(288)S11E9/10: Girard, Mimesis, and Propaganda w/David Gornoski
Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. I've interviewed about 15 people for my current season on propaganda and conspiracies. What's interesting to me is how I go through this mimetic process every time I reach out to someone for an interview because a lot of the people that I'm contacting seem really important. I'm contacting authors, speakers, and social media personalities who have some sort of a following, while I'm a nobody podcaster. So there are all kinds of feelings of inadequacy, jealousy, frustration at being turned down sometimes, and all kinds of things that just accompany reaching out for an interview.
Derek Kreider:There's a lot of internal stuff that I have to deal with every time I ask for an interview. I've been turned down a lot this season. Some of it, I'm sure, is because important people have limited time and resources, and speaking with me probably isn't the wisest thing for them to do. It's not the best use of their time or skills. But I've also had many people straight up ignore me.
Derek Kreider:And then there was this one person who told me, honestly, what I'm sure a lot of other people were thinking. She told me that she checked out my podcast and she didn't want to do the interview because I was a Christian, and that wouldn't be good for her image or her sales. Now, I appreciated the honesty. Truly, I did. I was glad that she just was straight with me, but it also clarified how much of a gain the realm of information is.
Derek Kreider:Many of these authors or social media personalities, they take one look at my podcast and know that they don't want to do an interview with me, if for no other reason, because I'm too much of something. I'm too religious, too far right, too far left, whatever it is. Because you can look at my podcast and depending on what episode you look at, you can kind of get whatever you want out of it. This season, I had the privilege of interviewing a wide range of individuals from conservative Christians to liberal atheists. Have had capitalists and communists on, have had at least one gay individual, minorities, women, men, Democrats, anarchists, libertarians, pacifists, veterans, government workers, and an individual whose parents were both executed by the government.
Derek Kreider:I mean, we have a wide range of representation for the season, which is exactly what I was shooting for because propaganda thrives on polarization, and we want to cut through that as much as we can. What I found beautiful about the journey I've been on this season is that almost all of the interviewees that I've been able to talk with have been of a certain mindset or character. They've largely been individuals who are willing to ignore image and seek truth. They might not all land at the same place in regard to where truth leads to, but they almost all seem to be seekers of truth. And one of the biggest shockers for me in regard to obtaining an interview, was when Robert Meeropol agreed to chat with me.
Derek Kreider:I emailed him, and I received the most gracious response back quite quickly. Here's this man, man whose parents were executed by the state in large part because of the Christian political element and our fervor against communism, and he was willing to speak with me, the host of an overtly Christian podcast. Now that couldn't possibly make him popular in his circles if such a thing ever got out, Yet who I seemed to be on paper had no bearing on Robert's willingness to have a discussion with me. The point is pretty much everyone that I've talked with this season has been a moderate in a certain sense. I can think of maybe one exception when I look back over my interviews.
Derek Kreider:Now I don't mean that they were moderates in terms of their politics or their theology. I mean that they seem to be moderates in terms of their epistemology. They're willing to hold their beliefs up under scrutiny and present those ideas on a platform irrespective of how unimportant I appear, how threatening my beliefs might be to their image, or anything else of that sort. They simply are happy to talk about beliefs that they hold dear because truth matters to them, and truth comes about through evaluating ideas, not through isolating ideas and affirming echo chambers. Today's guest, David Granovsky, fits in with everything that I've just said.
Derek Kreider:He's way too important to be giving me the time of day, yet he very quickly agreed to sit down and have a discussion with me. I asked David to a conversation because he has a solid background in an ideology I've long wanted to delve into but just never got around to it, Rene Girard and the idea of mimesis. If you're at all familiar with the topic of mimesis, you'll know that much of what the concept focuses on has a strong relation to issues of violence and nonviolence, hence my initial curiosity about it quite a while back. But as I've begun to listen to David unpack mimesis, and, by the way, thanks to Jesse for recommending David's show to me. Anyway, as David unpacked Mimesis for me, I've been amazed at how much overlap there is with concepts centered around propaganda.
Derek Kreider:And I suppose that shouldn't be too surprising because propaganda, like violence, is just another form of manipulation, coercion, and control. So hopefully, we'll be able to draw out some of those big ideas and connections in this discussion. So without further ado, here is the interview with David Granovsky. I came across your work recently because there was somebody who listens to my podcast, And, they they saw that I kind of had on my wish list that I wanted to do an episode on my Mises. But I told him that, you know, I probably wasn't going to end up getting to that because to to really dig into Gerard and and that whole philosophy would take quite a lot of legwork.
Derek Kreider:And and I do a whole lot of other research, and that just wasn't gonna be something that happened. But, this person said that I really needed to check you out because, I mean, that's kind of your wheelhouse. That's really what you focus on doing. So I, I started listening to some of your episodes. I kind of I just put it on 2 speed, and I listened to, like, probably 10 in a day.
Derek Kreider:And it I loved it, and it was exactly what I was looking for. So I was glad that you were able to, to make the time to to come on and chat with me. So, before I start grilling you though, I would love for you to just give yourself a brief introduction, whatever you think is important, and talk a little bit about what you do.
David Gornoski:I'm David Granovsky, and I'm a writer, a podcaster, radio host. I do some video production for different film series that I do called Things Hidden. I was my podcast is called Things Hidden, which is anthropological. My radio show is called A Neighbor's Choice, currently online only as we are taking a break from terrestrial radio on that piece for now. And then I have a podcast on seed oil called Seed Oil Survival, which gets into 90% of diseases are caused by this chronic disease.
David Gornoski:Chronic diseases have been caused in the last 100 years by this ingredient. And then, we explore that. We bring scientists together, doctors, everything for that, researchers. And then we also do Science in You, which is our physics show with New Physics and engineers, and we look for the Galileo's of our time. We also do, the science, which is a series about, public health policy and mismanagement of that field and and things we can do to make sure that this, atrocity never happens again, which they're probably looking forward to see what happens next.
David Gornoski:And we have to look forward to being smarter. And all of this goes back to what you talked about, which is mimesis, which is human behavior and human nature. And that's what draws our desires, and it's not something that is hard really to grasp. It's something that's very intuitive to understand, which is that we desire what other people desire. And we that includes what we think they want to acquire, including their status and the things that they seem to be wanting.
Derek Kreider:Alright. So so you would summarize my Mamesa says, desiring what other people desire, basically.
David Gornoski:What's that? Say say it just to focus, make sure I'm hearing
Derek Kreider:you correctly. Desiring what other people desire?
David Gornoski:Yeah. When you desire okay. So when we have we have needs. Right? Needs are what we would say are your basic survival things.
David Gornoski:You need shelter, food, water, things like that, mating. Those are things our needs are more instinctual. But then after that, you have a lot of other things that are called wants. And those things are not really instinctual as such. Those are that's a layer of want that's added on top of your need instinctual mechanisms, and that want is something that we are we are designed to be very masterful at imitating one another.
David Gornoski:That's how we learn language. That's how we learn, etiquette, customs, and that's how we learn values, conflict resolution, all those things. Music, art, painting on the cave, all those things have mimesis involved with them, but then you can imagine how my mimesis can also be negative because it's very hard to get out of a conflict once you get caught up into it when you're really getting on each other's nerves. And the closer you are to one another, the more often you can have conflict with one another. And that's why they say good fences make good neighbors.
David Gornoski:Remember what Rand Paul had to go through where he was viciously tackled by that crazed neighbor because they had the yard clippings where he said his yard clippings were 1 inch on top of his property. That's a metaphor for everything you see with undifferentiation creating rivalry.
