Transcript: Episode 0046

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Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

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And I'm still woe.

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On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing normalcy bias.

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Basically, the assumption that whatever exists today is inevitable.

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The things that you have are a natural consequence of you just existing.

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And the inherent bias that we have mentally to assume that whatever we have is going to persist.

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Even though intellectually we know that's not the case, there's still a psychological aspect of us making decisions

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and avoiding thinking about things based on, yeah, that's just always going to be there.

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So the reason we're talking about this today is that the reason we want to do it now rather than later is that

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as we look at the state of the world, it's clear that there are some things that are getting worse.

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We all, especially on the dissonant rights, see that stuff, we know what it looks like.

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We're going to talk about some of those details today.

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Before we get into it for fathers, there are always episodes that are maybe have stuff that's not necessarily for kids.

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This one is really an episode that's specifically focused on the duty of a father and a husband and a man.

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And so I don't think there's probably going to be a lot of stuff that kids really even need to hear.

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And frankly, women don't really need to hear either.

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I'm not saying turn it off.

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Just as we get into it, we'll be discussing the nature of the duties of men as it relates to the state of the world

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because we have a particular vocation and a particular mentality as men that's different than women.

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It's different than children.

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And that's how God has situated us for the sake of protecting what is ours, whether it's your neighborhood, your family,

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whatever scale there are things that men are supposed to do that others don't need to worry about.

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Today, we're going to be talking about some of the things that we need to worry about, specifically talking about what you can do to not worry about them.

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And that involves thinking about them, if that makes sense.

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So when we get through some of these topics, we're not going to be giving advice.

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We're not going to go really in depth on prognostication or anything too much.

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But we're going to be talking about some very pessimistic things, just as examples of the inherent normalcy bias that we all carry around every day.

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You assume that when you flip a light switch, the light's going to come on.

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That's normalcy bias.

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We'll get into the definition proper in a moment.

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But the idea that the thing that works is going to keep working is sort of baked into sanity.

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As a normal sane human being, you can't constantly be afraid that everything's going to fall apart.

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Everything's going to vanish behind your back.

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There are horror movies and there are dreams where that sort of thing happens, where you look in one direction and the thing is there.

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But when you look behind you, everything fades and vanishes.

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There's an ephemerality that's nightmarish and we don't want people to be feeling that way.

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So as we discuss the state of the world a little bit and we discuss the vocation of men in the world, we don't want this to be pessimistic, but we want it to be realistic.

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Some of you who are regular listeners, if you know personally that you tend to get so-called blackpilled, we'll be talking about that nomenclature as well.

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If when you hear things, it makes you fret and be distressed and nervous, maybe tune this one out.

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Maybe don't listen to this episode because we don't want to make you anxious.

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The whole point is for men to be able to confront these things without being anxious.

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And so if you know that's just not you, if you know you get wound up, just skip it.

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You can get around to it later when you're in a better place mentally and spiritually.

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We hope that the purpose of doing this, this is kind of a continuation in part of the episode on fear of the Lord.

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We talked about trusting in God for providing for us and the episode we did recently on sweating the small stuff.

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There are things that we can handle and there are things that we can't.

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That's the serenity prayer.

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God grant me the wisdom to differentiate between the things that I can deal with and the things I can.

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And part of what we live through is that you have to triage, you have to figure out, okay, there are these big-ticket macro-scale national calamities.

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And then there's my local community and there's what's going on under my roof with my wife and my kids and my neighbors and my family.

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We're obviously supposed to spend most of our time worried about what's right in front of us.

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That's where God put us when God talks about us being neighbors.

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Our neighbors are those who are immediate and our family is even closer than neighbor.

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Family is your family no matter where they are.

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But in a rightly ordered society, you're probably going to live near your family.

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That's a blessing when that's the case.

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On the other hand, it's necessary for men to worry about bigger ticket stuff, not every man.

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Some men are just equipped for being head down and focus on what's right in front of them.

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Other men are equipped for dealing with macro-scale issues, for dealing with geopolitical issues.

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And I kind of hate the fact that that's so prevalent in our age.

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It shouldn't be if we had an actual godly government.

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Geopolitics would be something that would virtually never cross anyone's minds.

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So I'm not saying this is stuff we need to worry about.

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As though that were a normal thing.

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It's certainly stuff we need to worry about when it's trying to kill us, which is the case today.

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But the idea that the average man would be spending part of his day or even part of his week

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listening to international news and tracking calamities far away, it's dumb.

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It shouldn't be necessary.

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And so on one hand, we live in a society where some of those things are necessary.

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And on the other hand, we have to segregate the big ticket knowledge that we have from the immediate stuff in front of us

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so that we can figure out what to do.

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And sometimes when you look at the big ticket stuff, your realization is simply, I can't do anything.

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And that's fine.

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Maybe at the end of the day, you look at the state of the world and realize, I can't fix that.

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I can't do anything about that.

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Frankly, that's usually the case to some extent, not completely.

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But most of the things that tie up a lot of our cycles when we're looking far away,

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it's just crap that there's nothing you can do about.

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Except when you talk to other men around you and say, hey, this is common.

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We need to be prepared locally.

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And sometimes the rest of what you do is just, I'm not going to worry about it.

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But the reason we're going to talk about it today is that we want to exhort everyone who's listening,

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at least those who are still listening, to actually spend a little bit of time,

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not a lot of time, not dwelling, not obsessing, not fixating,

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but spend a little bit of time thinking about bad things that can happen.

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Thinking about, this is normal, but it's not inevitable.

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Because for a man, that's the cusp of civilization.

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That's that thin veneer between everything's working and everything is crumbling

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or everything is completely disintegrated.

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And the veneers preserved by men just doing their daily stuff.

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It's not that it's inherently fragile.

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It's just that it takes all of us like an orchestra working together civilizationally to keep everything moving.

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And when men stop doing their jobs, when men start being replaced by those who are incapable of doing those jobs,

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things start breaking one by one.

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And so the thing like the electricity always being on that's inevitable,

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ostensibly inevitable in industrialized society soon becomes a rarity when you collapse into the third world.

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And sometimes those are slides.

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Sometimes it's very instant.

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We'll be talking about some scenarios where one or the other could possibly happen to us.

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But we as men, when we're confronted with the possibility of those things,

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we can't become dejected about it.

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We just have to square up against whatever the facts are and say,

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okay, what can I do about this?

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If it's nothing, then take comfort in the fact that you're in God's hands entirely and there's nothing you can do.

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And if there's something you can do, even if it's a small thing, take care of doing that thing.

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And then you put the rest in God's hands.

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And so that's the other part of the serenity prayer.

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Some of it we just leave to God and some of it we can do something about.

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The failure that the modern man frequently has is not wanting to think about those things,

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to want to focus on whatever trivialities are nice distractions, but they're not part of our duties.

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They're part of fun.

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The duty sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes involves taking stock of the situation and figuring out

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what do I need to do to prepare me and mine to confront whatever might go wrong either today or tomorrow

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or 10 years or 50 years from now.

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Maybe the things that ideally if we were planning for things going wrong, if things were going well,

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we would be planning for our grandchildren.

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Instead, really we're planning for like next year, next school year, next harvest season.

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We're looking much closer because things are clearly much more fragile.

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And I hope by the end of this that we'll have given some specific ideas on how to think about this stuff,

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but without making people feel dejected.

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God bless Cory and me with the ability to stare directly into the abyss and not worry about it.

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And I don't say that in terms like, oh, I like seeing whores, I don't.

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Like, you know, I've seen plenty.

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I don't need any more new terrible things on my screen to remind me that things can be terrible.

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But at the same time, when I remember, hey, yeah, things can get really terrible really quickly,

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it doesn't make me sad or dejected.

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It's like, okay, that's one more thing we have to deal with.

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So we're able to talk about these things.

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And it's something that I personally struggle with sometimes communicating with other men, even privately,

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is that because it's very easy for me to look at really bad things getting worse,

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I'm not always sensitive to the emotional effect it can have on other people.

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I try to be, but I can only put myself in someone else's shoes so far.

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So we're going to try to be respectful as we tackle this stuff,

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but we're going to give a frank assessment of things and hopefully you'll come along with us

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and then figure out whatever in your own situation you need to worry about.

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So like I said, we're not going to give a bunch of advice because we don't know your circumstances.

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Your life, your family situation, your environment, your neighborhood,

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completely different than ours in some ways that they're going to matter.

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So there's no one solution for everything, but we all have the same questions.

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And we have a duty to God, to our families, to our neighborhoods and communities

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to just think about these things once in a while so that should bad things happen,

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we can be prepared to confront them like men, not emotionally, not panicky,

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not having no idea what to do, but like, okay, I have a plan and maybe it's a good plan,

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maybe it's a bad plan, at least you have an idea of what you do next when something goes wrong.

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And so we'll start off with a bit of this general matters definitions and then a little bit of psychology

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to give some of the groundwork for the discussion in this episode.

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First, I'll give a working definition of normalcy bias,

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since that is an important concept to understand for this episode and just generally in life.

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So normalcy bias is the tendency of individuals to downplay or ignore often clear evidence

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or warning signs that perhaps significant change may be likely,

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and thus to fail to prepare adequately for the possibility of those changes.

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An example of those changes would be a disaster, for instance.

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Now psychologically, there are a number of reasons for this and also a concept that I'm going to explain

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because it relates to this, it's important to understand sort of how the human mind processes information in a general sense.

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And so first to note on information processing itself,

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without active mitigation, most individuals will process information that falls outside of their experience

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or controverts something they already believe, particularly a deeply held belief, by ignoring or downplaying it.

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This is what feeds into that normalcy bias, because if you ignore this information, if you downplay the information,

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you are not going to properly prepare for what that information indicates could happen.

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This leads into and is related to a general resistance to change that we see in human psychology and in our thinking patterns.

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We have a subconscious or even unconscious assumption that things will simply continue as they always have.

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And so we have a resistance to seeing the potential for change, particularly great change.

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And this is that concept I was going to explain. It's called Bayesian updating, there are a number of other terms for it,

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but they all involve the word Bayesian pretty much.

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The human mind more or less works on this system that we call Bayesian updating.

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This is a probabilistic calculation. It's not a conscious probabilistic calculation, at least not for most people.

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And so don't think that, oh, well, I'm not constantly running an analysis, a statistical analysis of the things I've understood,

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so I don't do this. No, this is largely subconscious.

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And how this works is your mind takes previous likelihood calculations based on previous information, previous inputs,

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integrates new information into that, and then produces a new probability.

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This is very simple. It's just you have a prior probability, you integrate new information, you have a posterior probability.

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This is a rough system, it's not entirely precise, and it is open to error.

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You can, of course, make errors in judgment, we all know that, we've all made them.

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And one of the problems with this system is that outliers are inherently undervalued or overvalued if you happen to be psychologically prone to, say, anxiety.

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And so it requires a degree of thought when you encounter an outlier to properly integrate that using this Bayesian updating.

