FORREST COOPER | Can Weak Men Be Good?

My name is Will Spencer and you're listening to the renaissance of Men podcast, a place for extended, in depth discussions about the rebirth of virtuous masculinity happening around the world today. My guest this week is a former US Army Ranger and special forces operator, plus philosopher, journalist and security consultant. Today he hosts the redacted culture cast, discussing the interaction between violence and values in gun culture.

In what is easily one of my top three conversations of all time, please welcome Forrest Cooper. This is a time of transformation. As old ways fall, men are called to rise, to heal our lives, grow strong, and transcend our limitations. In tribes around the world, drawing on the best of masculinity from all of time, a new day is beginning. This is the renaissance of men.

You are the renaissance over the past couple weeks, the Christo Twitter sphere has exploded in a discussion about the relationship between Christianity and strength in men. To me, this is not a subject worthy of debate. Its not even worth discussing. I regard it as more productive to argue about what color the sky and grass is or whether water is wet.

But whatever is going on in Christianity right now shows that men cant quite figure out that a man can be both christian and strong, and that theres not a contradiction between the two. And lets be clear about what I mean by strong. I mean fit, as in a physically capable body appropriate for your height and age. Lets start there, you know, with the basics.

Id also add the renaissance of men council standard of emotionally stable and resilient, mentally sharp and spiritually committed to a daily practice of your faith. Put those together and you get the kind of strong that puts the gynocracy or the female institutional dominion over America on notice. So if you ask me, not only is it okay that christian men be strong in those ways, its required id make the case that its even commanded. And yet saying so is a sure way to start a Twitter firestorm.

Because obviously pursuing those things must inevitably come at the cost of godliness. I mean, we wouldnt want to interrupt our precious time in our prayer closet to care for our bodies, would we? In case it isnt obvious, I regard arguments over this topic as ridiculous and self defeating at best, or being made in bad faith to cover up one's own shortcomings at worst. It's like saying I'm gonna make sure everyone else is weak to cover up from my own weakness.

Liberals and leftists in San Francisco do this with misery. If we're all depressed, how can anyone even say what happiness is? So maybe for christians today, it's if we're all weak. How can anyone say what strength is? Some words that come to mind in response to this are nihilism, pietism and gnosticism. Take your pick. And yet somehow it works. Christians buy it. They think godliness and goodness can be squared with weakness. This defies common sense for me.

But we are living in clown world after all, and the church is not immune from having its own ring in the circus. So with christians I've found that it's necessary to take another approach. The frontal assaults of words like gluttony and sloth or the statement weakness is ungodly dont seem to work because apparently theres plenty of scriptural and cultural armor against it built up over generations.

Verses like my kingdom is not of this world and physical training is of some value get deployed on demand, which I regard as an abuse of scripture. Concealing personal failings behind proof texts. Its a bit like someone hiding by covering their eyes. I mean, I see you. The good news is since were dealing with adults, we can address the subject another way by undermining the core premise beneath the counter argument.

Its a bit like the philosophical version of infiltrating behind enemy lines, parachuting from altitude with specialized high speed gear, and quietly taking out your targets before being exfiltrated in a helicopter or escaping to a safehouse outside the village and fitted with a new identity before catching a commercial flight home. Get my drift? Which brings me to my guest this week.

His name is Forrest Cooper, and he might know a thing or two about the scenario I just described, not in a philosophical sense, but also a physical, material, real world sense because he's a former us army Ranger and security consultant. But he's also more than that. He's a journalist and philosopher, and he hosts the Redacted culturecast podcast. As their website states, the act of redacting a document implies that one, the document exists, and two, that information has been removed.

When applied to life, it translates into our pursuit of happiness is not something to be spied upon. Free men don't ask for permission, so those bits of data should help you triangulate his philosophical position. And he came to me with an idea for this show that speaks directly to the moment christian men and women are facing, not whether goodness and strength are at odds. That's like trying to bash in through the front gate.

Instead, he wanted to discuss can a weak man even be good in the first place? Do you see the difference? Were wondering, if a man is weak, is he even capable of being good? This is what I mean by infiltrating behind the lines were questioning the very premise that weakness is defensible from a christian perspective. Because if we prove that you cant be both weak and good, then christians who wish to be good cannot be weak.

And we kicked that ball around for more than 4 hours, producing one of the finest conversations I've ever hosted on the renaissance of men. This conversation made me proud to do what I do because I know that not everyone can even imagine a four hour podcast, let alone listen to one. But praise God, I know that my listeners are here for it. So lace up your boots and let's go.

Along the way to our destination, Forrest and I discussed a number of different topics, including guilt, shame and the red pill, masturbating your sense of morality, gun culture versus masculinity culture, the cult of the feminine, the differences between revolution and reformation, Ted Kaczynski versus the gospel, and finally, why it matters that orcs don't have a culture. If you enjoy the renaissance of Men podcast, thank you. I think you're going to love this one.

Please leave a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, plus a five star rating on Spotify and share this episode or another one of your favorites with a friend. Tell them yes, the four plus hour runtime is not a joke. And please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, a true warrior of mind, heart, spirit, and body, the host of the redacted culture cast, Forrest Cooper. Forrest, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Hey will, it's good to talk to you again.

We had a couple conversations in the past, but this is a long awaited one, so I've been looking forward to this for a while. Absolutely. I really enjoyed coming on your show maybe a couple months ago, but I've enjoyed our personal conversations as well. I was actually thinking about that.

I was thinking about that the other day, like how much time we've actually spent in conversation and what a privilege it is to get to talk to somebody that I feel like I know on the show, as opposed to like we just meeting from. Let's just go right now. Right? So it's good to have that familiarity. Well, let's do our best then, to not make everybody in the audience the third wheel. Yes. We're just going to do in jokes for the next period of time.

So we scheduled this, we scheduled this a while ago, and it turns out that it's actually pretty fortuitous timing given what's happening in the news with Israel and Palestine and the Christian Twitterverse exploding with questions of, are we actually allowed to be strong christian men? And so I'm looking forward to talking about all of these things and seeing where these questions take us.

Yeah, I definitely woke up this morning with a sense of vigor after spending some time in the word and then going through all of my feed to look at what I'm kind of getting started with for the day. First world problems of a media guy. But just the way that Twitter has been exploding in what I would think of as bad faith arguments about christian men being compelled to be strong, bad.

Faith arguments about christian men not being compelled to be strong, or the bad faith arguments like, you have to be, because what Twitter has been saying is that by saying that you have to be strong as a christian man. Oh, my gosh, no, we should be pursuing godliness. That's the part that I think I would disagree with. But I think there are a lot of men making good faith arguments, but we probably agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let's start with a fundamental question. Can weak men be good?

Like if. Right. So let's talk, let's talk about the concept, because let's talk about, like, concepts of humility. And you read the Bible, and you could go into one corinthians, wherever Paul compels, or he implores the corinthians to be strong, act like men. And it's like, it's the core Bible verse of even my father's church's men's group. And it's this concern about Paul compelling these people to live in strength.

And I think out of strength is where you find humility, because I think the bad faith argument that's always presented is that that strength is sort of this ancillary fashion statement kind of thing where you could be strong or you could be weak, or there's this bad faith argument about, like, what about old men?

And I've got an old friend who's a professor of theology, and he's well established in, he's a mentor of mine, and he's not young, and I wouldn't describe him as a muscle Mandev, but he is. But he, his strength comes from more than just his physicality, but there is a physical element to it. He disciplines his body. He maintains his health.

And the bad faith argument is that it's pitting the idea of being strong against being humble or against being kind or against being graceful or against being merciful. And what the issue, the issue that I have with that argument is how are you expected to be humble if you're just a doormat. Like if you, this calls back to, this idea about, this calls back to even the most, one of the most abused verses to target people of, like, turning the other cheek.

And the thing about turning the other cheek is it implies a bit of a prerequisite that you have an alternative. You have an alternative. You could choose to do something else, but you choose instead mercy. You choose instead grace. And this is between men, and this isn't between God and us. This isn't like, well, I am choosing to be a Christian outside of divine intervention. It's not like my strength had something to do with Jesus on the cross.

It's rather, if you're compelling people to make a choice, you're implying that there's a choice. And I think that what we've done in these, this kind of christianese pietism that I've seen you talk about is that we've missed, we've used the word pietism as a never ending excuse for simply weakness.

And it's not weakness before the gospel, it's not weakness before Christ, because if you pursue strength, you see your own weakness, but it's recognizing that the weakness before God and the weakness before the gospel is that I am not capable of producing it myself. But then when you falsely pit that against also disciplining your body, you completely throw out all of Romans. What shall we say then? Shall we go on sinning? That grace may increase.

How does that not that, how does that implication not also apply to how we live our lives? If you're going to be a man and you're going to be responsible for your life, and you're going to take the word seriously and you're not going to discipline yourself, then you're there. Something's out of sync here. So I think that's kind of the quick display, but let's get into it further. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you. I posted on Twitter today.

I've been kicking this thought around for the past week or so. And I said pietism is the posture that christians retreat to when an idea threatens to shake them out of their complacency. Right. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, no, I, I agree with the, I agree with the sentiment. Um, it's also just not a universal, but we're, like, wise enough to figure that out. The question is, are you making yourself weak so that you don't have to bear the responsibility of being strong, you don't have to make decisions.

And I think that's where it comes into. Well, and then you use scripture as an excuse. Right? And what I. What I observe in a lot of, uh, christian men that I. That I mentor is that they're hiding behind scripture as a wall. And I've worked a lot of men through this. Like, what about this? What about this? What about this verse? But what about this verse? And I say scripture is not a wall that you hide behind. It's a shield that you carry in front of you. Right? It's a. You have to be mobile.

And too many christian men, and women, for that matter, hide behind scripture as a wall. And they think that it makes them godly, when, in fact, it just makes them, for lack of a better word, cannon fodder. It makes them weak. It doesn't make them meek. It makes them weak. It's. Meekness is strength restrained, not weakness. Right. Weakness. Meekness is strength restrained, not weakness. Celebrated. I got to write that down. Yeah, you should, because that's a great line. I agree with it.

I think we could dig into some New Testament and Old Testament theology over time and continue to explore that in humility, submitting ourselves before the gospel and before the word. But, of course, it kind of going back to the bad faith argument is if I come out and say that christian men should be strong and you pit strength against righteousness, I didn't present that argument. And that's why I'm saying it's a bad faith argument.

I didn't come and say, if you can't bench press 300 pounds, you're not a good Christian. I would become. You know, I think christian men are saying, you should not be a weak man. You should not. You should. You have these things. You have your life. You have your responsibilities. And part of strength is having mastery over your environment. Not absolute. We're not. You know, we're not despots of our own world. But it's that.

It's that ability to act and make decisions and be able to execute those decisions. And then by pursuing them, we also. Oh, no. Am I still here? You're back. Because I still. I see me just fine, and I'm looking at my connection. I hope it's not terrible. That's fine. Keep going. Okay. Okay. But even in that case, it's this. The bad argument is that it pits the idea of pursuing strength or health or capability in opposition to the gospel. I am not trying to.

I'm not trying to bench press my way into the pearly gates, but I am recognizing that as a man, I have responsibilities on this earth, either to my family or to my community or to the word. And if I try to make myself weak in order to avoid that responsibility, am I not just sinning in a long term format? Am I not just saying, God, I don't have to. I don't have to face, I don't have to run the race tomorrow because I've cut my horse's hamstrings today? Well, it's like, you know, that.

That. That's where it comes into. And then. And then from, it gets even worse because we can, we are fully capable of producing in ourselves the feeling of doing good without actually doing it. And we have a word for this. We have a word for this, and it's called masturbation. And it's not. It's not a pretty word. And everyone goes, ugh. But are you. Are you masturbating your sense of morality by producing in yourself the feeling of doing good?

Oh, I would do this, or I would do that, or I. This. This is what I, you know, like, I don't have to deal with the potentiality of violence because I could never do that. Are you really just producing in yourself the feeling of being pious without actually being pious? Are you actually producing. Are you just producing in yourself the feeling of being humble without actually being humble?

Like, and this is where I think the question of strength and Christianity or strength and morality, even to some sense, capacity and morality have a relationship with one another. So you started out the question, can weak men be good? And so I guess there's a couple terms that need to be defined in there. Weak and good. So what do we mean by good and what do we mean by weak?

But first, let me just say, I think the bad faith argument that I see in addition to yours is that when you say men should be strong, men who are interested in making bad faith arguments, like, what do I got to look like? Arnold Schwarzenegger, bro? It's like they have this image in their mind that you're hearing something that I didn't say. Strength can look a thousand different ways. In fact, there was a podcast that put up a quiz.

Which of these men would you consider more as a christian podcast? The Bible bashed podcast, I think. Which of these christian men is more masculine? A long distance runner or a bodybuilder? And I said it's a false choice because both of those men can be equally masculine if they've achieved the same level of proficiency in what they do. And in fact, they would be good teammates together, because I'm not going to tell a championship marathon runner that, oh, sorry, bro.

You're not masculine because this guy can bench press 500 pounds like it's two completely different body types. God did not make men one size fits all, right? And I know that's intentional. We see this. I use this example all the time. Watch the Lord of the Rings. In the Lord of the Rings, you have nine very different men that have very different skills that are all very complementary, and they accomplish the task together. And if they were all aragorn, it wouldn't work.

You need to have a Frodo in there, right? And so when christian men hear strong, they have this image of this muscle bound hulk that they have to become, and then they're like, oh, that's an idol. And they immediately cut themselves off from discovering what their own personal form of strength is. And that's the part that's so frustrating.

It's like you've conjured an image in your mind that you want to react to so that you don't feel accountable for being that, and you cut yourself off from discovering your own God given potential. And that's the part that's so frustrating. Yep. So are we going to. Which one are we going to define first, weakness or goodness? Let's start with good, because then from there, we'll go into how weakness impacts goodness.

Okay, so let's not confuse goodness with righteousness or justified before the Lord. Two different things. Yep. But let's make sure, for the sake of this conversation, let's make sure this distinction is clear. Goodness is not earned. Righteousness, goodness is the way that I would want to define goodness, especially in the frame of this conversation, is more of a disposition and a direction. Goodness is me pursuing that which is good and contending with evil.

And so goodness is not a state of being. Now, I'll use even this metaphor. My background from a long time ago is I was an army ranger. I did the Army Ranger thing, and I joined the military, got into special operations, and did a number of deployments there. And one thing that you learn that is that I learned very begrudgingly, is that you never arrive. You never are there. You go to the army. My pipeline, my path that I took is I joined the army out of high school. I was homeschooled.

So I joined the army, went to basic training. And then what happens after basic training? We go to airborne school. And what happened after airborne school? We went to Ranger selection. And what happens after Ranger selection? You get put in your battalion, and then you have to prove yourself to your team leader, and you have to prove yourself to your squad. And your guys and your, and your platoon that you're going to be working with, but you have to do that all the time.

The moment that you start sitting on your laurels, people start questioning whether or not you're really part of the team. And after a while, you go. After a while, after you've sort of earned a bit of a place as a lower caste private, you go to ranger school, which is different than selection, and then you get your tab. And now you're sort of in the higher caste. But if you immediately go back and sit on your laurels like, well, I got my tab now I don't have to do anything.

You kind of stop being a ranger. You stop doing the job. And so goodness, for the sake of this argument or the sake of this conversation, is pursuit of the good. Are you pursuing the good? Goodness, I think, would be, is more of this disposition rather than being at a status of being. Righteousness for the sake of the way that we're defining it, is only achieved through Christ's death and resurrection on the cross, which is not something that we do of our own strength.

And I mean that very clearly, whether it's strength of heart, strength of will, strength of body. And yet we are still compelled in the Old and New Testament to continue pursuing that which is good. You are slaves to righteousness or you are slaves to sin. Are you acting in pursuit of righteousness? Are you trying to live out your sanctification? Or have you achieved this?

Not malthusian, what's the best word, this character version of saved by grace theology, which says, I got mine, now I don't have to do anything. We all know that person when we see them. They're a caricature of the gospel. And so when, when you're. But so when you, when you become, when you.

When Christ enters into your life, if we're gonna use that terminology, or when you become saved, and I didn't have any lightning from the sky christian experience that some people have, it, it be, then it, your perspective changes. Am I pursuing. It does over time, and it takes effort and energy. Am I actually pursuing that which is good or am I complacent? Sometimes I need to take refuge in the gospel.

Sometimes I need to take refuge in Christ's holiness and his strength, recognizing that I'm incapable of achieving it myself. But then I still go to bed, wake up and try it again. I don't quit because of that. And so that, I think, is goodness is a bit of a kind of a leaning, a direction, an aim, a pursuit as opposed to a status. I really like that because there's a sense of, especially the juxtaposition of resting on your laurels.

Like, I think we can see that, that when a man at any stage of his life begins to rest on his laurels and think that he's done enough any age, you know, young to old, there's a sense in which he begins to lose something of himself and perhaps even begins to rot a little bit. Right.

I understand that a lot of men want to reach a stage of life, particularly as they get older, where it's like, well, I did my job and now I'm going to retreat to the golf course or the lake house, and I'm just going to sit here. And I don't think that's actually good for men. I think it's very bad. I think that's when they begin to diminish as men versus continual refinement towards a changing ideal that you never actually arrive at. Even a man who's 70 or look at Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell is like 90. And he just wrote a new book, another new book. He's still crushing it. He's apparently a very accomplished photographer, and that's a man who has continued pursuing excellence well past the point when most men in american culture, they think that they ever can. And I think that's fundamentally masculine.

I think that's pursuing the good versus the complacency which can set in at any stage of our life, twenties, thirties, that's when you begin to fall away from, from righteousness. So I really like that. I really like that definition that you laid out. And I have, I have personal experiences in it, too. Like, so I, I finished. I left the military, and then I did some other things for a while. And then I went to school for theology and philosophy.

And so that's kind of like, you know, and in some sense, I eventually, at one point in time, I recognized that I had the attitude of, I did the thing. Like, I went to school for theology. What more do you need me to do? But that's a personal experience. And as, and when, as I adopted that mindset of like, well, I've done the thing, then I allowed myself to be.

Then. Then I immediately started rotting is the best way of saying it, whether it was through alcohol, whether it was through depression, or different issues that happened at that time. And we can certainly get into him if we must, but the same thing applies to so many things. I knew a businessman who was rather successful, and he retired.

And after a while, he went back and started a new business because he realized that he was just complacent and he was a better man when he was in pursuit of a goal. The same thing applies to relationships, and we've seen this happen. We've seen this phrase a thousand times, date your wife. And, like, and so my wife and I have been married for just shy of eight years by a couple of days. And it is something that we've had to realize this year is that we've been married this long.

Are we still pursuing a marriage, or are we just resting in the status of being married? Married. That is a really great. That is a really great distinction, because I can think of another ways across my life where resting in the status of something threatens to take hold throughout our lives. I don't think it's just a marriage thing or a career thing. I think there's a pervasive attitude that may be woven into the human condition or maybe part of America today or the world.

I don't really know where there's a temptation to be like, okay, I got the thing, or I did the thing, and now I just get to kind of rest in the. In the having or the doing and be or the being of it instead of the constant pursuit of betterment and in various significant ways. And I can certainly relate to that. Like, I had spent my time traveling overseas, and I got back to the United States, and I was like, I literally did the thing in my own version.

Like, I literally did the Indiana Jones thing that I had set out to do. And I got back, and there was a six month period where I was, like, during COVID like, well, what am I going to do now? And it was actually quite difficult. It was a real difficult moment for me, those first few months of 2020 where it's like, wow, I've just been living an adventurous life.

Countries around the world, doing all these crazy things, and now here I am in this apartment that I'm in right now with no furniture, nothing glamorous about it at all. What do I do now? And meanwhile, I could have just rested in it and been like, hey, I just did the thing. Look at how awesome I am. But instead, I looked for the next hill to take. And I think there's something very masculine about that as well, for both men and women.

Yeah. And if you want to get extremely esoteric in our theology, I believe that this thing of complacency, this status that we're talking about, is taking refuge in your own achievements and not placing your identity and your refuge in Christ.

I know that it's such a christian y statement, but there's something that I'm calling to in this point is that you look at job, you look at the Old Testament characters who are again and again humbled before the Lord, particularly when they placed their identity and their status in themselves. And you see this in the New Testament as well. And I get to, I'm only saying this because it has been sort of laid heavy on my, on my identity this year of, well, I did the things. Don't I get the stuff?

And the challenge, the hard challenge, the hard theology that I'm saying is that when you place that stagnation, that status, resting is not resting in Christ. It's not resting in the gospel. It's not resting that our future home is off this earth. It's not resting in the fact that God is the source of all that which is good and holy and true, and that we understand and that this created world exists by his continual will. It's existing in a status of I did the thing. I am the achievement.

I have. I am not resting because I am thankful that God has given me rest. I am resting because I have arrived. And that's then we usually get humbled pretty hard after that. So if you're putting your rest in God, and if you're putting your rest in the gospel, if you're putting your rest in his truth, that is not what we're, that is not what I'm criticizing. I'm to being as specific as possible what I mean by this.

We are either in pursuit of the good or we are resting in our own self righteousness. Mm, great. Yeah. Yeah. And the important thing is to be able to hold this, this not resting in our own self righteousness, to be able to hold it without simultaneously falling into the attitude that God might be saying, what have you done for me lately? Right. Because you can imagine that it would be easy to say, well, I don't want to rest in my own righteousness.

And my performance on earth as a man is constantly being challenged. And if I'm meant to serve God, I don't want to put God into a place where it's like, great, what have you done for me lately? Because a lot of men would get there into that resentful place at the burden placed on them, I guess, by the curse of original sin to constantly be laboring the sweat of your brow. Right. And so there's a component of that maybe taking on that mantle consciously. Right.

