Episode 61

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with David Gornoski. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

[Intro Audio Qoute]

David Gornoski:                00:00:00               Even our current modern ideology isnt as sophisticated as they think they are, are doing the same thing that ancient mythologies did, which is to conceal the corpse of the human species at all costs.

[Intro Music]

Dustin (Host):                00:00:16               That is David Gornoski. He is an entrepreneur, speaker and writer who’s contributed to the foundation for economic education, the Mises Institute and many others. He’s also the host of the Orlando based radio program, A Neighbors choice and a podcast entitled things hidden. Today we’re going to be talking about Rene Gerard’s mimetic theory, which has been called the theory of everything. This is a fascinating conversation which will introduce you into a radically new way of understanding history, the present world, and perhaps where we’re going.

Dustin (Host):                    00:01:04               David, welcome to the show.

David Gornoski:                00:01:05               Thanks for having me Glad to be on your program.

Dustin (Host):                    00:01:09               So we, we’re talking about offline here. Just a few minutes ago, I first heard you, you know, on the Tom wood show where you talked about the mimetic theory of Rene Gerard, which is, the whole entire topic of kind of delving into philosophy is something I’m doing over this next month as well. And you know, like I said, I kind of got interested, I’d heard about it but I hadn’t really read anything about it. And since then, my early parts of this journey has been, you know, absolutely, you know, mind blowing as far as for understanding the implications of this theory. And you know, I was actually wondering if we could just start off with who Rene’s Gerard was.

David Gornoski:                00:01:54               Well that’s a, there’s a lot to this man, but he had one simple theory. It’s called the mimetic theory and he was a professor at several universities. He landed finally at Stanford university where it became most well known for his tenure there. And he taught a young Peter teal who went on to use the, framework of the romantic theory to write the book zero to one, which is a multimillion bestseller, how to understand startups, how to create monopolies, how to create a differentiation in a differentiated marketplace. And that also is the, my medic 30 was also the thing that Peter Tiel was inspired by to invest in a young Mark Zuckerberg at 19 years old, which turned into a multibillion return. So, uh, that just gives you a little preview for those who are familiar with Rene Gerard, how important his work is because it gives you the toolkit to be able to make those kinds of predictions in the marketplace for one, but also more importantly, for bigger

David Gornoski:                00:03:00               questions like who we are as human beings and what is the nature of human society? Where did humans, uh, pick up their patterns of ritual and behavior in their, in their need for belonging and transcendence? How do they create order with those feelings they have? And it also talks about even something more fundamental, which is the nature of human desire. The nature of human conflict, the nature of human identity, but mimetic theory is a throwback to an older type of theory that was more popular at the time. Uh, in the, let’s say 18 hundreds when there was more of the romantic spirit. There was more of a, you know, you had Charles Darwin with his unified theory of biology. Uh, and Gerard came about of course, past that time. He was born in the, I believe 1920s, 20. I don’t remember the exact year, but, uh, he, he was kind of a throwback to the era before where you would have a unified theory of knowledge.

David Gornoski:                00:04:04               And Gerard came into academia, teaching literature. He was a historian and he was teaching literature, French literature, and, and the time that he arrived in academia, the invoke thing to do was to look for, uh, the social construction of all texts in the sense that there was no, underlying meaning that one could derive from the texts and novels and so forth. It was all social construction, whatever you determine the meaning to be in a novel is what you determine it to be. And the author is work is simply kind of a reflection of different, uh, social constructions of his own identity or her own identity that are not inherently objective to the text that you can place that kind of a subjective interpretation into the text. However, you weren’t based on your own social construct of reality. And Gerard was totally in a different vein than that because he was interested in and seeing how all the different texts had a unifying pattern.

David Gornoski:                00:05:17               So he was looking for objective truth. He was looking for the common patterns that were found in each of these different texts, the patterns of conflict, the patterns of what he called triangular desire that you found in all the great, most profound works of Western literature. And so that’s what he was doing. And, uh, and he used that early work and literature as the basis for his grand unified theory of mimetic theory, which actually is a unified, uh, social science theory encompasses anthropology, uh, literature, you know, history, eh, ethnology, you know, psychiatry, the whole, there’s so many different fields and applies to and in economics there’s a lot of economists that are using my medic theory to do work in that field. So it was a really kind of a, a tour de force. It has had a huge implication, on a lot of different disciplines. And it’s one of those things that I can assure you that as we continue to go into the 21st century, that Gerard’s impact and our understanding of the world that we’re in will be much, much more important than the impact of Freud, Marx and and Nietzsche combined, I think.

Dustin (Host):                    00:06:45               Well, what was it, I mean, how did you come across Gerard’s work originally and what was it that, um, kind of got you to really to, for it to jump out at you and for you to really kind of take notice of it versus, cause there’s so many different, you know, theories of, of social construction and, and how the, you know, I guess how people operate, how history, uh, operates and, and the people within it.

David Gornoski:                00:07:14               For some reason it cut out. Just say it again please.

Dustin (Host):                    00:07:18               I was saying, you know, what jumped out at you, to, to make you kind of really take notice of this because there’s so many different competing theories of how things work or, you know, why people act at the way that they do, or the fact that though there’s, there’s a lot of thought, especially nowadays in, in the kind of the postmodernist somewhat, not that they’re the dominant thought, but they’re a growing dominant thought over the last 50 years of that there really is no objective truth. There really is nothing that unifies, um, you know, humanity or you know, history or, you know, the, the, I guess the sacred texts of humanity that they’re all just kind of ways that people were just kind of trying to figure out how the world work. But it’s mostly just junk.

David Gornoski:                00:08:08               Well, I’d been on my own quest for some time trying to put the patterns together in the Bible, uh, to understand that there was so much more power and significance and relevance to the story of Jesus and its impact in our culture for good or ill. Uh, then most Christian conversations wanted to consider, and I was raised in a Christian background in church community life and so forth. And I had, and over time explored various denominations just to understand, not, not as, uh, just to understand, uh, the direction of, of how these different thought traditions in Christian theology played out. And I was always, I always kind of came to the conclusion that I liked a lot of things about Christianity, but I always felt like the way the faith was, uh, was taught in most of the traditions. Even the smart and intelligent, uh, you know, communities.

David Gornoski:                00:09:18               There was a lack of, it almost seemed like an impotent, truncated view of Jesus as if, I drew an illustration one time to illustrate this. It’s as if you’re trying to, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re trying to glimpse at the picture of the crucified Jesus, but there is a mob of people with cross shaped daggers, with crosses, with the tip of it being a dagger that are all crowding out your glimpse of the cross. And those folks are the people who often times believe they’re representing Jesus but in fact are representing a crowd, hive mind, a group think social clique that really don’t have the full picture of the significance of Jesus in mind when they are trying to present it. And so I was actually working on my own book writing and thinking and talking about the, um, kind of the social ordering principles that Jesus is life on veils in our own world.

David Gornoski:                00:10:33               And the, I saw a complete connection, I’ll put it this way. I was, I felt like it was there something weird about the fact that you read these stories about Jesus and then you hear, you know, Christianity talked about and talked about by us own parishioners and so forth are practitioners. And you hear, you hear this, you know, this is what Christianity is. I believe in this. I believe in that. I believe in this. I believe in that. And, and you need to do this and you need to think that and you need to do these things. And those are all fine. I don’t have a problem with those things. But I was like, what? Why is it so truncated? It seems like it’s all dealing with things in the neocortex. It’s all dealing with things that are related to almost like a Cartesian model of reality.

David Gornoski:                00:11:19               You know, I think blank, therefore, I am blank in this case. I think the doctrine of the Trinity, therefore I am Christian. I think the doctrine of this type of understanding of baptism or soteriology or, uh, you know, the study of how we’re, say, the study of the end times the study of the church body. Uh, I believe in this tradition to orthodoxy. I believe in Roman Catholicism. I believe in this type of Protestantism. Therefore, I am a Christian at the best of that it is to be. And I kept thinking to myself, this is such a truncated view of looking at human nature, human, human desire, human, uh, you know, social life is so much richer and deeper than this. I think blank or an I do this type of baptism or I do this type of Trinity model and I do this kind of polity and therefore I am a Christian.

David Gornoski:                00:12:10               And I thought, why is it that all of these groups, they all emphasize this such a limited part of the full complex of what it means to be human. To the point that in order for you to get the rest of what it means to be human worked out in your life, you have to go supplement it with a political philosophy. You’ve got to go look, if you want to understand the justice of the, of the legal system, you got to understand political philosophy. You’ve gotta read Boston or you gotta go understand free market economics. You’ve got to go read, you know, Austrian economists or other folks that are doing things in that field. If you want to understand the nature of psychology, you’ve got to go study, you know, if you, whatever your field of interest there, Carl, you’re like a Jordan Peterson does or you know, this was before him though.

David Gornoski:                00:12:56               I was looking at this and then, and then, you know, or before he became a national figure. But the, the a, and then, and then if you want to understand the, the effects of Christianity in our time and the, and the effects of the Christ figure in opposition to the crowd psychology of, of, of all the different things that humans encounter, then you gotta go to meet ya and stuff. And I thought, why do we have to have all these supplements, you know, that are not, you know, explicitly framed within a Christian worldview of what you’re supposed to think about the world and how you work it out. And you know, I just thought, you know, maybe our concept of Christianity is a little dead. Maybe it’s a little truncated, maybe it doesn’t have the full picture in mind. And so I started writing about it and then I discovered Gerard’s work and it had a lot of parallels with what my own writing was. And so I just took some time where I said, you know what [inaudible] if I, I want to present these big ideas to the public, but Gerard has something very similar and he often goes into a different direction a little bit on some things than when I was working on. So I’m going to respect my elders and I’m going to study this man’s work and I’m going to help present what he’s doing here and then tie it back into what I’ve been researching on my own independently.

David Gornoski:                00:14:24               So, and I guess the best way to segue into that is, you talked about and what Gerard’s theory is basically called as it’s the theory of everything. And to…I think that people will get that the listeners will get a really good idea or be able to understand better, just human history and why did this happen? Why did that happen? What are these common themes through there? So I was wondering if you could actually go a little bit into depth of his, what his theory, his mimetic theory is and the kind of the, the central concepts within it.

David Gornoski:                00:15:14               Well, the thing that you have to, what are the best ways to look at it is to look at how it affects, you know, real life, you know, the how are unfolds in real life, you know. So again, I was struck by how, you know, you could go into a church community and you would find the same kind of dynamics of cliques that you would find in a community based on some secular value or based on, Hey, even something simple as high school cliques form. And then they find their belonging and their purpose based on the mutual exclusion of an enemy other. And I thought that’s weird that this is even popping up in churches because after all, Jesus was excluded as an enemy other by the community of his own time. And he was eliminated because he violated the, he violated the cliques, you know, kind of transcendent identity that kept them bound together.

