WEBVTT 00:00:37.040 --> 00:00:39.600 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. 00:00:39.600 --> 00:00:40.480 I am Corey J. 00:00:40.720 --> 00:00:41.840 Mahler. And 00:00:41.840 --> 00:00:44.560 I'm still Wo. 00:00:44.560 --> 00:00:49.680 On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing normalcy bias. 00:00:49.680 --> 00:00:54.080 Basically, the assumption that whatever exists today is inevitable. 00:00:54.080 --> 00:00:57.920 The things that you have are a natural consequence of you just 00:00:57.920 --> 00:01:02.320 existing and the inherent bias that we have mentally to assume that 00:01:02.320 --> 00:01:04.320 whatever we have is gonna persist. 00:01:04.320 --> 00:01:08.560 Even though intellectually we know that's not the case, there's still a 00:01:08.560 --> 00:01:15.120 a psychological aspect of us making decisions and avoiding thinking about things 00:01:15.120 --> 00:01:18.160 based on yeah, that's that's just always gonna be there. 00:01:18.160 --> 00:01:21.600 So the reason we're talking about this today is that the the 00:01:21.600 --> 00:01:24.320 reason we want to do it now rather than later is that 00:01:25.040 --> 00:01:27.280 as we look at the state of the world, it's clear that 00:01:27.280 --> 00:01:29.120 there are some things that are getting worse. 00:01:29.120 --> 00:01:31.920 We all, especially on the dissonant right, see that stuff. 00:01:31.920 --> 00:01:33.280 We know what it looks like. 00:01:33.680 --> 00:01:36.160 We're gonna talk about some of those details today. 00:01:36.160 --> 00:01:40.960 Uh before we get into it for you know fathers, there are 00:01:40.960 --> 00:01:45.760 always episodes that are maybe have stuff that's not necessarily for kids. 00:01:45.760 --> 00:01:49.600 This one is really an episode that's specifically focused on the duty 00:01:49.600 --> 00:01:51.600 of a father and a husband and a man. 00:01:51.600 --> 00:01:53.520 And so I don't think there's probably gonna be a lot of 00:01:53.520 --> 00:01:55.840 stuff that kids really even need to hear. 00:01:55.840 --> 00:01:58.560 And frankly, women don't really need to hear either. 00:01:58.560 --> 00:01:59.840 I'm not saying turn it off. 00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:03.520 Just as we get into it, we'll be discussing the nature of 00:02:03.520 --> 00:02:06.480 the duties of men as it relates to the state of the 00:02:06.480 --> 00:02:08.000 world, because we have 00:02:08.960 --> 00:02:13.760 a particular vocation and a particular mentality as men that's different than 00:02:13.760 --> 00:02:15.920 women and it's different than children. 00:02:15.920 --> 00:02:20.240 And that's how God has situated us for the sake of protecting 00:02:20.240 --> 00:02:25.440 what is ours, whether it's your neighborhood, your family, uh at whatever 00:02:25.440 --> 00:02:28.640 scale there are things that men are supposed to do that others 00:02:28.640 --> 00:02:29.520 don't need to worry about. 00:02:29.520 --> 00:02:31.520 And so we're today we're gonna be talking about some of the 00:02:31.520 --> 00:02:36.800 things that we need to worry about, specifically talking about what you 00:02:36.800 --> 00:02:40.640 can do to not worry about them, and that involves thinking about 00:02:40.640 --> 00:02:42.080 them, if that makes sense. 00:02:42.080 --> 00:02:42.400 So 00:02:43.280 --> 00:02:46.080 when we get through some of these topics, we're we're not gonna 00:02:46.080 --> 00:02:46.800 be giving advice. 00:02:46.800 --> 00:02:50.080 We're not gonna go really in depth on fun prognostication or anything 00:02:50.080 --> 00:02:50.640 too much. 00:02:50.640 --> 00:02:53.600 But we are going to be talking about some very pessimistic things 00:02:53.840 --> 00:02:58.480 just as examples of the inherent normalcy bias that we all carry 00:02:58.480 --> 00:02:59.200 around every day. 00:02:59.200 --> 00:03:01.600 Yeah, you assume that when you flip a light switch, the light's 00:03:01.600 --> 00:03:02.240 going to come on. 00:03:02.240 --> 00:03:03.680 That's normalcy bias. 00:03:03.680 --> 00:03:07.200 We'll get into the definition proper in a moment, but the idea 00:03:07.200 --> 00:03:10.000 that the thing that works is going to keep working is sort 00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:12.640 of baked into sanity. 00:03:12.640 --> 00:03:15.840 As a normal, sane human being, you can't constantly be afraid that 00:03:15.840 --> 00:03:19.200 everything's going to fall apart, everything's going to vanish behind your back. 00:03:19.200 --> 00:03:22.080 There are horror movies and they're there dreams where that sort of 00:03:22.080 --> 00:03:25.200 thing happens, where you look in one direction and the thing is 00:03:25.200 --> 00:03:28.880 there, but when you look behind you, everything fades and vanishes. 00:03:28.880 --> 00:03:34.080 You know, there's a there's an ephemerality that's that's nightmarish, and we 00:03:34.080 --> 00:03:35.920 don't want people to be feeling that way. 00:03:35.920 --> 00:03:39.200 So as we as we discuss the state of the world a 00:03:39.200 --> 00:03:43.840 little bit and we discuss the vocation of men in the world, 00:03:43.840 --> 00:03:46.560 we don't want this to be pessimistic, but we want it to 00:03:46.560 --> 00:03:47.600 be realistic. 00:03:47.600 --> 00:03:48.240 And so 00:03:49.200 --> 00:03:53.520 some of you who are our regular listeners, if you know personally 00:03:53.600 --> 00:03:56.640 that you tend to get so-called black pilled. 00:03:56.640 --> 00:03:59.680 We'll be talking about that nomenclature as well. 00:03:59.680 --> 00:04:03.440 If when you hear things it makes you fret and be distressed 00:04:03.440 --> 00:04:06.160 and nervous, maybe tune this one out. 00:04:06.160 --> 00:04:08.880 Maybe don't listen to this episode because we don't we wanna don't 00:04:08.800 --> 00:04:10.640 want to make you anxious. 00:04:10.640 --> 00:04:13.360 The whole point is for men to be able to confront these 00:04:13.360 --> 00:04:14.960 things without being anxious. 00:04:14.960 --> 00:04:17.680 And so if you know that's just not you, if you know 00:04:17.520 --> 00:04:19.840 you get wound up, just skip it. 00:04:19.840 --> 00:04:21.920 You can you can get around to it later when you're in 00:04:21.920 --> 00:04:27.120 a better place mentally and spiritually. 00:04:27.120 --> 00:04:29.840 We hope that the purpose of doing this here, this is kind 00:04:29.840 --> 00:04:33.440 of a continuation in part of the episode on fear of the 00:04:33.440 --> 00:04:36.720 Lord. We talked about trusting in God for providing for us. 00:04:36.720 --> 00:04:42.000 Uh, and the episode we did recently on sweating the small stuff. 00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:44.480 There are things that we can handle and there are things that 00:04:44.480 --> 00:04:44.880 we can't. 00:04:44.880 --> 00:04:46.320 Yeah, that's the serenity prayer. 00:04:46.320 --> 00:04:49.600 God grant me the you know the wisdom to differentiate between the 00:04:49.600 --> 00:04:52.160 things that I can deal with and the things I can. 00:04:52.160 --> 00:04:56.000 And part of what we live through is that you have to 00:04:56.000 --> 00:04:59.040 triage. You have to figure out, okay, there are these big ticket 00:04:59.200 --> 00:05:04.080 macro scale national calamities and then there's my local community and there's 00:05:04.080 --> 00:05:06.720 what's going on under my roof with my my wife and my 00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:10.240 kids and my neighbors and my family. 00:05:10.240 --> 00:05:13.440 We're obviously supposed to f spend most of our time worried about 00:05:13.440 --> 00:05:14.560 what's right in front of us. 00:05:14.960 --> 00:05:17.920 that's where God put us when when God talks about us being 00:05:17.920 --> 00:05:21.680 neighbors. Our neighbors are those who are immediate, and our family is 00:05:21.680 --> 00:05:23.360 even closer than neighbor. 00:05:23.360 --> 00:05:26.320 Family is your family no matter where they are, but in a 00:05:26.320 --> 00:05:29.520 rightly ordered society, you're probably gonna live near your family. 00:05:29.520 --> 00:05:31.920 That's a blessing when that's the case. 00:05:31.920 --> 00:05:36.720 On the other hand, it's necessary for men to worry about bigger 00:05:36.720 --> 00:05:37.760 ticket stuff. 00:05:37.760 --> 00:05:38.640 Not every man. 00:05:38.640 --> 00:05:42.640 You know, that some men are just equipped for being head down 00:05:42.640 --> 00:05:44.800 and focused on what's right in front of them. 00:05:44.800 --> 00:05:50.320 Other men are equipped for dealing with macro scale issues for dealing 00:05:50.320 --> 00:05:52.880 with you know geopolitical issues. 00:05:52.880 --> 00:05:56.720 And I kinda hate the fact that that's so prevalent in our 00:05:56.720 --> 00:05:58.000 age. It shouldn't be. 00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:02.160 If we had an actual godly government, geopolitics would be something that 00:06:02.160 --> 00:06:04.320 would virtually never cross anyone's minds. 00:06:04.320 --> 00:06:08.320 So I'm not saying this is stuff we need to worry about. 00:06:08.320 --> 00:06:10.880 As though that were a normal thing. 00:06:10.880 --> 00:06:13.280 It's certainly stuff we need to worry about when it's trying to 00:06:13.280 --> 00:06:15.200 kill us, which is the case today. 00:06:15.200 --> 00:06:19.200 But But the idea that the average man would be spending part 00:06:19.200 --> 00:06:23.280 of his day or even part of his week listening to international 00:06:23.280 --> 00:06:27.360 news and tracking calamities far away, it's dumb. 00:06:27.360 --> 00:06:30.480 Like it's it's it it shouldn't be necessary. 00:06:30.480 --> 00:06:34.640 And so on one hand, we live in a society where some 00:06:34.640 --> 00:06:38.480 of those things are necessary, and on the other hand, we have 00:06:38.480 --> 00:06:43.360 to segregate the big ticket knowledge that we have from the immediate 00:06:43.360 --> 00:06:45.600 stuff in front of us so that we can figure out what 00:06:45.600 --> 00:06:46.400 to do. 00:06:46.400 --> 00:06:50.000 And sometimes when you look at the big ticket stuff, your realization 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:52.320 is simply I can't do anything. 00:06:52.320 --> 00:06:53.200 And that's fine. 00:06:53.200 --> 00:06:55.360 You know, maybe at the end of the day, you look at 00:06:55.360 --> 00:06:58.400 the state of the world and realize I can't fix that. 00:06:58.400 --> 00:06:59.920 I can't do anything about that. 00:06:59.920 --> 00:07:03.200 Frankly, that's that's usually the case to some extent. 00:07:03.200 --> 00:07:07.440 Not completely, but most of the things that tie up a lot 00:07:07.440 --> 00:07:11.120 of our cycles when we're looking far away, it's just crap that 00:07:11.120 --> 00:07:12.960 there's nothing you can do about. 00:07:12.960 --> 00:07:15.680 Except when you don't talk to other men around you and say, 00:07:15.680 --> 00:07:17.680 hey, this is this is common. 00:07:17.680 --> 00:07:21.600 We need to be prepared locally. 00:07:21.600 --> 00:07:24.320 And sometimes the the rest of what you do is just I'm 00:07:24.320 --> 00:07:25.440 not going to worry about it. 00:07:25.440 --> 00:07:28.560 But the reason we're going to talk about it today is that 00:07:28.720 --> 00:07:31.920 we want to exhort everyone who's listening, let those least those are 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:35.600 still listening, to actually spend a little bit of time, not a 00:07:35.600 --> 00:07:39.760 lot of time, not dwelling, not obsessing, not fixating, but spend a 00:07:39.760 --> 00:07:41.680 little bit of time thinking about 00:07:42.640 --> 00:07:44.160 bad things that can happen. 00:07:44.160 --> 00:07:47.680 Thinking about this is normal, but it's not inevitable. 00:07:47.680 --> 00:07:49.440 Because for a man, that is 00:07:50.320 --> 00:07:52.800 that's the cusp of civilization. 00:07:52.800 --> 00:07:59.360 That's the that thin veneer between everything's working and everything is crumbling 00:07:59.440 --> 00:08:01.680 or everything is completely disintegrated. 00:08:01.680 --> 00:08:06.400 And the veneer is preserved by men just doing their daily stuff. 00:08:06.400 --> 00:08:09.520 It's not that it's inherently fragile, it's just that it takes all 00:08:09.520 --> 00:08:14.240 of us like an orchestra working together civilizationally to keep everything moving. 00:08:14.240 --> 00:08:18.560 And when men stop doing their jobs, when men start being replaced 00:08:18.560 --> 00:08:22.800 by those who are incapable of doing those jobs, things start breaking 00:08:22.800 --> 00:08:24.000 one by one. 00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:28.560 And so the thing like the electricity always being on, that's inevitable, 00:08:28.560 --> 00:08:35.360 ostensibly inevitable in industrialized society, soon becomes a rarity when you collapse 00:08:35.360 --> 00:08:36.960 into the third world. 00:08:36.960 --> 00:08:38.800 And sometimes those are slow. 00:08:39.520 --> 00:08:40.960 Sometimes it's very instant. 00:08:40.960 --> 00:08:44.320 We'll be talking about some scenarios where one or the other could 00:08:44.320 --> 00:08:46.240 possibly happen to us. 00:08:46.240 --> 00:08:50.400 But we as men, when we're confronted with the possibility of those 00:08:50.400 --> 00:08:53.680 things, we can't become dejected about it. 00:08:53.680 --> 00:08:57.200 We just have to square up against whatever the facts are and 00:08:57.200 --> 00:08:59.360 say, okay, what can I do about this? 00:08:59.360 --> 00:09:02.000 If it's nothing, then take comfort in the fact that you're in 00:09:02.000 --> 00:09:04.240 God's hands entirely and there's nothing you can do. 00:09:04.240 --> 00:09:06.320 And if there's something you can do, even if it's a small 00:09:06.320 --> 00:09:08.160 thing, take care of doing that thing. 00:09:08.160 --> 00:09:10.160 And then you put the rest in God's hands. 00:09:10.160 --> 00:09:12.480 And so that's the other part of the serenity prayer. 00:09:12.480 --> 00:09:14.160 Some of it we just leave to God. 00:09:14.160 --> 00:09:17.200 And some of it we can do something about. 00:09:17.200 --> 00:09:20.480 The failure that the modern man frequently has is not wanting to 00:09:20.480 --> 00:09:23.840 think about those things, to want to focus on you know, whatever 00:09:23.840 --> 00:09:28.400 trivialities are are nice distractions, but they're not they're not part of 00:09:28.400 --> 00:09:29.200 our duties. 00:09:29.440 --> 00:09:31.280 they're part of fun. 00:09:31.280 --> 00:09:37.760 The duty sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes involves taking stock 00:09:37.760 --> 00:09:41.120 of the situation and figuring out what do I need to do 00:09:41.120 --> 00:09:45.200 to prepare me and mine to confront whatever might go wrong either 00:09:45.200 --> 00:09:49.280 today or tomorrow or ten years or you know, fifty years from 00:09:49.280 --> 00:09:52.320 now. Maybe the things that ideally if we were planning for things 00:09:52.320 --> 00:09:56.160 going wrong, if things were going well, we would be planning for 00:09:56.160 --> 00:09:57.520 our grandchildren. 00:09:57.520 --> 00:10:02.320 Instead, really we're planning for like, you know, next year, next school 00:10:02.320 --> 00:10:04.880 year, next, you know, harvest season. 00:10:05.200 --> 00:10:09.440 we're looking much closer because things are clearly much more frequently. 00:10:09.440 --> 00:10:12.640 And I hope by the end of this that we'll have given 00:10:12.640 --> 00:10:16.720 some specific ideas on how to think about this stuff, but without 00:10:16.720 --> 00:10:19.280 making people feel dejected. 00:10:19.280 --> 00:10:22.960 God bless Cory and me with the ability to stare directly into 00:10:22.960 --> 00:10:25.840 the abyss and not worry about it. 00:10:25.840 --> 00:10:28.160 And I don't say that in terms like, oh, I like seeing 00:10:28.160 --> 00:10:29.040 horrors. I don't. 00:10:29.040 --> 00:10:30.960 Like, you know, I've I've seen plenty. 00:10:30.960 --> 00:10:34.400 I don't need any more new terrible things on my screen to 00:10:34.400 --> 00:10:36.320 remind me that things can be terrible. 00:10:36.320 --> 00:10:39.200 But at the same time, when I remember, hey yeah, things can 00:10:39.200 --> 00:10:42.640 get really terrible really quickly, it doesn't make me sad or dejected. 00:10:42.640 --> 00:10:46.400 It's like, okay, that's one more thing we have to deal with. 00:10:46.400 --> 00:10:49.120 So we're able to talk about these things, and it's it's something 00:10:49.120 --> 00:10:53.440 that I personally struggle with sometimes communicating with other men even privately 00:10:53.520 --> 00:10:56.720 is that because it's very easy for me to look at really 00:10:56.720 --> 00:11:01.760 bad things getting worse, I'm not always sensitive to the emotional effect 00:11:01.760 --> 00:11:02.960 it can have on other people. 00:11:02.960 --> 00:11:05.520 I I try to be, but I I can only put myself 00:11:05.520 --> 00:11:07.760 in someone else's shoes so far. 00:11:07.760 --> 00:11:11.680 So we're gonna try to be respectful as we tackle this stuff, 00:11:11.680 --> 00:11:15.520 but we're going to give a frank assessment of things and hope 00:11:15.520 --> 00:11:18.800 that you'll come along with us and then figure out whatever in 00:11:18.800 --> 00:11:21.680 your own situation you need to worry about. 00:11:21.680 --> 00:11:23.440 So like I said, we're not going to give a bunch of 00:11:23.440 --> 00:11:25.680 advice because we don't know your circumstances. 00:11:26.080 --> 00:11:31.840 your life, your family situation, your environment, your neighborhood, completely different than 00:11:31.840 --> 00:11:33.920 ours in some ways, that they're going to matter. 00:11:33.920 --> 00:11:38.400 So there's no one solution for everything, but we all have the 00:11:38.400 --> 00:11:39.360 same questions. 