This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz.
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Why We Need To Talk About Iran
It’s a wild moment we’re in, isn’t it?
This week I had intended to talk about the nature of a spiritual community. What is a mystical society? It’s an enormously important topic in terms of the new Story of Value.
But we got a little superseded now, by events in Israel and Iran.
I want to say a couple of things about why I want to talk about this for a second.
So, towards the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, I made a commitment to myself that I have not kept. I made a solemn promise, which I’ve broken. And the promise was just to stop teaching. And the reason I made that promise to myself to stop teaching is because I was disappointed in some fundamental way. I was more devastated than disappointed in the inefficacy, the lack of effect, of teaching.
And I had seen people who should know better, who spoke words that were the right words in the human potential movement and the New Age movement, just lost touch with a basic sense of what George Orwell called decency.
I saw it in multiple contexts around the world. I both had direct contact with it, but also saw it in multiple other contexts. And I said, this is not the way I should be spending my time. The world is in desperate need of repair, of a fixing, of Tikkun. There’s Tikkun, fixing, repair, transformation needed. There’s desperate suffering around the world. So what am I going to do?
So, I picked one issue that actually came from someone that I knew at the time, it was the mayor of a particular American city. And we jogged together here and there, and he had spent a lot of time on it. I was familiar with the issue, but his passion for it opened my eyes to it in a way that I wasn’t quite aware of before, which is the issue of human trafficking, and labor slavery and sexual slavery around the world. I spent about a year, a year and a half on this issue, both engaged with him, this particular person, but much more time with myself and calling other people. I started a little bit naively, maybe a lot naively, and said, we’re going to solve human trafficking. I’m going to wrap my heart and mind around it and we are going to rally funding and global coordination and global organization and really handle human trafficking.
We’re taught around the world, particularly in Western countries that slavery ended. One example is the United States, but another example is England and Western Europe.
In the United States, when you learn history in school, slavery ended at a particular moment, the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln in 1863. Abraham Lincoln with the Civil War ended slavery. But of course that’s not true.
There are more slaves in the world today. There are more people in the world, obviously, than there were in 1863. There are also more slaves in the world than there ever were, both labor slaves and sexual slaves around the world that are being trafficked.
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What Trying to End Slavery Taught Me
I spent about a year reading everything I could on the subject. And I failed. And I failed for many reasons, but a few of them I want to note.
* One: I didn’t have enough power. I simply didn’t have enough power to move the levers of reality to affect a significant change.
* Two: when I spoke to various figures, all of whom shall remain nameless, who were prominent in the movement around the world, what I found was that underneath the great cause of redeeming and liberating slaves, there was an enormous egoic competition about who the liberator would be. There was an enormous competition, both for funds, and for limelight, for spotlight, and for credit. And it was just shocking.
* Three: This is the one that was most shocking to me. I realized that these people I was talking to, when we would go deeper into conversation, knew that slaves needed to be liberated, but they didn’t have a deep and real sense that value was real.
And even though they were fighting for value, for liberating slaves (they got that was important), there was this deeper sense of malaise. And it wasn’t just in the people who were fighting the battle.
For sexual slavery and labor slavery to exist, you need collusion all over the world. You need governments, customs, various nations, money laundering, politicians turning away, refusing to pass laws in particular places, etc. There are many, many players. There’s a vast system of political, economic, and social benefit that keeps the system in place. And in order to dismantle it, you would have to have a fierce stand for value itself.
You’d have to really get that this is not the way it is, this is not the nature of the world. You would have to have a vision that the world could be different, that there was a true, right, and real possibility of a different and better world.
And you would have to let go of the cynical exhaustion that plagued many of the best people who, in their heart of hearts, didn’t believe it could really change. They couldn’t quite hold the vision. I understand why, I’m not critiquing them.
For modern slavery to end it would require multiple vectors of people around the world to take a stand for value and to have their moral, political, and social will aroused by value. But the overwhelming majority of people I was talking to simply didn’t believe that value was ultimately real.
Ending slavery was about well-being, but basically everyone was following what I’m calling the common sense sacred axioms of Modernity, which ignored the issue of whether value was real and just said, let’s just assume it’s real.
And Modernity took a social loan from Premodernity, to just assume value is real, to “hold these truths to be self-evident,” even if we can’t source them in anything. That was insufficient.
A Thomas Jeffersonian view of value was insufficient. Jefferson’s view of value was rooted in Epicurus and other, pre-Socratic thinkers, other Stoics, and it just didn’t cut it. And the John Adams view of value—who was the second president, Thomas Jefferson was the third—the John Adams view that value was real had been shunted aside.
And so I realized it’s not going to happen.
I won’t be able to accomplish this, which was devastating to me for all three of those reasons. And right around that time, I began to look carefully at what we now call the metacrisis or existential risk.
We Need A New Story of Value In Response To Existential Risk
I had given a series of lectures at Venwoude on how:
* The failure to articulate a vision of self, a vision of who we are, Unique Self specifically
* The failure to articulate a vision of Eros or ErosValue
* The failure to articulate a sense of the Universe: A Love Story
* The failure to articulate a worldview
was actually the fundamental cause for existential risk.
And Mauk Pieper, who was there at those lectures, wrote a book, Humanity’s Second Shock and Your Unique Self. It emerged out of his own thinking and out of those talks. And the second shock of existence is a great term.
The first shock of existence is the realization that we die.
The realization of death, the realisation of the death of the individual human being. The first shock happens at the dawn of history.
The second shock of existence, which comes some X thousands of years later—the second shock of existence is right now—which is not the threat of the death of the individual human being, but the death of humanity.
So the first shock of existence, the realization of death, pressed us into life. Death is not an accident. Death is an actual experience that presses us into life. It pressed us into culture and all of the depth of realization about who we are, where we are, and what we ought to do. The three great questions—what we call the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism—would never have been asked and never would have been responded to had we not had an experience of death. So, the experience of the first shock of existence presses us into life in which we disclose new gnosis, new knowing about:
* the nature of life
* the nature of death
* the nature of identity.
In the same way, the second shock of existence, meaning the potential death of our humanity, needs to press us into a re-engagement with these three great questions.
