Russell Brand
Appearances
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
If there is a Jesus, you're not Jesus. You are not at the center and neither is anybody else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Right, right. Some time ago, you said we were entering this era of new kings. I don't know when you started saying it, but you said it to me about a year ago. New kings, you said, and I clocked it and thought it was interesting. And now we're sort of seeing how that's playing out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
To let you know that the ego is still in here, I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ, but I'm going to give it as best a shot as I can give at being poor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The boundaries are shifting, kind of a cybernetic gerrymandering as the space moves beyond geography and into something more conceptual yet actual in so much as it can be administrated and it can be controlled. Now, to your point about spontaneity, I wonder if it's in any way ultimately distinct from the sort of Socratic idea that the spoken word had a distinct authenticity from the written word.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
No, not necessarily continually. Now, you remember about 500,000 words ago, 10 minutes ago, at the beginning of our conversation, we both speak relatively quickly. I mentioned that an ever-present, omnipresent God, if God is the absolute creator, atemporal, aspatial, outside of the limitations of space and time, it struck me the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Other days I was having one of these kind of transcendent experiences that I've been having since becoming Christian, that God would be present in every moment and discernible in every interaction, that there would indeed be narrativizable lessons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
To divine. Where is it? Where is the divine? Where is God? Absolutely. Divine is a transitive verb. rather than as a description of sublime. And what I... So, to your point about how... Now, you said that thing about new sovereigns ages ago, and I said ages ago, after reading Martin Goury's book, The Revolt of the Public, that there was an inevitability...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The independent media and the way that it, you know, Martin Gore, he saw this much earlier than any of us. He saw like, I think he saw like, whoa, Napster, what that's done to the record industry. How's that going to play out? Wait a second.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And then he saw like, you know, Arab Spring, Occupy Movement, Brexit, Trump, like watching how institutions are unable to adjust to the new thermals and the new contours that emerge with this Southern impactful and incursive instantaneous communication.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I said, as an occupant of new media spaces like yourself, how long is it before inevitably the independent media and a new form of independent politics coalesce, align and emerge? Mm-hmm. We're seeing it now, that it will become so porous as to be without distinction. And it seems now that what you want- What distinction are you referring to there exactly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Media is this category, politics is this category. Oh yeah, I see, I see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Let's start with that. It feels like something absolute has been encountered which has ameliorated, mitigated, neutralized, and somehow compounded and infused something that was always latent and yet corroming within me, the self, the self as the absolute. I want this. Do what thou will shall be the whole of the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And the problem with the new age, the problem with I'll have a little bit of Buddhism and I'll have a little bit of Sufism and I'll read a bit of Foucault and I'll conjure up my own little pantheon. In fact, it was you that said it to me, that if God is everything, God is everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
anything and I encountered that more empirically when returning to a kind of new age festival and I thought what is this feeling that I'm having here having you know since coming a Christ in a new age festival and I don't you know I still got the other day it is adorned permanently about my body as a reminder and what it felt like is it's false idolatry a false idolatry is predicated on a polarity between the self and the idol Christ replaces the self
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
you die on the cross with him it's the self that has to go there is that what self exactly how do you conceptualize yourself that has to go the rustleness the observer the witness the rustleness by default inadvertently i'm always in the service of the centrifugal force around which
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