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And, of course, there's also the concept of uncertainty or a confidence level for those who are more familiar with statistics,

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which basically just means whether or not, because you're the one making the assessment,

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whether or not you find the information you're using to be reliable, to be certain.

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And this, of course, leads to a certain form of inertia, certain kind of inertia behind things you already believe.

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Because the things you believe have this pedigree behind them.

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They have many years or even decades of proof, and you've built up this certain conception of this is how things operate in this subset of reality in my life.

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And so new information finds it very hard to overcome that inertia.

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But sometimes the new information is critical to understand.

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And so that's where this takes a bit of thought.

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More than just allowing this subconscious system to run through and do its job, you need to think about these issues.

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So if you encounter something that runs entirely counter to what you previously believed,

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or is an outlier, an extreme example, which an outlier for those who are unaware just means something that is very statistically unlikely.

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That's the rough definition of an outlier.

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And so if you encounter that, you need to think about how you integrate that into what you already believe,

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not just toss it to the side as, ah, that's an outlier, which is indeed what we do sometimes in statistics.

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Often that is one of the definitions of an outlier. It's a thing that you exclude.

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You can't really necessarily do that in life, because some of the most important data points are going to be outliers.

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Because we're talking about, in this episode, things that are significant changes.

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That doesn't mean they're likely. They could be, in fact, extremely unlikely.

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But just because they're unlikely doesn't mean you don't plan for them.

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In fact, those are often the things for which you should be planning,

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because those are the things that if they crop up and you have not planned for them, turn into disasters.

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Now it's important to explain some of why we have these systems and why they interact in this way,

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why we think in this way. And a big part of it is psychological comfort.

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Human beings, by and large, like the status quo.

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Now there are many people who will contend that they like change, like a change of scenery, they like novelty, etc.

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They really don't, generally speaking.

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Human beings are by and large creatures of habit.

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And so that's one of the most important things in life, actually, just as a side note.

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You need to have a routine in your life, because that is not only how we learn things,

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it is how we actually manage to get things done. You need a routine.

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And so you wake up at a certain time, you go to sleep at a certain time, you eat meals at a certain time,

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you do certain things on certain days. That's part of how you keep moving forward in life.

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Now, when I say the status quo, it's important to recognize I am not saying necessarily the status quo as it exists today,

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because obviously, most of those listening to this podcast do not like the status quo.

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By the status quo, I mean the way that your personal life generally proceeds on a day-to-day basis.

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There may be things you do not like, but by and large, you are going to psychologically prefer the status quo,

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certainly to some enormous change.

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Because in the unknown, there's that huge risk.

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The human mind does not typically like the unknown, because the unknown cannot be calculated.

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And if you can't calculate it, it makes it difficult to prepare, and part of what your brain is constantly doing

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is running alternatives, running through scenarios, figuring out, what would I do if X or Y or Z?

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That's how you plan for the future, even if it's something as trivial as, how do I exit this room if there's a fire?

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Or how do I exit this room if I need to use the restroom?

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That's still running alternatives in your mind.

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Now, some of you may experience this. I believe that the studies show it's something north of 50%, but perhaps not by much.

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Lapelle du Vide, the call of the void, where you have a sudden transitory thought about jumping off a bridge or something like that.

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Now, of course, there are times where that is possibly the temptation of a demon,

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but there are other times where it's just your mind running through an alternative and going, what would I do if X happened?

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And so the reason that these unknowns are uncomfortable is because your brain can't really do anything with them, if they are a true unknown.

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And so there is that psychological comfort in the status quo.

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And so, generally speaking, we as human beings are psychologically resistant to significant change, particularly unexpected or unpredictable change.

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And part of that is just that it induces that anxiety and that stress from being unknown.

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In the modern world, we have an additional aspect, and that is the media.

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And we could also class social influences into this because social influences in the modern era are more expansive.

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Certainly, in the past, you did not have Twitter, so you couldn't be influenced by someone 5,000 miles away.

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He had no relevance to you. You'd probably never meet the man. You probably would never know his name.

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You would, of course, have social influences, though, because you'd have your family, your church family, your friends, your village.

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Maybe the next village over, whatever. You'd have the people around you as your social influence.

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But today we also have the media influence.

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And the modern media works essentially on a cycle of normalcy and crisis.

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And it depends on what they are trying to achieve, which is to say it depends on what those who direct them wish to achieve.

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As to what they say and which one of these two tools they use at a given time.

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Potentially, you'll have different outlets using different ones.

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Often, they will all use the same one, and you can see fun little montages of them all using the exact same wording.

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But they use this cycle to exploit human psychology.

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Because if they reinforce normalcy, particularly if they attempt to reinforce their changes to what was otherwise normal in the past as what is now normal,

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they can bias people in favor of maintaining the status quo as it has been created by the media and those who control the media.

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And crisis, of course, is used in order to push forward in their sense of progress.

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And so if you watch the media, particularly the mainstream media, you need to bear in mind these little psychological tools that they are using against you to manipulate you.

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And the two big ones again are your sense of normalcy and crisis.

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Of course, there's also group think where if you get a group of people together, they often make worse decisions than individuals for various reasons.

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That's a tangential issue, but it is obviously related to this.

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And so that's basically the psychology foundation of this, the basic groundwork upon which you can build and understand what we're discussing in this episode.

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And I already gave essentially the general recommendation for how you avoid these issues, how you solve these problems.

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And that is quite frankly, you simply have to actually think.

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I know that's not a simple matter because actually actively thinking about things is something that many men, many others simply do not do in their lives.

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You go through life and you simply exist.

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You react as necessary to external stimuli to things that come your way, but you don't necessarily actively process these things and figure out why did that happen?

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What was the reason for that? What should I do in response?

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And when it comes to these matters, particularly as men, we do not have an alternative. We have to think about them.

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As Woe said, there are some issues that unfortunately the average man has to think about these days, some geopolitical issues.

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When those really are issues about which the average man should never have to think.

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If we had a godly prince, he would handle international affairs and the average man would never think about them because they would not be relevant to him.

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If you're a shoemaker, you don't need to know what's going on in Ukraine.

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That's not relevant to you. If you are a plumber, you don't really need to know what's going on in China. That's not relevant to you.

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Unfortunately, because of the form of government we have and the media and various other influences, these things are relevant today for men generally.

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Yes, of course, it's to varying degrees.

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What's going on in your town, what's happening with your neighbor is significantly orders of magnitude more relevant to you and you should spend more time and thought on it than what is happening half the world away.

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But what is happening half the world away is still relevant, again, because of the circumstances under which we live.

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And so, again, the basic recommendation as men actually think about these issues, actually think as you go through your daily life.

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Why am I doing these things? Why are other men doing these things? What could happen? What would I do if that did happen?

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The very specific current event that is one of the precipitates for us doing this episode is the opening of the spigots of Africans invading every white nation on Earth.

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Just in the last few weeks, really, we're seeing tens of thousands of military-age African men streaming into seemingly almost every white nation on the planet.

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This is an act of war. If you listen to our episodes on race, you understand that they are not here as refugees.

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That's part of what Corey was describing before as the media rapper of the sweetness on the medicine so that you don't taste it going down.

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When they call military-age Africans refugees, they're disguising the fact that these are rapists and murderers who are here to conduct war.

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And as soon as they arrive, they begin raping and murdering and conducting war. That is why they are coming.

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Those men are bio weapons being shipped into our lands in order to destroy them. That's why it's happening.

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And so when you look on the news, if you haven't been paying attention politically for the last few years, and again, ideally you shouldn't have to.

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It shouldn't matter. But the reason that in your small town where you're head down focused on your local community issues, tens of thousands of Africans streaming across some border matter is that the men who want to see your family dead are shipping these rapists and murderers to your communities.

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These people are being sent to places that are completely incapable of handling them. No one should have to handle them because they have no business being there in the first place.

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But when they're shipped and they're delivered, just like D-Day, they're being delivered in order for them to deliver the payload of destruction that comes with wherever they go.

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Again, we're talking about military-age men. It's almost not ever families. Families shouldn't be coming either. But at least you can make the made up case that those are refugees somehow.

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When military-age men are coming across, the normalcy bias response is what we saw last week from James Woods on Twitter.

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He said, oh, look at all this voter fraud that's coming. These guys are going to be voting Democrat. That's precisely the sort of response that we don't want people to be having.

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The reason that's normalcy bias, it's thinking, oh, a foreigner is coming in here. I'm afraid that they might vote illegally and that might shift the balance in Congress or whatever.

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Not the point. When millions of military-age Africans pour into this country, it is in order to do what they do wherever they go.

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And that is crime. It's a violent crime. Again, you can go back and list of the episodes on race if you forgot about that, or if you don't believe any of the statistics that have been gathered globally ever since we first encountered those people.

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That's what happens.

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Stonecore is mostly a theology podcast. This isn't really a theology episode because it doesn't need to be. This is about the reality on the ground and what we have to do in the face of things coming.

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We're talking about the normalcy bias because if you think that today is going to be just like it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago, when you see tens of thousands of military-age African men on trains being shipped into the heartland of the United States,

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you don't have a frame of reference for that because, as Cory was saying, the normalcy bias, when we see these things happening, if we don't have a frame of reference, the easiest thing to do is just throw it away, say, I don't think that's happening,

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or you stick it into some old outdated box like voter fraud. Yeah, voter fraud is real. Not the concern with rapists and murderers coming across the border.

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You don't worry about how they're going to illegally vote. You worry about them destroying your neighborhoods.

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As they do, as we see all across Europe and in many small towns in this country, when they show up, they destroy the towns.

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That's the intended result. The intended result is not, oh, voter fraud or something else. It is to displace and destroy the local communities.

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It's a stated goal of these people. We're not going to get into details of that. If you think that's crazy, okay. It's a fact. It's long established.

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We've talked in past episodes about the books that the people doing this stuff have written talking about what they plan to do with these populations.

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Now that we're doing it and we're seeing it, we're seeing most men either ignore it or just shout impotently or say incredibly stupid things like, oh, voter fraud.

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Right now, there's really nothing else that can be done because, again, these are government matters. The government should be the one preventing it.

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In this case, it's the government doing it. And as podcasters, we're not going to tell anybody what to do to the contrary.

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Those are private matters that will be sorted out elsewhere. We're not going to have any part of it.

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What we do want individuals who hear our voices to think about is that this is one of the existential threats that my nation faces.

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Perhaps my community will face where one day you have, you know, there's a town in Italy of a few thousand people and it more than doubled in size overnight

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when a huge number of African military-age rapists and murderers were disgorged on their chores and immediately started destroying everything.

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That could happen to your town too. And if you live in a nice town, that is exactly what they want to happen.

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And we're not going to get the reasons for that because, again, this isn't, we don't even want to talk about those specifics apart from saying that this is how quickly things can change.

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You wake up one morning and it's peaceful and it's quiet and you wake up the next morning and everything's on fire.

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And that's why I said at the beginning, this isn't really an episode for women and children because they shouldn't have to think about that.

