524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
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Why did Russell Brand abandon hedonism?
If there is a Jesus, you're not Jesus. You are not at the center and neither is anybody else.
If you're not united by responsibility and by voluntary self-sacrifice, you will be united by power.
To let you know that the ego is still in here, I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ, but I'm going to give it as best a shot as I can give at being poor.
If you lose your individual relationship with divine guidance, the only thing that can possibly emerge is either chaos or despotic force.
Elon Musk, in a matter of posts, can disrupt, elevate new potential kings, desiccate them and remove them in a matter of moments.
Are you hopeful? And what are your concerns? So I had the opportunity today to once again sit down with Russell Brand. We've talked quite a bit, and we're getting to know each other quite well, which makes the discussions even more interesting and faster-paced. And we started out with a discussion of Christianity, and it's—what would you say— the challenge that it poses in its fundamental elements to the doctrines of dissolution, so you could say that on the nihilistic side, and to the insistence that the only proper centralizing and unifying force is power. And so... Well, both of those are very powerful arguments. One, the nihilistic argument is that everything is fundamentally meaningless and fragmented and that all unity of any sort is an illusion in this veil of tears, entropy-ridden veil of tears. And the contrary position to that on the side of power is that Only the naive believe that unifying forces are anything but the imposition of compulsion and power.
And that it's, as I said, it's terminally willfully blind to assume that there are any principles other than the Hobbesian battle of all against all. Well, is there an alternative to that? Well, the... The Western alternative, the Judeo-Christian alternative, has been, forever been, something like the proposition that an ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the alternative to nihilism and to power. And, well, we tried to sort that out and to clarify that more particularly, to investigate that claim and to see what it means in the context of relatively formal religious beliefs, say, specifically belief in Christianity, And with regards to the alternatives, we're definitely at something approximating the end of the Enlightenment. That's partly what the culture war is about.
The rationalists and empiricists, their account of the world was insufficient. The postmodernists challenged it with a high degree of success, although they turned to power. And that was a dreadful mistake. Well, everyone is, what would you say, feeling out what the alternative might be. And the discussion we had today is an attempt to further that process. So join us for that.
How's this Christianity thing working out for you? It's a powerful transforming agent. It's beautiful to moment to moment know that if he is the creator of all things, then his DNA is present in every moment, in every moment. The continual renewal of the mind that it talks of in Romans seems comparable at least to... ideologies that I'm somewhat more familiar with, corralled together loosely under the term new age, stay continually present in the moment, die unto yourself, allow yourself to die as it says in Galatians, be born again moment to moment. Now as we enter this period of wild and giddy flux, Jordan, it seems that a route to eternity is a valuable escape hatch to have identified. So how it feels... I'm reading Genesis right now. Have you read it? Have you done a course on it? And even when you're reading about Sodom and Lot and reading about a culture of... gang rape that precedes the storm of fire it feels like yeah i'm reading that then i'm like you know sort of scrolling on x and looking at the world and the hills are an inferno
And Britain is beset with a rape gang crisis that appears to be being handled in an unusual way bureaucratically. The pillars and institutions are quaking and shaking too much. intersection, inappropriateness section between the judiciary, the media, and the government. Not enough proper coordination and interconnection and communication between those same institutions.
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