urges, projections, reflections, the intellect, the memory, they all, like you once said, when talking about like the word witch might have a bunch of associated words like cat and poultry and all that. I got Russell and Russell's memories and projections. I got this sort of loose sense of a continuum of self.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Yes, it's sent before he was right. And we nearly touched on this before because WBH was right. The centre cannot hold. And that's what we're experiencing with the emergence of the Hydra. The sovereign is unfolding. The seed is cracking open. The wheat is being born. It's being born out now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The thing is before, with the narcissism, me being a devotee of the other culture, a devotee of the false idolatry, I worshipped self. Now at first it felt like the pilgrimage was very meekly undertaken, for I was not a robust child athlete, nor was I a high school heart-throb. I was sort of a broken and wounded little trickster in the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And when I became empowered at puberty and attractive and potent and then famous, and it all was, I felt, evolving or growing, but one of my teachers would say inflating. It was inflating.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Like, I, you know, it's difficult if you've felt pretty worthless your whole life and all of a sudden there's a culture queuing up to give you sort of accolades and pat you on the back and there's a sort of an endless cortege of fellatio suddenly available. It's difficult not to think that you might not be rather magnificent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, the reason I like, as a sort of a counterweight to the feelings of inferiority, I would have been resistant. I always knew something about Jesus. I knew something about Jesus. But my odd contemporary translation of that was, I want to be him. I want to be the saviour. I want to be in direct commune with God. I want to lead. I want to be empowered. And then when...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
When the desolation came, the desolation and despair, when the grail came again, not like the adolescent despair, when you know you've got a whole life and a bunch of hormones about to hit you and elevate you, middle-aged desolation and decimation, desecration, despair, despondency. When that incursion came, when those arrows landed...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
There was a clarification took place amidst the catastrophic white noise and haze was not just the cross, but the solitary figure, fully man, fully God, to whom we must bow down. Now, they do all they can in the United Kingdom to... make astringent, anodyne and banal the figure of Christ.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The TV shows, the ceremonies and sermons themselves, with some notable exceptions, I have some brilliant English Christian teachers, J. John, Father Dave, although he's just become a bishop and he's certainly not a Catholic minister, Father Julian at Brompton. Loads of people out of the UK, so I'm not being dismissive in the widest sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I'm just saying sort of culturally the way that Christianity is presented is somewhat mundane. And then over in this country, the United States, where we are now, sometimes they can give it so much carnival that it can seem too sequined, glistening and ridiculous. But somewhere within all of us is that He's there. He is there for that was His gift.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
He died that we may know eternal life and we may be redeemed of our sins and He bequeathed upon us the Holy Spirit. Now, What I felt was, again, it wasn't sort of flashbang wallop. The moment of the baptism was powerful. The moment of sort of this slowly, the slowly separating fugue. And as I say, the clarification and emergence of the face of Christ was very real.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And I knew what the compromise was. If there is a Jesus... You're not Jesus. You are not Jesus. You are not at the centre and neither is anybody else. He is firstborn among the dead and the rest of us, we're all lined up before the throne as sinners.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The people that have tried to destroy me, the people that hate me, the people that I've wronged and the people I've sinned against, all of us, just one congregation before him. My cherished and prized individuality, sometimes that cast me so low, worthless, disgusting, worse than everybody else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
there's sometimes self-reification and self-deification i am so spectacular i am so marvelous all of it now just sort of eased into i am as he made me i am as he would have me now i don't know that i might know you know it'll be for someone as as you say open peripatetic intellectually and capricious as i have sometimes been perhaps it would seem audacious to claim that i belong to him but i surrender to you as my lord and savior jesus christ i serve you yeah well something
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
you want to do with care, that's for sure. So surely, surely. But to let you know that the ego is still in here, I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ, but I'm going to give as best a shot as I can give at being poor. I'll come down from Jesus. But only so far. Oh, no, sorry, Lord. Sorry, Lord. Paul's just a man like us. Paul's just a man like us. Acts is full of men like us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Ephesians, written by a man like us. Galatians, a man like us. And now, amidst these tectonic shifts and new and emerging kings and new paradigms and new language, here he is, Christ. Okay, so let's come and have a drink, please, because that was real life. as well. I ran with it because spontaneous. Spontaneous. Don't stop. Don't stop filming.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
How's this Christianity thing working out for you? It's a powerful transforming agent. It's beautiful to moment to moment know that if he is the creator of all things, then his DNA is present in every moment, in every moment. The continual renewal of the mind that it talks of in Romans seems comparable at least to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