00:11:39.360 --> 00:11:42.480 And we have a duty to God, to our families, to our 00:11:42.480 --> 00:11:45.440 neighborhoods and communities, to just think about these things once in a 00:11:45.440 --> 00:11:49.600 while so that should bad things happen, we can be prepared to 00:11:49.600 --> 00:11:53.920 confront them like men, not emotionally, not panicky, not having no idea 00:11:53.920 --> 00:11:55.840 what to do, but like, okay, I have a plan. 00:11:55.840 --> 00:11:57.840 And maybe it's a good plan, maybe it's a bad plan. 00:11:57.840 --> 00:12:00.560 At least you have an idea of what you do next when 00:12:00.560 --> 00:12:02.320 something goes wrong. 00:12:03.360 --> 00:12:08.800 And so we'll start off with a bit of just general matters, 00:12:08.800 --> 00:12:12.480 definitions, and then a little bit of psychology to give some of 00:12:12.480 --> 00:12:17.040 the groundwork for the discussion in this episode. 00:12:17.040 --> 00:12:21.440 First I'll give a a working definition of normalcy bias since that 00:12:21.440 --> 00:12:23.840 is an important concept to understand 00:12:24.720 --> 00:12:28.080 for this episode and just generally in life. 00:12:28.080 --> 00:12:33.680 So normalcy bias is the tendency of individuals to downplay or ignore 00:12:33.840 --> 00:12:39.040 often clear evidence or warning signs that perhaps significant change may be 00:12:39.040 --> 00:12:42.800 likely, and thus to fail to prepare adequately for 00:12:43.920 --> 00:12:47.680 the possibility of those changes. 00:12:47.680 --> 00:12:52.160 An example of those changes would be a disaster, for instance. 00:12:52.160 --> 00:12:57.200 Now, psychologically, there are a number of reasons for this and also 00:12:57.200 --> 00:13:01.040 a concept that I'm going to explain because it relates to this. 00:13:01.040 --> 00:13:06.480 It's important to understand sort of how the human mind processes information 00:13:06.640 --> 00:13:08.480 in a general sense. 00:13:08.560 --> 00:13:13.600 And so, first a note on information processing itself. 00:13:13.600 --> 00:13:20.400 Without active mitigation, most individuals will process information that falls outside of 00:13:20.400 --> 00:13:26.400 their experience or controvert something they already believe, particularly a deeply held 00:13:26.400 --> 00:13:30.960 belief, by ignoring or downplaying it. 00:13:30.960 --> 00:13:35.520 This is what feeds into that normalcy bias, because if you ignore 00:13:35.520 --> 00:13:40.800 this information, if you downplay the information, you are not going to 00:13:40.800 --> 00:13:46.560 properly prepare for what that information indicates could happen. 00:13:46.560 --> 00:13:51.520 This leads into and is related to a general resistance to change 00:13:51.520 --> 00:13:55.280 that we see in human psychology and in our thinking patterns. 00:13:55.280 --> 00:13:59.840 We have a subconscious or even unconscious assumption that things will simply 00:13:59.840 --> 00:14:02.240 continue as they always have. 00:14:02.240 --> 00:14:06.800 And so we have a resistance to seeing the potential for change, 00:14:06.800 --> 00:14:09.840 particularly great change. 00:14:09.840 --> 00:14:12.320 And this is that concept I was going to explain. 00:14:12.320 --> 00:14:14.160 It's called Bayesian updating. 00:14:14.160 --> 00:14:16.240 There are a number of other terms for it, but it they 00:14:16.240 --> 00:14:19.040 all involve the word Bayesian pretty much. 00:14:19.040 --> 00:14:22.720 The human mind more or less works on this system that we 00:14:22.720 --> 00:14:24.640 call Bayesian updating. 00:14:24.640 --> 00:14:27.040 This is a probabilistic calculation. 00:14:27.040 --> 00:14:31.840 It's not a conscious probabilistic calculation, at least not for most people. 00:14:31.840 --> 00:14:35.200 And so don't think that oh well I'm not constantly running an 00:14:35.200 --> 00:14:38.400 analysis, a statistical analysis of the things I've understood, so I don't 00:14:38.320 --> 00:14:38.640 do this. 00:14:38.640 --> 00:14:41.760 No, this is largely subconscious. 00:14:41.760 --> 00:14:42.560 And how this works is 00:14:43.680 --> 00:14:51.760 your mind takes previous likelihood calculations based on previous information, previous inputs, 00:14:51.760 --> 00:14:58.480 integrates new information into that and then produces a new probability. 00:14:58.480 --> 00:14:59.520 This is very simple. 00:14:59.520 --> 00:15:03.280 It's just you have a prior probability, you integrate new information, you 00:15:03.280 --> 00:15:05.280 have a posterior probability. 00:15:05.280 --> 00:15:09.280 Now, this is a rough system, it's not entirely precise, and it 00:15:09.280 --> 00:15:11.040 is open to error. 00:15:11.040 --> 00:15:13.200 You can of course make errors in judgment. 00:15:13.200 --> 00:15:13.840 We all know that. 00:15:13.840 --> 00:15:15.360 We've all made them. 00:15:15.360 --> 00:15:20.800 And one of the problems with this system is that outliers are 00:15:20.800 --> 00:15:26.400 inherently undervalued or overvalued if you happen to be psychologically prone to, 00:15:26.400 --> 00:15:28.080 say, anxiety. 00:15:28.080 --> 00:15:32.080 And so it requires a degree of thought, when you encounter an 00:15:32.080 --> 00:15:37.760 outlier, to properly integrate that using this Bayesian updating. 00:15:37.760 --> 00:15:40.960 And of course there's also the concept of uncertainty or a confidence 00:15:40.960 --> 00:15:44.320 level for those who are more familiar with statistics, which basically just 00:15:44.320 --> 00:15:48.240 means whether or not, because you're the one making the assessment, whether 00:15:48.240 --> 00:15:51.520 or not you find the information you're using to be reliable, to 00:15:51.520 --> 00:15:52.480 be certain. 00:15:52.480 --> 00:15:57.040 And this, of course, leads to a certain form of inertia, certain 00:15:57.040 --> 00:16:00.000 kind of inertia behind things you already believe. 00:16:00.240 --> 00:16:05.440 Because the things you believe have this pedigree behind them. 00:16:05.440 --> 00:16:09.920 They have many years or even decades of proof, and you've built 00:16:09.920 --> 00:16:14.400 up this certain conception of this is how things operate in this 00:16:15.440 --> 00:16:20.800 subset of reality in my life, and so new information finds it 00:16:20.800 --> 00:16:24.320 very hard to overcome that inertia. 00:16:24.320 --> 00:16:28.240 But sometimes the new information is critical to understand. 00:16:28.480 --> 00:16:31.600 And so that's where this takes a bit of thought. 00:16:31.600 --> 00:16:35.040 More than just allowing this subconscious system to run through and do 00:16:35.040 --> 00:16:37.440 its job, you need to think about these issues. 00:16:37.440 --> 00:16:41.680 So if you encounter something that runs entirely counter to what you 00:16:41.680 --> 00:16:47.680 previously believed, or is an outlier, an extreme example, which an outlier 00:16:47.760 --> 00:16:51.520 for those who are unaware just means something that is very statistically 00:16:51.520 --> 00:16:54.960 unlikely. That's the rough definition of an outlier. 00:16:54.960 --> 00:16:57.840 And so if you encounter that, you need to think about how 00:16:57.840 --> 00:17:01.680 you integrate that into what you already believe, not just toss it 00:17:01.680 --> 00:17:04.240 to the side as oh, that's that's an outlier. 00:17:04.400 --> 00:17:07.360 Which is indeed what we do sometimes in statistics. 00:17:07.360 --> 00:17:09.680 Often that is one of the definitions of an outlier. 00:17:09.680 --> 00:17:11.920 It's a thing that you exclude. 00:17:11.920 --> 00:17:15.520 You can't really necessarily do that in life, because some of the 00:17:15.520 --> 00:17:19.920 most important data points are going to be outliers. 00:17:19.920 --> 00:17:25.600 Because we're talking about in this episode, things that are significant changes. 00:17:25.600 --> 00:17:27.200 That doesn't mean they're likely. 00:17:27.200 --> 00:17:29.520 They could be in fact extremely unlikely. 00:17:30.400 --> 00:17:34.160 But just because they're unlikely doesn't mean you don't plan for them. 00:17:34.160 --> 00:17:37.440 In fact, those are often the things for which you should be 00:17:37.440 --> 00:17:40.240 planning, because those are the things that if they crop up and 00:17:40.240 --> 00:17:44.480 you have not planned for them, Turn into disasters. 00:17:44.480 --> 00:17:49.920 Now it's important to explain some of why we have these systems 00:17:50.080 --> 00:17:54.800 and why they interact in this way, why we think in this 00:17:54.800 --> 00:17:58.960 way. And a big part of it is psychological comfort. 00:17:58.960 --> 00:18:03.200 Human beings, by and large, like the status quo. 00:18:03.200 --> 00:18:08.000 Now there are many people who will contend that they like change, 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:12.000 like a change of scenery, they like novelty, etcetera. 00:18:12.000 --> 00:18:14.960 They really don't, generally speaking. 00:18:14.960 --> 00:18:19.840 Human beings are by and large creatures of habit. 00:18:19.840 --> 00:18:22.560 And so that's one of the most important things in life, actually. 00:18:22.560 --> 00:18:25.920 Just as a side note, you need to have a routine in 00:18:25.920 --> 00:18:27.760 your life. 00:18:27.760 --> 00:18:31.120 Because that is not only how we learn things, it is how 00:18:31.120 --> 00:18:32.800 we actually manage to get things done. 00:18:32.800 --> 00:18:34.320 You need You need a routine. 00:18:34.320 --> 00:18:37.120 And so you wake up at a certain time, you go to 00:18:37.120 --> 00:18:39.520 sleep at a certain time, you eat meals at a certain time, 00:18:39.520 --> 00:18:41.680 you do certain things on certain days. 00:18:41.680 --> 00:18:47.520 That's part of how you keep moving forward in life. 00:18:47.600 --> 00:18:50.960 Now, when I say the status quo, it's important to recognize I 00:18:50.960 --> 00:18:55.360 am not saying necessarily the status quo as it exists today, because 00:18:55.440 --> 00:19:00.000 obviously most of those listening to this podcast do not like the 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:01.600 status quo. 00:19:01.600 --> 00:19:05.760 By the status quo, I mean the way that your personal life 00:19:05.760 --> 00:19:08.160 generally proceeds on a day-to-day basis. 00:19:08.160 --> 00:19:11.360 There may be things you do not like, but by and large, 00:19:11.360 --> 00:19:14.240 you are going to psychologically prefer the status quo 00:19:15.120 --> 00:19:18.960 certainly to some enormous change. 00:19:18.960 --> 00:19:23.600 Because in the unknown, there's that huge risk. 00:19:23.600 --> 00:19:28.320 The human mind does not typically like the unknown because the unknown 00:19:28.320 --> 00:19:30.160 cannot be calculated. 00:19:30.160 --> 00:19:33.520 And if you can't calculate it, it makes it difficult to prepare, 00:19:33.520 --> 00:19:38.480 and part of what your brain is constantly doing is running alternatives, 00:19:38.480 --> 00:19:43.120 running through scenarios, figuring out what would I do if X or 00:19:43.120 --> 00:19:44.640 Y or Z. 00:19:44.640 --> 00:19:48.000 That's how you plan for the future, even if it's something as 00:19:48.000 --> 00:19:52.720 trivial as how do I exit this room if there's a fire? 00:19:52.720 --> 00:19:55.840 Or how do I exit this room if I need to use 00:19:55.840 --> 00:19:57.040 the restroom? 00:19:57.040 --> 00:20:00.560 That's still running alternatives in your mind. 00:20:00.560 --> 00:20:03.600 Now some of you may experience this, I believe the the studies 00:20:03.600 --> 00:20:07.040 The studies show it's something north of fifty percent, but perhaps not 00:20:07.040 --> 00:20:08.080 by much. 00:20:08.080 --> 00:20:12.480 Uh Lapel du Vide, the call of the void, where you have 00:20:12.480 --> 00:20:17.440 a sudden transitory thought about jumping off a bridge or something like 00:20:17.440 --> 00:20:21.920 that. Now of course there are times where that is possibly the 00:20:21.920 --> 00:20:24.080 temptation of a demon. 00:20:24.080 --> 00:20:27.600 But there are other times where it's just your mind running through 00:20:27.600 --> 00:20:32.400 an alternative and going, what would I do if X happened? 00:20:32.400 --> 00:20:36.720 And so the reason that these unknowns are uncomfortable is because your 00:20:36.720 --> 00:20:40.880 brain can't really do anything with them if they are a true 00:20:40.880 --> 00:20:46.720 unknown. And so there is that psychological comfort in the status quo. 00:20:46.720 --> 00:20:51.760 And so generally speaking, we as human beings are psychologically resistant to 00:20:51.760 --> 00:20:58.320 significant change, particularly unexpected or unpredictable change. 00:20:58.320 --> 00:21:01.200 And part of that is just that it induces that anxiety and 00:21:01.200 --> 00:21:04.800 that stress from being unknown. 00:21:04.800 --> 00:21:09.920 In the modern world, we have an additional aspect, and that is 00:21:09.920 --> 00:21:15.040 the media, and we could also class social influences into this because 00:21:15.040 --> 00:21:18.480 social influences in the modern era are more expansive. 00:21:18.480 --> 00:21:21.520 Certainly in the past you did not have Twitter, so you couldn't 00:21:21.440 --> 00:21:25.600 be influenced by someone five thousand miles away. 00:21:25.600 --> 00:21:26.960 He had no relevance to you. 00:21:26.960 --> 00:21:28.560 You'd probably never meet the man. 00:21:28.560 --> 00:21:31.040 You probably would never know his name. 00:21:31.040 --> 00:21:34.400 You would of course have social influences, though, because you'd have your 00:21:34.400 --> 00:21:40.000 family, your church family, your friends, your village, maybe the next village 00:21:40.000 --> 00:21:41.680 over. Whatever. 00:21:41.680 --> 00:21:45.200 You'd have the people around you as your social influence. 00:21:45.200 --> 00:21:48.400 But today we also have the media influence. 00:21:48.800 --> 00:21:53.840 And the modern media works essentially on a cycle of normalcy and 00:21:53.840 --> 00:21:58.240 crisis. And it depends on what they are trying to achieve, which 00:21:58.240 --> 00:22:01.040 is to say, it depends on what those who Those who direct 00:22:01.040 --> 00:22:06.320 them wish to achieve as to what they say and which one 00:22:06.320 --> 00:22:11.040 of these two tools they use at a given time. 00:22:11.040 --> 00:22:14.000 Potentially you'll have different outlets using different ones. 00:22:14.000 --> 00:22:17.840 Often they will all use the same one, and you can see 00:22:17.840 --> 00:22:22.240 fun little montages of them all using the exact same wording. 00:22:22.240 --> 00:22:26.880 But they use this cycle to exploit human psychology. 00:22:26.880 --> 00:22:33.680 Because if they reinforce normalcy, particularly if they attempt to reinforce their 00:22:33.680 --> 00:22:38.400 changes to what was otherwise normal in the past as what is 00:22:38.400 --> 00:22:44.000 now normal, they can bias people in favor of maintaining the status 00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:48.800 quo as it has been created by the media and those who 00:22:48.800 --> 00:22:50.480 control the media. 00:22:50.480 --> 00:22:54.800 And crisis, of course, is used in order to push forward in 00:22:54.800 --> 00:22:58.400 their sense of forward, their sense of progress. 00:22:58.400 --> 00:23:02.560 And so if you watch the media, particularly the mainstream media, you 00:23:02.560 --> 00:23:05.600 need to bear in mind these little psychological tools that they are 00:23:05.600 --> 00:23:08.480 using against you to manipulate you. 00:23:08.480 --> 00:23:13.760 And the two big ones again are your sense of normalcy and 00:23:13.920 --> 00:23:17.920 crisis. Of course there's also groupthink where if you get a group 00:23:17.920 --> 00:23:22.160 of people together, they often make worse decisions than individuals for various 00:23:22.160 --> 00:23:25.040 reasons, that's a tangential issue. 00:23:25.040 --> 00:23:29.280 But it is obviously related to this. 00:23:29.280 --> 00:23:34.240 And so that's basically the Basically the psychology foundation of this, the 00:23:34.240 --> 00:23:40.640 basic groundwork upon which you can build and understand what we're discussing 00:23:40.640 --> 00:23:41.920 in this episode. 00:23:41.920 --> 00:23:48.400 And I already gave essentially the general recommendation for how you avoid 00:23:48.400 --> 00:23:52.320 these issues, how you solve these problems, and that is quite frankly 00:23:52.400 --> 00:23:55.680 you simply have to actually think. 00:23:55.680 --> 00:23:59.200 I know that's not a That's not a simple matter, because actually 00:23:59.440 --> 00:24:04.320 actively thinking about things is something that many men, many others simply 00:24:04.320 --> 00:24:05.520 do not do in their lives. 00:24:05.520 --> 00:24:10.080 You go through life and you simply exist. 00:24:10.080 --> 00:24:14.720 You react as necessary to external stimuli, to things that come your 00:24:14.720 --> 00:24:18.880 way, but you don't necessarily actively process these things and figure out 00:24:19.120 --> 00:24:20.720 why did that happen? 00:24:20.720 --> 00:24:22.080 What was the reason for that? 00:24:22.080 --> 00:24:24.080 What should I do in response? 00:24:24.240 --> 00:24:28.640 And when it comes to these matters, particularly as men, we do 00:24:28.640 --> 00:24:32.080 not have an alternative, we have to think about them. 00:24:32.080 --> 00:24:37.120 As Wo said, there are some issues that unfortunately the average man 00:24:37.120 --> 00:24:40.880 has to think about these days some geopolitical issues. 00:24:40.880 --> 00:24:44.080 When those really are issues about which the average man should never 00:24:44.080 --> 00:24:45.600 have to think. 00:24:45.600 --> 00:24:50.800 If we had a godly prince, he would handle international affairs, and 00:24:50.800 --> 00:24:54.560 the average man would never think about them, because they would not 00:24:54.560 --> 00:24:55.840 be relevant to him. 00:24:55.840 --> 00:25:00.080 If you're a shoemaker, you don't need to know what's going on 00:25:00.080 --> 00:25:01.600 in Ukraine. 00:25:01.600 --> 00:25:04.240 That's not relevant to you. 00:25:04.240 --> 00:25:08.400 If you are a plumber, you don't really need to know what's 00:25:08.400 --> 00:25:09.840 going on in China. 