David Gornoski:                00:16:15               And so I was thinking, you know, how is this popping up as a phenomenon in churches and churches exclude and shine and, and uh, scapegoat. A common enemy is within their own community and they do it with the same righteous fervor as if they’re on the side of Christ, even though they’re doing the same behavior to people that, that Jesus experienced himself. Then they’re there. They’re shunning and scapegoating people with an all against one psychological force in the same pattern of the ones who killed Jesus. And, and so I thought that’s weird that that pattern still emerges even in churches that are teaching Jesus ostensibly. But again, it goes back to the fact that if churches are teaching our Cartesian model, I think blank, therefore I am a Christian, then they don’t have an antelope anthropological foundation for what Jesus is all about. And so this is where you get into kind of like a Gnostic kind of Christianity where, um, yeah, we have a theology of Jesus, but we don’t have an anthropology of Jesus.

David Gornoski:                00:17:24               So theology is the study of God. If you read the book of the BA, if you’ve read the Bible, you’re going to get, you know, people, everyone, whether you’re atheist or not, will say, yeah, this is an attempt at a study of God in this book. Um, but then you don’t say it’s an anthropology anthropological book, which would be the study of man, how man came to be as a, as a, as a group, as a community. And as a, um, there’s, there’s that that’s not considered, but the claim that Jesus makes more often than he makes it, he makes the claim that he’s supposed to set up God and son of man and he makes the claim son of man more explicitly than he does a sound of God. So if we want to take this from a, just a kind of a taking the spiritual claim out of that sentence or that statement, son of God, son of God would mean is the highest.

David Gornoski:                00:18:17               He is, he is claiming to be the highest example of what it means to be like God. He’s the best representation of God and God’s plan in history and God’s experience in history with humans. But then the son of man part would mean that he is the highest example of what it means to be human. And what does it, what does mankind, what does my current all about? Where did Mary Curran come from? Where did we create our order, our co, our culture, our society. So if we only have a theology of the Bible or a theology of Jesus, then we won’t have a full picture of Jesus. We’ll get these Cartesian type models that become these, uh, these, these little mythologies that we use to exclude the enemy, others in the name of Jesus and self righteousness. And that’s what the church has done many times.

David Gornoski:                00:19:08               And it’s not the church only. I’m just saying that because the church doesn’t recognize the fullness of Jesus claim in the anthropological dimension, it only keeps their encounter with Christ and the realm of ideas, the realm of propositional as sin. But if you have an anthropological approach to Jesus as I think Gerard’s theory helps provide, then what you’ll find is that it’s not just about what you think. It’s not just about a creedal affirmation or some kind of a doctrinal, mental assent. It’s not an sat test that gets you into the kingdom of heaven, but rather it is the imitation of the person of Jesus that allows you to experience kind of the reality of what it means to be an a follower of Jesus. So Gerard was a, someone who converted to Christianity first from an intellectual basis, not a theological experience or religious experience. He can, he converted to Christianity after he saw its intellectual, superior superiority. And so he started with the magnetic theory being the, the basis of it being that humans desire what others desire. That we are a copycat species. We, we don’t just borrow the, uh, wrote, uh, behaviors, uh, and, gestures that we see around us. We also, we borrow the desires of those. We see around us. We, we borrow what they perceive that we, we borrow what we perceive

David Gornoski:                00:20:48               them desiring and we covet what they covet and we come it really their perceived success in life based on the things that we see them having. And those things are not just objects like in property. They can also be intangible things like popularity within the social circles that you want to be esteemed by or they can be, you know, success within a social hierarchy of a clique that you hang out with or, uh, you know, uh, you know, acclimation in your workplace or you know, different, uh, perceptions of success that many people have on a social plane. Those are also in some sense objects that we see other people having. And we perceive that if we could have those things too, that we would have that better state of being that they, that we perceive those people around us having. So human beings, we don’t, we’re not just walking Braves aren’t sticks and libertarian philosophy would do well to get out of the enlightenment bubble, which is itself a manifestation of the Christian, framework of reality.

David Gornoski:                00:21:58               But a deviation of it a little bit. The enlightenment framework is that it has inherited Christianity but also goes off the rails just like somebody other epochs in human history that we’re experienced that we’ve, we can look at. But the, um, we would do well to get out of this kind of rationalistic Cartesian bubble that our own Christian friends are into when it comes to our, our, our processing of, of what Jesus is all about. And that means getting back to a desire, getting back to what actually motivates human beings, which is something more guttural, which is something more in the limbic brain rather than just neocortex operations. Something that’s more rooted in our full being, our full, you know, our full, um, kind of primordial drives of wanting to be, you know, what other people have and what they are. So we see mimetic desire in the most fundamental things that humans do.

David Gornoski:                00:22:59               We see it with children. The classic example, a lot of my medic theory, uh, researchers point to as kind of like a way for people to understand it is, you know, you see, you know, two children in a playroom and there’s a, uh, you could have two of the same dolls in a stack of toys and if one of the little toddlers picks up one of those dolls, the other child immediately grabs for that doll. And tries to pull it away. And then the, the first toddler who picked it up was just playing with, it lacks a days of course at first, but now that his neighbor has desired it, it has inflamed his desire for it. And so he pulls back harder. Now he really wants it when before he just kind of picked it up and out of mild interest. Now he’s, his interest has increased because he

David Gornoski:                00:23:46               has imitating the desire of his neighbor who imitated his desire and that back and forth ping pong of reciprocal, a desire and gesturing can create conflict. As we can see with the toddlers screaming or maybe pushing or hitting or something. Sometimes it goes to that point before it has to be broken. You know, someone has to step in and stop it. Um, uh, I, I like to say that, uh, the third part, the second part of Gerard’s grand theory, which is the idea that in order for human beings to imitate each other in a way that doesn’t end in war of all, it gives stall. They have to find a third party to vent their frustrations onto together to channel their anger and desire and, and jealousy or what have you, into a common direction that can unify the two people in conflict or who, however many are in the community.

David Gornoski:                00:24:42               And to illustrate that, I can use the same toddler metaphor, um, and, and say that the two kids are, are pulling hard on the same doll. There’s another doll just like it in the play. Pow, but it doesn’t matter. There’s no rational reason and in the sense of the object itself doesn’t have a true intrinsic desire for the child. It’s the fact that the child wants to be like the other child and, and wants to have what they have. And then that gets resolved with maybe a dog comes by and wagon, a little fluffy tail and both of them find pleasure pulling on the tail together and laughing when the dog tries to, you know, get them off or something. And that would be a kind of a primordial level of like escape go affect that. That is the second great part of Gerard’s theory.

David Gornoski:                00:25:34               So in my medic theory, the first part is that humans desire what others desire. And that, memetic means imitation. It’s like where we get the word mind or it’s related to the word for meme, but it is different from meme. There’s a meme theory that, uh, that people get confused with my medic theory and it’s different. But, mimetic is, is, is about desiring what our neighbors desire. And then, um, we go about our lives trying to create all of these artificial, external, uh, posturing of, of, of difference that we are different and this and that and we’re different, this or that. But those are all ways for our, um, our selves to be able to kind of delude ourselves into believing that we’re not mostly copying what those around us, uh, like or desire or think. And then the second part of Gerard’s grand unified is that, that conflict, that, that conflict, that bruise from having, from having contagious desires, from catching desires.

David Gornoski:                00:26:53               Like we catch a cold in an airplane or something from other people coughing around us. We catch desires for scarce goods scarce, social statuses on hierarchies. And that if you leave that kind of on its own can lead to genocide and extinction of everybody because it just goes on and on and on to the point of violence and murder. And if you didn’t have a way to stop that kind of contagious desire, then we wouldn’t be here as a species today. And so the way that humans found a way to resolve it at the fundamental level of our, our origins as a human species was that we stumbled on a way to imitate each other in a way that could, uh, defer that building animosity onto a common enemy. And so if everybody’s pointing fingers at everybody else because contagious aggression is spreading, then it’s easy to see in a primordial sense how if everybody’s supporting, copying each other’s finger-pointing, you can still copy each other’s finger-pointing as you start to point in the direction of one single enemy.

David Gornoski:                00:28:06               Someone who stands out somewhat in a, in a kind of, again, arbitrary way that allows people who are caught up in a sea of mob mentality, a sea of lack of identity, a sea of sameness,and in that sea of sameness. Someone who stands out in an arbitrary sense can be quickly a target for wrath and blame and accusation as the cause of the rest of the people’s problems. And that person can be deformed. They could be a dwarf, they could be a two to frail, they could be blind, they could be disfigured. Typically it’s someone that has a disability in the ancient times. That’s why all the gods that we see in pathology walk with a disability and they have disfigurements. They have one eye. Medusas is ugly to look at. Uh, Oedipus Rex. Oedipus walks with a twisted gate and different gods have similar attributes like that that you can see as some of their earliest mythologies.

David Gornoski:                00:29:13               So there’s this pattern that the scapegoats that we select tend to be those who have a towel. Something that’s kind of an arbitrary standout feature that when people feel like they’ve lost their sense of self, they can look to that person as a community and say, that person’s different. Maybe they’re a tricker, maybe theyre a demon, maybe they’re, maybe they’re the person who has stirred us all up against each other and, or, you know, maybe maybe they’re disfigured, the gods are cursing them or, you know, maybe, maybe there are two. It could be someone who’s too rich, too beautiful. But it’s typically gotta be someone who does not have a prevailing power faction at their disposal to avenge the accusation and killing of them. So if you have a community, they’re looking to, vent their anger into a common direction. They are not going to target someone who’s very popular typically, uh, and, uh, send all of their, animosity towards them and Lynch them and kill them or cast them off of a cliff or stone them or devour them as they did at ritual cannibalism.

David Gornoski:                00:30:25               And every level of our earliest records of human culture, they’re not going to do that to somebody who’s got a willing band of, defenders ready to say, this guy is not to blame for what you’re doing. I mean, for the causes of our time, you know, the famine or the plague or whatever it is that’s caused the pressures to build and the tensions to flair in a mimetic, you know, pattern. So it’s gotta be someone who will not have an event, a party ready to get to get back, payback or otherwise. It would just be more reciprocal than medic conflict, you know, between a rival faction. So it’s gotta be something that can be a unifying, uh, target for the community to ostracize blame. And everybody truly believes that’s what’s important is that the group think is so powerful. The human nature, the everybody truly believes that that person is guilty and deserving of death or ostracization.

David Gornoski:                00:31:28               And when they kill that person together, it creates a cathartic release. It creates a sense of ecstatic relief because before things were getting to the point where people felt like they were at their wits end with tension and stress and paranoia between each other. Um, maybe there was a fam, you know, maybe there was a famine and food was very scarce and people were getting hungry and they were seeing people die in the village, and then all of a sudden, you know, when they’re fighting in there and they’re suspicious and they’re looking for answers, and then this person over here who’s a little bit different, maybe they’re bigger than everybody, or maybe they’re too, they’re smaller than everybody, or maybe they’re came from a rival tribe and they look a little bit different externally, that person, and they say, you know, that person did this.