Derek Kreider:So, you know, there are lots of places that, that we could go. But I think for me, wanting to deal with propaganda, listening to to some of your episodes, I thought that the clearest overlap to start with, in regard to propaganda and amesis was it the idea of polarization. So another French guy, who is a contemporary with, Gerard, actually, Jacques Ellul, he, he talks a bit about propaganda, and he explains how it thrives on this, this polarization. And part of the way that he explains that is he says that, well, if you have nuance, if you don't if you lack this polarization and instead you have nuance and you really have to think through things, then what nuance does is it's going to delay your instinct. It's gonna delay your response.
Derek Kreider:And if it delays your response, then, that might lead to an undesirable outcome for the propagandist. Because if I hesitate to ask the question, why should I hate that person? Then I might not end up voting the right way, or I might not end up supporting the next war because I'm I'm questioning. I'm hesitating. So propagandists want the outcome to be assured.
Derek Kreider:They want, reaction, and and they do that through reflex. So I think Alul is very insightful in regard to, the idea of polarization and that that's what happens. But he doesn't really get too much into the mechanisms that make us susceptible to polarization. And I think that's where Girard's work comes in and can be helpful. So could you maybe explain through the lens of Girard, like, why are humans susceptible to polarization?
David Gornoski:Well, you've got, it was interesting you said nuance. I thought, well, that's what Christianity brought into the world of mythology, you know, is nuance. Because when you are polarized against the common enemy or a scapegoat, it's black or white kind of thing. You know, that's the person that's polluted our community, or that's the person who's been cursed by the gods or that's the person who's hostile or that's the person who's created, chaos with breaking taboos by stealing or mating with animals or something that has crossed the line of differentiation in this in the community. Whatever the accusation is that snowballs into mimetic contagion of aggression against a common threat, common scapegoat.
David Gornoski:Nuance can quickly dissolve that unanimity consensus that this person is to blame for the problems of the community. It's precisely that which Christianity brings into the conversation of culture and allows for people to say, well, what about the death penalty? What about this heinous murderer? What about this particular piece of information that calls into question their culpability? And what about this person that we've captured in the moment of war as a war prisoner?
David Gornoski:Do they deserve to be tortured to pieces even though they were trying to kill our people and take over our land, or do they deserve certain rights? There's nuance. Christianity brings in nuance because Christianity is Holy Spirit community. The word Holy Spirit, Pericle, means defender, the defense attorney of humanity. The holy spirit is the defense spirit of, of the world, and it builds community based on figuring out how to get human beings to unite based on nonviolent creativity rather than creative, or violent creativity.
David Gornoski:You know, violent creativity is what the scapegoat mechanism is about. There's another guy who, was a contemporary of Renee Girard, who would call it, generative, the generative scape the generative scapegoat mechanism, and that was to indicate precisely that, that it it creates something out of chaos. When Jesus talks about say how can Satan cast out Satan? Satan has been considered to be associated with disorder and chaos in a whole host of different thoughts and religions, but Jesus brings into this idea that Satan can also create order out of chaos through creating a selection of a sacrifice. Controlled act of violence mediated onto a third party instead of discharging onto all against all.
David Gornoski:And, so nuance is the contamination of the Christian revelation into the world of mythology. Right? And so propaganda is just a, is a vestige of mythology that's stripped of its more ostensibly fantastical elements, as we would conceive of them, replaced with sterile bureaucratic concepts like will of the people will of the people, the nation's destiny, general welfare, democracy, liberal order, whatever the word is. Right? There's always gonna be a word.
David Gornoski:And that's just to stand in for Odin, Thor, Ra, whatever. It's just mind think it's just word thinking. Right? You just you throw an incantation out, and that's the big other. As you said, this this big other that dominates the psychological order of a community.
David Gornoski:And, that big other demands little others, little scapegoats to be fed to the you gotta think about human beings when they get caught up in mimesis, they become and and and they could get to the point where they're like a blob of sameness. And it's almost like they have to eat. They're like Pac Man. They become this giant blob that has to devour pellets of differentiation to maintain their its sense of togetherness.
Derek Kreider:So they they
David Gornoski:That's like a metaphysical way of describing what's going on in some sense, in a physics way, maybe.
Derek Kreider:Yeah. In in one of your episodes, you talked about, you know, how mimesis can unite a group in its hatred. And so if there's if there's nothing for them to aim their hatred towards, then there's really nothing unifying them anymore. Is that correct?
David Gornoski:Yeah. And or or if they're if they're aiming their hatred to each other, then there's then that's this that's called that's gonna end up in disorderly violence. Right? If everybody doesn't trust each other and everybody is mad and envious and jealous and competitive and obsessed with beating the other and insecure in their emotional state and all this, When they have all that, it's hard to have a cohesive successful society. And the things that trigger those things are things like scarcity driven issues, like famines and plagues and so forth, but it can be an ordinary thing.
David Gornoski:Could be the arrival of a new ethnic group that comes to visit that tribe that creates a little bit of nervousness that can snowball into problems. So they don't it's not a it's be careful that a scapegoat mechanism doesn't mean that the people are cynically choosing someone to blame in a plot to slander someone. They truly believe the person is guilty. I mean, we have we think about today, like, people still believe you see all those people stuffing ballots into those drop boxes for ballots and stuff, and they still think that's like, oh, no. Nothing there.
David Gornoski:No problem. It's just stuffing things in and people with masks on to stuff it. You know, those are completely that's first class democracy right there. I mean, and they, and they, and they believe it because the crowd, including a lot of respectable and I don't even care. Like, that's not even an issue that I'm talking about, and I'm saying it in a vague way to protect your, you know, your platform.
David Gornoski:But the point is because you can't even talk about it without the little fascist book where they're trying to get you. But, like, any intelligent person would would notice there was something severely bizarre about that whole thing. You know? But I don't even have an opinion about what exactly was going on and all this. I don't really get into that.
David Gornoski:But the fact that it's not fashionable within conservative ink and even populous linked media to talk about it still, it colors the mimetic, atmosphere of wanting to, I don't want to copy that because I don't want to be as considered in the uncool table, the lower social status table of conservative or anti establishment opinion. And the same thing goes for, like, the the COVID thing. They'll say, I I I I've seen no evidence that x generic drug helps with this particular disease. Right? I have yet to see evidence, yet we know of so many examples of people who did generic drugs or natural things and vitamin d and so forth that did wonderfully with this by the millions.
David Gornoski:And we know of people who did everything they were supposed to do to it, took every iteration of that failed product that was supposed to be the miracle drug. And they're injured, and they're having problems, and they can't there's nothing they can do. And yet people will just say, I have not seen any of it, and they're just saying, and they believe it with all their heart. Human believe human beings believe in their own BS, and that's what makes them incredibly dangerous when they're in a crowd because you can get someone to believe anything about you. We can I could we could we could have a bunch of people bust into your house right now where you're at and just start leveling an accusation?
David Gornoski:And the whole community around you could come out and see what's going on and look in the hallways, or you'd come out into the streets, and we'd all keep slinging that accusation against you. And people would start to, oh, I guess this guy thought he was a nice guy. I thought Derek was a nice neighbor. I guess I didn't know the truth about it. People would just get contagiously caught up in this hysteria of of of guilt, dislodge, dislocation and and discharging.
David Gornoski:And there's a I think there's a physics component to it, as well as the psychological component, and Gerard looks at the anthropological level.
Derek Kreider:Okay. So yeah. I guess, you know, maybe if we were gonna figure out why people are susceptible to polarization, kind of a summary there would be that, it I think a lot of times we focus on the hatred that a a certain polarized group has, but it's not it's not so much the animosity towards other. It's the fact that that animosity unites them to It's
David Gornoski:not it's not just animosity. It's just passion in in general. Because if you think someone truly is to blame, like, libertarians scapegoat the state. And so that's interesting. They just scapegoated as an other.
