You're oppressed, You're oppressed, You're oppressed, You're oppressed,
God only knows why.
Maybe you're too short.
You're not as beautiful as you could be.
You know, your grandparent was a surf,
likely because almost everybody's great grandparent was.
It's like, and you're not as smart as you could be.
You have a sick relative and you have your own physical problems.
And it's like, frankly, you're a mess.
And you're oppressed in every possible way, including your ancestry and your
biology and the entire sum of human history has conspired to produce
victimized you with all your individual pathological problems.
It's like, yes, true. Okay.
But the problem is that it is true.
And so if you take the oppressed, you have to fractionate them and fractionate them.
It's like you're a woman. Yeah.
Okay. Well, I'm a black woman.
Well, I'm a black woman who has two children.
Black woman who has two children, and one of them isn't very healthy.
And then, well, I'm a Hispanic woman, and I have a genius son who doesn't have
any money so that he can't go to University.
And I had a hell of a time getting across the border.
It was really hard on me to get my citizenship.
My husband is an alcoholic brute.
It's like, well, yeah, that sucks, too.
So let's fix all your oppression,
and we'll take every single thing into account, and then we'll fix yours, too.
We'll take every single thing into account.
It's like, no, you won't, because you can't.
You can't.
It is technically impossible.
First of all, you can't even list all the ways that you're oppressed.
Second, how are you going to wait them?
Third, who's going to decide?
And that's the bloody thing.
Who's going to decide?
That's the thing.
Well, what's the answer in the west?
It's like in free markets. Oh, yeah.
Christ will never be able to solve this problem.
No one can solve it.
What are we gonna do about that?
We're going to outsource it to the marketplace.
You're gonna take your story pathetic being.
And you're gonna try to offer me something that maybe I want.
And I'm gonna take my story. Pathetic being.
And I'm gonna say, well,
all things considered as well as I can understand them.
Maybe I could give you this much money,
which is actually a promise for that thing.
And you've packed all of your demo oppression into the price.
And I've packed all my oppression into the willingness to pay it.
And that solution sucks.
It's a bad solution.
But compared to every other solution, man, it's why 10% of us have freedom.
And so there's a tremendous illogic at the bottom of this.
It's like...
You have to fractionate the oppressed all
the way down to the level of the individual.
Well, that's what the west figured out.
You know, there's a couple of figures who at the mythological roots of our
culture and people get upset with me because I bring in religious themes.
But I understand some things about mythology and religion,
and it's not an accident that the axiomatic Western individual is
someone who was unfairly nailed to a cross and tortured.
It's like, yes! Right!
Exactly!
So what do you do about that?
Well, I thought about that for a long time, too.
It's like, well, you don't get together
in a damn mob, because all that does is allow you to be
as horrible as you could possibly imagine and suffer from none of the consequences.
That's a bad idea.
So how about we don't do that?
Well, there's a deep idea in the west, too.
It's like: Pick up your damn suffering! And bear it! And try to be a good person!
So you don't make it worse!
Well, that's the truth.
You know, I read a lot about the terrible
things that people have done to each other.
You just cannot even imagine it. It's so awful.
So you don't want to be someone like that.
Now, do you have a reason to be?
Yes.
You have lots of reasons to be! God.
There's reasons to be resentful about your existence.
Everyone you know is gonna die.
You know, you too.
And there's gonna be a fair bit of pain
along the way and lots of it's gonna be unfair.
It's like, yeah, no wonder you're resentful.
It's like act it out and see what happens.
You make everything you're complaining about infinitely worse.
There's this idea that hell is a bottomless pit.
And that's because no matter how bad it is, some stupid son of a bitch like you
could figure out a way to make it a lot worse.
So you think.
Well, what do you do about that?
Will you accept it?
That's what life is like. It's suffering.
That's what the religious people have always said.
Life is suffering. Yes.
Well, who wants to admit that?
Well, just think about it.
Well, so what do you do in the face of that suffering?
Try to reduce it.
Start with yourself. What good are you?
Get yourself together for Christ's sake.
So that when your father dies,
you're not whining away in a corner and you can help plan the funeral.
Then you can stand up solidly so that people can rely on you.
That's better.
You'll be a damn victim?
Of course you're a victim.
Jesus, obviously!