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There's nothing that went around on Twitter recently where a woman said, I've been married 30 years and I just learned that my husband is constantly scanning for threats wherever he goes.

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He's always scanning for trouble, looking out for trouble. And she was a maid. She had no idea.

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And so she asked and got millions of impressions. All the guys were like, yeah, of course. And the women were like, what?

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That's how men are supposed to be. We are supposed to be scanning for threats.

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If you are a man and you are completely cavalier about sitting with your back to the door in a restaurant, you're doing it wrong.

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Your dad failed. You failed to teach you properly how to assess threats.

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And by that, I don't mean live in paranoia, live in fear. I don't mean everyone should think he's John Wick.

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If nothing else, you can at least pay attention. You can at least have your head on a swivel and look out for what might be happening because the normal, everything's hunky-dory, everything's quiet, everything's peaceful.

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That's not free. The peace and quiet that we enjoy is not free. It's not inevitable.

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It's something that is produced by generations of men guarding the borders of big scale and small scale, saying we don't want negative elements in our town.

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And when you have enough of that over a long enough time, you can relax more just as you can relax in your house more than you would relax when you're out in public.

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But it is a duty of a man to choose when he relaxes. It shouldn't be your default state. You should have a time and a place where you can relax.

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And that's why relaxation is differentiated from a normal state of being. Normally, a man should have a higher degree of awareness.

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And again, I'm confident there are some men who hear that and think, wow, what a paranoid thing to say. Don't try to psychologize this.

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I'm sorry that your dad failed you as a man if he didn't teach you how to understand the true nature of the world, but it's not a peaceful, quiet place.

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It's a place where there are some men who are evil and intend to do harm and have no problem doing harm to you and yours.

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And so whatever capable response you're apt to raise against that is beside the point.

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It's not about training for anything in particular. You at least have a duty to watch your family's back.

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You should be the one looking out so that they can relax because your wife and your kids, they should be able to be completely relaxed in your presence knowing that you are looking out for them.

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If you're not looking out for them, then yeah, they're going to have to worry.

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And so when I said at the beginning, this isn't really for women. It's not that these things don't hurt everyone they do.

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I mean, the reason for men being concerned is to protect the women and children because that is our duty.

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And women today have to worry about this stuff. Women are taking self-deception and fence classes and other things, and I want a world where they don't have to worry about it.

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That's a long-term goal. Like there are a lot of problems we have to solve to get there.

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So I'm not saying anything negative about women who pay attention to this stuff.

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I'm saying that it's a problem that you even have to think about it.

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If you as a woman have to be engaged in politics, it means that the men have failed.

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And that's my concern. I'm concerned about men failing to do the duty that we have from God to our families and to our communities and to our nations.

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And correctly assessing threats should always be going on in big ways and in small ways.

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As Corey said, with a godly prince, you won't have big threats that the local guy has to worry about.

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Like short of some completely out of the blue calamity, that doesn't happen.

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Short of the more showing up and invading, you don't have to worry about that.

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And yet today, the invasions are coming with the help of the men who were put in charge of protecting us.

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And so as individual men, we're faced with something that's, I don't want to use the term unprecedented,

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but we don't really have a modern model for what men and communities are supposed to do when they're foreign invaders on our soil,

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particularly in the United States.

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We have been blessed by God with almost total isolation from physical enemies,

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which is why they have to be shipped from thousands of miles away in order to begin to do their harm.

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And simultaneously, we're being told both by the media and by the government and by our churches all in concert,

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welcome the refugee, welcome the helpless, they're downtrodden.

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Don't mind the fact that they're rapists and murderers, you need to help them.

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You love Jesus, don't you?

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Well, that's why we're talking about this.

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That's why this is a subject for a religion podcast because some of these things that are being done civilizationally

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are being done by evil men in God's name.

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And that's something we talk about a lot.

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There's nothing more really to say here except for the fact that when you have a physical enemy,

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you deal with him first as a physical enemy.

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You don't worry about the spiritual primarily because it's the same reason as if you're on an airplane

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and they tell you if the oxygen mask drops, you don't put the oxygen mask on the man next to you before your own

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because he has a fighting chance to put it on his mouth too.

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If you look out for yourself first in that one instantaneous moment,

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if you put the mask on yourself first, it keeps you conscious so you can help the man next to you.

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If you act self-sacrificially in that one moment and try to help the guy next to you when he's having trouble,

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maybe you both become unconscious due to lack of oxygen and then you may both die

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or if you had looked after yourself first and then you help him, you can both survive.

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And so that sort of triage when we're talking about physical versus spiritual threats, the same thing is in play.

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If someone is still alive, we can deal with the spiritual problems later.

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We can't deal with the spiritual problems with someone who's dead.

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And so keeping people healthy and alive and safe is paramount.

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As long as you draw breath, there's hope.

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When you get murdered and you weren't baptized and you weren't a Christian, that's the end.

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So there's a triage even in this life for Christians of when and where we're concerned about things.

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And we must first and foremost be concerned about helping the welfare of our neighbor.

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The parable of the Good Samaritan was not about spreading the gospel, the man.

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It was about helping a man who is nearly dead.

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You take care of him, you bandage him up, and you take care of the rest after that.

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If someone is facing a mortal threat, that is the most serious thing.

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So all this is fundamentally about triage.

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All these things matter, they're all important, but they're not all important at exactly the same time.

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And it's not saying this isn't important to separately say this is important.

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It's saying we have to deal with this first and then the other thing.

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And when you get that backwards, you're set up for achieving the very results of those men who sent these people to do these things to us in the first place.

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Dumvita est spes est.

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You happen to make me think of a Latin phrase, while there is life, there is hope.

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It's the sentiment you were advancing there.

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But to give people a framework for this, I know that we sort of said this was not necessarily a theology episode,

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but let's deal with some scripture and some of the history surrounding it to give you a framework for what is happening today.

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Between the years approximately 900 and 600 BC, the Assyrian Empire relocated somewhere between five and six estimates vary,

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but somewhere between five and six million people within the borders of their empire.

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And they did this for a number of reasons.

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One reason was to disperse technology throughout the empire, particularly agricultural,

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but another and a more salient reason, probably the biggest reason for this mass relocation,

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was to break the will to resist of various peoples in their empire,

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because the Assyrian Empire encompassed a number of different nations.

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And how this ties into scripture is that one of those nations was the northern kingdom of Israel,

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otherwise known as just Israel, when you divide between Israel and Judah.

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And so the ten northern tribes were part of the Assyrian Empire,

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and the Assyrians forcibly relocated much of the population of Israel out of Israel

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and relocated others from outside Israel into Israel.

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And they did this specifically to break the will of the Israelite population to resist.

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And they succeeded.

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What they did was they miscegenated the Israelite population, the northern kingdom,

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the ten northern tribes out of existence.

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They made the Samaritans by mixing the Israelites with other peoples.

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That was their goal because it made it easier for them to rule over these populations

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because they were no longer cohesive.

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These populations were no longer united, tempted to bring up the transcendentals again

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because we're dealing of course with unity, typically numbered as the fourth or the fifth.

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But these populations were no longer united, and so it was easier to rule them.

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This is the same thing that is done on a smaller scale in businesses.

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So for instance, if a business hires a bunch of employees from a local town,

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well if the business owner also lives in the town then perhaps he will treat the employees better

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because they are in fact his immediate neighbors.

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But if these people, these employees, are all neighbors, they all live together,

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they attend church together, their children play together, they are going to cooperate better.

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Which yes, this does mean most likely they will organize and form something akin to

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or even actually a union.

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And they are going to get better treatment because of that.

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I don't intend to get into the politics of unionization and that in this episode, that's not my point.

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My point is that when you have this cohesive workforce,

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they are able to get better treatment and if necessary demand better treatment from the employer

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then if they were not unified.

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And the reason this is relevant is that we see businesses exploiting this today.

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The reason that you often see such large corporations sponsoring all of these visas

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bringing in now at this point millions of people from foreign countries,

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millions of alien people into this country and various other countries around the world

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is that if you do that, you get cheaper labor.

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Because they will not have that cohesiveness, there will be a lack of unity,

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they will not be able to oppose what you impose on them.

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It works the same for countries, for empires.

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Now of course there is the aspect today where the overarching goal is the actual destruction of nations.

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But part of it is of course just simple greed because you have different players in different parts of this story.

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The industrialists, the capitalists have different incentives and different goals

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from those who have perhaps grander schemes, but they work along the same lines.

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And so when you think about what is happening, as a Christian you very much have a framework

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within which to think about this it's given to you in Scripture.

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The ten northern tribes of Israel no longer exist incidentally.

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This is one of the reasons that you cannot read the list of tribes in Revelation as being literal Israelites

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because the ten northern tribes are gone.

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They no longer exist.

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The only tribes that remain are from the southern kingdom from the kingdom of Judah

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and it was not enslaved by the Assyrians and shuffled around and miscegenated out of existence.

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And so as a Christian, again, you have a framework for this, you see it in Scripture.

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Why did it happen?

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It was punishment for the wickedness of the northern tribes.

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Yes of course there was also the Babylonian captivity for the southern tribes, but it was not as destructive.

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Basically exclusively due to the fact that God had made certain promises regarding the line of David.

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That's for another episode perhaps though.

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As punishment for the wickedness of the northern tribes, God utterly destroyed them as a people.

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We see that happening today.

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And I would say yes, it is fair to interpret that as a punishment for the wickedness of our nation.

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As Christians, it is our duty, particularly as men, to prepare for these things.

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Can we necessarily on our own reverse course?

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No of course not.

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We can pray that God will show us mercy.

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We can pray that God will create repentance in our fellow man, in our brothers, in this nation

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so that he will turn from his anger and his wrath.

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But in the interim, we have to deal with things as they exist.

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We have to remain firm in the belief that we will be able to see our way through this.

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That God will again turn to us, that we will be victorious to be entirely blunt.

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We have to remain firm in that belief, but we have to do that while looking square at the facts.

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While not denying the reality of the hard road ahead, and of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

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Because if you live a delusional life, if you metaphorically, symbolically stick your head in the sand,

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you're simply not a man, because that is not what men are called to do.

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Men are called to do a number of things, and among those, chief among those, first and foremost,

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the only possible thing that could even be considered to rank higher, but not prior to,

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would be instructing those in your care with regard to the faith.

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But the highest duty in terms of priority is the physical protection of those entrusted to your care.

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Because again, as Woe said, if you do not have that physical well-being, if you do not have that physical security,

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you cannot address the spiritual needs.

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And if you don't address the spiritual needs, you have utterly failed as ahead.

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And I think it's important when we're looking at the scriptural example that Corey just gave,

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is that whether or not this is punishment for God or something is completely beside the point for the purposes of this episode.

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Because the point is that our normalcy bias is that I would never do that.

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I would never try to wipe out another nation by causing them to be overrun by aliens who would breed them out.

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That's not how I conduct my life.