David Gornoski:                00:32:22               This is why we’re feeling this pain in this stress and this anxiety. And they channel all of that together and stoning that person. Now they feel relief because they feel like they did a, they did something together and it brought a sense of peace in order, uh, that, uh, the problem that the cause of the problem has not been vanquished. And it’s, uh, it’s a very, very powerful and passionate and primordial experience for people to kill someone and to kill them off it in a brutal way. And to do it, to gather with people who have web time where your enemies, now you’re joining together. We see this all the time. You know, think about the all the war campaigns today. You know, go back to world war one or world war II or whatever, where, you know, you might have a, uh, a neighbor down the street that just gets on your nerves.

David Gornoski:                00:33:17               You can’t stand them. They’re of a different religion. They are of a different economic way. The different political philosophy. And you can’t stand for your kids to play with their kids and you just have this hatred, rivalry built up and then a war breaks out and you and them go together to enlist in a war to go fight a common enemy that seeks the destruction in your mind of the whole neighborhood and everything around. And that unifies you. And that ecstatic catharsis knowing that you’re going off to destroy and vanquish a foe. That means the annihilation of everything together. Well that the fear of annihilation is a real fear because they there, there’s something about contagious violence and anxiety that feels like everybody’s about to be dead. You know, everybody’s about to be destroyed here. Just go wipe out everything we have. We’re, I’m going to have our village or our community anymore.

David Gornoski:                00:34:13               But then they project that fear of annihilation onto their common foe and they make them the, so you know, cause of it so that when they beat that person and destroy that person, they then all memetically as a group, think conceit, feel the feeling of, of salvation. And when you have this moment, the person who at one point was the demon of all the community now becomes the savior. Now becomes this psychologically unifying force that resolve the tensions between mortal enemies who felt like their very being at stake if that tension wasn’t able to be resolved. And so then what does a, you know, what do ancient communities, what do these, primitive societies make of this weird experience? Whereas at one point, this focus of obsession to destroy this person because they are the cause of all calamity and fear and pain or trouble.

David Gornoski:                00:35:21               Now they are the cause of all unity and peace in order. Well, that’s what we see when they tell the oral tradition to their, to their, descendants. That’s what see that oral tradition becomes what we call mythology, where they tell these stories that in the beginning there was chaos. And out of that chaos, a God have merged and slaughtered another guy or did or, or, or battles something else and out of that, that that killing order was restored. Or we see stories like in the Greek, the Greek mythologies of gods that were tricksters and little antagonists in their earliest exploits and stories that we hear of their, uh, interactions with man. But then later on we see them acting as saviors of saving communities from destruction and plagues and famines. Usually if the community provides them a sacrificial you know, they give a sacrificial victim or you know, do certain things that please them in a sacrificial way.

David Gornoski:                00:36:39               They save them from a storm or save them from a of arrival war camp, arrival war, uh, you know, campaign that’s coming against their city. But you see that, that paradox, that mercurial nature of all mythological gods that they, they’re both, they can destroy you with terror, but they can also save you and they can also restore everything you have. That is the hallmark of the scapegoat at the, at the primordial level of scapegoat violence. They, they, cause they are blamed as the cause of the problems of the community. And then they’re destroyed. And in their destruction, it’s as if they were there to teach us a lesson. All along the, the, the story that people transmit to their children, their children and children or your grandchildren, is that there are certain things that we need to do to prevent out-of-control mimetic desire for running a rock.

David Gornoski:                00:37:41               And those taboos are what we get with primitive religion. Don’t steal because if you steal, it’s going to set off reciprocal stealing and then the whole community is going to be inflamed and a war of all against all, you know, don’t kill, you know, don’t, don’t, don’t take somebody else’s, partner, you know, wife or whatever because they’re going to take years and it’s going to go back and forth. It’s going to create a loss of difference. So all those primordial taboos are all about, maintaining difference, maintaining boundaries of being so as to not unleash the terror of mimetic desire, uncontrolled. Once people feel like they are losing their sense of self and their sense of distinctiveness and their sense of existence because of other people, you know, kind of, consuming and desiring everything that they felt was there. Um, and so that’s where taboos come along.

David Gornoski:                00:38:39               To kind of reiterate the things that were the occasion for the feeling of chaos that surrounded the community when they stumbled on to a common enemy to destroy, to stop that chaos. That’s where original rituals and taboos come about and primordial religion, uh, with, and then, uh, the mythology is the projection of the community violence into symbols outside of them that they call gods that they attached to forces of nature and other things that are mysterious in the world that serve as kind of conduits for understanding the psychological experiences that the community experiences when they break those taboos of difference and go into a state of differentiation. So the moral of the story for these, these communities all over the world is that, you know, you need to follow these taboos of, of difference that are preventing us from stumbling into contagious envy and jealousy and desire.

David Gornoski:                00:39:46               And you’ve all these taboos and if you break them, it’s going to unleash the wrath of the gods. But the wrath of the gods are actually just comfort or just they’re just projections into the sky into an abstract sense. What are actually just scapegoat victims, which are actually just a common enemies of a community that were selected in our almost arbitrary way to, to provide relief for a contagious violence that’s brewing in a community. And so that, that’s why all of our mythologies have that kind of weird interplay between the gods being both beneficial and salvific and, and saving the community and giving them and even birthing communities and birthing civilizations, but then also in their earliest exploits doing weird things that violate taboos of order and difference. Like a lot of the gods are accused of being incestuous or having beastiality, you know, you get guys that are half a bull, half human, half horse, half human and different beasts. Some gods have a face of a lion and an Eagle and a bear all mixed in one. And all these things, this is, these are all symbols representing on differentiation. And so again, remember what I said, escape goat. To become an effective scapegoat, they need to get, you know, the community has to convince themselves that they’re the cause of the undifferentiated, they’re the cause of the loss of self. The loss of boundaries of order. They’re the cause of the uncontrollable, mixing of things into a kind of sea of sameness.

David Gornoski:                00:41:33               And that’s why you get this, accusation and say, well, it’s not, it’s not portrayed as an accusation of mythology. It’s just written as so that, you know, Zeus was, was doing incest here, or this God was doing beastiality here or this, they, you know, this, they, you know, was, you know, all these different boundaries there, they sometimes they steal, sometimes they take on the identity of somebody else and deceive someone. But then they also say, and that push-pull of the gods is, is really just a psychological distillation and a symbolic representation of the, uh, push pool effect of the scapegoat and the scapegoat, u draws us together and unites us, uh, to, uh, to basically act as a God, to teach us what we have to do when we, feel the, uncontrollable, loss of self that mimetic desire contagiously can breathe into when we’re not careful about following taboos of difference.

Dustin (Host):                    00:42:42               So with…

David Gornoski:                00:42:42               Does that make sense, by the way.

Dustin (Host):                    00:42:45               Yes, Absolutely ,this, this reminds me of the, a while back I’d read “Hero of a thousand faces” by Joseph Campbell and, George Frazier, as well, he was a, an anthropologist. They formulated this kind of, this concept that’s somewhat similar but very different, that throughout history, cultures and societies, they develop these common myths with common elements, themes, whatever. And Campbell kind of went a step further saying that there’s a universal myth that’s continually repeated, that’s retold throughout all cultures in a different form, but the, the, you know, what he called the basically or would say it was the same story with just a different actors. And I was wondering if you could maybe, uh, clarify, um, although it’s probably a little bit obvious to many of the listeners, but how Gerard’s, memetic theory differs from, from someone like Campbell or Frasier who identify these common quote unquote myths. Whereas Gerard’s kind of goes in a, in a much more, intellectual or a much better direction I think then than Campbell or Frasier.

David Gornoski:                00:44:05               Well, I’ve, you could see a contrast between Gerard and say a Campbell. We’ll take a story like, like a, the story of like a, a community that does a ritual where they take two young teenagers and they put them in a shack as a Rite of passage ritual. And, uh, they’re, they, uh, they do all kinds of and rights around that shack and then they kill that, those teenagers or they burned the shack or something like that. And, uh, it’s what Campbell will do is he’ll say, well, look, look how this is, this is connected to the harvest season and how this is, this is a ritual that is a universal to cultures who are looking to, uh, you know, make meaning about the, the changing of seasons and fertility and the values that are there and was, would do is say, but you’re missing the elephant in the room, which is why are they killing these teenagers?

David Gornoski:                00:45:02               You know, why are they, why are they selecting these teenagers in this ritual and then killing them that the kill is the, is the real huge thing there. And, uh, that, that those killing rituals that you find them in all ancient, you know, uh, ritual religions and that’s the fundamental, that’s the fundamental heart of the mythologies that accompanied them. Right? And so when you, when you take them and you say, and you diminish the scapegoat mechanism phenomenon and just say, well, these are just stories that are meant to give humans a fantasy and give them a sense of meaning for storms and make them feel a sense of belonging and all that stuff, but they don’t want to really touch the real core. They want to keep the corpse of humanity hidden. Right? And that’s what Jesus said when he said, I’ve come to reveal things say that since the foundation of the world, that even our current modern etiologies, as sophisticated as they think they are, are doing the same thing that ancient mythologies did, which is to conceal the corpse of the human species at all costs to hide the victims.

David Gornoski:                00:46:16               So that’s to not allow us to confront the ugly truth of where we came from anthropologically speaking and where we’re still trying to, uh, practice these rituals and justifications for might makes, right and sacrificial violence and coercion and domination and all the things that we do in the modern world, which are just religious vestiges of these, of these, this, this universal practice of humankind since the Dawn of recorded history. And before that. So, uh, you know, the difference was Gerard, you know, again, is you know, the dying and rising savior myth. Um, again, you can see the pattern of the scapegoat right there. You know, it’s die. They, you know, there’s a, there’s a, uh, you know, a, a hero and they have to fight the dragon. What’s the drag of the dragon in the, in the real sense is that the community’s, uh, undifferentiated chaos.

David Gornoski:                00:47:17               The community is in a state of chaos. It’s going to lose its sense of existence. It might extinguish itself, its the dragon in some sense, and the hero is presented to fight the dragon. And in the fight he dies and then he, he is bore. Well, What’s the rebirth of the hero? The reverse of the hero is the fact that after they kill that hero, the community then feels as if that hero spirit lives within all of them. Now they re-interpret the irrational ecstasy of the experience of carbon, of a carbon lynching, that a restored order. And now they tell the story as well. That hero was reboarded all of us. And that hero becomes our, our, our patron God, our tribal leader, our hero that will, will, will bring us through any time of, of turmoil as long as we sacrifice God humans in his honor. So it’s a God, the gods are victims themselves who are demanding more victims to be fed to them, to keep the engine of community intact. Does that make sense?