And say, this is my response to Adam's curse as a man is that I will have to labor for a lifetime, right up until and maybe the rejection of that curse, the burden of that curse is what creates that complacency. Because he could probably make the case. It was Adam's complacency that led Eve to get deceived. Right. You could make that. I think you could make that argument, and I'm not. We wouldn't be original in saying that Adam's. One of Adam's first sins was that he said, I'm not going to.

I'm just going to let see how this plays out. Right. Yeah, I reflect on that. I don't think that there's any clues given, well, at least so far as I know in the text, as what Adam's thought process was at the time. I think it's a little bit like a Rorschach test. I've looked into that in various moments and seen my own mind reflected in various ways. So I think that's probably the purpose of why this reasoning was left out.

Yeah, I mean, I suppose one day we'll get to ask Moses, but I'm not even sure. I mean, it'll be. It'll be relevant for the glory of God, for sure. Yes, exactly. It's not today. So we've defined. Yes. So we've defined. So we've defined good. Like, because the question is, can a weak man be good? And we've defined good, which is the constant. The constant pursuit of, say, taking the next hill to put it in a frame. So. So let's say. So another question is, let's define weak. And I think.

I think the definition of the word good in this way almost clarifies the definition of weak by default. Yeah, I think you're right. There is that. Well, we understand what is evil by seeking what is good. You've got the old metaphor of how do people figure out counterfeit money? They know what real money looks like, but let's find a better version of describing it, because I think weakness, I don't even think it's for expediency. Weakness is the right point, but the length of it is more of that.

Resting in weakness, like not resting in weakness. Basking in weakness. Exchanging the good for what is evil. Weakness in its fundamental core is incapability. You can't lift it. You can't do it. Or choosing morally weak is choosing to do what is wrong. And so in this case, I would describe weakness as a lack of capacity with a measure of intention. Okay. Yes, I was going to say there's a consciously chosen. Is it abdication, like weaknesses, is abdication of capability leading to complacency?

Yeah. Or even so, I think there's actually a convenient way of looking at it. So we have inherent weakness that you may not be aware of, but once it's drawn, once your attention is made about that, once you're made conscious of that, what do you choose? Do you choose to allow that weakness to persist in and essentially gain some mastery over you, or are you disciplining yourself against it? I think. And so when I. When I. When in this.

In the way that I would want weakness to be understood in the. In the. In the way that we're talking about it now, is that by saying the word weak, I'm identifying a concept which means if someone's listening, they have there, then they have things in themselves that they consider strong or weak. And then that weakness, by identifying it, is. Is that something that I'm going to maintain or is that something that I'm going to improve, which then leads back to goodness? Yes. Okay. So it's.

Weakness is not an area of unknown incapacity. So if I don't know how much I can overhead press and say it's like, 25 pounds, the weakness is not necessarily. Well, that's not really a whole lot. So let's just say there's no objective standard. If I discover my own incapacity in a particular way, the weakness is not the incapacity but the conscious choice not to address it. If I don't know what an overhead press is, how can I be judged by it? Exactly. That's a. That's a better.

That's a better definition. Yes, because we all have blind spots. Right? But the reality that we live in by what is. What's. What's the. What's the theological term? Common grace. Is that the right one, or is it a general revelation? A general revelation, like, living in this world, um, does. Like. Does show us our weaknesses. You. You don't, you may not know what an overhead press is, but when you have to lift something over your head. Yeah, you know what that is.

And if you are, let's just say you work in. We'll go back to a military example. Um, before you join the military, you may not know that part of your grading system will be based on push ups, and it changes depending on whatever the military is, whatever part of the military you're in and whatever it is. But. So if you don't know what a pushup is and you're not in the military. It doesn't matter. But if you're in the military and you don't know how to do a push up, there's something wrong there.

Right? And now that's, you know, there's not only is there something wrong there, uh, front leaning rest or whatever you want to call it in today's jargon, but if you. If you don't know what it is, then you will be shown what it is. But then if you continue to not know how to do it, that is intentional weakness. That is choosing weakness over strength.

And so each of us has in our lives responsibilities, like, whether it's paying the bills, taking care of my family, cutting the lumber for the winter, and all of the taking, lifting my. I don't have a child. I don't have any kids right now, but, like, being able to carry my child or these issues that are. That we're faced with purely with the struggle that came from that was a result of Adam's sin, we are going to be made aware of those.

The intentional blindness is that weakness that I would want to address is the intentional choosing to bask in this sort of. Well, God's grace is everywhere, and so I don't have to do anything. In fact, I just get to mope around and be depressed, and that's me talking to myself. No, I completely get it. Yes. So, let's see.

This ties into a couple conversations that I was having, that I was having this weekend, this past weekend, with some men that I met about the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is about what you've done. Shame is about what you are. And we were talking about how to apply this in groups of men, in brotherhoods, enforcing agreed upon standards. So you come into a group of men, 510 guys, doesn't matter. And there's a set of standards that you all agree to.

And if you, as a man, fail to perform to those standards, say, the first few times, you guilt them. Like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Do it better. Do it better. But then at the end of that road, if the man continues to choose incapacity, continues to choose weakness, then that's when shame kicks in. Was like, what's wrong with you? There is something, and that's shame, right? They need to be. It needs to apply.

Be applied very judiciously at the end of a long road of guilting through behavior. But then it's like, if you just can't. I've shown you how to do a push up five times, and you still haven't been able to do it. Is there something wrong with you, son? Right. There's something. That's a state of. That's a state of being. So you described both guilt and shame as a verb, something that's being done. Like, I am guilty. I'm essentially identifying that you have the noun guilt. You have the.

And that you are guilty for not doing the thing, or you are guilty for doing the thing. And then there's shame. And shame is closer. I am placing shame, or you are acting shamefully. Maybe. It is a tricky distinction, too, because I've also. My wife has helped me with this one because I've. I've been like. I generally have been a melancholy person, which actually sometimes, frequently delves into a sinful behavior of depression. It's not. You know, and I. And I'm not saying that it's universal.

There are multiple factors that can. That can participate. But she tells me is, like, you did something wrong. You feel guilt, but you need to, like, give that up before God. You need to give up your guilt because you're currently living in your guiltiness and sort of stewing in that. And then. And so these are. It's a hard one. That's a really, like, guilt and shame are really tricky, but they are certainly relevant topics to our day. Like, how do I shame you into doing what is right?

Or does that work? Or is it the right answer? Because shame. Guilt, I think from a christian sense, they imply that if you change your ways, you repent from it, then you will no longer be shameful for it. It's this forgiveness, right? Yeah. Recently reading through Corinthians. And so it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So this is. We're talking about the difference between things that are objectively sinful. Right. Versus things that are outside of the bounds of accepted.

Between an honor group of Mendez. And there's a difference between the two. Right. There are things that the honor group of men can say that we won't do because they are sinful, but then there are relative cultural things that the men have agreed upon, in a word, of honor amongst themselves. And so I think we're talking about two different things. So we can feel, I guess we would have to identify within ourselves as men where the guilt is coming from and where the shame is coming from.

Is it because we've done things that are sinful or done things that are, we'll say, not necessarily vulnerable to our friends? Dishonorable? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And that would be the question. Right. Because something that's dishonorable that's a different between brothers. That's something that needs to be addressed differently than something that is sinful. Yes. So I think we could actually clean up our language a little bit here by saying guilt is a state of being before justice.

You are guilty of a crime. You are guilty of a sin. We are guilty of rebellion, whatever. And that. And so guilt is more of a status. It's more of like, well, is he guilty of this? Yes or no? But we have turned that a little bit into a verb by guilting somebody, by accusing them of doing the thing. But really what they're feeling is shame. And shame. Like, the feeling is shame and shame. We are. If I'm shaming you, I want you to feel shame. I want you to be ashamed of what you've done.

I think to clean it up a little bit. I think guilt should be restrained to a little bit of. More of a justice oriented conversation. Are you guilty of the crime? Are you guilty of the sin? Are you guilty of lying to your brother? The thing that you did? And then shame is how shame is. Some is not only an emotional state, but it's something that we may do to one another. But the purpose of shame exists within a system of honor. And honor is something that, like you, are you not?

Let's say you and I have a rule. I'll even. I'll use a personal example. At a time in my life when I was drinking too much, my friends came to me and said, what you're doing is wrong. And they shamed me into that, because what I was doing was shameful. But it was also dishonorable because this group of men got together to be as men, united and stronger in Christ. We had sort of an implicit and an explicit intention of meeting together.

And I was being dishonorable to that group because I was not sober, because I would do these things, because I would drink, because I would spend time with my friend, playing video games and drinking too much. And so not to be too loose in confessions here, but the shame of that is that the shame I felt was that I was not living up to who I was claiming to be amongst my friend, but I was also dishonoring them by not living up to our agreed upon moral standards.

Okay, so in that sense, yes, both guilt and shame are appropriate. Yes. So I can get down with that definition. I usually tell men that guilt adheres to the doing and shame adheres to the being. And both of them can be righteously or unrighteously applied. Yes, absolutely. You can falsely shame people into believing certain things, which would be like peer pressure. You can accuse somebody of a crime that they did not do, or you can hold somebody to an honor standard that they're not a part of.

So those are all different ways to betray the thing. Yes, I think you can. Can you hold someone to an honor standard? I guess you could try. Yeah, you could. And that's bullying, right? Bullying is like, I have this honor standard. I think we see a lot of this today. I have this honor standard that I hold as a mandeh. And because you are also a man, you need to agree with my honor standards. Like, I haven't agreed to your honor standard.

Just because you're a man doesn't mean that I have to agree with you. And we see a lot of that, particularly in the public dialogue about masculinity, that if you're not 6ft tall, alpha six figures, that you're somehow beta, weak, awful, and this terrible, terrible thing. It's like, I haven't actually agreed to your honor standard of what your values are, Mister Alpha influencer. And so that's where bullying comes. It's like, well, if you don't agree, you're just, you're just gay, bro.

Stuff like that. And that's attempting to force an honor standard on men they haven't agreed to. Yeah. And there is a, the level of agreement is not universal. Like, I don't, I don't, I'm not so legalistic in the, in the sense that every person has to explicitly sign a contract into being a man. Right? That is the, there's no explicit contract. There is, there is no explicit statement of like, okay, cool. Well, I've signed the manosphere document 17935, and then it's a TPS report.

You know what I mean? And so, and here the council accuses you of not holding up to your standard. But there is still a standard between men, which is still, I still think goes back to that idea of common grace where we can look at somebody that is, say, not a Christian and say, what you're doing is wrong, and I can appeal to the argument. And so then you have a separation between logic and rhetoric. Rhetoric being a method of trying to convince somebody of something for good and for ill good.

Logic with bad rhetoric is hard to function. But then it also is a statement of being like, if I am saying a personal example of this, again, would be in Afghanistan, I learned pashtun and we were engaging in, we were dealing with high value target capture raids and high value, these kind of cool special operation stuff is what the Internet would like to think. But call of duty, modern, modern warfare was basically your life. It was, yeah. Well, actually, funny thing. Just kidding.

I was going to send you a video of modern warfare three and be like, I'm going to tell my friends, this is, this is Forrest. Oh, no, please don't. Okay. Or do, or do, but just, just don't use my last name. Okay? Make it, make it mysterious. Make it Balthazar gracian. Mysterious. But the point, the joke being, but I could still speak to a man from a different culture in his own language and say, if I were to go to, I kind of discovered this in a roundabout way.

I could go to him and say, what you're doing is wrong, and it would mean nothing to him. But if I went to him and said, what you're doing is dishonorable, then he would think about it. It was, some of it was in a conversation with an interpreter or some, it was in conversation with a detainee or something like that. Right. And so there is a little bit, there is a little bit of a universal standard. We're just not very good at identifying it, but we're still in pursuit of it.

When you say we, do you mean men in general? Do you mean christian men? Because the question that this is bringing up for me is you mentioned that we can be forgiven for not knowing the things we don't know. If I don't know how to do a pushup, I can't be blamed for my weakness in doing push ups. But as soon as I become aware that I don't know how to do a pushup, then I become accountable for gaining strength in doing push ups, potentially, if that's an aspect of our honor group.

So I think what's happening right now is that Christians in particular are being introduced in very rapid fashion, as in the past three years, to all the areas of their enculturated weakness and are suddenly becoming accountable for a whole lot of things that they weren't taught to be accountable for.

Now, we can argue whether they were or were not accountable for those things during those times, but let's just say for the sake of argument that they weren't ever made aware of being held accountable to these things. So now theyre being shown exactly how weak they are in body, mind, spirit, congregation, and everything. And theyre reacting to suddenly being held accountable in all these ways. Like, nobody told me that I had to be strong. What are you talking about?

And so maybe were seeing some of that going on, that response to the things that they didnt know. They didnt know and they dont want to know them. Yeah, I think theres some of that that does make sense. Like that is, that is, I think that is a little bit of, there's a difference here. Let's, let's actually help. I was thinking about this before we were gonna, before we jumped on the show.

And part of the conviction is, is part of the conviction falls back into even some of the writings of proverbs where Solomon says, no man knows the heart, only God, man only. And David said some of the same things of like, only God knows your heart and, and only, and only. And like no other man really knows what's at the core of who you are. Really. If you, if you get deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down, ultimately, that is between you and God.

And for the, for the church and for men in the church, some people are, let's, let's use the, let's, let's stay within the confines of the church at this time. Some men are faced with their weakness, and, and that internal dialogue might very well looks something like, well, I don't like this, and I'm going to find a way to justify my way out of it, or I'm recognizing that there's a deficiency and I'm struggling with how to handle it. So there is a bit of a difference.

And this is where I come without judgment on the factor, because I have to submit before the Old Testament and say, no man knows another man's heart. But if I know you and I have a relationship with you, I can say, will you say this? But you are doing this. You say that you should, but you are doing this, or I am coming to you saying you should be strong in this area, but you are choosing weakness. If your response is, well, I am justified in my weakness because I dont have to do anything.

Then weve already answered the question. The issue is rebellion and a lack of humility. In fact, you could almost go so far as to say its an iron law of woke projection applied in the church where I am convicting you. I am saying men should be strong and your response is, no, men should be humble. And then what reality is saying is that you're trying to argue to me that I'm not being humble, but what it's revealing to the world is you have a lack of humility in your own heart.

And I don't want that to be a cudgel of an argument saying every single response is some sort of projection, but it is something that's worth investigating in our own selves, especially before the Lord in prayer and petition and asking for forgiveness to say Lord or to myself, it's like if I am being convicted of something that I did not know I was doing, and I continue to live in that, am I rejecting the conviction because maybe the conviction is illegitimate?

Or am I choosing to live in my sin by justifying it through a. False humility and even using scripture to justify the false humility? And that's the dangerous part. Like, I don't mind a man. I mean, I do, but for the purpose. You'll understand in a minute if a man just says, yeah, I know I'm accountable for that, and I don't want to do it, it's like, all right, thank you for owning that right.

But when a man throws back a scripture verse, like, well, physical training is of some value, it's like, just own it. And that's the thing, is that you get people hiding behind the word of God to justify their own weakness, and that's pietism. Like, well, I'm staying weak because that's what we're commanded to do. It's like, I don't think that that's true. And that's the part that gets really frustrating, especially to me.

And not just in a. Not just in a dialectical level on Twitter, but because I see the way that this shows up in mens lives. I see the pain that it causes them, and I see the way that they build defenses or their pastors or fathers or whoever, generations of pastors, so far as I can tell, have built these enormous walls of defenses of scripture verses between men in their own innate capacity. So theyve been enculturated by scripture to be weak.

And, like, I don't mind helping men break that down, but it's frustrating to see it on a societal level, especially knowing where we've gotten to in America right now. Yeah. And ultimately, you can blame everything you want on culture. You can blame everything you want on oppression and culture and the wickedness that's been done to you, but that is not an equivocation or. It's not an equivocation. That is not justification for living in that lifestyle once you know about it.

Yes. And so, like, and I don't. I don't even think anyone. I don't. I don't. It's not like we're expecting. It's not. We. It's not like the expectation or the conviction is to, okay, well, you know, you need to be able to bench press 300 by Friday. It's that, you know, it's, it's. You know what I mean? Like, oh, I'm not going to reach it.

Yeah. But rather it's sort of like, hey, it's, I think in genuine conversation between men, it's saying, I don't think you're living up to the standard that you should be, and I think you're capable of it, which is a very hard thing to hear because being told that you have potential is a very, very hard thing to hear because it also implies you're not living up to that potential. It's like, ah, that stings. Is the sting genuine?

And we know and we can learn that it does come with a kindness as well. Right? So a good leader takes one of his subordinates and says, you're doing this. I think you should be doing this. And then here's how I think you can do it. And then that person, then their subordinate goes out and does it. The subordinate deserves, in some sense, some sort of recognition. He's not now the.

He's not now the kingpin of the arena, but he is somebody who, like that leader, will, on the one hand, pick up, grab the person who is not living up to his potential, try to articulate and identify it and convey that, and then reward them in some sense. Whether it's simply, look, I see what you're doing, and it's encouraging. Thank you very much. You're working in the right direction. I want to encourage this activity. And so you have this. It's so simple, but it's so thorough.

In our lives of between men, we will see each other acting in ways that they shouldn't convict them of it. And then if they follow through, like Paul says, in one and two corinthians, then they're welcome back into the fold. And we are thankful before God for his mercies that extend forever, that you have left your life of sin and entered into a life of holiness. Well, a life of goodness in this sense. So I love all of that.

And I want to correct one word that I think gets to the root of everything we're talking about. You use the word leader, but ultimately the word that should be there is father. Right? And I think that's what people are feeling is that I think I am also not a father. But it seems pretty straightforward and apparent to me.

And I can refer people to books like wild at heart and stuff like that, which gets into this in particular, that it is a father's job to help his son answer the question, do I have what it takes. And so now that we've had generations of fatherlessness where fathers have not helped their boys becoming men, discover that they have what it takes, that now men are looking to leaders like, please help me find out whether I have what it takes. Right. And because a father never did it.

And that's what you said about how convicting and how much it stings to be told that we have potential and that we're not living up to it, because the thing that's implied in that is that it stings for adults because no one's ever told us that before. And when we hear it for the first time, which as adults, which shouldn't be the first time we hear it, that's the part we're like, yeah, I know that's true.

And what stings on the back half of that is like, why has no one ever said this to me before? Mm hmm. Yeah. And resentment can set foot and take control of your life and cause more pain quickly. Yeah, yeah. And it takes over men very quickly to watch because it shows up. And I think this is ultimately the appeal of the so called, like, red pill. If I'm going to kick this, I'm going to try this on. I'm going to try this on. I think do a thought experiment. Let's do a thought experiment.

Yeah. How do I know what I think until I hear myself say it? So I'm going to try and see if this works. I think what's so appealing, what hooks menta into the red pill as an ideology is that they've never had a father say to them, I see your potential. Right. And so there's a stinging conviction with that, a longing, a pain, and then an anger at not having heard that that not only extends to their father, but they also see the impact of women feminism, particularly through that.

And so that anger doesn't have any place to go. So it expresses itself outwards towards women. Right. Because turning it towards dad, maybe, or turning it towards the self for one's own failing is too hard, and so it gets turned towards women collectively. And so the red. And the red pill is a mischanneling of energy towards women who don't deserve it.

Now, certainly there's plenty to criticize with feminism, but to make the hatred of feminism your lifestyle, to make it the sole outlet of your anger towards being, I think, is what hooks men. I think I'm going to go with that. I think you get it. Yeah. Can you help me a little bit? Because the term red pill is a little bit broad right now. And what do you. So when you're. When you describe the red pill, what do you mean by that?

So in this sense, I mean, the red pill is intersexual dynamics, sexual market value, not the red pill in the matrix, perceiving the way that society, geopolitics, etcetera, really works. I mean, strictly in terms of intersexual dynamics, the expectations between men and women for dating, romance, you know, providership, beauty, all those different aspects. Okay, so what is the core? What would you describe the core? Worldview, truth statements that define the red pill.

Is it that the world that we live in is out of balance because women have more power than men? Or that the way to, the only way? Or is it that the end goal of man is to spread his seed? Is it, is it the like, what is. What is like? Because that is a problem that I have with the. The. What you'd consider the kind of the red pill world is its theology is very muddy. Its philosophy is. It's. It's sort of very reactionary in some senses, but it's also. It's also very cynical. And, and it's.

It's. It's sort of. It's. And then finally, the combination of those two is it's reacting to abuses that may or may not have happened, and then it's identifying those abuses in a social setting, and then it's providing an ethic which is something akin to hedonism. Yes, correct. Agree. Okay. Yeah. The theology of the red pills, there isn't one. It's purely materialist. It's reactionary. It's reactionary to the marxist theology of feminism, but flipped the other way towards chauvinism.

I like that. Terminal. And unless checked by the reality of christian patriarchy, christian masculinity, unless channeled in that direction, the red pill ideology becomes nietzscheanism. Great man theology, where you are the master of the universe, that's ultimately where that leads. It leads to things like polygyny, multiple wives, you know, spreading your seed, et cetera, because that's the materialistic response. So that's the revolutionary wheel going around and around, right?

Like, men oppress women, women get fed up and oppress men, and back and forth. That's the revolutionary wheel turning. The only way out of that is Christianity, which is why the red pill guys don't like Christianity. Yeah, I still will. I want to extend some grace in this idea personally towards what people refer to as the red pill, because it being so broad has been difficult. It creates, it's a difficult place to identify.

I think what would be more useful, then, is identifying specific traits that are common within what we call the red pill community. Because even if we talk about the manosphere, that is such a broad term. Now, I don't really know about a council of guys who determine who is in and who is out, and if it doesn't matter, okay, there's a. There's a president, and he kicked me out of the manosphere. Well, he never gave. He never gave me a call, so he wouldn't. Oh, that's actually.