00:25:09.840 --> 00:25:11.920 That's not relevant to you. 00:25:11.920 --> 00:25:15.600 Unfortunately, because of the form of government we have and the media 00:25:15.680 --> 00:25:22.000 and and various other influences, these things are relevant today for men 00:25:22.160 --> 00:25:27.200 generally. Yes, of course it's to varying degrees. 00:25:27.200 --> 00:25:31.040 What's going on in your town, what's happening with your neighbor, is 00:25:31.360 --> 00:25:35.120 significantly orders of magnitude more relevant to you, and you should spend 00:25:35.120 --> 00:25:38.960 more time and thought on it than what is happening half the 00:25:38.960 --> 00:25:40.640 world away. 00:25:40.640 --> 00:25:44.720 But what is happening half the world away is still relevant, again, 00:25:44.720 --> 00:25:48.240 because of the circumstances under which we live. 00:25:48.240 --> 00:25:54.640 And so, again, the basic recommendation, as men, actually think about these 00:25:54.640 --> 00:25:58.960 issues. Actually think as you go through your daily life. 00:25:58.960 --> 00:26:00.720 Why am I doing these things? 00:26:00.720 --> 00:26:03.200 Why are other men doing these things? 00:26:03.200 --> 00:26:04.560 What could happen? 00:26:04.560 --> 00:26:08.320 What would I do if that did happen? 00:26:08.480 --> 00:26:13.840 The very specific current event that is one of the precipitates for 00:26:13.840 --> 00:26:18.880 us doing this episode is the opening of the spigots of Africans 00:26:18.880 --> 00:26:19.360 invading 00:26:20.480 --> 00:26:22.400 every white nation on Earth. 00:26:22.400 --> 00:26:27.360 Just in the last few weeks, really, we're seeing tens of thousands 00:26:27.360 --> 00:26:33.040 of military age African men streaming into seemingly almost every white nation 00:26:33.520 --> 00:26:35.040 on the planet. 00:26:35.040 --> 00:26:37.680 This is an act of war. 00:26:37.680 --> 00:26:43.200 If you listen to our episodes on race, you understand that they 00:26:43.200 --> 00:26:45.680 are not here as refugees. 00:26:45.680 --> 00:26:50.720 That's part of what Corey was describing before as the media wrapper 00:26:50.720 --> 00:26:54.000 of you know the the sweetness on the medicine so that you 00:26:54.000 --> 00:26:56.320 don't taste it going down. 00:26:56.320 --> 00:27:01.760 When they call military age Africans refugees, they're disguising the fact that 00:27:01.760 --> 00:27:05.360 these are rapists and murderers who are here to conduct war. 00:27:05.360 --> 00:27:09.040 And as soon as they arrive, they begin raping and murdering and 00:27:09.040 --> 00:27:10.160 conducting war. 00:27:10.160 --> 00:27:12.080 That is why they are coming. 00:27:12.080 --> 00:27:17.040 Those men are bioweapons being shipped into our lands in order to 00:27:17.040 --> 00:27:18.400 destroy them. 00:27:18.400 --> 00:27:19.760 That's why it's happening. 00:27:19.760 --> 00:27:22.560 And so when you look on the news, if you haven't been 00:27:22.560 --> 00:27:26.640 paying attention politically for the last few years, and again, ideally you 00:27:26.640 --> 00:27:27.600 shouldn't have to. 00:27:27.600 --> 00:27:28.960 It shouldn't matter. 00:27:28.960 --> 00:27:31.680 But the reason that in your small town where you're head down 00:27:31.840 --> 00:27:36.480 focused on your local community issues, tens of thousands of Africans streaming 00:27:36.720 --> 00:27:40.080 across some border matter is that the men who want to see 00:27:40.080 --> 00:27:44.480 your family dead are shipping these rapists and murderers to your communities. 00:27:44.480 --> 00:27:48.240 These people are being sent to places that are completely incapable of 00:27:48.240 --> 00:27:49.120 handling them. 00:27:49.120 --> 00:27:51.440 No one should have to handle them because they have no business 00:27:51.440 --> 00:27:52.640 being there in the first place. 00:27:52.640 --> 00:27:56.480 But when But when they're shipped and they're delivered, just like D-Day, 00:27:56.480 --> 00:28:00.000 they're being delivered in order for them to deliver the payload of 00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:02.480 destruction that comes with wherever they go. 00:28:02.480 --> 00:28:04.400 Again, we're talking about military age men. 00:28:04.400 --> 00:28:06.480 It's almost not ever families. 00:28:06.480 --> 00:28:09.520 Families shouldn't be coming either, but at least you can make them 00:28:09.600 --> 00:28:13.040 the made-up case that those are refugees somehow. 00:28:13.040 --> 00:28:18.400 When military-age men are coming across, the the normalcy bias response is 00:28:18.400 --> 00:28:21.520 what we saw last week from James Woods on Twitter. 00:28:21.520 --> 00:28:24.720 He said, Oh, look at all this voter fraud that's coming. 00:28:24.720 --> 00:28:28.320 These are gonna these guys are gonna be voting Democrat. 00:28:28.320 --> 00:28:32.000 That's precisely the sort of response that we don't want people to 00:28:32.000 --> 00:28:32.720 be having. 00:28:32.720 --> 00:28:37.440 The reason that's normalcy bias, it's thinking, oh, a foreigner is coming 00:28:37.440 --> 00:28:40.880 in here, I'm afraid that they might vote illegally and that might 00:28:40.880 --> 00:28:45.200 shift the balance in Congress or whatever. 00:28:45.200 --> 00:28:46.800 Not the point. 00:28:46.800 --> 00:28:52.240 When millions of military age Africans pour into this country, it is 00:28:52.240 --> 00:28:54.720 in order to do what they do wherever they go. 00:28:54.720 --> 00:28:56.160 And that is crime. 00:28:56.160 --> 00:28:57.440 It's violent crime. 00:28:57.440 --> 00:28:59.840 Again, you can go back and listen to the episodes on race 00:28:59.920 --> 00:29:02.720 if you forgot about that, or if you don't believe any of 00:29:02.720 --> 00:29:06.480 the statistics that have been gathered globally ever since we first encountered 00:29:06.480 --> 00:29:07.280 those people. 00:29:07.280 --> 00:29:09.440 That's what happens. 00:29:09.520 --> 00:29:12.240 Stonequarter is a mostly a theology podcast. 00:29:12.240 --> 00:29:15.120 This isn't really a theology episode because it doesn't need to be. 00:29:15.120 --> 00:29:17.680 This is about the reality on the ground and what we have 00:29:17.680 --> 00:29:21.280 to do in the face of things coming. 00:29:21.280 --> 00:29:26.000 We're talking about the normalcy bias because if you think that today 00:29:26.000 --> 00:29:28.320 is going to be just like it was 10 years ago or 00:29:28.400 --> 00:29:33.680 20 years ago, when you see tens of thousands of military-age African 00:29:33.680 --> 00:29:38.960 men on trains being shipped into the heartland of the United States, 00:29:38.960 --> 00:29:41.440 you don't have a frame of reference for that. 00:29:41.840 --> 00:29:46.560 Because as Corey was saying, the the bias, the normalcy bias, when 00:29:46.560 --> 00:29:49.200 we see these things happening, if we don't have a frame of 00:29:49.200 --> 00:29:51.920 reference, the easiest thing to do is just to throw it away. 00:29:51.920 --> 00:29:54.160 Say, I don't, I don't think that's happening. 00:29:54.160 --> 00:29:58.160 Or you stick it into some old outdated box like voter fraud. 00:29:58.160 --> 00:29:58.480 Yeah, 00:29:58.480 --> 00:29:59.920 voter fraud is real. 00:29:59.920 --> 00:30:01.360 Not the concern. 00:30:01.360 --> 00:30:04.560 With rapists and murderers coming across the border, you don't worry about 00:30:04.560 --> 00:30:06.240 how they're gonna illegally vote. 00:30:06.240 --> 00:30:10.000 You worry about them destroying your neighborhoods, as they do, as we 00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:13.920 see all across Europe and in many small towns in this country, 00:30:13.920 --> 00:30:16.160 when they show up, they destroy the towns. 00:30:16.160 --> 00:30:18.080 That's the intended result. 00:30:18.400 --> 00:30:21.520 The intended result is not oh voter fraud or something else. 00:30:21.520 --> 00:30:25.840 It is to displace and destroy the local communities. 00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:28.160 It's a stated goal of these people. 00:30:28.160 --> 00:30:29.920 We're not gonna get into details of that. 00:30:29.920 --> 00:30:31.840 If you think that's crazy, okay. 00:30:31.840 --> 00:30:34.480 It's a fact, it's long established. 00:30:34.480 --> 00:30:38.320 We've talked in past episodes about the books that the people doing 00:30:38.320 --> 00:30:41.760 this stuff, have written talking about what they plan to do with 00:30:41.920 --> 00:30:42.960 these populations. 00:30:42.960 --> 00:30:46.160 Now that we're doing it and we're seeing it, we're seeing most 00:30:46.160 --> 00:30:52.320 men either ignore it or just shout impotently or say incredibly stupid 00:30:52.320 --> 00:30:55.200 things like, oh, voter fraud. 00:30:55.200 --> 00:30:59.440 Right now there's really nothing else that can be done because again, 00:30:59.440 --> 00:31:00.720 these are government matters. 00:31:00.720 --> 00:31:02.720 The government should be the one preventing it. 00:31:02.720 --> 00:31:05.200 In this case, it's a government doing it. 00:31:05.360 --> 00:31:08.640 And as podcasters, we're not gonna tell anybody what to do to 00:31:08.640 --> 00:31:09.440 the contrary. 00:31:09.440 --> 00:31:12.560 Those are private matters that will be sorted out elsewhere. 00:31:12.560 --> 00:31:14.400 We're not gonna have any part of it. 00:31:14.400 --> 00:31:18.480 What we do want individuals who hear our voices to think about 00:31:18.480 --> 00:31:23.360 is that this is one of the existential threats that my nation 00:31:23.360 --> 00:31:26.160 faces. Perhaps my community will face. 00:31:26.160 --> 00:31:29.520 Where one day you have, you know, there's the town in Italy 00:31:29.600 --> 00:31:33.440 of a few thousand people, and it more than doubled in size 00:31:33.440 --> 00:31:38.160 overnight when a huge number of African military age rapists and murders 00:31:38.240 --> 00:31:42.320 were discourged on their chores, and immediately started destroying everything. 00:31:42.320 --> 00:31:44.240 That could happen to your town too. 00:31:44.240 --> 00:31:47.120 And if you live in a nice town, that is exactly what 00:31:47.120 --> 00:31:48.400 they want to happen. 00:31:48.400 --> 00:31:51.440 And we're not gather reasons for that because again, this isn't we 00:31:51.440 --> 00:31:55.440 don't even want to talk about those specifics apart from saying that 00:31:55.440 --> 00:31:57.920 this is how quickly things can change. 00:31:57.920 --> 00:32:00.960 You wake up one morning and it's peaceful and it's quiet. 00:32:00.960 --> 00:32:04.480 And you wake up the next morning and everything's on fire. 00:32:04.480 --> 00:32:04.800 And 00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:08.480 that's why I said at the beginning, this isn't really an episode 00:32:08.480 --> 00:32:12.640 for women and children because they shouldn't have to think about that. 00:32:12.640 --> 00:32:16.160 There's nothing that that went around on Twitter recently where a woman 00:32:16.160 --> 00:32:18.640 said, I've been married thirty years and I just learned that my 00:32:18.640 --> 00:32:22.800 husband is constantly scanning for threats wherever he goes. 00:32:22.800 --> 00:32:26.400 He's always scanning for trouble, looking out for trouble. 00:32:26.400 --> 00:32:27.440 And she was a mate. 00:32:27.440 --> 00:32:28.320 She had no idea. 00:32:28.320 --> 00:32:30.560 And so she asked and got, you know, millions of impressions. 00:32:30.560 --> 00:32:32.880 Everyone's all the guys were like, yeah, of course. 00:32:32.880 --> 00:32:35.200 And the women were like, what? 00:32:35.200 --> 00:32:37.360 That's how men are supposed to be. 00:32:37.760 --> 00:32:40.240 We are supposed to be scanning for threats. 00:32:40.240 --> 00:32:45.280 If you are a man and you are completely cavalier about sitting 00:32:45.280 --> 00:32:48.800 with your back to the door in a restaurant, you're doing it 00:32:48.800 --> 00:32:50.720 wrong. Uh your dad failed. 00:32:50.880 --> 00:32:54.800 He failed to teach you properly how to assess threats. 00:32:54.800 --> 00:32:57.680 And by that I don't mean live in paranoia, live in fear. 00:32:57.680 --> 00:33:00.480 I don't mean everyone should think he's John Wick. 00:33:00.720 --> 00:33:03.680 If nothing else, you can at least pay attention. 00:33:03.680 --> 00:33:06.320 You can at least have your head on a swivel and look 00:33:06.320 --> 00:33:08.160 out for what might be happening. 00:33:08.160 --> 00:33:14.640 Because the normal, everything's hunky-dory, everything's quiet, everything's peaceful, that's not free. 00:33:14.640 --> 00:33:18.480 The peace and quiet that we enjoy is not free. 00:33:18.480 --> 00:33:19.920 It's not inevitable. 00:33:19.920 --> 00:33:25.520 It's something that is produced by generations of men guarding the borders 00:33:25.840 --> 00:33:30.000 of big scale and small scale, saying we don't want negative elements 00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:31.040 in our town. 00:33:31.040 --> 00:33:33.760 And when you have enough of that over a long enough time, 00:33:33.760 --> 00:33:36.640 you can relax more, just as you can relax in your house 00:33:36.720 --> 00:33:39.680 more than you would relax when you're out in public. 00:33:39.680 --> 00:33:42.240 But It is a duty of a man 00:33:43.440 --> 00:33:45.600 to choose when he relaxes. 00:33:45.600 --> 00:33:47.760 It shouldn't be your default state. 00:33:47.760 --> 00:33:50.000 You should have a time and a place where you can relax, 00:33:50.000 --> 00:33:55.040 and that's that that's why relaxation is differentiated from a normal state 00:33:55.440 --> 00:33:56.240 of being. 00:33:56.240 --> 00:34:00.320 Normally a man should have a higher degree of awareness. 00:34:00.320 --> 00:34:04.160 And again, I there I'm confident there's some men who hear that 00:34:04.160 --> 00:34:07.120 and think, wow, what a paranoid thing to say. 00:34:07.120 --> 00:34:08.880 Don't try to psychologize this. 00:34:08.880 --> 00:34:11.760 I'm sorry that your dad failed you as a man if he 00:34:11.760 --> 00:34:15.920 didn't teach you how to understand the true nature of the world, 00:34:15.920 --> 00:34:18.240 but it's not a peaceful, quiet place. 00:34:18.240 --> 00:34:21.760 It's a place where there are some men who are evil and 00:34:21.760 --> 00:34:25.200 intend to do harm and have no problem doing harm to you 00:34:25.200 --> 00:34:26.320 and yours. 00:34:26.320 --> 00:34:32.640 And so whatever capable response you're apt to l raise against that 00:34:32.640 --> 00:34:34.240 is beside the point. 00:34:34.240 --> 00:34:36.720 It's not about training for anything in particular. 00:34:36.720 --> 00:34:40.560 You at least have a duty to watch your family's back. 00:34:40.560 --> 00:34:43.600 You should be the one looking out so that they can relax. 00:34:43.600 --> 00:34:46.320 Because your your wife and your kids, they should be able to 00:34:46.320 --> 00:34:50.880 be completely relaxed in your presence, knowing that you are looking out 00:34:50.880 --> 00:34:51.440 for them. 00:34:51.440 --> 00:34:53.680 If you're not looking out for them, then yeah, they're gonna have 00:34:53.680 --> 00:34:54.480 to worry. 00:34:54.480 --> 00:34:57.040 And so when I said at the beginning, this isn't really for 00:34:57.040 --> 00:35:01.520 women, it's not that It's not that these things don't hurt everyone, 00:35:01.520 --> 00:35:02.000 they do. 00:35:02.000 --> 00:35:05.280 I mean, the reason for men being concerned is to protect the 00:35:05.280 --> 00:35:08.480 women and children, because that is our duty. 00:35:08.480 --> 00:35:08.800 And 00:35:09.760 --> 00:35:12.000 women today have to worry about this stuff. 00:35:12.000 --> 00:35:14.560 Women are taking self-dog fence classes and other things. 00:35:14.560 --> 00:35:17.600 And I want a world where they don't have to worry about 00:35:17.600 --> 00:35:19.120 it. That's a long-term goal. 00:35:19.120 --> 00:35:20.640 Like there are a lot of problems we have to solve to 00:35:20.640 --> 00:35:21.120 get there. 00:35:21.120 --> 00:35:25.200 So I'm not saying anything negative about women who pay attention to 00:35:25.200 --> 00:35:26.000 this stuff. 00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:29.120 I'm saying that it's a problem that you even have to think 00:35:29.120 --> 00:35:29.760 about it. 00:35:29.760 --> 00:35:32.400 If you as a woman have to be engaged in politics, it 00:35:32.400 --> 00:35:34.160 means that the men have failed. 00:35:34.160 --> 00:35:35.520 And that's my concern. 00:35:35.520 --> 00:35:38.800 I'm concerned about men failing to do the duty that we have 00:35:38.800 --> 00:35:41.680 from God to our families and to our communities and to our 00:35:41.680 --> 00:35:47.920 nations, and correctly assessing threats should always be going on in big 00:35:47.920 --> 00:35:51.040 ways and in small ways, as Corey said, with a godly prince 00:35:51.120 --> 00:35:53.760 you won't have big threats that the local guy has to worry 00:35:53.760 --> 00:35:58.800 about. Like short of some completely out of the blue calamity, that 00:35:58.800 --> 00:35:59.840 doesn't happen. 00:35:59.840 --> 00:36:03.040 Short of the Moors showing up and invading, you don't have to 00:36:03.040 --> 00:36:03.600 worry about that. 00:36:03.600 --> 00:36:07.760 And yet today the invasions are coming with the help of the 00:36:07.760 --> 00:36:10.240 men who were put in charge of protecting us. 00:36:10.240 --> 00:36:14.960 And so as individual men we're faced with something that's I won't 00:36:14.960 --> 00:36:18.240 I overuse the term un unprecedented, but we don't really have a 00:36:18.240 --> 00:36:21.920 modern model for what men in communities are supposed to do when 00:36:21.920 --> 00:36:25.760 there are foreign invaders on our soil, particularly in the United States. 00:36:25.760 --> 00:36:29.840 We have been blessed by God with almost total isolation from physical 00:36:29.840 --> 00:36:32.240 enemies, which is why they have to be shipped from thousands of 00:36:32.240 --> 00:36:34.800 miles away in order to begin to do their harm. 00:36:34.800 --> 00:36:38.560 And simultaneously we're being told both by the media and by the 00:36:38.560 --> 00:36:41.760 government and by our churches, all in concert. 