David Gornoski:                00:48:29               Yes. Absolutely. It does.

David Gornoski:                00:48:31               Yeah, it’s, it’s fascinating stuff. So I mean, the point is, is that the only way to have, to be a true atheist is to follow Jesus. People don’t want to hear that. Excuse me. They don’t want to hear that because you know, we all want to believe that, uh, we’re autonomous little individuals that, you know, we want a Jaguar because we just want one objectively. Uh, you’re not because the neighbor across the street or down in a nicer neighborhood has one. We want the accolades just because we like the accolades, not because we feel like that will give us a sense of peace and satisfaction in the heart of our being that we perceive others who get accolades and cheers and for the crowd get we, we all, we tell all these little convenient self mythologies to justify us blindly being pulled here and there with role models all around us, whether we read them in a book like, you know, the Cervantes and the, the, uh, what’s the story of the…Don Quixote?

David Gornoski:                00:49:41               Don Quixote is someone who loves the King Arthur, a romantic novel of the, of the shivery and the nightly honor. And so he lives his whole life, uh, in imitation of an external role model that is someone in a book from far a long time ago who he can become and find his sense of being and satisfaction in that. And then we have internal role models, which are people who are more closer to home. Could be your parent who doesn’t want to see you succeed or surpass them because they kind of want to keep you down under their thumb because that makes them feel like they’re still successful. If they can work that out or maybe it’s a, you know, a, a friend at work who you guys love the same things, but at some point it turns into rivalry because, you know, you’re fighting for the same position at work and, your character qualities are kind of similar to the people on the outside.

David Gornoski:                00:50:44               And then you have to try to emphasize the differences between each other. But on the outside people say, it looks like these guys are just squabbling, you know, over the same stuff. I can’t see the difference. Uh, internally, you guys feel like you’re farther apart than ever outside of a, everybody thinks you look like a loony tunes cloud. You know those Looney Tunes cloud. When you have a two characters fight and they get into a little desk cloud and then bugs bunny will come out of the desk cloud and the desk cloud’s still fighting. You know what I mean? That’s mimetic desire in the sense that, you know what I mean? From the app front, it’s like, you know, you have a conflict, eh, two characters get into a fight, bugs bunny and whoever, and it turns into a desk cloud. You can’t tell who’s who anymore.

David Gornoski:                00:51:27               You just see a little hair, little arm and it’s just a cloud. And that’s supposed to represent the loss of self between two rivals. And then bugs. Money will come out of that. That’s cloud of fight and the fight still going, but there’s only one guy in there. So it shows you that I’m differentiating cause it’s kind of pointing at it like, what’s the point? You know, it’s just a, a loss of sameness over there. He doesn’t even know who he’s hitting anymore. He’s just hitting himself. Uh, and that’s the kind of a week to the audience that these little stories and childhood characters can, can reveal to us the most profound things right under our noses. But you know, that’s what all modern ideology is really just a continuation of the concealment of the hidden victims, of our, of our collective sense of being an order.

David Gornoski:                00:52:11               And that’s what we’re struggling with today with understanding of the state. And it’s not just the state, it’s any group. I mean, you can have, you know, and you can have a vegan clinic and that excludes people who eat, uh, eggs and they’re vegetarian guys. You’ve got to really exclude them. Like they violated a sacred taboo of, of unity by any egg. So they get, they get excluded and they, uh, you can have a ketogenic group that excludes people who eat, you know, more than a hundred carbs or something, you know, or something like that. Uh, there’s always, we all have this predilection for forming a community that’s based on the ritual explosion of people who violate the taboos that everybody shares adherence to. And the reason why I think that they have to do this is because you know, within a community that’s undifferentiated, let’s say everybody in a community of veganism, they all eat the same particular way of veganism.

David Gornoski:                00:53:07               There’s all kinds of philosophies. Let’s say there’s a particular type of group and they have a very specific protocol within that adherence to the whole lifestyle package that comes with that. That’s a loss of self, right? And so within that loss of self environment, there is a lot of opportunity for contagious envy and aggression and resentment and anxiety too to foam it because we fight because we’re the same, not, not that we’re different, but it’s in that tension of loss of self. That order is restored by finding people within the community who have violated where of the taboos of difference that we do not eat eggs here or we do not eat fish and they’re eating fish and they need to be shunned because they’re trying to push the idea that we need to eat fish for some vitamins or something like that. They have to be shunned out of the community in order to restore the sense of unifying, uh, order that the, uh, group, uh, maintains in their transcendent values that keep them glued together.

David Gornoski:                00:54:13               That’s what religion is. That’s what communities are, by the way. That’s what all fields of knowledge operate on. That’s why, you know, if someone tries to do something different and they say, you know, like Stanley ponds and Mark Fleischman in 1989 came out with this so-called cold fusion experiment. And again, whether there’s anything to it or not, there was an immediate crisis, a sacrificial crisis that opened up because all of a sudden when, uh, you know, someone challenges the foundations of knowledge that binds the whole community together, that’s a violation of the sacred dogmas. A taboos that makes nuclear physics or chemistry and in the related fields that were being, uh, you know, brought into this, this announcement for cold fusion that makes them have a crisis of identity. And so they have to bind themselves together by shunning these people to the point where, uh, Stanley ponds fled to France and to this day will not come back into America or do any interviews because of how ugly he was treated just because he came up with this, uh, insight that you could have room temperature, nuclear energy reactions, and uh, many people apparently have been replicated that work through the years quietly in Japan and United States and other places.

David Gornoski:                00:55:30               But it’s still, that field has never, that field of research or inquiry has never fully recovered from the stigma of the scapegoat shutting hysteria. That happened, uh, with, uh, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley ponds where they did the cold fusion thing. So what happened was, you know, they had to be shunned. They had to be excommunicated because they, they, they triggered the sense of the, the sacred boundaries of what it means to be nuclear physics. They said, you know, nuclear fusion has to have a certain, uh, certain factors. It has to have a certain environmental situation for it to our core occur. And this was something that was laid at the foundations of the standard model and all these other things. And then here comes these it, you know, some of the best chemicals. I think Mark Fleischman was one of the highest, chemical engineers in the world.

David Gornoski:                00:56:19               You know, these are the top of their top, but they went above their, so they violated the taboo of order, which means a chemist is making claims about physics. So now he’s gone above cause in the hierarchy of the scientific world. you know, physics would be at the higher level than chemistry. And I care, here are these chemical genius chemistry geniuses making a pronouncement about so-called fusion. Now they violated the taboo of the hierarchy of the, of the community. And so the way you, uh, the way you, uh, reinforce and restore order of that hierarchy is that you excommunicate you destroy, you, denounce, you vilify the person who got out of line and tried to make a pronouncement about what’s possible with fusion without having the, you know, the, the, the rank to make such a claim. And so they’re destroyed and eliminated. And, um, that field has still got the taboo that has left that, that, that, that trail of shame was left with. But it’s still percolating that whole field.

David Gornoski:                00:57:26               But my point is just to show you that I can show you veganism fans, I can show you Keto fans, I can show you scientific community. I can show you how this group dynamic, operates on the same religious group, fake characteristics of shared catharsis, of shared rituals, and then the need to maintain that boundary of order by, eliminating people and socially destroying people who challenge the sacred perimeters of what makes that order bound.

Dustin (Host):                    00:58:01               Well, I don’t know if you’re familiar with John Vervaeke at all.

David Gornoski:                00:58:07               I, I’ve seen a couple clips focus work and, uh, a few people have referenced his work. Yeah. Paul Vanderclay.

Dustin (Host):                    00:58:14               I had, interviewed him a while back on, on episode 47. His contention is that, I think that he’s, he’s right and he’s very, he’s spot on at recognizing the symptom. And you know, this fits in perfectly with, with Gerard’s, memetic theory. I think that he, that Vervaeke, he identifies the symptom and he is himself… As well as that is trying to develop kind of basically a secular alternative, I guess if you want to call it to that. But his, main contention is that these, especially in the Western world as we’ve moved away from, ysince the enlightenment really since, move away from,religious institutions as a purveyor of meaning, right? As inding meaning in your life, through faith, and in more modern history, that’s really accelerated to the point now where it’s even fraternal organizations, things like that are all gone or dying very, very rapidly.

David Gornoski:                00:59:24               Like you don’t see a lot of young people and, at like the Elks club or whatever. Right? For the most part. And what he is saying is that this is why you see all these issues in society. You see, you know, increased rates of suicide, drug use, just all these kind of, you know, mass shootings could, could also be, , considered one of the, these things even though like the numbers are really not as crazy as as they’ll put out in the news. But these are symptoms of, of people who feel hopeless of people who feel they have no meaning in life. Because when you have a established meaning in your life, you have a reason why you get up in the morning. You have a reason why you’re doing whatever it is that you’re doing every day, and a thing to be moving forward to a thing you’re trying to emulate, and, you know, model your life after, but…

David Gornoski:                01:00:19               What are the reasons those mass shootings happen is because, you know, you look at those movies that Hollywood produces when they encourage people to be a hero by gunning down everybody, you know, and, you know, there was that clip from the Kingsman where the guy, have you seen that movie where there’s a scene where he goes into a church setting and just shoots everybody over and over and over again? You know, it’s really repulsive to think about that. But, you know, I mean, you know, these kids that are disaffected, they see that and they say, you know, look at the glory of that. You know, and I’m,on the low end of the hierarchy. I’m the lowest of the low and my high school and my whatever,whether they’re a rich kid or what, maybe their mom or dad barely gives them any quality time and treats them with respect, they feel they deserve not to be treated like a child or something.

David Gornoski:                01:01:05               And so, you know, they, they go in, they nurse this resentment and they feel like, well, I have the right to move up on the hierarchy. I mean, look at this movie star. He gets to get millions of dollars. And so that’s mimetic desire unleashed, right? They’re looking at that. So they get to have the glory and they get to have millions of dollars. All the women, the yacht, the trips to every fine hotel, you can imagine the finest food. And he gets to pretend to shoot down people with the most brilliant way. Why can’t I do that? These people around me in my class there, they’re awful. They’re fake or whatever. They’re, they’re dumb. Whatever their little motivation is for justifying the dehumanization of their classmates. And so they want revenge. They want, it’s a revenge and revenge of the skate go. They perceive themselves to be on justly, uh, marginalized and treated as an outcast.

David Gornoski:                01:01:56               So it’s the revenge of the scapegoat, this is a purely modern phenomenon because you didn’t have revenge of the scapegoat, uh, narratives happening in the ancient world. And the reason why we have this, Meredith, is because Christianity broke the ancient world’s mythological frame of reality. And we’re dealing with the pieces and shards of it today. Um, and so that’s why someone who’s on the of the low hierarchy hierarchical structure like an outcast in school, feels like they have the ability to rise up and get their moment of TV glory, just like the movie stars and TV stars. And then you add to that the, the media is, uh, and the government’s whole, love affair with perpetual violence. You know, I mean, we’ve got to have a law to get the rich tax, well, taxation in usually taxation to punish certain peoples is a kind of violent way of trying to say, we’re going to bring someone down by force when we get the numbers on our side to get our people in power and then use that power of the state to bear down on them, on the backs of the crooked rich or the crooked, these groups of that group.