ideologies that I'm somewhat more familiar with, corralled together loosely under the term new age, stay continually present in the moment, die unto yourself, allow yourself to die as it says in Galatians, be born again moment to moment. Now as we enter this period of wild and giddy flux, Jordan, it seems that a route to eternity is a valuable escape hatch to have identified.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And obviously is partnered by the abortive sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, which precedes, preempts, and acts as a prologue to the ultimate sacrifice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Also, faith. Faith demands of us that even though materially and actually you're in a moment where there's a knife above your child, you are... Okay, then God, I mean, it just doesn't look good from where I am, but I know that my perspective is just a set of interlocutors of fragmented desires that transubstantiation is being taken anyway.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
You are taking the body, and the word you used was possessed. By the false idols, by the desires continually, the transubstantiation of desire is continually taking place. I am occupied. I am occupied by desire. I locate myself here in this desire. My polarity is achieved by my desire. And inverted commas, my, because who is the my if the false idol has now occupied me?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I am its parasite, so we have no choice. The only antidote, the only salve is Him. He is the only salvation. It's only by dying on the cross with Him that I can neutralize it, because otherwise I will be possessed again. Now, elsewhere in that, you talked about something that I picked up while reading that book you gave me, told me to read, Profane and the Sacred.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
That's Iliad. The homogeneity, that you're not even living in a morass of neutralized space, but arbitrarily scattered fragments.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And those desires that you just talked about, those desires of which you become the temporary host, you become puppeted by and parasited by if you don't have within you the fortitude that as just a sort of a set of urges and memories and projections without their ideal, without the supreme ideal as maximum power, maximum sacrifice, maximum power, maximum service, not maximum power, maximum fulfillment of desire.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Right. Yeah, that is the narcissistic paradigm
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
See, part of the reason- But only by overcoming self, Jordan, because the self is no longer the totem at the center of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Because it's atemporal, though. It's atemporal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So how it feels... I'm reading Genesis right now. Have you read it? Have you done a course on it? And even when you're reading about Sodom and Lot and reading about a culture of... gang rape that precedes the storm of fire it feels like yeah i'm reading that then i'm like you know sort of scrolling on x and looking at the world and the hills are an inferno
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And will it tell us, Jordan, if our culture is antithetical to that and organized around the exact opposite principle, that the self is the apex, that the family isn't real, that the nation isn't... I mean, I understand post-structuralism in a way, and I understand the arbitrary and I understand the nature, of those arguments. But in the same way that C.S.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Lewis observed that something that is foreclosed against and forbidden continually in Scripture, usury and debt-based culture, has become the economic foundation of the West. That something that is scripturally forbidden becomes essential is an indication that Paul and John and our Lord, I'm not talking about the Beatles, I'm talking about the New Testament, were all right
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
when they said, this is the dominion of the evil one, that you fight not against flesh and blood. And I'm interested in what you think about this occultist component, because you are a genius in clinical psychology and using that set of tools to dissect something, which I think is part of the mysterium tremendum, and therefore...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
not subject to that particular analytic, not ultimately, not ultimately. These are secondary, it's a secondary discourse.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
If scripture is the absolute, if this is good, if this is the word of God, if this is him, then that which flows out of it, even if we do take the branch of Jung and afford ourselves the ongoing mystery, we are acknowledging the continuing, the unknowable, supernatural, preternatural, aspatial, atemporal component of all this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So I wonder, because I don't think we are going to be able to get... I feel that what has been happening for the last, I don't know if it was 20 years, I don't know if it was the last 50 years, I don't know if it's beyond time, but certainly it seemed to me it was a result of materialism, rationalism and individualism and the natural conclusion that flows forth from materialism is that all that is real is the self and what you just described there, that you may as well just have a mosaic of desires...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
lining up chronologically through life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Elon Musk, in a matter of posts, can disrupt, elevate new potential kings, desiccate them and remove them in a matter of moments.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
