Hello, and welcome to Mythic Mind, where we pursue wisdom on the path between primary secondary worlds.

I'm doctor Andrew Snyder, and I'm glad that you're here.

This is going to be a different kind of episode, and that's because I'm a different kind of man.

Or maybe that's too early to say, but I'm at least in a different kind of space.

The last few weeks, like many of you, I witnessed two murders.

I didn't just hear about them, but I saw them come across my feed.

And I don't think that's something that is really meant to happen.

I don't think it is something we're meant to be exposed to in such a casual kind of way.

Now, obviously people die all the time.

People are murdered all the time, and that is tragic, and that's horrifying, or a death it sounds, is horrifying, that's something that's fundamentally unnatural.

Yet at the same time, there's a difference between being aware of death and even aware of our own death, and seeing it in such a casual way, because it's not a casual thing.

Death is never a casual thing, and something like murder is definitely not a casual thing.

And you know, it's one of these problems with the Internet, especially with the social media age, that one hand, I appreciate the Internet.

It's done a lot of good things for me.

It's exposed me to all kinds of people that have enriched my life.

It's exposed me to all kinds of ideas and books and things that I just would not have come across in my day to day life.

Offline.

You know, I've formed some meaningful relationships.

I built some important networks, not just for career purposes, but for more personal, more existential benefit, And so I appreciate the Internet.

I make my living off the Internet primarily.

At the same time, one major problem with the Internet is that it gives us a kind of artificial omniscience that we were simply not meant to have.

But be that as it may, you likely know what murders I'm talking about.

First, there was Arena z Rutzka, which I apologize if my Ukrainian pronunciation isn't great, but of course she was the or she is the Ukrainian refugee who fled a violent war zone only to get stabbed to death on our light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, apparently for the crime of sitting in the wrong place while being white.

You.

Now, as I say that, I'm not saying that there's a race war going on.

I'm not saying that there needs to be that.

That's not at all where I'm going with that.

I mean, but the reality is like, that is why she was murdered.

Now, what I find most disturbing about that scenario is not simply that one there's one bad actor who did a very bad thing.

Like I can rationally accept anomalies.

Can I can accept the madman who is disturbed on some level and just does stuff, and even aside from a diagnosis, you know, I can accept that some people have just so given themselves over to evil that they are fundamentally irrational and they are responsible for that kind of behavior.

I mean, in fact, evil by definition, it is irrational.

And this is this is a Christian conviction.

Is it's also a conviction that you find in classical philosophy that reason is fundamentally good or better yet, that reason is a is derivative of goodness, that the real is good, the rational is good, that all things were made through the lagass, the reason that holds all things together, and evil is not actually a substance.

Evil is a turning away from being.

It's a turning away from the most fundamental reality.

And as we turn away from higher reality, lesser reality, we move in the direction of the void, of non being, of irrationality, because again, rationality and reality are intricately tied together.

You can't have reality without reason, otherwise you would just have the chaotic, you just have the void.

You know, it is the application of the word of God to that which was foremost and void that provides us with the ordered world in which we live.

And so as we move away from that ordering principle of reason, away from the law goss, we're moving in the direction of non being, or moving in the direction of irrationality, and so evil is fundamentally irrational.

In fact, in the City of God, Gustin tries to deal with his question of where did evil come from?

In a good world established and upheld by a good God, Like, how do we get evil?

And we could say that, okay, the first humans were tempted by Satan, Okay, that's where this idea for evil came from.

But then the question just gets backed up.

How did Satan fall right, how do we get the of satan?

And Milton tackles this and in Paradise Loss that you know, he became enamored with his own genius.

Essentially, he elevated his own goodness above the goodness of God, and in so doing he entered into a space that does not exist, namely, a goodness that stands apart from God, that stands above God.

And so he stepped into the void, and in so doing he became consumed by his own pride.

Well, okay, that doesn't really deal with the question of like, how did this happen?

How did he engage in the sin?

And Augustine basically comes down on this and says that we can't answer that question because that would be an attempt to provide a rationale for evil.

But evil by definition is irrational, and so there really isn't a rational account that we can give for it.

And so, you know, whether I don't know that this this murderer, this guy who stabbed this poor girl on the train, you know, I don't know if he has some chemical imbalance.

I don't know if he is somebody who's simply has given himself over to evil again, And again and again.

I mean, he certainly has that track record.

Right, This is a guy who was released from prison fourteen times, which raises all kinds of questions regarding what was he doing on that train, what was he doing in society, what right did he have anymore to have a presence in society?

And so there are all kinds of problems that go into us And in fact, I had really considered taking a good portion of time to work through C.

S.

Lewis's essay found in God in the doc called the Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, in which Lewis argues that we are we are miscarrying justice when we make our justice system run by sociologists who are interested first and foremost in reform or in you know, empathy, rather than in justice.