Who am I? Where am I? What ought I do?
Those three questions were answered in ethnocentric ways in the medieval world, each nation, each religion answered them in their own way. There were certain common features, but they were ethnocentric. It was: me and my people. And we were going to triumph in our vision of the world. Our fairytale of the world was that our triumph matters and everyone must join our cause. And then we will create a better world with everyone obeying our God and our laws and our rules, which is clearly problematic, but there was a sense of intrinsic value. There was a sense of meaning that collapsed in Modernity.
We thought we could get away with it. We thought we could borrow social capital from Premodernity, and just assume value was real. Jefferson thought Epicurus will get us through and we’ll have this world of immense and amazing progress into the future and we’ll create utopia, a heaven on earth.
But of course, that turned out not to be true because we failed to articulate a new Story of Value.
And we could get away with it in Modernity, but Postmodernity came and called in that loan. This is the basic premise of One Mountain, of Who We Must Become.
Postmodernity came and called that loan and said, you guys don’t have a Story of Value. And you can get away with that for a couple hundred years, but when Postmodernity said, actually, you guys have been lying. You can’t get away with it anymore. We’re calling the loan. Value is not real. It’s all about power. Nothing happens after death. That’s contrived.
Postmodernity began from many roots, but let’s trace it to neo-Darwinism, through logical positivism, through existentialism, into Postmodernity (there are about 10 other strands that I didn’t mention). But basically the assumption of Postmodernity was:
* This life is all there is.
* There’s no ultimate meaning.
* Everything is ultimately arbitrary.
* We are an irrelevant speck of dust in a vast cosmos.
* Nothing ultimately matters intrinsically and inherently.
And Sartre writes an amazing volume that blew my heart open, but is tragic, called Being and Nothingness, where he says that human responsibility means that you have to basically embrace the fact that you’re making the whole thing up.
And any reliance on any intrinsic value, intrinsic meaning, intrinsic truth, is an abandonment of responsibility. That was the existentialist moment.
“Mother died today, or was it yesterday?” A text I’ve cited often at the beginning of Camus’ book, The Stranger. There was this realization that we’re strangers. George Steiner writes that we are “strangers to ourselves, errant at the gates of our own psyche.” We’re social constructs, we’re made up.
Harari, who I’ve quoted often comes out of that line of thought and he says, Any meaning we ascribe to our lives is mere delusion and he italicizes any.
So, that’s the postmodern calling of the loan.
In that realization, I realized, oh, okay, I get it. What needs to be done is that we need to step out of any particular tradition as interpreters of just that tradition—and that realization, of course, matched my biography at the time—and we need to actually create a shared Story of Value.
* We need to go deep into every great religious tradition.
* We also need to go into systems theory and into complexity theory and into chaos theory.
* We need to go into the new realizations of quantum mechanics, which are superposition, and quantum entanglement.
* And we need to go into the depth of biochemistry, which is probably more important than anything else.
Biochemistry, or what Dennis Noble, the professor at Oxford, calls systems biology, or what James A. Shapiro calls, the new view of evolution, which emerges from those who rejected the neo-Darwinian reductive materialism of Thomas Huxley and the Russian prince Kropotkin. James Shapiro writes about the mutual aid, and it begins an entire heterodox, more correct reading of Darwin, of Darwin’s later book, Descent. He weaves in the early Darwinian notes from the diaries, and develops it with James Mark Baldwin followed by Charles Sanders Peirce, the great polymath. And those two, by the way, birthed Piaget; Baldwin birthed Piaget, and then it goes to Alfred North Whitehead.
So there’s this heterodox lineage bringing together the best of what I call the interior sciences, and we begin to create a new Story of Value, and that new Story of Value becomes a shared Story of Value that we can actually show to be valid. It’s non-dogmatic, it’s empirical, you can access it.
It draws on all of the great traditions. It weaves them together. It doesn’t abolish the great traditions.
Taoism continues, and Christianity, in its various forms, continues, and the best of Sunni and the best of Shiite in their best forms continue, and the best of Judaism continues, and the best of the great African traditions continue, et cetera, et cetera, but not in their dogmatic forms. Their best realizations are woven together into a shared Story of Value, which is a shared sheet of music, out of which a billion instruments, a hundred systems can play their unique instruments in this Unique Symphony in a world in which we are unbearably intimate with each other. Meaning:
* There’s no place to hide
* There’s no place to go
* There’s no place to run away to
* There’s no gingerbread house on any continent.
It’s one world, and therefore, it’s either one destruction, one dystopia, or one heaven on earth.
It’s a world in which we’re all connected to each other. The elites won’t escape in their bunkers. We need to actually create a shared Story of Value which we all participate, in which we are rooted in eternal value which is evolving value. We come together and we can have a conversation with each other.
Why We Stopped Talking About Current Events
We did quite a bit of talking about current events. We talked about a lot of things going on around the world. The last major current event we did was a devastating critique of Stephen Miller and the way he talks about immigration, which is a disaster.
But we did a lot on:
* COVID
* Conspiracy theory
* Ukraine
* Roe versus Wade and abortion
* Democracy
And then at a certain point I stopped. And I didn’t stop because I stopped caring. We stopped because we care so much. I stopped because I realized, whenever I go into a topic, first off, it takes me an enormous amount of time because I can’t talk about anything unless I’ve read a thousand things on it and thought about it enormously. I don’t want to just talk.
I don’t want to talk about something unless I can get to the core of it and then actually say something new that changes and shifts the conversation in some fundamental way.
So what I did was I recommended a few vectors of information on various topics that are worth looking at. I said, take a look at Haviv Rettig Gur who does very good commentary on Israel, who criticizes the Israeli government constantly, but gives a good sense of that world. Sam Harris also does a very good job in Israel. I tried to recommend a bunch of vectors, not just on Israel, but in both private and public conversations where you can go look for good commentary, and it’s very hard to find good commentary on anything.
If you want to look at Ukraine, I think Kasparov, the chess champion, who just did a dialogue with Sam Harris is very important. Ukraine is absolutely critical. The Ukraine war is far from over. It’s a horror.