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The normalcy bias is to believe, because I wouldn't do that and I haven't seen it done, that can't exist.

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And so when I see things on the TV and in my church bulletins and from the podium at the White House,

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that are all pointed in that direction, I don't believe it, because that can't be.

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I'm pointing to scripture and saying, well, yeah, this is how warfare has been conducted for thousands of years.

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And by the way, this is how you fall under God's judgment is a historical point.

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You don't need to believe in God to believe that this happens.

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The Soviet Union did exactly the same thing.

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It's a reason that there are so many Russians in what is today Ukraine.

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It's a reason that there were so many Germans in Poland.

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They moved there because it was their territory.

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And then later on when the borders moved, the people were still there.

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So this has always been a part of conquering a place.

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And today we are to being conquered by these people.

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Now, the difference is that those who are being sent to subjugate are not the conquerors.

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They're bioweapons.

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They're being sent by others because the goal is not replacement.

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The goal is functionally just destruction.

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And that's what we see playing out.

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So it's something that if you'd followed me on Twitter for a while,

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one of the key giveaways that I'm on a Twitter account is that pretty soon I'm going to talk about the Stockdale paradox.

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Admiral James Stockdale was a highly decorated naval officer.

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He received a congressional medal of honor for what he did in Vietnam.

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He was very well respected.

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The name is known by some because if you're old enough, you might remember when Ross Perot ran for president in 1992

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and got Bill Clinton elected with 43% of the popular vote.

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It was because Perot ran and Stockdale was his running mate.

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SNL lampoon Stockdale and kind of made fun of him.

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He said at the vice presidential debate, who am I, why am I here?

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I think it was Phil Hartman who parodied that and just kind of made the guy seem like a joke.

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He was a hero.

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He was an incredibly inspirational guy and it's a shame that the last memory the most people have of him is that because he was amazing.

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On a read here, a description of the Stockdale paradox to give you an idea of the mindset that we're trying to share with you

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because this is fundamentally a Christian message and it's also fundamentally just a basic human message for success

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even in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

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The Stockdale paradox is named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was a United States military officer held captive for eight years during the Vietnam War.

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Stockdale was tortured more than 20 times by his captors and never had much reason to believe he would survive the present camp

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and someday get to see his wife again.

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And yet as Stockdale told Collins, he never lost faith during his ordeal, quote,

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I never doubted not only that I would get out but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience in the defining moment of my life,

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which in retrospect I would not trade.

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Then comes the paradox.

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While Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable, he noted it was always the most optimistic of his prison mates who failed to make it out of their life.

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They were the ones who said we're going to be out by Christmas and Christmas would come and Christmas would go and they'd say we're going to make it out by Easter

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and Easter would come and Easter would go and then Thanksgiving and it would be Christmas again and they died of a broken heart.

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What the optimist failed to do was confront the reality of their situation.

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They preferred the ostrich approach, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for the difficulties to go away.

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That self-delusion might have made it easier on them in the short term,

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but when they were eventually forced to face reality, it had become too much and they couldn't handle it.

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Stockdale approached adversity with a very different mindset.

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He accepted the reality of his situation.

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He knew he was in hell, but rather than bury his head in the sand, he stepped up and did everything he could to lift the morale

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and prolong the lives of his fellow prisoners.

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He created a tapping code so that they could communicate with each other.

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He developed a milestone system that helped him deal with torture

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and he said intelligence information to his wife hidden in the seemingly innocent letters he wrote.

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Collins and his team observed a similar mindset in the good-to-great companies.

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They labeled it the Stockdale paradox and described it like so.

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You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end regardless of the difficulties

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and at the same time, you must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

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We're talking about normalcy bias today because the brutal facts are the facts that men like James Woods

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can't confront the fact that they're being overrun militarily because he's close to 80.

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He's an arch-boomer. He's very intelligent. He's a genius. He's a really smart guy.

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I'm not speaking disrespectfully of him, but all he can process things in terms of is what he has seen in the past.

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And because he's never seen this, he's trying to pigeonhole it into the political paradigm that he can't understand.

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This is something we talked about in the Generations episode a few weeks back that there are certain things

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that previous generations, if they're old enough, their experience is so alien to our own,

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they're younger that when they try to give advice, it's well-intentioned advice.

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In their day, it may have even been good advice, but when confronted with the current facts,

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if they deny them, as Cory was describing earlier, where you receive new information and then just throw it out because it doesn't fit,

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and so James Woods sees train loads of military-age rapists and murderers and says,

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well, no, voter fraud. They're going to vote Democrat illegally. Not my concern. It shouldn't be your concern.

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Regardless of what you think about the situation, you need to confront the fact that there's something happening today that's never happened.

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There are millions of people being imported into our lands in a way that's never happened before.

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And the guys who are screaming about politics, who are screaming about the law, who are screaming about what's not fair

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are doing that because they're not ready to confront the fact that these are military-age males.

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And that means only one thing. The fact that they didn't bring guns with them is irrelevant.

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They can very easily be armed, and frankly, they don't even need to be because as long as people get thrown in prison for resisting,

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they can do whatever they're going to do without needing any particular military equipment.

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That's a brutal fact. That's a brutal reality to face. It's an unprecedented one, and I don't blame most men for not wanting to think about it.

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I don't want to think about it all the time. I don't think about it all the time.

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As I see this stuff come across the transom, for me personally, it just fits in with the paradigm that I already had in mind for the current state of affairs.

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So if I were deluded, then that would be confirmation bias, but it's not. I'm right. This is what's going on.

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I don't want others who are listening and looking at this stuff and considering it to do either the optimists in Stockdale's scenario or the pessimists did.

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See, the optimists are what today we call white pillars.

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There were some useful things that came out of the matrix, but it's really only shorthand.

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The idea that, quote, I am a white pillar is just nonsense. You're a man in a situation. You have imperfect information.

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You have imperfect, impure motives in some cases. You try to get all that as good as you can, but you know it's never going to be perfect.

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Then you try to make a plan as best you can.

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It's entirely appropriate to be optimistic in the sense that you believe that you will prevail for the sake of your family, for your community, for your church

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and because you believe it's what God wants for you. That's appropriate.

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What is going to set you up for failure is if, when confronted with a brutal reality, you say, I'm a white pillar, it's fine.

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I don't accept your negative frame. I don't accept your black pilling. That's nonsense. These are just facts.

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It's literally happening right before our eyes.

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There are millions of hours of footage of millions of men streaming across the border.

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I say millions because it's on TikTok, it's on YouTube. You shouldn't watch it all. You should just watch enough to know, yeah, it's happening and it's real and it's of concern.

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So whatever concerns you have, knowing that it's real is important.

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I don't want guys falling into this categorization trap to say, well, yeah, there's new information, but that doesn't fit with my black pill view or my white pill view.

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Maybe something good happens and you say, well, I'm black pilled. Am I going to buy that? That's retarded. Cut that out. Don't be like that.

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The attitude that you have and the emotions that you feel when you're receiving new information is one thing.

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But the notion that your root of sanity is in your identity as a white pillar is setting you up for failure. That's not a foundation.

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As Christians, we know what our foundation is. It's hope in God. It's hope in His promises. It's hope in eternal life and in resurrection.

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And in this life, we know that when we obey Him, good things will happen and we know that when we disobey Him, we should expect nothing but horrors.

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Right now, civilizationally, we are in a state of disobeying Him and seeing nothing but unlimited horrors.

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And so for me, that's not surprising because it fits with what I already knew.

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Some people don't look at things like that. And again, I don't want guys to spend a lot of time dwelling on the negative.

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That's not the point. It's not to be negative about stuff. It's just to be realistic and to say, yep, this is really bad.

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And if something comes along that's really bad news and it doesn't fit in any of your existing boxes, you need to find a new box.

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You need to figure out how to incorporate that new information. That's synthesis. That's thinking.

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When a man thinks he's able to incorporate new information into his existing worldview, even it means that he needs to make room.

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Even if something has to change, even if he has to have an entirely new section of his mind to accommodate this thing.

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But what a man should not do is say, oh, that's nothing. That's nonsense. I don't believe any of that crap. It's a PSYOP.

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It's CGI. It's not even real. They're using Wettedworks to digitally insert those guys. There's nobody at the border. Don't worry about it.

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There are people who talk like that because that's easier for them than confronting the brutal reality.

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When you take the Stockdale approach and say, look, this is real. I trust that we're going to prevail in the end.

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I trust in God to preserve us. But right now, here's what we're facing on the ground.

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So all the good things we have, they're not inevitable. They're fragile and they're gifts.

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And many of them are miracles. They're given to us by God.

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And when you flip the light switch and the light doesn't come on, because it turns out that maybe it's a temporary glitch,

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or maybe the power station was knocked offline for months, it's another smaller part of this episode that men should be thinking about.

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If the status quo today is gone tomorrow, even if it's gone for one day or three days or a week, what's next?

01:00:01.000 --> 01:00:10.000
And that's one of the things that we want you to take out of this episode is if I'm used to this normal life that I have today,

01:00:10.000 --> 01:00:18.000
and then some part of it just vanishes. One of the reasons we did this episode now is that I think at some point, not too distant future,

01:00:18.000 --> 01:00:24.000
the internet's going to go away. You're not going to be able to hear us anymore. And it's going to be at least your problems.

01:00:24.000 --> 01:00:30.000
I'm not worried about people not being able to listen to some stupid podcast when they're fighting for their lives.

01:00:30.000 --> 01:00:40.000
But it's important for us to get people thinking about this now while someone can still hear us, because maybe it'll help someone's situation later on

01:00:40.000 --> 01:00:45.000
when they remember something that we said and it cheers them up or keeps them in the faith or whatever.

01:00:45.000 --> 01:00:50.000
I think that when those things go out, I don't want you to be disarmed. I don't want you to be terrified.

01:00:50.000 --> 01:00:56.000
If you wake up tomorrow and the lights don't come on, and that only lasts for three days, at the beginning you don't know.

01:00:56.000 --> 01:01:03.000
But what do you do? What is your next step if there's no electricity for one day, for two days, for three days?

01:01:03.000 --> 01:01:08.000
What is your next step if the internet goes out and it doesn't come back for three days or for a week?

01:01:08.000 --> 01:01:14.000
Again, we're not going to give specific guidance because I don't know. You're going to do what's appropriate for you.

01:01:14.000 --> 01:01:21.000
What I want you to do is to be in a situation that Stockdale was clearly in going into prison camp.

01:01:21.000 --> 01:01:29.000
He already had enough centering in himself and in his faith in God that when he was confronted by that situation,

01:01:29.000 --> 01:01:33.000
he had a foundation from which to build other things.

01:01:33.000 --> 01:01:39.000
If the lights go out or the internet goes out or something worse than that, if there's no food at the grocery store for a week,

01:01:39.000 --> 01:01:45.000
you should already have thought about that. You should already know, okay, the power goes out.

01:01:45.000 --> 01:01:50.000
If it's out for an hour, maybe you do one thing. If it's out for six hours, you do a different thing.