David Gornoski:But when you become so obsessed with all things that's wrong come from this person, you truly believe it, you know, you may not feel motivated by hate. You may feel motivated by righteous, protection of your loved ones. You know? So if you're in a tribe and someone says this person is demonically possessed, and and and you believe it, and this person is causing us all to go under a spell, or this person caused this child to die of malaria, you can get swept up in that, and that's fear. Not just hate.
David Gornoski:It could be fear. Mhmm. And it could be jealousy or, you know, or or or just, or or, again, a sense of protection. I wanna protect my family from this evil person. And, people just copy the desires of those around them.
David Gornoski:Now at a at a at a day to day level, that causes a lot of obsessive rivalry because you can't really do a good job with your business when you're always fixated on beating your opponent. Because when you're fixated on beating your opponent, you're not actually fixated on doing an excellent job. So if your opponent says red shirts are wonderful, and yet you're gonna say, well, I'm gonna only wear blue shirts. Okay? Well, that's not you're you're obsessing over your opponent rather than serving what your actual customer or service is that that's needed to be done, and that can create dysfunction.
David Gornoski:And so all that can build up, and you have bad blood. When everybody's pointing fingers at everybody else, it's it's it's gonna be, inevitable that that's gonna be a place of bad blood and dysfunction.
Derek Kreider:So if
David Gornoski:you can't turn those finger pointings into finger pointing in the same direction, then you're going to have a problem with creating cohesion and unity.
Derek Kreider:Yeah. I wanna run with, with, that train of thought that you were you were having where, you were talking about how, you know, basically groups and you use the word, crowds, I think. And, that kind of brings up my next question that, because I think identifying crowds is a is a vital aspect of Mimesa since it relies on others and and groups of others. There were there were 2 people who were kind of influential for me recently. Another Frenchman.
Derek Kreider:That's kind of a theme for tonight. Gerard Allul. And now there's this guy, at the the turn of 20th century, named Gustave Le Bon. Mhmm. And he wrote a book actually entitled The Crowd.
Derek Kreider:And in it, he talks about how the crowd actually when they get together, they they kind of instead of being a bunch of individuals, the crowd as a whole actually takes on an an identity of its own. And, you know, he talks about how, like, these crowds will en masse perform an action, like a really heroic action, you know, like, an army telling all their people to do a suicide charge. Yeah. And and they do it or even despicable acts. Like they'll they'll, you know, the lynchings are a great example of that.
Derek Kreider:And we got this, this other guy a little bit earlier, but, Soren Kierkegaard. And he spoke, against the crowd. He actually has a book called, The Crowd is Untruth. And in that book, he has a quote where he says, a crowd in its very concept is untruth since a crowd either renders the single individual wholly
David Gornoski:unrepentant and irresponsible, or it weakens his responsibility by
Derek Kreider:making it a fraction of his decision. Individuality as a good that has to remain in view. Because in the crowd, a new entity, which is untruth, is formed. So you were just talking about the crowd and how that's important, for Gerard. Can you maybe discuss the importance that individuality plays in, in being truly human and in, in being on the right path and how is it highlighted by Gerard?
David Gornoski:Yeah. I mean, you can see it with the, example of, the the woman accused of adultery, and that crowd truly believes that she's deserving of of destruction. And, you know, Jesus says, who's gonna cast the first stone, which takes it it it exercises the crowd out of the individual. And, typically, pagan exorcisms are gonna exercise the individual out of the crowd because he stood out. Right?
David Gornoski:That kind of scapegoat explosion. But with Jesus, you reverse that, and you and you exercise the crowd out of the heart of the person. That's what that's what repentance looks like. That's what following Christ looks like, exercising the crowd out of your heart. Because the crowd is a lie, and the crowd is something that possesses you in various different ways.
David Gornoski:Your family crowd, your community crowd. Right? Your your your ideology crowds. Your neighbor that your rivalrous with is a kind of crowd that's possessing you if you get it on that obsessive one upmanship or, the, keeping up with the Joneses. Like, why are houses so big and huge and expensive, and why do they cost $1,000,000 to pay for?
David Gornoski:Because people need to keep keep up with the Joneses. Right? And why do people subject themselves to Nazi like HOAs that attack you for the grass blade being a half a millimeter too high? Because they're keeping up with the Joneses. And and so they're possessed by the crowd.
David Gornoski:So so much of our life is governed by unconscious possession by crowd feelings. And that crowd that was gathered to murder that woman, you know, Jesus says, he's who who's gonna cast the first stone? That he who is without sin cast the first stone. So that's what he says. He doesn't actually ask a question, but he he says a statement which creates a question in the heart of the person listening.
David Gornoski:And so that is going to wake them up to their participation in the crowd. And, when you do that, you have an opportunity for nuance. You say, wait a second. That rock's pretty big. And I don't wanna be the one that throws the first stone because if I throw the first stone, you know, I might be the one that hits the biggest wound or, you know, hurts the person in the most egregious sense.
David Gornoski:That's pretty bold to do that alone. And then you start thinking about, well, who is worthy? Because he said, let he who's without sin cast the first stone. So now I'm thinking about, okay. Am I the most worthy here?
David Gornoski:Or, you know, maybe that other person over there is not worthy to throw this stone because they've been in a bad behavior themselves. And so suddenly, they're they're losing their crowd unity. And now they're losing their mythology in the they're running narrative in their head, which is a kind of mythology in in real time. And now they're gonna lay down their stones, starting with the oldest, putting their stones down first rather than striking the woman. So that's an example of the crowd being cast out of the individual.
David Gornoski:He does this with the, demoniac in the Gerasenes, the village of the Gerasenes, which is in the northern side of Galilee. And that was the only, pagan town in that area at the time. It was installed by the Romans to be a model town of of the good life of pagan grandeur. And, it was a little town that was going along, and they function with the Grinch. By the way, the Grinch is a is a scapegoat murder.
David Gornoski:You know that too. Right? Think about that. With the Grinch, why is the Grinch It ends with a feast, which is kinda like the sublimated I understand that they ate the Grinch, the little Who's. They were all united in
Derek Kreider:the That's really dark.
David Gornoski:Yeah. It's unfortunate, but it's a it's a real real mythology in real time where they they they otherwise the Grinch. They're riding it from the who's perspective. You don't know the Grinch's perspective. It's right.
David Gornoski:They're riding his ugliness, his monstrosity into his name, which is what humans tend to do with their victims. So mythology is heavily symbolized because it's so far back in time. It's so nice entrenched in the scapegoat mechanism that it generates a lie in what it creates. It generates a lie in the sense that it says gods were killing this god or that god, and this popped out the earth or this popped out water or so forth or so on. It's very cartoonish and abstract, and therefore, we don't look at as a cover up for murder.
David Gornoski:But what's going on is that when you murder a scapegoat, there's such a transformative experience of relief and such a unifying sense of oneness that comes from that experience of having overcome a common witch. Ding dong. The witch is dead. Remember that? They were they were excited.
David Gornoski:They had catharsis. And they were United with Dorothy and they were an ecstatic union together, the little munchkin land. And so that created. A kind of high that created a meaning of, wow, man. That's a wonderful thing.
David Gornoski:So now, whenever there's a a crisis of differentiation bur burgeoning again, they'll say, well, what did our ancestors do? And they'll recreate that spontaneous murder, which was not a cynical plot to slander, but truly a a sincere, in their mind, perspective of trying to deal with the problem. And they'll recreate it in the form of ritual sacrifice. And that's why all the religions of the world do ritual sacrifice. That's why all the one of the most ancient forms of it is, which is the laying of a of a victim in the in the beginning of a city underneath the cornerstone.