It's interesting. When we pursue it rationally, of course it makes sense because... Elsewise, in some ways, what would be the point? Like, I can empirically say that having tried to live a life at times that was motivated by self-service, like, well, why not take loads of drugs? Oh, yeah, that's what happens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Well, why not just have sex with everyone who's around you, who wants to have sex with you? Why not do that? Oh, right. Oh, I see. That's what happens. So, in a sense, those prohibitions, those edicts, those sanctions were, in a sense, compassionate at the point of origin. But the mistake... What do you mean, I don't follow that exactly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
You can do what you want, but if you do do it, you'll be unhappy, rather than it being, I'm going to kill you if you have sex with loads and loads of women. Right, right, right. Go have sex with loads and loads of women... And find out for yourself. See how you get on. Told you. Yeah, right. Told you that that won't work for you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And Britain is beset with a rape gang crisis that appears to be being handled in an unusual way bureaucratically. The pillars and institutions are quaking and shaking too much. intersection, inappropriateness section between the judiciary, the media, and the government. Not enough proper coordination and interconnection and communication between those same institutions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Yes, exactly. But what we have to do is actually, Jordan, is not pursue it, I believe, not entirely down the lines of rationalism, i.e., if you sacrifice this now, things will be better in the future, if you are cooperative with your peers. Because in a sense, that's no different than the kind of evolutionary biology that comes out of Pinker and your man Dawkins and all of the atheists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Oh, we can rationally, even love, we can describe love. No. There is something that is beyond reason. There is something that is beyond our understanding, beyond our ken. Now, first we must enter into an alternative state. That state is belief. Like me, I'm pretty clever. So to sort of like go...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
All right, so God came to earth in human form, lived a life as a normal person with genitals and fingernails and farts and picked stuff out his teeth. Then he died because somehow there had to be absolution for sin. Somehow, some, I can't, even when I try to put it in rational language, some frequency had to be augured, some template, some portal, some opening, some new milieu.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Something had to be done. A transition had to be achieved. I can't rationally unpack it. But when through despair, that set of that mosaic of traits and recollections and urges that I call self, when it is... annihilated and when it implodes there, when that becomes inutile, who is there amidst the archetypal morass and miasma? Is there some form, some figure?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, if I believe in him, if I go, Jesus Christ, you are my king and my Lord and my savior, something happens. So
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I believe we have to go beyond, like, even though I have personally experienced, if all you do is narcissistically pursue pleasure and power and the privileges of the false cathedral of the evil one that we now have normalized and regard to be ordinary life, fame, celebrity, materialism, rationalism, commodification, commerce, all of that. When I'm
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
broken out of it by an almighty slap from the Heavenly Father. I don't re-enter into it with the kind of idea that, oh, this will be good for me, and this will pay dividends one day. It's like, I live only in you. Allow me to become a living sacrifice, continually renew my mind, live in me, my Heavenly Father.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, I will change, and I will become absolutely what He wants me to become, but it isn't in order that I, because if it is absolutely in the moment, it is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Because I suppose you want... but what you don't want is conspiracy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
You described how on the observable plane, the smallest material components of reality and the largest expanse conceivable of time, the origin of time as we might understand it, are enshrined in an unknowable, ineffable mystery.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Perhaps in our own fractal reality, in my little personal cosmos with its own hierophanies, I see I did read that book, I have encountered in various ways those edge lands. Now, any genius, whether it's in a scientific discipline, a sport, or arts, are trying to find that edge.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And in so doing, occasionally in their renderings, we'll come up with some concert, landscape, portrait or rhyme that is indicative of the perfection that underlies observable reality, that there is an absolute. Now me, while...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
In relationship, if the sort of culture is telling you, you know, become, don't be in this ordinary world of Grey's Essex with its sort of endless tedium and its sort of trash glamour and its post-proletariat denim bleed into nothing. Aspire you to the upper echelons, to the great Vatican now in flames. There you will find salvation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But we know what prophets and what idols speak from those hills now incandescent. And when you get there, and if you have experienced all that stuff, if you sort of sleep around, like most people, probably Jordan, that sort of like live a lot, I don't know about most people, some people may be like, they're like, you know, I live a pretty chaste life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But, you know, as we have discussed before, and as you've touched upon on innumerable occasions, well, have you ever been offered? Did you receive an offer to the banquet? Do you know what it's like? Have you been presented with any temptation to resist? Have you known that temptation? And when you are, it is the false defibrillation of his kingdom.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
