In the final part of my episode with Christian, we unravel the crisis of masculinity, the deepening gender divide, and the psychological currents tearing apart modern society in an unfiltered, thought-provoking discussion.

We delve into the philosophical clash between Nietzsche’s belief in self-created values and Jung’s view that values are inherited through archetypes, examining how Jung’s concept of individuation—integrating the shadow self—corresponds to Nietzsche’s Übermensch as a path to personal sovereignty. Christian critiques the "industrial emotional complex," where women’s nurturing instincts are redirected from family to social justice causes, creating an addictive cycle of empathy-driven activism.

We confront the paradox of demonising masculinity only for society and women in particular to glorify its darkest caricatures, ultimately being both reviled and romanticised by society. Christian draws on Schopenhauer to highlight hedonism’s limits, where pleasure inevitably becomes pain when pushed beyond natural bounds, reflecting a culture addicted to excess.

From fear-mongering and social media to mass psychogenic illness, we examine the forces driving societal fragmentation and explore how stoicism, self-awareness, and reclaimed wisdom can provide a foundation for men in this chaotic age.

Takeaways:

• Constantly having our needs met is like living in a cushy prison, man.
• Oppression and protection are just two sides of the same coin in our behaviours.
• When we push our desires too far, we end up in a hedonistic spiral that bites back.
• Can we pick our own values? Or are they just thrown at us like confetti?
• Modern society has us in a metaphorical prison where we play both guard and inmate.
• The chaos of today's world is just a reflection of the breakdown of family and masculinity.

It ultimately doesn't serve a human to have all of your needs and desires constantly taken care of.

The problem is right, Oppression and protection exist on the same axis of behavior.

We are now in a prison camp without walls.

We are the prison guards and the prisoners.

When you start trying to push that further than it's naturally supposed to go, you start getting into this place of hedonism that then just continually just gets worse and wor.

Like any addict in any addiction.

You mentioned Nietzsche and you were speaking about, because Nietzsche believed that we could pick our own values, but Jung believed that we can't pick our own values.

They are almost imbued upon us.

For, for whatever reason.

Do you.

And I thought.

I remember reading and listening about that and I thought that was really interesting.

Do we pick our own values or do we.

Are they thrust upon us, so to speak?

What do you think?

I like to think that there's a phase of individuation from the Jungian aspect is to me, aligns with the Ubermensch in the Nietzschean perspective.

To me, that's that, that's that point where you basically, you're, you're.

You're integrating the whole self, the, the things that you have rejected about yourself in your shadow and the conscious.

You, you're taking that all in, you're coming to peace with that.

And then you're also creating from all of the wisdom and the culture and your experience of life, you, you then create some sort of framework.

I wouldn't, it's not just, I'm making this up now.

This is this new thing that we do in, you know, where we just stand on our edge whenever we want.

To agree with someone, doesn't it, you.

Know, it's just like, no, we're taking from the past.

We look to these traditions.

You talked about that earlier, which is to me, a tradition is just an idea that works.

So yes, we look to those and we say.

Because I don't think it's about going back.

We can't go back.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle.

We can't go back to like every, every, every like 50 years.

There's a swing in the pendulum and it's just a.

It's always doing this.

We're just in that other place and it's, and it's.

Whether we go back again, we swing to the other way, or we, at some point we, we end this game of this civilization of the west, the experiment goes away and then we go back to sticks and stones.

Like, that's that's, that's going to happen at some point.

We've gotten too, too smart for our own good, you know, and it's just, it ultimately doesn't serve a human to have all of your needs and desires constantly taken care of.

That's where you die.

That's where men go to die, you know, and that's just historical.

We can see that.

So this has never been done like this before.

This is the newest version of it.

And we are now in a prison camp without walls where, you know, we are the prison guards and the prisoners.

We think the new game is that we think we're free.

Weaponized emotion.

And they've, they've lobotomized women into refocusing their nurture aspects of their psyche away from children and that all of that empathy goes towards social justice.

Now it's sort of quenching their emotional need, their empathic need into these never ending, almost like an addiction.

It's a.

Never ending.

Well, it's.

That's absolutely spot on.

And we're, that's why we're seeing the political gender divide manifest itself.

And the left have, you're completely right, they've completely suss what it is that they need to do.

They need to, you know, virtue signal and they need to recruit the blindly empathetic and use that to garner status effectively and then to plead sanctimonious and no and moral.

But it's not just the empathy, it's the.

If you, I was thinking about this the other day.

When you look at sort of tribes, you find that men are more tolerant of outsiders of the tribe than women and they're more tolerant of low status tribe members.

And I think maybe the reason that could be is because the more low status members there are, the higher up you can be.

Whereas if they, in certain studies, not all studies, they found women were more likely to want to.

What's the word?