David Gornoski:It's laid down, and you lay a live victim underneath that stone and you smash the stone onto them and kill them and that's the blessing of the new city. Now the people when you ask them, why are we doing that? They're saying, well, we're doing that to not disturb to to appease the gods and the spirit so that they don't curse this new city or new town or new temple. But in reality, the gods are a projection of the crowd. The gods are what they project into the into the sky, which is a shared experience of transcendent oneness.
David Gornoski:Why do they say it's a god? Because they say, well, our ancestors said some strange person did these weird taboos and broke some taboos, and then we came together, and they flew off into the sky. And that's a cover up for murder. We threw them off a cliff and, brought rain and sunshine the next day. And so the idea is that, something could be so evil, but yet also be so salvific.
David Gornoski:As a reminder to the people, this is what you do when you need to stave off runaway chaos and and evil spreading. You give a sacrifice in honor of the original God, who was himself a victim. Right? But the crowd writes his story or her story for them and writes the guilt into them. And that's why so many different gods have their early stories or pranks and tricks and miss and little little, wicked little mischief deeds and taboo breaking things and and rape and bestiality.
David Gornoski:And then later on, their stories, as they continue, are like, oh, well, they saved us from a war. They saved us from an earthquake, or they saved us from this or that. Well, what you're seeing is a mythologize a mythologization of the psychological transference from guilt, evil, demon, to salvific savior who just was trying to show us the way of peace and unity and and and how to overcome, you know, calamities in the future. Because it's not that the rain it's not just that it's deadly that the famine is is caused by the lack of rain. It's even more deadly what human beings do when they're very, very hungry and there's a lack of food.
David Gornoski:Right? And so the way the the the mimetic, contagion of violent aggression is just as much a plague as the famine or the bug that's causing pestilence. And in ancient literature, they tend to associate social disorder as a synonym for plague. Excellent.
Derek Kreider:Interesting. Yeah. This might, this might be a good time. I feel like you've you've kind of laid out, mimesis and and the crowd really well, and how the crowd kind of, guides our actions, how we respond to the crowd. But, you know, you've talked about something that's really fascinating to me as well that deals with the crowd, but it it kind of actually seems the opposite at first.
Derek Kreider:You talked about, reverse mimesis, which is is, this action that you sometimes see people take, which embraces the extreme almost for effect. And I I think you give an example of something like, you know, this kid growing up in rural Kansas, like farmland. And all of a sudden, one day, he or she walks into school in, like, dark goth attire and, like, all this black eyeliner and stuff. And you're like, wow, they're, you know, they're an individual. But, no, they're actually not really being an individual even though though as an individual, they stand out a lot.
Derek Kreider:They're still actually controlled by the crowd. So could you talk about this, the reverse of my Mises and how the crowd is still at play here?
David Gornoski:That's what everybody is a status, then you become an anti status because you wanna stand out, be different. But do you really truly oppose the state by just criticizing the state? You see what I mean? Jesus didn't oppose the state by criticizing it. He wasn't a philosopher.
David Gornoski:He was a performance artist, so to speak. You know, he was doing action. You know? And that's how he changed the state is by performing signs and wonders and healing and disrupting their boundaries of violent differentiation and so forth. But, yeah, I mean, that that's something that governs a lot of of the lie of individualism and romantic, notions of the self, which is that, you know, we are we are the, we are the fount of our desires, and, we we choose we choose what we want from some kind of objective mysterious, stimulus in our hearts.
David Gornoski:Right? And, the case actually is that those who are more inclined to view themselves as unique little snowflakes are the ones most owned by the crowd. You know, when someone says, I have found my true identity, and it's this, you know, 10 thousandth new gender, that, in their mind, they feel like they're the most unique little individual they've ever conceived of because they found the 10 thousandth new gender. But to everybody else who's not possessed by that same crowd spirit, they're gonna say, actually, you know, you're you're very much a part of the crowd. You you would never have done this in 1999.
David Gornoski:You wouldn't have done this in 2,000 4. You wouldn't have done this in 2010. You wouldn't have done this in 2016. You know, it's only you know, you're a product of your hate. Your desires are shaped by those around you.
David Gornoski:But we don't like to admit that. We always want to make it look like we were the ones that created it first. That's why people get really out of fashion when something becomes too popular. Like, Jordan Peterson got really popular, and then he became out as cool. Right?
David Gornoski:He also associate it also came along with some things that he came out with that people disagreed with, but then it became, like, really cringey and uncool to, like, Jordan Peterson because he hit a certain tipping point where he was really fashionable amongst even, like, baby boomers and stuff. And now his book was in Walmart and stuff. It was supposed to be something Edgelord online once it became famous to a certain critical mass. It wasn't cool anymore. It's the same reason why people say I like Star Wars before you did.
David Gornoski:When I was into skateboarding before you were into skateboarding. You copied me. I got you into it because we don't want to admit how much alike we are. And so we create these little running narratives in our hell in our in our heads called ourself. Ourself is an amalgamation of these little narratives that we tell to try to, like, create this unique individual island kind of distinction from another.
David Gornoski:And that's why people don't like it when someone imitates them too much. They want you to people tend to wanna be imitated, but from a distance. They don't wanna be too imitated. And if it was too imitated, then they're gonna be losing their sense of self, and then they're gonna be in a state of, like, chaos. And, you mean, you can see this on a surface level when you look at, like, I've said before, like that monkey see monkey do thing where people copy what you say.
David Gornoski:You just keep copying it. Have you ever done? Have you ever seen a kid do that?
Derek Kreider:I mean, I was a middle school teacher for a bit, so we got into
David Gornoski:some school teacher for a little bit, so, you know, you've heard them do that. Right?
Derek Kreider:Yeah. Yeah.
David Gornoski:And they'll just go on and on and on and it's so annoying. Right. It's just so annoying. Cause it feels like it's never going to end. I think that speaks to a little bit of the window of how human beings view mimesis when it's too close.
David Gornoski:It's maddening. There was a movie called, what was the name of it? No, it's really good movie. It's called, the, Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer. I highly recommend it.
David Gornoski:It's a real time case study in crowd violence and scapegoat lynching in the 19 sixties and today, dealing with Indonesia. And these guys were going around killing people who were suspected or falsely accused of being communist. And they were going around killing people and taking their stuff and and just going to just bloodbath with machetes. And they said that after they would kill some of these people, the people are still alive. The perpetrators of these killings are still alive, and they're in power.
David Gornoski:And they were saying, we would drink the blood of our victims so that we wouldn't lose our minds. Remember what I said earlier? That the crowd is like a Pac Man of sameness, and it has to devour pellets of differentiation to keep its sameness going. Telling you, man, there's something there to that. Because they think they're experiencing the very thing.
David Gornoski:It's like they have to devour their victim, which is wholly different from them from their experience in order to maintain their kind of ecstasy of unanimous violence that they're partaking in. I think that's very telling about scapegoats. I think I think the fact that that certain, you know, like, you know, a lot of poor folks that were in the South that were participating in lynchings of African Americans were terrified of losing their place in the pecking order, and they felt like they wanted to make sure that there was someone who would be considered wholly other in distinction from them being relatively wholly same as their richer, wealthier counterparts in the community by saying, well, we're united in killing this person and their otherness. Does that make sense? So you see this kind of attempt to, you know, I'm part of the I'm unified because I'm terrified of that, actually, if if I don't unite in the explosion or devouring of this person, in their property or their dignity or life, that somehow we'll actually be realizing that we're a lot closer than we thought.
David Gornoski:And that's gonna create rivalry. Right? And then I actually I could lose my position to become at the lowest of the pecking order if I'm in rivalry and competition. So we have to destroy their businesses. Right?