That's actually true. That's actually. That's actually true. I'm not making that up. Yeah. Yeah. So. So, um. I tend to spend a lot of time in gun culture, and. And this is a topic that happens within american gun culture, is that there's never what feels like. It's not actually the case, but it's what feels like this never ending battle. But there is some part that gun culture is perpetually at war with itself. And that I'll agree. I've made that statement publicly. I will stand behind it.

But it's dealing with parts of the human condition, which is who's in the group, who's out of the group. What are the in group rules? Are there in group versus out group rules? What are the things that we hold to be right and true and good? What are our belief systems and gun culture? You would think, at its core, would be simply, well, the right to own guns and self defense. But if you dig deeper, gun culture is a lot more about pursuing some semblance of character and capability.

It's that I don't just own a gun because I'm worried that somebody's going to kick down my door, because, quite frankly, I'm not. I'm not worried that someone's going to come kick down my door, because whether I want to use a statistical argument or a skills, capability based argument, it's really not the thing that I'm concerned about. Right. And so.

But what I am concerned about is this soft tyranny of low expectations and weakness in men and women and our population into complacency that results in a rejection of responsibility in favor of a godhood seated in government, where the God of our country, the God of our community, is not the God who created this world, but the government. And so I see that the gun culture is fundamentally a rejection, in this sense, of the worship of the state, because we have rights, rights to bear arms.

And by expressing that right and by participating in it, we hold the great Leviathan at bay, even if we are not in the streets with rifles. So, so, but that what the gun culture, and I think I see this in the manosphere as well, struggles with, is x person a good representation of our group?

And if you don't have a clean line, which gun culture and masculinity will never have a perfect line, I mean, with the exception of maybe biology, but you won't have a, you know, you won't have this, this clean line. We are perpetually in struggle with it, not in a marxist or eternal revolution sense, but it's something that we all have to contend with. My grandfather grew up hunting and was in multiple.

He was in world War two in Korea, and he learned how to shoot, and he learned how to take care of his family, and then he passed that on to my dad. And then my grandfather got old and died, and then my dad passed on to me. And then I wouldn't, he didn't, but my father was never in the military, but he learned these things and he passed on values to me. And so, and he's not, he's not going to be alive forever. And then he passed some of those values on to me.

And then I went into the military and I learned other things, and I have these values and I'm passing them on to somebody else. And as a result, there is no one man there like, no relation. But Jeff Cooper was a prominent writer in gun culture for many years in the late 19 hundreds. He passed away in 2006, and he was an authority figure, but some of his ideas have aged out. But that doesn't mean that we throw out everything that Jeff Cooper said. And masculinity is the same way.

The culture of the human condition, in its reflection to culture, reflects in the same way in mankind, especially in masculinity, because we do not know, we do not have an authoritative council, but we do have a question of what worldviews do we hold and where do we gain our values.

And so where the red pill community goes wrong, and I will argue what people were talking about, the red pill community goes wrong is it exchanges truth, for it exchanges the truth of one's identity in being created in God's image and designed to go live a certain way. And it exchanges that for the experience of being a dominant male with a good job or a lot of money or a great body count, if that's what you want to use.

But, like, I don't think it takes a big intellect to see how shallow that really is. It just, it's not I don't think it's a convincing argument. I think it's easy to see because it's inherently nihilistic and self destructive. Agree. Agree. It's interesting.

I think we've arrived at very similar conclusions coming through different doors, because I think there are a lot of parallels to, we'll call it masculinity culture versus gun culture, in that masculinity culture also rejects the state, but it perceives the state, I think, accurately, as a gynocracy. Right.

Like, the socio cultural milieu let's say we find ourselves in is entirely driven by what I would say, masculinity culture would call the female imperative that women get to do whatever they want, right up to and including killing babies. And men don't have anything that they can say about it. Right. And so. And there is no shortage of evidence. No shortage of evidence. Correct. And in the same way, within gun culture, people within gun culture will be reacting towards overreaches by the state.

It doesn't necessarily frame it in a gynecotic way, but it's looking at the same thing. Like, we're talking two cultures looking at the same problem and seeing different things. And so then the question that these two cultures are asking is, what is the proper response to that? And I think what we have both seen, and I think we've both seen in our own ways and very much like a speck in your eye, plank in my eye kind of way.

Meaning these two cultures is like, oh, you're overreacting and becoming nihilist. Oh, no, you're overreacting and becoming nihilist. Not saying you and me, but these two cultures. Because I look at gun culture and I'm like, wow, these guys really are substituting their firearm for a personality. But within the masculinity dialogue, there's like, oh, you really are substituting your car for a personality, aren't you? And ultimately without a faith direction.

Yeah, as long as we can understand that. Sometimes people do that out of humor, right? Yes, yes. Of course. There's the whole night vision nods thing. Like, oh, literally makes it his personality. Like, yes, some people do it unironically, and some people do it because it's funny. It is hysterical, you know? And it's like, I remember when I got my first set of personally owned night vision. It was like, this is the coolest thing ever.

I've used them before professionally, but now they're mine and they're mine alone. It's like, you know, and if you look at my Instagram page. I'm wearing a lot of night vision. Yes, you do it well, but it's tough. But at least recognize that we're still on social media. Like, there is a little bit, like, if you come to me and say, hey, man, I think you are making this way too much of your identity, and you come to me as a friend, I would hope that I would respond well to that.

But it's, I think, within what we do see, what we are seeing in kind of the red pill gun culture thing is that we see it when people do that and it doesn't, and we don't think it's a good thing. And then. But we don't. How. We don't always have a mechanism for handling that because, you know, I don't know. I don't. I don't know everybody on Instagram. I don't. I don't. I don't know the person behind every picture that I see. And so, you know, I don't. I don't really know.

But if I do know you and I do know that you're trying to make this too much of your identity, wouldn't it be my role and responsibility as a friend to be like, hey, Mandev, like, you're actually putting your identity in an object, not in. Not in Christ, like, oh, yes, yes. And to be fair, I follow a lot of the Goon culture Instagram pages, and I think they're hysterical, you know, and way, way, way early back when I started the renaissance of men Instagram account, there was an account.

There were a couple accounts that were kind of in goon culture. Pacific Northwest guerrilla, PNW, guerrilla, like, guerrilla warfare guerrilla. And he was really entertaining. He was deep into, like, goon culture. And then he kind of spiraled off into nietzscheanism. And it was really sad and kind of frightening and disgusting to watch that happen. As he kind of started, he had no place to put his identity other than violence, and it took him over. And you've seen that, I'm sure. It sounds.

Yes. So this is not stated entirely tongue in cheek, but with a salting of humor from my little ivory tower. In gun culture, I am wit. I am witnessing a paradigm shift, referring to Thomas Kuhn in how gun culture places its identity. And so I grew up. I was in ranger battalion from 2009 to 2013. And at that point in time, the area I was in was very much so steeped in the new atheist ideology.

And I grew up in the nineties where at church, you learned arguments against atheism, or you learned this is kind of, these are hyper simplifications, but generalities for the sake of the conversation and what I'm with, what I'm seeing in gun culture right now, which is not of my own power, but is of glory to God and none other, that men are coming to the end of themselves and they are choosing either the gospel or nietzscheanhe, not even Nietzsche.

And, but like hyper nihilistic ends, like ends justify the means level violence. Yes. And those two groups of people are not necessarily getting along very well. And it's a microcosm and you have to have some observation of it.

And I do think that there's a massive overlap between gun culture and the manosphere or the masculinity conversation, which isn't a big surprise because 95% of gun culture is men, but they're, and they, and they have a lot of shared values and concerns that attach themselves. And so what we're seeing at this time is as that new atheist sort of Daniel Dennett Dawkins, Sam Harris, Neil degrasse Tyson sort of bravado of atheism, loses its luster.

It also, it's not only losing its luster, it's losing its grip on people, because when it comes to the end questions, it doesn't seem to be capable of answering them very well and, or in a way that's fulfilling and that leaves the person with anything left to grasp onto. And yet we as christians know that there is an answer to that question, and we also know that we are incapable of producing it. Rather, we can only witness, bear witness the gospel to others.

And in that, that hesitation to be, well, I don't want to push my beliefs on you is, is funny because, like, who's doing it? And I don't really see this like, this bully pulpit mentality coming from the christian world. Now, I'm going to be biased, but I do see it. I'm seeing this happen within gun culture where John Lovell, warrior Poet society was a great influence in gun culture because he was forefront with his faith. He wasn't apologetic about it like you'll see in a video.

If you go back through his old videos, every once in a while you'll see him say something like, hey, look, if you're a Christian, I'm speaking to you, or if you're not a Christian, you don't need to be offended about it. And I think that's sort of good natured integrity in the way he's saying it. Sometimes I'd wish you'd come across as a little bit more bold, but then I do the same things. But what I am seeing in this sense is that gun culture is dealing with where do we even get our values?

And through that, the gospel is entering into their lives. And they're seeing that it's not this sort of mystical, wishy washy spiritualism. It's this long tradition with solid theologians and soldiers and fighters and men and masculinity, with weakness and strength and courage and despair and pain. And there is this richness in it that's in the culture.

But at the core of that belief system is that there is actually hope, because you were created by a God who knows who you are, who sent his son to die so that you could be reunited with the source of that which is good. And that is affecting the gun culture, because then from that they recognize, well, I believe that I have a right to bear arms. And where do I get that? Well, I have it because I have inherent rights. And I have inherent rights because I'm creating the image of God.

And because I'm creating the image of God and have inherent rights, then I have a responsibility to learn how to use those skills and pay attention to what's going on and be a useful agent in my environment, and then do and pursue what is good instead of just complain at the government because they're bad. People. Preach, brother.

Well, I think you've just made a very nice pitch for me to leave masculinity culture and join gun culture, because it sounds to me like the gun culture dialogue is way further ahead than the masculinity dialogue is. Because the masculinity dialogue is hung up on Christianity coming in, because Christianity actually offers the promise of what masculinity always has, which is a wife and kids and family. Right?

But what men are finding, as men like me come into the dialogue about masculinity, I get kicked out. This is why I got banished from the manosphere. One of the reasons, because men in that sphere are far less mature than it sounds like the men in gun culture are. I can't say why, but they're recognizing that they have to give up their bitterness towards women, right. And repent from that sin of bitterness. And it is not going super well.

In fact, you're seeing a very intense chemical reaction of people are blocking me. I don't even find out later I'm getting kicked out of things. Right? People are pulling away. It's been a real difficult thing I've had to go through because these are all men that I've met in person. I was filming a documentary. In many cases, I've been to their homes, met their families person to person, spending hours in front of them. And over time, I've become more christian in my beliefs. Right.

As my own sanctification has taken place. So I'm promoting a positive vision forward for men and women, families, the next generation. And the response that I've received is to be slandered and banished and blocked in all these different things. Right now. Look, fine, I'm happy to be persecuted for his name. This is not what this is about. But it's an indication to me that the gospel is not taking root in the masculinity dialogue as deeply, I don't think, as it appears to in gun culture.

And I'm very happy about that because your guys are the ones with guns. So I'm very happy that it's going in that way. But it's very favorable for me to hear that from you. Well, let me, without cutting the legs off the horse and trying to give you a full picture here, take the. Head off the horse and put it in the bed next to the gangster. Yeah. Well, you know, I know, I know a guy, but.

But the point being said is I am saying this because this is what I am seeing, and I am, I'm only, my perception is only so wide. But it is something. From your ivory tower. Yeah, from my little ivory tower, you know, my little Sauron. Little, little, you know, single story Sauron house. But what I, what I am saying is that I, I said it earlier, there's a massive overlap between the two. There is a massive overlap. And I. And maybe a better way of saying it is what I'm seeing in this community.

You may be seeing in a similar community, but at the same time, I still think there's more overlap. And the other thing is that gun culture is a broadening sphere. I think it's actually growing more than it is isolating. And. Yeah, and so, and so in that sense, leaving one to join another, you might find you're just in the same bedfellows, just different groups. I think there is plenty of the drama in gun culture, do not get me wrong. What? There's plenty of the drama. Yeah. Men being dramatic.

No. There'S plenty. You're going to find that everywhere. But what's more important is that there are people who are learning how to concern themselves with it, knowing what the limit of concern. How much opinion do I place on random people, on social media? You know, and it's that we're all people in this sense. So we're all struggling and facing some of the similar problems. I just have my sphere, and a lot of those people overlap in your sphere. And I wonder if the.

To quote, to make a witcher reference, the spheres are colliding or aligning or. Oh, I'm about to. I'm not going to get heavily interrupted, but I'm going to get interrupted. Hey, cat. I'm allergic, but somebody let the cat out, so. Okay. So hopefully you'll be okay. I'll be fine. I might sneeze once, but I won't sneeze in the microphone so that everyone will die. Sneezing is allowed. So I'm still encouraged.

I'm still encouraged to hear that because, yes, there's drama in any community of Mendez. We're seeing this right now in christian Twitter as well. The constant purity testing, like, well, the no true Scotsman fallacies flying far and wide. But I think, yeah, if you don't work out, you're going to die. If you don't have nods, you're going to die.

If you don't have a 14.5 inch SBR with a pinned and welded barrel so that you can legally have your stock, and then it's not got quadrails, because that's way too 2008. You're going to. There's purity culture everywhere. It's just. It's like we kind of have to. Everyone comes to that maturity where they realize at some point in time that anonymous people on Twitter do not determine their entire worldview, but they do have to contend with it from time to time. Right. And I think I'm.

And I, of course, encounter that in the dialogue about masculinity, you know, like, are you. Did you. Did you eat seed oils today, bro? Are you, like. I remember when sunning your balls was a thing. Like, are you sunning your balls? I think. I think I missed that. I think I missed that whole phase. Oh, good. Yeah. You didn't miss very much because it was really, you know, are you. Are you. Are you getting enough sun on your testicles?

As if that was something that men have needed for thousands of years. Was that in 2020? It was post 2020. Yeah, post 2020. Ah, okay. Well, I think I was dealing with riot season in Minneapolis when that happened to. So. Oh, yeah, just no big deal. Real world concerns is what you're saying. Yeah, dude, I was just. I'm just flexing my masculinity on you. No, I remember hearing about it. I remember hearing about it, but it was just kind of like what? What? Yeah, what?

Well, there's something to this where it's like the things that, the arguments that men get into about expressions of masculinity when they're not actually doing the thing. And that's why I think there probably is an advantage that gun culture has in this discussion where it's like, no, we are guys who at least are moderately to even extremely proficient in actually doing the thing, and it's not theoretical for us. Right.

And so at least you can say that many of the men who are in gun culture are ex military or military adjacent, you know, in a positive sense, not in a fake sense. And so at least they have some real world grounding versus a lot of guys, you know, a lot of guys who are influencing the masculinity dialogue exclusively, who perhaps are australian, and they blur their faces and they're talking about, you know, crystals and reading books. And look, there's nothing wrong with reading books.

You know, read, read as many books as you can. But there's a real isolation from reality that leads to that purity testing, like sunning your balls and doing all these weird esoteric things. It's like, no, man, I don't think it's that. I think there's more to it. And so you have men that actually are trained in doing the thing, know how to do the thing, have real life stuff going on that they've participated in, sometimes even unwillingly.

That creates a different perspective on the conversation about masculinity that I think is important to note. Yeah, well, the gun culture world goes sour when it starts engaging in mysticism, but I think the same thing applies to masculinity as well. When you start getting into these mystical arts of, again, the crystals and the sunning of your genitals and the. It. There was a. There was a, one of the first guys who came on my show was Jared Arsenault of Orion training group.

And we were talking about tactical gnosticism. We were talking. And it was. We were talking about how one of the challenges that gun culture faces or was facing at the time, and, I mean, it's sort of a concept, you know, an idea was that, well, CQB is something that only the secret masters can learn, and no one really believes that. But we know, like, we know that if you're. If you're a Navy SeAL and SEAL team six, you've probably done a decent amount of this skill set.

And, and while we can believe. While we believe that that skill set really should be open to everybody because we believe in human rights, and you should be able to. You should train, and it's a good thing to do and discipline your body and become capable of these things. There's one way that it gets displayed funny is like, we don't really have a solid hierarchy for it. Or is it hierarchy or hierarchy?

I don't know, but the other side of it is, it's like, is that CQB or recce or whatever the word is, the trending word of the day gets sort of mystified into this secret skill set of John Wickism. And it's like, yeah, but I don't think anybody really believes that. It's just, it gets the. The cool factor gets mixed in with the identity factor, and then you start spoiling the eggs, and it all goes south. And so there is, again, there's overlap here.

There's certainly overlap, but, and a challenge that the gun culture has is you have plenty of people who are very experienced in doing the thing, whether it's reconnaissance, whether it's long range patrolling, guerrilla warfare, whether it's CQB, self defense, competition, shooting. You have all these. You have a whole bunch of people with a lot of skill, and that skill is not, when you're a civilian, not being put to the test every day.

And so it's kind of like the masculinity issue of there's no real rite of passage until you realize that the idea of there being a perfect rite of passage for this is a little hard to nail down because, well, I have more CQB experience than this seal over here. But a private in the marines who had no special operations background had way more experience in Ramadi or fallujah than I ever had. And so is that.

Does that experience directly measure, is it a measurable experience that qualifies as an expert? And if an expert says something that's ridiculous and proven false, is their entire testimony thrown out? No, but we. The. But the heuristics of these kind of things, hey, this guy's gone to combat. Therefore, I can trust him. Only go so far. They're not absolutes, and so they're not being an absolute in that. In that there's no absolute.

Hierarchy provides an I at a place where people have room to argue over it. And some people argue better than others, and some people argue with good faith and some don't. And at the end of the day, where I were, that whether it's in masculinity or in gun culture, you got to start with, what are your values? And what is the direction that we're aiming at.

Is my goal to simply survive a nuclear holocaust, or do I believe that there's something right and true and good about a man being capable of defending his family and being in mastery over his own capability of violence?

And from that, he trains himself to become capable so that he can not only defend his family in the time where it may become necessary or needed of him, but also so that he will not be swayed by emotional arguments to go enact violence and then find himself the bad guy in the story. Well said. Yeah, well said. Like, why. Why are we doing this? Like, why are we ultimately having this discussion? What's the purpose of it?

And I think specifically, and so this gets, like, the telos of the whole thing, right? Telos, what's the purpose? What's the meaning? And so, like, if you're engaging and. Okay, and I see the parallels again, because the discussion about masculinity for a very long time was very much serving itself. Right? It's a. It's a self serving discussion. Like, to the, I'm more masculine than you.

Like, I've run up higher, a higher score on the masculinity scoreboard because I have more of the six sixes or whatever measuring in terms of, like, well, I have a lower body fat percentage or I have a higher bench press or I make more money or whatever. It's just scorekeeping. Right. And so versus, are you developing these things for the purpose of protecting and providing for a family?

And so the problem with masculine, the masculinity dialogue in particular, is that it began out of resentment towards women. So the manosphere came out of the pickup era, and the pickup era was all about exploiting women for one night stands. And so that's where it got all of its early. Excuse me. That's where it got all of its early dogmas, was all about winning, like winning the game over women.

So instead of faking it using conversational techniques like mystery and Neil Strauss, the game, they instead decided, rather than faking it with conversation, they wanted to win by actually being the fit, attractive, high status guy. But the only reason for that, the only reason they could come up with for that is to have power. Power for power's sake. And that all sounds really cool for men that go from their teens into their twenties.

But once they start getting into their thirties, they discover that power for power's sake either becomes a self defeating proposition, or you have to put that power into service for a wife and kids, for a legacy. Now, the problem is that if you go to put that power into service for a wife and kids, you immediately discover that there's something else other than power, because you can't dominate your wife and kids with pure power. It doesn't work that way.

And so this is where the fracture has come in the dialogue about masculinity, because men are recognizing that I just can't be this Nietzschean Ubermensch and be a good husband and father. I need another move. And so a lot of men who make a lot of money are flinching off of that notion of, like, serving, leading by serving, serving by leading, and instead are doubling down on pure power.

And we're watching this fracture happen between guys that are leaning into fornication, nietzscheanism, paganism, power for powers sake, and are cutting themselves off from the telos of what masculinity is for, which is wives, children, family, et cetera, being a husband, provider, patriarch. And so I see this paralleling in the gun culture, because it's like, why have I become powerful in the way that I have in the use of this instrument? Is it for its own ends, or is it for higher purpose?

And I can see that that split would probably be pretty tough as well. It does become tough, because you have to be split between Ted Kaczynski and the gospel, where you're striking out against power, and, and, you know, you're striking out against power, or even, there's got to be another good example, like, I wish I was better read in Nietzsche. I really do. Sure. Well, I mean, I say that, but I haven't, I've had his books on my shelf for a while, and I've only done cursory pass throughs, so.

But at the end, like Nietzsche, Nietzsche's life didn't end well. No, it didn't. They never do well. It's well, and I don't mean this. I don't mean this, like, as a gotcha, but Nietzsche brought a lot of good observation to the world. He did. I think he, I think he, he deserves the respect. He deserves respect.

But what you run into is that I think I have this, I have this model that I use, and it, and it's, and it goes naivety, cynicism, wisdom, and, or, you know, one way or another is that, is that we're all, we kind of all enter into the world naive, whether it's a skill set, like learning how to shoot, or whether it's, as a mandeh and our fathers or our communities may have some assistance in that, but ultimately, we are responsible to what we believe and what we think about and what we put our

mind to. And so we enter naive. And naivety can be described as a combination of lack of knowledge or misplaced knowledge or knowledge that isn't very well grounded with a sense of innocence. So there's a difference between. There's a difference between ignorance and naivety. Naivety has a. It has at least a dollop of. Of innocence to it. Um, but then naivety. And then I'm gonna go. I'm gonna do a straight parallel into Christianity. I'm gonna use Christianity as this example.