You can achieve something there in the false light, in the false light of the enlightenment that built out that new template where man sits at the apex. Lucifer himself, if the original sin of disobedience is knowledge apart from him or them, depending on how you see it,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Lucifer is cast out and falls from heaven like lightning precisely because he sees himself as a competitor, opponent, and alternative to the divine. Now, I believe that is the archetype of selfishness. That's where it is. It's germ and germination.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Why not? But, like, you know, the reason that I spoke about that, the despair as being the rupture... as being the point of epiphany is because I suppose I've been taken to the very edge of it. I'm not claiming this is objective or absolute. I'm claiming precisely the opposite. It's entirely subjective, of course.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But I went as far as I could go, not only with the Hedonism and the Epicureanism, but also with the, oh, look, you've got a family now and a dog and a thatched cottage and you live by the river. And I've sort of tried all of it. And then somehow lurking in the past, those two serpents that I had adored, my own personal Baal and Moloch, fame and sex turned.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
When I was trying to live, even within the purview of the culture, a somewhat truthful and honest life. Hey, this pandemic don't seem right. They're not telling us the truth about the origins of this. Well, I don't think you can trust these people. What's the relationship between the media and these organizations? And liberalism itself is a kind of godless ideology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
This was when those two serpents turned. Now, I already felt that I was kind of an awoken and awakened person. I kind of felt like I was kind of clever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
had not long but held a festival where rather brilliant people like vandana shiva and wim hof and cali means you know brilliant people had come turned up and i had marched about the grounds holding a staff chant in ragnarok with a bunch of pagans down there by some river the river in fact that serves as a border between wales the celtic wilds and england the stable center
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And not long after that, everything fell apart and I was exposed to so much sin. And sin, I think, here's a good near acronym, in, in self, the stands for self, self, the sibilant serpent self, in self. Now, because my background is in addiction and chemical dependency and behavioral dependency, I can see that what you do is, as well as that sort of mosaic that we keep referencing to of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
of a kind of black mass of transubstantiation placing desire where the center should be, no wonder it cannot hold. But whilst as a kind of a cardinal of that dark worship, while considering myself to be awakened, of course, because, you know, you have to normalize these things, you have to deify these, no one's going around macabrely claiming... I am evil.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. It's either banal. It's either the banality of evil or the celebration of evil or the invisibility of evil because it's so immersive and absolute and so far-reaching. So my identity fell apart. My identity fell apart peculiarly at the exact same... Because it's like Russell Brand is not a famous womanizer. Russell Brand is a famous rapist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
That's what Russell... What? ! What? Look at him standing on stage making these jokes. What? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Being able to direct people's will is not the same as overcoming their will or ignoring their will or coercing them. It's precisely the opposite. Having the ability to direct people's will or charm or seduce or enchant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
These are all sort of shamanic things. magical kind of qualities. But yes, I now see where they lead. Thank you for the lesson, Lord. I now see where they lead. And I also now know absolutely, and look at what's happening in my country right now, falling apart with a kind of an extraordinary subterranean, potentially barbarian culture of gang rape. I mean, what's going on?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
It is like Old Testament stuff. So my despair came when what I had built, what I had made for myself, my false idol, not, you know, like over my life, I've carved this thing, this image of Russell and look at it. It can be destroyed. It can be destroyed in a half hour.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I can, but. but it's in the despair holds the key because I believe that was the communion and the communication that simultaneous with that, like while, you know, people were, you know, like friends and enemies were calling me and you among the friends, like, you know, let's say like, God, are you okay? This is crazy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