00:36:41.760 --> 00:36:43.280 Welcome the refugee. 00:36:43.280 --> 00:36:44.480 Welcome the helpless. 00:36:44.480 --> 00:36:45.680 They're downtrodden. 00:36:45.680 --> 00:36:48.000 Don't mind the fact that they're rapists and murderers. 00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:48.960 You need to help them. 00:36:48.960 --> 00:36:50.640 You love Jesus, don't you? 00:36:50.640 --> 00:36:52.960 Well, that's why we're talking about this. 00:36:52.960 --> 00:36:56.560 That's why this is a subject for a religion podcast, because some 00:36:56.800 --> 00:37:01.280 of these things that are being done civilizationally are being done by 00:37:01.280 --> 00:37:03.520 evil men in God's name. 00:37:03.520 --> 00:37:05.280 And that's something we talk about a lot. 00:37:05.280 --> 00:37:07.440 There's nothing more really to say here except for the fact that 00:37:07.440 --> 00:37:10.400 we When you have a physical enemy, you deal with him first 00:37:10.400 --> 00:37:11.520 as a physical enemy. 00:37:11.520 --> 00:37:14.160 You don't worry about the spiritual primarily. 00:37:14.160 --> 00:37:16.720 Because it's the same reason as if you're on an airplane and 00:37:16.720 --> 00:37:19.680 they tell you if the oxygen mask drops, you don't put the 00:37:19.680 --> 00:37:22.800 oxygen mask on the man next to you before your own because 00:37:22.800 --> 00:37:25.440 he has a fighting chance to put it on his mouth too. 00:37:25.440 --> 00:37:29.120 If you look out for yourself first in that one instantaneous moment, 00:37:29.120 --> 00:37:32.000 if you put the mask on yourself first, it keeps you conscious 00:37:32.160 --> 00:37:34.400 so you can help the man next to you. 00:37:34.400 --> 00:37:38.080 If you act self sacrificially in that one moment and try to 00:37:38.080 --> 00:37:40.800 help the guy next to you when he's having trouble, maybe you 00:37:40.800 --> 00:37:44.000 go both become unconscious due to lack of oxygen, and then you 00:37:44.000 --> 00:37:44.880 may both die. 00:37:44.880 --> 00:37:48.000 Or if you had looked after yourself first and then you help 00:37:48.000 --> 00:37:49.840 him, you can both survive. 00:37:49.840 --> 00:37:53.280 And so that sort of triage, when we're talking about physical virtuous 00:37:53.280 --> 00:37:56.480 spiritual threats, the same thing is in play. 00:37:56.480 --> 00:38:00.480 If someone is still alive, we can deal with the spiritual problems 00:38:00.480 --> 00:38:04.160 later. We can't deal with the spiritual problems with someone who's dead. 00:38:04.160 --> 00:38:08.480 And so keeping people healthy and and alive and safe is paramount. 00:38:08.480 --> 00:38:11.120 As long as you draw breath, there's hope. 00:38:11.120 --> 00:38:14.560 When you get murdered and you weren't baptized and you weren't a 00:38:14.560 --> 00:38:16.720 Christian, that's the end. 00:38:16.720 --> 00:38:22.240 So there's a triage even in this life for Christians of when 00:38:22.480 --> 00:38:24.320 and where we're concerned about things. 00:38:24.320 --> 00:38:28.240 And we must first and foremost be concerned about helping the welfare 00:38:28.320 --> 00:38:29.600 of our neighbor. 00:38:29.600 --> 00:38:32.960 The parable of the good Samaritan was not about spreading the gospel 00:38:32.960 --> 00:38:33.600 to the man. 00:38:33.600 --> 00:38:36.160 It was about helping a man who is nearly dead. 00:38:36.160 --> 00:38:38.560 You take care of him, you bandage him up, and you take 00:38:38.560 --> 00:38:40.640 care of the rest after that. 00:38:40.640 --> 00:38:44.560 If someone is facing a mortal threat, that is the most serious 00:38:44.560 --> 00:38:47.440 thing. So all this is fundamentally about triage. 00:38:47.440 --> 00:38:50.320 All these things matter, they're all important, but they're not all important 00:38:50.480 --> 00:38:52.560 at exactly the same time. 00:38:52.560 --> 00:38:56.800 And it's not saying this isn't important to separately say this is 00:38:56.800 --> 00:38:59.760 important. It's saying we have to deal with this first and then 00:38:59.760 --> 00:39:00.800 the other thing. 00:39:00.800 --> 00:39:04.960 And when you get that backwards, you're set up for achieving the 00:39:04.960 --> 00:39:08.000 very results of those men who sent these people to do these 00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:10.480 things to us in the first place. 00:39:10.480 --> 00:39:15.760 Dum vita est spes est you happen to make me think of 00:39:15.760 --> 00:39:20.480 a Latin phrase while there is life, there is hope. 00:39:20.480 --> 00:39:25.120 It's the the sentiment you were advancing there. 00:39:25.120 --> 00:39:29.680 But to give people a framework for this, I know that we 00:39:29.680 --> 00:39:34.480 sort of said this was not necessarily a theology episode, but let's 00:39:34.400 --> 00:39:38.560 deal with some scripture and some of the history surrounding it, to 00:39:38.560 --> 00:39:42.400 give you a framework for what is happening today. 00:39:43.200 --> 00:39:50.640 Between the years approximately nine hundred and six hundred BC, the Assyrian 00:39:50.640 --> 00:39:57.840 Empire relocated somewhere between five and six estimates vary, but 00:39:57.840 --> 00:40:02.560 somewhere between five and six million people within the borders of their 00:40:02.560 --> 00:40:06.960 empire. And they did this for a number of reasons. 00:40:06.960 --> 00:40:13.840 One reason was to disperse technology throughout the empire, particularly agricultural, but 00:40:13.840 --> 00:40:20.240 another and a more salient reason, probably the biggest reason for this 00:40:20.400 --> 00:40:26.880 mass relocation location was to break the will to resist of various 00:40:26.880 --> 00:40:29.120 peoples in their empire. 00:40:29.120 --> 00:40:33.920 Because the Assyrian Empire encompassed a number of different nations. 00:40:34.160 --> 00:40:38.960 And how this ties into scripture is that one of those nations 00:40:39.120 --> 00:40:44.000 was the northern kingdom of Israel, otherwise known as just Israel, when 00:40:44.000 --> 00:40:47.360 you divide between Israel and Judah. 00:40:47.360 --> 00:40:52.080 And so the ten northern tribes were part of the Assyrian Empire, 00:40:52.080 --> 00:40:58.400 and the Assyrians forcibly relocated much of the population of Israel out 00:40:58.400 --> 00:41:04.880 of Israel and relocated others from outside Israel into Israel. 00:41:04.880 --> 00:41:10.400 And they did this specifically to break the will of the Israelite 00:41:10.400 --> 00:41:12.720 population to resist. 00:41:12.720 --> 00:41:14.400 And they succeeded. 00:41:14.960 --> 00:41:21.920 What they did was they miscegenated the Israelite population, the northern kingdom, 00:41:21.920 --> 00:41:26.080 the ten northern tribes, out of existence. 00:41:26.080 --> 00:41:34.560 They made the Samaritans by mixing the Israelites with other peoples. 00:41:34.560 --> 00:41:38.000 That was their goal, because it made it easier for them to 00:41:38.000 --> 00:41:42.720 rule over these populations, because they were no longer cohesive. 00:41:42.720 --> 00:41:49.520 These populations were no longer united, tempted to bring up the transcendentals 00:41:49.520 --> 00:41:53.600 again because we're dealing of course with unity, typically numbered as the 00:41:53.600 --> 00:41:56.400 fourth or the fifth. 00:41:56.400 --> 00:42:01.120 But these populations were no longer united, and so it was easier 00:42:01.120 --> 00:42:02.240 to rule them. 00:42:02.240 --> 00:42:06.240 This is the same thing that is done on a smaller scale. 00:42:06.560 --> 00:42:08.160 In businesses. 00:42:08.160 --> 00:42:13.200 So for instance, if a business hires a bunch of employees from 00:42:13.200 --> 00:42:17.120 a local town, well, if the business owner also lives in the 00:42:17.120 --> 00:42:19.840 town, then perhaps he will treat the employees better because they are 00:42:19.920 --> 00:42:24.240 in fact his immediate neighbors. 00:42:24.240 --> 00:42:29.760 But if these people, these employees, are all neighbors, they all live 00:42:29.760 --> 00:42:33.520 together, they attend church together, their children play together, they are going 00:42:33.520 --> 00:42:37.840 to cooperate better, which yes, this does mean most likely they will 00:42:37.840 --> 00:42:42.480 organize and form something akin to or even actually a union. 00:42:42.480 --> 00:42:45.440 And they are going to get better treatment because of that. 00:42:45.440 --> 00:42:49.040 I don't intend to get into the politics of unionization and that 00:42:49.040 --> 00:42:50.080 in this episode. 00:42:50.080 --> 00:42:51.440 That's not my point. 00:42:51.440 --> 00:42:56.000 My point is that when you have this cohesive workforce, they are 00:42:56.000 --> 00:43:00.960 able to to get better treatment and if necessary demand better treatment 00:43:01.280 --> 00:43:06.560 from the employer than if they were not unified. 00:43:06.560 --> 00:43:10.800 And the reason this is relevant is that we see businesses exploiting 00:43:10.800 --> 00:43:11.600 this today? 00:43:11.600 --> 00:43:16.960 The reason that you often see such large corporations sponsoring all of 00:43:16.960 --> 00:43:21.920 these visas, bringing in now at this point, millions of people from 00:43:21.920 --> 00:43:27.600 foreign countries, millions of alien people into this country and various other 00:43:27.600 --> 00:43:31.760 countries around the world, is that if you do that, you get 00:43:31.760 --> 00:43:33.360 cheaper labor. 00:43:33.360 --> 00:43:36.160 Because they will not have that cohesiveness, there will be a lack 00:43:36.160 --> 00:43:41.280 of unity, they will not be able to oppose what you impose 00:43:41.440 --> 00:43:42.240 on them. 00:43:42.240 --> 00:43:46.720 It works the same for countries, for empires. 00:43:46.720 --> 00:43:50.640 Now, of course, there is the aspect today where the overarching goal 00:43:50.640 --> 00:43:54.560 is the actual destruction of nations. 00:43:54.560 --> 00:43:57.520 But part of it is, of course, just simple greed, because you 00:43:57.520 --> 00:44:01.520 have different players in different parts of this story. 00:44:01.840 --> 00:44:08.080 The industrialists, the capitalists have different incentives and different goals from those 00:44:08.080 --> 00:44:11.200 who have perhaps grander schemes. 00:44:11.200 --> 00:44:14.880 But they work along the same lines. 00:44:14.880 --> 00:44:19.040 And so when you think about what is happening, as a Christian, 00:44:19.040 --> 00:44:23.040 you very much have a framework within which to think about this. 00:44:23.040 --> 00:44:26.080 It's given to you in Scripture. 00:44:26.080 --> 00:44:31.520 The ten northern tribes of Israel no longer exist, incidentally. 00:44:31.520 --> 00:44:34.480 This is one of the reasons that you cannot read the list 00:44:34.560 --> 00:44:39.520 of tribes in Revelation as being literal Israelites, because the ten northern 00:44:39.520 --> 00:44:41.200 tribes are gone. 00:44:41.200 --> 00:44:43.040 They no longer exist. 00:44:43.040 --> 00:44:46.640 The only tribes that remain are from the southern kingdom, from the 00:44:46.640 --> 00:44:52.240 kingdom of Judah, that was not enslaved by the Assyrians and shuffled 00:44:52.240 --> 00:44:56.400 around and miscegenated out of existence. 00:44:56.400 --> 00:45:00.320 And so as a Christian, again, you have a framework for this, 00:45:00.320 --> 00:45:02.080 you see it in Scripture. 00:45:02.080 --> 00:45:03.520 Why did it happen? 00:45:03.520 --> 00:45:07.840 It was punishment for the wickedness of the northern tribes. 00:45:07.840 --> 00:45:11.280 Yes, of course there was also the Babylonian captivity for the southern 00:45:11.280 --> 00:45:14.000 tribes, but it was not as destructive. 00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:18.720 Basically exclusively due to the fact that God had made certain promises 00:45:18.720 --> 00:45:20.880 regarding the line of David. 00:45:20.880 --> 00:45:24.560 That's for a another episode, perhaps, though. 00:45:24.560 --> 00:45:30.640 As punishment for the wickedness of the northern tribes, God utterly destroyed 00:45:30.640 --> 00:45:33.360 them as a people. 00:45:33.360 --> 00:45:35.680 We see that happening today. 00:45:36.480 --> 00:45:39.520 And I would say, yes, it is fair to interpret that as 00:45:39.520 --> 00:45:43.760 a punishment for the wickedness of our nation. 00:45:43.760 --> 00:45:48.880 As Christians, it is our duty, particularly as men, to prepare for 00:45:48.880 --> 00:45:49.680 these things. 00:45:50.320 --> 00:45:53.840 Can we necessarily on our own reverse course? 00:45:53.840 --> 00:45:55.440 No, of course not. 00:45:55.440 --> 00:45:58.080 We can pray that God will show us mercy. 00:45:58.080 --> 00:46:02.720 We can pray that God will create repentance in our fellow man, 00:46:02.720 --> 00:46:06.400 in our brothers, in this nation, so that he will turn from 00:46:06.400 --> 00:46:08.480 his anger and his wrath. 00:46:08.480 --> 00:46:12.400 But in the interim, we have to deal with things as they 00:46:12.400 --> 00:46:14.320 exist As they exist. 00:46:14.320 --> 00:46:18.400 We have to remain firm in the belief that we will be 00:46:18.400 --> 00:46:22.880 able to see our way through this, that God will again turn 00:46:22.880 --> 00:46:27.120 to us, that we will be victorious to be entirely blunt. 00:46:27.120 --> 00:46:30.400 We have to remain firm in that belief, but we have to 00:46:30.400 --> 00:46:35.200 do that while looking square at the facts, while not denying the 00:46:35.200 --> 00:46:39.520 reality of the hard road ahead and of the circumstances in which 00:46:39.520 --> 00:46:41.360 we find ourselves. 00:46:41.360 --> 00:46:46.640 Because if you live a delusional life, if you metaphorically, symbolically stick 00:46:46.640 --> 00:46:51.040 your head in the sand, you're simply not a man. 00:46:51.040 --> 00:46:53.840 Because that is not what men are called to do. 00:46:53.840 --> 00:46:57.520 Men are called to do a number of things, and among those 00:46:58.160 --> 00:47:04.080 chief among those, first and foremost, the only possible thing that could 00:47:04.080 --> 00:47:09.280 even be considered to rank higher, but not prior to, would be 00:47:09.280 --> 00:47:13.920 instructing those in your care with regard to the faith, but the 00:47:13.920 --> 00:47:19.920 highest duty in terms of priority is the physical protection of those 00:47:19.920 --> 00:47:21.600 entrusted to your care. 00:47:21.600 --> 00:47:26.160 Because again, as Wo said, if you do not have that physical 00:47:26.160 --> 00:47:30.000 well-being, if you do not have that physical security, you cannot address 00:47:30.000 --> 00:47:32.400 the spiritual needs. 00:47:32.400 --> 00:47:36.400 And if you don't address the spiritual needs, you have utterly failed 00:47:36.560 --> 00:47:38.400 as ahead. 00:47:38.720 --> 00:47:38.880 And 00:47:38.880 --> 00:47:42.960 I think it's important when we're looking at the scriptural example that 00:47:42.960 --> 00:47:46.960 Corey just gave is that whether or not this is punishment for 00:47:46.960 --> 00:47:50.800 God or something is completely beside the point for the purposes of 00:47:50.800 --> 00:47:55.920 this episode because the point is that our normalcy bias is that 00:47:55.920 --> 00:47:57.520 I would never do that. 00:47:57.520 --> 00:48:01.680 I would never try to wipe out another nation by causing them 00:48:01.680 --> 00:48:04.400 to be overrun by aliens who would breed them out. 00:48:04.400 --> 00:48:07.120 That's not how I conduct my life. 00:48:07.120 --> 00:48:10.240 The normalcy bias is to believe because I wouldn't do that and 00:48:10.240 --> 00:48:13.440 I haven't seen it done, that can't exist. 00:48:13.440 --> 00:48:16.480 And so when I see things on the TV and in my 00:48:16.480 --> 00:48:20.800 church bulletins and from the podium at the White House that are 00:48:20.800 --> 00:48:25.680 all pointed in that direction, I don't believe it, because that can't 00:48:25.680 --> 00:48:29.200 be. Pointing to scripture and saying, well, yeah, this is how warfare's 00:48:29.120 --> 00:48:32.240 been conducted for thousands of years, and by the way, this is 00:48:32.240 --> 00:48:37.040 how you fall under God's judgment, is is is a historical point. 00:48:37.040 --> 00:48:39.840 You don't need to believe in God to believe that this happens. 00:48:39.840 --> 00:48:42.320 The Soviet Union did exactly the same thing. 00:48:42.320 --> 00:48:45.040 It's a reason that there's so many Russians in what is today 00:48:45.040 --> 00:48:49.600 Ukraine. It's a reason that there were so many Germans in Poland. 00:48:49.600 --> 00:48:52.960 They moved there because it was their territory. 00:48:52.960 --> 00:48:56.480 And then later on when the borders moved, the people were still 00:48:56.480 --> 00:49:00.960 there. So this has always been a part of conquering a place. 00:49:00.960 --> 00:49:05.360 And today we are too being conquered by these people. 00:49:05.360 --> 00:49:10.720 Now the difference is that those who are being sent to subjugate 00:49:10.720 --> 00:49:12.640 are not the conquerors. 00:49:12.640 --> 00:49:14.080 They're bioweapons. 00:49:14.400 --> 00:49:16.400 They're being sent by others. 00:49:16.400 --> 00:49:18.000 Because the goal is not 00:49:19.520 --> 00:49:23.280 replacement. The goal is functionally just destruction. 00:49:23.600 --> 00:49:26.080 and that's what we see playing out. 00:49:26.080 --> 00:49:26.400 So 00:49:28.000 --> 00:49:30.880 Corey alluded to this, and it's something that if you've if you'd 00:49:30.880 --> 00:49:34.480 followed me on Twitter for a while, one of the key giveaways 00:49:34.480 --> 00:49:36.880 that I'm on a new Twitter account is that pretty soon I'm 00:49:36.880 --> 00:49:39.760 going to talk about the Stockdale paradox. 00:49:39.760 --> 00:49:45.760 Admiral James Stockdale was a highly decorated uh naval officer. 00:49:45.760 --> 00:49:49.520 He received the Congressional Medal of Honor for what he did in 00:49:49.520 --> 00:49:52.000 Vietnam. He was very well respected. 