Extradite and to eradicate certain tribe members who weren't acting in the way that they believe they should have been acting.

And a lot of that is.

See now speaking to a girl the other day and we were talking about ideology and how universities are swept up in ideology and she was fighting against it.

She, but she calls herself the anti woke feminist.

And she said I don't understand why so many women just go along with, with all these spurious ideas.

And I was like, I think there's three reasons that we, we face ourselves.

One is women are temperamentally more agreeable like a lot of this Peterson stuff.

But the Other one is.

Is me more agreeable.

So they want to keep the peace.

Makes sense.

Anything is seem to be out of the ordinary.

Track it don't like that.

Let's eradicate it through safety.

And then the other one is fear which I guess sort of seep into what I just said.

And I think fear is quite.

Fear is potentially more powerful than agreeableness actually.

Because if you're really.

If you make people scared of something and women are very.

Women so complicated.

We've made women feel so vulnerable now because they are vulnerable inherently.

And we've convinced them that the thing the problem is right is oppression and protection exist on the same access of behavior.

It's just they're like oppression is an extreme version of a protection or a perceived extreme version of a protection.

So we've navigating that and you could just say you're being oppressed.

Well actually maybe you're being a protective.

Maybe there's a reason.

And obviously that brings up different issues.

But going back to the other point so that the fear is.

Is really if you get.

If you fear monger and you, you touched on it earlier.

I'm going to speak to someone about the climate change.

She was a climate activist and now she's basically campaigning against climate, against the climate scandal and saying, you guys, this is actually what's going on.

So fear is powerful.

And the third reason is hypergamy.

I think women's hypergamous nature makes them more obedient because they need the.

They.

They.

The people that look up to, they follow and submit to.

And if you create all three of those things together, you basic.

If you can manifest and manufacture environment that satiates all three aspects of that.

You create an environment where they're basically at your beck and call and they will do what it is that you need them to do.

And there's a fourth aspect which is another Peterson thing and I've read into a lot of it and it's.

This is really weird.

Mass psychogenic illness.

MPIs.

They're all women.

It's always women that.

Young women that get impacted by mass psychogenic illnesses.

Yeah.

And I think that's probably part of the reason that the things that I just mentioned.

So I don't remember how we got into that, but it was the, the fear you mentioned.

The fear so masculine.

I would also just just to add.

Yes.

Just.

Just to jump onto what you just said.

Yeah.

I would say that it all ties into the breakdown of masculinity.

You know and it's.

And it's Women, Women are no longer.

Women don't respect men on an individual level anymore.

They respect, that's why they respect the government.

Because the government is the daddy, right?

The government is the author, the authority that's firing off what you just mentioned, hypergamy, you know, and, and, and, and giving them the answer to their fear is the safety of daddy, which is the government.

Right?

And so all of those things you just talked about, plus there's no men that they're not listening to the men saying, hang on a minute, that don't give all of your faith to this organization called the government.

Look at history.

Look at.

There's not a great track record with governments.

And all of a sudden we're living in a world where the government would never do anything like that.

And it's like because we've forgotten about it because men are not being listened to, we're just being ridiculed.

And anytime we drop into natural masculine energy, you just get gaslit and told that you're being toxic or misogynistic or any of these things.

And so you end up submitting.

And men have just shut down.

Men have, men have gone tools down.

And the women, it all happens simultaneously.

So the women are sort of filling a hole, so to speak, where the men were.

And I think this is just really stemming from the second World War, basically post Second World War.

What we saw in the second World War was overt masculinity as an overreach through the Nazis, right?

The Nazis were like a caricature of masculinity.

They were like, you know, toxic masculine.

Hitler was like the ultimate misogynist.

Basically.

They were just stepping in and doing what they want.

And so the west won the second World War and they, and they said we're never going to let that happen again.

And the antidote to it was femininity.

Femininity became a deity almost, you know, pure goodness.

And, and, and it can't be bad if a woman does it.

They're sweet and sensitive and soft and that just happened slowly chipping away to the point where we are now, where we are simultaneously glorifying women for being sex objects and at the same time being told to not look at them and objectify them because it's all gone into chaos.

They have no order around them other than their own order that they've proxy made up of by watching men.

They've gone, we can do that and we'll just do our own version of masculinity which constantly moves around because they're women.

I think the other.

There's, there's a lot to get in there.

The ironic thing about modern way that women are being reared nowadays is that where they're being served up to the exact sorts of men that they were told to avoid in the first place.

Exactly.

They're being served.

Exactly.

There's, there's a quote.

When you demonize masculine, only the demons seem masculine.

And we're, we're, we are genuinely serving this generation of women up to the exact sort of men that they were allegedly trying to like, fight against.

I mean we, we have a generation of women that hate Andrew Tate and yet the Andrew Tate's of the world are their biggest fantasy.