I grew up in the church. I grew up in the church, and I grew up as a Christian, and I grew up under good, like, christian parents who were genuine in their concerned to be parents. And I grew up in a church that had mixed levels. Right. But we're not going to. We're not going to turn this into. Well, it was my youth pastor's fault, but rather so. And as you're growing up, you're learning different things, whether it's.

Well, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, or it's, well, there was a flood and Noah was there, or whether it's Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and how do we understand what sin is and. And belief in this metaphysic, this worldview of, like, this is what the earth is, and this is who I am, and this is who God is. But then you go out into the world and you leave your parents home.

And for me, it was a culture shock because I went into the military, and a lot of that naivety was challenged. But I am not unique in that case, because you see it in christian kids who grew up in christian homes, who go to christian colleges. You see it in family. Whatever your worldview is, when you were a child, you thought like a child, and then you were confronted with the world. And so naivety, when faced against reality, something has to give.

And you can either go deep into delusion and reject all reality and become a solipsist or a not even, like, you can reject all reality and just say, my belief uber alice, and. And whatever I believe to be true. And this is the postmodern answer, and that is, well, perception is reality. And what I believe is actually only a fashion statement about how I care about things. And. Or the other option is to become skeptical of everything, and both of them comically produce the same thing. Cynicism.

There's no such thing as truth. It's all corrupt. There is no truth but power. And then so skepticism is a intellectual tool. Is an intellectual tool. So you present a theory, an argument. I will be skeptical towards it. My skepticism should be considered a sign of honor if it's done in good faith. And that skepticism is a tool. I'm being skeptical of your position, your argument, your thesis, your premises.

But then if that skepticism starts becoming a worldview that, well, I don't know if there is any reality or I don't know if there is any truth. There is no truth at all. It's just perception. And then there is no. There is no. When you apply skepticism to epistemology of what, how do we understand information and how do we think and how do we act? Then you start becoming cynical, and then cynicism, if left to fester, becomes nihilism. And nihilism is a met.

It is ace, is skepticism at the metaphysical level where you are and you've gone from your foundations of morality, nothing but skepticism, your belief. There's nothing good. Everything's corrupt. There's nothing good under the sun. There is no truth but power. And this is what nihilism produces. There is no truth but power. There's no good but pleasure. There is no fun but hedonism. There is no. And it destroys. It destroys me. There is no meaning. Everything is meaningless.

And so let's eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. And the dark part of it is that nihilism, that very nihilism, the end, is either hedonism or suicide. And hedonism is a slow suicide. Yep. It's just a slow distraction from the death.

And I can say that with absolute conviction that the suicide of that sort of hedon, that lifestyle of hedonism is ultimately when you wake up in the morning, hungover, when you come off that buzz, when that distraction has become your meaning of life, every moment away from that distraction is terrible because all you have left is the meaningless of existence. But so you're faced with this abyss, and this is Nietzsche's abyss, right? You stare into the abyss.

The abyss stares back at you, and you start seeing that. That very wickedness that you see in the world is also in yourself. And all the evils that you see in other people are that can exit. They exist in you as well. And you have to distract yourself from that or reject it or fight it. So this is where you get. This is where we end up with this is. You started naive. Naivety had to crumble because it faced reality. When it crumbled, something had to fill the void.

And it started with skepticism manifested in a cynicism. And then it completely encapsulated into nihilism, which is death, then. But you have a choice. You have an option here. But what you can do when you see that abyss is you can look into it, recognize that you don't know all the answers, you don't know everything.

But you start with a little bit of truth, and you take one step into the darkness, and you learn to navigate it one step at a time, and you start walking through it just a little bit. And that is a voluntary participation. And you are engaging in it one step at a time. And as you learn to navigate that infinite doubt, as you take time and effort and humility, because that darkness is out there, is also in you, then you can find the boon. And that boon.

This is kind of hearkening back to a little bit of Joseph Campbell, which I wouldn't write him as, like the world's most solid theologian, but here, with a thousand faces, is worth reading. And. And it was specifically for the hero's journey. And he. And he. But you get this journey, this process of going back to that statement about the good taking one step in pursuit of goodness, one step. And that is where wisdom is found. It's not found in infinite skepticism.

It's not found in foolish naivety or childish naivety. It's found in facing the hardship of the world with humility, one step at a time. And so for the manosphere issue, I'll speak to the gun culture issue first. And for the gun culture issue is it starts with, there's good guys and bad guys. There's cops and robbers, there's oppressors and oppressed. And if you'll not give Marx, we'll give Marx his due, but we won't give him the credit he demanded, which is near godhood.

What we will do is that there's good guys and bad guys. And then you get out into the world, and you realize that it's not so clear that the army that you joined in is participating in things that has gone to war, a juice ad bellum war, which doesn't really match up with the jus in Bello rules of engagement, that the people who send men to war don't pay the price. They don't pay the consequences for the war that they're sending people to.

And the rules of engagement are being written by people whose intent is to become rich and get rid of you because you go make them money, and then they dispose of you because you do your. You live honorably as a veteran and as a soldier, and then you become a veteran, and the VA doesn't help you at all. Yeah. You know, and so. And the world gets really dark really quickly. And there's a refuge from that darkness, which is, well, nihilism or skepticism, even cynicism. But that.

That refuge starts to eat away at your soul. You start losing not even the flavor for life, but even the will to live. And from there is where you start. You can choose to either bask in the wickedness in some form of self justification, and let's say you bask in that nihilism, but you achieve power, go forth and destroy, I guess, because then all you have is power.

And when that power fades because mankind is fickle and the world does not uphold emperors or kings to last forever, then you will find your day of ruin. But there is the step where. That you are faced with. Do I choose to pursue wisdom? And wisdom is recognizing that there's doubt, recognizing that there are. There's. It's complex. Recognizing that you have a capability to handle some of that complexity, but not all of it at any given time.

And so you take small steps to understand a little bit here and a little bit here. So you learn how to shoot. You learn. Maybe you don't join the military, but you realize that it's not all great. There's oppression coming from the government through the ATF or whatever. And then the nihilistic answer is, well, then let's just live in violence. Let's just bask in violence. And that you can get Bosnia from that.

No one wants to see a bosnian revolution in America where people are just taking potshots at each other, trying to get gas or feed their family. Or you can. Or you can choose wisdom, which is learning to be capable. And not only learning to be capable, but grounding that capability in that higher purpose, which you take one step at a time. There's no silver bullet to gun culture. There's no silver bullet to corruption. But you can participate in small parts.

Maybe it's at your church, in your family, raising your kids, influencing their friends. Maybe it's participating in competition, building an economy, running a small business. And you. And you have your small participation, which leads to a greater participation. Maybe you become very influential. You've got millions of people who follow you. Then you have the ability to speak into their lives, not out of arrogance, but out of humility, because we're in this together. We're in this.

This. This nation together. And. And you, you submit that strength to a higher power, which you continuously engage in instead of just submitting to it like a fool. The masculinity might have its, I think masculinity has a similar, a similar attribute attribution to it. Mm hmm. I think you said the magic bit there at the end, submitting to a higher power. And that's the part where I think a lot of men are forced into a position of they either have to submit or they have to go their own way.

They have to become God. Thats right. And thats Nichu. Its like God is dead. What will we do? Well, we will have to become gods ourselves. I was talking to some guys. I spoke at a conference this past weekend, and I was talking about my particular strategy with debate and dialogue is I will jujitsu people into a position where they have to either choose, they have to choose the gospel or whatever it is they're choosing instead.

So, for example, with feminism, getting women into a position where it's like, hey, you see that right there? You have to choose to either let that go, to choose the gospel and submission to Christ, or choose feminism. Like, theres no other choice. And so with men as well, I do this also. And the challenge there is men get to this place where theyre in nihilism or theyre in hedonism. Right.

And im so glad that you said hedonism is slow suicide, because I recorded part of and asked me anything yesterday where I was talking about something that ive heard described. Theres no source for where this term came from. But I heard it. And so ive been using it. Long tail suicide. Right. And you just said it. That's hedonism. Right. Like, for example, overindulgence and food and alcohol and obesity over time is hedonism. It's the pursuit of pleasure. It's just killing yourself slowly.

And you can see that, right. And so men get in this position where it's nihilism, hedonism, nietzsche ism, nietzscheanism, et cetera, like will to power, where they recognize, you can walk that road, that road does not have a good end, or you can submit to a higher power. But then they recognize very quickly, I think, the conviction of sin and repentance within themselves. And I think they think they're too strong to be humble or they're too strong to apologize.

Like, no, I'm the man, and that's pride. And so the men who can truly repent for their sins, for their mistakes, perhaps through their whole lives, are the men that are strong enough to be humble. Now, in many cases, this may mean that they lose everything.

If you've built, there's a great example of this, and his name is Roche V. And he was one of the most infamous pickup artists, made God only knows how much money traveling around the world, who knows how many women had books and forums and all this stuff. He got convicted of his sin long before the manosphere started to figure it out. And he became Eastern Orthodox, which I think was the faith that his family was in.

So he returned to the faith of his family, burned all of his books, took them all down off Amazon, gave away his website, and left it all behind, lost everything. It's been very difficult for him, but I judge him as being sincere.

And so for men that are forced into this position that they've built themselves up as sort of pseudo gods, stand in for God, and they've built an identity out of that when they feel the call to repentance because they go through some crisis or they've recognized that maybe my theology, my personal theology, isn't as strong as I had hoped. Right? They may recognize I will have to probably lose everything and repent for my wrong beliefs.

And for some men, that's like the rich young ruler, like, give it all up and follow me, it's like, nope, I won't do that. And then, so they take off. They take off down the other path. And so for me, this is very validating of the by grace alone, faith through grace alone. Like, I couldn't have gotten there through my own repentance for my own things without, without God doing it. Like, I'm not a self made man, I'm a God made mandeh. And so it's really reaffirming for me of the true power.

And I don't know that I hope and pray that more men feel that, because I don't think you can just walk that through your own will. It must be something deeper within you, higher above you that's taking place through you, to get you through the depth of repentance that some men and women as well, will have to go through to achieve what we're talking about. Yeah, there's a, there was, there was this sort of, how do you, how do you say it? Like this story, story book version of coming to faith.

And, and like, I remember as a child, you know, you'd see, I was a young man in my teenage years, and you would see these people who were living, these young kids, right, living, living lives of sin, whatever, whatever it was at the time, whatever was the, the dirty word. And then they, they, through some event, through Christ coming to them, received the gospel, became christians and turned their lives around.

And sure, none of it happened overnight, and some of it was bigger and some of it was smaller and there was emotion expressed. But then for some of us, it wasn't like that. And it wasn't like we had this big aha. Moment where, like, the world pulled back and you saw everything and you finally had your. I. Your grasp. It was something that took time. And for some people it happens externally, and for some people it happens very much so internally. And I struggled with that for a long time.

Being a man who grew up in the church, who read my Bible as a child, who went in the military, who had my deployments, who went to school for theology, who learned to read Greek so I could read the original or the Old Testament or the New Testament, its original language. And then the challenge of faith that I was met with has taken multiple forms, and some of them are very personal, but one of them is that I was trying to become co. Like a sidekick to Christ.

Like, well, you're going to save me, but then I'm going to be a hero. And it was a conviction that didn't happen in some grandiose moment. It was literally in quieter. In my head, in my heart, happening at this one time. And that extended over like, it took seasons, but it was like this sort of coming to recognition that I was trying to be not a. Not. Not a co heir in Christ of his salvation, but a co conspirator in the prison rescue of my soul. And. And it was like, no, no, you do not get.

It was. What was it? It was it. Second Corinthians 318, which was recently at a church service we were attending, was part of that simple recognition that we are being made like Christ. We are being made into his image, not as co authors in the future, right? But that doesn't mean that I go off and abandon all attempts at living or doing what is right. It's that small thing, but it meant something at that time and it still does, you know, and it wasn't.

It wasn't exactly an ancient history for me. But there is some encouragement there is that you don't. It doesn't all happen externally, it doesn't all happen in this great, grandiose emotional experience. But there was a mentor of mine was saying, if you lack faith, ask for more. And we can go off on all the christian diatribes and all of the christian, you know, Christianese, gentle, worthless, empty, valid or empty statements.

But what I would be, what I'm trying to say in that one is, don't quit. Don't quit because it's hard. Don't quit because it's uncomfortable, because you don't feel anything. Don't quit. And. And. And submission to Christ, submission to truth, is, is you. At the end of the day, you're going to realize that there are two options in the world. Either your intellect is sovereign or God is sovereign. You cannot. There is no third option.

Either you are a. And if you choose the intellect, you have an infinite number of endless, hedonistic, masturbatory self destruct, whether it's like the oppressor oppressed narrative that fits within the marxist argument, where it's like, well, I would be. I would literally be a divine, perfect God if it wasn't for those pesky capitalists over there or whatever. Or I would be the perfect man if it wasn't for feminism. Or I would be the perfect.

I would be like, no one recognizes my perfection is. Isdezhehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe is an easy selling point when you feel then that the world is dark. But that is not a road that ends well. It ends in the worship of the self. And the worship of the self is that hedonism and that slow death. So the only solution is to recognize that there's something more true than you.

And the only place that you can find that truth is in the gospel.

And it might be powerful and emotional for some people, and for you, it might simply be in my own mind, where I look down into my deepest parts of who I am with as much integrity as I can try to bring to it, and recognize that what at the core is not Jordan Peterson's little burning flame of greatness, but it's an ugly little rot, this ugly little creature, if you get to your very core, and then you have to give that up, and you give it up, there's this idea that life is a crucible, or you're

going through a crucible where you're cutting away the dead flesh and you're burning off the chaff and you're getting rid of all the parts of you, whether it's unrealistic expectations of an abusive parent, or whether it's society's demands of whatever you're supposed to be, or whether it's the difficulty of making money in this economy, or whether it's. You start cutting away even the personal parts, which is my resentment towards my successful friends or my jealousy.

What is it, my frustration with my wife or my loneliness or whatever, you start cutting those away, too. And you think at the core of it, I'm going to find this little flame of, uh, this innocent, earnest, good person at your very core. But when you get there and you crack into that final chamber, you're not going to find. You don't find what is good. You find what is evil, and it, and that is terror. That at your core, you're not the savior of the story. And and that is a hard place to come to.

But then from there, you take that, you take that wickedness out and you place it on the altar and say, even this is not worthy of you, but this is all I have left to give. And Christ is faithful to take that and say, I am redeeming you. So that's incredibly beautiful. I just want to let that sit for a minute. I wish that the Internet was better at respectful silence. It's the one thing that the Internet is not good at.

But I offer that gesture of gratitude for that which you said, and I hope men will go back and listen to that again, because it's really true. And everything in our culture tells us the opposite. Whether you believe in eastern mysticism, that tells you that we are fundamentally good, which I believed for a very long time, or whether you believe the message of secular culture, which is you can be anything you want, there's something, and it reinforces that message.

But another way to actually witness the decrepitude of the soul and to go into that space and to remain there undefended and to be witnessed in it by almighty God, the creator of the universe, is crushing from a secular perspective. And there's no hope in that place unless you have the power to submit to the gospel. And then the absolute transformation of the soul, that happens where it's like, wait, this is who I am, and you sent your son to die for this? How absolutely glorious.

That's the only thing that can change hearts and lives and minds. And it's absolutely true that it's obscured from some people to be able to witness the glory of that.

And that's a tragedy, because that's where the only safety, the only security, the only redemption, the only love, the only purpose, the only meaning can be found is in that profound truth that God was willing, God himself was willing to die for this little decrepit, evil creature to bring you back into reconciliation with him, which he didnt have to do. Its incredibly powerful.

And the end of the cell, its where the self ends, and not a good end either, but a glorious end if you have the courage to accept it. Yeah. As a young man, the phrase take up your cross and follow me was always difficult because it would be nice if the act of taking the cross up was a simple act of martyrdom. Right? Like if we live. If we truly lived in, in America right now in a very simple, oppressive, where if you're found with the Bible, you will be executed on the spot. Like that. Is it.

I'm not saying it's easy, but compared. It'S more, it's less abstract, it's more clear cut. But it would be. It would at least be a little bit simpler. Yeah. You know, and, but we don't. And history shows that it's. It's nothing that all the time, but ultimately, that's where we stand, is what is going on. What. What is taking up your cross look like. And it's not simple. It's not something you achieve overnight. It's not something that you. Sometimes it is simple that you just have to do it.

But, you know, this, this goes back to that argument of strength is that, like we started with that earlier part on the question of can weak men be good and selfishly? It's, it's a, it's a subject of great interest, but it is that weakness that we were talking about is refusing to come to the end of yourself. But living in that medium ground where you living in the miasma between, you know, there's something at the bottom, but you won't go there, but you're not willing.

You can't rise to the surface. And, and that weaknesses is choosing not to do the things that you not is choosing not to be. Not to do the things not to. Not to. It is willingly choosing to live in that miasma and that cynicism and that nihilism and choosing to bask there as long as your body can hold out and hoping that your spirit will. Your body will expire before your spirit has to face it. It's kind of dark framed that way. And I think you're right.

The weak man is the man who refuses to come to the end of himself. However it presents itself in the moment. And that can be physically, that can be professionally, that can be morally, that can be theologically. The weak man refuses to come to the end of himself. And so goodness can only be something because we talked about this at the beginning. Goodness is an ongoing pursuit in the way that we framed it. We never actually get there.

So if goodness is an ongoing pursuit and the goodness is found in the pursuit itself, if a man refuses to come to the end of himself, he fails on the path of goodness. And by default cannot be good. Right. I refuse to go past myself. That is a. That is a way that I'm gonna have to listen to that a second time because it's. I think it's. I think you're right on the money there. But I wanna. I need to. I need to.

I think I need to meditate on such things or think about it a little bit, because I believe that you're correct in the sense of goodness being a pursuit, weakness being refusal of the pursuit. Both of those are different than righteousness or sanctification through. Sorry, not sanctification. Justification. Justification by grace. And so in that sense, we are. Yeah. Weaknesses is refusing.

I mean, we see this in other characters like David Goggins and running these super ultra marathons, and he's challenging weakness. You see it in this compulsion to become a Navy SeAL or an excellent competitive shooter is that like a person who doesn't become an excellent competitive shooter is not willing to put in the work. And weakness in this sense, it can sometimes be looked at as simply laziness. And laziness might be a form of weakness, and weakness is a form of sin.

But basking and identifying in that weakness as if it were the same as justification, probably what we're looking at right here as. Yeah, I think I'm going to let it go. Yeah, I think this is important because there's a way in which. So we're talking about two different things, but there's overlap and there's like a Venn diagram overlap, and there's also a way in which they're separate. And this is what I run into when I talk to.

To christians, is that there is an aspect of our earthly pursuits, I won't call it worldly, of our earthly pursuits that is exclusively earthly, where it is not necessarily explicitly commanded by God in the same way that repentance from sin is. So the ongoing commitment to the pursuit of moral goodness and the repentance from sin is essential to salvation. You know, grace alone through faith alone means that sanctification will happen on its own rather than through works. Right.

So this moral rectification will happen on its own. I can say that it's happened on its own through me, which is an incredible feeling. So that is to be differentiated from the pursuit from worldly pursuits such as physical strength, financial stability, professional accomplishments, etcetera. There is a way in which those two things are separate. But where I think the dialogue about Christianity and masculinity is not good at is saying there is a place where these two things overlap.

We don't know what it is, but they must overlap somehow. Because if you refuse to go past yourself for the purposes of serving your family, are you truly pursuing godliness? If godliness is vertical, like your orientation of yourself towards your conscience, and the divine versus horizontal, which is the orientation towards culture and family and earthly things, where is the overlap there?

Are you failing in your duties towards God if you allow yourself to be a weak mand like meaning in terms of your earthly pursuits? And this is where I think the dialogue around Christianity gets caught right now, where it's like, I don't want to be convicted of my weakness, my earthly weakness, in various ways, because I have godliness and that's all I need. And that can't be true. That can't be true.

And I don't think christians prior to this moment in history would have ever agreed with it being true. Paul wouldn't even agree with it being true. Right? The New Testament would, like Jesus says, go and sin no more. Right? That is an action. Go and sin no more. Sell your cloak and buy a sword, whether it's turn the other cheek, because you can love your neighbor, love your family, love your God. Like these are actions. They're imperatives, they're exhortations.

Paul, I do not boast in myself because that myself is only weakness, but that which I boast in. I'm not quoting him perfectly, but I'm kind of talking about first and second corinthians again, which has probably been the center component of this episode only because I've been reading it. This is what I was reading recently because it's on top of mind. But the way of saying it being, you know, Paul says, he says, this is church discipline. This person among you.

How do you live with them, living in open sin amongst you? Approach them or cast them out. And then if they repent, welcome them back in and go and be men. Be strong. Act like men. Do what is good. But we also recognize that our sanctification is not made possible by our own strength, but we must participate in it. So go and do what is good. Go and do it. Love your family.

And how is it that you can create an argument in the church that making yourself an incompetent buffoon who is unwilling to stand up to any sort of challenging arguments, whether they be, because this is, again, second corinthians, go and present good arguments. Go and present these things to each other. Challenge that which is evil amongst yourselves. And he's calling these people to do these things.

And then I think the modern church, where we see this going back to the beginning of the bad faith argument, is I don't want to, I don't want to handle the, I don't want to face this type of conviction because I am sanctified in another way. And on the one hand, my brother in Christ, I hear you. We are not saved by our own strength. But what I am saying is that you are not acting godly because you're refusing your responsibility as a mandehead. I agree. I agree.

