Dr. James Lindsay

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161 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Dr. James Lindsay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 544. When the Right Goes Too Far | Dr. James Lindsay · 5 May 2025 podcast
Well, it's certainly in Iran's interest. The Iranians would sacrifice every single Palestinian in a second. They're just cannon fodder. I mean, it's obvious that Iran is funding Hamas.
This is such an ugly vision of the future.
So that's a Nietzschean revaluation of all values.
Okay, so to me, I know that... We've talked a little bit about religious matters, but I'm going to delve into that for a second.
Yes.
That's what a Tower of Babel is.
Yeah, well, that comes along for the ride.
Okay, so I want to talk about this Lucifer idea. So Lucifer is the morning star and he's the angel of the untrammeled intellect. That's how he's portrayed in Milton, right? And he's allied in some strange way with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Right, right.
Right, right, right. The spirit of enlightenment, right?
Yeah, right, absolutely. Well, that's the question. What's the difference between what's genuine and what's false, let's say? So, in the story of Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve that they can pretty much have free reign... except for one thing. They can't, as far as I can tell what it means, is they can't take the right to define the moral order to themselves.
They have to abide by the moral order, that there's an intrinsic moral order that's grounded below nature, even grounded in the principle of being itself. They have to ally themselves with that. But Eve, interestingly, Eve is tempted by the serpent. Maybe her powers of discrimination are somewhat lacking. Maybe her proclivity to empathy clouds her. And maybe it's a form of feminine pride.
In any case, the serpent tempts her, telling her that if she ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that she would become like God, which is the one thing God forbade, right? So the idea seems to be something like the more radical the revolutionary precept, the more likely something Luciferian is behind it. So it's a serpent in the garden.
So it's clearly something poisonous, but then it gets weirdly associated with the idea of Lucifer, right? Which is a very strange leap. The leap is something like, what's the most poisonous of all possible serpents, right? So then it becomes a meta principle. And it looks to me like it's something like the drive to power.
And that fits well with the notion that, well, Marx would be on top of the communists and Hitler would be on top of the Nazis and Mussolini would be top of the Italian fascists. So if the... belief system is pressed into the service of the hierarchical status of its originators, then there tends to be something profoundly Luciferian behind it.
And the cardinal sin of Lucifer is pride. Is pride. Right. And the desire to replace God, to replace the fundamental moral order. So, I figured something else out too recently. So, imagine that you could found a society on power, because you can, at least for a short period of time. And imagine that you could organize a group of people hedonistically as well.
So that would be the real dark side of populism, right? We'll just have the government give people, it's like Pleasure Island in the Pinocchio video, right? Bread and circuses. You can get away with that for a while. Power. hedonism. You can abandon everything and sink into a pit of nihilism. That's not very effective psychologically or socially.
But that begs the question that the postmodernists wrecked their ship on, I would say. Is there a unifying principle, a high-order unifying principle? That's the metanarrative idea, right? Because the cardinal proclamation of postmodernism is that there's no pinnacle metanarrative. There's no upper union. But I think that's wrong.
I think that the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice is foundational. And I think that's the narrative that runs through the biblical course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and so... then we would have a dynamic where one, because we're trying to figure out how to identify the Luciferian players, let's say. That seems reasonable, right? So they're in love with the creations of their own intellect, but that intellect is not serving the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice. It's serving the principle of power.
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