If you want to look at Sudan, Nicholas Kristof is actually quite important. He’s doing a very, very, very good and important job.
There are people doing some really good work, but I decided, just internally, in terms of my heart and mind, that the desperate need, like the utterly, totally desperate need is to articulate a new Story of Value; not as an intellectual project, not as an intellectual masturbation, not as a demonstration of intellectual prowess, not as someone desperately alone in their apartment seeking attention, which is what happens so often, flailing for attention. None of that. No, no, no, we’re madly in love with Reality. We’re madly in love with every individual human being and every individual person, right?
And if we don’t:
* Articulate a new Ground of Value
* If we don’t solve value theory
* If we don’t create a new identity theory
* If we don’t create a new theory of Eros, of relationship
* If we don’t create new visions of economics and governance
* If we don’t articulate what are the First Principles and First Values upon which the whole thing is based…
Then it’s over.
In order to do that, we have to bootstrap. We have to go into five, six, seven major vectors of thought that got stuck, that got stultified, that got ossified in academic departments themselves. Corrupt and funded and vying in their own egoic game. We’ve got to blow that out of the water. We got to create a new Florentine Platonic Academy like they did in the Renaissance, like Marcello Ficino did, and Pico della Mirandola, and Leonardo da Vinci, and of course, they were funded by Medici. We need some Medici’s.
And we have to go into this.
So, Zak and I and many of us who are around this table, who are here, said, okay, that’s what we have to do. We have to put every drop of energy into that. Those of you who know me closely know, I follow events around the world insanely carefully. I’ve been following, for example, Sudan, which is just a complete horror; probably 500,000 people were killed in Sudan in the last several years. It’s one of the greatest tragedies in the Islamic world, and it’s barely covered at all, it barely gets attention. The horror of Sudan barely gets attention.
And the probably 50,000 people just destroyed in Iran didn’t even vaguely get the amount of attention since December / January that was given to other things happening in the world which had other agendas driving them.
The amount of suffering in the world is unimaginable, and I try and track everything I can everywhere, and I feel it, and I pray it, and I meditate it, and I swallow it, and I breathe it, and then I go back to the new Story of Value.
And for me, if I can just be honest, before I die, I want to leave the new Story of Value in the world with you—together, not me doing it myself, all of us together. We created a name. F**k Gafni. It’s not about Gafni, or Stein, or Wilbur.
It’s David J. Temple. And we’re all in various ways doing David J. Temple together.
Just like somehow Shakespeare got created, or Shimon Bar Yochai who was considered the author of the Zohar, but actually there was a group of people who called themselves Shimon Bar Yochai. There was a community, there was a band of Outrageous Lovers, who sat around the table as it were, the table of history, and said, we’re going to evolve the source code.
And the Zohar went into the mystery schools of Christian Kabbalah and actually formed the Renaissance and Pico della Mirandola, a key figure in the Florentine Platonic Academy, was studying with Jacob Megiddo and Yohanan Alemano, who were rooted in the Solomon lineage. But the point is, let’s create David J. Temple. Let’s create an artifact. Let’s create an angel. Let’s create together this force, and then pour into it the utterly deepest distinctions that are possible.
In literally seven or eight vectors we’ve tried to crack open and then begin to articulate the shared Story of Value, which needs to get to China, to the ruling circle, and it needs to get throughout Russia, and it needs to get throughout Africa, and it needs to get deep in Iran and deep in every country in the world. And it has to be not us; we get to disappear, but it has to be downloaded into the source code of culture.
So, literally, my own experience of life is a race with death. I feel like I’m in a race with death, and I hope I don’t die in the next couple of years, or the next couple of days, or the next couple of weeks. I would like to live for 30 more years. Who knows? Who knows? Right now I’m myself, personally between about 18 manuscripts that are moving around in my mind. And I’ve got a couple of really great partners who support the work. I’m working with brilliant partners, with Zak Stein, but with many other brilliant partners who are here, who are David J. Temple together.
Talking About The Iran Current Events
Now, why did I need to say all that? Well, because I don’t want to talk about the Israel-Iran thing because I happen to have an old relationship with Israel. I don’t think that the suffering in Israel is more important than the suffering in Sudan. And I don’t think that the suffering in Gaza and Israel is more important than the suffering in the Ukraine. That’s really important to say. No one’s blood, as I’ve said many, many times, no one’s blood is redder than anyone else’s blood. And the conflicts in Congo and Myanmar are insane. In Myanmar, the civil war started in 2021 and probably about 90,000 people have been killed. It’s street protests escalating into a very sophisticated multi-front war. There’s ethnic armed groups against the people’s defense forces and it’s an utter horror. It’s a nationwide uprising against the military junta that seized power there. It’s all so intense
And in the Congo, there’s this new resurgence of violence, fueled by the M23 rebel group, tens of thousands of direct deaths and millions more dying from the collapse of the regional health system. These are the fundamental tensions between the DRC and Rwanda. And so that’s critical.
And here in the United States where I live, so far three people have been killed, who should not have been killed. It was a horror. All three people who were killed by ICE agents were a horror. There’s no reason they should have been killed. It’s murderous. And deportation and immigration is a very complex issue. Obama deported more people than anyone else. Three people were killed by the special task force created by President Trump in order to engage in deportation. And again, the issue Trump was addressing is an issue that Biden tried to address and Obama tried to address and in three or four years, there were an enormous amount of people let into the United States who were violent in a very, very serious way. Obama recognized that, Biden did, and Trump did, but the way this has been done and the three people that were killed in the United States is obviously a horror. Democracy is being challenged in very serious ways in the United States, which is a different conversation.
My point is, I’m not picking this conversation. All the conversations are critical. I’m not choosing this issue because it’s the only issue. It was important enough for me to transmit that, to spend all the time we just had to locate us where they are.
Worldwide Conflicts Demand to Establish a New Story of Value
If you want to understand a very good critique of what Trump did here, if you want to understand where there are flaws which are very serious, and where there is some genuine corruption at play here that needs to be called out, take a look at February 28th, 2026, read Rachel Maddow’s article. She gets about six or seven things wrong in the article, but the issues she raises are real. She’s a good representation of the neoliberal American critique of Trump, which is quite serious. The article is excellent, I read it, and 10 others in the middle of the night, and marked it up. It’s worth reading. I read about 10 other pieces like this. It’s a legitimate and important critique. I’m not going to engage that critique. One of the reasons I hesitate to step into an issue, is because there’s so much to say and so many dimensions to it that it’s almost impossible to engage in a short period of time.