00:49:52.000 --> 00:49:54.160 The name is known by some because if you're old enough you 00:49:54.160 --> 00:49:58.240 might remember when Ross Perot ran for president in nineteen ninety two 00:49:58.560 --> 00:50:02.320 and got Bill Clinton elected with forty three percent of the popular 00:50:02.320 --> 00:50:07.440 vote. It was because Perot ran and Stockdale was his running mate. 00:50:07.440 --> 00:50:10.960 SNL Lampooned Stockdale and kind of made fun of him, said, you 00:50:10.960 --> 00:50:14.240 know, he said at the vice presidential debate, who am I, why 00:50:14.240 --> 00:50:14.800 am I here? 00:50:14.800 --> 00:50:17.360 I think it was Phil Hartman who parodied that and just kind 00:50:17.360 --> 00:50:19.440 of made the guy seem like a joke. 00:50:19.440 --> 00:50:20.400 He was a hero. 00:50:20.560 --> 00:50:22.880 He was an incredibly inspirational guy. 00:50:22.880 --> 00:50:25.600 And it's a shame that the last memory the most people have 00:50:25.600 --> 00:50:28.080 of him is that because he was he was amazing. 00:50:28.160 --> 00:50:29.680 On read here um 00:50:30.560 --> 00:50:34.800 a description of the Stockdale paradox to give you an idea of 00:50:34.800 --> 00:50:38.640 the mindset that we're trying to share with you because this is 00:50:39.360 --> 00:50:43.600 this is fundamentally a Christian message, and it's also fundamentally just a 00:50:43.600 --> 00:50:49.440 basic human message for success, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming 00:50:49.440 --> 00:50:55.120 odds. The Stockdale Paradox is named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was 00:50:55.120 --> 00:50:58.400 a United States military officer held captive for eight years during the 00:50:58.400 --> 00:50:59.600 Vietnam War? 00:50:59.600 --> 00:51:03.520 Stockdale was tortured more than 20 times by his captors and never 00:51:03.520 --> 00:51:06.640 had much reason to believe he would survive the president camp and 00:51:06.640 --> 00:51:08.640 someday get to see his wife again. 00:51:08.640 --> 00:51:12.640 And yet, as Stockdale told Collins, he never lost faith during his 00:51:12.640 --> 00:51:17.600 ordeal. Quote, I never doubted not only that I would get out, 00:51:17.600 --> 00:51:20.480 but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the 00:51:20.480 --> 00:51:24.320 experience into the defining moment of my life, which which in retrospect 00:51:24.400 --> 00:51:26.080 I would not trade. 00:51:26.080 --> 00:51:27.920 Then comes the paradox. 00:51:27.920 --> 00:51:31.760 While Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable, he noted that it 00:51:31.760 --> 00:51:34.880 was always the most optimistic of his prison mates who failed to 00:51:34.880 --> 00:51:36.480 make it out of their alive. 00:51:36.480 --> 00:51:38.880 They were the ones who said we're going to be out by 00:51:38.880 --> 00:51:43.040 Christmas. And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go, and they'd say, 00:51:43.120 --> 00:51:45.680 We're gonna make it out by Easter and Easter would come, and 00:51:45.680 --> 00:51:49.280 Easter would go, and then Thanksgiving, and then it'd be Christmas again, 00:51:49.280 --> 00:51:51.280 and they died of a broken heart. 00:51:51.440 --> 00:51:55.040 What the optimists failed to do was confront the reality of their 00:51:55.040 --> 00:51:58.880 situation. They preferred the ostrich approach, sticking their heads in the sand 00:51:58.880 --> 00:52:01.440 and hoping for the difficulties to go away. 00:52:01.440 --> 00:52:04.880 That self-delusion might have made it easier on them in the short 00:52:04.880 --> 00:52:08.160 term, but when they were eventually forced to face reality, it had 00:52:08.160 --> 00:52:10.720 become too much and they couldn't handle it. 00:52:10.720 --> 00:52:14.160 Stockdale approached adversity with a very different mindset. 00:52:14.160 --> 00:52:16.800 He accepted the reality of his situation. 00:52:16.800 --> 00:52:19.680 He knew he was in hell, but rather than bury his head 00:52:19.680 --> 00:52:22.560 in the sand, he stepped up and did everything he could to 00:52:22.560 --> 00:52:25.840 lift the morale and prolong the lives of his fellow prisoners. 00:52:25.840 --> 00:52:28.720 He created a tapping code so that they could communicate with each 00:52:28.720 --> 00:52:32.640 other. He developed a milestone system that helped them deal with torture, 00:52:32.640 --> 00:52:36.000 and he said intelligence information to his wife hidden in the seemingly 00:52:36.000 --> 00:52:37.760 innocent letters he wrote. 00:52:37.760 --> 00:52:40.400 Collins and his team observed a similar mindset in the good to 00:52:40.400 --> 00:52:41.680 great companies. 00:52:41.680 --> 00:52:45.440 They labeled it the Stockdale paradox and described it like so. 00:52:45.440 --> 00:52:48.800 You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end regardless 00:52:48.800 --> 00:52:53.040 of the difficulties, and at the same time, you must confront the 00:52:53.040 --> 00:52:57.200 most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. 00:52:57.200 --> 00:53:02.240 So we're talking about normalcy bias today because the brutal facts are 00:53:02.240 --> 00:53:07.200 the facts that men like men like James Woods can't confront the 00:53:07.200 --> 00:53:11.200 fact that they're being overrun militarily, 'cause he's close to eighty. 00:53:11.520 --> 00:53:12.880 he's an arch boomer. 00:53:12.880 --> 00:53:13.840 He's very intelligent. 00:53:13.840 --> 00:53:14.480 He's a genius. 00:53:14.480 --> 00:53:15.440 He's a really smirk guy. 00:53:15.440 --> 00:53:18.720 I don't I'm not speaking disrespectfully of him. 00:53:18.720 --> 00:53:22.960 But But all he can process things in terms of is what 00:53:22.960 --> 00:53:24.320 he has seen in the past. 00:53:24.320 --> 00:53:28.400 And because he's never seen this, he's trying to pigeonhole it into 00:53:28.720 --> 00:53:31.680 the political paradigm that he can understand. 00:53:31.680 --> 00:53:34.560 This is something we talked about in the Generations episode a few 00:53:34.560 --> 00:53:39.520 weeks back that there are certain things the previous generations, if they're 00:53:39.440 --> 00:53:43.920 old enough, their experience is so alien to our own, those who 00:53:43.920 --> 00:53:48.000 are younger, that when they try to give advice, it's well intentioned 00:53:48.000 --> 00:53:51.120 advice, in their day it may have even been good advice. 00:53:51.120 --> 00:53:55.360 But when confronted with the current facts, if they deny them, as 00:53:55.360 --> 00:53:58.880 Corey was describing earlier, where you receive new information and then just 00:53:58.880 --> 00:54:00.720 throw it out because it doesn't fit. 00:54:00.720 --> 00:54:06.240 And so James Wood sees trainloads of military age rapists and murders 00:54:06.400 --> 00:54:08.080 and says, Oh no, voter fraud. 00:54:08.080 --> 00:54:10.720 They're gonna vote Democrat illegally. 00:54:10.720 --> 00:54:12.000 Not my concern. 00:54:12.000 --> 00:54:14.000 Shouldn't be your concern. 00:54:14.000 --> 00:54:16.960 Regardless of what you think about the situation, you need to confront 00:54:16.960 --> 00:54:21.920 the fact that there's something happening today that's never happened. 00:54:21.920 --> 00:54:27.840 There are millions of people being imported into our lands in a 00:54:27.840 --> 00:54:30.160 way that's never happened before. 00:54:30.160 --> 00:54:34.240 And the guys who are screaming about politics, who are screaming about 00:54:34.240 --> 00:54:38.400 the law, who are screaming about what's not fair, are doing that 00:54:38.400 --> 00:54:42.240 because they're not ready to confront the fact that these are military 00:54:42.320 --> 00:54:43.360 age males. 00:54:43.360 --> 00:54:45.200 And that means only one thing. 00:54:45.200 --> 00:54:47.760 The fact that they didn't bring guns with them is irrelevant. 00:54:47.760 --> 00:54:49.280 They can very easily be armed. 00:54:49.280 --> 00:54:51.360 And frankly, they don't even need to be. 00:54:51.360 --> 00:54:55.280 Because as long as people get thrown in prison for resisting, they 00:54:55.280 --> 00:54:59.440 can do whatever they're going to do without needing any particular military 00:54:59.440 --> 00:55:02.080 equipment. That's a brutal fact. 00:55:02.080 --> 00:55:04.160 That's a brutal reality to face. 00:55:04.160 --> 00:55:05.680 It's an unprecedented one. 00:55:05.680 --> 00:55:08.720 And I don't blame most men for not wanting to think about 00:55:08.720 --> 00:55:10.400 it. I don't want to think about it all the time. 00:55:10.400 --> 00:55:12.240 I don't think about it all the time. 00:55:12.240 --> 00:55:17.360 As I see this stuff come across the transom, for me personally, 00:55:17.360 --> 00:55:21.040 it just fits in with the paradigm that I already had in 00:55:21.040 --> 00:55:23.440 mind for the current state of affairs. 00:55:23.440 --> 00:55:27.040 So, you know, if I were deluded, then that would be confirmation 00:55:27.200 --> 00:55:28.240 bias, but it's not. 00:55:28.240 --> 00:55:28.880 I'm right. 00:55:28.880 --> 00:55:29.920 This is what's going on 00:55:30.800 --> 00:55:35.040 I don't want others who are listening and looking at this stuff 00:55:35.040 --> 00:55:36.960 and considering it to 00:55:37.920 --> 00:55:43.120 do what either the optimists in Stockdale scenario or the pessimists did. 00:55:43.120 --> 00:55:46.880 See the the optimists are what today we call white pillars. 00:55:46.880 --> 00:55:49.680 There were some useful things that came out of the Matrix, but 00:55:49.680 --> 00:55:51.840 it's really only shorthand. 00:55:51.840 --> 00:55:56.000 The idea that quote, I am a white pillar is just nonsense. 00:55:56.000 --> 00:56:00.560 You're a man in a situation, you have imperfect information, you have 00:56:00.560 --> 00:56:04.160 imperfect impure motives in some cases, you try to get all that 00:56:04.160 --> 00:56:06.640 as good as you can, but you know it's g never gonna 00:56:06.640 --> 00:56:09.280 be perfect, and then you then you try to make a plan 00:56:09.280 --> 00:56:10.720 as best you can. 00:56:10.880 --> 00:56:15.760 It's entirely appropriate to be optimistic in the sense that you believe 00:56:15.760 --> 00:56:19.040 that you will prevail for the sake of your family, for your 00:56:19.040 --> 00:56:22.160 community, for your church, and because you believe it's what God wants 00:56:22.160 --> 00:56:22.800 for you. 00:56:22.800 --> 00:56:25.360 That's appropriate. 00:56:25.360 --> 00:56:28.640 What is going to set you up for failure is if when 00:56:28.640 --> 00:56:31.760 confronted with brutal reality, you say, I'm a white pillar. 00:56:31.760 --> 00:56:32.480 It's fine. 00:56:32.480 --> 00:56:36.080 I'm I I don't I don't accept your negative frame. 00:56:36.240 --> 00:56:38.560 I don't accept your black pilling. 00:56:38.560 --> 00:56:40.000 That's nonsense. 00:56:40.000 --> 00:56:41.360 These are just facts. 00:56:41.760 --> 00:56:44.720 it's literally happening right before our eyes. 00:56:44.720 --> 00:56:48.560 There are millions of hours of footage of millions of men streaming 00:56:48.560 --> 00:56:49.520 across the border. 00:56:49.680 --> 00:56:52.160 I say millions because it's on TikTok, it's on YouTube. 00:56:52.160 --> 00:56:54.000 You could you shouldn't watch it all. 00:56:54.000 --> 00:56:56.640 You should just watch enough to know, yeah, it's happening and it's 00:56:56.640 --> 00:57:00.560 real and it's of concern. 00:57:00.560 --> 00:57:04.880 So whatever concerns you have, knowing that it's real is important. 00:57:04.880 --> 00:57:10.480 And I don't want guys falling into this categorization trap to say, 00:57:10.560 --> 00:57:13.840 well, yeah, there's new information, but that doesn't fit with my black 00:57:13.840 --> 00:57:15.600 pill view or my white pill view. 00:57:15.600 --> 00:57:18.240 Maybe something good happens, and you say, Well, I'm black pilled, I'm 00:57:18.160 --> 00:57:18.960 not gonna buy that. 00:57:18.960 --> 00:57:20.480 That's just that's retarded. 00:57:20.480 --> 00:57:21.200 Cut that out. 00:57:21.600 --> 00:57:23.120 don't be like that. 00:57:23.120 --> 00:57:25.600 The attitude that you have and the emotions that you feel when 00:57:25.600 --> 00:57:29.760 you feel when you're receiving new information is one thing. 00:57:29.760 --> 00:57:35.200 But the notion that your root of sanity is in your identity 00:57:35.200 --> 00:57:38.080 as a white pillar is setting you up for failure. 00:57:38.080 --> 00:57:39.760 That's not a foundation. 00:57:39.760 --> 00:57:42.400 It's crazy Christians, we know what our foundation is. 00:57:42.400 --> 00:57:45.440 It's hope in God, it's hope in his promises, it's hope in 00:57:45.440 --> 00:57:47.600 eternal life and in resurrection. 00:57:47.600 --> 00:57:50.560 And in this life, we know that when we obey Him, good 00:57:50.560 --> 00:57:51.680 things will happen. 00:57:51.680 --> 00:57:54.560 And we know that when we disobey Him, we should expect nothing 00:57:55.120 --> 00:57:56.160 but horrors. 00:57:56.160 --> 00:58:00.320 Right now, civilizationally, we are in a state of disobeying him and 00:58:00.320 --> 00:58:02.560 seeing nothing but unlimited horrors. 00:58:02.560 --> 00:58:05.760 And so for me, that's not surprising because it fits with what 00:58:05.760 --> 00:58:06.400 I already knew. 00:58:07.040 --> 00:58:09.440 Some people don't look at things like that. 00:58:09.440 --> 00:58:12.320 And again, I don't I don't want guys to spend a lot 00:58:12.320 --> 00:58:14.000 of time dwelling on the negative. 00:58:14.000 --> 00:58:15.120 That's not the point. 00:58:15.120 --> 00:58:18.320 It's not to be negative about stuff, it's just to be realistic 00:58:18.960 --> 00:58:21.200 and to say, yep, this is really bad. 00:58:21.200 --> 00:58:24.960 And if something comes along that's really bad news and it doesn't 00:58:24.880 --> 00:58:28.240 fit into any of your existing boxes, you need to find a 00:58:28.240 --> 00:58:28.880 new box. 00:58:28.880 --> 00:58:31.920 You need to figure out how to incorporate that new information. 00:58:32.400 --> 00:58:34.560 that's synthesis, that's thinking. 00:58:34.560 --> 00:58:39.600 When a man thinks, he's able to incorporate new information into his 00:58:39.600 --> 00:58:42.880 existing worldview, even it means that he needs to make room, even 00:58:42.880 --> 00:58:45.600 if something has to change, even if he has to have an 00:58:45.600 --> 00:58:50.800 entirely new section of his mind to accommodate this thing. 00:58:50.800 --> 00:58:54.080 But what a man should not do is say, Oh, that's that's 00:58:54.000 --> 00:58:55.120 nothing, that's nonsense. 00:58:55.120 --> 00:58:56.240 I don't believe any of that crap. 00:58:56.480 --> 00:58:57.520 it's a PSyOP. 00:58:58.320 --> 00:58:59.760 it's CGI. 00:58:59.760 --> 00:59:01.040 It's not even real. 00:59:01.040 --> 00:59:04.800 They're using Wedded works to digitally insert those guys. 00:59:05.120 --> 00:59:07.200 there's nobody at the border, don't worry about it. 00:59:07.200 --> 00:59:10.640 There are people who talk like that because that's easier for them 00:59:10.640 --> 00:59:13.760 than confronting the brutal reality. 00:59:13.760 --> 00:59:17.680 When you take the Stockdale approach and say, look, this is real. 00:59:17.680 --> 00:59:19.760 I trust that we're going to prevail in the end. 00:59:19.760 --> 00:59:21.760 I trust in God to preserve us. 00:59:21.760 --> 00:59:26.640 But But right now, here's what we're facing on the ground. 00:59:26.640 --> 00:59:26.960 So 00:59:27.840 --> 00:59:30.320 all the good things we have, they're not inevitable. 00:59:30.720 --> 00:59:34.320 they're fragile and they're gifts, and many of them are miracles. 00:59:34.320 --> 00:59:36.000 They're given to us by God. 00:59:36.240 --> 00:59:39.680 And when you know when you flip the light switch and the 00:59:39.680 --> 00:59:42.480 light doesn't come on because it turns out that you know maybe 00:59:42.480 --> 00:59:46.720 it's a temporary glitch or maybe the the power station was knocked 00:59:46.720 --> 00:59:48.720 offline from For months. 00:59:48.720 --> 00:59:52.080 Yeah, it's another smaller part of this episode that men should be 00:59:52.080 --> 00:59:53.280 thinking about. 00:59:53.280 --> 00:59:57.600 If the status quo today is gone tomorrow, even if it's gone 00:59:57.600 --> 01:00:00.640 for you know one day or three days or a week, what's 01:00:00.640 --> 01:00:03.040 next? And that's one of the things that we want you to 01:00:03.040 --> 01:00:08.960 take out of this episode is if I'm used to this normal 01:00:08.960 --> 01:00:12.000 life that I have today, and then some part of it just 01:00:12.000 --> 01:00:14.960 vanishes. One of the reasons we did this episode now is that, 01:00:14.960 --> 01:00:18.640 you know, I think at some point, not too distant future, the 01:00:18.640 --> 01:00:20.240 internet's gonna go away. 01:00:20.240 --> 01:00:22.400 You're not gonna be able to hear us anymore. 01:00:22.400 --> 01:00:24.240 And it's gonna be the least of your problems. 01:00:24.240 --> 01:00:27.360 I'm not worried about people not being able to listen to some 01:00:27.680 --> 01:00:30.560 stupid podcast when they're fighting for their lives. 01:00:30.560 --> 01:00:34.320 But it's important for us to get people thinking about this now 01:00:34.320 --> 01:00:39.200 while someone can still hear us because maybe it'll help someone's situation 01:00:39.200 --> 01:00:42.240 later on when they remember something that we said and it cheers 01:00:42.240 --> 01:00:45.120 them up or you know keeps them in the faith or whatever. 01:00:45.120 --> 01:00:48.000 I think that when those things go out, I don't want you 01:00:48.000 --> 01:00:48.880 to be disarmed. 01:00:48.880 --> 01:00:50.320 I don't you to be terrified. 