I wanted to understand, and I knew that those were systems of value, right, that that belief system is something that enables you to ascribe value to things so that so that you can act in the world towards things and away from things roughly speaking.

And I've already made a case to you that belief systems regulate people's emotions, but not not as a consequence of decreasing their death, anxiety or anything like that, or even directly decreasing there.

Their threats, sensitivity or uncertainty, but more specifically bye, helping them orient themselves in the world so that what they do match is what they want in the social environment.

And it's an important set of distinctions because the emotional control that belief systems allow is mediated by success in the social environment.

That's the crucial thing.

It's not.

It's not directly.

It's not as if you're holding a belief system, and that's directly inhibiting somehow your emotional, responsive ity.

It's more that you share.

You have ah, motive orienting yourself in the world so that other people can understand what you're up to so that you can cooperate and compete with them without conflict and the fact that you could do that without conflict and maybe even with cooperation.

That's what regulates your emotion.

So it's not only the fact of the police belief system, it's the fact that it's shared with everyone else.

And so people are willing to defend their belief systems because they're defending the territorial structure that enables them to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world with everyone else around them.

Now, then, the question arises.

What if two different groups of people have different belief systems?

What do you do in a situation like that?

And one answer is, you capitulate.

Another answer is that you fight.

Another answer might be that you come to some consensus about how the difference between those different belief systems might be mediated so that you can inhabit the same territory without subordination or without conflict.

But if you're going to come together in agreement, you can't do that simply by abandoning the belief system because the belief system is what orients you in the world.

And so the negotiation is very tricky, and because of that, it often ends up in subordination or conflict.

Another question that might arise out of that rat's nest of questions is if you have belief, system may and you have belief system be and they're in conflict.

Is there any principles that you can use or any guidelines you can use to take the belief systems apart?

To understand, to try to understand what might be of central value in either of them are both so that if you do bring them together, or even if one supersedes the other, that there's some evidence that they're predicated on principles that are actually viable.

And, of course, that brings up the question of what constitutes viable principles.

I got interested in that more particular question because when the Cold War was raging, there were two ideological system set up in the world.

Roughly speaking, there were, of course more, but we can simplify it for the sake of argument down to two and one was predicated on the communitarian principles that were put forward by Marx and the other was a consequence of, you know, the I would say, Western, individualistic, free market capitalist democracies, roughly speaking.

And then you might ask yourself, What were those?

Only it was that only a difference of opinion, Right?

Cause that's the central question.

It is just a difference of opinion.

If what's underneath it is arbitrary, then, eh?

It doesn't matter which system wins, roughly speaking be There's no right and wrong in the discussion, right?

It's that that would be something that would be more akin to a postmodern claim.

It's just Groupe puts forward their claims to power and Group B puts form their claims power, and they're both equally valid and well have atter fundamentally because there's no way of of solving the problem.

But it struck me that that I didn't think that we should leap to that conclusion so rapidly.

And so I started to investigate.

I think I started to investigate the sub structure of Western thought.

Not so much communist thought because I thought of communism as an interloper on the scene.

It was a system that wasn't devised and formalized until the late 19 hundreds, late 18 hundreds and I didn't see it as part of what you might describe his organic development.

There's no mythology, so to speak, at the basis of the communist perspective.

And one of the things that's very interesting is that although those ideas were roundly defeated by the end of the 20th century, they're making a comeback so rapidly that it's almost unbelievable.

You know, I got Ah, email from a medical student yesterday at the University of Toronto and now their courses that they have to take the mandatory.

These air social justice courses include modules on equity and equity is equality of outcome.

It they're pushing.

People are having the equality of outcome.

Notion pushed on them in mandatory training, in universities everywhere again.

And equity isn't equality of opportunity.

It's equality of outcome.

No, that was the central dictum of the Communist states in the 20th century is like, What the hell?

How how did we get back to that again?

Already so?

And the idea of being is, if there isn't absolute equality of outcome within an organization, that the thing is corrupt and needs to be restructured from the bottom up, and then the question, of course, is who decides that outcomes are equal by what means and with what groups.

Because you can.

You can produce an infinite number of groups of people with equally validly in some sense.

And you're never gonna get equality of outcome across the infinite number of ways that you can parse up society into groups.

It's not even technically possible unless everyone has nothing.

So anyways, these are obviously very powerful ideas.

And the mere fact that they killed 100 million people already or more in the 20th century wasn't enough to put them to rest anyway.

So back to the main theme.

Is there something?

This is the main question.

Is there something?

Is there a set of ideas that Western civilization is predicated on that air?

More than just bloody opinion.

That's the question, because if there isn't, well, then what do you what do you do about that?

It's arbitrary.

You just holding it for no reason whatsoever.

It could be a different system.

There's no reason to stick with it.

All of those things, like it takes the it takes the core out of it.

When that was nature's claim, right, he said, You take the core metaphysical pre supposition out from underneath Western civilization or any civilization for that matter and the whole thing loosens, shake un's shakes and crumbles well for nature.

The metaphysical presupposition was God well, And then the question, of course.

Well, what even does that mean?

And on one hand it means, I suppose, adherence to a dogmatic set of beliefs.

But then you might ask yourself, Well, is there something else that it means?

It means at least the hypothesis of some transcendent value.

It means at least that.

So you know, Nietzsche announced the death of God.

And so one of the consequences of that no, Dostoyevsky was working on exactly the same set of ideas and in crime and punishment in particular, which is a book.

It's a necessary book.

That's the thing is there's a number of books that were written in the last 120 years that you really have to read, and crime and Punishment is one of them.

And I think the Gulag Archipelago is another and probably beyond good, and evil is another.