David Gornoski:                01:03:08               And then you have the whole force of, you know, um, you know, punch a Nazi and all this stuff that’s always percolating. Anybody who’s not a radical Marxist is by definition a Nazi collaborator. And therefore they need to be dehumanized and hit and hurt. And it hit their brain, you know, with the punch to the face so that you cause their brain to have concussions and contusions or what have you. This is disgusting. But that kind of sacrificial, violent language is all in our society. And it’s always masked in the self righteousness of the victim because again, it’s mimicking the framework of Christianity because Christianity says the, the victim is where God stands. And so we, we have, uh, thrown out the word God, but we’ve still doing the same thing. But we’re doing it by trying to reassert violence back into the Christian framework by saying, uh, well, uh, I get to kill, or I get to destroy, uh, the, this enemy group by getting political power, uh, because we’re the victims or we’re the allies of the victims and therefore we deserve vigils.

David Gornoski:                01:04:18               And that’s the really, that’s the big thing that Nisha was identified before his time. And he knew Christianity was the reason why that resentment was building that resentment was building on such a deep level that, uh, would be very dangerous once the, the notion of the old God was finally put to, uh, you know, mainstream consciousness, uh, to death in that mainstream way that we would be, uh, flailing or about for resentment. And this idea that people who in the ancient world would be just brutalized and shut down and had no place and no storytelling in pop culture that said they as a loser could move up the hierarchy, uh, that has totally dissolved. And the in the light of Christianity’s impacted the West. So now everybody feels that they are marginalized as a victim, that they have a self righteous fervor to use sacrificial violence against their oppressors.

David Gornoski:                01:05:17               And that’s what that mass shooting phenomenon as a bell memetically trying to one up the last scapegoat or want to be scapegoat guy or whatever, who shoots people, uh, to get revenge on the, on the, on the community for not exalting them as the victim par excellence. Right. So they, they become, they feel like they can become a little TV made for TV God and their ability to murder people in that way. So it, it’s a very sorority and the memetic phenomenon very, very much so. but you know, this is something that, you know, have you seen that? Have you seen the Gotthard tunnel opening ceremony by chance?

Dustin (Host):                    01:05:56               I have not.

David Gornoski:                01:05:58               That was a big tunnel opening that they opened in the Swiss mountain region. That was, it’s open now. It’s this big tunnel that connects the whole EU spine and that Swiss mountain region. And it, uh, it was an interesting ceremony, which I encourage people to look it up. It’s, I want to make sure I’m saying it right there.

David Gornoski:                01:06:28               I think it was Gotthard or guttered or Gotthard, Swiss tunnel. And it’s, uh, I encourage you to look at the presentation that they, they do a few different rituals, in the different, uh, dramas. But one of the things that’s interesting about it is that it’s a, it was a railway tunnel through the Alps, uh, opened in 2016 June 1st. And, uh, it, it’s the world’s longest railway and the deepest traffic tunnel in the first flat low level route through the Alps and all the major, you know, globalists and heads of state. And everybody were in attendance to these little plays I did to commemorate the opening of the tunnel. Um, and what was interesting about it was that in the, uh, in the play, they have a situation where they have a goat demon come out who represents a legend of a kind of a satanic goat figure in ancient Swiss legend and mythology of that mountain pass area.

David Gornoski:                01:07:36               And this goat, uh, character at one point has to claim the soul of some workers who die in the construction of the tunnel, right? And so these tunnel, it shows these construction workers working on this tunnel. And then it shows the died, it shows there’s little spirits go and it shows this, this goat demon kind of bear down on them almost in like a marriage ceremony of claiming these souls has, is as a way of making the tunnel, uh, kind of blessed to be open. So what’s interesting about that is that in the, uh, tunnel construction,

David Gornoski:                01:08:16               several workers actually died in the making of the tunnel. I’m actually looking at that. Do you follow what I’m saying? Yeah, no, I was, I was Googling this while you were, while you were speaking as well. And there it is. Nine people died during the construction. So these nine people were represented in the play that people like Angela Merkel and everybody was watching as this goat demon like bore down on these people’s spirits and represented as actors or construction workers in the construction of the tunnel. So here we have, these people are blatantly kind of celebrating and I think I’m most ugly fashion, right? Cause these are people, these are real people who die. Nine people died during the construction of this tunnel for this globalist EU glory to unite the European union with the trade and everything that going to do there. And they use those people’s death and symbolize them with construction workers be almost as sacrificial tokens for this bathroom mat or some kind of goat like demon figure to consume for his glory in order to kind of bless the passage, uh, in its ability to happen.

David Gornoski:                01:09:30               Isn’t it a little bit offensive to you to think that that the, the heads of the States and businesses of the world’s biggest corporations involved, we’re kind of enjoying this kind of drama and there’s nobody talking about how, how offensive it is to represent actual people dying as being consumed as sacrificial fodder for some kind of God character. And that weird we have…

Dustin (Host):                    01:09:51               Very much so.

David Gornoski:                01:09:53               Exactly. So that’s there right in the open. Right. And so what’s interesting about it to me is, there is an ancient story of a Christian legend that, uh, Satan appeared as this goat, like demon in that same pass, the Gotthard base tunnel is built here where he would say, you can come across the, he told the community, and I don’t remember all the details, but basically something to the effect of you can come across this mountain pass, but you have to offer the life of a human.

David Gornoski:                01:10:34               In order to pass, you have to offer the life of a purse of the first to come across the path. And I believe that the Christian and the Christian legend, instead of sending your human, they send a goat and he has to kill the goat as a sacrifice. That’s all he gets. And it’s like a trickery of the devil in there. So it’s kind of like, so you see, you see how the Christian community, their legends are kind of, again, think of it like a fossil record of storytelling. They’re repudiating the old sacrificial order that used to be the domain of the gods.

David Gornoski:                01:11:10               And that has now been relegated to the domain of Satan, the enemy, right,? And the enemy is now this adversarial entity outside of the community, not the God reigning over the community and he still demands human flesh. But because they’re Christians, they’re not going to offer human flash. They’re going to offer a go to to kind of trick him in his little tricks. So it’s still still kind of sacrificially connected to the older world of the Swiss pagan culture that was there before it became Christianized is it’s got a, it’s got a, it’s got a, it’s got a connection in its DNA to that tradition of that community, but it’s, it’s a renunciation of human sacrifice. But in this new, this new dramatic play of this new Gotthard tunnel, it’s a, it’s an attempt to reverse the Christian renunciation of human sacrifice and to celebrate it in the public square in front of all these heads of state who are clapping and cheering on this symbolic play that represents the values of the, of the EU and the globalism.

David Gornoski:                01:12:12               And it’s, it’s just very interesting to me how, you know, that stuff is, is kind of coming back. It’s almost like the pagan, sacrificial, mythological order of the ancient world is almost bubbling up to the point where, uh, you know, it wants to be celebrated in the public square, that it’s okay to treat human life as a, as a token sacrifice for some kind of a God that demands it for the glory of the tunnels construction. And I bring that up to make a point, which is that this is nothing new. Every ancient community has what we call a foundation sacrifice, where they would lay, victims, sometimes alive, sometimes killed already into a, grew for the cornerstone to be laid at the beginning of a new, temple or a new wall or fortress or dam or bridge construction or, you know, anything just like this Gotthard tunnel.

David Gornoski:                01:13:16               And so you would lay down a victim as a cornerstone blessing for the construction of the new complex or the new town, or what happened. So in Japan, you know, there’s stories of like, you know, there’s a raging river. And, people who Army’s trying to pass and it’s so bad, some of them get killed and swept away. And so they end up having to take a young woman and sacrifice or in the bed of the, of the, of the river. And then once they did that, the Japanese legend says they were able to build a bridge and tame the river, after they gave a blessing to, the gods or whatever of the river by sacrificing a human being. And that again, is again,a repetition of the sacrificial violence of the scapegoat mechanism at the heart of all human society and culture.

David Gornoski:                01:14:18               And so that’s that sacrificial practice of laying a cornerstone ritual. Ceremony is everywhere. We find it in ancient, you know, Mexico and the things are, they’re uncovering these things all the time where they find victims. It in the first stone laid in the construction of a great project. So, I mean, what they’re doing in this Gotthard tunnel ceremony of 2016, you know, the, the director or whatever had a very key, it seems like, or maybe they didn’t, I don’t know, but it’s very, very similar to the, the glory of the ancient world. How they found meaning was through, you know, emulating a victim and or, entumbing them inside of a, of a, of a wall sometimes just happened everywhere. And this is what was going on around the time of the ancient Israelites. And that’s why, you know, what’s so radical about the old Testament is that it’s showing you the vestiges of this behavior, but it’s also showing that humanity is being called out of human sacrifice and, and towards living among themselves and living among each other without having to have a human sacrifice to bind each other together.

David Gornoski:                01:15:33               I keep using the word binding together because that’s the Latin root for the word religion. And that’s what that, that binding together, that social psychological order that we find by, you know, offering up someone, A misfit a king who’s been too powerful too long. You know, like the French revolution, you know, chopping the heads off of the elites. Those are sacrificial victims too. Even though they may seem to be, to be escaped… Just for clarification doesn’t mean you’re wholly innocent of everything. It just means that you’re not truly to blame for the community’s full problems.

David Gornoski:                01:16:09               That though, that you may have done things too that were bad, but you are not the, cause of the problems that are festering within community that, uh…

Dustin (Host):                    01:16:18               I was going to say in a modern sense, right, that we use the political process as scapegoating. You know, we, they talk about the mandate, of a president or a Congress. And if you don’t like that, you know, if you’re not happy or pleased with the direction it’s going, then you scapegoat that current president and say we don’t like the way the economies or the country’s going. And then we…and they, they may be responsible for some of it. They may not be responsible for other parts of it. But then we just use them as a blank slate to say from here on out we are, we are going to choose a different person to be the sacrificial King.

David Gornoski:                01:16:59               Exactly. Yes. That’s precisely right. So that’s what presidents and politicians serve as their escape goes and see a lot of libertarians and stuff, they don’t like that. Right. Cause they were like, wait a second, those are the bad. It’s like, well that’s kind of like, if you think that then you’re still fully statist than you even realize. You know what I mean? It’s like you don’t fully get the full effect of how the state awkward, you know what I’m saying? And so you’re right, it’s, it’s a very good point that the purpose of a politician is to serve as a scapegoat misdirection conduit. They’re meant to channel up all the tensions that we’re feeling amongst each other, whether they’re born of real injustice or they’re also born of just envy and jealousy and covetousness and on satisfaction with our place in life. And we bottle all that cauldron up that we have towards each other.