01:00:50.320 --> 01:00:52.480 If you wake up tomorrow and the lights don't come on and 01:00:52.480 --> 01:00:55.600 that And that only lasts for three days at the beginning you 01:00:55.600 --> 01:00:56.320 don't know. 01:00:56.320 --> 01:00:57.440 But what do you do? 01:00:57.440 --> 01:01:00.720 What is your next step if the if there's no electricity for 01:01:00.720 --> 01:01:02.960 one day, for two days, for three days? 01:01:02.960 --> 01:01:05.440 What is your next step if the internet goes out and it 01:01:05.440 --> 01:01:08.240 doesn't come back for three days or for a week. 01:01:08.240 --> 01:01:11.760 Again, we're we're not going to give specific guidance because I don't 01:01:11.680 --> 01:01:14.160 know. You're going to do it's what's appropriate for you. 01:01:14.160 --> 01:01:17.120 What I want you to do is to be in a situation 01:01:17.280 --> 01:01:21.760 that Stockdale was clearly in going into prison camp. 01:01:21.760 --> 01:01:26.400 He already had enough centering in himself and in his faith in 01:01:26.400 --> 01:01:30.320 God that when he was confronted by that situation, he had a 01:01:30.320 --> 01:01:33.920 foundation from which to build other things. 01:01:33.920 --> 01:01:36.400 If the lights go out or the internet goes out or something 01:01:36.400 --> 01:01:38.880 worse than that, if there's no food at the grocery store for 01:01:38.880 --> 01:01:42.640 a week, you should already have thought about that. 01:01:42.640 --> 01:01:45.200 You should already know, okay, the power goes out. 01:01:45.200 --> 01:01:47.360 If it's out for an hour, you know, maybe you do one 01:01:47.360 --> 01:01:50.080 thing. If it's out for six hours, you do a different thing. 01:01:50.080 --> 01:01:52.400 If it's out for a day, you do a third thing. 01:01:52.400 --> 01:01:54.640 You should just have some idea in mind. 01:01:54.640 --> 01:01:58.320 You know, and again, when we're talking about planning, the plans may 01:01:58.320 --> 01:02:00.400 fail. You have a you try to have a good plan, you 01:02:00.400 --> 01:02:03.360 hope it's gonna work, at least have something in mind. 01:02:03.360 --> 01:02:05.920 And then if that fails, what's next? 01:02:05.920 --> 01:02:10.400 Because one of the great comforts in a stressful situation is 01:02:11.280 --> 01:02:12.960 practice and planning. 01:02:12.960 --> 01:02:17.680 It's the reason in the military they do so many emergency drills. 01:02:18.000 --> 01:02:21.360 they rigorously drill over and over and over again exactly what they're 01:02:21.360 --> 01:02:22.960 going to do in an emergency. 01:02:22.960 --> 01:02:25.040 Because by simulating the disaster 01:02:26.400 --> 01:02:29.600 and getting you used to all the things that you mechanically do 01:02:29.600 --> 01:02:32.560 with your body and with your mind and with your voice as 01:02:32.560 --> 01:02:36.160 you go through those motions repetitiously when you get to the point 01:02:36.160 --> 01:02:41.360 that there's an actual emergency and you're you're actually in physical jeopardy. 01:02:41.360 --> 01:02:45.280 If it becomes a rote response bodily, if it's already familiar to 01:02:45.280 --> 01:02:48.240 you, I run here, I grab this hose, I go over there, 01:02:48.240 --> 01:02:52.560 I do this, if that's already ingrained in you from repetition and 01:02:52.560 --> 01:02:56.640 from thinking about it, then it's easier to deal with the additional 01:02:56.640 --> 01:03:00.400 stress of I have to put this fire out or everyone dies. 01:03:00.400 --> 01:03:04.320 So we can't give you advice and we can't help you succeed 01:03:04.640 --> 01:03:07.040 or fail in in some emergency situation. 01:03:07.040 --> 01:03:10.080 What we're trying to tell you is that if you think about 01:03:10.080 --> 01:03:13.360 it now, when there's time, when there's no stress, when you can 01:03:13.360 --> 01:03:15.840 have peace and quiet and can do what you need to do 01:03:15.920 --> 01:03:19.360 to just work through mentally what do I do if X, Y, 01:03:19.360 --> 01:03:20.720 or Z happens. 01:03:20.720 --> 01:03:24.160 In the event that X, Y, or Z happen, you have a 01:03:24.160 --> 01:03:27.520 plan. You have something that you can fall back on and try. 01:03:27.520 --> 01:03:30.080 And again, maybe it's gonna work, maybe it's gonna fail. 01:03:30.080 --> 01:03:31.280 That's not even the point. 01:03:31.280 --> 01:03:33.600 Obviously, you want a plan that's going to succeed. 01:03:33.600 --> 01:03:35.520 There are a lot of people that talk about a lot of 01:03:35.520 --> 01:03:39.520 different strategies for a lot of different emergencies to help give guidance 01:03:39.520 --> 01:03:41.680 so that you don't have to think of every possibility because a 01:03:41.680 --> 01:03:43.600 lot of these things are pretty specialized. 01:03:43.600 --> 01:03:46.880 We're not going to give those specific pieces of advice because we're 01:03:46.880 --> 01:03:49.840 not experts and you can find plenty elsewhere and we don't know 01:03:49.840 --> 01:03:51.360 your situation. 01:03:51.360 --> 01:03:54.480 But I can tell you with absolute certainty that if you do 01:03:54.480 --> 01:03:58.880 not think about the possibilities of things going wrong, the the improbable 01:03:58.880 --> 01:04:04.240 things, when the improbable happens, and it's inevitable that the improbable will 01:04:04.240 --> 01:04:07.760 happen, on a long enough timeline, the bad thing comes. 01:04:07.760 --> 01:04:10.240 It's part of w how people get burnt. 01:04:10.240 --> 01:04:13.600 Stuff that seems improbable, suddenly it shows up and everyone's like, Wow, 01:04:13.600 --> 01:04:15.840 I how could that possibly happen? 01:04:15.840 --> 01:04:19.840 And another part of normalcy bias is sticking too long to your 01:04:19.840 --> 01:04:24.560 guns when all the information says no, that's it's it's dead and 01:04:24.560 --> 01:04:28.480 gone. The reality that I believed in yesterday is gone and it's 01:04:28.480 --> 01:04:29.680 not coming back. 01:04:29.680 --> 01:04:33.760 There are various things about our current civilization that are going to 01:04:33.760 --> 01:04:36.800 run their course in our lifetimes, personally, I think probably in this 01:04:36.800 --> 01:04:41.200 decade. And when those things start winking out one by one, we 01:04:41.200 --> 01:04:43.920 at least need to have some idea of what's next, so that 01:04:43.920 --> 01:04:45.760 we're not kicked in the teeth. 01:04:45.760 --> 01:04:49.360 I don't want people to be filled with fear then when it's 01:04:49.360 --> 01:04:50.880 an actual emergency. 01:04:50.880 --> 01:04:54.480 I would rather someone have a little bit of anxiousness now, a 01:04:54.480 --> 01:04:59.040 little bit of timidity and tri trepidation to say, I'm not sure 01:04:59.040 --> 01:04:59.920 what I need to do. 01:04:59.920 --> 01:05:03.440 Because the response of a man is to confront that situation and 01:05:03.440 --> 01:05:04.640 then make a plan. 01:05:04.640 --> 01:05:07.600 Do some research, do something, figure out what you can do for 01:05:07.600 --> 01:05:10.000 your family, and do it while there's time. 01:05:10.000 --> 01:05:12.720 But we're doing this now because I telling you there's not a 01:05:12.720 --> 01:05:15.280 lot of time for this planning left. 01:05:15.280 --> 01:05:19.200 That's it should be obviously inevitable to you if you're paying any 01:05:19.200 --> 01:05:21.120 attention to the news cycle. 01:05:21.120 --> 01:05:24.160 If it's not, I'm not gonna I don't want to terrify you, 01:05:24.160 --> 01:05:27.280 but think about these things while there's still time and I mean 01:05:27.360 --> 01:05:29.280 like this week, this month. 01:05:29.280 --> 01:05:33.520 Don't wait until 2030 to decide what you're gonna do if you 01:05:33.520 --> 01:05:36.080 don't have power in your house for a week or if you 01:05:36.080 --> 01:05:38.960 can't go to the grocery store for two weeks or a month. 01:05:38.960 --> 01:05:43.200 You should think about that today because if that unlikely thing that 01:05:43.200 --> 01:05:47.600 is in fact inevitable happens, I still want you to be okay. 01:05:47.600 --> 01:05:51.600 I want to have food and shelter and heat and I want 01:05:51.600 --> 01:05:55.200 your family to be comforted not only by the word of God 01:05:55.280 --> 01:05:58.320 and you know singing of hymns and all the things that we 01:05:58.320 --> 01:06:01.920 turn to in our darkest hours, but I would ideally like for 01:06:01.920 --> 01:06:04.400 you to have a full belly and not to be afraid in 01:06:04.400 --> 01:06:06.160 those situations. 01:06:06.160 --> 01:06:09.280 You plan for what you can and you trust God and the 01:06:09.280 --> 01:06:11.840 rest. And we can't make perfect plans. 01:06:12.160 --> 01:06:14.640 that's part of why we're not gonna even talk about it directly, 01:06:14.640 --> 01:06:19.440 is that whatever plan you make, when things go badly enough, your 01:06:19.680 --> 01:06:20.640 plan's out the window. 01:06:20.640 --> 01:06:21.760 And that's fine. 01:06:22.000 --> 01:06:23.600 You need to plan for that too. 01:06:23.600 --> 01:06:25.920 You need to be consciously aware of the fact that I can 01:06:25.920 --> 01:06:29.920 only do so much and beyond a certain point, I'm in God's 01:06:29.920 --> 01:06:31.520 hands. That's a part of this. 01:06:31.520 --> 01:06:34.800 When you start playing out some of these scenarios, they get more 01:06:34.800 --> 01:06:38.240 and more dire, eventually you're gonna realize that you can't possibly plan 01:06:38.240 --> 01:06:39.120 your way out of it. 01:06:39.120 --> 01:06:40.240 And that's okay. 01:06:40.240 --> 01:06:43.040 Even just thinking about that and knowing it and being aware of 01:06:43.040 --> 01:06:47.200 it is armor against the circumstance when that arises. 01:06:47.200 --> 01:06:51.280 Because if you know, okay, I I gotta put my life and 01:06:51.280 --> 01:06:54.560 the lives of my family in God's hands because all of my 01:06:54.560 --> 01:06:55.600 plans have failed. 01:06:55.600 --> 01:06:58.560 I don't have anything left that I know how to do. 01:06:58.560 --> 01:06:59.680 Not giving up. 01:07:00.320 --> 01:07:01.520 Never give up. 01:07:01.520 --> 01:07:05.440 This is not about surrender or or giving up or despair. 01:07:05.440 --> 01:07:08.480 It's about understanding here's what I can handle and here's what's going 01:07:08.480 --> 01:07:10.240 to come from God. 01:07:10.240 --> 01:07:14.480 And thinking it through when there's time is going to give you 01:07:14.480 --> 01:07:17.600 peace when you reach the point where you're out of time and 01:07:17.600 --> 01:07:18.960 all you can do is act. 01:07:18.960 --> 01:07:21.520 If you've never thought about it, your actions are going to be 01:07:21.520 --> 01:07:24.720 foolhardy. Or you may may not act at all. 01:07:24.720 --> 01:07:27.200 That's one of the worst things that happens in emergencies. 01:07:27.200 --> 01:07:30.640 People are so locked into their normalcy bias that they refuse to 01:07:30.640 --> 01:07:32.960 believe that a building is on fire and they don't leave. 01:07:32.960 --> 01:07:35.600 They're like, oh, it's it's an alarm, it's a drill, it's not 01:07:35.600 --> 01:07:38.160 real. As there's smoke pouring through. 01:07:38.160 --> 01:07:41.200 Because the idea there being smoke is too horrifying. 01:07:41.200 --> 01:07:42.080 Well, guess what? 01:07:42.080 --> 01:07:44.080 Smoke happens, fire happens. 01:07:44.080 --> 01:07:47.920 Deal with that brutal reality now, and you're gonna be able to 01:07:48.320 --> 01:07:50.880 get out okay. 01:07:50.880 --> 01:07:56.800 In nineteen ninety two, an imbecile by the name of Yoshihiro Fukuyama, 01:07:56.800 --> 01:08:01.440 better known as Francis Fukuyama, published a book entitled The End of 01:08:01.440 --> 01:08:03.680 History and the Last Man. 01:08:03.680 --> 01:08:07.680 I don't recommend you read the book, unless you have absolutely nothing 01:08:07.680 --> 01:08:10.000 better to do with your time. 01:08:10.000 --> 01:08:13.120 This man would have been better served, spending more time on his 01:08:13.120 --> 01:08:16.320 other hobbies instead of writing these books. 01:08:16.320 --> 01:08:20.800 But essentially in that book he put forward a thesis that at 01:08:20.800 --> 01:08:23.360 the time was quite popular. 01:08:23.360 --> 01:08:26.400 It still is to some degree today, and that's my point. 01:08:26.400 --> 01:08:29.760 But But in essence, his thesis was that 01:08:31.040 --> 01:08:39.120 liberal, Western style, so-called democracy was the end stage of human development. 01:08:39.120 --> 01:08:41.040 That with the so-called achievement 01:08:42.080 --> 01:08:47.200 of this liberal democracy, we had reached the point at which humans 01:08:47.200 --> 01:08:52.080 would no longer progress with regard to politics and this kind of 01:08:52.080 --> 01:08:55.120 social structure, this was the end. 01:08:55.120 --> 01:08:58.640 We had achieved the final form. 01:08:58.640 --> 01:09:01.920 And so it was the end of history. 01:09:01.920 --> 01:09:04.240 Of course, that's completely ridiculous. 01:09:04.240 --> 01:09:09.600 That is possibly the arch version of normalcy bias. 01:09:09.600 --> 01:09:13.120 It is ludicrous to the point where the fact that the book 01:09:13.120 --> 01:09:18.960 sold any copies is an indictment of our society, unless they were 01:09:18.960 --> 01:09:24.400 simply for the purpose of entertainment reading something so silly. 01:09:24.400 --> 01:09:29.280 But we still have the vestiges of that idea today. 01:09:29.280 --> 01:09:31.840 We see that in those who think that what is happening is 01:09:31.840 --> 01:09:36.320 a threat to democracy, to our republic, and notably as between those 01:09:36.320 --> 01:09:39.920 two there is essentially no daylight. 01:09:39.920 --> 01:09:43.840 What is happening is not the destruction of a particular political 01:09:44.720 --> 01:09:51.680 system. And also democracy is not the end stage of human development. 01:09:51.680 --> 01:09:55.440 If you have a random group of people and you're deciding where 01:09:55.440 --> 01:09:59.760 to get dinner, democracy is kind of the natural first thing you 01:09:59.760 --> 01:10:01.120 go to. 01:10:01.120 --> 01:10:04.960 It's not very developed at all, but that's a discussion for another 01:10:04.960 --> 01:10:10.960 day. The point is that this conception that what we have is 01:10:10.960 --> 01:10:15.360 what is normal, that we couldn't possibly change from here 01:10:16.320 --> 01:10:17.520 is ridiculous. 01:10:17.520 --> 01:10:20.000 It's simply not true. 01:10:20.000 --> 01:10:22.320 This system could collapse tomorrow. 01:10:22.320 --> 01:10:26.320 It's in the process of collapsing for anyone who has open eyes, 01:10:26.320 --> 01:10:30.480 and in fact, this original system as it was created is gone, 01:10:30.480 --> 01:10:32.560 it's dead. 01:10:32.560 --> 01:10:36.400 The political system as it existed at the founding of this nation 01:10:36.400 --> 01:10:38.800 This nation or even after the enactment of a number of the 01:10:38.800 --> 01:10:40.800 amendments is gone. 01:10:40.800 --> 01:10:45.520 Certainly after the Civil War, even more so after the Civil Rights 01:10:45.520 --> 01:10:49.920 Movement so called, and it just continues to get worse. 01:10:49.920 --> 01:10:54.160 And so these men are defending a corpse, which is notable, which 01:10:54.160 --> 01:10:58.400 is obviously something that is ridiculous to do. 01:10:58.400 --> 01:10:59.680 But my point 01:11:00.640 --> 01:11:06.400 is that this idea that we've reached an end stage, and so 01:11:06.400 --> 01:11:09.760 all of those things in history that used to happen, these wars 01:11:09.840 --> 01:11:14.480 and conflicts and mass migrations and replacements and genocide and all of 01:11:14.480 --> 01:11:17.760 these things, well, those don't happen anymore because we've reached the end 01:11:17.760 --> 01:11:19.760 stage, the pinnacle. 01:11:19.760 --> 01:11:20.880 We haven't. 01:11:20.880 --> 01:11:22.400 There's no such thing. 01:11:22.400 --> 01:11:26.560 As long as we are in mortal flesh, all of the things 01:11:26.560 --> 01:11:29.680 that happened to our ancestors in history will also happen to 01:11:30.560 --> 01:11:33.440 us. They saw war and tribulation. 01:11:33.440 --> 01:11:35.120 We will see war in tribulation. 01:11:35.120 --> 01:11:39.120 It's happening right now as we are recording this, in other parts 01:11:39.120 --> 01:11:40.000 of the world. 01:11:40.000 --> 01:11:42.400 It's happening in this part of the world as well in some 01:11:42.400 --> 01:11:48.240 places, because again, the so called immigration is actually an invasion. 01:11:48.240 --> 01:11:50.320 We're in a state of war. 01:11:50.320 --> 01:11:53.600 That is the reality on the ground as we see it today, 01:11:53.600 --> 01:11:59.120 even if people, due to normalcy bias and other psychological effects, don't 01:11:59.120 --> 01:12:02.960 wish to see the reality of what it is. 01:12:02.960 --> 01:12:06.240 And so no, voter fraud is not the issue. 01:12:06.240 --> 01:12:11.600 If your nation is being invaded and destroyed, your women are being 01:12:11.600 --> 01:12:15.520 raped, your children are being murdered, the issue isn't that the people 01:12:15.520 --> 01:12:18.720 doing the rape and murder might vote the way you don't want 01:12:18.720 --> 01:12:19.760 them to vote. 01:12:20.880 --> 01:12:25.040 No man looks at that problem and comes to that conclusion. 01:12:25.040 --> 01:12:26.480 That's insanity. 01:12:26.480 --> 01:12:32.160 It's evil as well, but it is also insanity. 01:12:32.160 --> 01:12:36.800 And I just want to make a quick point for those, if 01:12:36.800 --> 01:12:39.360 they happen to be listening, who say that what's happening at the 01:12:39.360 --> 01:12:45.280 border isn't real or it's blown out of proportion, or it's CGI, 01:12:45.280 --> 01:12:49.120 whatever it happens to be, whatever the argument raised is. 01:12:50.640 --> 01:12:55.440 I lived the first thirty years, more than thirty years actually, well 01:12:56.400 --> 01:13:00.080 almost exactly thirty years once you calculate in undergrad and other things 01:13:00.320 --> 01:13:02.720 of my life in Los Angeles. 01:13:02.720 --> 01:13:05.680 I've been down to that border many times. 