David Gornoski:And always make people feel psychologically put down so that they don't compete and supplant them in the pecking order. And then if that happens, then they will be the candidate for sacrifice. Like, what Trump supporters feel like they're being set up for. Right? That, you know, no one stands up for the white working class people, they say.
David Gornoski:And what's happening is is the elites are looking at demographics and everything that their trends and everything, and they're saying, okay. We're going to have a new scapegoat class. It's not gonna be this minority group or that minority group or women in the 18 tens or whatever. Now it's gonna be, you know, here's the scapegoat lottery. You know?
David Gornoski:The demographics are as such. I'm not saying it happens randomly, but for whatever reason, it's now becoming that this group is the group that you can call, incestuous. I mean, you can go I mean, leftists will sit there on Twitter and stuff and say at a Trump rally, look how they're bred of incest. Look at their dental teeth, how ugly they're look at how low their IQ is. It's the only group you're allowed to talk about IQ.
David Gornoski:It's Trump supporters or or, you know, right wing working class people. You're allowed to impugn that. You're allowed to talk about their weight issues. Like, you're allowed to say Trump's obese or whatever. You're allowed to say that he has horrible skin complexion.
David Gornoski:Yeah. That that's allowed to talk about obesity in the in the establishment religion for everybody else.
Derek Kreider:Yeah. That's that's fascinating to me because I'd I'd hadn't thought about that before because there's so much, you know, you talk about, on an elephant man and, you know, how the the standards of beauty. And, you know, right now, being overweight is kind of something that's that's elevated as beautiful.
David Gornoski:Unless you're part of the scapegoat class.
Derek Kreider:Yeah. But then you've got the the liberal media that talks about, you know, well, Trump eats, like, 6, Whoppers or whatever, Big Macs a day. And, yeah, I I never thought about that.
David Gornoski:Because you're supposed to become obese by eating, kale loaded with seed oil dressing, not, you know, not the classic foods that got you a piece. That's considered, you know, not that's passe. But you but but you again, no. Like, a lot of a lot of the members of the Democratic Party Coalition eat at McDonald's just like Trump, and they're not castigated for that. You're castigated for you to McDonald's if you're with the identity group or whatever that's associated with Trump.
David Gornoski:Okay? You're you're not allowed to talk about, low IQ in any way, except if it's Trump supporters or or or or those types of people, working class, people. And you're not allowed to, talk about income. Poor. Not talk you're not allowed to talk about the poor being bad unless it's a MAGA rally.
David Gornoski:Then you're allowed to talk about it with glee. You're not allowed to talk about people dying from COVID unless you're Herman Cain and you go to a Trump rally. So and and that's that's a narrative that's shared by much of the establishment media with glee. You know? And it's a shame, and people recognize it, and it's unfair.
David Gornoski:But every time people recognize it, they always point out, well, but there's all these other scapegoats that are in the Democratic brand. And so, you know, because whenever you're transitioning from one scapegoat identity group to another, it's not a clean break. Right? So there's a transition. So you can always point and find examples of of stuff that fits the pattern that, oh, no.
David Gornoski:No. No. No. No white people are all ever suppressed or oppressed. It never happens in ever.
David Gornoski:Since the dawn of time, since Neanderthals have existed, whites have been supremacists and, you know, that's the stupid it's just another mythology. Right? Just another mythology.
Derek Kreider:Yeah. And, I mean, the solution would be to not scapegoat at all, but, they feel like the the way that you fix the previous scapegoat That's
David Gornoski:my real estate. Scapegoat.
Derek Kreider:Yeah.
David Gornoski:Yeah.
Derek Kreider:I I wanna, kind of move on to a different topic. We'll kind of bring this all back together in just a minute. But it doesn't,
David Gornoski:by the way, fix it because the previous ones that were beneficiaries of the scapegoating of the original of the of the previous scapegoats, The people who benefited from that pecking order are still at the top in the new pecking order. You know, it's never their kids. You know? Yeah. No nobody who's a Morgan, you know, or a Vanderbilt or whatever is part of the team being pummeled by the new you know, you're the cause of all problems.
David Gornoski:They're happy. They're the ones putting on the Antifa mask and pretending to be communist ninjas. You know? Yeah. They're rich trust fund kids.
David Gornoski:Because the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and they're trying to imitate Jesus' aesthetic by being a billionaire trust fund kid and dressing up as a ninja for communism. Yeah. Because they're swimming in Jesus' fishbowl. They had to play by those rules to try to have social clout. They're they're like hermit crabs.
David Gornoski:They're they're hiding under little shells that are Jesus' aesthetics. We all are for remembering.
Derek Kreider:Yeah. I am I'm sure I am at times. In one of
David Gornoski:say now? You were saying
Derek Kreider:I said, yeah. I sure I'm sure I am at times too. Yeah. In one of your series that I I listened to you, it was really interesting, because it's a it's a topic that kind of fascinates me. But you were talking about demon possession a little bit.
Derek Kreider:And it's fascinating to me because because my family has had we've had a personal experience with that here in Romania, which I can talk to you about, if you're interested later. But, now you and your guests highlighted something that I really hadn't thought of before, which is the tendency for the demonic to isolate. And the reason the reason that that was really interesting to me is because in propaganda, that's it's the same thing. Like when you get to abusers, a big tactic for abusers is to isolate individuals, whoever the the victim is. To isolate them from the outside.
Derek Kreider:You know, polarization, even though that's done in large groups, like done in crowds, still that crowd is isolated. Right? If if I only watch Fox or I only watch CNN, I might be a part of a 10,000,000 other people that do the same thing, but we're isolated in our group in an echo chamber. So what I would like for you to maybe briefly discuss is talk a little bit about the demonic and and the use of isolation as a tool to feed off of the isolation of, of others.
David Gornoski:Well, I mean, that that's a reference to the book. Well, one of the things we were talking about there was Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin, father Malachi Martin. He wrote in the 19 seventies, and in the different he he he takes 5 contemporary at the time, American possession and exorcism stories, and he talks about the background of the priest and the person who was tormented by devils and goes through it that way. And there's 2 there's different thoughts about what's actually going on with possession. You can look at it from an anthropological perspective only and say, it's not an entity being jumping into them, but rather if human beings are spiritual beings and we are made in the image of God, we have that divine spark with us, and we're divine and we're divinely made in the image in such a way that we're shaped by the trinity being relationship in one being, then that means relationships around us, that's mimesis in in the way it looks, is going to shape our being.
David Gornoski:You know? And we're gonna be made to be in relationship with others, define our sense of wholeness and completeness because just like the Trinity is 3 in 1, we're gonna have, interrelationality involved in our very sense of wholeness of being. Right? The problem is we idolize those neighbors, and that becomes a scandal for us. But some would say that demonic possession is when those spiritual energies of mimesis are getting scrambled up because of sin or whatever, that you become possessed by voices of those around you to the point where you take on a different voice and you manifest these spiritually bizarre behaviors.
David Gornoski:Now, other people take the more traditional, classical approach of this is the story of the fallen angels that fell from Satan's choir, and they're jumping into you. And I I try to just have a conversation where you can look at it from both angles if you want to. But one of the things that's gonna be clear, is that if we're made in relationship, then Satan is gonna wanna divide and conquer. Right? And so you can be very alone in a crowd.
David Gornoski:You know? You can be very alone in a crowd. You can be very isolated in a crowd if you're not in a loving relationship that is Trinitarian in its shape and meaning self giving, reciprocal self giving, reciprocal self, sacrificing. Right? Giving up one's right to oneself to make way for the other's needs.