What was also happening is we were taking our son who was 12 weeks old to have his body carved almost in half, his heart taken out of his body. That was happening at the same time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So it was like, well, for all of the sturm and drang and the meteorological operatics of this conjured and concocted storm, which no doubt I provided the raw material for by being the poster boy of liberal hedonism, it's sort of the Lord showed me this is meaningless. This is meaningless. And I'll show you it's meaningless. Look.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
look what's actually happening right now look at your son look at the rain falling on his gentle face as you push the pram to great ormond street look at his tiny smile look at the breast milk coming through his mother's t-shirt because she can't feed him because he has surgery in a few hours so you tell me what's real what did it do for you where did it get you what does it mean
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And there he is, Jesus Christ. And there he isn't, Russell Brand. What good did he do you for all of your worship, for all of your effort, for all of the poetry, the prose, the posturing, the preening and primping? Where did it lead you? Nothingness, welcome to the annihilation. What you learn in crisis is true anyway.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
It's true anyway, but you just ignored it with all of the ornamentation and pageantry. you are able to distract yourself from it so marvelously. So, psychologically, what happens is a massive rupture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And you realize also, by the way, because you're in Great Ormond Street when the most important thing in your life is happening to you, that your son is undergoing surgery and he might not survive the surgery. So is everyone else's kid. So is everyone else's kid. Who do you think you are? Because when it came in the scan, you know, at 26 weeks prior to his birth, you know,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I was like, I'm not having that, Laura. I'm not having that. I'm not having some kid with tubes up his nose and wires. I'm not going to Great Ormond Street. But when you get to Great Ormond Street through surrender, who are you saying? Oh my God, something says, something says, who are you?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
to not go to great ormond street who are you who do you think you are you're not who you think you are you're not who you thought you were and the trials and the tests are not punishments but lessons as he strips it all away and he takes it away from you and he shows you who you are really and what you are here to do really so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
What it's like psychologically to experience Heavenism is it's a slow burn of knowing that it was always there when you're watching TV as a kid and Christianity is tedious, when you're singing, the wise man built his house upon the rock.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I've missed the fundamental lesson, the literal foundational lesson of that, that he's there all the time when you're there in sort of five-star hotel rooms and they're asleep on the bed now and you're looking out the window. pondering and lonely and empty, the sort of hollowness of it. It's there or he's there all the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
The threads are always there in every moment, in every moment, because in the end, like it says in your man Eliade there, Look, it's not even just a homogeneous, without the same, if you live entirely in the profane, you will sanctify profanity and the culture will sanctify profanity and a priest class will emerge in order to sanctify the profane and to set up false idols.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But it's not even just a homogeneous, endless space. It's worse than that. It's endless, chaotic fragmentation with order imposed on top of it. It's diabolical and dark and berserk. It's havoc and hell.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Maybe that's where then post-structuralists and Foucault and whatnot are right, because in that, the presupposition is that it's not free will and self-sacrifice, it's the imposition of order under the continual threat of violence that creates a society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
I'm going to do it now. Seek thee first the kingdom of God. Seek thee first the kingdom of God. And I'm thinking, I'm in a conversation right now with Jordan Peterson, and how do I orient myself in this moment, in this situation? Now, it feels like amidst the flux that we've earlier addressed, or at least alluded to,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
it appears that much of what you came to represent as you emerged in public life has proven to be true. It's not like the culture has just shifted. We aren't going to see so many pronouns in the bios. We're not going to see an escalation in gender-approving surgery. Hopefully that won't be concomitant with a lack of compassion for people, some people that are different and do identify differently.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
indeed one of the things i'm most hopeful about jordan is that with the transitions of power that are taking place and the way that it appears to be bleeding or at least influencing outside of its political jurisdiction like we're seeing like how american power and in particular the influence of elon musk which is a truly global power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And now when I said globalism like 18 months ago, I meant something different to what I might mean when I say globalism now, because it appears that Elon Musk in a matter of posts can disrupt, elevate new potential kings, desiccate them and remove them in a matter of moments. It's interesting to see how the old world will reorder itself on the basis of what's emergent now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