01:01:50.000 --> 01:01:55.000
If it's out for a day, you do a third thing. You should just have some idea in mind.

01:01:55.000 --> 01:02:00.000
And again, when we're talking about planning, the plans may fail. You try to have a good plan.

01:02:00.000 --> 01:02:06.000
You hope it's going to work. At least have something in mind. And then if that fails, what's next?

01:02:06.000 --> 01:02:13.000
Because one of the great comforts in a stressful situation is practice and planning.

01:02:13.000 --> 01:02:18.000
It's the reason in the military, they do so many emergency drills.

01:02:18.000 --> 01:02:23.000
They rigorously drill over and over and over again exactly what they're going to do in an emergency.

01:02:23.000 --> 01:02:32.000
Because by simulating the disaster and getting you used to all the things that you mechanically do with your body and with your mind and with your voice,

01:02:32.000 --> 01:02:41.000
as you go through those motions repetitiously, when you get to the point that there's an actual emergency and you're actually in physical jeopardy,

01:02:41.000 --> 01:02:49.000
if it becomes a rote response bodily, if it's already familiar to you, I run here, I grab this hose, I go over there, I do this.

01:02:49.000 --> 01:02:57.000
If that's already ingrained in you from repetition and from thinking about it, then it's easier to deal with the additional stress of,

01:02:57.000 --> 01:03:00.000
I have to put this fire out or everyone dies.

01:03:00.000 --> 01:03:07.000
So we can't give you advice and we can't help you succeed or fail in some emergency situation.

01:03:07.000 --> 01:03:13.000
What we're trying to tell you is that if you think about it now, when there's time, when there's no stress,

01:03:13.000 --> 01:03:21.000
when you can have peace and quiet and can do what you need to do to just work through mentally, what do I do if X, Y, or Z happens?

01:03:21.000 --> 01:03:25.000
In the event that X, Y, or Z happen, you have a plan.

01:03:25.000 --> 01:03:28.000
You have something that you can fall back on and try.

01:03:28.000 --> 01:03:30.000
And again, maybe it's going to work, maybe it's going to fail.

01:03:30.000 --> 01:03:32.000
That's not even the point.

01:03:32.000 --> 01:03:34.000
Obviously you want a plan that's going to succeed.

01:03:34.000 --> 01:03:39.000
There are a lot of people that talk about a lot of different strategies for a lot of different emergencies to help give guidance

01:03:39.000 --> 01:03:43.000
so that you don't have to think of every possibility because a lot of these things are pretty specialized.

01:03:43.000 --> 01:03:51.000
We're not going to give those specific pieces of advice because we're not experts and you can find plenty elsewhere and we don't know your situation.

01:03:51.000 --> 01:03:59.000
But I can tell you with absolute certainty that if you do not think about the possibilities of things going wrong, the improbable things,

01:03:59.000 --> 01:04:07.000
when the improbable happens, and it's inevitable that the improbable will happen, on a long enough timeline the bad thing comes.

01:04:07.000 --> 01:04:10.000
It's part of how people get burned.

01:04:10.000 --> 01:04:15.000
Stuff that seems improbable suddenly it shows up and everyone's like, wow, how could that possibly happen?

01:04:15.000 --> 01:04:20.000
And another part of normalcy bias is sticking too long to your guns.

01:04:20.000 --> 01:04:25.000
When all the information says no, it's dead and gone.

01:04:25.000 --> 01:04:30.000
The reality that I believed in yesterday is gone and it's not coming back.

01:04:30.000 --> 01:04:38.000
There are various things about our current civilization that are going to run their course in our lifetimes, personally I think probably in this decade.

01:04:38.000 --> 01:04:46.000
And when those things start winking out one by one, we at least need to have some idea of what's next so that we're not kicked in the teeth.

01:04:46.000 --> 01:04:51.000
I don't want people to be filled with fear then when it's an actual emergency.

01:04:51.000 --> 01:05:00.000
I would rather someone have a little bit of anxiousness now, a little bit of timidity and trepidation to say, I'm not sure what I need to do.

01:05:00.000 --> 01:05:10.000
Because the response of a man is to confront that situation and then make a plan, do some research, do something, figure out what you can do for your family, and do it while there's time.

01:05:10.000 --> 01:05:15.000
But we're doing this now because I'm telling you there's not a lot of time for this planning left.

01:05:15.000 --> 01:05:21.000
It should be obviously inevitable to you if you're paying any attention to the news cycle.

01:05:21.000 --> 01:05:29.000
If it's not, I don't want to terrify you, but think about these things while there's still time and I mean like this week, this month.

01:05:29.000 --> 01:05:39.000
Don't wait until 2030 to decide what you're going to do if you don't have power in your house for a week or if you can't go to the grocery store for two weeks or a month.

01:05:39.000 --> 01:05:48.000
You should think about that today because if that unlikely thing that is in fact inevitable happens, I still want you to be okay.

01:05:48.000 --> 01:06:01.000
I want to have food and shelter and heat and I want your family to be comforted not only by the word of God and singing of hymns and all the things that we turn to in our darkest hours.

01:06:01.000 --> 01:06:06.000
But I would ideally like for you to have a full belly and not to be afraid in those situations.

01:06:06.000 --> 01:06:12.000
You plan for what you can and you trust God and the rest and we can't make perfect plans.

01:06:12.000 --> 01:06:22.000
That's part of why we're not going to even talk about it directly is that whatever plan you make when things go badly enough, your plans out the window and that's fine.

01:06:22.000 --> 01:06:24.000
You need to plan for that too.

01:06:24.000 --> 01:06:31.000
You need to be consciously aware of the fact that I can only do so much and beyond a certain point, I'm in God's hands.

01:06:32.000 --> 01:06:40.000
When you start playing out some of these scenarios, they get more and more dire, eventually you can realize that you can't possibly plan your way out of it and that's okay.

01:06:40.000 --> 01:06:47.000
Even just thinking about that and knowing it and being aware of it is armor against the circumstance when that arises.

01:06:47.000 --> 01:06:55.000
Because if you know, okay, I got to put my life and the lives of my family in God's hands because all of my plans have failed.

01:06:55.000 --> 01:06:59.000
I don't have anything left that I know how to do, not giving up.

01:06:59.000 --> 01:07:01.000
It's never give up.

01:07:01.000 --> 01:07:05.000
This is not about surrender or giving up or despair.

01:07:05.000 --> 01:07:18.000
It's about understanding here's what I can handle and here's what's going to come from God and thinking it through when there's time is going to give you peace when you reach the point where you're out of time and all you can do is act.

01:07:18.000 --> 01:07:24.000
If you've never thought about it, your actions are going to be foolhardy or you may not act at all.

01:07:24.000 --> 01:07:27.000
That's one of the worst things that happens in emergencies.

01:07:27.000 --> 01:07:32.000
People are so locked into their normalcy bias that they refuse to believe that a building is on fire and they don't leave.

01:07:32.000 --> 01:07:34.000
They're like, oh, it's an alarm.

01:07:34.000 --> 01:07:35.000
It's a drill.

01:07:35.000 --> 01:07:41.000
It's not real as there's smoke pouring through because the idea of there being smoke is too horrifying.

01:07:41.000 --> 01:07:42.000
Well, guess what?

01:07:42.000 --> 01:07:43.000
Smoke happens.

01:07:43.000 --> 01:07:44.000
Fire happens.

01:07:44.000 --> 01:07:49.000
Deal with that brutal reality now and you're going to be able to get out okay.

01:07:50.000 --> 01:08:03.000
In 1992, an imbecile by the name of Yoshihiro Fukuyama, better known as Francis Fukuyama, published a book entitled The End of History and the Last Man.

01:08:03.000 --> 01:08:09.000
I don't recommend you read the book unless you have absolutely nothing better to do with your time.

01:08:09.000 --> 01:08:15.000
This man would have been better served spending more time on his other hobbies instead of writing these books.

01:08:16.000 --> 01:08:23.000
But essentially in that book, he put forward a thesis that at the time was quite popular.

01:08:23.000 --> 01:08:26.000
It still is to some degree today and that's my point.

01:08:26.000 --> 01:08:38.000
But in essence, his thesis was that liberal Western style, so-called democracy, was the end stage of human development.

01:08:39.000 --> 01:08:54.000
That with the so-called achievement of this liberal democracy, we had reached the point at which humans would no longer progress with regard to politics and this kind of social structure.

01:08:54.000 --> 01:08:55.000
This was the end.

01:08:55.000 --> 01:08:58.000
We had achieved the final form.

01:08:58.000 --> 01:09:02.000
And so it was the end of history.

01:09:02.000 --> 01:09:04.000
Of course, that's completely ridiculous.

01:09:04.000 --> 01:09:09.000
That is possibly the arch version of normalcy bias.

01:09:09.000 --> 01:09:23.000
It is ludicrous to the point where the fact that the book sold any copies is an indictment of our society unless they were simply for the purpose of entertainment reading something so silly.

01:09:24.000 --> 01:09:29.000
But we still have the vestiges of that idea today.

01:09:29.000 --> 01:09:39.000
We see that in those who think that what is happening is a threat to democracy to our republic and notably as between those two there is essentially no daylight.

01:09:40.000 --> 01:09:45.000
What is happening is not the destruction of a particular political system.

01:09:46.000 --> 01:09:51.000
And also democracy is not the end stage of human development.

01:09:51.000 --> 01:10:00.000
If you have a random group of people and you're deciding where to get dinner, democracy is kind of the natural first thing you go to.

01:10:01.000 --> 01:10:05.000
It's not very developed at all, but that's a discussion for another day.

01:10:07.000 --> 01:10:17.000
The point is that this conception that what we have is what is normal, that we couldn't possibly change from here, is ridiculous.

01:10:17.000 --> 01:10:19.000
It's simply not true.

01:10:20.000 --> 01:10:22.000
This system could collapse tomorrow.

01:10:22.000 --> 01:10:26.000
It's in the process of collapsing for anyone who has open eyes.

01:10:26.000 --> 01:10:31.000
And in fact, this original system as it was created is gone. It's dead.

01:10:32.000 --> 01:10:40.000
The political system as it existed at the founding of this nation or even after the enactment of a number of the amendments is gone.

01:10:40.000 --> 01:10:49.000
Certainly after the civil war, even more so after the civil rights movement so called, and it just continues to get worse.

01:10:50.000 --> 01:10:56.000
And so these men are defending a corpse, which is notable, which is obviously something that is ridiculous to do.

01:10:58.000 --> 01:11:05.000
But my point is that this idea that we've reached an end stage,

01:11:06.000 --> 01:11:15.000
and so all of those things in history that used to happen, these wars and conflicts and mass migrations and replacements and genocide and all of these things,

01:11:15.000 --> 01:11:19.000
well those don't happen anymore because we've reached the end stage, the pinnacle.

01:11:19.000 --> 01:11:22.000
We haven't. There's no such thing.