David Gornoski:As your heavenly father does, you imitate that same pattern in your relationship of service and not reacting in a mimetically tit for tat way when they insult you, stopping the mimetic cycle by discharging it with joy or aikido by allowing them to see the futility of their action. Like, turning the other cheek is meant to show the stupidity of the whole insult doesn't bother me, and it's discharged itself. Do you want another attempt to just insult me? So, yeah, I mean, all of that, you know, possession is gonna drive you into isolation. You connected it to propaganda, And that's interesting because I I I saw that father Malachi Martin was brought in, did you know, by the US government.
David Gornoski:And the Fort Bragg was where they did a lot of their psyops. They developed a lot of their psyops, and, apparently, one of them went really bad.
Derek Kreider:Yeah. I heard you reference that. Yeah.
David Gornoski:Yeah. And and and Malachi Martin was brought in to, like, do an exorcism on the base, and someone's making that into a movie. It'll be interesting to see if it's factual or accurate or whatever. But I thought that was really interesting that, like, you know, the very sources of law these the finest propaganda the world's ever seen, in some cases, with Hollywood and stuff and our government, that they were getting into this stuff, and it got they they they felt the need that they needed to bring in an exorcist to clean up the mess they had made. And it makes you wonder, you know, how these things work, and what does it mean to wrestle against principalities?
David Gornoski:And and and what does it mean that Satan is the prince of the air? And so much of our thoughts are shaped by words that are spoken into the air through media. And, radio airwaves are blanketing you with their you know, and I think there's something to it that, you know, in a physics sense, the the the messages and the emotions and the intents and the passions that you send in a message on radio, on FM and AM is actually literally, physically, subconsciously saturating the community that it's coming around in the tower. So you're almost being if it like, imagine in an experiment, if everybody's saying, I hate you. I hate you.
David Gornoski:I hate you on every radio station, and you're not listening to any of them, you're actually subconsciously being bathed in in magnetic frequencies that are hearing that that spirit of I hate you. Think about that for a moment, what that could do for the human mind. And now think about all the programming that you're bathed in when you're driving in their car, and you're not listening to any of that, and yet people are listening to music that draws out the passions for envy and lust and all that stuff. And you're soaking yourself subconsciously on a vibrational level and, and messages which are isolating and alienating and nihilistic. No wonder people feel like they deal with, you know, problems with despair, and they don't know where it comes from.
Derek Kreider:Yeah. So I wanna I wanna kind of jump on one of the the ideas that you're having in there, because it I think this the question about the demonic and isolation seems like it's it's like, you know, where does that come from? How does that fit in? But you talked about community. And I think I think while I while I was thinking through my Mises, and I was thinking about crowds and masses, I'm like, well, then it seems like if the problem is the crowd, then it seems like the best thing to do is to be isolated, like to isolate myself from the crowd to be separate.
Derek Kreider:Of course, as a Christian, I know that's not true.
David Gornoski:Sometimes Jesus did that. Sometimes he got away from the crowd to go to rest, to get away from it.
Derek Kreider:Right. But, you use the word community, and Laban and and others use the word crowd. And I think we can maybe make a distinction. Can you explain, we need community, but we don't wanna be part of the crowd. What's the difference between community and crowd?
Derek Kreider:And how do we make sure we're plugged into the the right thing, the community?
David Gornoski:Well, community is one that recognizes that we're all sheep and that much of this community is about recognizing and being aware of your passions and why they're now it would help you to actually understand how much it is mimetic, But at least to be suspicious of your passions is a good start, and that's what Christianity has been able to do even though it doesn't get you the full you know, most people don't understand the full mimetic package of of the whole thing. Right? And that and that doesn't give the full picture. But, yeah, I mean, that's the the crowd is the kind of breakdown byproduct of a community that's in dis that's in dysfunction. Right?
David Gornoski:A community that's in in a state of of of charged up energy ready to offload onto somebody as a as a punching bag. Community is one in which you are learning to get along together nonviolently by maintaining differences without violence. Right? Maintaining differentiation without the threat of coercion to do it. So that's the idea.
David Gornoski:It's like, can a society, for example, the drug war. You know? Can a society, stamp out drugs through the use of coercion, or can it use the social ordering principle of turning of the cheek, which would allow the, the competition of drug dealers to be able to extinguish their ability to have the kind of stored up capital to control neighborhoods and communities generationally. Jesus' social aikido principle allows overreach of ambition in the black market to dismantle its ability to maintain the kind of obscene profit margin that it was holding by having a black market. In other words, nonviolence is an is a proactive social ordering aikido principle that allows you to dismantle, overreach and evil by not mirroring it back.
David Gornoski:So can you get along? Can you can you deal with drug abuse without putting people in rape cages? Do you need the scapegoat ritual, sacrificial type vestige that you see with our mass incarceration state? Do you need that in place to maintain order, or can you use nonviolent creative means of getting people to lose their sight in desiring drugs? If you get rid of a sick culture, would it make people not desire drugs as much?
David Gornoski:If you stop using sacrificial violence to try to failingly stop a drug trade when in reality it creates obscene profits for it, then, you know, if you can't learn how to stamp it out nonviolently, it won't result in anything but more and more dysfunction and chaos. Right? Because people are not afraid of the law right now. People are are, you know, serving time. They get out.
David Gornoski:They serve time. They get out. They serve time. They get out. And obviously, the law is not working.
David Gornoski:Obviously, they're they don't respect or fear the law. The level of coercion that's being employed by the law is not apparently strong enough to deter the action that's supposed to be being deterred. You see what I mean? So there's a fundamental existential crisis of differentiation. And to the point where we are so not interested in using the level of violence that we used to use before Jesus' cultural infection, that we don't even want to fathom the kind of brutality that would be necessary in the public square to get people to respect those acts of imposition of force.
David Gornoski:Does that make sense?
Derek Kreider:Yeah. Yeah. It does.
David Gornoski:You see? Because I think this is an important part, and I don't talk about this part a lot, but it's so it's so important. I call it the impotence of sacrifice. The sacrifice can't create catharsis. It can't create believability because we're not willing to do the level of violence necessary.
David Gornoski:We don't believe in the level of violence that we used to believe. It used to be there was a kind of semi catharsis that could happen if you were throwing the witch, you know, into the water. But now people are like, no. That's too cruel. That's too mean.
David Gornoski:Right? And so there's no appetite to do the kind of unanimous attack and unanimous brutality to kind of put an end to it.
Derek Kreider:Well, yeah. And we we even hide them. I mean, prisons are hidden. Like, nobody wants to see what happens to people now.
David Gornoski:Right. You're hiring people to do things for you that you wouldn't do yourself.
Derek Kreider:Exactly. Yeah.
David Gornoski:Which is a kind of mimetic discharging. So so the prison guards are a kind of scapegoat, and the prisoners are a scapegoat. Right? So there's different layers of scapegoats where you can kinda offload your guilt and participation in the collective act.
Derek Kreider:Oh, yeah. And I I mean, it damages all parties, the prisoners, the prison guards, you know, police, military, like, all of those occupations. It it damages them with PTSD.
David Gornoski:The turning of the cheek principle, which is why they have the power to do the kind of drug cartel stuff in the first place. And the national conservatives think they're so tough because they wanna increase, you know, incarceration, but it's like, no. I'm sorry. You're wrong. You're just wrong.
David Gornoski:They keep saying fentanyl, fentanyl, fentanyl. But, I mean, I understand that. That's a little tricky one. I'll be honest with you. I mean, you know, the idea of having fentanyl distributed around freely in bubblegum machines, it's not what would happen, but I'm just saying, you know, in a free market.
David Gornoski:I mean, that if you think about it, you can see, oh, that's pretty scary. And then you have to factor in the question of, like, foreign nations. If what they're saying is true that China is pumping that in to try to, like, get back at us for what we did with the opium thing to them. I don't know. But when you're dealing with the nation level, you know, warfare, I mean, then maybe there is a place to to to stop that at the border or wherever it's coming from, if that's true.