But that in older times we were concerned about justice, right, that we talked about the justice system.

Justice deals with the question of what is one ode?

What is one do?

And if we aren't making that our first priority in the justice system, that is not actually a justice system.

It's just a sociological experiment which then becomes rife with injustice on all kinds of levels.

But that's actually not where I want to focus my attention at the moment.

Maybe we'll do that some other time.

What I want to focus on.

What I found most troubling about this scene is not that there was one mad man which was enabled by apparently a string of other mad men in the so called justice system, but that when you look at the witnesses of this murder, the other people in the immediate vicinity of the train, even right next to this poor girl who is stabbed to death, what you find is just apathy.

I mean, maybe in the best case scenario, they were just so afraid that they didn't want to do anything, but that's not really what it looks like.

You don't see from the camera.

It doesn't see like a lot of nerves.

Basically, you see people just trying to mind their own business ignore or what they obviously saw.

Write The lady right next to this poor girl, I mean, she basically waits for her stop, picks up her purse, and then just walks right past her while she's bleeding out to death.

And it takes a few minutes for somebody to come to this poor girl in open public, bleeding out to death.

That is horrifying.

That apathy is what I find to be the most horrifying, such willing dehumanization.

Nobody tried to stand up and stop this cruel beast who just casually shook the blood off his knife and walked off the train.

Nobody ran up to this poor girl to check on her, to try to help her, or at least to just sit with her in her final moments.

Now she sat there, dying alone while in a public space.

And it just raises the question, like, how can people be so callous to the value of human life?

And when I raise this question, number of people who commented saying that, well, you know, universal empathy, well that's just a concern of white people, but that you know, minorities, black people, they don't have any real concern for other people, other races.

And I just do not buy that.

I don't, you know, based off my experience with people, let alone the clear teachings of Christian scripture, the teaching of classical philosophy that I appreciate, Like, I simply don't buy that.

I believe that all people are made in the image of God.

And part of what that means is that in our basic nature, we are capable of reason, we're capable of virtue, we're capable of living in a kind of way that reflects the order with which the world was made and then declared to be good.

We have an innate relationship with reason and with goodness.

All people do, even I was reading just today in Marcus Aurelius's meditation.

If intelligence is common to us all, then so is the reason that makes us rational beings.

And if that be so, then so is the reason that prescribes what we should do or not to do.

If that be so, there is a common law.

Also, If that be so, we are fellow citizens.

And if that be so, the world is a kind of state.

For in what other common constitution can we claim that the whole human race participates?

And it is from there from this constitution that our intelligence and sense of law derive, or else where could they come from.

And so then it goes on from there.

And so what he says is, and this is a common position up from classical philosophy, that the Greeks, the Romans, and especially so in the Stoics, that all people are capable of reason because we ourselves are microcosms of the macrocosm in which we live, And so the same reason that establishes the ordered reality in which we live is the reason, or at least is the source of the reason that we have available to us by virtue of our human minds.

This is what separates us from the beasts, that we are capable of reason, you know, as Aristotle says, like we are the rational animal.

And so yes, we have this beastly nature that we have in common with the other animals.

But what makes us unique is that we have this rational nature as well, this rational soul that allows us to ask not only what is, but what could be, and out of that what should be, and that naturally leads to virtue in which we enact these ideas of what ought to be, or at least who we ought to be.

And so, whether we're looking at classical philosophy or we're looking at the Christian understanding of man as imago day, I believe that all people have access to reason, have access to virtue.

Unfortunately, however, we as a society have become so numb to this reality through the so called progressive spirit that leads us further and further into the void.

And I don't when I say progressive spirit.

What I mean is that this idea that whatever it is that we are as human being, what we should be is something that is to be found in the future, as opposed to the more conservative position, but which I don't just mean republican, right, There are a lot of Republicans that I would not describe as conservative in the way that I'm using it.

When I talk about a true conservative, what I mean is that we uphold eternal realities about the way that things ought to be, what human nature ought to be, That this is something that is given to us, and then it's up to us to conserve that reality, which often means that we struggle hard, right, We struggle first and foremost against our own selves.

And in fact, even Aristyle got this right.

This is why Aristyle said that young people generally should not be getting involved in political science, that before you get involved in political science, you first need to get personal ethics down, because what right do you have to tell other people to how to live until you figure out how to live yourself.

You need that personal virtue before you become interested in ordering the world for the virtue of those around you.

And so that's what I mean by conservative, that there are eternal realities of what a human fundamentally is the air eternal realities of truth, goodness, and beauty.

And as we strive to conserve, as we strive to uncover what those realities are and instantiate them in our own lives, that that makes us better citizens, that makes us better members of our community.

And that's fundamentally how you get a strong and virtuous state by having strong and virtuous individuals, having strong and virtuous families, strong and virtuous institutions that work together in order to give us a strong and virtuous state as strong virtuous people.