So.

And you know, that's the female, the female romance is really, really tricky.

I often think that you can judge this sort of sanctity and the Doug know, the groundedness society, the degree to which the textbook, the stereotypical female romance sort of aberrates away from like what it originally was.

And I think we're seeing a huge aberration and it's become into, it's turned into something very, very messy and very, very.

Just contradictory and sort of ironic.

But yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to the breakdown of the family, family unit and how, yeah, we've lost grassroots masculinity and we've replaced it with totalitarian masculinity in the sense totalitarian control.

Yeah.

The point that you said about the government not wanting, you know, the government.

Why would the government want such things?

We.

I don't know if you, Are you a football fan or soccer?

I mean Leeds, I wouldn't call that football.

Okay.

Yeah, Leeds are a big club.

The Premier League have introduced PSR over the past five years, which originally was branded as a way of keeping things fair and not allowing big clubs to spend too much money and keeping things balanced and equal.

But actually what we're realizing is it's actually just a way of keeping the big clubs big and the little clubs small.

And they branded it up this way to get it through the door.

So they used compassion to enact their goal.

And now everyone's going, everyone's changing their mind and going.

And I think it's going to change, but they're actually realizing that it's hindering people to such a degree that it's just completely unfair.

So when people think that big, you know, governments and compassion is a really dangerous virtue.

And obviously Peterson talks about that a lot.

And I've experienced it a lot because I've worked in like special needs Schools and compassion.

Have you heard of something called Munchausen by Proxy?

You ring the bell.

When parents make their children sick so that they can garner the attention.

Always women, always mums.

Okay.

They can garner the attention.

There's Munchausen, which is when you make yourself sick.

So.

But compassion.

The Phantom Threat.

The Phantom.

I haven't seen it.

There's one called Run on Netflix.

I was really weird.

I'm going to write Phantom thread down.

No.

So Paul, the Paul.

Paul Thomas Anderson's last film with what's his face that was in There Will Be Blood, The English actor that does all the method.

Yeah, I know.

You mean 13 of Lewis.

Daniel Day Lewis.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Basically, it's all about that.

The whole movie's about that.

Yeah.

I mean, absolutely horrible.

Someone's sick so you can look after them.

Yeah, exactly.

So you.

So you feel needed.

And that sort of.

That's like playing it down, so to speak.

And yeah, you.

The thing that you spoke about, like Nazi Germany.

But the thing is, is on the other side of Europe, there was another atrocity taking place, which was the Russian Revolution, which no one in the west ever addresses because it's sort of been pushed down and hidden.

And we talk about a political spectrum, and there's actually no such thing as a political spectrum.

It's more like a political sphere.

And when the left and the right meet, you get Nazism and Soviet Russia.

And then on the other side, you get.

Well, I don't know what you get.

But, you know, you've sort of alluded to it a couple of times.

People are just completely fragmented now.

They have no.

Nothing undergirding them.

They have no stable unit that they can then branch out and express themselves in different ways.

It's just all freedom.

The thing with all freedom is that's.

Not freedom, which total is total like that.

It's death really, is what it is, because you need to harness and energy needs harnessing in order to transmute into movement, forward movement, you know, and if it's just anything goes, there's no contrast to, you know, there's no peace without war sort of thing.

You know, there's no war without peace.

You need them both or we don't know what it is.

So if you just.

Like, there's only.

There's only.

I mean, I was a lunatic when I was a kid, you know, Younger, and.

And I played that out.

So I know that that's.

That was what informed me of all of that because I lived a chaotic life.

You know, I was encouraged to be hedonistic when I was younger.

You know, like, you can only stay up for so long on drugs, you know, until it.

It's not doing the thing that you started doing drugs for.

Yeah, exactly.

There's only so many times.

There's only so many times you can fuck three girls in a night or something or like, have sex all night, but it starts to get like.

The pleasure flips.

It's.

It's basically what we've just all talked about.

Everything's full circle.

The pleasure starts becoming pain, you know, because you can't overdo pleasure.

There's only so much amount of pleasure you can have until it becomes painful.

It's literally like when you're hungry.

This is Arthur Schopenhauer, which is essentially the removal of pain is pleasure, and that life is suffering.

For an example, you would think about, if you're hungry, the pleasure is relieving the hunger, but you can't.

You can only eat so much.

It's a need until it becomes redundant, and then you become sick if you keep eating.

So you have to stop.

And it's built into the system that.

That you can't eat any more than you need to to quench that hunger.

And now you're back to life.

You know, the relief is the moment of healing, that moment of hunger.

And so to me, when you stop trying to push that further than it's naturally supposed to go, you start getting into this place of hedonism that then just continually just gets worse and worse.

And like any addict and any addiction.