I want to try and understand a little bit of the issues here, and you’ll see why, because I want to understand them in the context of the need to establish a shared Story of Value, the same way we talked about immigration in that context. And the same thing could and should be done for the Sudan, and the same thing could and should be done for Russia and the Ukraine. We could actually turn this forum into doing that every week, but I don’t think we would change the conversation. I don’t think we’d change the conversation in Congo, and in Myanmar, et cetera. And then we could go to China and the amount of people killed in detention camps in China as they’re oppressing one particular Muslim minority. And then we could look at the Chinese Communist Party, which itself is essentially a criminal organization, fundamentally, and then let’s not even begin to talk about Putin.
I spend my days moving between mad joy, because I’m insanely ecstatic to be alive, and I’m madly in love with the world, and I love people, and I love the birds and the daffodils, I love Reality. I’m also just in massive pain.
Every day, I cry out of one side of my mouth, and I laugh out of the other side of my mouth. Joy, ecstasy, and unimaginable pain live together.
That’s the nature of what it means to be a human being, probably since the beginning of time, and certainly in this moment in time.
What’s Actually Happening In Iran?
The best estimates I’ve been able to find say between 40 and 50,000 people have been killed in Iran. Just to say that phrase is horrible. You’re talking about 10,000’s of individual people, each life.
Anyone who saves one life is as if they’ve saved the entire world, says the lineage.
So to even say the phrase 40 to 50,000 people is a horror. It’s obscene to even talk that way. But somewhere between 40 and 50,000 people have been killed in the last weeks.
And these people are the best of Iran. I know the situation quite well because I’ve tracked it for probably 25 years. One of the things I’ve tracked very closely is Iran’s commitment to the glorification of what Hamas did. Hamas was funded by about $100 million a year by Iran. Hamas was a complete proxy of Iran. And Iran was ecstatic when Hamas went and knifed women in the vagina, as they cut their breasts off and burned their babies. Yes, that is what happened. My son was there the next day. That was considered an ecstatic victory for Iran. That’s unimaginable that anyone could consider that an ecstatic victory. And then there was the sexual violence that was perpetrated against women and the hostages in the tunnels by Hamas. Also considered a great victory for Iran. The horror that was seen by the entire world that was celebrated or ignored, or somehow, somehow dismissed; that’s Iran. And what Iran has done? Killing, raping, 15-year-old girls, even as it goes against their entire repressive sexual code. We talked about Masha Amini a couple of years ago.
So about 40 to 50,000 young people have been killed. The best people, the most courageous, the ones who sacrificed the most, who stepped forward have been slaughtered.
I mean, slaughtered on the streets of Iran. And Iran’s fundamental commitment is to destroy Israel, but it’s not a local issue. Israel is actually directly connected to the fundamental stability of the world in multiple vectors, but particularly the Middle East, which then affects the rest of the world. It’s one world. So, when someone says, why are we taking on Iran? It’s got nothing to do with us. They don’t have ballistic missiles that can reach the United States, a position represented in one of the weaker parts of Rachel Maddow’s article that completely misunderstands the nature of the world today.
And Maddow’s challenge was, she says, I don’t believe that’s what moved Trump. That’s a separate issue. I don’t know what moved Trump. But what Maddow and I agree on a thousand percent is that there’s sufficient moral ground to step in.
And then the broader question is, well, when do you step in? Why don’t you step into Sudan? Why haven’t we stepped into Congo? Why haven’t we stepped into Myanmar?
Those are hard questions. Those are real questions. But I want to go more basic.
I’m not going to be able to work out all of real politic with you right now, because we just won’t be able to. There’ll be many more questions than answers.
We’re Living in a Broken Information Ecology
I know Israel in and out. I know Gaza well. I lived with an Arab family in a house together. And I walked the streets of Qalqilya unarmed and was very, very close to the leaders of the Arab community. If you’re seeing the news you’re seeing a quite distorted prism, right? We’re living in a broken information ecology.
And again, one of the reasons I hesitated in addressing this is because you have to address everything, it’s very, very, very, deep. And it’s very, very, very hard to actually understand what’s going on by watching the news. You’re not going to get it by watching the news. You just won’t get it that way. You’ve got to actually look much deeper than the news. The news is an entertainment outlet. And each news source has its own set of biases.
The news sources today that are in the public space are so wildly distorted. And the way they’re reporting the news is unimaginable.
So on each one of these issues, on each one of these issues, you have to look at it carefully. I suggested that you actually go take a look and listen to Haviv Rettig Gur on Israel. And Haviv is one of the greatest critics of the Israeli government. I’d take a deep, deep, deep, dive into it. You’ll get an enormous amount of information. I’ve tracked this for 30, 40 years. I went to Israel and I lived right next to Qalqilya. I was very, very, very close friends with many of the leaders of Qalqilya, one of the four major cities in the West Bank. I know the West Bank inside out. I refused to carry a machine gun walking through Qalqilya, even though people said I would get killed. And I said, no, these are my brothers. I won’t do that. I lived with an Arab family in Jaffa. None of this is strange or far from me. I keep in touch with a number of people in Gaza constantly. I check Gaza feeds every day and Israeli feeds every day. I have an enormous amount of critiques of the Israeli government. Having said that, I would just make it clear, the moral equivalence between the democratic Israel and Hamas is insane and absurd; based on a thousand pieces of information, which obviously I can’t go through right now.
And everyone is welcome in this community, even if we disagree on everything. You’re madly welcome.
How To Have Difficult Conversations About Polarizing Topics
[editor’s note: At this point in the live stream, a few different participants wrote that they disagreed with Dr. Marc Gafni in the chat box. He responded to each of them, saying why they were wrong and where they could get more information, and invited them all to stay and bring sufficient evidence and challenge his viewpoints. He concluded with this statement about why we must have difficult and real conversation in the chat box even when it is uncomfortable]:
I don’t view this as a divergence or a waste of time. It’s why we don’t do just a normal podcast. We’re here together in this. We are a mystical society in some very, very deep way. In a couple of weeks I want to come back to what a mystical society is, what a spiritual community is, how it works and what the conditions are.