But the problem is that we've largely abandoned these ideas of truth and virtue, saying that they aren't given to us as eternal realities.

But there's something that we must actualize at some point in the future.

Right as we continue to march forward and define who we are, we will uncover who we are.

It doesn't really make sense that there is no fixed human nature.

Therefore we need to decide where we're going to progress.

But see the problem why why this doesn't make sense?

It's like, what is it that we're progressing toward?

If there's no fixed standard, then how can we meaningfully talk about progress?

What are we progressing toward.

And this is something that Lewis hits at, you know, again and again in his writings.

Just about all of his villains have this idea of progress.

I mean, consider, like the young man in Perilandra, that we're going to reach forward, We're going to reach forward into what is not in order to make what is.

But the problem is that we are incapable of that kind of absolute creation, something that only God can do.

I mean to go to Tolkien with the Cilmarillion, that Melchor goes seeking forward the imperishable flame in the void, but he doesn't find it because it dwells only with Eru Aluvatar.

And so instead what he does is he just cast himself into the void.

He cast himself into a state of absolute chaos, because he enters into that which is formless, void without the power to order it in and of himself.

His only chance at order is to bow down and to participate in the order that is established by God by virtue of his own logoss And so he ends up in the void place trying to self create.

And this is the postmodern condition.

C.

S.

Lewis is the Great Divorce when he describes Hell as just radical isolation of people ever moving further and further away from each other into their own delusions, and they live in these houses that aren't really there.

They're just products of their own delusions, their own imaginations.

They don't really keep the rain out, they don't do anything, but these constructs just make the people feel safe, but they don't actually do anything.

And when Lewis tells us this, he's not first and foremost giving us eschatology in this text.

He's giving us a commentary on modern or on postmodern society, the postmodern human condition, which is radically ice because if we don't affirm a capital R reality that stands between us as a common space, then all we are are islands.

We are just bystanders on a train while our fellow human beings are savagely murdered, and we don't care, because what does that have to do with us.

All that is is an impression upon my mind.

It's not an actual person like me, who shares my blood, who shares my fundamental nature.

It's not a person like me.

All it is is an impression upon my mind.

And so if it's inconvenient, then it's fine for me to ignore it, because well, you know, I'm responsible for my own thoughts.

I'm responsible for how I'm evaluating the impressions that are placed upon me.

In fact, that is what reality is.

It is the valuation that I give to the impressions that come upon me.

And so these ideas we're starting to ruminate within my mind as I watch that video, and then not long after, we get the murder, the assassination, the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk.

Now Charlie Kirk is somebody that I was aware of, not someone I followed very closely, but like many of you, I was struck deeply by his death.

Another video that I saw come across my feed as the bullet hit his neck and blood came gushing out.

Just an absolutely horrifying scene by this kid who seems to be radicalized by Antifa type people.

He's obviously somebody on the left based off all the things that have come out, and it's just it's so sad.

And there are many ways that I could rant and rave about this, but a lot of that has already been done.

I don't think I have a lot to contribute to that that would be new to you.

There's no point in just venting emotion.

That's not what I'm interested in doing here.

But again, if it was just a madman with a gun who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, I can accept anomalies, as tragic and horrifying as they may be.

What I cannot accept is the number of people on the left who have actively celebrated the murder of this husband and father who committed the crime of going to college campuses and having conversations like, maybe he said some things you didn't like, But is that a reason to rob a wife of her husband?

Is that a reason to rob young children of their father?

And this is the thing that really got me.

I mean, like I said, I never paid super close attention to him before his death, but after seeing that, after hearing about what happened in more detail, you know, I went, I like, I shed some tears that night.

And I'm not somebody who has a tendency to cry very often or very easily.

But as I went downstairs to my own children, who are roughly the age of his, you know, I just thinking about what it would be like for them to hear that, you know, their daddy isn't coming home today, that they're never going to see him again, at the very least in this world, which I mean for young children, that's really all they can truly understand, and then have them have to grow up without their father, like I can't imagine, Like it hurts me to even think about that, and the fact that there would be people that would be actively celebrating the fact that children were robbed of their father.

I simply cannot understand such heinous evil.

Or perhaps I can understand it.

I can understand it to the extent that I can't understand heinous evil.

But as I said at the beginning of this episode, there is an irrationality to heinous evil that we should never really be able to understand.

And the thing is, I'm not just talking about one or two outliers.

I mean, I know that the Internet isn't always representative of like reality as such, but at the same time, just numbers wise, there are a lot people that I've seen on social media cheering on the death of Charlie Kirk.

I've had friends, or at least former friends, posts on social media that they don't feel sorry for him, they don't feel sorry for his family because he supported gun rights or something.

That means that somehow an ironic twist of fate that he was killed by a gun.

It's just absolutely dreadful stuff.