01:11:22.000 --> 01:11:31.000
As long as we are in mortal flesh, all of the things that happen to our ancestors in history will also happen to us.

01:11:31.000 --> 01:11:35.000
They saw war and tribulation. We will see war and tribulation.

01:11:35.000 --> 01:11:40.000
It's happening right now as we are recording this in other parts of the world.

01:11:40.000 --> 01:11:48.000
It's happening in this part of the world as well in some places, because again, the so called immigration is actually an invasion.

01:11:48.000 --> 01:11:50.000
We're in a state of war.

01:11:50.000 --> 01:11:58.000
That is the reality on the ground as we see it today, even if people, due to normalcy bias and other psychological effects,

01:11:58.000 --> 01:12:02.000
don't wish to see the reality of what it is.

01:12:02.000 --> 01:12:06.000
And so no, voter fraud is not the issue.

01:12:06.000 --> 01:12:13.000
If your nation is being invaded and destroyed, your women are being raped, your children are being murdered,

01:12:13.000 --> 01:12:20.000
the issue isn't that the people doing the rape and murder might vote the way you don't want them to vote.

01:12:20.000 --> 01:12:24.000
No man looks at that problem and comes to that conclusion.

01:12:24.000 --> 01:12:32.000
That's insanity. It's evil as well, but it is also insanity.

01:12:32.000 --> 01:12:40.000
And I just want to make a quick point for those, if they happen to be listening, who say that what's happening at the border isn't real,

01:12:40.000 --> 01:12:50.000
or it's blown out of proportion, or it's CGI, whatever it happens to be, whatever the argument raised is.

01:12:50.000 --> 01:12:55.000
I lived the first 30 years, more than 30 years actually.

01:12:55.000 --> 01:13:02.000
Well, almost exactly 30 years, one should calculate an undergrad and other things, of my life in Los Angeles.

01:13:02.000 --> 01:13:05.000
I've been down to that border many times.

01:13:05.000 --> 01:13:18.000
I've seen the reality of what is happening there, and more than that, I got to witness firsthand the reality of what is happening at the border affecting where I lived.

01:13:18.000 --> 01:13:21.000
I watched LA get destroyed.

01:13:21.000 --> 01:13:28.000
Now some of you may think, oh well Los Angeles has always been a cesspit and a problem, and no.

01:13:28.000 --> 01:13:35.000
Southern California, and if you like trees more, which I actually do ironically despite having lived in LA,

01:13:35.000 --> 01:13:42.000
Northern California is better for the trees, but California was a paradise.

01:13:42.000 --> 01:13:48.000
For decades, it was even still basically a paradise when I lived there as a child.

01:13:48.000 --> 01:13:56.000
Within my lifetime, which of course is the blink of an eye, it is transformed into what you see on the news today,

01:13:56.000 --> 01:14:00.000
if you happen to watch news outlets that even show what's happening.

01:14:00.000 --> 01:14:02.000
Rampant crime.

01:14:02.000 --> 01:14:11.000
Tons of homeless encampments, needles all over the place in certain areas because of the rampant drug use, despair, suicide, and the list goes on.

01:14:11.000 --> 01:14:19.000
And of course San Francisco is no better, neither are a number of other places in California at this point, but that's coming to the rest of the country.

01:14:19.000 --> 01:14:21.000
It doesn't stop in California.

01:14:21.000 --> 01:14:27.000
It's not going to just stop at that mountain range, that's not how this works, it's already happening in other places,

01:14:27.000 --> 01:14:29.000
and so I have seen it firsthand.

01:14:29.000 --> 01:14:35.000
So even if you don't want to believe the media, you don't want to believe the video, don't believe your own lying eyes, I guess,

01:14:35.000 --> 01:14:40.000
I've seen it firsthand, and I can tell you that is exactly what is happening.

01:14:40.000 --> 01:14:47.000
And that is what those who pushed it on California, who pushed it on Los Angeles, want for the rest of the nation.

01:14:47.000 --> 01:14:55.000
That's what they want for your town, for your city, for your state, and for of course the entirety of the United States,

01:14:55.000 --> 01:15:00.000
and ultimately for everyone, because their goal is destruction.

01:15:00.000 --> 01:15:07.000
And so that is what is happening, whether or not you have personally seen it, it is occurring.

01:15:07.000 --> 01:15:20.000
And anyone who's lived in the heartland or in the Appalachians has seen similar horrors with fentanyl and the other drugs that have killed so many and caused so much despair.

01:15:20.000 --> 01:15:25.000
The reason for mentioning these things, again, it's not to be despairing.

01:15:25.000 --> 01:15:31.000
We don't want people to be dwelling on these things and just being really sad, because there's no point in that.

01:15:31.000 --> 01:15:36.000
There's no point in just staring at horror and feeling terrible about it.

01:15:36.000 --> 01:15:45.000
The only value in talking about this stuff, thinking about it, is A, to acknowledge the brutal reality of the situation,

01:15:45.000 --> 01:15:51.000
and then B, to decide in our own hearts and in our own communities what do we do about it.

01:15:51.000 --> 01:15:59.000
If you deny the situation, if you deny the fact that there are Somalis in Minnesota and Ohio, is evil per se.

01:15:59.000 --> 01:16:04.000
If you deny that that is a problem, then you're on the other side of this war.

01:16:04.000 --> 01:16:14.000
If you see that as a problem, then in our communities we have to decide what do we do when evil men are doing evil things to things that didn't?

01:16:15.000 --> 01:16:17.000
Have to inevitably become this.

01:16:17.000 --> 01:16:22.000
On one hand, we're saying that the good things that we have are not inevitable.

01:16:22.000 --> 01:16:27.000
On the other hand, we're not simply dealing with entropy here.

01:16:27.000 --> 01:16:33.000
We're dealing with an affirmative ontological evil seeking to destroy good things.

01:16:33.000 --> 01:16:39.000
And one of the good things that's being destroyed is godly lives where people don't have despair,

01:16:39.000 --> 01:16:44.000
where people do have God and have church and have a godly community.

01:16:47.000 --> 01:16:51.000
And when those things are lost, they're lost from the top down.

01:16:51.000 --> 01:16:55.000
Someone does not become a drug addict if he has a strong faith life.

01:16:55.000 --> 01:16:57.000
It doesn't happen.

01:16:57.000 --> 01:17:08.000
There's no room for either despair or self-indulgence or any of these other things that separate us from God until we first start moving away from him.

01:17:08.000 --> 01:17:17.000
And so the man who reaches rock bottom and then finds God again, it's the reason for the parable of the prodigal son.

01:17:17.000 --> 01:17:19.000
He wandered off and was prodigal.

01:17:19.000 --> 01:17:21.000
He was prodigious.

01:17:21.000 --> 01:17:25.000
He did all the bad things and he did them in high fashion.

01:17:25.000 --> 01:17:31.000
And then he hit rock bottom and he was eating the food that the farmer fed to his pigs.

01:17:31.000 --> 01:17:34.000
And he was astonished that his father would bring him back.

01:17:34.000 --> 01:17:39.000
And his father did that because he loved him, not because he deserved it, not because it was inevitable.

01:17:39.000 --> 01:17:47.000
It's easy for us when we're separated from God and we're on a high horse and everything's looking good to coast.

01:17:47.000 --> 01:17:53.000
We've talked in earlier episodes about the fact that today western civilization is coasting.

01:17:53.000 --> 01:17:57.000
It's in a nosedive, but it's still in the air.

01:17:57.000 --> 01:18:04.000
But it's coasting on the momentum of Christendom, of a Christian nation, Christian nations, plural.

01:18:04.000 --> 01:18:12.000
The European nations that were devoted to God for a thousand years abandoned God and then lost all of God's gifts.

01:18:12.000 --> 01:18:15.000
And it's not even necessarily punishment.

01:18:15.000 --> 01:18:18.000
It's just that when you stop obeying God, you start disobeying God.

01:18:18.000 --> 01:18:22.000
And the punishment for those things is baked into those things themselves.

01:18:22.000 --> 01:18:30.000
When we hand our bodies over to carnal us, we receive the due penalty in our bodies for them.

01:18:30.000 --> 01:18:32.000
God says that's how everything works.

01:18:32.000 --> 01:18:39.000
And so when we see it at the individual level or at the civilizational level, it can be no surprise.

01:18:39.000 --> 01:18:47.000
What's different in current year is that having abandoned God in past generations, as we've talked about elsewhere,

01:18:47.000 --> 01:18:57.000
we are now close enough to the ground in terms of these things failing that we've talked to some length about the fact that there's no one thing that we can fix.

01:18:57.000 --> 01:18:59.000
It's not, oh, everyone needs to go to church.

01:18:59.000 --> 01:19:00.000
Everyone needs to have kids.

01:19:00.000 --> 01:19:02.000
Everyone needs to, you know, whatever.

01:19:02.000 --> 01:19:05.000
There is no, if everyone does this, then the things will be fine.

01:19:05.000 --> 01:19:08.000
There's a whole bunch of stuff that we have to fix at this point.

01:19:08.000 --> 01:19:10.000
And some of it is really ugly.

01:19:10.000 --> 01:19:12.000
Some of it is terrible.

01:19:12.000 --> 01:19:22.000
And we want good men to be in the fight, to be of good cheer and to have their head on a swivel, to have their head on straight,

01:19:22.000 --> 01:19:27.000
to be looking at the actual facts and confronting them as they are and not as we want them to be.

01:19:27.000 --> 01:19:29.000
Leave that to the women and children.

01:19:29.000 --> 01:19:39.000
Let the women and children have their fantasies about how all of this is just naturally occurring, the good stuff and the bad stuff must just be a bad dream.

01:19:39.000 --> 01:19:44.000
Men know that the bad stuff is not a dream and it's not a nightmare.

01:19:44.000 --> 01:19:48.000
It is the reality that bad men make for good men.

01:19:48.000 --> 01:19:52.000
There are actual evil men in the world seeking to do evil.

01:19:52.000 --> 01:19:54.000
Good men know this.

01:19:54.000 --> 01:19:56.000
Strong men understand this.

01:19:56.000 --> 01:20:07.000
It's weak men who deny it because weak men want to hide with the women and children and pretend that all of this is emotional or it's being afraid

01:20:07.000 --> 01:20:10.000
or it's not trusting in God or some garbage.

01:20:10.000 --> 01:20:16.000
The truth is that there are good men in the world and there are evil men in the world and the evil men are going to keep being evil.

01:20:16.000 --> 01:20:22.000
And sometimes the scale of their evil is so overwhelming that it can cause despair,

01:20:22.000 --> 01:20:25.000
especially if you've been looking away or if it's been concealed from you.

01:20:25.000 --> 01:20:28.000
We talked earlier and you all know about media.

01:20:28.000 --> 01:20:31.000
It's there to lie and deceive.

01:20:31.000 --> 01:20:36.000
It's there to anesthetize you so that the surgery can be performed on your civilization

01:20:36.000 --> 01:20:40.000
while you're repeating their talking points, saying, yes, we welcome all refugees.