One of our prior conditions is that everyone has a voice.
But you can’t just say something. You have to prove it to be true.
You can’t just indulge in anyone’s slogans or just statements. You have to go so deep that you’re a master, and you can’t be a master from the news and a broken information ecology.
You have to do much, much deeper work. But the point is that as a mystical society, the way we hold each other in a mystical society goes into the very source code of culture.
Everyone, learn to not be sloppy, learn to be precise.
I said, if a person wants to call for this community to call Israel genocidal, then this is the wrong community. That’s what I said. Be precise!
This is not a side topic. This is it. It’s our capacity to be a mystical society. To stick it through and to honor and respect each other, to demand deep wells of wisdom and information.
* To not walk away.
* To have a hard moment
* To work it through
* To love each other madly
* To be a band of Outrageous Lovers and to write the Great Library from within that context.
That’s why I didn’t stay in Oxford. It’s why Zak didn’t stay in Harvard. That’s not the place to write it from. The place to write the Great Library is from the creative tension and love of this chat box. This is it. This is what the band of Outrageous Lovers is.
We’re going to hold the conversation in the chatbox here, but it’s great that we all spoke. And it’s great that we’re modeling something that’s enormously important, which is that we can actually hold together as a community even when we haven’t talked about issues. Even when there’s fierce disagreement. This is not a problem. This is exactly what we need.
This models the capacity to know that that which unites us is so much greater than that which divides us.
You remember Nixon and Kennedy? They were great friends all through the 50s, from 1947 until 1963 when Kennedy was killed. They were great friends.
It’s actually the most exciting thing that happened today, the most beautiful thing that happened today. There’s been a whole group of people who have said to me, Marc, just turn the chat box off, it’s annoying, and I’ve refused to turn the chat box off. Does everyone get it? I want the chat box. And I want to ask everyone in the chat box to come with us.
As I said, I referred everybody to a Rachel Maddow article, which I said is an important article. If you want to read very important voices that are profoundly supporting what’s happening in Iran right now, there’s quite a lot of those. You can see them in many, many places, but one of them in general is Sam Harris. Sam’s done a very, very good job on this, I think. Then there’s Douglas Murray, who’s a little feisty, but his positions are actually intelligent, and I think he’s done a very, very good job on it. You can also look at Chuck Schumer, who understands some very, very important things about this. So there are some very good voices out there which are very, very important.
Why Pacifism Is Immoral
I want to talk about one topic today. But I want to go more to the basics. I want to talk about just a more fundamental topic in terms of the Field of Value. This is a material that’s been covered here and there by different people both in the liberal side of the world and the conservative side of the world, around the world, but it needs to be stated explicitly.
War itself is a horror.A bullet is a horror.
But it’s not true that war is the crime. That’s actually not true.
That is a pacifist position. And pacifist thinking, I believe, is wrong, fundamentally, from the perspective of the Field of Value.
And that’s where I want to start.
I was sitting with the Dalai Lama at his home just the two of us in Dharamsala. It was right before we recorded a series of conversations. We had met in Castel Gandolfo in the Pope’s summer residence. And we both talked about the absurdity of claiming that war itself is the crime.
War is a horror. A bullet is a horror. Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean that there’s never a just war.
Before we get to it, I’m not gonna talk today about what’s happened in the last few days in Iran. I believe that this is a very, very complex moment. I believe, fundamentally, that it’s unclear how this is going to turn out.
I believe that Iran—not Iranians; Iranians are beautiful—but the government of Iran has been an utter horror. It has been very close to evil incarnate. I believe that the massacring of tens of thousands of girls and women, the brutality of Hamas, of Hezbollah, of the Houthis needs to be challenged in a very fundamental way.
The Dalai Lama and I completely agreed on this point, which is that the notion that there are no just wars is a fundamentally immoral notion like the notion that we should have allowed the Nazis to win World War II. There were 55 million people killed in World War II. It would have been a far greater horror in the world had the Nazis not been defeated.
So I want to just say this clearly, I am thankful. I am filled with gratitude. And the arrogance of people who are living in democratic societies today who say, no, no, no, war is terrible. There’s no just wars, is absurd. All of us are sitting here today and having this conversation because there have been just wars.
So, I stand with my friend, the Dalai Lama, and I hope he’s got a little credibility here. We got to really understand this in a very fundamental way, you can’t duck this question.
* Should we have let the Nazis win? The answer is no. I think there’s an unequivocal response to that. We should not have let the Nazis win. And you got to hold that. If you can’t hold that question, you’re not in a serious conversation. It’s not okay for the Nazis to win. That’s issue one.
* And number two, if we could have stopped Hitler from doing what he did, would it have been moral to take Hitler out? The answer is yes.
I’ve debated many people over the last 20 years who said they wouldn’t take Hitler out because they’re pacifists. I think that’s fundamentally morally wrong. If we could have stopped Hitler and stopped World War II I believe that we had an absolute moral obligation, an ethical obligation in the Field of Value to take Hitler out.
Chamberlain in the 1930s, who allowed Hitler to take Sudetenland, and Joseph Kennedy in the United States, who was actually part of that same movement, and the isolationist movement in the United States that actually not only allowed Hitler to come to power, but actually armed Hitler—Hitler was armed, and in a very, very significant way, by forces of industry in the United States—that was tragic. In other words, we should not have allowed it. We should have actually seen what was coming.
We should have taken Mein Kampf seriously.
If during the Nazi era, democratic societies had basically said, we’re going to do pacifism, we’re going to do nonviolence, then basically democracy and human rights themselves would have disappeared from the world.
I want to say that sentence again.
If during the Nazi era democratic societies had said, hey, we’re going to practice pacifism and nonviolence, then democracy and human rights, for all intents and purposes, would have disappeared from the world.
That’s a very big deal. Let’s get that straight.