Or even like, you know, shortly after his assassination, you know, the mainstream news media, I mean, one report was saying that, well, you know, he engaged in hate speech therefore, and hate speech naturally leads to hateful actions, and so he kind of had it coming, right, that was the idea behind it, or somebody else said, you know, before more facts came out, said that, well, you know, maybe it was just one of his supporters who accidentally fired a gun at him.

Like you know, the caricature of Republicans is that they're all just less intelligent Yosembiti sam just firing off guns randomly.

There were just some absolutely absurd and downright evil responses to this, and it's just the situation all over again that on some level, he deserved it, right, He deserved to be killed, his family deserved to be robbed of his presence.

The world's better off without him because he expressed a different political ideology.

He did what America is supposedly abound right where we battle it out in the marketplace of ideas that we are, you know, where these rational enlightened people that are able to appeal to reason in order to work out the best way forward.

But of course the problem is, you know, as it's been said, our Constitution was made for a religious people, people who affirm the reality of natural law, that there is a design to this world, and that the path of virtue is found in adhering to that design, you know, as conforming our microcosm to the macrocosm of the way that things fundamentally are, and not becoming deviant actors, stepping into the void.

But that's exactly what we're called to do in our age, right, you know, we're all told just follow your heart, be authentic.

But then even that, it's just so so absurd, this idea of be authentic.

I deal with this sometimes in my classes, where you know, we'll be talking about this idea of authenticity.

And what people mean by authenticity is you're just doing whatever you want to do, right, that you're you're not letting society define you, you're not relying on any external rules, but that you are being authentic to you because apparently anything else is artificial.

But the problem is that if you don't actually have a fundamental nature, there's no definition for who you fundamentally are.

Then what is it that you're being authentic to?

Are you being authentic to a moving river?

Like?

It doesn't make sense because there's no standard against what you are being held.

It's authenticity to the void.

And the thing is, if this is your mindset, if your understanding of virtue is simply being whatever it is that your whims tell you to be, then yeah, you you are being authentic to yourself.

But who you are is not a real person.

Who you are is an image of a person, a ghost of a person, a shell a person.

You are living as a man without a chest.

And this is totally antithetical to any traditional understanding of what it means to be a human.

Even that word virtue, right, it comes from the Latin weir, which means man to be virtuous is simply to live as a person ought to live, which presupposes this idea that there is such a thing as a human nature.

There are norms that we ought to follow.

And the thing is, like, well, Christianity certainly provides a framework for that.

You don't have to be a Christian to understand that there are more or less rational ways to live.

Some ways of life are better than other ways.

You know, even if you claim to be some kind of radical relativists that you say anything goes, you know, just be yourself, like you're going to recognize that there's a moral difference between the genocidal tyrant and someone serving at a soup kitchen.

One of those ways of life is better than another.

And if that's the case, then we're we are implicitly at least relying on some standard of behavior for how people ought to be living.

And Louis gets into this lot in book one of the of Mere Christianity that if we're willing to say Nazis are bad, then we need to have some kind of standard of human nature that they were willfully deficient in adhering to.

If we're gonna say anything is bad.

I mean again, And when I'm teaching on campus sometimes I ask my students, like, how many of you believe that there is objective morality?

And almost no one raises their hand, And I'll say, how many of you intend to vote in the next election?

They almost all raise their hand.

And I asked one of them, Okay, why do you intend to vote?

And they'll say something like, you know, along the lines of because this person is going to be better for our country, Okay, better than what you know.

You just told me.

There's no such thing as morality, There's no such thing as true.

One of the worst things you can do is impose your ideology on somebody else.

But then you're going to go vote on which regime is going to impose its ideology on your neighbors.

So the problem is that you're not against the idea of universal truth, you're just too much such of a coward to get invested in it yourself.

See, the reality is we cannot escape reality.

The reality is we cannot escape the understanding that some ways of life are better than others, that some ways of life are more rational than others, and that reason itself is fundamentally good.

Like we all know these things.

The only reason why we rely on relativism on this position that everything is just made up and we should all decide individually as islands, you know, how we ought to be put together.

I think it's just cowardice because you are actually choosing a moral position, right, You are just choosing a moral position that you're unwilling to reflect upon.

You're unwilling to authentically engage with, and so instead you shirk your responsibility and hide off in the shadows while somebody else imposes your unspoken will on others.

And this is different than the classical model of virtue, which instead relies on the idea that there are certain ways we ought to live.

Go back to Plato, go back to Aristotle, go back to the Stoics, that most of the great classical philosophers say that the job, the role of education, is not first and foremost to gain knowledge.

He can go off and get a job.

No, the role of education.

A good education helps us to love the right things and have aversion to the wrong things.

That we're able to distinguish between the muses and the sirens, because the thing is, muses and sirens can sound very similar.