01:20:40.000 --> 01:20:42.000
Yes, Jesus was a refugee.

01:20:42.000 --> 01:20:44.000
This is good. I love this.

01:20:44.000 --> 01:20:47.000
This is what my neighborhood needs more of.

01:20:47.000 --> 01:20:56.000
As long as people, as long as men are willing to repeat those lies, the evil men will win flat out.

01:20:56.000 --> 01:21:06.000
I think that's the final part of this, that the ultimate normalcy bias is to think that the good guys are going to just win because we're the good guys.

01:21:06.000 --> 01:21:09.000
No, find me that anywhere in history.

01:21:09.000 --> 01:21:18.000
The fact that the good guys sometimes pull it out and the fact that God will bless his people according to his good will is his grace,

01:21:18.000 --> 01:21:22.000
but it's not a promise civilizationally.

01:21:22.000 --> 01:21:25.000
We can't count on everything just working out.

01:21:25.000 --> 01:21:36.000
The worse things get, the more important it is for us to confront the trajectory and the final disposition because, as I said, this damage is accumulating.

01:21:36.000 --> 01:21:41.000
If you've never thought about it before, this is probably a miserable episode.

01:21:41.000 --> 01:21:43.000
You probably don't want to think about any of this stuff.

01:21:43.000 --> 01:21:45.000
Most of you have thought about some of the stuff.

01:21:45.000 --> 01:21:46.000
You've looked at it.

01:21:46.000 --> 01:21:49.000
You're probably overloaded on some of it.

01:21:49.000 --> 01:21:57.000
As we wrap this up, I just want you to think about the fact that we still have a job to do.

01:21:57.000 --> 01:22:03.000
Whenever a bad thing happens in your life, what makes you a man is how you respond.

01:22:03.000 --> 01:22:04.000
Maybe it's your fault.

01:22:04.000 --> 01:22:13.000
Maybe you screwed up a thousand times to get you to the point that you are in this terrible situation and there's a record scratch and a freeze frame.

01:22:13.000 --> 01:22:17.000
You say, I wonder how I got to this spot.

01:22:17.000 --> 01:22:32.000
How you respond next defines who you are as a man in rooting that response in love of God, in faith for God, in obedience to God, which will naturally flow down to all the good things that pagans have,

01:22:32.000 --> 01:22:39.000
love for a neighbor, love for family, caring for your own, preserving it, preserving your nation.

01:22:39.000 --> 01:22:44.000
All of those things happen automatically by men simply saying, you know what?

01:22:44.000 --> 01:22:46.000
I'm not going to put up with this anymore.

01:22:46.000 --> 01:22:48.000
We are going to do something about it.

01:22:48.000 --> 01:22:54.000
Again, we're not making any political advice about what anyone should do about anything.

01:22:54.000 --> 01:22:56.000
Sort that out in your communities.

01:22:56.000 --> 01:23:07.000
But if you ignore it, if you let it keep happening, you're going to get more and it's not going to be more of the same because we are in the end stage of this stuff unwinding.

01:23:07.000 --> 01:23:12.000
There's no undo for a people being wiped out.

01:23:12.000 --> 01:23:15.000
As Corey said earlier, 10 tribes are gone.

01:23:15.000 --> 01:23:16.000
They're gone.

01:23:16.000 --> 01:23:17.000
They're erased.

01:23:17.000 --> 01:23:18.000
There's nothing left.

01:23:18.000 --> 01:23:20.000
They don't get reconstituted.

01:23:20.000 --> 01:23:22.000
There's no way to piece that back together.

01:23:22.000 --> 01:23:24.000
That's Humpty Dumpty.

01:23:24.000 --> 01:23:35.000
The fact that we still have something that's worth preserving is a reason for us to pay attention into the optimistic that we have something valuable and we have the strength.

01:23:35.000 --> 01:23:40.000
We have everything that we need except for the acknowledgement and the will to preserve it.

01:23:40.000 --> 01:23:48.000
When those things change, we will begin to preserve those things that have been under attack and have not been preserved by past generations.

01:23:48.000 --> 01:23:52.000
But that will only come when we first acknowledge it.

01:23:52.000 --> 01:23:56.000
It's not simply a question of, oh, we got to turn around the political system.

01:23:56.000 --> 01:23:58.000
We got to do this or that.

01:23:58.000 --> 01:24:04.000
We need to acknowledge that there's evil trying to destroy everything that's good about us.

01:24:04.000 --> 01:24:07.000
We're being destroyed for a specific reason.

01:24:07.000 --> 01:24:09.000
We've talked about that in the past episodes.

01:24:09.000 --> 01:24:11.000
I'm not going to rehash it.

01:24:11.000 --> 01:24:13.000
We must be destroyed.

01:24:13.000 --> 01:24:16.000
No one cares about destroying Africa.

01:24:16.000 --> 01:24:18.000
Satan's not worried about destroying Africa.

01:24:18.000 --> 01:24:24.000
You'll notice that all this migration, so-called, is always only ever in a single direction.

01:24:24.000 --> 01:24:28.000
It's always in the direction of the object of the destruction.

01:24:29.000 --> 01:24:35.000
So, acknowledging that, understanding that, and then figuring out what we do next is paramount.

01:24:35.000 --> 01:24:41.000
Either we do that or we die and all this goes away because none of this is inevitable.

01:24:41.000 --> 01:24:43.000
We could end up like the Samaritans.

01:24:43.000 --> 01:24:45.000
We could end up vanishing.

01:24:45.000 --> 01:24:47.000
I don't know what's going to happen.

01:24:47.000 --> 01:24:52.000
I don't have to worry about it because I trust that God will keep his promises.

01:24:52.000 --> 01:24:58.000
One of those promises are that if we are a faithless nation and a faithless generation, we'll be wiped out.

01:24:58.000 --> 01:25:00.000
We have no promise of salvation.

01:25:00.000 --> 01:25:03.000
We have no promise of preservation or any good thing.

01:25:03.000 --> 01:25:09.000
When we realign with what God tells us to do, that's going to have temporal consequences.

01:25:09.000 --> 01:25:15.000
If we can accomplish anything, it's to get a few more men thinking about,

01:25:15.000 --> 01:25:18.000
okay, this is actually really bad.

01:25:18.000 --> 01:25:21.000
I need to talk to men in my community and we'll figure out what to do next.

01:25:21.000 --> 01:25:23.000
There's no specific advice to be given.

01:25:23.000 --> 01:25:27.000
Just think about how much worse it could get because it will get that much worse.

01:25:27.000 --> 01:25:30.000
It'll get worse, frankly, than any of us can conceive of.

01:25:30.000 --> 01:25:38.000
The prophecies in Scripture discussing the last days are so dire that we have prophecies without a prophet.

01:25:38.000 --> 01:25:41.000
We have visions and dreams describing things.

01:25:41.000 --> 01:25:48.000
When those things do occur in time in physical reality, we'll be able to look at those prophecies in Daniel and Revelation and say,

01:25:48.000 --> 01:25:49.000
yeah, there it is.

01:25:49.000 --> 01:25:51.000
I don't know what it's going to look like.

01:25:51.000 --> 01:25:53.000
I don't know if I'll see it with my own eyes.

01:25:53.000 --> 01:25:54.000
Maybe, maybe not.

01:25:54.000 --> 01:25:55.000
It doesn't matter.

01:25:55.000 --> 01:25:56.000
That doesn't concern me.

01:25:56.000 --> 01:26:02.000
What does concern me is failing to have been the sort of Christian man

01:26:02.000 --> 01:26:05.000
that can stand before the judgment throne and say,

01:26:05.000 --> 01:26:13.000
Jesus sacrificed everything for me and I tried my best not to bring him shame.

01:26:13.000 --> 01:26:18.000
There is something to be said for Christians trying not to bring shame to the cross.

01:26:18.000 --> 01:26:21.000
Beyond that, it's entirely in God's mercy.

01:26:21.000 --> 01:26:24.000
Not talking about saving ourselves in eternity,

01:26:24.000 --> 01:26:29.000
but in time, how we comport ourselves in whatever days these are,

01:26:29.000 --> 01:26:32.000
is a reflection of who we are as men.

01:26:32.000 --> 01:26:37.000
Right now, it's up for grabs what kind of men we are if we're men at all.

01:26:37.000 --> 01:26:43.000
For our part, for Corey's part and my part, we're doing what little we can to try not to just complain,

01:26:43.000 --> 01:26:45.000
try not to just run our mouths.

01:26:45.000 --> 01:26:50.000
We're trying to exhort and encourage men just as Stockdale did in the prison camp to say,

01:26:50.000 --> 01:26:55.000
look, let's focus on the small things we can to keep each other going

01:26:55.000 --> 01:26:59.000
and trust that we're going to get out of this and then do what we need to,

01:26:59.000 --> 01:27:04.000
to actually make that happen and leave the rest in God's hands.

01:27:04.000 --> 01:27:13.000
There are two words in the English language that both mean looking forward to something.

01:27:13.000 --> 01:27:18.000
These words have very different definitions, however, very different senses

01:27:18.000 --> 01:27:23.000
because the two words are eager and anxious.

01:27:23.000 --> 01:27:29.000
If you are eager for something, you are looking forward to it with the expectation

01:27:29.000 --> 01:27:34.000
that it will be enjoyable, pleasurable, something you want to happen.

01:27:34.000 --> 01:27:41.000
And so if you're getting married tomorrow, you're eager to see the wedding ceremony.

01:27:41.000 --> 01:27:45.000
Anxious, on the other hand, is essentially the inverse.

01:27:45.000 --> 01:27:51.000
It is something you know is coming, but you look forward to it with trepidation,

01:27:51.000 --> 01:27:57.000
with worry, with concern, because you think something bad is going to happen.

01:27:57.000 --> 01:28:03.000
And we're not telling you to be either of those things, more so the latter than the former.

01:28:03.000 --> 01:28:11.000
Absolutely do not be anxious in regard with being worried about what is going to happen.

01:28:11.000 --> 01:28:17.000
Be concerned about it, think about it, plan for it, but don't be anxious about it.

01:28:17.000 --> 01:28:23.000
And we're also not telling you necessarily to be eager about what is happening in the future.

01:28:23.000 --> 01:28:29.000
What we are fairly certain is going to happen because some of it is not going to be good.

01:28:29.000 --> 01:28:39.000
And so don't be pangloss on the one hand and don't be Ivan Karamazov on the other, I guess.

01:28:39.000 --> 01:28:43.000
But do be eager with regard to the good things that God has promised,

01:28:43.000 --> 01:28:46.000
because He has promised that He will care for us.

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He will see His elect through whatever happens.

01:28:50.000 --> 01:28:57.000
In fact, we know that even the end times at the worst possible point in human history,

01:28:57.000 --> 01:29:02.000
things will be cut short so that the elect will not fall.

01:29:02.000 --> 01:29:10.000
That is the promise we have from God, and so we can be eager with regard to what God has promised and what He will do.