The Parallels Between Hitler and Khamenei
Khamenei has said everything that Hitler said; directly and clearly. He said every single thing that Hitler has said, every single one. I’ve been reading him for 30 years. I know him backwards and forwards. I know the texts, I read the texts that come out of his world and his clerics.
* He’s said every single thing that Hitler says, and he says it five times over. I want you to get that. That is what he’s saying. That is his intention.
* His intention—it is not directed particularly at the “small Satan,” which is Israel—is directed at the “large Satan,” which is Western Europe and the United States, and what we would call the neoliberal world order.
* His intention is, not only him, but the entire network that’s been created to destroy the neoliberal world order in the most abject and horrific way.
* His intention is clearly the same a thousand times over. Let’s make it really clear. That’s what we’re talking about.
He just massacred 50,000 people. Let’s understand.
By any definition of evil, he’s on it. Not him particularly. It’s not about a person. It’s about the fundamental representation.
We’re talking about death cults for whom the worst violations are actually fine as long as they’re being done to the one who’s considered an infidel.
Systemic and intentional. That’s a big deal.
The Parallels Between The Cold War and Now
Now, let’s jump to the Cold War where it was America against communism.
I’m not Russian. I didn’t grow up in Russia. I’ve read 10 books, but reading 10 books is not the same. But I have quite a few friends over the years, and what Stalin did is a horror. Are we for real?
But in the United States, there was this embracing of communism and its ideals. And its ideals were quite powerful, and you can be quite inspired by them. There was this very strong liberal embrace of communism. So for example, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, they argued for various forms of unilateral disarmament.
Unilateral disarmament, the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, there were very strong voices, Catholic leaders, the Catholic Educational Association, made nonviolence their platform. It was basically a fundamental platform of Catholic education.
For example, Chester Finn Jr., who is a Vanderbilt University social critic, was about, you have to teach unilateral disarmament every place. The Bishop of Seattle, Hunthensen, called Puget Sound “Auschwitz,” because there were nuclear submarines docked there. Okay, that’s complicated. So nuclear submarines that were created to ostensibly protect democracy are the same as Auschwitz that was actively killing and gassing 20,000 people a day? So, let’s just go slow for a second, it’s complicated. I have debated any number of reform rabbis within the Jewish context, who have said that if they could have killed Hitler, they would not have done it, even if they could have stopped World War II.
Now, I get the power of that, but no! If we could have killed Hitler, we should have killed him.
The British Labor Party, the Greens in Germany, all supported unilateral disarmament in the latter part of the Cold War. The Physicians for Social Responsibility, same position. These are decent, good people. They aren’t evil people. These are decent, good people. So, how do decent, good people come to a place where they’re embracing a position that the result of would lead to limitless cruelty?
The Six Assumptions Of Pacifism
There’s a bunch of reasons why we’re unable to articulate fundamental moral distinctions, fundamental distinctions around value.
These have been pointed out, but I want to try and articulate it and deepen it.
The Assumptions of Pacifism:
* It’s always wrong to kill another human being
* In the Judeo-Christian context, the Ten Commandments say “Thou shall not kill.”
* Human life is a supreme value
* The best way to combat evil is nonviolence, and then usually people cite Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
* You can’t fight violence with violence.
* Before nuclear weapons there might’ve been a place for just wars, but now that there are nuclear weapons, there’s no place for any just wars whatsoever. Something like the following, this is where Bertrand Russell said, “better red than dead.”
Okay, so those are six powerful positions, they’re all powerful, they all have some allurement, they all have some beauty, they all have some depth, and they’re all wrong.
Every single one of those premises is wrong. We have to train ourselves to think, and we have to be willing to bracket our own voices in order to actually open.
They all allow evil to thrive, that’s absolutely correct, they all allow evil to thrive, that’s a very big deal.
1. Is It Always Wrong To Kill Another Human Being?
Okay, so number one, it’s always wrong to kill another human being, that’s simply not the case. It’s not always wrong to kill another human being, that’s simply not true. The moment you affirm the morality, you say, it would have been moral to kill Hitler, or it would be moral to stop a sniper from shooting other people, what you’re saying is, correctly, tha there’s not an absolute statement that it sometimes is moral to kill another human being. Sometimes you have to kill another human being in order to protect innocent human life. That’s true. So, sometimes it’s clear. It’s almost never okay to kill another human being, obviously, but that’s not always true. And sometimes it’s not clear.
So, for example, the Allied bombing of cities in Germany during World War II is a complex issue. I’ve looked at it very carefully over many years. I don’t want to talk about it now, but it’s a complex issue, and there were hundreds of thousands of people killed; men, women, and children, many, many innocent people, innocent Germans. Now, were there innocent Germans in World War II? Of course there were! Of course there were innocent Germans who hated Nazis. Are there any innocent people in Gaza? Of course there are! Of course there are.
So, there is a deep conversation about Germany, there’s a deep conversation about Gaza, but that’s not the point. I’m not having that conversation right now, because we can’t have every conversation in every second. It’s complicated. If you’re not willing to engage the complexity in your heart and bracket for a second then you can’t get anywhere. It was a very complex decision about how to bomb German cities, and how much to bomb. Was Dresden overbombed, for example, or wasn’t it? But you have to look really carefully. We weren’t seeing clips around the news every day, but believe me, the bombing of German cities looked horrific, horrible; the images were horrible, boys and girls being killed, let’s get clear.
Had someone killed Stalin in 1927, that would have been a good thing to do. So I want to say it really clearly; I would have killed Stalin in 1927.
I was just at my mother’s. My mother is in a very, very difficult health place, and so I went to Israel to see her, and she described to me her mother meeting Hitler. It’s like, wow, it’s intense; her mother met Hitler. And the issue, of course, is not what would have changed if someone killed Stalin or Hitler, the issue is the principle right now. If I could stop a horror by killing a person at a particular time—and we don’t always know what will happen—but there are moments when that’s the right thing to do; a thousand percent.
We don’t always have the luxury of perfect moral clarity, sometimes we do, and sometimes we have to take unique risks, and sometimes leaders have to take unique risks.