Right, That the muses are the daughters of Zeus that inspire truth and goodness, and the artisans and the poets and the craftsmen and whatnot.

They inspire us in spirationum that they breathe into us so that then we can exhale things that are truly beautiful.

The muses call the soul up toward what is true, what is good, and what is life giving, and lead us in producing fruit.

Accordingly, as opposed to the sirens who cast out their song across the water, they fill us with a kind of euphoria that may imitate the euphoria we get with true goodness, with true beauty, but instead the sirens that that kind of euphoria, it calls us in not toward what is good, what is true, is life giving, but to what is deceitful, what is evil, what is corrupting and ultimately life consuming.

And so the path of wisdom comes through conditioning our affections so that way we are able to discern and love what is truly lovable, and we're able to discern and have a version toward that which will consume us and by extent, the world around us, as we give ourselves over to the monsters and bring others along with us.

And so, in getting at this contrast between this classical understanding that we need to love what is truly lovely and hate what is truly hateful, and this postmodern idea that beauty is all just made up and so everything's willy nilly and we're all just you know, independent islands, I want to talk through some ideas that Lewis gives us in the abolition of man.

And it just so happens that the next episodes in the Lewis series we've been doing are on the abolition of man, and so there will be some repetition here.

But what we're doing right now is a little bit more more pointed, Lewis says.

Saint Augustine defines virtue as ordo amorus, the ordinate condition of the effects in which every object is accorded the kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.

Aristotle says the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil, who has thus been trained in ordinate affections or just sentiments will easily find the first principles and ethics.

But to the krufts man, they will never be visible at all, and he can make no progress in that science.

Plato before him has said the same.

The little human animal will not at first have the right responses.

It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.

You're not going to learn the right things until you have a desire for the right things, or better yet, a desire for rightness, like a desire for what is good, what is true, what is beautiful.

In fact, even like education, we need to move beyond the response, you know, when the student asks why do I need to know this?

We need to move beyond.

You need to know this so that you can get a good grade on the test and eventually you can get a good job and make good money.

Like, that's not what education is for now.

Education very well may equip you for those things, But what education is for it's for learning to love what is lovely.

And truth is lovely.

Truth is something that we ought to love.

Lies are things that we ought to hate, that we ought to have an aversion to.

And so true education is good, it's beautiful.

We should want our souls to be conformed to the way that things are, at least the way that things should be, the way that things are ideally, And that's what real education is.

And that's how you end up with a just society.

When you have people who have learned to love things that are truly good, Well, now they're going to act accordingly.

They're going to make the right sacrifices for the sake of goodness first and foremost in their own life.

Because see the problem is that now we are quick to make sacrifices of others for the sake of what we want.

But that's not really the issue, right, That's what comes from raw pragmatism of I need to do this so can get this position, so I can get this job, so I can get the status in life.

That leads to a kind of pragmatism that renders void the essential value of things, the essential value of your neighbor, the essential value of your own soul, the essential value of virtue, of doing what is right simply for the sake of doing what is right, that is its own reward.

You know, we see this even our churches, right, I mean I once, unfortunately, you know, I once went to a church that offered a money back guarantee on the tithe.

You know, if God doesn't bless you, then you know you can get your money back, as if participating in the Kingdom of God is not itself its own reward.

And so this pragmatism where we're not concerned about what is good, we're simply concerned with what works, has been debditing, not only to the process of education itself, but by extent deadening to the human soul.

Now, how did we get here?

Well, that could take a whole series in itself, but I want to talk about some things, especially focused right now, at least in the realm of education.

Towards the beginning of the Abolition of Man, Lewis says the following regarding the characters that he titles Guys and Titus, who wrote this book that he calls the Green Book.

He's trying to avoid dealing with the real world people, the real world text, because he wants to get at the general principle here.

But so there are these people he calls Guys and Titus, who wrote this green book about English grammar.

And here's what he says.

In the second chapter.

Guys and Titus quote the well known story of Coleridge at the waterfall.

You remember that there were two taurus present, the one called a sublime and the other pretty, and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgment and rejected the second with disgust.

Guys and Titus comment as follows.

When the man said this is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall, actually he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.

What he was saying was, really, I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime, or shortly, I have sublime feelings.

Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion, But the authors are not yet finished.

They add, this confusion is continually present in language.

As we use it.

We appear to be saying something very important about something, and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.

So Guysintitus criticize this idea that the waterfall could inherently be sublime.

But instead, if we say that the waterfall is sublime, all we really mean is that we internally associate this idea of sublime with our experience of the waterfall.

In other words, to say that the waterfall is sublime is not to say something about the waterfall.

It's only to say something about my own subjective psychological state.

And so we are never able to describe the quality of a thing in a manner that goes beyond a reflection of our own psychology.

And we see this in certain elements of modern and postmodern philosophy, such as with the naturalism of Ajar, who is actually a contemporary of Lewis and even taught at Oxford at the same time as Lewis.