01:29:10.000 --> 01:29:14.000
And now I know we recently read this passage of Scripture,

01:29:14.000 --> 01:29:18.000
but some people will undoubtedly listen to these in a different order in the future,

01:29:18.000 --> 01:29:26.000
and it is always worth revisiting the words of Christ in Matthew 6, and so I'm going to read it again.

01:29:49.000 --> 01:29:55.000
And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?

01:29:55.000 --> 01:30:00.000
And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.

01:30:00.000 --> 01:30:08.000
They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

01:30:08.000 --> 01:30:15.000
But if God so close the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven,

01:30:15.000 --> 01:30:19.000
will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

01:30:19.000 --> 01:30:25.000
Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear?

01:30:25.000 --> 01:30:31.000
For the heathens seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all,

01:30:31.000 --> 01:30:37.000
but seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

01:30:37.000 --> 01:30:42.000
Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.

01:30:42.000 --> 01:30:46.000
Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

01:30:48.000 --> 01:30:55.000
And I have two positive things that I want to give you at the end of this episode.

01:30:55.000 --> 01:31:03.000
One is a fairly minor one, and one I think is something about which you should think of it as you go about the rest of your day or the rest of your week,

01:31:03.000 --> 01:31:06.000
whenever you happen to listen to this episode.

01:31:07.000 --> 01:31:13.000
The first point is that we will continue this podcast as long as we are both able to do so,

01:31:13.000 --> 01:31:18.000
and distribute it as best we are able, whatever circumstances may come.

01:31:18.000 --> 01:31:23.000
And the reason I say that is because morale is important.

01:31:23.000 --> 01:31:29.000
And I do think that shows like this one do help with morale.

01:31:29.000 --> 01:31:33.000
It may seem like a strange thing to say at the end of an episode like this,

01:31:33.000 --> 01:31:42.000
but for men, part of our existence is staring reality square in the face and not losing hope,

01:31:42.000 --> 01:31:47.000
not losing your nerve, not losing morale.

01:31:47.000 --> 01:31:56.000
And so this episode is in fact part of that morale because you have to have a view of reality that is not through rose-tinted glasses,

01:31:56.000 --> 01:32:01.000
that is not a view of a hopeful reality, a reality that doesn't exist,

01:32:01.000 --> 01:32:05.000
but the actual one, the one in which we live.

01:32:05.000 --> 01:32:10.000
Because that is the one in which we have duties to care for our own.

01:32:10.000 --> 01:32:16.000
We have duties to care for our neighbor, duties for our family, duties for our church.

01:32:16.000 --> 01:32:20.000
It is the reality in which we live and the one in which we must plan for the future,

01:32:20.000 --> 01:32:26.000
both near term and long term God willing, in both cases of course God willing.

01:32:26.000 --> 01:32:32.000
But the second positive point, the second thing about which I want you to think,

01:32:32.000 --> 01:32:34.000
needs a little background.

01:32:34.000 --> 01:32:39.000
Very little though because you will all, at least most of you I assume,

01:32:39.000 --> 01:32:42.000
the overwhelming majority of you will be familiar with this.

01:32:42.000 --> 01:32:46.000
The southwestern United States has a lot of desert.

01:32:46.000 --> 01:32:52.000
Some of it high desert, some of it low desert like Death Valley, but there's a fair amount of desert.

01:32:52.000 --> 01:32:56.000
If you've never spent time in the desert, you've undoubtedly seen the desert

01:32:56.000 --> 01:33:02.000
because Hollywood portrays it all the time, there are nature documentaries, etc.

01:33:02.000 --> 01:33:06.000
The desert generally speaking is fairly devoid of life.

01:33:06.000 --> 01:33:11.000
There's a lot of sand, a lot of rocks, it's very hot during some parts of the year

01:33:11.000 --> 01:33:16.000
and also some don't know this but extremely cold during other parts of the year

01:33:16.000 --> 01:33:21.000
because a desert is simply a matter of precipitation, not a matter of temperature.

01:33:22.000 --> 01:33:29.000
But in the southwest, every so often, we get hit by very heavy rains.

01:33:29.000 --> 01:33:34.000
And if you've never had the pleasure of seeing this, I recommend at least looking up some pictures

01:33:34.000 --> 01:33:38.000
or perhaps a nature documentary, I'll put one in the show notes if I can find one.

01:33:38.000 --> 01:33:42.000
But when it rains, we get those very heavy rains and they don't come that often,

01:33:42.000 --> 01:33:50.000
but five, six, seven years on a cycle, you'll get very heavy rains in the desert.

01:33:50.000 --> 01:33:54.000
And everything bursts into life almost immediately.

01:33:54.000 --> 01:34:02.000
It goes from dead and barren, a moonscape practically, to overflowing with life.

01:34:02.000 --> 01:34:08.000
Plants, flowers, insects, all sorts of creatures just appear out of nowhere.

01:34:10.000 --> 01:34:17.000
And so it is possible for things not only to go from functional and running as expected,

01:34:17.000 --> 01:34:21.000
from normal as it were, to complete chaos in the blink of an eye,

01:34:21.000 --> 01:34:25.000
which is what we may very well be facing.

01:34:25.000 --> 01:34:27.000
The inverse can happen as well.

01:34:27.000 --> 01:34:31.000
God can take things that are complete and utter chaos

01:34:31.000 --> 01:34:34.000
and he can turn them around in the blink of an eye.

01:34:34.000 --> 01:34:39.000
We see that in the pages of Scripture, we see that in the pages of history.

01:34:39.000 --> 01:34:43.000
God can very well work miracles.

01:34:44.000 --> 01:34:51.000
And he has told us in Scripture what we have to do and how he will respond.

01:34:51.000 --> 01:34:55.000
God is not an unknown in that sense.

01:34:55.000 --> 01:34:57.000
God is not mercurial.

01:34:57.000 --> 01:35:02.000
God does not roll a die and then do whatever happens to result.

01:35:02.000 --> 01:35:04.000
God does not play the odds.

01:35:04.000 --> 01:35:06.000
It is not a game of chance.

01:35:06.000 --> 01:35:12.000
God tells us, if you do X, then he will do Y,

01:35:12.000 --> 01:35:14.000
because God is faithful to his promises

01:35:14.000 --> 01:35:18.000
and there are promises throughout the pages of Scripture.

01:35:18.000 --> 01:35:23.000
And so, no, there is no easy solution to all of the problems we face

01:35:23.000 --> 01:35:27.000
because there are many, the systems are complicated, they are interconnected,

01:35:27.000 --> 01:35:30.000
many things have to be addressed at once.

01:35:30.000 --> 01:35:34.000
However, the first step, always the first step,

01:35:34.000 --> 01:35:38.000
the most important step, not to quote the proverb,

01:35:38.000 --> 01:35:43.000
but the most important step is that first one, is to obey God,

01:35:43.000 --> 01:35:46.000
is to do the things that God has told us to do.

01:35:46.000 --> 01:35:50.000
Faith, yes, is a gift and faith is the beginning of that relationship.

01:35:50.000 --> 01:35:55.000
But as we have mentioned repeatedly, this show is about the what then,

01:35:55.000 --> 01:35:58.000
it is about the and of the Christian life.

01:35:58.000 --> 01:36:00.000
God has given you the free gift of faith,

01:36:00.000 --> 01:36:05.000
whether in the sacrament of holy baptism as a child or through the word.

01:36:05.000 --> 01:36:07.000
However God gave you that faith,

01:36:07.000 --> 01:36:11.000
whichever of the means he has instituted for the creation of faith,

01:36:11.000 --> 01:36:15.000
he used, in your case, to give you that free gift.

01:36:15.000 --> 01:36:17.000
You have the faith.

01:36:17.000 --> 01:36:18.000
Now what?

01:36:18.000 --> 01:36:23.000
And the now what is what God has commanded us to do in the pages of Scripture.

01:36:23.000 --> 01:36:26.000
We start, of course, on the small scale

01:36:27.000 --> 01:36:30.000
and that is simply by dealing with your family.

01:36:30.000 --> 01:36:33.000
Love the members of your family.

01:36:33.000 --> 01:36:38.000
Forgive them, deal with them as you would want them to deal with you.

01:36:38.000 --> 01:36:40.000
It's just the golden rule.

01:36:40.000 --> 01:36:46.000
Then move on to your neighbor, then to your town, your city and your nation.

01:36:46.000 --> 01:36:49.000
If we do these things, God will bless us

01:36:49.000 --> 01:36:55.000
because he has promised that he will do so and he is always faithful.

01:36:55.000 --> 01:36:59.000
No, there is no guarantee that we will be able to accomplish

01:36:59.000 --> 01:37:05.000
the things that need to be done to avoid certain of the bad outcomes.

01:37:05.000 --> 01:37:13.000
But we do know that if we turn to God, it is a better outcome than the alternative.

01:37:13.000 --> 01:37:17.000
No, we're not betting on God just because we want a better outcome.

01:37:17.000 --> 01:37:20.000
This is not mere consequentialism.

01:37:20.000 --> 01:37:24.000
Although notably, if you obey God simply because you fear punishment,

01:37:24.000 --> 01:37:28.000
that is in fact better than not obeying God.

01:37:28.000 --> 01:37:33.000
You do still get credit for your good works even if they are done out of fear.

01:37:33.000 --> 01:37:39.000
It is better to do them out of joy, but they are not worthless if done out of fear.

01:37:39.000 --> 01:37:44.000
We obey God because that is our duty.

01:37:44.000 --> 01:37:46.000
That is what we were created to do.

01:37:46.000 --> 01:37:53.000
This is the purpose of man, specifically in this episode we're talking about the duty of men, of course.

01:37:53.000 --> 01:37:59.000
But it is also the duty of women to obey God with regard to the things they have been given to do,

01:37:59.000 --> 01:38:04.000
to submit to their husband, to keep a home, to raise godly children, all of these various things.

01:38:04.000 --> 01:38:07.000
We know that Scripture tells women to do.

01:38:07.000 --> 01:38:14.000
And so as Christians, if we do these things that God has commanded us to do,

01:38:14.000 --> 01:38:16.000
that is all there is for us to do.

01:38:16.000 --> 01:38:18.000
Do not be anxious about tomorrow.

01:38:18.000 --> 01:38:24.000
Plan for tomorrow because God commands us to be wise, but don't be anxious.

01:38:24.000 --> 01:38:30.000
The present is just as much in God's hands as was the past,

01:38:30.000 --> 01:38:35.000
and the future is just as much in his hands as is the present.

01:38:44.000 --> 01:38:49.000
Jesus Christ.

01:38:49.000 --> 01:38:54.000
Jesus Christ.

01:38:54.000 --> 01:38:59.000
Jesus Christ.

01:38:59.000 --> 01:39:04.000
Jesus Christ.

01:39:04.000 --> 01:39:09.000
Jesus Christ.

01:39:09.000 --> 01:39:14.000
Jesus Christ.