we have to be able to recapture
the possibility of opposition as debate within unity.
Speaker 2: So, like I.
Speaker 1: Said, different thoughts to consider. You know, don't forget to
check out the video that mets your did. It's very insightful.
He also talks about Antichrist in ways that is just
in passing. He says these things in passing extremely wise
and extremely extremely worth considering.
Speaker 2: So thanks everyone for your attention.
Speaker 1: I feel like this was not completely coherent, but hopefully
these thoughts are valuable to you, so I'll talk to
you very soon.
Speaker 2: Bye bye.
Speaker 1: 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 in books to purchase, So
go to the Symbolic World dot
Speaker 2: Com and thank you for your support.