And the reason that I feel that Christianity is so significant is because it's significant with regards to every single issue. But now that we don't have as we did with the previous project, an attempt to completely control ideological life through politics. We're not going to be altering language wildly and radically. We're not at war with nature and old taxonomies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
We're not seeking to annihilate the principle of God that we may lay claim to his kingdom. I wonder how these new forms of government may evolve and unfold. And I wonder how these new forms of nationalism might develop.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Yes, yes, yes, yes. The vicissitude. Now, I'm assuming that your experience as a clinical psychologist must be primarily interpersonal, although you will ultimately be dealing with large data sets.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But the reason I'm fascinated that you'd bring up play so early in our conversation is because when precisely looking at the posts of Elon Musk and Trump, Trump saying, you know, make Canada the 51st state. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
or we're going to reach all the way down to Panama, or we're having Greenland, or Elon Musk's sort of puckish pugnaciousness in dealing with his detractors on his own platform doesn't have that kind of haughtiness and piety that we remember, that kind of Pharisee-like certainty of the materialist, rationalist, neoliberal oligarchs who appear now to be being displaced.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
This play, though, I wonder, Jordan, and this is not an assertion I'm making with regard to the previous listed individuals, I know our audience when it comes to Trump and Musk and stuff, but there isn't there mischief and play in the demonic also?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, the reason I like play, one, I'm a comedian, one, I enjoy liminal spaces and I enjoy the uncertainty that's a prerequisite of play, the true spirit of pioneering discovery that is encompassed within play. And I enjoy, actually, in fact, perhaps much of the Trump phenomena was this politician isn't talking like other politicians. Way back 2015 with Hillary Clinton, because you'd be in jail.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
That moment, it's like, people don't say that. Up against the sort of school mom sort of... the sort of bluster and haughtiness of, you cunts! You know, sort of the English have bequeathed to the world abundantly that kind of sort of Victorian certainty, glance thee not at the piano leg, in case you feel a tumescent stirring in the loins. Total lack of joy in play.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, isn't it interesting to see that tool of play wielded now by the truly powerful, by Trump and Musk, It'll be interesting because, you know, their detractors continue. Like, you know, you might see a late night talk show host saying, see, I told you, I told you they're going to take over Canada. What's Elon Musk doing meddling in British politics?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But regardless of the, again, as a Christian, regardless of the, you know, Trump's not God, Musk's not God. They're all human beings that are going to come and go. And perhaps I've been thinking this about Elon Musk somewhat lately. Yeah. Is there a point where order of magnitude alters essence, i.e., is not Musk just a reiteration of Murdoch?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Because, you know, Tony Blair used to kowtow, bend the knee, go on holiday to ensure that Murdoch would support his new labor movement. It was understood that Thatcher required Murdoch. It was understood that if Murdoch unleashed an ocean of ink against an opposition party, the government would remain in power.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Now, Murdoch, he still has some power across the anglophonic world, and I don't know what Murdoch's power is like now. But what I know is that Elon Musk is like a version of a media magnate, at least when it comes to the social media aspect of his vast enterprises.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
But when it becomes not a 20-minute perusal of some rag, but an ever-present mirror reflecting back an ongoing conversation, the ability to maneuver and censor that, as well as the manner in which he's conducting that conversation, again, not the sort of what would appear to be, and perhaps I'm being naive, the economically-led kind of, I imagine, Dow Jones-watching sort of traditional entrenched mentality of Digger, for that was the nickname, wasn't it, of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
Murdoch, you now see this sort of, well, perhaps again it's the technology that leads, because the technology now, diffuse cybernetics, instant instantaneous systems taking place in the present, because Because our systems for understanding God were mechanical in the industrial age. They were agricultural at the advent of that significant seismic shift in our kinds, Weltanschauung.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
So now that we have this instantaneous omnipresent potentiality, Maybe everything's changing. So in short, what I'm saying is, is what's happening now entirely unique because it is temporal, because of the temporal component, because of this instantaneous immersive ability to alter conversation? Maybe it no longer is even paradigmatically the same, Jordan.