And you know Ajer, he said that language only has real meaning when it's empirically very afiable, and so whenever we say anything that's not empirtically verifiable, meaning that there's no scientific test we can run to demonstrate his veracity, that we're not actually using language at all.

We're just emoting, right, And so if I say that the waterfall is sublime, that's just me emoting.

I'm not actually saying anything about the waterfall.

If I say any make any kind of quality statement whatsoever, something that can't be objectively scientifically demonstrated, that I'm just doing the same things.

I'm just emoting.

I'm not actually saying anything at all.

I'm not using real language.

And so if I look out at the sunrise over the ocean and I say that that is beautiful, I'm not functionally doing anything other than if I were just to stare at it and fawn over it.

That that's the same thing.

But the problem is that they pass this off not as philosophy but as grammar, and so Lewis goes on to say, the very power of Guias and Titus depends on the fact that they're dealing with a boy, a boy who thinks he is doing his English prep and has no notion that ethics, theology and politics are at stake.

It is not a theory that they put into his mind, but an assumption which ten years hence its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

See that's what's so insidious about this that a lot of postmodernism has actually come to us by means of language, of linguistic philosophy, and so this relativism has been pushed in not first and foremost in the philosophy classroom, but in the English classroom, right in the way that we approach literature, where we're no longer concerned about what the author has to say about a text, but it's all about this deconstructed idea of what you, the reader have to say about the text.

That the author has no more authority over his own words than you do, because again, you're both just disconnected islands dealing with this moving ocean.

There's nothing solid there between you, and so it all just depends on however it happens to wash up on your shore.

Well, that's what it looks like.

And so this virtue kill philosophy has largely come to us incognito right in a way that we aren't necessarily aware of when we hear it.

And so then when we do hear it outright, when we do hear it explicitly stated, we simply accept it as common sense because the groundwork has already been laid before we even realized it.

Lewis goes on to say that the practical result of education in the spirit of the Green Book must be the destruction of the society that accepts it, because again, classical understanding of what makes for a strong people, the idea of what would make for a strong America was a virtuous people, people who understood that there are better and worse ways to live, and people who are equipped to pursue real happiness, and even the idea of like the pursuit of happiness.

You know, we're so conditioned to accept happiness as this just completely subjective construct where anything goes that we don't understand what was actually meant when we were told that we have the right to pursue happiness.

The word happiness there, it's the same idea that Aristotle has when you read the Nikomachy and Ethics and he talks about the happy life.

The Greek word there is you'd ammonia.

It's the blessed life.

It's the good life, the life that we experience when we're living as a human ought to live.

When Aristotle says that we need to be pursuing the happy life, what he doesn't mean, and he very carefully clarifies this and so we know it's not just a translation issue.

He says that what we don't mean is just what makes you feel good.

What we mean is the satisfaction that comes to living in a way that someone ought to live, and the way that someone ought to live is in accordance with reason and with virtue, and sometimes that means you do things that you don't really want to do.

Now, a truly virtuous person is not just going to drag their fee in the direction of justice, but that they're actually going to have a love for justice.

But that doesn't happen overnight, because virtue is a habit as Lewis says in Mere Christianity, every time you make a choice, you are changing that part of you that makes choices for better or for worse.

And as Aristotle says, as we exercise that choice making component of us for the better, well, now we are conditioned to continue to move in the direction of the good.

Virtue begets virtue, reason begets reason.

And so as we condition our affections, we learn to love what we ought to love, we learn to hate what we ought to hate.

We become more in tune with our fundamental human nature, and in so doing we become wise.

We become virtuous.

We're better able to relate to the people around us.

Epictetis, the Roman Stoic philosopher, talks about this that the Stoics are very much people who affirm the reality of fate.

You know, things are largely going to happen outside of our control.

What we need to worry about is not how things are going to happen.

What we need to worry about is how we are situated to respond to fortune itself, right, whether that seem to be good fortune, whether it seemed to be bad fortune.

We need to be stable beings.

We need to be stable beings that aren't dependent on fortune.

So we have a healthy relationship with fortune itself, whatever that looks like in the particular.

But then he deals with the question, Okay, so if everything happens according to fate, why are we concerned about commending virtue to the people around us?

And his response is that if people around me live virtuously, well now I've got virtuous neighbors.

And if i have enough virtuous neighbors, well now I've got a virtuous society, and that's going to be better for everybody.

However, where we are, we have a people who will clamor for justice with one breath and claim maybe even it was justice that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.

You know, it's just like that that Luigi guy, who you know, certain elements of the left turn into a hero because he killed that insurance, that health insurance ceo, because apparently that was justice.

And so in one breath they'll clamor for justice, but in the other breath say there's no such thing as justice, because there's no possible standard for justice.