David Gornoski:You know? It's the narrative I've heard.
Derek Kreider:Yeah.
David Gornoski:But the idea of using that, they use that as a cover to go along with the nonviolent crime laws that we have for everything else. And they they don't work. They don't so they're so they're so they are brutal and violent in a slow way. You know? But they're not vicious enough to deter.
David Gornoski:So it's like the worst of both worlds. Like I said, if you want I mean, the people these little nat conservatives people I mean, if you wanna stop marijuana, man, I don't want marijuana distributed. I wanna be criminalized. You'd have to do, like, crucifixions in the public square to get people to be so horrified that they wouldn't risk it. You know what I mean?
David Gornoski:If they saw people, like, moaning and groaning with crucifixions all through their town square, and the sheriff said, this was gonna happen to you, and we're gonna put this on public access TV. You'd be like, holy shnikes. I don't know if I'm gonna sell this bag of weed. I think this actually deterred me. But when it's kinda like you go into prison for this many days, you get meals, you get street cred back from home when you get out.
David Gornoski:You you know, you get to join a gang. You get to still do drugs inside the prison or sell them. You can study. You get a degree. There's a lot of there's a lot of it's kind of a way you waste, though.
David Gornoski:You know? Now, it does dehumanize you, and it does strip fathers away from kids and mothers away from their children and and horrific things. But it's kinda you see what I mean? It's like a slow, mutate, degradation, where it's not like acute, like, you know, like, public crucifixions, you know, or floggings or something. Like, no one would do that.
David Gornoski:You're not allowed to do that. And now and and then those little people that want their right wing Caesars, they'll say, well, that's a bad thing. You know? That's a bad thing. But they're just they're just lie they're just fantasizing.
David Gornoski:You know? Because they'd be you know, there's I mean, you know, all it takes I mean, they could make a thing that you should get flogged for doing Zoom too much, and all these little national conservatives would get flogged in the public square. You know what I mean? Because they'd say that degenerate. They do zoom too much.
David Gornoski:You should be out in the sunshine 8 hours a day or something. You know what I mean? You know? You if you go too far with that, there's really it's just nihilism of a different type. And they use that word too, anarcho tyranny, but that's what they're calling for, really, when they go too far with these things.
Derek Kreider:Speaking of doing Zoom too much, I wanna respect your, your hour here. So I'm gonna try to, go quickly through just a just a couple of final questions that I think are gonna help to to pull everything together. So, you know, one one of the things that I I've respected about the shows that I've listened to, you know, I don't agree with you on everything, but I like that. And I like that, you don't you don't agree with the right on everything or the left on everything. In fact, so far in our discussion, you've called out both sides on on various different things.
Derek Kreider:And when we're talking about community, one of the things that that's, stands out to me, you know, from the bible when it talks about, building a a good community, it says speaking the truth in love. Right? So those two components, truth and love, go together. And, you know, one of the things I feel like you do is that and a community is supposed to do is to deal with hard truths, truths that people don't wanna hear. So, I mean, I've I've heard you talk about a bunch of different things.
Derek Kreider:The one that stands out to me, you know, you talk about gender identity. And that being a truth that, you deal with that the left doesn't want to hear. But what I I loved in your conversations that I heard you talk about that, you also kind of go against the rights and their vilification of of people who, you know, have have these different ideas about gender identity and just talking about how the right wants to scapegoat them. And so it seems like, the idea Gerard's ideas and, your Christian ideal kind of drives you to speak truth, but to also have have love towards both groups. And so you're able to kind of split the middle of the left and the right and and go wherever truth leads you.
Derek Kreider:And wherever truth leads you, you're able to speak to the other side or each side in, in love. Can you talk a little bit about truth and love? Not that's not really a very specific question, but maybe talk about how you're guided by those things and why that's important.
David Gornoski:Yeah. I mean, I mean, if you, you know, there's a subjective element to truth in that sense of being, you know, in love. And so, you know, if you go up to somebody who was a pretty rotten or mixed bag at someone's funeral, you know, who was a mixed bag and really did some bad things and you go up to their grieving child and say, let me tell you the truth about your dad is a horrible human being to me. Is that it could be factually true, but it's not ecstatically true. Right?
David Gornoski:You see what I mean? That's that's not true to say that. It's not true to relationality to say that. And so, you know, that's the kind of thing that we have to keep in mind is that, you know, the right likes to play the role of the teacher's clown, you know, the one that'll act up and say the irreverent thing, and they get the laughs as they get sent to the principal's office and they get the f. But they get their attention economy that way, and they can build their little cottage boycott, you know, counter cultural grift machine off of that.
David Gornoski:So the principal banning them off of a platform and then them complaining about it and getting notoriety. Just like the war on drug person, by the way, you know, You know, it's the same thing, actually. They're doing they're in the that's the black market, so they're in the social black market. That's what they are. That's an interesting thing I have to remember there.
David Gornoski:That's a social black market that they're in. You know? And they exist because of the prohibition of ideas, right, in the official market on the tonight show and everything else, the Grammys, the Hollywood movies, and so forth. So you have to you have to, you know, just be mindful of the fact that when you're dealing with problems as they're presented in your culture, they're going to be in the context of 2 warring mimetic doubles. As Gerard calls mimetic doubles, those people who are so caught up in rivalry that they look the same to an outside observer.
David Gornoski:But to themselves inside the rivalry, they look farther apart than they could ever imagine.
Derek Kreider:I think you you use Peter and Malchus. You you call them mimetic doubles as a good example.
David Gornoski:Yeah. Because they're both the servants of their respective high priest, and you have to decide which one you wanna be. And and in terms they both fail, really, but you're given the option to follow the the Christ way by obeying what Jesus says and not using the sword to strike at the other high priest who is of the sword. And he will live by the sword and die by the sword. So he had to come with a spirit of trying to be a peacemaker.
David Gornoski:Now a peacemaker, it's easy to play that role and be a moderate conservative like a Mitt Romney. That's the fake version of it. Right? You know know what I mean? Because there's a lot of people that say, oh, David sounds like a Mitt Romney or some of these, national review people.
David Gornoski:Right? Who are always talking about have, you know, the kinder conservatism while they wanna, you know, murder half a 1000000 Russians with glee like Lindsey Graham. And you're like, what? Wait a sec. No.
David Gornoski:No. No. No. No. We're not doing that.
David Gornoski:That's another fake rip off of the Christian way. You know, the Christian way is, you know, trying to deal with the thing as it actually is and not doing this mushy middle thing where you say, well, both are equally wrong and both are equally right. No. No. I mean, if you're supporting, you know, murder, it's there's no moderate position on that.
David Gornoski:It's just not right, you know, and it might be complicated to explain how that works, but, you know, there's a way to get to the truth. I think that's what we gotta do when we keep in mind that when we're entering into the debates of our time, it's gonna be a mimetic doubling, which means there's no really good truth in that. And the truth is the mimetic doubling and how alike their rivals are and how possessed by the crowd that they are and how they're missing out on so much opportunity. Like, why fight about you know, like, a lot of people having gender dysphoria is because of seed oils. So get the seed oils out of the way, and you'll solve a lot of the gender dysphoria naturally.
David Gornoski:I mean, literally, we had doctor Kate Shanahan talk about the science behind that. Taking it see, Christians take a dispassionate view when it comes to matters of solving problems in the world. Right? And they go to the aid of the pagan even in the time of the Roman plague, even when the pagan was laughing at them as their family members were being torn apart by lions in the gladiatorial games. They went to their aid and took care of their pagan neighbor who was sick and gave them water and so forth and and and tried to bring them back to life when their pagan friends wouldn't help their pagan neighbor.