And that weakness festers into nihilism. And nihilism is the anti God. Explore that. Kick that around. So that weakness, maybe we covered it already. That if you refuse, so if you as a christian man, okay, so this gets into questions perhaps of apostasy, right? What does that look like?

Because I can see a scenario where a man is in church and he's behaving faithfully and he's pursuing his sanctification, and then comes a moment where he refuses to go beyond himself to mortify a sin and ends up going down that road and falling away. I can see it. Which ultimately ends up in the pursuit of fleshly desires, which itself leads to nihilism, hedonism, you know, long or slow suicide. So, yeah, okay, I can see those two.

And, you know, then we can get into the questions of, was his salvation effectual? But that's a separate. Only God knows that answer. Yeah. So another version of it, let's use like the, you exist in a church in America and we are witnessing something like persecution of the church. Right.

And right now, what we're seeing, what we're seeing in America is not the persecution that is told in storybooks about the early church, but certainly there are some adjacencies or there's warning signs or there's concerns. Right? And so you exist in a church and somebody enters in the church, not necessarily as a snake oil salesman, but bringing in, like, overt heresy. Right. And let's, I think I'm just going to get away from all of the, the ambiguities of it.

So you're a man in church, and somebody enters the church who is preaching the gospel of Marxism, preaching the gospel of whatever you want to call it, black lives matter, or whatever the current thing is today, whatever the current version of, well, the government is God. And we're not talking about christian nationalism.

We're talking about a very specific thing of, like, you know, you have someone who enters into your church and says, oh, well, we should have, we should have women lead the church now. Or we should have. Let's just use that one. Let's just use like, well, we, you know, we need to have a woman's perspective from the pulpit. Okay, well there's a pretty clear cut case for that in the old and New Testament where that's, that's not the way that things are supposed to go.

And you know, and there is, we don't need to get full on, we're not going chauvinist here. We're saying there is a direction that's given in the church where it's saying, no, we don't need a woman's perspective because even that is saying the gospel isn't good enough because a woman didn't say it.

So you're a man in a church and the church starts entertaining and you've participated, you're not just a guy who's been there occasionally, but you've been participating in your church and you've humbled yourself, recognizing that not everybody is on your level. And I'm putting air quotes on that on purpose. Not everybody is up to your level of awareness of domestic terrorism. Not everybody is up to your verbiage in theology. Not everyone. Whatever. Pick your idol, your small idol there.

But I guess idolatry is not the right word. But you're in a church and you're seeing the encroachment happen and you've done your due diligence to make sure it's not about your ego being challenged. I think that can be a given. You've done your due diligence to make sure it's not your ego being challenged.

You're not just complaining about other people having more influence than you, but you see the church going astray and your community, the people you care about, are being led into a false gospel. And if you sit and let the world go by and just say nothing, do nothing, care nothing, because it's too much of a, it's too much of an attack on your little safety bubble to say, I don't think this is right and you didn't.

And you're not willing to put in a little bit of work to think about how you're going to say it, whether it's speaking in front of the mirror, reading your Bible, writing it down, or in earnesty. And so you watch your church go from a body of believers to this, what do you call it? What's the right word for it? Dual. Not dualistic, parallel. Parallelism. Synchronism. Synchronistic pseudo Christianity theology of worshiping the self and the divine mother or whatever it is. And so what do you do?

Well, you leave the church and then you become nihilistic, and then you become angry. And then you're now going down your oppressor, oppressed narrative. And now you're rejecting the gospel because your complacency for that in your midst. Not with these zealous, zealous in articulation of a templar burning everybody at the stake or the inquisition, but with even the simple act of saying, no, this isn't right.

And trying to build in yourself the capability to speak and have relationships with people. If you just sit by and let it all happen, that, how does that produce. How does that produce repentance before the Lord? You just sat by and died. And it's like that is that kind of weakness that I'm talking about.

It's not that we need to all pick up our pitchfork and burn people at the stake, but it's that, like, do you really care so little about your community and your family that you're willing to just do nothing because it's too much of a emotional compromise for you to say, I don't think we should be going. Okay, so I agree with you. Let me give you the counter position. The counter position would be that this Marxism in various forms, which we might call modern modernity, right.

Maybe a form of soft americanism which prioritizes comfort. We'll call it modernity lives within every church in unconscious ways or barely conscious ways. I have not yet found a church where that's not true. The boldest pastors will admit it, but we'll say. But we'll say that they don't know what to do about it. They see it and they feel it and they see it in the. Even in the relationships of the men in their church where the men are being led around by the women, right? So there's a lot of.

It's inside every church. So in comes someone who sees these things, right? Knowing that they are ungodly and they are unrighteous and they are unbiblical and they are unchristian. Definitively, definitively. Yeah. Let's remove all ambiguity. Remove all ambiguity. Right. If you like, the women pastors are a great example. If you. Because it's unambiguous. But there's more, right. That's in some ways the most acceptable, but let's just say unambiguously, it's all those things.

And yet, you know that if you push the point, if you really push the point, it will break the church in half at least the church will explode, because, you know, this modernity is everywhere. And so, you know, of course, there is the passage about every vine that bears fruit will be pruned so it can bear more fruit. Right. Of course. I've seen that in my own life.

But from the perspective of a man sitting in the pews where you see this, and it's like, I could understand if a man or even a group of men were like, hey, we don't want to be the guys that a church split gets hung around our necks. Right? And so that's the big. That's the big question that I think a lot of men are going to be facing as they begin to wake up to the state of modernity that has infected the christian church.

It's like, are we going to be the guys that do this, or do we just step back and let it take its own course? I don't know. I really don't know. But, yeah. Are you on the horns of a dilemma where you can either do nothing and let it all turn to rot, and you take the church. You are there watching the church become something it is not. Or are you. Is the other horn of the dilemma you having to like, you being the person who breaks up the church?

And some people go, and some people, like, this is a true. This is a good example of the horns of a dilemma. Do you do nothing and let it fall apart? Or do you come in like a bull in a china shop and break up the thing and to make one more parallel to gun culture, do you go and do the thing and create the giant response, hoping that it would create some sort of shakeup in the world, risking the Ted Kaczynski answer? Or do you hope that your small influence over time doesn't go unnoticed?

And this is a good place where that cynicism point is addressed, is that the cynical answer is to sit and do nothing. The wise answer is to not necessarily burn the house down or wait and do nothing, but to navigate the line and do so knowing that, you know, the. What is it? It's not the final solution. That's a little bit more bad. We're not there yet. We're not. No, no, that's. That's not. I don't think there's ever a. There, like, there's no final solution.

Yeah, there's no silver bullet that comes in. There will be no, like, complete resolution until Christ comes back at the end. There will never be any final resolution. But what are you doing in yours, in your life and your family that like, that you have influence over and that you do have concern over. And are you able to, are you, are you willingly participating as a part of that community, or are you using its growing corruption as a justification to recede into yourself and not participate?

And, and that, I think, I think the horns of the dilemma are, are very apparent to people, whether you exist in gun culture, masculinity, or the church, which all overlap quite a bit, or you're in a position where, like, if you're, I'm sorry, not. Or you're in any of those arenas, both of the horns are not a solution at all. They're not. And I don't wish to paint this as some, like, oh, it's an easy answer. You just do the middle ground. It's like, oh, no, you don't just do the middle ground.

It's, you have to take, you know, at least take one step, at least make a small step, because if you're in that environment where you realize that the church that you're attending is, you know, I don't know. There's no measurement of hedonism. We don't have like a seven on the hedonism scale. But there is a decision that you have to make a decision, because choosing to make no decision is choosing the weaker option and the destructive.

Not the destructive, but the breakup of the church has its consequences. And it's like revolution. So the difference between these two horns is revolution and reformation. And this language comes up in theology. We've talked about it before. But the problem with revolution is you either end up with revolution is the cause, it is the end goal. And then you get Bolshevik ism and you get, like, the Leninist and no, sorry, Trotsky.

And you get kind of this russian idea of, like, perpetual revolution until we achieve utopia. And the problem with revolution, we talk, we can, you can point it, bring up the american versus the French Revolution, you can bring up, you know, the age of revolutions. Just to be clear. It's great to come in and smash everything. But if you have, if you're not actually, if you're not contending evil with good, you're just doing the evil, and that's hedonism.

You're just doing the evil, but justifying your evil by evil being present everywhere else and the complacency option. So the challenge with revolution is if you're going to make the hard. If you're going to, you're going to step down the hard road of revolution. The hard part of revolution is not the tearing down, but the building up. And if you're gonna. If you're gonna take the reformation side, the hard part of reformation is doing nothing and just claiming reformation. And the.

So, like, the hard part of reformation is that you have to do it consistently over time and make conscious effort, even when you do not have the evidence that you want, because revolution produces great evidence. Something happened, something burned down, but are you building up something in its stead? No, your revolution was wrong. If the other answer is your reformation, you're going to go from the inside and you're going to make changes and you're going to participate.

Are you actually doing that? Or are you sitting in the seat complaining that the deacons are electing blue haired transgender feminists, and you're sitting there going, oh, it's all going to hell. I should stop going to church, and I'll stop reading my Bible as well. And, you know, I'll stop praying and I'll stop caring, because that is ref. That is the. That is corrupting reformation. That is corrupting it by complacency, laziness, weakness.

Yes. And I think the hard part about this is that a reformative. I think that's the adjective version, reformative action righteously taken in alignment with your conscience may still produce disaster. And that's the part that's a little scary. So I'll give you an example. So this conference I was at this past weekend, I met a man who was in line to be the pastor of a church. And he caught the senior pastor plagiarizing whole portions of his sermons. Like, caught red handed.

Like, he looked into it, found the evidence, you know, from audio recordings versus, you know, versus. Versus printed text from other pastors. Like, not even a question. And so he was. And I've heard different versions of the story with different sins committed by the pastors. Like, I could have said. I could have said nothing and just let him retire and, you know, whenever that would have happened and had taken over that role. But I was convicted by my conscience that I had to say something.

And he went to the pastor personally and brought the evidence and confronted him man to man before it became a whole thing. And then that didn't go well. And then it got run up the flagpole to the elders, who ultimately sided with the pastor and kicked this. Kick this guy out. Hugely devastating for the man's family moving. And it was a really difficult situation.

And so, of course, come to find out a couple few years ago, one of those same elders contacts this pastor friend and says, will you please forgive me? Because the pastor who was plagiarizing was in sin other ways, financially, obviously. So a man getting away with it is doing other things.

But regardless, there was still a whole two to three year period before that happened, where this guy who did the right thing, did the right and righteous thing, the right and righteous way, was punished and was kicked out. And that had real implications for his family. Almost ended in, you know, almost ended in divorce. Right? Like, because of the stress and the strain and the moving and all this stuff, right. And so he paid the real cost for doing that thing.

And so that's the part that makes this so difficult, is that we want to believe as men that doing the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons will lead to the right result. Meaning, not necessarily he didn't do it because he wanted to take the pastor seat right away. He did it because it was the right thing to do, and yet he paid a significant cost. Now, ultimately, God was redeemed, and he gets to stand up right before God knowing that I did the right thing.

But the two horns of the dilemma, at least I'm not arguing for this. Understand, at least on the passive side, you're not the one personally paying the cost. This person's being divisive, getting kicked out, slandered, who knows? Losing friends, losing reputation. You're not paying that cost. Right? Versus, if you speak up, even if you speak up for the right thing the right way, and you follow the process, you could still get this hung around your neck. Right? And so that's.

That's a tough ask for a lot of people within the church. Yes, it is. It is a tough ask, but I'll contrast you with this thing. Sure. If you do nothing and commit suicide, did it win? No, wait. Hold on. Slow down there. That escalated quickly. It escalated quickly. But to be more thorough on this one, we want an ordered world. We want something where actions have consequences, where if I do the right things, I get the right outcomes.

And so for this person's situation, and I don't, you know, like, for the person situation, the comfort he gets at the end, in the one hand, is that he was right. The temptation is to turn that sense of persecution into about himself. And to the man in the arena, that is a challenge.

And so to the men who are in that arena, not to be a dude jeering in the crowd, it's sort of saying, like, okay, that is a temptation to say, well, I was doing the right thing, and so I'm justified in my persecutions. And it's like, well, you're justified in your persecutions, but our glory is not in ourself. And so the alternative that I'm saying is, okay, so does this man, this man's going through all these difficulties and he did the right thing and it resulted in his family suffering.

Does his son look to him and say, okay, I understand the nuances of the description. I think you did the right thing, but we're still going to continue to act? Are we going to turn this into an open door for nihilism and say, well, if I do the right, even if I do all the right things, I get punished? Well, then there are no consequences. There's no consequences. Then there is no cause and effect. There is no cause and effect.

Then we're looking at hedonism because their hedonism is, well, I can do whatever I want. And we're right back to that original issue of if he, this is a hypothetical, but if he had done nothing, would him and his family still been christians? I don't know. I don't know. And this is, again, that salvation only God knows kind of question. But I don't have. On the other hand, I want to say, like, when you go through those things, suffering produces perseverance. Perseverance produces character.

Character produces hope. And this is again quoting from Paul, this time in Romans, and I'm quoting that because if you had never suffered, because you never stood up for you never believed it, you never did the thing that you said you were convicted to do, then what perseverance would you have acquired? What character would have been developed? What hope would you have? And the death, the sacrifice, might the alternative. Sacrifice, not sacrifice.

The alternative option might have been the death of hope, that nothing can ever be done. And so I'm not giving a solution. And to someone who's looking for a short answer, I'm telling you now, I cannot give to you. I'm not in that position of authority. I am not in that. I do not sit in that seat. But what I can say is there is the alternative, which is the death of hope, and that is that it all ends in destruction. So, okay, yes, and I get. Yes, a bit more abstract.

Trust me, it is a bit more abstract. Well, so, no, I get it. Because if a man is put into that position, let's sit down in his actual seat, when he discovers beyond a shadow of the doubt that not just one sermon but multiple sermons over many years have been extensively plagiarized, meaning there's no question convicted immediately in your heart, concrete, no ambiguity.

So in that moment, if you don't, if he hadn't spoken up, I can see that going down a nihilistic direction, because your conscience is going to be jumping up and down on you to say something because you see, right? And so what are you doing to numb your conscience? Are you drinking? Right? Are you, like, how are you pushing. How are you pushing that away? And I can see that going in a nihilistic direction. So, yes. However, and again, I'm not defending this position, I'm just stating it.

But there's a sense in which suffering, and maybe again, we can return to Paul. There's a sense in, like, I'm suffering on behalf of my own church, right? And I guess you could probably say that's Paul, that's Christ, et cetera. But I think a lot of men find themselves in this position where they see modernity painted on the walls within their own church in various subtle and acceptable ways.

And it's like I have to be the one to speak up into this environment and suffer on behalf of a church and suffer on behalf of saving the pastors. Aren't they the shepherds of my soul? Aren't they supposed to be suffering on my behalf? Why am I going to take the suffering on their behalf? And so I think it's that hierarchical distinction that makes it feel so strange not to say that it's unrighteous or wrong or shouldn't be that way. There's no shoulds here.

It's just the feeling of, like, there's a feeling in, like, why am I the one having to take responsibility for this community when it's the pastor who's supposed to be taking responsibility for this, for this community and he's not? And so that's the part that I could see men getting into where it's like this community sin is now falling on me.

I guess you can, again, you can say Paul and Christ and all of that, but I think for a lot of men, that's an awkward position to be in, given that they're not men of any authority or status. And it's like, and yet, and then again, we go back to Paul and Christ and all that. So I guess I can talk myself into and then talk myself out of it. But are like, are you a man of no status? No. You are a member of the church. Are you a man of no conviction? No. You're a member of the church.

Is that your community, or are you just a bystander watching it happen? So question. I mean, like, I think, I think. I think I, in this situation, there's a lot of way we can see if anything else, we can at least do a little bit of not ex nylo, but. Ad hominem. No, no, not ad hominem. It's, it's, it's Nicholas Nassim Taleb from reduction. From reduction. Reduce. Like, what are the things that are not the right answer? Oh, what are the things that are not the right answer?

Okay, so we know do nothing is not the right answer. Yes. You know, we know that burn down the church is not the right answer. We know that, you know, institute a tribunal might not be the right answer, but we know that becoming a slanderous fool is not the right answer. Yes. So it's gossip is not a good answer. Gossip is not the right answer. Right. And, you know, forsaking your community, not the right answer. Okay. And so maybe if I, like, I don't. I am saying I don't. I do.

I am not equipped to answer this. I do not know the full thing, but I'm willing to engage in it. Yeah. And my engagement is such that remove the parts. Look, write the options out and remove the ones that are not, that, that betray the gospel, that betray the exhortations placed upon us by Paul and therefore God through the scriptures. And start with those and then narrow it down to, well, these are the kind of ways that you won't know how it's going to play out. I very seriously doubt that.

When he thought, well, he said, let's use this example where he witnessed the pastor doing something considered wrong. He witnessed the pastor sinning and living inappropriately leading it, not leading, but rather betraying his flock. And he went through the right, what was supposed to be the right mechanism of doing it. And when he started that path, I very doubtly, I very realistically doubt he expected, well, I'm going to be persecuted at every length and shape.

He probably didn't expect everything like that. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but I wouldn't. That seems like a pretty, an assumption that I'd be okay to make for now. And what you run into, and I want to start that one, like, by removing the parts that are not options, like the complacency, the ignorance, the turning a blind eye, the aggression, not aggression, but like, you know, destruction or malice, and just start with those and narrow it down and pursue in that direction.

I think that's how it started. That's the only thing I can look at is just even because I could imagine being in that position where then the persecution turns into self righteousness. And we see in Paul where he talks about how many times he was persecuted for what he did, but he persisted. He persisted and he persisted in faith. And for some people, it will involve leaving the church. The hardest part of that whole story to hear is the divorce being on the table. Why don't you just let it go?

It was his wife who was not, who was having real trouble and was withdrawing from him and all that. It wasn't really, there was no attorneys contacted or anything like that. The whole stress of the entire situation just caused her to really withdraw. And his response to that was not appropriate. And they were like, oh, are we even going to make it? It was like that. It wasn't like she lawyered up or anything.

At least you can ask the question, but then you have, what is your answer going to be as a married man? You are going to face questions where you go, do we want to do this anymore? And sure, you can blame the divorce rate or feminism on how quickly it is for women to leave the home with what looks like scot free economically, but there are scars that are not seen.

And you can, this goes all the way back to what we were talking about earlier, and it's one of those things that probably is an antidote to the nihilistic approach, antidote to the red pill. Nihilism is you can go and tell me that everything in the world is wrong. We are living an absolute clown world. Everything that is good is considered evil. Everything that is righteous is considered, is disdained.

You can, if you can, if you can tell me that the situation that you're living in is one where literally everything that is up is down, except for gravity, because then we'd be dead. And is that a justification for the abandonment of the road? If you say yes, you have already made your decision that you do not wish to do what is right.

And you can say, because I want to bring this up, bring it up in a finalish, not a final point, but a big worldview challenging issue is there are plenty of stories in the Bible where the one who is doing the righteous thing, who is living righteously, is completely alone or feels completely alone. Elijah, Elisha, Noah, you have Paul, to some extent, you have Jesus, even as an example, known as righteous, not one. And then there's Jesus. And so.

And so there is this consistency where you may enter into a time where you do feel alone. And all of those times, the men are commanded that their sense of righteousness and their belonging is not granted by where they're at their persecution. They're even. They're even, um. Even their identity of being the persecuted is stripped of them, where they can't just claim I am the only righteous person. And this goes back to the story of job, where he was a good man.

He was what you would consider he was considered. The stories that are told about him, that he wasn't, by no means of his own, doing the wrong thing. And all of this happened to him, and everybody rejects him, and his wife is condemning him, but. And he goes before God, and. And he says, God, what. What's the deal? You know, this isn't right. And God's responses. I am God. Were you there at the creation of the earth? Deal with it. It's. It's not.

Well, I think to some people, it might have to be. Deal with it. Ultimately, that is. It is a very short way of saying it, but it is. It's more than that. It is. Do you even have access to that which is good except for from me? No. So, you know, trust in my promises. Remember that I am God, and put your faith in me. And then. And what do we see? Time and time again, the long, dark night of the soul peels back. And it's not about the reward that they're given at the end.

David did not end his life in glory and splendor, but he still was right before God, and he still pursued that which was right. And so the men who have built an altar to themself on their self righteousness, thinking that they are the ones who are being persecuted because of their self righteousness, come to a shallow end.

And so the story that you're told, I think the story that you tell is a hard one to hear, and it's a hard one to hear because we want our leaders, whether it's in the church, in the military, or in our government, to be strong, upstanding men. But that's not always the case. And that we look through history, and that is human history. But what persists is nothing.

Governments, empires, armies, kingdoms, physical churches, organizations, even though I'd like to see cathedrals back because they're pretty cool, even though those things are not. Which persists? The true church is what persists between God and man. And I know that there's a temptation, kind of like almost an inverse of what we were talking at the beginning, to say, I am being persecuted, therefore I am righteous. And that is where I think that is an entirely.

That is the weakness speaking and not the strength. That is the self worship speaking. And not Christ. And so for the man who suffers persecution from his church because he did what was right, he has the very real temptation against his circumstances to say, I was righteous, look what I did.

And yet, at the beginning, if he goes all the way back to where he started, he didn't produce the righteous concern for justice, that he didn't even produce the concern for justice which drew him to conviction, to challenge the leadership, to say, what you're doing is wrong, that very concept of righteous judgment, that very concept of justice was given to him by God. And if he tries to take it on as his own self righteousness, we know what destruction that produces. So, boom. That is awesome.