Put yourself together!
And then maybe if you put yourself together, you know how to do that.
You know what's wrong with you, if you'll admit it.
You know, there's a few things you could like polish up a little bit that you might
even be able to manage in your insufficient present condition.
And so you might shine yourself up a little bit.
And then your eyes will be a little more open.
Then you can shine yourself up a little bit more.
And then maybe you could bring your family
together instead of having them be the hateful, spiteful, neurotic, infighting,
batch, that you're doomed to spend Christmas with.
So then you fix yourself up a little bit kind of humbly because, you know, God,
you're a fixer upper if there ever was one.
And then you got to figure out, well,
can you figure out how to make peace with your idiot brother?
And probably not because he's just as dumb as you.
So how the hell are you going to manage that?
And so then maybe you get somewhere that way and your family sort
of functioning and you find out, well, that kind of relieved,
a little bit of suffering, although it reduced the opportunities
for spiteful, revenge and that's kind of a pain in the neck.
And so then you get your family together a little bit.
You're a little clued in, then, at least a bit because you've done
something difficult that's actually difficult.
You're a little wiser.
And so then maybe you could put a tentative finger out beyond the family
and try to change some little thing without wrecking it.
It's like our society is complex,
and we teach our students that they could just fix it.
It's like go fix a military helicopter and see how far you get with that.
It's like you're gonna do you'd like a chimp with a wrench?
Whack! Oh, look, it's better.
It's like, no, it's not better.
Things are complicated.
And to fix things, it's really hard.
And you have to be like a golden tool to fix things.
And you're not.
And that's the other message of the west.
It's like, how do you overcome the suffering of life?
Not saying it's only the message of the west.
How do you overcome the suffering of life is: Be a better person!
That's how you do it.
Well, that's hard.
It takes responsibility.
And I think, you know, if you said to someone,
"You want to have a meaningful life? Everything you do matters."
That's the definition of a meaningful life.
"But everything you do matters", you're gonna have to carry that with you.
Or do you want to just forget about the whole meaning thing?
And then you don't have any
responsibility, because who the hell cares?
And you can wander through life doing whatever you want, gratifying,
impulsive desires for how well useful that's going to be.
And you're stuck in meaninglessness.
But you don't have any responsibility.
Which one do you want?
Well, ask yourself, which one are you pursuing?
And you'll find very rapidly that it isn't the majority of your soul that's pursuing
the whole meaning thing, because, well, look what you have to do to do that.
You have to take on the fact that life is suffering.
You have to put yourself together in the face of that.
Well, that's hard.
Christ, it's amazing.
People can even do it.
I'm stunned every day when I go outside,
and it isn't a riot with everything burning.
Really? God, you talk to people.
It's like I knew this guy.
He'd been in a motorcycle accident, and it really ruined him.
And he was like a linesman, you know, working on the power.
And he was working with someone who had
Parkinson's disease, and they had complimentary inadequacies.
And so two of them could do the job of one person.
And so they're out there fixing power lines in the freezing cold,
despite the fact that one was three quarters wrecked with motorcycle accident.
The other one has Parkinson's.
It's like that's how our civilization works.
It's like there's all these ruined people out there.
They've got problems like,
you can't believe off they go to work and do things they don't even like.
And look, the lights are on.
My God, it's unbelievable.
It's a miracle.
And we're so ungrateful. College students,
the postmodern types, they're so ungrateful, you know,
they don't know that they're surrounded by just a bloody miracle.
It's a miracle that all this stuff works. That all,
you crazy chimpanzees that don't know each
other can sit in the same room for 2 hours, sweltering away without tearing
each other apart, because that's what chimps do.
So, what happened?
Well, I made some videos,
and I got to the bottom of some things, at least as far as I can tell.
So I told you what the bottom is.
And then I've got this idea about what you might do about it, which isn't my idea.
It's not my idea.
It's an old, old, old old idea.
It's far older than Christianity. It's old.
It's the oldest story of mankind.
Get yourself together, transcend your suffering.
See if you can be some kind of hero, make the suffering in the world less.
Well, that's the way forward.
As far as I can tell if there is any way forward.
That's under assault by the postmodernists.
So look out, because they know exactly what
they're doing, and they know exactly why they're doing it.
And that's what it looks like to me.