01:13:05.680 --> 01:13:10.000 I've seen the reality of what is happening there, and more than 01:13:10.000 --> 01:13:14.240 that, I got to witness first hand the reality of what is 01:13:14.240 --> 01:13:19.840 happening at the border affecting where I lived, I watched LA get 01:13:20.000 --> 01:13:24.400 destroyed. Now some of you may think, oh well Los Angeles has 01:13:24.400 --> 01:13:27.600 always been a cesspit and a problem, and the no. 01:13:28.560 --> 01:13:33.040 Southern California, and if you like trees more, which I actually do, 01:13:33.040 --> 01:13:37.120 ironically, despite having lived in LA, Northern California is better for the 01:13:37.120 --> 01:13:41.760 trees, but California was a paradise. 01:13:41.760 --> 01:13:42.880 For decades. 01:13:42.880 --> 01:13:46.960 It was even still basically a paradise when I lived there as 01:13:46.960 --> 01:13:48.240 a child. 01:13:48.240 --> 01:13:52.720 Within my lifetime, which of course is the blink of an eye, 01:13:52.720 --> 01:13:56.400 it is transformed into what you see on the news today, if 01:13:56.400 --> 01:14:00.240 you happen to watch news outlets that even show what's happening. 01:14:00.240 --> 01:14:02.160 Rampant crime. 01:14:02.160 --> 01:14:06.320 Tons of homeless encampments needles all over the place in certain areas 01:14:06.400 --> 01:14:10.800 because of the rampant drug use, despair, suicide, and the list goes 01:14:10.800 --> 01:14:14.320 on. And of course San Francisco is no better, neither are a 01:14:14.320 --> 01:14:17.680 number of other places in California at this point, but that's coming 01:14:17.680 --> 01:14:18.960 to the rest of the country. 01:14:18.960 --> 01:14:21.600 It doesn't stop in California. 01:14:21.600 --> 01:14:24.400 It's not going to just stop at that mountain range. 01:14:24.400 --> 01:14:25.360 That's not how this works. 01:14:25.360 --> 01:14:27.360 It's already happening in other places. 01:14:27.360 --> 01:14:29.200 And so I have seen it firsthand. 01:14:29.200 --> 01:14:31.280 So even if you don't want to believe the media, you don't 01:14:31.280 --> 01:14:34.320 want to believe the video, don't believe your own lying eyes, I 01:14:34.320 --> 01:14:36.960 guess. I've seen it firsthand. 01:14:36.960 --> 01:14:40.560 And I can tell you that is exactly what is happening. 01:14:40.560 --> 01:14:44.480 And that is what those who pushed it on California, who pushed 01:14:44.480 --> 01:14:47.680 it on Los Angeles, want for the rest of the nation. 01:14:47.680 --> 01:14:51.760 That's what they want for your town, for your city, for your 01:14:51.760 --> 01:14:55.760 state, and for of course the entirety of the United States, and 01:14:55.760 --> 01:14:58.000 ultimately for everyone. 01:14:58.000 --> 01:15:00.320 Because their goal is destruction. 01:15:00.320 --> 01:15:02.400 And so that is what is happening. 01:15:02.400 --> 01:15:06.880 Whether or not you have personally seen it, it is occurring. 01:15:07.200 --> 01:15:07.280 And 01:15:07.520 --> 01:15:12.080 anyone who's lived in the heartland or in the Appalachians has seen 01:15:12.080 --> 01:15:16.720 similar horrors with fentanyl and the other drugs that have killed so 01:15:16.720 --> 01:15:20.480 many and caused so much despair. 01:15:20.480 --> 01:15:22.960 The reason for mentioning mentioning these things again. 01:15:22.960 --> 01:15:25.360 It's not to be despairing. 01:15:25.360 --> 01:15:28.560 We don't want people to be dwelling on these things and just 01:15:28.560 --> 01:15:29.760 being really sad. 01:15:29.760 --> 01:15:31.360 Because there's no point in that. 01:15:31.360 --> 01:15:36.000 There's no point in just staring at horror and feeling terrible about 01:15:36.000 --> 01:15:41.120 it. The only value in talking about this stuff, we're thinking about 01:15:41.120 --> 01:15:46.000 it, is A to acknowledge the brutal reality of the situation, and 01:15:46.000 --> 01:15:48.880 then B to decide in our own hearts and in our own 01:15:48.880 --> 01:15:50.880 communities what do we do about it. 01:15:51.200 --> 01:15:54.560 If you deny the situation, if you deny the fact that there 01:15:54.560 --> 01:15:59.680 are Somalis in Minnesota and Ohio, is evil per se. 01:15:59.680 --> 01:16:02.960 If you deny that that is a problem, then you're on the 01:16:02.960 --> 01:16:04.720 other side of this war. 01:16:04.720 --> 01:16:08.160 If you see that as a problem, then in our communities we 01:16:08.160 --> 01:16:12.080 have to decide what do we do when evil men are doing 01:16:12.080 --> 01:16:16.720 evil things to things To things that didn't have to inevitably become 01:16:16.720 --> 01:16:20.400 this. You know, on one hand, we're saying that the good things 01:16:20.400 --> 01:16:21.920 that we have are not inevitable. 01:16:21.920 --> 01:16:26.640 On the other hand, we're not simply dealing with entropy here. 01:16:26.640 --> 01:16:33.200 We're dealing with an affirmative ontological evil seeking to destroy good things. 01:16:33.200 --> 01:16:37.280 And one of the good things that's being destroyed is godly lives 01:16:37.360 --> 01:16:40.640 where people don't have despair Spare where people do have God and 01:16:40.640 --> 01:16:47.040 have church and have a godly community. 01:16:47.040 --> 01:16:50.480 And when those things are lost, they're they're lost from the top 01:16:50.480 --> 01:16:53.920 down. Someone does not become a drug addict if if he has 01:16:53.920 --> 01:16:55.280 a strong faith life. 01:16:55.280 --> 01:16:56.640 It doesn't happen. 01:16:57.200 --> 01:17:01.600 there's no room for either despair or self indulgence or any of 01:17:01.600 --> 01:17:06.400 these other things that separate us from God until we first start 01:17:06.400 --> 01:17:07.920 moving away from him. 01:17:07.920 --> 01:17:11.920 And so the the man who reaches rock bottom and then finds 01:17:11.920 --> 01:17:16.080 God again, it's it's the reason for the parable of the prodigal 01:17:16.240 --> 01:17:19.200 son. He wandered off and was prodigal. 01:17:19.200 --> 01:17:20.880 He was prodigious. 01:17:20.880 --> 01:17:22.720 He did all the bad things. 01:17:22.720 --> 01:17:24.880 And he did them in high fashion. 01:17:24.880 --> 01:17:26.960 And then he hit rock bottom. 01:17:26.960 --> 01:17:29.840 And he was eating the food that the farmer fed to his 01:17:29.840 --> 01:17:33.920 pigs. And he was astonished that his father would bring him back. 01:17:33.920 --> 01:17:36.640 And his father did that because he loved him, not because he 01:17:36.640 --> 01:17:39.520 deserved it, not because it was inevitable. 01:17:39.520 --> 01:17:43.840 It's easy for us when we're separated from God on a and 01:17:43.840 --> 01:17:47.440 we're on a high horse and everything's looking good to coast. 01:17:47.440 --> 01:17:51.840 We've talked in in earlier episodes about the fact that today Western 01:17:51.840 --> 01:17:53.600 civilization is coasting. 01:17:54.080 --> 01:17:57.440 it's in a nosedive, but it's still in the air. 01:17:57.440 --> 01:18:02.720 But it's coasting on the momentum of Christendom, of a Christian nation, 01:18:02.720 --> 01:18:07.040 Christian nations, plural, the European nations that were devoted to God for 01:18:07.040 --> 01:18:12.880 a thousand years, abandoned God, and then lost all of God's gifts. 01:18:12.880 --> 01:18:15.040 And it's not even necessarily punishment. 01:18:15.040 --> 01:18:18.320 It's just that when you stop obeying God, you start disobeying God. 01:18:18.320 --> 01:18:22.560 And the punishment for those things is baked into those things themselves. 01:18:22.560 --> 01:18:27.520 When we handle hand our bodies over to carnal lusts, we receive 01:18:27.520 --> 01:18:30.000 the due penalty in our bodies for them. 01:18:30.000 --> 01:18:32.320 God says that's how everything works. 01:18:32.320 --> 01:18:35.440 And so when we see it, at the individual level, or at 01:18:35.440 --> 01:18:41.360 the civilizational level, it can be no surprise What's different in current 01:18:41.360 --> 01:18:45.760 year is that having abandoned God in past generations, as we've talked 01:18:45.760 --> 01:18:50.960 about elsewhere, we are now close enough to the ground in terms 01:18:50.960 --> 01:18:55.040 of these things failing that we've talked at some length about the 01:18:55.040 --> 01:18:57.120 fact that there's no one thing that we can fix. 01:18:57.120 --> 01:18:59.040 It's not, oh, everyone needs to go to church. 01:18:59.040 --> 01:19:00.480 Everyone needs to have kids. 01:19:00.480 --> 01:19:02.320 Everyone needs to, you know, whatever. 01:19:02.320 --> 01:19:04.960 There is no if everyone does this then the things will be 01:19:04.960 --> 01:19:07.600 fine. There's a whole bunch of stuff that we have to fix 01:19:07.600 --> 01:19:08.400 at this point. 01:19:08.400 --> 01:19:12.080 And some of it is really ugly, some of it is terrible. 01:19:12.080 --> 01:19:12.400 And 01:19:13.680 --> 01:19:17.920 we want good men to be in the fight, to be of 01:19:17.920 --> 01:19:21.120 good cheer, and to have their head on a swivel, to have 01:19:21.120 --> 01:19:24.560 their head on straight, to be looking at the actual facts and 01:19:24.560 --> 01:19:26.880 confronting them as they are, and not as we want them to 01:19:26.880 --> 01:19:28.720 be. Leave that to the women and children. 01:19:28.960 --> 01:19:32.800 Let the women and children have their fantasies about how all of 01:19:32.800 --> 01:19:36.000 this is just naturally occurring the good stuff. 01:19:36.000 --> 01:19:39.280 And the bad stuff must just be a bad dream. 01:19:39.280 --> 01:19:42.480 Men know that the bad stuff is not a dream A dream 01:19:42.560 --> 01:19:44.000 and it's not a nightmare. 01:19:44.000 --> 01:19:48.320 It is the reality that bad men make for good men. 01:19:48.320 --> 01:19:52.640 They're actual evil men in the world seeking to do evil. 01:19:52.640 --> 01:19:54.000 Good men know this. 01:19:54.000 --> 01:19:55.840 Strong men understand this. 01:19:55.840 --> 01:19:58.080 It's weak men who deny it. 01:19:58.080 --> 01:20:01.680 Because weak men want to hide with the women and children and 01:20:01.680 --> 01:20:05.680 pretend that all of this is emotional or it's, you know, it's 01:20:05.760 --> 01:20:09.520 it's being afraid or it's not trusting in God or some garbage. 01:20:09.520 --> 01:20:12.320 The truth is that they're they're good men in the world and 01:20:12.320 --> 01:20:14.240 there are evil men in the world and the evil men are 01:20:14.240 --> 01:20:15.840 gonna keep being evil. 01:20:15.840 --> 01:20:20.240 And sometimes the scale of their evil is so overwhelming that it 01:20:20.240 --> 01:20:23.680 can cause despair, especially if you've been looking away or if it's 01:20:23.680 --> 01:20:24.880 been concealed from you. 01:20:24.880 --> 01:20:28.160 We talked earlier and you all know about media. 01:20:28.160 --> 01:20:30.560 It's there to lie and deceive. 01:20:30.560 --> 01:20:34.400 It's there to anesthetize you so that the surgery can be performed 01:20:34.400 --> 01:20:39.200 on your civilization while you're repeating their talking points, saying, Yes, we 01:20:39.200 --> 01:20:40.560 welcome all refugees. 01:20:40.560 --> 01:20:42.560 Yes, Jesus was a refugee. 01:20:42.560 --> 01:20:43.440 This is good. 01:20:43.440 --> 01:20:44.160 I love this. 01:20:44.160 --> 01:20:47.280 This is this is what my neighborhood needs more of. 01:20:47.280 --> 01:20:51.360 As long as people, as long as men are willing to repeat 01:20:51.360 --> 01:20:55.040 those lies, the evil men will win. 01:20:55.040 --> 01:20:56.160 Flat out. 01:20:56.160 --> 01:20:59.200 And that's I think that's the the final part of this, that 01:20:59.440 --> 01:21:02.480 you know, the the ultimate normalcy bias is to think that the 01:21:02.480 --> 01:21:06.000 good guys are gonna just win because we're the good guys. 01:21:06.000 --> 01:21:09.520 No. Find me that anywhere in history. 01:21:09.520 --> 01:21:12.240 The fact that the good guys sometimes pull it out and the 01:21:12.240 --> 01:21:16.240 fact that God will bless his people according to his good will 01:21:16.800 --> 01:21:22.480 is his grace, but it's not a promise civilizationally. 01:21:22.480 --> 01:21:25.680 We can't count on everything just working out. 01:21:25.680 --> 01:21:28.720 The worse things get, the more important it is for us to 01:21:28.720 --> 01:21:33.360 confront the trajectory and the final disposition. 01:21:33.360 --> 01:21:37.040 Because as I said, there's this damage is accumulating. 01:21:36.880 --> 01:21:40.320 and if you've never thought about it before, this is probably a 01:21:40.320 --> 01:21:42.480 miserable episode, you probably don't want to think about any of the 01:21:42.480 --> 01:21:44.720 stuff. Most of you have thought about some of the stuff. 01:21:44.720 --> 01:21:46.400 You've looked at it. 01:21:46.400 --> 01:21:49.360 You're probably overloaded on some of it. 01:21:49.520 --> 01:21:52.160 As we wrap this up, I just want you to think about 01:21:52.160 --> 01:21:53.200 the fact that 01:21:54.720 --> 01:21:56.880 we still have a job to do. 01:21:56.880 --> 01:22:01.280 You know, whenever a bad thing happens in your life, what makes 01:22:01.280 --> 01:22:03.280 you a man is how you respond. 01:22:03.280 --> 01:22:04.560 Maybe it's your fault. 01:22:04.560 --> 01:22:07.520 Maybe you screwed up a thousand times to get you to the 01:22:07.520 --> 01:22:10.240 point that you are in this terrible situation. 01:22:10.240 --> 01:22:13.360 And there's a record scratch in a s freeze frame and you 01:22:13.360 --> 01:22:15.680 say, I wonder how you how I got to this spot. 01:22:16.800 --> 01:22:20.640 How you respond next defines who you are as a man, and 01:22:20.640 --> 01:22:25.920 rooting that response in love of God, in faith for God, in 01:22:25.920 --> 01:22:29.840 obedience to God, which will naturally flow down to all the good 01:22:29.840 --> 01:22:32.160 things that pagans have. 01:22:32.160 --> 01:22:37.200 Love for neighbor, love for family, caring for your own, preserving it, 01:22:37.200 --> 01:22:39.280 preserving your nation. 01:22:39.280 --> 01:22:44.000 All of those things happen automatically By men simply saying, you know 01:22:44.000 --> 01:22:46.560 what? I'm not gonna put up with this anymore. 01:22:46.560 --> 01:22:48.720 We are going to do something about it. 01:22:48.720 --> 01:22:53.200 Again, we're not making any political advice about what anyone should do 01:22:53.200 --> 01:22:54.320 about anything. 01:22:54.320 --> 01:22:56.240 Sort that out in your communities. 01:22:56.240 --> 01:23:00.000 But But if you ignore it, if you let it keep happening, 01:23:00.000 --> 01:23:02.400 you're going to get more, and it's not going to be more 01:23:02.400 --> 01:23:05.760 of the same, because we are in the end stage of this 01:23:05.760 --> 01:23:07.520 stuff unwinding. 01:23:07.520 --> 01:23:11.760 There's no undo for a people being wiped out. 01:23:11.760 --> 01:23:14.800 As Corey said earlier, ten tribes are gone. 01:23:14.800 --> 01:23:15.600 They're gone. 01:23:15.600 --> 01:23:16.800 They're erased. 01:23:16.800 --> 01:23:18.320 There's nothing left. 01:23:18.320 --> 01:23:20.080 They don't get reconstituted. 01:23:20.080 --> 01:23:22.080 There's no way to piece that back together. 01:23:22.080 --> 01:23:24.320 That's Humpty dumpty. 01:23:24.320 --> 01:23:28.640 The fact that we still have something that's worth preserving is a 01:23:28.640 --> 01:23:32.400 reason for us to pay attention and to be optimistic that we 01:23:32.400 --> 01:23:35.360 have something valuable and we have the strength. 01:23:35.360 --> 01:23:38.800 We have everything that we need except for the acknowledgement and the 01:23:38.800 --> 01:23:40.400 will to preserve it. 01:23:40.400 --> 01:23:44.640 When those things change, we will begin to preserve those things that 01:23:44.640 --> 01:23:48.800 have been under attack and have not been preserved by past generations. 01:23:48.800 --> 01:23:52.800 But that will only come when we first acknowledge it. 01:23:52.800 --> 01:23:55.520 It's not simply a question of, oh, we gotta, we gotta turn 01:23:55.520 --> 01:23:58.720 around the political system, we gotta do this or that. 01:23:58.720 --> 01:24:02.960 We need to acknowledge that there's evil trying to destroy everything that's 01:24:02.960 --> 01:24:04.480 good about us. 01:24:04.480 --> 01:24:07.440 We are being destroyed for a specific reason. 01:24:07.440 --> 01:24:09.360 We've talked about that in the past episodes. 01:24:09.360 --> 01:24:11.040 I'm not going to rehash it. 01:24:11.040 --> 01:24:12.880 We must be destroyed. 01:24:13.760 --> 01:24:16.160 No one cares about destroying Africa. 01:24:16.160 --> 01:24:18.720 Satan's not worried about destroying Africa. 01:24:18.720 --> 01:24:22.720 You notice that all this migration, so called, is always only ever 01:24:22.720 --> 01:24:24.480 in a single direction. 01:24:24.480 --> 01:24:28.560 It's always in the direction of the object of the destruction. 01:24:28.560 --> 01:24:33.200 And so acknowledging that, understanding that, and then figuring out what we 01:24:33.200 --> 01:24:35.280 do next is paramount. 01:24:35.280 --> 01:24:38.800 Either we do that or we die and all this goes away. 01:24:38.800 --> 01:24:41.520 Because none of the is inevitable. 01:24:41.520 --> 01:24:45.040 We could end up like the Samaritans, we could end up vanishing. 01:24:45.040 --> 01:24:46.880 I don't know what's going to happen. 01:24:46.880 --> 01:24:50.160 I and I don't have to worry about it because I trust 01:24:50.160 --> 01:24:53.360 that God will keep his promises, part of those promises are that 01:24:53.360 --> 01:24:57.520 if we are a faithless nation and a faithless generation, we'll be 01:24:57.520 --> 01:24:58.240 wiped out. 01:24:58.240 --> 01:25:01.440 We have no promise of salvation, we have no promise of preservation 01:25:01.600 --> 01:25:03.280 or any good thing. 01:25:03.280 --> 01:25:04.400 When we realign with the God 01:25:05.280 --> 01:25:09.600 tells us to do, that's going to have temporal consequences. 01:25:09.600 --> 01:25:09.920 And 01:25:11.120 --> 01:25:13.840 if we can accomplish anything, it's to get a few more men 01:25:13.840 --> 01:25:18.000 thinking about: okay, this is actually really bad, I need to talk 01:25:18.000 --> 01:25:20.560 to men in my community and we'll figure out what to do 01:25:20.560 --> 01:25:23.200 next. There's no specific advice to be given. 