It’s very easy to discuss things in a chat box, but actually, when you’re in a position of leadership, and you’re responsible, you have to make very, very, very hard decisions that are very complex. If you don’t hold the enormous agony of that complexity, and you don’t realize, I’ve got to be able to identify evil and then stop it, then you’re missing something fundamental in Reality.
2. Do The 10 Commandments Say You Shouldn’t Kill?
Two: Well, Marc, what about the Ten Commandments? Ten Commandments say, ‘thou shalt not kill,’ and I thought you were like a Ten Commandment guy, Marc.
No, the Ten Commandments do not say, “thou shalt not kill,” they don’t say that. There’s no place in the Ten Commandments where it says that. It doesn’t exist.
It says, “thou shalt not murder, Lo tirtzach (לֹא תִּרְצָח).” The Hebrew word for murder, tirtzach, is not the same as the word leharog, to kill. So, there is not a commandment, “thou shalt not kill;” it’s “thou shalt not murder,” and there is an equal and commensurate obligation to stop evil. And to actually pretend that, oh, we’re going to ignore that obligation, we’ve got full moral clarity, that’s wrong.
When I hear from a friend, a student, or a colleague, when I hear the agony of complexity, I’m in the conversation.
When I hear moral platitudes, and no agony, and no complexity, and no dialectical tension, just like, no! Stop!
We are commanded as human beings to destroy evil.
And imagine, you are the leader, you’re not commenting in a chat box, you are responsible for evil, you’re responsible to respond to evil, you have to make the decisions. Step into that. Feel that. That’s part of Outrageous Love. That’s part of what Outrageous Love is. Part of Outrageous Love is responding to evil, and you can’t ignore that, we can’t bracket that.
I’m going to open a text, okay. So, this is the story of Moses, and it’s in the book of Exodus. How does Moses become Moses?
So Moses become Moses because, vayeitze elakha, he goes forth into society, like Buddha went forth into society, vayar basiv lo tam, and he saw the suffering, vayar ish mitzri make ish ivri. And he saw an Egyptian overlord smiting a slave, vayifen ko vaho, and then what he does is vayakhate mitzri, he kills the Egyptian, and he buries him in the sand.
Wow, that’s the Moses story. It’s not all of the Moses story, but that’s the Moses story. Let’s get that straight. And now, let me be really clear: the same Moses story, in the same text, let’s fast forward to Isaiah, and Isaiah writes, what’s the vision?
The vision is: “v’chitetu kharvotam li’itim, and you shall beat your swords into plowshares, and your spears into pruning hooks, lo yisagoy elgoy kharev, no nation should ever lift forth a sword against another nation, v’lo yilmadu od milchaman, let’s no longer be studied in the horror of warfare.“ That’s the vision.
That’s the prophetic vision.
Of course that’s the prophetic vision!
Lo yisagoy elgoy kharev, no nation should lift up sword against any other nation, v’lo yilmadu od milchaman, let’s not be studied in war—that’s not pacifism; that’s the vision!
That’s where you want to get. That’s the aspiration. The aspiration’s not a militarism, but it’s not pacifism, do you understand the difference? That’s not at all pacifism, and that’s my point.
My point is that the same text that holds Moses as becoming Moses by standing for justice in a particular moment and slaying the Egyptian overlord. The very same text holds the vision of Isaiah, no nation shall lift up sword against nation, and they shall not learn war anymore. Huh, did you get that? Wow!
3. Is Human Life The Supreme Value?
The third argument for pacifism is that human life is the supreme value.
So I just want to get this really clear. That is not true. That is simply not true. Human life is not the supreme value. For example, if you tell me, I’m gonna kill you unless you kill those 10 children, I have to give up my life.
Let’s go even deeper, let’s say, if I had to take the life of the German and Japanese doctors, who performed the most grotesque experiments on human beings during World War II, I would, for sure.
It’s really important. Human life is a critical value, but there’s a gamut of values in which life is one of them. But our job is not to live as long and as comfortably as we can. To be a human being and particularly to be a leader is to consider the field of human life, and that’s why we fought the Nazis in World War II.
I want to show you a scene for a second. I’m going to show you the opening scene of a movie, it’s an incredible movie Saving Private Ryan.
[editor’s note: At this moment Dr. Marc Gafni showed the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan. You can watch it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKsj_WAQu5o]
Do you think that the people they were shooting at experienced themselves as being evil? The Germans, do you think that the Germans they were shooting at didn’t have children? And girlfriends? And didn’t have kind moments and didn’t make love? Of course they did. That’s the point. And they were fighting for Hitler. I want you to get that clear.
And had they not stormed those beaches, we probably wouldn’t be in this conversation in this way at this moment in time.
When we argue the third argument for pacifism, human life is the supreme value, what it’s saying is that biology takes precedence over value. In other words, living as long as you can and being alive is the ultimate value, which is a quite stupid ultimate value because everyone’s going to die. There’ll be a continuity of consciousness, that’s a different conversation, but death happens.
And that was the exact point, it was that beautiful movie The Dark Knight (2008), that Heath Ledger actually died right after he made, in which the Joker wants to show that everyone just wants to live, that life is the ultimate value, and that no one actually really holds any real Field of Value.
In that Batman movie with Heath Ledger, the Joker connects two boats. And he says to each boat, I’ll let you guys survive if you blow up the other boat. And in the end, they refuse, and the Joker goes mad because they chose value over their own lives.
That’s what it means to be a human being, my friends.
Now, of course, we need to discern what value is. And of course, how many people have died in the name of Christ, I can’t believe it all, sang Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
And of course, there are false values and there are false causes, I understand that. But first, let’s get the basics. You have to start with the beginning. The basic understanding is that human life is not the supreme value.
In other words, good lives are more important than long lives. Goodness is ultimately more important than life. And life in this world is not all there is.
There’s a larger vision. Now, can that be perverted? Can that be hijacked by visions of fundamentalism, which say I’m going to kill you in order to get you to heaven? Of course, it can be. Of course, that’s a perversion and a degradation. Of course, it is. I understand that. Of course, we understand that. But that doesn’t mean that we say, because human life is the only value, we’re not going to fight Nazism.
No, we will fight, because there’s something higher than life.