And all the time Lewis tells us such is the tragic comedy of our situation.

We continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.

You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more drive or dynamism, or some sacrifice or creativity.

In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function.

We make men without chess and expect of them virtue and enterprise.

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traders in our midst We castrate and build the geldings, be fruitful, and so there it is.

We want justice.

But the problem is that if you deny the ideal of justice, you deny the natural law from which we might derive justice by appealing to our capacity for reason and virtue.

Like if you deny that, you deny our basic relationship to justice, then we can't have justice.

And the justice that we do put forward will not be justice.

It will be nothing more than a vain power play.

It will be nothing more than a Nietzschein will to power, which and look at the twentieth century and you see exactly where that leads.

Right, when you have people who are trying to recreate a humanity in their own image, what we get is the truly It's where we get the truly fascist dictators.

It's where we get the horrors of communism and socialism, and all of these philosophies that do not care about human value, even while they put forth the propaganda of justice and empathy.

Lewis goes on to say the process, which, if not checked, will abolished man goes on a pace among communists and democrats, no less than among fascists.

The methods may at first differ in brutality, but many a mild eyed scientist, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst means in the long run, the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany.

Traditional values are to be debunked and mankind to be cut out of some fresh shape at the will, which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.

And that's important that at best, in these systems that denying natural law, what we get is simply a will to power, which by definition is an arbitrary will, because of no natural law by which this will ought to be molded, ought to the natural law to which this will ought to be conformed.

That's what I'm trying to say there.

And so you cannot have justice apart from a belief in a capital art reality that can be rationally comprehended and then enacted through a life of virtue.

If you deny that you cannot have justice, all you can have is raw power.

And again you can look back to our recent past to see exactly where that leads.

Where it leads is a few people at the top and a lot of people six feet under.

If you want the kind of society that, if you're honest with yourself, you want to live in, would there has to be something like justice.

So maybe you don't know if justice is real, you can at least recognize that it'd be better if it were, and then live accordingly.

And while I wouldn't suggest that being the ending point of your philosophy, it might not be a bad place to start.

If you want justice to be real, start living as if it is, Start operating as if it is, Start forming ideology as if it is, because well, if it isn't, what do you have to gain by abandoning it?

All you have to gain is the void both internally in yourself, with nowhere to go right, that there is no direction, there is no origin point, there is no safe harbor, if you don't have a fundamental nature, if there's nowhere that you ought to actually be living.

It may sound freeing to say that you have no set tay loss, that you have no goal, that you have no set purpose, But at the same time, it's actually far more freeing to know that you have a purpose and that you're capable of expansively relating yourself to a reality that goes above and beyond you, because otherwise all you have is yourself and you can never get outside the prison of your own isolated psyche.

But here's the thing.

Say you take this radical, psychologically isolating philosophy, Say that you maintain that that there is no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as capital or reality, that there is no such thing as an objective morality to which our lives ought to conform.

Well, do you not then believe that that is a philosophy that we ought to believe?

Are the very least that you ought to believe?

And now notice what you've done.

You've reintroduced hotness.

Relativism is fundamentally self defeating.

As soon as you say that all truth is contingent upon individual subjectivity, well, now you're saying something that you believe is true for all people.

It just doesn't work.

It's the same problem when you say there is no truth.

The natural response that should be is that true.

It's incoherent.

In going back to this idea of a misuse of language, I mean, it's a fundamental contradiction, which means, like you have two statements going against each other.

It is not actual language.

And so what you are in fact doing is you are imposing a philosophy on the world around you while saying that there's no philosophy imposed on the world around you.

In actual fact, Lewis tells us Guyas and Titus will be found to hold with complete uncritical dogmatism the whole system of values, which happen to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the wars.

Their skepticism about values is on the surface, is for use on other people's values about the values current in their own set.

They are not nearly skeptical enough.

And a little bit further down, he says, a great many of those who debunk traditional or as they would say, sentimental values, have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.

They claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos in order that real or basic values may emerge, and so that there is no such thing as the abandonment of values.

You will have values.

Everything that you do is in accordance with some theory of value, some philosophy of values.

But the problem is that if you deny any kind of objectivity for those values, any kind of otness for those values, you aren't abandoning oughtness.

You are just unreflectively submitting yourself to a different set of dogmas, a kind of dogma that now you are not skeptical about, and so your skeptic about that which might be approached through reason, even if there might be some debate involved.

Right at least we're debating, we're discoursing towart, we're dialoguing right through dialogue, diologous through the lagos, and so in dialogue we might move closer to what is truly true.

But if you deny that the very reality of truth.

Then all you have now is just unreflective dogma versus reflective dogma, which might be justified.

And this is where the ablistion of man really gets fleshed out with that hideous strength, where we see that those who debunk traditional values have their own dogma, but their dogma is born of the void and returns to the void.