01:25:23.200 --> 01:25:25.040 Just think about how much worse it could get. 01:25:25.040 --> 01:25:26.720 Because it will get that much worse. 01:25:26.720 --> 01:25:30.400 And it'll get worse, frankly, than any of us can conceive of. 01:25:30.720 --> 01:25:35.280 the prophecies in scripture discussing the last days are so dire that 01:25:35.360 --> 01:25:37.920 like we we have prophecies without a prophet. 01:25:37.920 --> 01:25:41.120 So we have visions and dreams describing things. 01:25:41.120 --> 01:25:44.880 When those things do occur in time, in physical reality, we'll be 01:25:44.880 --> 01:25:48.080 able to look at those prophecies in Daniel and Revelation and say, 01:25:48.080 --> 01:25:49.280 Yeah, there it is. 01:25:49.280 --> 01:25:50.800 I don't know what's going to look like. 01:25:50.800 --> 01:25:52.640 I don't know if I'll see it with my own eyes. 01:25:53.120 --> 01:25:54.320 maybe not. 01:25:54.320 --> 01:25:55.120 Doesn't matter. 01:25:55.120 --> 01:25:56.400 That doesn't concern me. 01:25:56.400 --> 01:25:58.240 What does concern me is 01:25:59.680 --> 01:26:03.600 Failing to have been the sort of Christian man that can stand 01:26:03.600 --> 01:26:09.280 before the judgment throne and say, Jesus sacrificed everything for me, and 01:26:09.920 --> 01:26:13.120 I tried my best not to bring him shame. 01:26:13.600 --> 01:26:16.640 That's there is something to be said for Christians trying not to 01:26:16.880 --> 01:26:18.400 bring shame to the cross. 01:26:18.400 --> 01:26:21.280 And beyond that, it's entirely in God's mercy. 01:26:21.280 --> 01:26:25.920 So not talking about saving ourselves in eternity, but in time, how 01:26:25.920 --> 01:26:30.880 we comport ourselves in whatever days these are is a reflection of 01:26:30.880 --> 01:26:32.400 who we are as men. 01:26:32.400 --> 01:26:35.200 And right now it's up for grabs what kind of men we 01:26:35.200 --> 01:26:37.120 are, if we're men at all. 01:26:37.120 --> 01:26:39.760 For our part, for Corey's part and my part, we're doing what 01:26:39.760 --> 01:26:43.840 little we can to try not to just complain, try not to 01:26:43.840 --> 01:26:47.680 just run our mouths, we're trying to exhort and encourage men, just 01:26:47.680 --> 01:26:51.840 as Stockdale did in the prison camp, to say, look, let's focus 01:26:51.840 --> 01:26:54.480 on the small things we can to keep our each other going 01:26:54.960 --> 01:26:57.760 and trust that we're gonna get out of this, and then do 01:26:57.760 --> 01:27:00.880 what we need to to actually make that happen and leave the 01:27:01.200 --> 01:27:02.960 rest in God's hands. 01:27:04.000 --> 01:27:09.360 There are two words in the English language that both mean looking 01:27:09.360 --> 01:27:13.520 forward to something. 01:27:13.520 --> 01:27:19.280 These words have very different definitions, however, very different senses, because the 01:27:19.280 --> 01:27:23.440 two words are eager and anxious. 01:27:23.440 --> 01:27:27.440 If you are eager for something, you are looking forward to it 01:27:27.600 --> 01:27:33.440 with the expectation that it will be enjoyable, pleasurable, something you want 01:27:33.440 --> 01:27:34.640 to happen. 01:27:34.640 --> 01:27:38.400 And so if you're getting married tomorrow, you're eager to see the 01:27:38.400 --> 01:27:41.440 wedding ceremony. 01:27:41.440 --> 01:27:45.840 Anxious, on the other hand, is essentially the inverse. 01:27:45.840 --> 01:27:49.760 It is something you know is coming, but you look forward to 01:27:49.760 --> 01:27:55.280 it with trepidation, with worry, with concern, because you think something bad 01:27:55.280 --> 01:27:57.360 is going to happen. 01:27:57.360 --> 01:28:01.040 And we're not telling you to be either of those things. 01:28:01.040 --> 01:28:03.360 More so the latter than the former. 01:28:03.360 --> 01:28:06.320 Absolutely do not be anxious 01:28:07.280 --> 01:28:11.440 in regard with being worried about what is going to happen. 01:28:11.440 --> 01:28:15.600 Be concerned about it, think about it, plan for it, but don't 01:28:15.520 --> 01:28:17.360 be anxious about it. 01:28:17.360 --> 01:28:21.200 And we're also not telling you necessarily to be eager about what 01:28:21.200 --> 01:28:25.680 is happening in the future, what we are fairly certain is going 01:28:25.680 --> 01:28:28.960 to happen because some of it is not going to be good. 01:28:28.960 --> 01:28:32.960 And so don't be pen loss on the one hand and don't 01:28:32.960 --> 01:28:38.800 be Ivan Karamazov on the other, I guess. 01:28:38.800 --> 01:28:42.800 But do be eager with regard to the good things that God 01:28:42.800 --> 01:28:46.480 has promised, because he has promised that he will care for us, 01:28:46.480 --> 01:28:50.400 he will see his elect through whatever happens. 01:28:50.400 --> 01:28:54.960 In fact, we know that even the end times at the worst 01:28:54.960 --> 01:28:59.760 possible point in human history, things will be cut short, so that 01:28:59.760 --> 01:29:02.400 the elect will not fall. 01:29:02.400 --> 01:29:04.880 That is the promise we have from God, and so we can 01:29:04.880 --> 01:29:08.560 be eager with regard to what God has promised and what He 01:29:08.560 --> 01:29:10.480 will do. 01:29:10.480 --> 01:29:11.600 And now I know we recently 01:29:12.480 --> 01:29:16.800 read this passage of scripture, but some people will undoubtedly listen to 01:29:16.800 --> 01:29:19.520 these in a different order in the future, and it is always 01:29:19.520 --> 01:29:23.760 worth revisiting the words of Christ in Matthew six, and so I'm 01:29:23.680 --> 01:29:25.920 going to read it again. 01:29:25.920 --> 01:29:30.080 Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what 01:29:30.080 --> 01:29:33.520 you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body 01:29:33.680 --> 01:29:35.200 what you will put on. 01:29:35.200 --> 01:29:39.680 Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 01:29:39.680 --> 01:29:43.120 Look at the birds of the air they neither sow nor reap, 01:29:43.120 --> 01:29:47.600 nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. 01:29:47.600 --> 01:29:50.240 Are you not of more value than they? 01:29:50.240 --> 01:29:53.440 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour 01:29:53.440 --> 01:29:55.120 to his span of life? 01:29:55.120 --> 01:29:57.520 And why are you anxious about clothing? 01:29:57.520 --> 01:30:00.400 Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. 01:30:00.400 --> 01:30:02.560 They neither toil nor spin. 01:30:02.560 --> 01:30:06.480 Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not 01:30:06.480 --> 01:30:08.400 arrayed like one of these. 01:30:08.400 --> 01:30:11.920 But if God so close the grass of the field, which to-day 01:30:11.920 --> 01:30:15.520 is alive, and to morrow is thrown into the oven, Will he 01:30:15.520 --> 01:30:18.880 not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 01:30:18.880 --> 01:30:22.720 Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat, or what 01:30:22.800 --> 01:30:25.520 shall we drink, or what shall we wear? 01:30:25.520 --> 01:30:28.240 For the heathen seek after all these things. 01:30:28.240 --> 01:30:32.160 And your heavenly Father knows that you need them all, but seek 01:30:32.160 --> 01:30:35.680 first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things 01:30:35.680 --> 01:30:37.200 will be added to you. 01:30:37.200 --> 01:30:40.960 Therefore do not be anxious about to morrow, for tomorrow will be 01:30:40.960 --> 01:30:42.320 anxious for itself. 01:30:42.640 --> 01:30:48.640 Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. 01:30:48.640 --> 01:30:53.360 And I have two positive things that I want to give you 01:30:53.360 --> 01:30:55.520 at the end of this episode. 01:30:55.520 --> 01:30:59.600 One is a fairly minor one, and one I think is something 01:30:59.600 --> 01:31:01.600 about which you should think a bit as you go about the 01:31:01.600 --> 01:31:04.160 rest of your day or the rest of your week, whenever you 01:31:04.160 --> 01:31:07.680 happen to listen to this episode. 01:31:07.680 --> 01:31:11.040 The first point is that we will continue this podcast as long 01:31:11.040 --> 01:31:14.640 as we are both able to do so, and distribute it as 01:31:14.640 --> 01:31:18.560 best we are able, whatever circumstances may come. 01:31:18.560 --> 01:31:23.600 And the reason I say that is because morale is important. 01:31:23.600 --> 01:31:28.240 And I do think that shows like this one do help with 01:31:28.240 --> 01:31:30.640 morale. It may seem like a strange thing to say at the 01:31:30.640 --> 01:31:36.480 end of an episode like this, but for men, part of our 01:31:36.480 --> 01:31:42.640 existence is staring reality square in the face and not losing hope, 01:31:42.640 --> 01:31:46.960 not losing your nerve, not losing morale. 01:31:46.960 --> 01:31:51.040 And so this episode is in fact part of that morale because 01:31:51.040 --> 01:31:54.720 you have to have a view of reality that is not through 01:31:54.720 --> 01:31:59.600 rose tinted glasses, that is not a view of a hopeful reality, 01:31:59.600 --> 01:32:03.600 a reality that doesn't exist, but the actual one, the one in 01:32:03.600 --> 01:32:05.360 which we live. 01:32:05.360 --> 01:32:09.040 Because that is the one in which we have duties to care 01:32:09.200 --> 01:32:10.400 for our own. 01:32:10.400 --> 01:32:14.160 We have duties to care for our neighbor, duties for our family, 01:32:14.160 --> 01:32:15.760 duties for our church. 01:32:15.760 --> 01:32:18.240 It is the reality in which we live and the one in 01:32:18.240 --> 01:32:21.520 which we must plan for the future, both near term and long 01:32:21.680 --> 01:32:23.040 term God willing. 01:32:23.040 --> 01:32:26.080 In both cases, of course, God willing. 01:32:26.080 --> 01:32:30.320 But the second positive point, the second thing, about which I want 01:32:30.320 --> 01:32:31.120 you to think 01:32:32.320 --> 01:32:34.560 needs a little background. 01:32:34.560 --> 01:32:38.640 Very little, though, because you will all at least most of you, 01:32:38.640 --> 01:32:42.640 I assume, the overwhelming majority of you will be familiar with this. 01:32:42.640 --> 01:32:46.640 The southwestern United States has a lot of desert. 01:32:46.640 --> 01:32:49.600 Some of it high desert, some of it low desert like Death 01:32:49.600 --> 01:32:52.000 Valley, but there's a fair amount of desert. 01:32:52.000 --> 01:32:55.280 If you If you've never spent time in the desert, you've undoubtedly 01:32:55.280 --> 01:32:58.800 seen the desert because Hollywood portrays it all the time, there are 01:32:58.800 --> 01:33:01.280 nature documentaries, etc. 01:33:02.080 --> 01:33:06.080 The desert, generally speaking, is fairly devoid of life. 01:33:06.080 --> 01:33:08.320 There's a lot of sand, a lot of rocks. 01:33:08.320 --> 01:33:12.080 It's very hot during some parts of the year, and also some 01:33:12.080 --> 01:33:16.000 don't know this, but extremely cold during other parts of the year, 01:33:16.000 --> 01:33:19.360 because a desert is simply a matter of precipitation, not a matter 01:33:19.360 --> 01:33:22.080 of temperature. 01:33:22.080 --> 01:33:27.440 But in the southwest, every so often, we get hit by very 01:33:27.440 --> 01:33:29.280 heavy rains. 01:33:29.280 --> 01:33:32.240 And if you've never had the pleasure of seeing this, I recommend 01:33:32.240 --> 01:33:35.520 at least looking up some pictures or perhaps a nature documentary. 01:33:35.520 --> 01:33:38.560 I'll put one in the show notes if I can find one. 01:33:38.560 --> 01:33:41.280 But when it rains, we get those very heavy rains, and they 01:33:41.280 --> 01:33:46.480 don't come that often, but five, six, seven years on a cycle, 01:33:46.480 --> 01:33:50.720 you'll get very heavy rains in the desert. 01:33:50.720 --> 01:33:53.040 And everything bursts into life. 01:33:53.040 --> 01:33:54.480 Almost immediately. 01:33:54.480 --> 01:34:01.760 It goes from dead and barren, a moonscape practically, to overflowing with 01:34:01.760 --> 01:34:07.840 life. Plants, flowers, insects, all sorts of creatures just appear out of 01:34:07.840 --> 01:34:13.520 nowhere. And so it is possible for things not only to go 01:34:13.520 --> 01:34:19.440 from functional and running as expected, from normal as it were, to 01:34:19.440 --> 01:34:22.640 complete chaos in the blink of an eye, which is what we 01:34:22.640 --> 01:34:24.400 may very well be facing. 01:34:25.120 --> 01:34:27.600 The inverse can happen as well. 01:34:27.600 --> 01:34:32.000 God can take things that are complete and utter chaos, and he 01:34:32.000 --> 01:34:34.240 can turn them around in the blink of an eye. 01:34:34.240 --> 01:34:36.000 We see that in the pages of Scripture. 01:34:36.000 --> 01:34:39.760 We see that in the pages of history. 01:34:39.760 --> 01:34:43.760 God can very well work miracles. 01:34:43.760 --> 01:34:46.240 And he has told us in scripture 01:34:47.120 --> 01:34:51.440 what we have to do, and how he will respond. 01:34:51.440 --> 01:34:55.280 God is not an unknown in that sense. 01:34:55.280 --> 01:34:57.440 God is not mercurial. 01:34:57.440 --> 01:35:01.120 God does not roll a die and then do whatever happens to 01:35:01.600 --> 01:35:04.960 result. God does not play the odds, it is not a game 01:35:04.960 --> 01:35:06.480 of chance. 01:35:06.480 --> 01:35:12.320 God tells us if you do X, then He will do Y. 01:35:12.320 --> 01:35:16.080 Because God is faithful to his promises, and there are promises throughout 01:35:16.080 --> 01:35:18.320 the pages of scripture. 01:35:18.320 --> 01:35:22.000 And so, no, there is no easy solution to all of the 01:35:22.000 --> 01:35:26.080 problems we face, because there are many, the systems are complicated, they 01:35:26.080 --> 01:35:30.000 are interconnected, many things have to be addressed at once. 01:35:30.240 --> 01:35:36.240 However, the first step always the first step, the most important step 01:35:36.480 --> 01:35:40.080 not to quote the proverb, but the most important step is that 01:35:40.080 --> 01:35:44.480 first one, is to obey God, is to do the things that 01:35:44.480 --> 01:35:46.240 God has told us to do. 01:35:46.240 --> 01:35:49.280 Faith, yes, is a gift, and faith is the beginning of that 01:35:49.280 --> 01:35:54.240 relationship, but as we have mentioned repeatedly, this show is about the 01:35:54.240 --> 01:35:55.200 what then. 01:35:55.200 --> 01:35:58.160 It is about the and of the Christian life. 01:35:58.160 --> 01:36:01.680 God has given you the free gift of faith, whether in the 01:36:01.680 --> 01:36:06.160 sacrament of holy baptism as a child, or through the Word, however 01:36:06.320 --> 01:36:10.080 God gave you that faith, whichever of the means He has instituted 01:36:10.080 --> 01:36:14.480 for the creation of faith, He used, in your case, to give 01:36:14.480 --> 01:36:17.760 you that free gift, you have the faith. 01:36:17.760 --> 01:36:18.640 Now what? 01:36:18.640 --> 01:36:22.080 And the Now What is what God has commanded us to do 01:36:22.080 --> 01:36:24.080 in the pages of Scripture. 01:36:24.080 --> 01:36:28.080 We start, of course, on the small scale, and that is simply 01:36:28.080 --> 01:36:30.480 by dealing with your family. 01:36:30.480 --> 01:36:32.480 Love the members of your family. 01:36:32.960 --> 01:36:36.960 Forgive them, deal with them as you would want them to deal 01:36:36.960 --> 01:36:38.160 with you. 01:36:38.160 --> 01:36:40.400 That's just the golden rule. 01:36:40.400 --> 01:36:44.160 Then move on to your neighbor, then to your town, your city, 01:36:44.160 --> 01:36:45.840 and your nation. 01:36:45.840 --> 01:36:49.840 If we do these things, God will bless us, because He has 01:36:49.840 --> 01:36:54.960 promised that He will do so, and He is always faithful. 01:36:54.960 --> 01:36:58.960 No, there is no guarantee that we will be able to accomplish 01:36:59.200 --> 01:37:03.280 the things that need to be done to avoid certain of the 01:37:03.280 --> 01:37:05.360 bad outcomes. 01:37:05.360 --> 01:37:05.680 But 01:37:06.560 --> 01:37:09.520 we do know that if we turn to God, it is a 01:37:09.520 --> 01:37:12.960 better outcome than the alternative. 01:37:12.960 --> 01:37:16.480 No, we're not betting on God just because we want a better 01:37:16.480 --> 01:37:19.920 outcome. This is not mere consequentialism. 01:37:19.920 --> 01:37:24.160 Although notably, if you obey God simply because you fear punishment, that 01:37:24.160 --> 01:37:27.360 is in fact better than not obeying God. 01:37:27.680 --> 01:37:31.520 You do still get credit for your good works even if they 01:37:31.520 --> 01:37:32.880 are done out of fear. 01:37:32.880 --> 01:37:35.520 It is better to do them out of joy, but they are 01:37:35.520 --> 01:37:39.360 not worthless if done out of fear. 01:37:39.360 --> 01:37:41.920 We obey God. 01:37:41.920 --> 01:37:43.920 Because that is our duty. 01:37:43.920 --> 01:37:45.760 That is what we were created to do. 01:37:45.760 --> 01:37:47.760 That is the purpose of man. 01:37:47.760 --> 01:37:52.320 Specifically, in this episode we're talking about the duty of men, of 01:37:52.320 --> 01:37:56.160 course, but it is also the duty of women to obey God 01:37:56.560 --> 01:37:59.520 with regard to the things they have been given to do, to 01:37:59.520 --> 01:38:02.480 submit to their husband, to keep a home, to raise godly children, 01:38:02.480 --> 01:38:03.280 all of these various things. 01:38:03.280 --> 01:38:06.480 We know that Know that Scripture tells women to do. 01:38:06.480 --> 01:38:10.400 And so as Christians, if we do these things that God has 01:38:10.400 --> 01:38:15.200 commanded us to do, that is all there is for us to 01:38:15.200 --> 01:38:17.840 do. Do not be anxious about tomorrow. 01:38:18.160 --> 01:38:22.160 Plan for tomorrow because God commands us to be wise, but don't 01:38:22.080 --> 01:38:24.400 be anxious. 01:38:24.400 --> 01:38:28.960 The present is just as much in God's hands as was the 01:38:28.960 --> 01:38:32.880 past, and the future is just as much in his hands as 01:38:32.880 --> 01:38:34.400 is the present.