David Gornoski:                01:17:45               And then when whoever is in office and things need to get the crowd, you know, fervor channelling against the, dump it all on this first and say Donald Trump, you know, or whatever. And now they have to dehumanize him. They call him 45 because they don’t want to dignify him with president Trump. They call him orange man to dehumanize the fact that he has garish hair, classic scapegoat. You know, scapegoats stand out, their hair’s too long. It’s too weird. They’ve gimp, a limp leg. They’ve got a disfigurement, they’ve got a weird walk. They’ve got two long legs. They got, uh, you know, one eye, a Cyclops, whatever it is. So he’s gotten the garish here. He’s heavyset. So they make fun of him for that. There were a lot of last president’s who were that heavy. So he stays out there. He’s too rich and he’s proud of it.

David Gornoski:                01:18:33               So he stands out there. You’re supposed to get success in modern Western world by pretending that you’re not rich or that you’re ashamed of your wealth, you know, and that’s the way you’re supposed to do it. And the uh, and the victim concerned world that we live in because of the cross. Uh, so yeah, politicians are scapegoats. Trump is the most, is the most scapegoat of the politicians that we have today. And that doesn’t mean that he’s the best. It just means that he is the one who has violated the taboos of what the mythology of political, uh, state craft should look like in the West. And it’s because he claims to be a winner when you’re supposed to pretend to be a loser in order to gain power and the West. And so that makes him a throwback to a Nietzsche type cause Nietzschewas all about, we’re the winners and Christianity has unleashed this slave morality where the little guy thinks he’s got dignity and the little guy should be squashed by the beautiful people and the rich people in the elites.

David Gornoski:                01:19:33               The Dionysian cult should be the way we go back to things. That’s the only way to make the world function. That’s the only way to keep things going and keep the lights on. That’s what Nietzsche was basically getting at those writings about the slave morality. And, uh, and, and now, you know, that’s what, that’s what Trump’s kind of becoming a scapegoat for it because he never says, you know, loser language. He says, I’m a winner. I’m the best. I did this because I’m a brilliant person. I’m a genius. I made more money than you even know. You know, and that’s winner’s language. That’s Nietzschean style language inside of a world which is very victim concern, which is very Marxist, you know, in terms of its, posturing of victimization to gain power over another. So he’s mad. he is the number one threat about Trump is because he challenges the sacred taboos of what binds the state cult together in the, in America and the West.

David Gornoski:                01:20:34               He challenges the narrative. He doesn’t actually change the policy, but what’s more important than the policy and the power and the coerce and all of that is the narrative that we tell ourselves. Because all of our politicians reinforce it by all posturing as victims and various ways and clean language and victim concern language for a war. You know, if we’re going to fight a war, it’s because the poor little children that Assad’s destroyed, not because we want to make money off of his oil fields. We’re going to Iraq is because of the poor little children that Baghdad that Saddham Husseins destroyed. Not because it’s their strategic location and it helps our allies, in Saudi Arabia and so forth. And it makes us a lot of money for our military industrial contractors. You can’t say that stuff. And Trump says he, he violates the mythology of the politically correct language.

David Gornoski:                01:21:30               So here’s something to take away. That mythology still exists and broken in more concealed forms because it hides itself with abstract and ideological language that makes it seem rotted and not religious. And then it also high to self in political correctness and proper speech because it’s almost like we get caught up in this, this suspension of disbelief when we have a president like Barack Obama or something who says, we’re gonna, you know, go to Libya because they got to save the people from Qaddafi’s brutality. Right? And, and so we, we listen to that. He’s using all the right language. He’s smooth. He, he, he presents the position of an identity that is on the side of victims. And so we say, okay, we believe this story script. Go ahead and sell us. Go ahead and sell us. And even it didn’t even work that well, right?

David Gornoski:                01:22:22               Because that’s the thing is that these, these attempts to use sacred violence or sacrificial violence or scapegoating, whatever word you want to use there, they don’t work in light of Christianity because Christianity and the story of Jesus in the gospels reveals the processes of the scapegoat mechanism. And it reveals systematically the concealment that is in dying and rising savior myths and mythology. And it, it reveals it from within, by taking on the form and structure of those processes, but allowing you to see it from the vantage point of the person being persecuted by the winners of history. But this time because they persecute Jesus, they’re no longer the winners of history. And ever since then, wherever the story of Jesus, his story, wherever Jesus story goes in the world, it infects their mythological storytelling ability. And it breaks down their ability to get things done through the scapegoat mechanism process of sacrificial violence.

David Gornoski:                01:23:31               And so that’s why hierarchies are falling apart, particularly in the West because the West has had the longest bout of Christian infection into its sense-making, than the other communities that sometimes had Christianity calmer earlier on. But then it got stamped out because of the presence of another religion or ideology that that took hold afterwards. But Christianity has had the longest continuous infection in the Western frame that we have and therefore we are the ones who are most haunted by victim concern. And this was all predicted by Jesus by the way, in his teachings. He talks about all the time, the idea that, you know, mother will fight against daughter. And so, you know, families will break up I guess each other. That’s what’s happening in the West. And he said it because he’s basically predicting that we’re, as he comes in and brings a new paradigm of anti mythology, which is what the gospel stories are.

David Gornoski:                01:24:32               He does so in a way that it’s going to be hard for us to humble ourselves as a human species and renounced the scapegoating violence. And because we don’t want to do it, we keep reinserting attempts at sacrificial violence and failings, increasingly family ways. It doesn’t bind us together anymore. Remember, the importance of sacred sacrificial violence in the primordial past was that it bound us together. It prevented us from contagiously envying one another to the point where we’re obsessed with destroying each other rather than just getting on with life. And so it’s, it’s like, it’s like sacred violence. And the scapegoat mechanism was almost like training wheels for the human species. It was our, it was our baby food, if you want to use that, it was the bumper of our bowling game. Right. You know, you could ball the game without worrying about failing and now those bumpers are off, the training wheels are off. We’re off of the baby food and now we have to sink or swim. That’s the bottom line.

Dustin (Host):                    01:25:33               Well would you, I mean, maybe, you know, I was going to say it’s ironic, but maybe, you don’t view it as such, but I’ll just frame it that way, I guess. Anyways. it does seem ironic in that as, faith in Christianity in the West is on a precipitous decline, compared to say a hundred, 200, 300 years ago, that you are seeing the kind of the mimetic end effect of this, of the theology infection,throughout the West kind of, I guess chickens coming home to roost as far as for, it’s outcomes. I mean, do you think that’s correlated, and kind of like a natural evolution of, the, Christian mimetic thought process in this society? Or do you think that’s it? It’s somewhat unrelated to it and that would happen regardless of it?

David Gornoski:                01:26:36               I think Christianity predicts its own demise. So I think this is kind of the process that it kind of predicted what happened. it’s a kill the messenger effect. and it’s also because, as I alluded to at the beginning of this discussion that, uh, you know, the church or the institutional representation of Jesus as a community has failed to fully account for what the true implications of imitating Jesus look like. It means nonviolence. It means non-aggression, it means non vengeance. There is a place I think you can make for some type of self-defense. You know, I don’t think it’s against the Christian image. I don’t think it’s against the invitation of the person of Jesus. And if you see a little old lady being accosted by violent assaulters in the middle of the street, and you have the means to defend her, that you come in there and you break it up and you restrain those people.

David Gornoski:                01:27:24               And physically, you know, if you have to take them down and hold them in a lock until somebody can call whatever authorities or whatever to get the situation resolved. Uh, you know, I don’t think that’s immoral on a Christian level. And I don’t think there’s any case for that. But I do think that it’s a moral to initiate violence. Right? So the non-aggression principles, libertarianism gets part of Christianity, right? It just, there’s just more to it than that. It’s not just non-aggression, it’s not inventions. So that vengeance part is something that doesn’t have to be just physical violence. It can also be just, you know, visions for, you know, look, I want Liberty and freedom and free markets, but I got a vote this time cause I got a punish the liberals really bad this time because they’d been hurting me. They’d been destroying my communities, destroying my schools, the straight off.

David Gornoski:                01:28:11               So we got to get that vengeance in there. You know, that vengeance mentality is what perpetuates, this, difficult situation that we’re going to increasingly be in because we’re in a, in a post sacrificial order that still trying to use sacrifice. So, yeah, I mean, again, another thing is, is that when you say Christian theology is on a decline, again, I don’t, don’t really take that seriously because, people just mimic whatever other people say so you know, the,smartest people of the room of the last century in pop culture and in conversations, we’re all saying that they were atheist or agnostic scientific minded people. So that’s the, that religion does your, that still kind of dominates what people think is fashionable to say that you believe. And so people memetically are adopting the language of, Oh, I’m not religious. It’s not because they’ve had some big concrete transformation away from, uh, some of the metaphysical claims of Christianity, but rather they’re just trying to fit in with who they believe a society has presented to them as the smartest people in the room.

David Gornoski:                01:29:15               And those are the scientific clique and obviously, but I noticed that the scientific community is wrong on so many things and will be increasingly exposed to such. The more we can actually start to think scientifically. The only way we’re able to think scientifically in the true sense of the word is with the practice of Christianity. More and more be properly applied to the structures of the knowledge that we have taken for granted as dogmatic, axiomatic truth that underpin our, our sense of meaning in this world. What I am suggesting very clearly is that maybe the foundations of our, of our, uh, esteemed bodies of knowledge like physics and things like that and nutrition, uh, chemistry have a lot of foundational errors that we miss precisely because we don’t understand the power of mimetic group thing and allowing us to take on faith the established, uh, doctrines and paradigms that are,that we’ve inherited from past generations of people who say, this is the law of gravity.

David Gornoski:                01:30:21               This is what it looks like. And this is the standard model and this is quantum physics. And there is no question when you’re a scientist going into the quantum physics field to be able to challenge the very foundations of quantum physics. Rather you inherit the fundamentals of it. This is what Thomas Kuhn, the scientific philosopher talks about philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn and the paradigm shift theory that he developed. The average scientist does not go into the field questioning the very foundations, the presuppositions of the body of knowledge that he is going to be studying. He takes it on a leap of faith and he, he assumes the foundations are correct and then he works on developing the parameters and expanding the boundaries of the research of his inherited paradigm. This is, I hate to say it is called religion because religion means to bind together. What binds the community together in the field of this field of science or that field of science is the inherited dogmas that they’ve inherited from their, people who’ve come before them.