That is awesome. Because that conviction of righteousness that you have is a gift. It's not yours. So what are you going to do with this gift that's been given to you? It's not even yours to begin with. And so, yes, so placing that righteousness in God and recognizing that if you see something, say something, not because it's you, but because you're being shown something as a gift from above you, and what are you going to do with this? That's a blessing.

To be able to have this conviction puts an entirely different spin on it because it would be easy to say, I see this thing that's wrong and I need to go crusading to fix the wrong and invest too much of your own identity into it versus, wow, what a gift that I've been given to be able to perceive this wrong and to be able to speak into it and to even care. And how can I carry this with love and gratitude and open heartedness and brotherly affections into this. Praise God for this.

And then also to avoid the ditch on the other side of the road, which is also begin to develop a martyr identity with it. To joyfully go to the cross but not go running because you get to be hanging up in front of everybody. Yeah, mar that. We have certainly seen martyrdom turned into an idol. We have seen every good thing that God has created on this earth. Man has found a way to turn into a false idol.

Amen. So I really like how we were talking about the ditch on either side of the road with the ditch on one side of the road being crusading in your own self righteousness and the ditch on the other side being martyrdom. Yes. Perfect capsule. I like the way you're doing that. It's a tough spot that I think a lot of men find themselves in.

And I think the thought, because I can identify both tendencies within myself, I can absolutely recognize within myself the tendency to bring the righteous hammer of justice down. I may have been guilty of doing that once or twice, but one of the things that I'm also acutely aware of within myself is, like, I shouldn't joyfully. I don't know how to say this. Like, I shouldn't joyfully go, look, looking forward to my own persecution because it proves I'm right.

Like, how to avoid that tendency of, we'll say the ego. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's, you know how, like, people like to take a spectrum and then bend it like a horseshoe. Yeah. You know, so, and this is kind of what you see here is if your spectrum on the one side is the crusader and the other one is the martyrdeh. If you bend that into a horseshoe at where they touch at the end is the self righteousness aspect. There you go. I am a martyr for my own self righteousness.

It's like there's a hook in there. We are not righteous by our own means. And then the crusader is, I am the arbiter of justice, bringing the sword to everything. And it's like that sword was not handed to you in vain. So if you're a magistrate, you don't wield that in vain. When you start wielding in vain, then when the wicked rule, the innocent suffer, and then the martyr being, well, Christ didn't die for my sins. I died for the world's sins. It's like, yeah, okay.

See how far that goes in your. We know where that ends. Mm hmm. Well, you mentioned with the sword being handed the sword in vain. As a man who has wielded the modern equivalent of truly fine swords. Right. You understand the need to even be less self righteous in the wielding of that and the more godly in the wielding of that. We started out the conversation referencing some of the political topics that we have going on right now, particularly Israel and Palestine.

And you and I kicked around a couple ideas. So the need to be righteous in your wielding of violence is even more important because we're talking about the sort of one's own self righteousness in a church context, going against heterodox, heretical, pick your term. Doctrines. Right. Whatever. But now we're actually talking about scenarios where human lives are on the line, potentially millions of them. We're talking about a very different category of subjects.

Yes. And I think we can start off on the right foot by recognizing that we approach these topics with a measure of humility, because the unsanctimonious anger fighting that goes on whether it's on x or social media of any sort. I think the part that gets most disturbing is the willingness of people to call to violence, knowing full well that they will have no application in it. The willingness. Oh, yeah. So people to.

People will start talking trash about doing violent things and they're just like a literal keyboard warrior. Yeah, I mean, I. The. I know the word keyboard. The phrase keyboard warrior is used in, as a pejorative. It's an insult to somebody. And some people fit the bill. Yes, fair. But the issue with the Israel, the Israel Palestine thing is you kind of have not just two ditches, but three ditches. And the one of them is the two obvious ones are like, are you pro Israel? Are you pro Palestine?

And then the third one is, I'm pro nothing. And you're like, you know, okay, like, that is a tough. I think that's where those kind of. Those three extremes go. It's like, well, are you pro Israel? Are you pro Palestine? Or are you just abdicating from it? You know, like I. And I. And that is couched in a statement where I can have my opinions, but I don't have to always say them. Like, I don't, I don't, I don't. There's wisdom in knowing when to speak and when not to speak.

Yeah. Because I do see. I do see. I try to make it a point. It's almost a personal policy that I don't talk about the things that everyone else is talking about on social media, that as soon as everyone starts talking about anything, I don't say a word because I see too much shepherding of the herd mentality into failing the social media iq test one way or another. Like, collapse into a position publicly so the algorithm can sort you and who knows how. That's all being logged.

But one thing I definitely have noticed is the three buckets that you're talking about where you have the really hardcore pro Palestinians, the really hardcore pro Israel, and then you have. And then I don't know if it's nihilism, but then you have the. Then you have the withdrawalism where it's like, just let them. Just let them fight it out. And I can understand american isolationism.

I can understand Americans saying, like, why are we even getting involved in this in the first place, whether in terms of our time and attention or money? Like, I can understand that argument, but that's not what people are saying. There's a nihilistic, like, if they got a fight to the death, let them die. And I don't think that's the right answer either. No. I think Lindsey Graham recently got pretty aggressively lambasted for calling this a religious war.

And that's tied with, on the one hand, he's saying that the war between Israel and Palestine is not just political, it's religious. And there is certainly some truth to that. Yeah. I mean, there is. There is certain. There is. You can't say that your religious leaders are calling for the death of the other population because on the basis of religion and say that it's, there's not a religious aspect to it.

But that also varies on how you define religion, because religion is the thing that each one of us, whether we call ourselves Christians, Muslims or atheists, where do we originate, our concept of morality? And so fundamentally, every war is a religious war. It's just, I mean, so the communist takeover of countries is a religious war. They're just, you will, you will submit to the God of government. And so he's not wrong. It's that. What does that imply? Right? And what does that imply?

And what are you, what are you saying about that implication now? I am not a senator. I am not a. I am not a member of the House of Representatives. And so I can agree that the war that we're seeing happen in between Israel and Gaza, between the government of Israel and the pseudo government of Hamas, is not only a political war, but also a religious war. And as religious people, we're not. We have to.

When we see things like this, we're faced with what do we believe and what do we understand and what do we know and how does that apply to our lives? So it's not like the Milquetoast issue is to make no decision, is to have no intention of answering it. Just your only answer is no answer whatsoever. But that is also matched with humility. And I wish there was an easy way to approach it. But once again, we're talking about possibly millions of people's lives here.

Yeah. Well, I think the challenge with describing it as a religious war, particularly that is coming from Lindsey Graham, is that, okay, let's go with that. If it's a religious war, are we saying that all religions are equally valid paths to truth? Like, are we going to go with that? Or are we going with this myth of neutrality? Because if it's a religious war and you're saying one religion is more right than the others or the other, let's just say it's between these two.

It's like, well, is there not one religion that's more right than all of them. And does that religion not get a say? And I think that a lot of people in America who would agree with Lindsey Graham and would call it a religious war wouldn't take that extra step to say it is a religious war. And if religion has something to say about it, there is one true religion, and maybe that religion should say something really important to both of them. But people don't go, not in the right way.

I mean, like, I don't want to start getting into, you know, George W. Bush ism carrying a cross and wrapped in a flag. I don't want to say that America needs to go riding in like the Christian John Wayne. That's not what I mean. But there is a way to adjudicate this between the two. But they both have something, both these religions have something very interesting to say about Christianity in general, and they define themselves specifically in opposition to it.

And. Which, which religious standpoint, if you want to dig in, the standpoint, theologians, which reli. Which I know, I know. I had to go there, but. Which. I'm glad you did. Which religious standpoint are you coming from? Are you coming from the religion that is preached in the Old and New Testament, or are you coming from the religion of multiculturalism? Yeah, no, I mean, like, I mean, there. Right.

I would say I'm coming from the position of the religion that's preaching the New Testament as the fulfillment of the old, which is one side of that. One side of the conflict would say that the New Testament has nothing to say, and the other side of that would say the New Testament is lying. Right. Amazing how that works, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's amazing that both religions that have rejected the New Testament are at war with each other. Go figure. What are the odds?

What are the odds, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a. So we're where. I am prepared to talk about this, though, where I can, where I, where I don't, I'm not, I don't see myself as an expert in israeli palestinian conflicts. I've not been to Israel. I've studied under professors who have lived there. But even those things could be discredited as credentialism. And I acknowledge that criticism.

One thing that I do have experience in is regular versus irregular warfare, rules of engagement and the ethics of the battlefield. And, and perhaps more, as a philosopher, it's interesting to look at how we've come to believe certain things about rules of engagement and regular versus irregular warfare, limited versus unlimited warfare as well, because when we watch our movies and we watch our films and we play our video games and we read our books. Classic.

In american christian culture, Lord of the Rings. There isn't really a big question when you're reading the Lord of the Rings that Sauron is the bad guy and that the orcs are not. They're not. The orcs are not the good people. Right. Not ambiguous. And it's, you know, it's convenient that it's convenient.

It's not convenient as in a dig on it because the epic are the, you know, the high fantasy story that is the Lord of the Rings is fundamentally a struggle of good versus evil and how that evil is manipulates and twists and it uses temptations and how men are not infallible but they still rise to the occasion in the face of clear and present evil. And. But in. But in the Lord of the Rings, there. There aren't orc women and children being hit by gondorian bombs and there aren't. Good point.

There aren't, you know, there aren't these, like, bastions of cultural development that Tolkien puts into the orcish population as being this sort of half of the coin. They're corrupted elves. They're twisted by the wickedness. They're people. There are these, you know, there's the people who have been corrupted and the people who have not been corrupted. And so, you know, and that story is a good story and it fits within its. It talks about the character qualities of these.

These people who rise to the occasion and put themselves through peril to do what is right. And Frodo has to contend with the temptation of the Ring and. And Aragorn has to do this and the sun, you know, the line of Alyndial. And he has to choose to become the kingdom as opposed to run away from it. And there's all these, you know, these challenges for the character development. But it's. It's a, but the Lord of the Rings is, you know, what do you. What do you see in, when you watch the movies?

Well, it's the orcs that are burning the villages with the women and children inside. And it's the, you know, and so, like, that's. That is what we would call unlimited warfare. Whereas the. The good people in this, the line of men and elves really only have limited warfare at their disposal because everything that they're fighting against is an orc, a troll, a goblin, something that's trying to, you know, something that was once good, that was twisted. And so they're.

They don't have to distinguish between combatants and non combatants. And so the difference. The. The short difference between limited and unlimited warfare is. Limited warfare is rules of engagement that distinguishes between combatants and non combatants, legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Unlimited warfare, whether it's the guerrilla, whether it's Hiroshima, whether it's these, you know, these. These scales, in some sense, is warfare against the entire apparatus.

And it can be as ugly as genocide or as not confusing but as. As morally conflicting as well. Does the factory that builds a. Does the tanks count as a target if it's staffed by women and children? Does the. Does the. Does the, you know, does the mine, which produces the coal to run the train that is not run by the military but run by the state or run by a private institution, does that count? And we've seen that, but we're not. Where I have a certain amount of.

Maybe disdain isn't the right word, of frustration with the way that this gets displayed in social media level discourses is it's not that there isn't room for nuance. It's that the audience is treated as if they are incapable of nuance and understanding and considering these things themselves and how this reflects when it ends up on your doorstep.

And what this looks like when it turns into a corruption on the bureaucratic level, is when the people who are writing the rules of engagement have no consequence or cost or understanding of the rules of engagement. And so. And so what it looks like, and this can reflect on multiple layers of our society.

Regardless of whether you live in America or you live in Israel, or you live in Ukraine, or you live in Mongolia, is you have rules of engagement that are determined on a bureaucratic level to some extent, but you also have a right way of acting before your God. And if you substitute what is right for what is politically correct, then you have a question to face of when you're put in a position, where do I do what's expedient, or do I do what is right? Which do I choose?

And so to kind of tie this in a little bit closer, the idea of limited warfare, from how we understand it, mostly comes from the 17 hundreds into the 18 hundreds, and the european balance of powers, war. Most of our understanding of it comes from that era of writing, which also takes place during the enlightenment. And what we saw is that the era of the enlightenment produced this need, this desire for a balance of power, according to the. Of the european powers.

At the same time that colonies are popping up all over the world, including everything from Egypt to America and in America, while the hundred Years war. I'm sorry. While. Was it. Well, the. Was it the seven Years War? I believe it's. The seven Years war was going on in Europe between the English and the French. America was encountering the french and indian war, and those wars were not fought exactly the same way.

And undergirding a lot of that was Catholics versus Protestants, was Christians of this community, versus Christians of that community, which was the French versus the English, was american settlers versus this native american group in conjunction with the Acadians, which were french settlers.

And so what you saw is what we see in this desire, what I think that I've observed in this desire to institute rules of engagement in limited warfare is to contain the scale of destruction down to a measure where we can essentially negotiate our battles with minimal force. But what you realize on the battlefield is that the number of deaths necessary to create an overwhelming victory on either side isn't very high.

In movies, we see, you know, a group of a thousand men versus 1000 men, and at the end of it, only 300 of one team are left. That's 1700 people that have died, and that is not the normal. Or in other words, not only that is not the normal in limited warfare. In limited warfare, a mass casualty experience is typically something like 10% of your. Of your force. If you got 30 dudes and you got three people down, you're already at a mass cal experience. Mass cal mass casualty.

And so in american military doctrine, a mass casualty is typically enough to consider canceling the mission, especially during the global war on terror. So, again, if you're going out with three dudes, or 30 dudes, and three of them get injured but aren't dead, the mission's over. Your objective is no longer to finish everything unless it's within achievable.

And there's officers and there's all these different arguments, but now there's a major objective has shifted from whatever it was to now exfilling and refitting and doing it again. Napoleon was made famous during his era because this idea of the balance of power wars had manifested in the french military to these what accounted to, like, sort of political skirmishes on their borders. And then Napoleon was like, no, we're going to win. We're going to crush them.

We're going to defeat our opponents. There will be no so much so that they cannot retaliate tomorrow. And he stepped, he didn't. He challenged the. He had challenges with, like, limited versus unlimited war on his own front. But that was a distinction that he produced in that era, which to some people was considered ungentlemanly, but then he was the first french emperor. So your ungentlemanliness can go fly a kite. Results speak for themselves. Yeah. Right.

So in all of these things being wrapped together, and we're talking about limited warfare. Limited warfare is the ideal, but it is not the reality. And just because the reality of warfare includes the extensions into unlimited warfare, where maybe a government hires mercenaries, which it can disavow, to go burn a village with women and children in it and then disavows them, maybe providing a pension, who knows?

Or safe harbor, can then say, look, that wasn't our armies that do it, but your armies still need to face our armies while your armies are starving. And the grand strategy looks different than what we would like to see in Lord of the Rings.

And so when you're looking at conflicts between people and violence, there is a. There is a. There's the temptation of cynicism to say, well, this is just how it is that, you know, there's the temptation of cynicism that says, this is just how it is that, well, war is hell, and we might as well go to hell while doing it. Mm hmm. And that is bloodlust. Right. So, you know, and. But the.

But the solution to that is, well, when you die, you will go before God, and then that gives men reason for constraint. And it also, there, it also comes at a very aggressive negation to the kind of baby killer mentality that was prominent maybe ten years ago, maybe 15 years ago, which is this, you know, every soldier is a baby killer. It's like, well, then you've never met one, because those people who are making that decision to go there are making conscious decisions on the ground.

And when they make decisions, you can't condemn everybody for the actions of a few. That's right. What's interesting about that, before I take the idea a little further, is the difference between the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones is that Game of Thrones actually has an unlimited warfare option, which is the dragons. The dragons are pure unlimited warfare, which is the giant distinctive. And the Lord of the Rings has no such thing.

In fact, the Lord of the Rings actually has a giant deus ex machina army, which is Saruman's forces that he raises up out of the ground. Literally just pulls him up out of the ground. I need an army. I don't know. Where are they? Down on the ground. There you go. Got an army. But it serves a purpose. But that's a really good distinction in that there isn't a lot of moral gray area that takes place in the Lord of the Rings, and that's part of the appeal.

The moral gray area, I guess I would say that takes place through the Lord of the Rings story is in the heroes with having to step up and do the hard things as they encounter. We might say the heroic, though not the moral gray area within themselves. And they have to overcome it. There's no moral gray area in the battle. Right. Because it's pure evil. It's pure evil downstream from, like, morgoth and all that stuff.

So, and that's what, that's what lends the story a certain clarity and a didactic nature for men to read and to realize their own heroism is that we recognize the moral gray area and the need to choose within ourselves. Yeah, but the moral gray area of Lord of the Rings is not gray to the reader, but is the reader gets to experience and observe the characters navigating it. Like, for example, when Frodo or Aragorn are tempted to take on the ring and solve the world's problems.

The reader knows that it's not gray because he knows that the ring is evil. But the character that is in the book or in the movie is experiencing the process of navigating the gray area. Yes. Viscerally. That's Frodo's whole deal, right. Whether he's going to give in to the temptation of the ring or give up at least. And then at the end he gives into the temptation of the ring, of course. But it's more that, yeah.

Okay, so versus reality, where the moral gray area, where you make a really good point, there is no orc culture. There is no orc village. Right. Theyre just pure evil bad, wicked twistedness. Versus the reality is even someone you may be tempted to describe as pure evil bad, or at least a whole people, I think we can probably, in many cases point to individuals and say, yeah, this individual who committed this atrocity, whatever village they come from doesnt really matter.

But when youre talking about wiping out an entire people, the bloodlust manifesting on social media one way or another, right. That's when, that's when it's like, well, it's not so simple. You can't just call you can't just call a people group, orcs and think that these two things map to each other. But social media went there real quick. Yeah. And because it pleases the ego, there is, it goes back to what we were talking about a while ago. It serves the righteous that sense of need for justice.

But it goes awry when it replaces justice as something created by God, by his own character and replaced with, I am the one offended, therefore I have my infinite right to vengeance. So that's. Yes. And a lot of people adopted that posture. Well, it's very common for people these days on social media to adopt that posture one way or another. Right.

And that's almost the core, the chief temptation of social media, at least Twitter or X. I don't know about Facebook so much anymore, but certainly the culture of Twitter lately has become crusading in one's own righteousness. To the point like, hey, raising my hand. Guilty is charged from time to time, right? So that's all. Not. There's no accusation to the point where when someone isn't crusading in their own righteousness, it appears as weakness.

Like, how dare you crusade in God's righteousness. Who do you think you are? This is the. This is the our righteousness feel. Well, yeah, it's the, you know, social media is now one group, people versus another group of people, with a third group of people tut tutting everybody else. And it's like, oh, interesting. You know, tut. Ah, tut, tut, tut, tut. How dare you? Yeah. Or it's, you know, what is it? So, so social media is not necessarily where cooler heads prevail.

It's where people lecture each other about being cooler heads. I know, I quite heated about it. Yeah. But no, I think we can. But it is important here to make another distinction, because philosophers do nothing but make distinctions. But that is, there is what's happening in the world, and then there is what's happening on social media. And social media reflects the heart of people. And what's happening in Israel and Gaza is not the same thing as what's happening on social media.

But there is a real concern, and I don't. And I think. I think. I think it's nearly universal. Maybe not, but I'm saying, I think because I'm willing to sort of, kind of bet on it, but I'm not. It's not something that I would state with, like, a theological stake in the ground, but I think that the concern that people have in social media is that what is represented on social media will become real life. Yes. Okay. Yeah. What do you mean? Like, what. What is represented on social.

What specifically do you mean? So there's a. There's a consistency. There's been, since 2020, maybe even before that, there has been a. There's a trend on social media for people oftentimes or most often with anonymous accounts to be willing to go onto social media and call for the deaths of other people. Oh, yeah. You know, and you see this from ideologies that are caked into the american system. Or you see, we'll just, I'll use an example.

So one of the things that we get to be thankful for at this time in the United States is that all the people who are really good at violence are either gainfully employed in engaging it in some way, shape, or form elsewhere, or are not participating. And, and so you look at, this is, you look at school shootings, you, you know, they're, they're, the people who go out and commit school shootings are not typically that very good at what they're doing.

Um, including, well, I'm not going to make a joke there. Yeah, yeah. But, like, but the point I'm saying is they're not particularly good at the application of force. Oh, that's what I, that's what I was going to say. They're not particularly good at anything else either, is. Yeah, well, yeah, sure. I, um. Yeah, but, but so, like, the people. Who are like, oh, I see what you mean. You're not, you're not getting a grandmaster at USPSA going and shooting up a school.

You're not seeing a guy who is an ex Navy SeAL going out and committing this kind of violence. I see what you mean. Okay. Yeah. You're seeing, you're seeing people who are isolated initially, you know, like isolated, or they're kind of the stereotypical example. But, you know, and it's not less of a tragedy because it's happening. It's, we're at least thankful that the people who are committing that level of violence are not actually that good at it.

Rather, all the people who are really good at violence are not going onto social media calling for the deaths of republicans or calling for the deaths of Trump supporters or calling for the deaths of liberals or calling for the deaths of the left or whatever. They're, they're, they're kind of nothing doing that because they know what violence looks like and the people who have done it well or are good at it know the consequences of calling for such things.

Yeah. You know, and so we're thankful for it. And now, but we've seen a scale shift in the Middle east where that some of, some of the people who are participating in that kind of violence are good at it. And the concern that is, is represented on social media is that the call to violence that is being found on social media will return to manifest in our very lives. I see, yeah. Because it's easy to make a post about violence on social media.

It's a little, in an instant, in a hot take kind of instant. You plug in your 280 characters and hit go. And depending on the algorithm and the influence of the individual, that call to violence could literally echo around the world. And are people really thinking through the consequences of potentially doing that? And I would even say that the risk is on the other side, that there are people that are doing it in full awareness of the potential consequences.