It ultimately consumes them back to the ablistion of man.

However far they go back or down, they can find no ground to stand on.

Every motive they try to act on becomes at once petissio.

It is not that they are bad men by their own philosophy.

They are not men at all, stepping outside the towel, which is how Lewis refers to natural law in this text, they have stepped into the void.

Nor are their subject necessarily unhappy men.

They are not men at all.

They are artifacts.

Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man, and this, I think accounts for our deadening relationship with virtue.

We have abandoned the very groundwork of virtue, the very groundwork of justice, in favor of a faux justice, in favor of faux virtues that cannot be justified.

They're fundamentally irrational, and back to the beginning, irrationality is tied up in the essence or the lack of essence that is evil.

And so as we continue to abandon virtue, well we should expect that people are going to be less virtuous.

We can expect that people will be less human as they devolve into something else, which reminds me of this line from the Chronicles of Narnia, specifically Prince Caspian, when some of the talking beasts of Narnia had artificially devolved back into wild creatures, and after they get attacked by this bear, Lucy says, wouldn't it be dreadful someday in our own world at home started going wild inside like the animals here, and still looked like men that you'd never known which were which, And this is where we are.

You abandon virtue, You abandon the kinds of things that make us human, And so you don't care that an innocent girl is stabbed to death untrained beside you.

You don't care about maybe even publicly celebrate the execution of an innocent man, because there are no standards for how you ought to be, how you ought to live the sentiments that you ought to have.

In fact, I saw this video that was going around Instagram where this I guess he's some kind of therapist, was saying that it's actually self care to not feel empathetic for a man who said things that made you feel unsafe.

So, because Charlie Kirk called people to a standard that they didn't like or appreciate or affirm, that it's actually self care to not care or maybe even celebrate his death because well, now you have one less force in the world making you feel uncomfortable.

But friends, this is not the way.

It's a way that sounds kind, it's the way that sounds affirming, but it is a path to despair, which sore In Kirkergard refers to as the sickness unto death.

In real death, there can be honor, and there certainly can be hope.

I certainly believe that there is hope, that there is life that can be found through the right kind of death.

But death of the soul is something very different, indeed, and that is the very nature of despair.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn't make it clear that I don't think that this abandonment of virtue is strictly a leftist idea, although I think that the left is most explicit about their abandonment of traditional ideas of virtue.

Right, this is what it means to progress.

We're moving beyond where we were into the void.

But obviously not everyone on the right is virtuous either, And there's a lot of tribalism that really doesn't care that much about reason and virtue, but it simply cares about power displays, even if they may or may not be doing things that you like.

There's not a lot of discourse regarding the reality, reason of virtue, the way that people ought to be living.

And so as we approach the end here, I want to reference a line from The Flight to Eras a novel, a semi autobiographical novel by Entwin Die Santa Zupri.

He said that the sole reason why our society still seemed a fortunate one was that our true civilization, which we were betraying in our ignorance, still set forth its dying rays, and still, despite ourselves, continues to preserve us.

And so what I would encourage us to do is to rediscover the life that is in those rays.

As we strive to move closer and closer to the sun that provides us with light, with warmth, and which illuminates not only who are supposed to be as a society, but who are supposed to be as individuals.

And as we live in accordance with that light, with that warmth, with that love for our fellow human beings, we will strive to live good lives because that's the best way that we can be neighbors to the people around us.

And as we strive for virtue in our individual lives, in our families, in our communities, and in our institutions, we will again be able to recapture that which truly makes a people great, namely great people.

But first we need to recover this idea of greatness as such, what does it mean to be human?

And how do we be that effectively?

And I think, to go back to the classical thinkers, part of what that means is that we need to practice good education that helps people, helps ourselves to better love what is lovely and to better hate what is hateful.

And there's a lot more that could be said about all of this, but I think that is that's my capacity for right now.

That's where we're going to end for now.

Now, preparing for this episode, I had an idea that, you know what, if I started an entire show, you Mythic Mind Show number four, where I, you know, maybe some others who joined me, take a C.

S.

Lewis approach to current events, where we look at current events, we look at current trends, and we tie it to a particular Lewis text like I've done today, whether it be one of his essays fiction or longer nonfiction texts.

And so it'd be a different approach to the current event space, you know, instead of just getting wrapped up in political punditry and all that.

Instead we look at trends, We look at things that are happening in this world, things that are happening in this country, and we filter it through the lens of a Lewis text.

I think that there could be a lot of value in that, And that's something that you would like for me to do.

If you'd like for that to happen, then let me know, Let me know on Twitter, let me know in the comments wherever you're watching this, let me know in the discord if you're over there, And I'd appreciate that if you'd like to support my work.

Support this kind of thing as well as these new ventures.

Head over to patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind and enjoin this community.

But that's different now.

Next time over here we will continue with the abolition of man.

Until then, Gospe