David Gornoski:                01:31:22               Whether those things are right or not, those things are inherited. And the, the, the Kuhnian paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn talks about, which happens when enough anomalies pile up about a rainy paradigm of knowledge that one needs to have a revolutionary moment to shift to a whole new body of, of knowledge to understand the new anomalies that are discrediting the old one. That that process is retarded because of the presence of government, monopolization of funding and, and, research that happens in these fields of knowledge like nutrition, like chemistry, like nuclear engineering, like physics and all these other things that we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know how much, how many secrets of nature are still right under our noses. And we have this bias that we’ll just trust the experts that, you know, I don’t know, I’ll just throw out something like anti-gravity is not real because the experts figured it out.

David Gornoski:                01:32:22               How do you know that? How do you know? They’ve even researched it to the point where they’re looking for the answers that might actually them that they’re asking the questions that might actually present answers right under their nose. We don’t understand how mimetic human beings are even the ones who we perceive to be the smartest in the room of our society. So this idea that Christian metaphysics is, Is on the decline. I think it’s a memetic phenomenon. It’s not really grounded in anything, in anything tangible about, you know, something we’ve inherited that the others didn’t know because we’re more, again, in the real sense of the word religious than ever. We’re religious. Whenever we have people like Elizabeth Warren presented to us on CNN in the backdrop of it at their climate change debate, and it’s a glow, but she’s in front of it all and she’s talking about how she’s going to grab the power of the economy and move it towards clean energy to ever apocalypse.

David Gornoski:                01:33:15               This is sacrificial language. This is the same rainmaking ritual brouhaha that we’ve been seeing since the primordial times of our past, so it’s nothing new. It’s all religion, it’s all, it’s all leaps of faith. It’s all transcendent attempts at trying to create catharsis, but it increasingly fails. It fails to unite. That’s why we can see it for what it is. The problem is of course, that we see scapegoating happening all the time now in our society. But we don’t have an ability to renounce the violence as as a group community. We keep clean to our type of self-justification and our violence and our fervor against our enemy. And the, and the, and the Jesus story is simply renounce your prerogative to initiate violence. Renounce your prerogative to respond in vengeance. Let go of envying your neighbor. Stop believing that the desires that you think are pulling you towards the lifestyles that you think are beautiful.

David Gornoski:                01:34:15               Maybe it’s all an illusion, maybe the grass is not greener on the other side. Christianity gives you the full framework of wisdom and intelligence to be able to solve problems that really matter for your everyday life. And it’s the place where we’ve had the scientific revolution began was because of people that stopped burning witches. You know, Christianity softened, even the, you know, the, the, the scapegoat mechanism to the point where we were able to discover the scientific method because we had time to think of other alternatives other than violence to solve our problems. So when everybody’s thinking, Hey, there’s a disease in the community, let’s burn this, which he caused it and it was like, yeah, that sounds good to me. I think she did and they all my medically at the time believe that’s to be the true case of the cause of the disease.

David Gornoski:                01:35:01               They burned the person, but then there’s a little bit of a feeling that’s not quite as satisfying as it used to be. You know, and then they start to thinking, I don’t know if we’re going to do that next time. And then somebody says, you know what? Maybe there’s another alternative to what causes this disease. Maybe we need to wash our freaking hands a little bit more, when we use the restroom, or maybe we need to look at what that bacteria, what, what does that look right there? Is that up? Is that a culture of bacteria growing on that phase right there? Let’s check a look at that and see what that is. Then you say, well, how do I see that? So you figure out mirrors, you figure it out. you know, pieces of glass that amplify the, the image so you can see it better.

David Gornoski:                01:35:36               And then you start to rip it, repeat that memetically in a positive way, and then you can get scientific development. So Christianity is where scientific revolutions can actually flourish. It’s the ancient sacrificial cyclical pattern of history that we were in before Christianity that retard scientific development. And we’re going to, we’re going to continue to have that same, uh, retardation of scientific knowledge and progress the longer we, uh, rely on trying to increase the power of the transcendent state, which is itself, again, a sacrificial primitive entity that’s masking itself and messianic Christian language and feelings and so forth, um, that we keep relying on to do our research funding, our grant making or university funding or our peer review journal staffing, all that stuff has monopolized. And because it’s monopolized, it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know and it doesn’t have the ability to account for a, in a dissenting perspective and says, Hey, actually, uh, you don’t need to rely on your sacrificial violent, your, your sacrificially funded funding mechanisms to solve this problem of dirty energy. We can actually have pollution free clean energy without having a single government grant, a single grant government subsidy or carbon credit, we can actually solve it if we try this. That’s not allowed in academia because they’re medic and they’re in a hive mind just like most of the small are, but they have more danger because they’re protected by the special, funding that’s given to them by the sacrificial violence of the state.

David Gornoski:                01:37:17               Well, the last thing that it just kind of a slight side note, that I wanted to throw out there as like, do you see, you know, the kind of the explosion on the, on the pop culture landscape of like what someone like Kanye West is doing right now as kind of that indication of the, of the, the continued strength of the concept of the, Christian, memetic quality, or do you see that as a side.. As kind of a, not really in keeping with that tradition?

David Gornoski:                01:37:47               Uh, I think, you know, I think Kanye West can be a good example of maybe a little bit of a Renaissance for a Christian values. It’s always a little tricky. You know, how to untangle this. Again, remember what I was saying at the beginning that you know, the full scope of Christianity is not this mental assent to the metaphysical claims of Christian identity. You know, um, so a lot of times where people say, okay, this person is now Christian. Well what, what does that mean? Do they understand whether the nonviolence of Christianity? Because that’s the one that was primordial. I mean that’s not primarily, that’s where the most essential elements of making a claim. Like I imitate Jesus. When you call yourself a Christian, that means you’re saying, I desire to imitate Jesus as the primary, the medic role model for how I will process reality and make sense of things and act and treat myself and treat my neighbor.

David Gornoski:                01:38:47               That’s what you’re saying. That’s not what Christianity is talked about in the conversation. In most churches, it may, you know, most churches, I’m not indicting churches, I’m just saying this is just where we’re at. You get more of a, you know, to be a Christian means you got to say, Jesus, God got that. They don’t even know who Jesus is just because you say the word Jesus, that’s a word. It’s a symbol and that can, you can impute anything you wanted in that word. So if you’d say, Jesus is God, he was a, he was born in this time. You believe that? Yes. You died on the cross. Do you believe that? Yes. Do you believe he died on the cross because you’re bad. He made bad choices? Yes. Okay. And you know, he raised again. Do you believe that? Yeah, I could see that happening.

David Gornoski:                01:39:31               Okay. Check that. That one. Uh, do you believe he’s going to come again one day and he’ll beat up all the libs or whatever, or whoever your enemy is? Conservatives. If you’re a liberal Christian. Yep, yep, yep. You got that. Okay. Okay. Got that. Do you believe he’s a part of a Trinity? Yep. Got that. Okay. That means you’re a Christian. Now in our tradition, we do this kind of baptism. You good with that? Yes sir. Okay, so we got you. Good. You’re a Christian now. Now don’t masturbate. Don’t you know the little trip, you know, there’s the focus on the personal self becomes, you know, don’t do this. Don’t do that. You know, don’t, uh, you know, don’t be, you know, don’t be too greedy. They love, there’s a lot of virtue in the, in the practical, you know, personal, uh, behavior practices as a Christian tradition.

David Gornoski:                01:40:11               That’s, that’s all good. But that’s not the, you know, I could believe all of that and still not be imitating Jesus. Right? This is obvious. You know, the fruits of the spirit is love, joy, patience, long suffering, goodness, meekness, gentleness against such things. There is no condemnation. Those are the things that manifest whether you’re imitating Jesus or not. So that’s what I’m excited about is, is trying to get people, whether you’re religiously Christian or not, to imitate Jesus, and then you’ll functionally be a Christian. You know? So whether you have your metaphysics worked out, maybe you’re, you don’t understand that because you’re a product of your times, you don’t, you think it’s embarrassing to believe that someone could resurrect from the dead. And why? Because you would say it’s supernatural and you only believe in nature. And I would say, well memetically you don’t even really fully know for sure what nature really is because we are taking by faith the experts who are supposed to be the priestly cast in the scientific world who tell us what nature is.

David Gornoski:                01:41:11               You’ve, you’ve, you’ve taken a leap of faith and accepting that their paradigms that you’ve presented while they have logic to them and so forth are the end all be all what nature is. So I would say, you know, you’re not really making a scientific indictment on Christianity’s claims of having a resurrection in history in a physical sense. Because if you don’t know what nature may be, you don’t know what super nature would look like. Maybe it’s not supernatural after all. Maybe it’s actually something in nature that you don’t even know about. But that’s just the open kind of thing that we need to have a, have an openness to the idea that so much of the received bodies of knowledge that we assume are set in stone may in fact be something that we’ve held onto because of a magnetic group, fake, a blind spot that we’re just not aware of because we don’t think that humans are so driven by imitation rather than we think that humans are just walking brains on sticks.

David Gornoski:                01:42:06               They have autonomous desires and autonomous faculties fully in and of themselves. And, uh, yeah, there’s a little bit of invitation. That’s just what a few dummies do. But not me. I’m not the scientist people or whoever that I aspire to be like. So yeah, Kanye West seems like a good thing. You know, it seems like a good thing. We’ll see what the fruits of that, uh, bear. But, I just, I think the more important thing that people need to do is imitate the true message of Jesus. Right? So I’ll give you an example. It’s very clear. You know, when Jesus comes into Jerusalem and he, sees the, situation at hand in the city that he loves and he says, Oh, Jerusalem, if you had only known the ways of peace, but they’ve been hidden from your eyes, what do they hit him by?

David Gornoski:                01:42:57               They’re hidden. They’re hidden by the self righteous. A blind spot that is a mimetic group thing. They, they can’t see what Jesus is trying to say is their answer. They believe they’re going to memetically respond, to the oppression of the Roman occupiers with violent vengeance against them. And Jesus is telling them, it’s not going to get you what you want. That’s not the kind of kingdom of heaven that I have in mind. And it’s just going to have Rome destroy you utterly. And so he says, if you’d only know the ways of peace, so he doesn’t say, if you’d only know the ways of eating Chick-fil-A instead of, you know, burger King or if you only know the ways of the moral majority and the purity culture and all these things, then you would have the real solution. If it only known the ways of Trinitarian theology doesn’t say anything and you would only know the ways of peace.

David Gornoski:                01:43:49               So if you’re, if you understand literature is a climactic scene, this is what act three is about to begin, you’re going to have an intermission. This is act two is it is concluding, and Jesus say, if you’d only know the ways of peace, but now they’ve been hidden from your eyes. This is when they would do a curtain and they would have an intermission for the final climax. That’s about to happen in the next scene when the passion story begins. So that’s a tell if you know anything about how literature works, and that’s the key issue which is reiterated over and over and over again almost on every sentence with Jesus’s story that the key issue about his kingdom is that it’s a political reorientation of how humans are going to function. He’s going to strip us of our ability to find meaning in order and hierarchy based on sacrificial violence being initiated.