And maybe that's what you're saying is that there are people calling for violence, knowing that will echo back on us collectively, if not the individual in question. Yeah, I don't, I don't think we're moving away. I think we're moving closer to that day, not away from it. I see, yeah. Yeah. And that is the, and that is a, that is a very real concern that is reflected in the hearts and minds of many people is that we're not moving away.

We're not deescalating in any way shape reform and the attempts at the end. So many of the calls for de escalation of force are coming from authoritarians and plutocrats who are using it as a religious moral high ground to say, let's, you know, we just all need to get along. But what they're implying is that you, we all need to get along in my fashion. So when we talk about what's going on in, in Israel and Gaza as a religious war, it's not so simple as a mere peaceful solution.

Because the problem with, let's just say, enforced peace through multiculturalism is that it comes with the absolution of meaning. The annihilation of meaning is the right word, the annihilation of meaning. So I think what's more important is to address the issue of multiculturalism, is that multiculturalism in the west is this argument that all different religions can get along, we can all get along and we can all, you be a Muslim and I be a Christian, he practices his religion.

And as long as your religious practices don't impact anybody else, then we're all good. But that's not how it works. Not only is that not how it works, the only way that it can be achieved by human methods is to annihilate the meaning of your beliefs. It's to annihilate, in turn, everyone's belief system, their religion, in this description, their metaphysical worldview, into nothing more than a fashion statement. Okay?

So, you know, so imagine going to, you know, there, you know, so there's this, um, let's, let's take the example of. Take two. Two random into two individuals that are in conflict in the Middle east. Two, two individuals. Two. You know, you have a Hamas character and you have a israeli IDF person. Yep. Right. And you say, get along. Okay. Get along. Stop bombing each other now. Yes. We don't want them to destroy each other, but they. They both share a religious significance to a location.

And in order for them to just get along, the signification of that religious location needs to be annihilated. But it's not really important. It's just. It's just a metaphor, man. The Temple Mount is just a metaphor. The dome of the rock is just an idea. I see. Or your religious convictions are just your personal ideas. Yes. Okay. Okay. So this is approaching it. Not. This is approaching it from the standpoint, from the position that our religious views hold conviction over our lives.

If they don't, if we don't allow any room for conviction, all you get is that nihilism. Right. And so with. You have. Your worldview has to. Cannot simply be that we need to get along, that all roads lead to Rome, that all belief systems are the same. They can't all be the same. They can't all have equal value. Yeah. Because one, what happens when they can, it's. Well, one, it's not realistic. What happens when they conflict? You know, what happens when you get the religious.

A religious supremacy clause within some sect of a group that says people of our height, people only over 6ft tall are. No one over 6ft tall is as good as anyone or, I'm sorry, you must be above 6ft tall to be a holy one. Everyone above, you know, like. And we, and we place meaning and value on the, on the height, you know, then you got the bed of Procrusteus and you got all these other issues going on. But like, this is an absurd example, but you look at it in, in our worldview where it's.

You could do like supremacy arguments all day long and they're actually kind of tired and boring. What you really run into the issue of is the idea of multiculturalism on its own face is built on the. Is built on the foundation that none of your personal beliefs have any relevance to your life. The only thing that matters is economy, materialism and communal good, whatever that is. But who gets to determine communal good? Well, it's the monarchs of multiculturalism.

You've just created a new overarching religion that is tut tutting all of the other religions and sometimes bombing them and sometimes policing them to not fight with each other, but they need to get along. But they can't get along because they're antithetical to one another.

And so the very human, real problem here that we're being faced with, the human problem that we're being faced with this issue is that we are in contest between the significance of our belief and how that applies to our lives and how that belief system does that belief system under undergird or build a foundation for how we view other lives.

And this is one of the reasons why, as a Christian, I'm saying there really is no other worldview that can handle this because Christianity doesn't have infidels. It doesn't have the crushing of the non believers. It is only when you commit crimes against people like you are crimes against Imago Dei, where there is a system by which they are enacted upon.

So a Christian can't go to a Muslim and say, well, you don't believe in my form of Jesus, so therefore I have unlimited warfare application against you. Although Christians have certainly done this in the past. And. And there's no, you know, and there's grounds for. What is it? There's grounds for conviction there, maybe a persecute, not persecution. But prosecution isn't the right word either. But there's grounds for issues being presented there.

However, your multicultural prosecution is, it's still like, well, they. I mean, the crusades were a long time ago. Okay? You know, like, whatever, right? But it fundamentally comes down to the question of, what is your system of justice based on? Is it on vengeance or is it on justice? And we're right back to where we started. Where does the origin of justice come from?

So I'm listening to you say all this, and I'm smiling to myself because I'm seeing a bunch of different threads that we've been exploring all throughout the conversation, kind of twinning together. So right now I'm reading the case for christian nationalism by Stephen Wolfenhe, which is an excellent book. And the section that I just finished is about the christian civil magistrate having the ability to restrain public professions of other faiths, including atheism.

So in a truly christian nation, this is what he proposes. The civil magistrate is oriented towards the christian good, the ultimate highest truth, which is christian truth, and orients people towards that highest truth, which is mediated through the church.

So the civil magistrate doesn't take on religious duties, but is informed by the christian religious faith, because the christian religious faith points to the highest good for people, social, you can have inner other beliefs, but social expressions of those beliefs will be prohibited in order to orient the populace towards the christian truth. Right. Okay. In civil practice, it's a great. I really am enjoying the way that he's talking about this.

Okay. So as part of this book, he's talking about the gynocracy and the need for robust, masculine christian men to assert a form of Christianity that has been lost. Right? Whether we ever were, whether that form of christian nationalism ever existed before, there were christians that were more upfront about their beliefs being superior and even supreme than we have now, where we all kind of live in this modernist kind of like myth of neutrality. I don't want to force myself upon.

Okay, so going back to the question of can weak men be good? We defined good as having the ability to go beyond yourself, the constant pursuit. Right. And then we define good as pursuing goodness. Pursuing goodness, yes. And weakness as the inability or unwillingness to go beyond oneself. Right.

And so, and so to kind of put the pieces together, there is a call now amongst christian men in America, particularly evangelicals, will focus on that, to go beyond themselves in their socio political conceptions of the myth of neutrality and actually fight in the public square for the christian faith against other false religions, right?

Yep. Okay. Okay. And so now we're seeing the same struggle manifested on the geopolitical international realm where we would, where the myth of neutrality would have us say, well, we'll let these people work out their religious or cultural differences or their political differences, instead of stepping forward boldly and saying, the christian faith has something to say about this conflict to both of you, and will Christian Menta go past themselves and be strong and step in to that goodness on

the international scale? And so it's very interesting we're having this conversation because in the same context, we're talking about christian men, talking about literal physical strength and how there are lots of men that don't want to go beyond themselves in this way. Can a robust, masculine Christianity assert itself in the local, national, and even geopolitical level on behalf of the good of perhaps the entire world? Like, are those the stakes right now?

So it sounds like a scaling question. Well, yeah. So do I have the ability to assert myself? It's not like immediately going to assert the christian faith on behalf of all of Christendom over in Israel. Like, I'm not getting right, but it's like, it's a question of can a man take dominion over his, over his diethye? Can he take it over his body? Can he take it over his relationships? Can he take it over his home? Can he take it over his neighborhood? Can he take it over his church?

Can he take it over his community? Can he take it over his nation? Can he take it over its world? So, like progressive levels of dominion taking, do christian men have it within themselves now today to begin that process? Obviously, it's a big, you know, you got to eat the elephant one, one bite at a time. But when we're having a discussion about whether or not it's even appropriate for christian men to celebrate lifting weights, I think we have a sense of where the dialogue is.

Okay. So I almost see two different arguments being pitted against themselves in this description. One of them is, get your house in order before you try to fix the world. Yes. You know, american. What right do american men who aren't willing to get their own life in order, what right do they have to make statements about a war that's happening on the other side of the world? Sure. And, you know, and that's, and that's a criticism. It's an argument in the form of criticism.

And the, the argument that's being made is actually accusatory of the person, of a person not in the room, but it is an accusatory argument saying, I know you are calling for this over here, but you're not even doing it at home. Sure. Right. And so. Ad hominem. Almost. But yes. Well, it sticks a little bit. It can be ad hominem. It can be, but it's not immediately ad hominem. Yes, but it is a challenge saying.

It is more of a challenge saying, you are calling for justice and righteous dominion over there, but you don't even have it over here. And so this is like, this is the american, it's not the american nationalist, but it's like, well, I am pro american. I'm not pro Palestine and I'm pro american. Well, is that person saying to America that, like, what grounds do you have to stand on? Well, China made the same accusation of America. America made the same accusation of China. Like, this is.

And while I get the argument, the question is, where does it go other than nowhere? Correct. The other side of the. So that's one column that's being pitted here. I think the other column that's being pitted here is that that challenge is being, is one part of the argument. The other part of the argument is, let me, give me, let me get my thoughts together. How are we going to even. I am a citizen, too, of this world, and I have and God has.

And through revelation or through logic and through argument and reasoning, we can make observations and we have a duty to act and live. So shouldn't we not do it like, shouldn't we not live as the creation go and act? And so on the one hand you have the issue of, well, you're not even doing it at home. And on the other hand you're saying, yeah, but we should do something. Yes, in its simplest form, it's just like, well, we should do something you're bad at. It's like, well, you're not wrong.

And so the christian nationalist argument is not one that I am going to say I'm well versed in, but what I'm seeing being said is the myth of neutrality is that you can be your christian self in private, but then go out into the world and be a heathen like everybody else.

And it's almost like a medieval idea of the sacred and the profane, except for the medieval idea of the sacred and the profane existed under a sort of, at least as it's told, this sort of universal, loose christian left and right balance and kind of that medieval myth. Right. It's like, you know, you have the church and the pope and you have the king and like there's all these things that happen in between, but whatever.

And so, so the myth of neutrality is that you can be a christian in your home but you should vote for some other religion. And that other religion is multiculturalism and that other religion is this like, well, anything goes mentality or whatever is the current thing with the current vengeance structure, the current oppression or the current thing.

And where I think both of those fall apart is that, well, we don't have, we're not all going in the same direction, me and, me and a person who has, who is adamant for gun control, we don't have, we don't have the same end goal in mind. I want free people. I want dangerous freedom. You want peaceful slavery just to be cruel about it. I believe, and I'll be clear on this, support of gun control is support of slavery.

No, no, in between, because what you're doing, what you're doing is you're going to people and saying, you are not man, you are not human enough to have sovereignty over even your own life. That is somebody else's responsibility. And so, you know, and you could go through like, well, tyranny and all this other kind of stuff. But if I, even if I'm not a magistrate and I go to somebody else and say, you know, well, you're not a human enough to own a gun.

Is it because they've committed felonies or it's because I don't think they're good enough, they're real enough as people, whatever the word you want to be. And that's a bit of a straw man. And I admit it. I admit it, that the way that I'm presenting it is not the strongest way I could present that argument. I get what you mean. And I'm mixing too many things in at the same time.

And so to kind of tie it back into this christian nationalism of argument, what I think is being said is that if you believe x to be right and you want that to be right in your society, how far does it extend outside of your home? And the challenge that we saw recently in Minnesota was that the Walker Arts center hosted a child Family friendly event, which was motten Bailey as an artistic expression.

And that was, that was, you know, that was the Bailey, the, the idea of, like, oh, we're just doing this art thing, but the explicit statement on the website and advertisement that we are going to bring your kids in and we're going to summon demons. Hmm. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Summoning, that's art when we want it to be, you know, summoning the demon Lilith so that we can put it into a little thingy and solve it. Right. It's like. You're kidding. They said that?

Yep. Oh, so we're all going to summon our own personal demon, and it's this, you know, this thing to do with Lilith and this idea of what is it? Putting it into a familiar so you can, you know, make friends with your demon and solve your problems. Yeah, no, it was very explicit. And then when they were. Yeah. And then when they were challenged, I like, it's just art. Like, really. I mean, this is where that goofy meme comes in. Like, really, really?

It might just be art to you, but, like, if we believe in demons, angels and demons and demon possession, that's not something that we want publicly praised in the streets. And so if christian nationalism is simply saying you can't summon demons in front of children, then I don't know. Like, we would all be for it. Well, we'd think we'd all be for it.

But, but I, and so the suspicion that's present, I think the suspicion that's leveled at christian nationalism, if there's, if we're going to give the suspicion it's due and iron steel man. It is. I think that you're veiling a authoritarian government through a appeal to religious concern, which isn't very different than what we are already seeing happening. Exactly. We need to worship the cult of safety.

And so we're going to, we're going to, you know, we're going to, we're going to make sure that we're going to punish the churches that don't fly the rainbow flag because we don't want to harm feelings. And we're doing it to protect you, and we're doing it, you know, so I think there's some legitimacy to the concern. It's that I don't think most of the targeting is all that honest. I think. I think most of it is just dishonesty, and that's not uncommon.

So I'm not actually even coming out in defense of even Wolf's version of christian nationalism. I haven't read the book. I'm not going to go that far. But what I do think that he's appealing to people is if you're going to call yourself a Christian, you're going to hold christian values, but then you're going to go to the Senate and you're going to vote against those values, then there's something that's inconsistent here.

Yes, I think you make a really good point that everyone's so afraid of masculine christian nationalism because of its authoritarian nature, and yet they don't want to acknowledge that we have feminine gynecotic authoritarianism that is more, quote unquote, loving, intolerant and accepting and hurts less feelings, but is no less oppressive to the human spirit. Right.

Well, you don't need a, you do not need a PhD to recognize that the very, very, the high priests of tolerance are anything but what they say. You know, you don't need, you don't need a PhD, you do not need a doctorate to read Ibram X Kendi's book and recognize that his thesis is that you should give him money. Right. Well, I mean, there are a lot of really smart people that seem to overlook that because they want a piece of the, they want a piece of the money, too.

And I recommend everyone go back and listen to my podcast with Jimmy song about fiat ruins everything for more.

So it was my episode last week because he talks about how fiat currency creates all these perverse incentives for people to get next to the source of power, next to the money printer, rather than actually produce durable masculine values that masculine value, the production of valuable labor in terms of creation of goods and services, has fallen out of fashion in favor of what he calls rent seeking jobs where you have a middle manager position where your entire life is sucking up to the person

above you so that you get the promotion or the pay raise to all this fake fiat cash. Right. And so that's kind of what we're looking at, is people just willfully overlooking the obviously corrupt values of these. Of a lot of the social justice hucksters, because they want to be in the circles of power where they can get access to the money, printer cash, instead of standing up for something difficult and inconvenient and masculine in the public square and saying, no, that's wrong.

I won't allow this to happen to my society. And so you can see the fracture points of everything between this, between two different conceptions of reality. Are you worshiping? And I really, really believe this. So I've probably stated this elsewhere. I think that what's going to happen is over the next six to twelve months, effeminacy and weakness will be conquered in the evangelical christian church. Churches may explode, but it'll happen.

And then who will be left will be ready to truly take on the next big boss, which is the reality that we live in a world that worships the divine feminine, that worships, that doesn't identify it. But, like, you see this in the gynocracy, you see this in, you know, feminism, you see it in all these different ways that we live in a world right now that is occupied, you know, by some wicked feminine spirit. It's not really feminine. It's just Satan wearing a wig.

But christian men and families, but men have to be prepared to take on. And so I think we're getting there. And what we're talking about, all this about, can weak men be good? Right? Can weak men prosecute this spiritual battle? No. No way. Yeah. We going back to the old, old Testament gods. Like, we might have conquered some of the spirit of Baal, but have we conquered the spirit of Asherah and Lilith? Well, I'm not. That's mysticism. That's. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not. What would be a cool word?

A demonologist? Isn't that like a d and d term? It's probably a real thing, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Asherah. Exactly. Mm hmm. You know, it's like, and, and I think the. The cult of the, the cult of the feminine manifests many ways in our culture right now. A cult of. A cult of safety, right. So you can't do that. It's not safe. Some things are not safe, but they're good to do. Executing justice against a violent criminal is not safe.

You know, but executing justice against a violent criminal is not safe. You try to execute it as safely as possible. You don't, you know, recklessness in a night raid gets people killed. But it's so, so, but the cult of safety would say, don't even do it. Let them get their kicks out or it's not safe. And it's not. This is not an appeal to young men's recklessness.

It is a. It is a, it is a challenge to the cult of safety which says, don't do anything that could cause, that could result in pain, because pain is the only. Is actually evil, not evil, or suffering is suffering at all. Itself is not evil, or suffering is evil not the cause of suffering. And you see the cult of the divine feminine, it's easy to see how do you adjudicate against it? And some of it has to be overt, but some of it is very internal. And this goes back to that man.

If you're not even willing to face the cult of safety that has controlled your life, then how are you expecting yourself? What? How many, how many children's lives are sacrificed on your cult of safe, on your altar to the God of safety? Yep. You know, and it's, it's. You have that, that pull. We're not going to just start lighting pyres. But are you. Don't tempt me. Are you? Well, no, but are you.

Are you, are you sacrificing your children, your future, your church community, on the altar of safety? Safety, comfort, niceness. Right. This is like almost the holy trinity of the divine feminine. Right? Pleasure. That's another one. So maybe there's more than a trinity. So I could probably run this out and. Yeah. How many lives are we willing to sacrifice on those altars? Apparently many. Versus what? Dangerous freedom. This is the real. You froze again. There you are.

This is the real challenge that we're facing now. Ultimately, it's a false choice because safety, comfort, niceness and pleasure are really just screens for the hard authoritarianism that's going to come right in behind it. Like it's just, it's just the leading edge. And then behind it was the iron fist and the velvet glove. That's all it is, right?

And we see this, you've probably seen this in Minnesota where it's like it's all loving and it's all accepting and it's all friendly and nice and we all just want to get along until Antifa shows up and then it's a very different ballgame. Well, to go Old Testament on this one, let's go to go Old Testament on this one.

When God is leading, very, very physically leading the people of Israel, and they're tempted to worship other gods, whether it's the golden calf or then when they're in Israel or Canaan, and they're tempted to fall into baal worship and Asherah and these things, God is calling them to say, your only security is in me. Your only safety is in me. You're only good. Like, your crops are dependent on me. They're not dependent on how many babies you sacrificed to this, your fruit, your security.

And let's not be so trivial and say that security is limited to the food I put on the table and the roof over my head. Men committing suicide in this world, we have veterans, veteran suicide, and men committing suicide in this world is not a trivial concept. But are they not bodies sacrificed on the altar of safety or the. Or the divine feminine? Right? And that gets pretty. I mean, that's.

I'll be willing to say that that can come across as a bit of a stretch or a bit of a reach in that sense of like, hey, I'm kind of. I'm exploring on the periphery of the argument here, but the men, when I. When I experience that conversation, it's because they are trapped in a prison of meaninglessness and si. And safety. And safety. Uber all this, like, safety for what, you know, for to what end? To be safe. Like, this isn't meaningful, right? And then.

And they feel that they're a failure and that there is. They're alone and they're. And they're. And they're saying, you know, it isn't right that I should be living this way or I have not lived up to whatever invisible standard that's been placed over me, that I should be more nice or I was nice and I didn't get my reward or I didn't get whatever. And it's like, yeah, that is a rough place to be. The solution is not self deletion. The solution is to.

The solution is not heretical zealotry towards the destruction of all. It is, it is. It is. It is turning away from. Even in the land of your enemies, turning away from the cult of safety to your security and identity as in Christ. It's. I am again trying to preach the gospel here, but it's. It is. It is turning away from the comfort and ease of just being nice. Like, we all know it, though. The nice guy is anything but nice. It's a fake.

Like, I grew up in a world where I was the nice guy for a while, and I'll tell you, heart of malice, and I'm not alone in this. And. And so, like. And so that that turn starts internal and moves outward. And for. Even for men, like, we're not alone in this. I guarantee you, you're not alone in this. And it may feel that way, but if I can say one thing as one man, you're not alone in this. So I agree. I just. A podcast about that just came out today about isolation and men's loneliness.

And I know that it especially shows up in the veterans community in so many other ways where it's like, I think I could probably tie safety culture to the epidemic of veteran suicides, because our culture is not good with death, because death makes us feel bad. And so one of the things we do is we take old people, we tuck them away in homes, because we don't want to look at the reality of death because it gives me the feel bads and the feel sads.

And then, so in the same way, we have these warriors who go overseas and serve admirably, maybe not always, but certainly in the main, they serve admirably, and then they come home, and our culture is not, for all of its celebration of violence and movies and video games, is not actually good with dealing with the real world. Men, three dimensional men who do it. And so we tuck them away and we tell them, nope, you're not nice. You're too safe. And we take these dangerous men.

I really liked the movie american sniper for this reason. I know that there's all kinds of things with Chris Kyle and that whole thing, but one thing that it surfaced for me as a man who doesn't have military experience was just how difficult the transition was for him when he came back from the front lines, back to, like, there's a scene where he's in, like, a body shop or something like that, and he's just so.

He's so alienated from his environment specifically, because it's so safe and comfortable, and I felt that. And so I think that's the manifestation is we don't actually know how to integrate dangerous warrior men with dangerous warrior experience back into our safety culture world. And so we throw them away. We'll just go over here. Yeah, I think this is. I want to speak personally on this one, too, please. Is that we've seen this happen.

We've seen that hyper vigilance is something that we see occasionally. I don't think we see it as much as we have in the past, but this idea of hyper vigilance, which is like the veteran comes back from overseas. He spent years perfecting his ability to wage war in an effective manner, or at least trying to become good at it, and struggling with the ethical structure, the battles that he has to face inside himself and then outside.