David Gornoski:And that's speaking truth to love. Right? Action.
Derek Kreider:I think that, that right there is a really good segue for for the last question, because there's there's something I've heard you bring up quite a lot. And I think what you what you just said, kind of resonates on that same tune, you know, talking about the plague victims and and loving our enemies and those sorts of things. It it seems like historically, Christianity's message has spread and true solid Christianity has come, you know, as Tertullian said, the the, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The church has has grown in quality and quantity through touching on this this note that nobody else touches on. You know, everybody else is trying to sacrifice other.
Derek Kreider:But the the Christ way is to be a sacrifice, to to end that scapegoating, and to be willing to lay down our own lives, to love our enemies. And you you call I mean, maybe not just this idea, but this this kind of general concept. You talk about a Christ haunted world. And, you know, that it reminded me when you when you said Christ haunted worlds, I just read a book this year by Carl Sagan, which you're probably familiar with because you're you're into science. But, he has he has a book entitled The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark.
Derek Kreider:So a lot of that book is is really about him. He's trying to get people to see the world as he says that it truly is, rather than how those people perceive it or want it to be because that's generally how we tend to see things. And the way that he he does this is he says that this happens through science. Right? The world is illuminated through science.
Derek Kreider:And it, the title kind of reminds me of that, you know, like the old maps they used to have at the edge of the the map, it said, that here be dragons. Right? It's kind of like a dragon haunted geography. So we we fill in our ignorance with with superstitions like dragons or demons or the god of the gaps. So, you know, science has been truth.
Derek Kreider:It's been a light in the dark. But I think you and I would agree that it's it's been an inadequate light. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of recognizing our world as a Christ haunted world? And how is is recognizing this, Jesus, how does that illuminate more fully than than Sagan science and and any other path that people are trying to take?
David Gornoski:Because Sagan probably and I don't know him too well, but he probably would have taken the same position of Neil deGrasse Tyson and going along with the experts about, like, this disaster we had with public health. Okay? So he doesn't have a scientific mind in that sense. Right? He has a scientism mind.
David Gornoski:That's an in crowd. It's another priestly cast that has some auspices of scientific rigor, but really, at its core, is a deeply suspicious of moving away from its authority figures and dogmas. And one of its blind spots is being a sucker for prestige and expert status. And when these types of folks, like Carl Sagan, see that you have a PhD from a certain Ivy League school on a particular expertise subject matter. That's gonna give them a blind spot to say, well, they are an expert, and I'm gonna trust Fauci on this because I'm a scientist and I'm very smart.
David Gornoski:And it's like, no. You're you're you're just completely memetically owned. And and in that sense, you're extremely religious because the word religion means to bind together. And they're built on scapegoats too, by the way. They're disciplines.
David Gornoski:Like, physics is rarefied because it continually expels people, from its camp that defy the dogmas of of of its established textbook canons of what is physics and what is an atom and what is this and what is that. Look at Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, 1989. They believe they've discovered what is called cold fusion. And because they were chemics chemical engineers dabbling in the world of the word fusion, now they're in the world of physics. Physics outranks that in the pecking order of scientism, and academia.
David Gornoski:And therefore, if you're gonna use those terms that they were using, there's certain dogmas about what's to be expected, like gamma rays and so forth are to be measured by these things, and they couldn't produce the type of, you know, results that that their official definition of nuclear fusion was supposed to have. That's word thinking again. Right? This is you if you're saying this is fusion, you have to do this instead of just like looking at, okay, let's see exactly what happened here. Is there anything here that maybe we need to go back and go back to the founding books about what is fusion and what is nuclear energy and how do these things work and how do elemental transportation work.
David Gornoski:They couldn't do that because they were blinded by religious superstition, just like Carl Sagan. So he's completely religious in the Durkheim sense of the word, of like a social structure. Right? And he's completely misunderstanding to the point where he's taking an ideological explanation for religion being fantastical beliefs and a god with a beard. Right?
David Gornoski:So they they they otherize and they truncate and they ideologize they they turn it they turn the metaphysics of Christianity into the kinda like, this is what it means to have religion. They cartoonize it. They straw man it. And they point out things in the text that only a fool who doesn't know how to read the text would say is in the text. And then they say, I'm not that.
David Gornoski:And I went to a prestigious school, and I hang out with prestigious people with prestigious wine glasses. So therefore, I'm intelligent. And therefore, this is what intelligent people I have mimicked others that talk a certain way, and I'm gonna talk a certain way. Intelligent people might feel, don't believe in God, so I don't believe in God. Right?
David Gornoski:It's just pure mimesis. It's not actually they're completely owned by the sheep matrix. All we like sheep have gone astray, each into our own way. The sheep thinks he's going his own way, and in reality, he's going in the way of the herd. They don't know it.
David Gornoski:The only way to become a true scientist in a true sense of discovery is to imagine and to to realize that nature that you have, to be extremely to have a hermeneutic of suspicion about rarified dogmatic fields of knowledge, but also to be intelligent enough to not fall prey to every false, stupid, alternative theory that comes along as well. That's a hard thing because that takes a lot of hard work.
Derek Kreider:And people
David Gornoski:want easy answers. They want the establishment line or they want it to pick some dumb alternative community and just, mimetically, be a mere opposite. Right? Like I told you, the goth kid with the country kids. Yeah.
Derek Kreider:Could you could you compare that to the Christ haunted world? And and how is that different or better?
David Gornoski:Well, Christ's haunted world just is is the reference to the idea that everything in our world is moving towards what he said it was gonna move towards. The first shall be last. The last shall be first. And blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor spirit. And in order to get power, you have to mimic that and emulate that aesthetic in some way to try to get social status and currency within the general public.
David Gornoski:And those who are war profiteers and oligarchs and so forth know that better than Christians do apparently. And so they play into that. And, you know, if you want to follow Christ, you have to repent of your participation in scapegoat violence. You have to you have to be aware of your the illusion of your end of your distinct self being some kind of island of desires that it that you that you come up with on your own. You have to, get rid of your, envy and your desire to have social status to the point of doing really stupid things, and then free your mind.
David Gornoski:You know, Jesus teaches us how to think. Once you learn how to think, then you can go up to a field that says, oh, we've already established. This is this is possible. That's not possible. And you say, I will move that mountain because I have trust in gee that's faith.
David Gornoski:I have trust in Jesus' way, being the superior way. That that because, again, those fields are based on scapegoating. They expel people. They expelled Martin Fleischmann was this was, like, discredited. He was a top of the line chemist.
David Gornoski:Stanley Ponds is still in hiding in France. You think I'm joking? When I say they're scapegoats, they're scapegoats. He still won't come back to America. He was a US citizen.
David Gornoski:He won't talk to anybody about it. He's in hiding. He don't wanna be talked to. You see what I mean? So that's what scientism is really about.
David Gornoski:That's what Fauci did, expelled people. He was trying to censor people and get people off of Twitter. That's what they do. They're no different than Caiaphas. It is better that one man die than the whole nation perish.
David Gornoski:It's better that one chemist lose his career than the whole profession perish if we have to rethink what it means to have an Adam. La bum. That's that's your answer to Carl Sagan. A Christ haunted world gives you the impetus to be able to see past the crowd and being able to have the courage to think for yourself, not react against the crowd, to think for yourself, which is very difficult to do, and then to, to to be able to stand in solidarity with the misfits and the victims over your age, no matter which ideology tells you not to do that.
Derek Kreider:That is a a great, fantastic ending. So thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day and, and being willing to do this.
David Gornoski:Yeah. Great questions.
Derek Kreider:That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom outpost network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom living.