Every kid on that beach that we just saw at the opening of the movie, Saving Private Ryan from Montana and Kansas and Idaho, who rolls out on that beach and knows that I have a very good chance of not surviving this beach, was saying I’m a hero.
And what is a hero?
A hero means that I realize that there’s a larger Field of Value to which I am in devotion, for which I’m willing to sacrifice my life.
That’s a shocking realization of enlightenment. The hero has a moment of enlightenment. Every one of those kids on that beach had a moment of enlightenment. They were willing to sacrifice life for a higher vision.
Does that not mean there are false causes? Of course, there are false causes. Of course, there are. Of course, there are suicide bombers who go into a cafe and blow themselves up. And I’ve seen it happen. I just missed getting blown up by a second on one particular day on Ben Yehuda Street in the middle of Jerusalem. And I’ve been very, very close as school buses blew up. I understand there are false causes.
But the fact that there are false causes doesn’t mean there are not just causes.
You cannot respond to evil by saying, you guys got the field; we’re withdrawing from the field. You can’t do that. You have to be willing to fight for a just cause. And I have to be willing to give up my life for the sake of a just cause. If there’s nothing I’m willing to die for, I’m not alive. The idea that human life itself is the ultimate value doesn’t even succeed on its own grounds because there’ll be much less life. It’ll destroy life, right?
What happens when we step out of the Field of Value and we don’t have a sense that there’s a larger Field of Value that’s real, and that there’s a set of values, uniqueness, integrity, creativity, fairness, justice; what happens when I step out of the Field of Value? Then the violations of Khamenei in Iran seem like nothing.
And then we lose the ability to bracket ourselves, to listen. We get caught in broken information ecologies, and we can’t make moral discernments. If we don’t first defeat evil there’s no conversation. A secular liberal context doing spiritual development, doesn’t exist. Try and again bracket yourself and follow the thread of the argument because that demonstrates maturity and an ability to actually integrate information.
4. Is Nonviolence The Best Way to Resist Evil?
Fourth assumption of pacifism: Nonviolence is the best way to resist evil. Is that true?
No, it’s not, it’s not true. Nonviolence is not the best way to defeat evil. Now, let’s go clear.
If you’re Gandhi or you’re Martin Luther King, it’s a different story. So Gandhi is fighting the British empire, and the British empire did many evils, but it lived in a Field of Value. So therefore, Gandhi could challenge the British empire with nonviolence because there was some shared Field of Value between Gandhi and the British troops that he was opposing.
Martin Luther King Jr. went to challenge the horror of segregation, which went on for a hundred years, from Jim Crow to redlining in the United States and the horrific lynchings in the South, it’s an unimaginably important and tragic story. When Martin Luther King Jr. went to challenge the United States, he was challenging the United States because both Martin Luther King Jr. and the United States were in a shared Field of Value, imperfect, but a shared Field of Value. And so therefore, nonviolence did something.
And yes, there were people killed during the protests in the South, but I want you to compare what happened with the nonviolent protests of the civil rights movement and what happened in Iran. In Iran, they just mowed down 50,000 people.
At Kent State, when three people were killed, the nation was horrified, correctly. But you can’t compare those two. If you’re not able to make that discernment, you’re out of the conversation. Kent State is not the square in Tehran. One killed three people and the country was horrified. The other killed 50,000 people and the government thought it was fine.
If you can’t make that distinction, we’re in trouble. Now, again, there’s not one bone in my body that’s whitewashing. Of course not, we’re not whitewashing the United States, but we’re making a distinction.
If you can’t distinguish between a liberal democracy and between a death cult, we’re in very big trouble.
If you can’t distinguish between the founding documents of Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, all of which I’ve read, we’re in trouble. How many people have read the founding documents of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard? You should read them. They read quite differently than the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights.
Everyone outside of their particular social circle is an infidel for which you get to do what Hamas did in October, 2023. And you have to get that distinction, my friends, or the conversation doesn’t start.
And by the way, Gandhi himself didn’t get the distinction. Gandhi didn’t get the distinction. Gandhi writes to the Jews in Germany. I want to tell you what he says. And he was dead wrong. Gandhi says, “I am as certain as I am dictating these lines, that the stoniest German heart will melt if only the Jews adopt active nonviolence.” I want you to get this again. I get where you’re coming from, brothers. But it’s dead wrong. Gandhi wrote this in 1938. He writes to the Jews of Germany. He just didn’t get evil. He didn’t get it. He simply did not get evil.
I want you to get this again. “I am as certain as I am dictating these lines that the stoniest German heart will melt if only the Jews adopt active nonviolence.” He writes, “I do not despair of his (he means Hitler’s), I do not despair of Hitler’s responding to human suffering even though caused by him.”
Did everyone get that? Is that insane? That was 1938.
Let’s go on. In 1942, Gandhi writes an open letter to the British and it’s called Nonviolence and Peace and War, okay? Here’s what he says:
“I would like you, the British, to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.” Everyone get that? That’s Gandhi. Gandhi’s not a bad guy. He’s a complicated guy. Gandhi was quite complicated, but definitely not a bad guy.
5. You Can’t Fight Violence With Violence
This is the fifth argument is, you can’t fight violence with violence.
The essence of this argument is that when you fight violence with violence, you’re fighting evil with evil, then you become the moral equivalent of the person that you’re fighting. That’s just not true. It’s not true.
Violence is sometimes necessary to achieve good aims. Now that can be wildly distorted. That’s an unimaginably dangerous sentence to say, but it’s true.
That’s why Gandhi was wrong. The British should not have laid down their arms, right? Thank God, Churchill threw the letter out.
Churchill, wild, crazy man who understood in the moral fiber of his being at his best that you have to fight violence with violence. That’s just absolutely true.
6. Now That There Are Nuclear Weapons, We Shouldn’t Wage War
The fact that there are nuclear weapons should not make us into pacifists.
It makes the entire thing infinitely more dangerous. That’s for sure. And it also means that we have to prevent rogue actors who don’t believe in fundamental value from getting nuclear weapons.
That’s the point of this war. That’s quite a good point.
That’s quite a good point.
You have to be able to make those distinctions, my friends.
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