And then he comes back to America, and every time he goes to a restaurant, he has to know where all the exits are, and he has to sit with his back to the wall, and he has to. This hyper vigilance of hearing a car backfire and then immediately going into panic, this goes back to even what we were talking about earlier, is that there's a distinction that needs to be made between the individual, or distinction, not a distinction. It's something that no man knows another man's heart.

But for the hyper vigilance, specifically addressing the issue of hyper vigilance, some of it can be the response from traumatic experiences, yes, but another part of it is placing your identity in those experiences. So the hyper vigilance, and I think it's the like, I think veterans have to walk through this sometimes not alone, but internally, and we are willing to speak about it to one another.

Is, is your hyper vigilance an extension of an identity that you no longer have, that you're trying to hold on to? Mmmdh or, you know, or sometimes it's one and sometimes the other, and sometimes it's both. But the hyper vigilance aspect of this. Right, so that the veteran comes home, and this is kind of might speak a little bit to the Chris Kyle thing. I haven't seen the movie for a long time, but one part of it is when you're overseas and you're going to war, there's a very sense of order.

Not order, that's dictated by purely structural means of a government or, sorry, military organization, like chain of command and so on and so forth. But there's also a sense of order where, like, if I don't load my rifle, if I don't shoot my gun, if I don't participate, if I don't do the like, things have cause and effect. Cause and effect, cause and effect. And then you come back to the United States, and there doesn't seem to be that anymore.

The line between, or the straight line between cause and effect seems to be muddied in many situations. So a person is acting in an aggressive behavior. Well, it doesn't mean that they're going to get into a bar fight. They just might be angry about something.

But from what you're used to is a person who's acting like this is getting ready to do something bad because you can tell when a person is about to go do something bad because of the way they walk, the way they talk, the way they stand, the way they move, the way they look at you. And some of that is intuitive, and some of it is less intuitive. Some of it is intuitive, and some of it is intellectual and articulate. And so when it comes to the experience that veterans get when they.

Some. Some veterans go through, some veterans go through when they come back to the United States, is moving from a world where they understood the mechanism of being into a world where they no longer understand the mechanism of being. And part of that transition is to figure out the rules of the new game, because they're not the same as the old game. Your identity, your environment has changed, and not all of it is going to be easy, and not all of it is right. Let me be clear on that one.

Not everything about how the american system functions is right. Yes, good people get away with, or evil people get away with evil. Good people get punished for their good. And if you. There's a certain compulsion for people to join the military that has to do with a sense of justice. And when you see that eroded or contradicted in the United States, there is reason to be angered and frustrated by it. But now we're again stuck at the battle of apathy and crusader, you know, and we're.

And we're one. We're once again stuck between those, those two lines. So for the person struggling with hyper vigilance, on the one hand, some of it is experiential, but make sure that you do the due diligence to not be making that your identity, that hyper vigilance is a form of identity, because certainly, don't get me wrong, if you've gone off and experienced war and you've seen violence and you see things which are real, some of them might, you know, might be exaggerations.

Like the fireworks is incoming fire. Like veterans can distinguish between a dude, it's the 4 July, you're not getting mortared, but you wake up in the middle of the night because you hear a noise and you're scared like you're supposed to be, you know, as you cool off, you realize, I need to be able to solve this. I need to be able to solve this, or am I going to make it my identity? And we don't want to make it our identity because, well, that's not an end. Well. And so you can.

You can observe the injustice in. That's done through the VA. I am. I am right there with you, brother. I have seen it. The VA is a bureaucracy, and it's a bureaucracy staffed by a lot of wicked people. And it doesn't. Not only does it not care about you, but it might not even have the ability to do so. It's trying to. And so some grace they can't solve a problem that they can't solve.

But the other side is, you know, when you make an appointment with somebody at the VA and they don't even choose to show up, and that causes your paperwork to lapse, and then you have to deal with all the stuff, and then it's on your responsibility. Yeah, that's wrong. Yeah. You know, and I don't need to be. I don't need to be a judge of a. I don't need to go to law school to recognize that there's something wrong going on there.

I don't need to be a doctor to recognize that, hey, after this event, I had this problem, and the VA wrote it off as an allergy. Right? I don't need to be. I don't need to be a doctor. And that does happen. And so what. What our. But what our culture certainly doesn't know how to deal with, and I think where a lot of that hurt comes from, is that you answered a call to go do something. Not, maybe with some naivety, you answered a call to defend your country.

Maybe with some naivety, you went into the war or you went into the military, you experienced some of the issues that were challenged, that challenged your naivety, and then you became cynical. But then you started to try to walk out of that cynicism into wisdom.

And part of that challenge is that you may have gone to war and learned something, and then you came back to the United States saying, look, I answered the call during a time when it was the heroes, like the men who went in the military were the heroes. And by the time I came out and got back, none of that mattered anymore. Where's my damn reward? And that is a very bitter pill to taste.

And so I commiserate with my fellow veterans in that sense of, I joined the army in a time of conflict to go in defense of my country, maybe realize that it wasn't exactly a defense thing. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. Maybe I did good things. Maybe I saw only corruption. But then I came back to the United States, and I didn't even get a genuine thank you. I got a free meal once a year, and I got, you know, and I got a hard time getting a job because now I'm.

I've got to go to school and I've got. And my college doesn't. And my college doesn't know how to handle it. And, you know, I have this sense of justice which is now no longer wanted. It's actually discarded, if not even hated. Go learn how to do something. You know, I went and did the thing. I became an army ranger. And then I came home and they condemned me as being irrational and insane for learning how to do the thing that they. That I was encouraged to do as a young person.

And I can understand that bitterness. I can understand that bitterness because it is personal. So the. The solution part of. The. Part of that issue is, you know, we do. We do have to walk through it, and we do have to, like, part of the solution is there is no final solution. And part of it is like, we're going to be in this together. Uh, but the other part of it is, unfortunately, it's not unique to veterans. Well, it's not. Unfortunately, it's not unique to veterans.

Men are dealing with the same thing. We want you to be providers. We want you to be protectors. We want you to look after yourself. But if you do any of those things, you will be hailed as a bigot or a disruptor or just a rebel without a cause, or you'll be condemned for being dangerous. It's like, okay, the christians will say, they'll wax poetic about David's bravery against Goliath. And so when you say, here I am, send me, they're like, yeah, but, no, we don't want it that way.

We want it in a kinder, nicer way. And you're like, well, then why. Why did I even start? That's right. And. And to let that bitterness control you is to quit halfway through the fight. Look at that bright sun. Yeah, it's coming. It's coming in. Yeah, no, I. Go ahead. We've just been out here long enough that I've watched the sun move through the sky and the beautiful cloudy afternoon turn into this nice, sunny, late afternoon. Nice. Yes. And yes, I want to be sensitive to your time as well.

We've had wonderful, a wonderful conversation, and I hear all of that, and it's hard for me to separate it from the general posture that our culture feels towards men in general. I don't think I'm going to encourage you in this sense. It doesn't need to be separated because my personal testimony being I got out of the military, I got out of the military.

And then I worked in another similar field for a while, and then I went to school, and I didn't hit my post military depression until I stopped or until I graduated college. And at that same time, I recognized the same feeling of. That a veteran feels a similar feeling, not identical, because we all have our own experiences, but a similar feeling just in men for being men. And that's kind of.

And that that's kind of the point, I guess, is I saw, like, I think, well, you know, the overwhelming majority of people in the military are men, at least at this time. And so there's one part of the equation that is a veteran specific problem, and there's another part of the equation that has to do with men and how our culture deals with masculinity.

And I can say with conviction that I have friends who have never served in the military who are dealing with some of the similar issues of, similar issues of, like, aimlessness or a lack of direction or a lack of appreciation or I do the work and I don't get. I don't. I don't have it. It doesn't come back to me or the resentment and the anger and the frustration and the sense of injustice and. And so, like, it's not. It's not.

Veterans have their own camp, their own part, their own experiences in it, but it's not unique to veterans anymore. You know, it's not anymore. It's. The entirety of the experience is not unique to veterans. Now, those who are not veterans, who never have to recognize that the veteran section gets their due. Right? So, like, we can share worldview concerns because we both believe in justice, we both believe in the rights of man. We both believe that there's a way, the way a man should live.

And my section of experiences that have to do with the veteran side really do contribute, give me a contribution to the veteran conversation. But I can share those same values across the spectrum, whether it's not even across the aisle, but with the whole overarching question of men and masculinity and integrity and valor and honor. And these are, these. These qualities and strength. Veterans are not the only people who are in desire of strength.

People who have gone to experience war are not the only people who desire to protect their families or to live as honorable men. And. And yet that false separation is more like, well, you know, these guys have their own little. They have their common language, but we're as men, we are in. We are in contest with evil. I mean, I experienced some of this in my own way. You know, coming back. And this is not to liken my experience to warfare or anything like that.

However, having lived for four years on the road, and I've got just me and my little backpack and I've got my 50 things, and everything has its place, and if a thing is not in its place, then the thing is probably gone because there's no place else that could be. And it's kind of. I don't want to say it's me against the world, but it's me and the world with no insulation, no barrier, and often not even a door, right.

And then coming back into the quote unquote real world and integrating back into, back into an apartment, integrating back into life. And there was a sense of, like, I lived on the edge of immediacy every day for years. Then I come back into this very comfortable, nice world, and I've seen things that people can't understand, and I've been the guy on the edge in my own way.

And now here I am coming back into the world and seeing all the lies and seeing all the things that people are living within that I lived very much on the outside of for a long time. And it's like figuring out for me how to integrate back into that and finding that the things that I had gone looking for were not things that were welcome. Right. And I can understand that within secular society.

But then to come into the christian church and to have come in through the doorway of masculinity, to have discovered that Christianity is a masculine religion, it's the masculine religion, in fact. And to come in through that door and be like, hey, guys, look, I found all this stuff. And to have, like, it feels like an entire church in a metaphorical sense, turn and look at me and like, what's that? Right? And these things are related.

Again, I dont want to liken myself to veterans because its something very different, but I think were looking at two ends of the same kind of problem. What do men similar to us do? Carrying all this knowledge in a world that rejects it, throws it away, discards it, doesnt want to deal with it, isnt ready to deal with it, and to come all the way back around to the question of, can a weak man be good? It's like I would actually ask, will weak men allow good, allow strong men to be good?

That's really the question, because I think a strong man isn't necessarily going to be good, but a strong man can be good. A weak man cannot be good. A strong man can be good. But given that we live in a world that's been captured by weak Mendez. When the strong, good men show up, will they allow or will there be a fight? Which I think is what's going to happen to allow those strong, good men to rule? And that's really the question. Yeah, well, you've already set the stage with that argument.

Is that, by the way, that we presented it as weak men being those who are unwilling to participate in goodness. No, it's going to get noisy in a second. Oh, well, the wind chimes are about to start up. That's fine. Or maybe not. But I think you've already set the stage for the argument with as the way that we've defined it, the weak men are those who are in rejection of the good.

And when they see strong men who are pursuing good, pursue good, they are naturally going to get in the way of it, because that conviction of goodness is a reflection of that. Another man acting in good is only conviction of the person refusing to do good. And because it's convicting, they must destroy it. The envious, resentful man cannot abide a good man existing, because that goodness is a conviction of their refusal to participate in the scenario.

And by nature, we should be ready for, as christians, to have a right response to that. And a right response is not simply get out of the way, you're just getting in the problem. It's that we are convicted to do what is right and true and good. And if you're going to stand in the way of that, by nature of praising weakness, then we're not going to consider your counsel worthy of our time. And that very quickly turns, can turn into a dark, tribalistic, inside group mentality.

But we also have defenses against that. We also have. We can recognize it and say, no, we're not going to create a cabal. But all accusations of the cabal are not. Are not equally valid. And so the. Yeah, I think by setting the stage that way, absolutely weak men. But that is. That is. That is a part of what weak men do, is they must get in the way of strength moving. Because if the.

If strength exists and strong men exist, they exist as a almost existential threat to the masturbatory self weakness. Or not self weakness, but the masturbatory worship of weakness. And. And it's. And it's no surprise that when people who have made that wickedness their God are that weakness. When people have made that weakness their God are faced with strong men, the only solution they can do is to get onto twitter and call for their death.

Yes. And the response of those strong men, as we talked about earlier, is not to suffer the horns of either side of either apathy or crusaderism. Right. Or martyrdom versus, I don't know, unjust aggression, like how we prosecute our particular war, is as important as the war that we prosecute. Yeah, martyrdom or tyranny. We'll use those. You know, that's a good way to conclude.

Concluded is that, you know, we, we are compelled by we, if you even go back to Genesis, you know, go forth and spread across the earth in dominion. Dominion is not tyranny. And we are warned against tyranny, and we are warned against apathy. And so if you feign, if you mistake, or if you create a false doctrine that masquerades cynicism, an old friend of mine once said, cynicism is cowardice masquerading as bravery.

And, and he, I haven't talked to him in a long time, so if he ever, he happens to hear this, I hope that you reach out, but there is, because I've lost, I've lost contact with him.

But the point being said is what we're, I think what we're addressing specifically in this conversation is that sort of divine feminine cult of weakness that specifically tries to repaint the world in a way antithetical to the gospel, which, out of accusations of tyranny, produces the divine feminine and says, you cannot, you have no strength, no courage. All that is dangerous. So we must produce safety. We must produce weakness, because weakness is harmless. Wrong. Weakness. Final summary.

Conjunction. The masturbation of one sense of morality by believing that weakness is equivalent to humility, is the same spirit that produced is the genocidal maniac. The idea, the idea that you could, because what it produces is a sense of victimhood.

And victimhood is at the core of every belief system that we've seen, where your core identity is victimhood, that, not victimhood because of the sin nature, but victimhood against other men is mao, Stalin, Lenin, and all these other examples that. I mean, the fact that you have to, like, continuously explain them. It's like, well, you know, the, the Nazis accused themselves of being victims of this way. It's like if your core identity is victimhood, watch out.

You are sowing the seeds of genocide, and you'll find yourself not on the wrong side of history, but going down in going down before your God as, oh, well, I kind of killed a million people because they offended me. And it's not really a good look. Because victimhood, like, if someone who has an identity as a victim earns, or so they believe, carte blanche from their own conscience to do whatever they need to do versus God doesn't care if you're a victim or not. The law is the law.

Yes, we are called to a higher purpose that recognizes that the source and locus of justice and injustice is not in yourself, but in something greater, whether it is the concept of justice. And then where do you ground that happens to be God? And that is what the conviction is. And so whether you do the tyrant or you do the martyr, the self sanctimonious martyr, both of those locate the concept of justice in the divine self or the divine feminine.

Whereas if you're going to be masculine, masculine servanthood, your servanthood has to be to justice and in your own heart, if you are going to sacrifice true justice for the sake of tyranny or vengeance, then you are committing the sin. But that doesn't mean that you have. But that is also measured and contrasted by the sin of the martyr of, well, all justice is in the injustice done to me.

So the weak man who will not go beyond himself, the reason why he won't go beyond himself is because he believes he's a victim. How dare I be subjected to this? Versus the man who willingly submits to the circumstances that God has presented to him goes beyond them in a spirit of service and a spirit of submission, in a spirit of obedience and humility, and in doing that, finds his strength. Yes, I think that's a. I think that's a good way to put it.

I will listen to it again, but from where we're at right now. Yeah, I will stand behind that, is that you have to give up. The identity of the self sanctimonious martyr and the tyrant are both rooted in the self being God. And that self has to be sacrificed on the altar to the one true God so that you can be in service to either. We are either in service to righteousness or in service to sin. We are. We are. We are slaves to righteousness or we are slaves to sin. Amen. Yeah, we got there.

We got there. We got there. Yes. Yes. Yes, we did. It can be done. It can be done. We did it. Praise God. Hallelujah. Amen. So as we wrap this up, like, you know, where do you want to send people to find out more about you and what you do? You got a podcast. You got all these other things you do which we haven't really even talked about at all. Oh, will, I thought you'd never ask. So I almost didn't. It's all right. So where I'm at right now. So the podcast that I run is we do a lot of.

I do a little bit of shorter segments because I do shorter segments and then longer interviews. And that is the redacted culture cast. It's on YouTube, Spotify, Rumble, Apple, Google, maybe I heart, I don't know. But we're on. We're on, you know, your Apple, Spotify, and Google podcasts for sure. And then we're also on. I'm also on YouTube. And that you can search the redacted culture cast and find us there. The website is redacted, llc.com. and then the, and then our Instagram is redacted, LLC.

So the easiest thing is, if you go to Instagram, redacted, LLC, that's, that's Instagram. Or the website is redacted, llc.com. dot. The core idea of why we chose I chose or we chose the word redacted. And the idea that came from that is we believe in this idea of private property, you know, gun control or gun gun, you know, the rights of the man. And this idea of private property is one of those specific things in our world where the physical meets the abstract.

I have spent years in, I have done the violence side. I've been in the military, I've been a part of gun culture. I went to school for philosophy. And so the core idea and the core thing that is at the center of the podcast and what we do is the fusion of rigorous, classic philosophy and gun culture, or another way is the philosophy of violence.

How do we understand and what do we believe to be right and true and good about the application of force and whether that is scale that scales as high as warfare or as close to the human soul as how vengeance corrupts. And so if you want to, if you were to follow us, I'd be super thankful. But that's how. That's how we are. Yes. You and I had a wonderful, wonderful conversation when I came on your show. And I very much enjoy your Instagram account as well.

Like, I love the way that you present these issues. Visually, the aesthetic is second to none. Yep. So I get to the artistic side, goes out through Instagram, and then for the core argumentation and philosophy, it's through the podcast. Excellent. Well be sure to send men your way for, for more of this. Thank you. Yep. Community building is where gun culture is out right now. I know its a buzzword, its what people want to talk about, but its really what were trying to do.

And the best way we can do it, you know, like Weve talked about in the past with isolation, is that part of where were at veterans feel isolated, go and seek out other people. And for young men, you know, its build community, it takes work. Youre going to fail at it. But we're here together.

And so our core contribution, my core contribution to gun culture is more of the philosopher's side and how do we think about these things and how do we think about violence and use of force, whether it's something as technical as CQB, as abstract as well, CQB versus recce versus this. But I tend to not really talk about, like, barrel length and kit loadouts.

I tend to more talk about some of the morality, like morality and philosophy and how we look at the history of warfare and the history of violent conflicts and its application to ethics and identity and maybe even a simplest thing of how having a firm, having a solid worldview and understanding of at least a desire to understand ethics is part of a. A healthy immune system and preventative measure against PTSD. Because what I don't want to see in the world is what I don't.

What one of the things that I've seen is that gun culture has progressed. What we refer to as gun culture is this big, amalgamous watercolor painting where the boundary lines are not very clear. It's not a line, it's not an excellent line drawing. It's a little bit more broad. Uh, it's the. The difference between one camp and another is a little bit murky. But, and so are the edges. Like, we're not. It's not. There is no real hierarchy if there's no pure leader of gun culture.

But. And so, uh, but what we've seen in the shift in gun culture in America specifically is the older kind of, what is tacitly referred to as the fud era has kind of gone, is it has aged out of. And so the new version of what we see now in gun cultures, people are buying night vision and kit and plate carriers and suppressors and learning how to do things.

And they're, instead of just taking a how to shoot a gun 101, they're taking a CQB course with Orion training group, or they're taking a more advanced course with cogworks, or they're following Garand Thumb, or there's a little bit broader of a spectrum, but it's kind of moved away from, like, hunting and ye olde sports to something even deeper than I need to have a handgun to defend myself in case there's a bump in the night.

It's more like, no, I have civic responsibilities to my community, and so then they're looking for that community to participate in. But the other side of it is one of the older sort of vestiges of the past was an anti intellectual approach. It sounds too smart. So it's got to be. It sounds too smart. It's too academic. It's got to be. There's got to be a trap in it.

And we're like, no, I'm not particularly interested in the fact that the second amendment enshrines my right to bear arms in our constitution. What I am really concerned about are, what are the ideas behind that? How did somebody get to the idea that they should enshrine in the law that a citizen of the United States has a right to bear arms? If you were to go in a weird hierarchy, you buy a rifle, you learn how to use it. You buy a handgun, you learn how to use it. You buy.

You have a rifle and a handgun, you learn how to use them together. Then you buy kit, and then you buy night vision, and then. And then you got it. But you got all this kit. Are you in shape? Sure. I've started. I've started dealing with some of my fitness, but I've gotten all these things together. Then what. What do I believe in? What are my values? What are my. What are my end goals? And that's where we start to play. That's where I start to play in that field is like.

I'm not saying that all of this is a given, but it's a fusion of the why and the how. In redacted private property, privacy is a purely abstract object. Property, physical object. But the combination of that idea and the thing is what has combined into gun culture, and that's where you find us.

My listeners can probably understand why I would find that so appealing, because I deal with more of the philosophy and theology of masculinity versus, like, here's how to get six pack abs, and here's how you make six figures. Like, I don't deal with those issues. There are plenty of capable men who do. I tend to think bigger picture about things in the way that you do. And so, I don't know, maybe I'm a little bored with the masculinity dialogue.

Maybe you can help usher me into the gun culture dialogue, because that sounds kind of interesting. What's going on over there? Yeah, well, any day. Jump on. Let's do this. Let's go. All right, man. Well, thank you so much for us. This has been amazing. Thank you for having me on. And thank you for enduring the, the fall weather in the midwest and the cat that interrupts my lap. And, and thank you for going through a long tail conversation, because these are what I enjoy.

I think this is where a lot of good is being done. Even if it's not happening in Congress, it's still happening between men. So amen. This is what it's all about. Thank you, man. All right. God blessed. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Renaissance of Men Podcast. Visit us on the [email protected] or on your favorite social media platform at Ren of Men. This is the renaissance of men. You are the Renaissance.