But you know, Dostoyevsky and meet You were writing in parallel.

It's remarkable how much their their lives intertwined, and Nietzsche knew more about Dostoevsky than than is generally known.

There's been some recent scholarship indicating that, but in Dostoyevsky's book, Crime and Punishment, he has, ah, his main character.

Raskolnikov decides that he's gonna commit a murder, and he has very good justification for the murder.

And Dostoyevsky is very good at this.

He he puts his characters into very, very difficult moral situations and gives them full justification for pursuing the the, uh, pursuing the pathway that they're pursuing.

And so, Raskolnikov, he's broken, starving.

He wants to go to law school.

His sister's about to prostitute herself rough, roughly speaking, by marrying a guy that hates her that she hates, and that and he has contempt for at least acts in that manner.

He's trying to rescue his mother as well, who's also in dire financial straits.

He he goes to a pawnbroker to pawn his meager position so that he can continue to scrape by.

And she has this niece.

I believe it's your niece that's not very bright, who she basically treats as a slave and is horrible to and and so the carrot that the pawnbroker has this money.

Raskolnikov is in dire need.

He thinks.

Look, I'll just killer, because why the hell not?

I'll take her money.

She's not doing any good with it anyways.

Ah, free your niece, who's just working as a slave.

She's got all these other people tangled up in her pawnbroker schemes.

All that will happen is the world will be a better place.

And the only thing that's holding me back is conventional moral cowardice.

And, you know, Dostoyevsky has his character in crime and punishment.

Go through days, hours, hours and days and weeks of intense imagination about this rationalization about this trying to justify himself, placing him l outside, placing him self outside the law so that he can perpetrate this act and telling him self with all the best nihilistic arguments that the only possible thing that could be holding them back is an arbitrary sense of indoctrinated morality.

And so Dostoevsky explores that he does commit the murder.

And then, of course, all hell breaks loose because things don't necessarily turn out the way that you want.

He gets away with it, however, while he gets away with the technically because no one knows he did it.

But he doesn't get away with it in relationship to his own conscience and so that the rest of the book explores that, well, Dostoevsky.

I believe it was in crime and punishment.

Although he makes the same point in many of his books, he makes a very fundamental point.

And this is the kind of point that that I think that people who haven't investigated these matters down this particularly little particular literary and philosophical pathway never grapple with Dostoevsky, said straightforwardly.

If there's no God, so if there's no higher value, let's say if there's no transcendent value, then you can do whatever you want.

And that's the question that he's investigating.

And you see, this is why I have such frustration, say, with people like Sam Harris, the sort of radical atheists, because they seem to think that once human beings abandoned their their grounding in the transcendent, that the plausible way forward is with a kind of purest rationality that automatically attributes to other people equivalent value.

It's like I just don't understand that they believe that that's the rational pathway.

What the hell is irrational about me getting exactly what I want from every one of you whenever I want it at every possible second.

Why is that irrational?

And how possibly is that Maur irrational than us cooperating, so we can both have a good time of it?

I don't understand that.

I mean, it's a Ziff.

The psychopathic tendency is irrational.

There's nothing irrational about it.

It's pure naked self interest.

How is that irrational?

I don't understand that.

Where's the pathway from rationality to to an egalitarian virtue?

Why the hell not every man for himself and the devil take the hind most.

It's a perfectly coherent philosophy, and it's actually one that you can institute in the world with a fair bit of material success if you want to do it so I don't see to me.

I think that that the universe that people like darkens and Harris inhabit is so intensely conditioned by mythological presuppositions that they take for granted the ethic that emerges out of that as if it's just a given.

A rational given in this, of course, precisely Nietzsche's observation as well as Dostoevsky's Our Snitches observation.

You don't get it.

The ethic that you think is normative is a consequence of its of its of its nesting inside this tremendously lengthy history, much of which was expressed in mythological formulation.

You wipe that out, you don't get to keep all the pre suppositions and just assume that they're rationally axiomatic there, the rational.

To make a rational argument, you have to start within its initial proposition.

While the proposition that underlies Western culture is that there's a transcendent morality now, you could say that's a transcendent morality.

And Stan, she aided in the figure of God.

That's fine.

You could even call that a personification of the morality if you wantto if you don't want to move into a metaphysical space.

I'm not arguing for the existence of God.

I'm arguing that the ethic that drives our culture is predicated on the idea of God, and that you can't just take that idea away and expect the thing to remain intact Midair without any foundational support.

Now you don't have to buy that, But if you're interested in the idea, then you can read Nietzsche because that's what he was trying to sort out.

And it wasn't Onley Nature came to.

That conclusion was.

Many people have come to that conclusion, but I think the two who have outlined it most spectacularly, where Nature and Dostoyevsky And each is an unbelievably influential philosopher.

You know, I don't think there was anyone that was more influential during the entire course of the 20th century, accepting a very, very tiny handful of other people accepting the scientists.

We won't bother with their their discussion.

You could put marks in that category.

You could, but Freud in that category, partly.

But after that, the list starts to get a lot thinner, you know?

So maybe there's 10 people up in out level.

And Dostoyevsky, of course, I think.

I mean, if if you ever if anybody ever prepares a list of the top 10 greatest literary figures in the world, he would be in the Top 10 list now I think he's perhaps second to Shakespeare and maybe above Shakespeare, in my estimation.

So these aren't trivial people we're talking about, and they weren't dealing with trivial issues.

Well, so then the question might be what's at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent value.

And I wantto wanted to approach that, staying out of the metaphysical domain as much as possible because you can claim anything you want from a metaphysical perspective, and that's a big problem.