David Gornoski:                01:44:38               He’s going to remove that. He’s going to, he’s not going to move it overnight. That’s why the church and everybody still sacrificially kills people through history and all these things. It’s not like some kind of magic bullet. This is not an infomercial. This is a process is like a yeast working itself in a low, which is what humanity is experiencing right now. That he’s going to strip us of our ability to be ignorant to the sacred violence that we do. He’s going to allow us to see that the victims that we select as our enemies are not really that, uh, you know, guilty of all the problems that we aspire to throw onto them. And then he’s going to deprive us of the unifying effect of those victims that at that time in history had been the unifying effect that bound communities together and kept them from being extinguished by, runaway violence.

David Gornoski:                01:45:30               And so he’s going to strip that sacred violence of its sacredness. He’s going to reorient our desires towards love and mercy, not sacrifice. That’s why he says my father desires mercy, not sacrifice. He’s going to strip us of our ability to believe that we are the unique originators of our desires. That’s why he says, imitate me, be like me. And then, Oh, by the way, everything I do as an invitation to as an invitation of my father and having who we all have as our father. And he’s also an invitation of all the prophets that had come before me who were also critiquing the domain of the sacred violence that he’s exposing. So he’s saying the most unique man in history is saying everything I do is invitation. And so everything you should do is imitating my invitation. And so he’s trying to get you to see then the memetic nature.

David Gornoski:                01:46:19               That is what’s behind so much of what we do already. Uh, and he’s, he’s unveiling our desires. He’s done veiling our, our reciprocity of goodness. How to, how to, how to set a contagious, um, wildfire of positive imitation. Because memetic desire is not always evil. It’s meant to be good. It’s how we learn. It’s how we transmit ideas. It’s how we create technologies. It’s how we love and forgive each other. Uh, it’s that reciprocity of goodness and respect and confidence that he’s trying to instill in those who imitate him by reading his story and learning about his life. By the way, other people imitate it in their own time. That’s his counterculture and it’s happening. It’s going to continue to destroy our ability to have buying. We will not be bound together anymore. You see the flag? It doesn’t even unite us at football games and more football games are a vestige of the Colosseum rituals of ancient times where you come together and you watch simulated warfare in the ancient world.

David Gornoski:                01:47:22               Would in Jesus’s time, they would kill people. They would tear people’s chests and entrails apart and people would war with love and adoration for the, for the ecstasy of the sacrificial violence being done. It gives the gladiators or slaves or what have you. today we do football or things like that, but we simulate the violence with nice cushions because we’re concerned about our, our, you know, modern vestige of a gladiator. We’re concerned about them getting a concussion. I can assure you in Jesus’ time in the Roman empire, no one was concerned about a gladiator getting a fricking concussion during their spectacle. They did not have a concern for their victims of sacrifice. Uh, they were also not concerned with how their gladiators treated their spouses or girlfriends like has been a scandal in the NFL as well, where there’s these stories of football players having, domestic violence issues and how that takes the glory of the game.

David Gornoski:                01:48:17               So we are thoroughly Christianized in this sense, not that we’re not ready. We’re like half Christian. We’re thoroughly within the, the fishbowl of Christianity, but we’re, we’re only half Christian in the sense that we’re aware of victimization and we’re aware of the brutality of violence and more eight more earlier times in our recent history, but we don’t want to fully recognize it and how it affects than what we do today. So we want to be able to believe that when we say lock them up and put someone away for being a drug dealer, that we’re justifying that violence. It has nothing to do with the same kind of sacred violence that we did in ancient times. Or we would stone people for being a witch doctor. We don’t want to connect that at all. We don’t, we don’t want to see that as the continuation of the same, mythic lie, that justified, that kind of stuff.

David Gornoski:                01:49:05               We don’t want to see that. Even those who go to Christian, every Christian Church, every Sunday have a hard time seeing that. But, but nevertheless, Christianity was still having the biggest impact of any other force in the world. It is fully in the driver’s seat of history. A political correctness will continue to be a kind of, a desperate and cheap imitation of the real thing. And in what we have to do is that those who want to defend order and the rule of law and, beauty and prosperity and capital and, innovation and love and, and having our neighborhoods cleaned up. We have to say this stuff. We have to talk about the hidden victims of our society. And the best way to do that is to tell their stories because that’s how Jesus, his story destroyed so much of the sacred violence that has been, it has destroyed that we’ve inherited the results of in the modern world.

David Gornoski:                01:50:09               It is the fact that people read the story of a wrongly accused person, persecuted by his whole community. One week they adored him because he was the one elected for the mandate, so to speak, by the crowd, and the next week they wanted to destroy him and kill him and they moved like a mob. It wasn’t the domain of the gods that demanded that Jesus die. It was the domain of humans. It was the fomain of us. It was a domain of his own friends who betrayed him, even though they hang out with her for the last three years, they sold them out when the crowd said, Hey, do you know this guy? And he said, I have no idea who this guy is. Even Peter said that that’s representative of the genetic power that we’re still slow to wake up to today, but it’s right in front of our eyes.

David Gornoski:                01:50:54               In that text. And that’s why,, that story of Jesus wrongful persecution and the fact that pilate inherits it says in the book of Luke are reconciled, uh, by the King of the Jews or their governor or of the Roman interests in that region are reconciled through their common persecution of Jesus. That story, deconstructs the mythological mythmaking attempts that, that we still try to resurrect today, it deconstructs us and allows us to see it for what it is and it allows us to see that God, or if you’re scared of that word, God put the word highest social ordering principle. The highest social ordering principle stands on the side of the wrongly accused one and condemns the actions of the many. So God stands on the side of the misfit. He stands on the side of the ostracized one. He stands on the side of each person who has to receive the, violence and exclusion.

David Gornoski:                01:51:56               That is the spirit of collectivism in the crowd. He stands on that side and he reorients all of history from henceforth to be one in which the person becomes paramount, not the collective in which human dignity and what we call human rights become paramount. Not, uh, the, the idea that might makes. Right. And that’s why all of our attempts at trying to continue the old order will continue to fail because Jesus in effect or the Christian story has filed down the teeth of the state. So the state is still brutal. It’s still violent, it’s still disgusting. And what we are doing and as a part of it is still wrong, but it’s just not violent enough to have to, to create any of the effects of the ancient world. You know, we, we put, we put people who do, you know, who sell a drug, we put them in jail with, you know, some AC and some food and three square meals and they can get a degree.

David Gornoski:                01:52:50               It’s not violent enough. You know, if you wanted to go that way, you’d have to like, you know, publicly torture people in the public square who sell drugs. We’re never going to do that. I don’t think, you know, I think it’s awful, but what I’m saying is that’s what the ancient world would do for the equivalent kind of targets of, of the community’s wrath that we’re trying to target with the drug war and so on. You’d have to have utter brutality. And because of Christianity, softening our appetite for that level of brutality, the kind of violence that we still employ to coerce people to do what we want them to do is not efficacious enough to produce the fruit that we’re supposed to produce with that, which is to deter people from using drugs or selling drugs or whatever other vice that we have to use. Government power to police.

David Gornoski:                01:53:39               Well, I think that’s actually a great place to end this, this podcast on. I mean, I can’t tell you how much I really enjoyed the conversation. I’m just absolutely fascinated by this as I’ve started to fall deeply down this rabbit hole. I’d love to have you back on as I kind of explore this mimetic theory and how it applies to the different places that this podcast goes. How can people consume your content and, and get ahold of you.

David Gornoski:                01:54:10               You can email me David@aneighborschoice.com. That’s David@ aneighborschoice.com. My website is aneighborschoice.com. I don’t actively put new content on there. It’s more of like a teaching page, like a landing page where you can learn a few principles for practical purposes. And it, there’s going to be more work to put all of my work together to that hub. Eventually. I just have way too many projects go over at this time to get that properly looked at fully. But I do my radio program, “A neighbor’s choice” I do that each night. Mondays through Thursdays on WFLA Orlando, which is the top, iHeart media radio station in that Orlando Metro market. You can listen online by joining my Facebook. If you type in David Gornoski ask you to join me on there. I post a video live streams there. We can follow along the work that we do.

David Gornoski:                01:55:11               And then I do a podcast called “Things Hidden”, which is a reference to Jesus’ statement about revealing things he has since the foundation of the world and that is on Apple, iTunes and all the other podcast platforms of significance…”Things Hidden” uh, by David Gornoski. You can subscribe to that. I appreciate cause I just started that and I’ve just, it’s just in its early stages. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel. David Gornoski and I post some of my radio episodes and podcasts on. There are also posts..So my YouTube exclusive interviews with folks like Jordan Peterson. I interviewed him the day his book came out, “12 rules for life” in person together in New York city. Had a great discussion with him there. David Bentley Hart, the noted theologian new Testament translator. Had a great discussion with him and Peter Schiff and Ron Paul and Walter Williams and scientists and physicists and… We just go everywhere cause we’re having fun with this. Once you have the right toolkit, once you understand how the patterns of human error work and how to be policing yourself constantly and being very nimble in that way of using the memetic framework, it allows you to take that full tool kit and go off to the races in variety of different fields of interest. So, uh, been a pleasure talking to you.

David Gornoski:                01:56:39               Yeah. And as far as for getting that tool kit, just real quick, what books would you recommend, um, for people to start reading to kind of get an introductory, level of understanding of mimetic theory?

David Gornoski:                01:56:53               Well, the way I’ve framed it, you know, it was not just within mimetic theory, so I’m using the mememtic theory as like a, as a touch point to get you started. So I’m pulling from media, ecology and economics, my own insights that I’m trying to pull all this together. But for memetic theory specifically, because it’s not, I say that just to saying when you read some of his Gerard’s work, you know, it’s not going to have the full applications of what I’ve spelled out. It’s been my own work that’s kind of extended it to certain areas and he didn’t specifically address as much, but I would recommend uh, his book, “I See Satan fall like lightning” uh, which is I believe $17 on Amazon and it’s about 180 pages or so, 200 pages. And it’s a good book. It’s written in a very kind of clunky kind of technical way, but I would just stay with it as the first book I read of him and I would just read it slowly and digest it.

David Gornoski:                01:57:53               And if you have a question you can email me David@aneighborschoice.com you can also join my community on Facebook where we have a lot of fellow travelers who are also versed in the memetic theory and they give you a lot of help and guidance. But once you get it, it’s the biggest, you know, game changer for understanding a lot of the processes. We’ve only, I’ve been very, we’ve covered a lot as a two hour conversation. This is like a feature length movie of discussion, and I haven’t even scratched the surface about the implications of how it helps you understand everything that’s going on. I know it sounds too good to be true because we want to believe that specialist knowledge and those things are important. But it’s true that you can see these patterns come alive when you understand how essential, uh, the gospel is an understanding. Everything in our headlines today is, it helps you understand why all the top superhero movies all deal with self-sacrifice.