Wrath's Consuming Power | Chris Hedges and Hamza Yusuf

i think it's a misnomer and dorothy sayers calls this out it's a misnomer to call them the deadly sins
because they're not they're not really sin yeah they're states they're states of being the the well evogrius never call
them sins right he called them thoughts that's right and but the thing is once
one of these uh and and of course he called them demonic so once one of these demonic
forces takes you over then you cannot do anything but engage in sinful
behavior and and i think the reason origin and ivogris are so important is
that it's not the hebraic notion of sin as law but it's more that notion of sin as
separation from the self separation from god and separation from the community
and that's what these forces do whether it's gluttony or envy and just so you know
i mean i remember when we studied it envy in the classical sense
you probably know this is not just about coveting it is about uh it is about desire for
the destruction of the other who have the other right in the islamic tradition
they actually there's two arabic words so one of them is hasa which is envy
where you want the destruction of the goods of the other or or you want them to lose what they
have at least if you envy their wife you want them to to have a divorce right right right
but the other word is which it means joyful admiration
and so it's it's it's a positive envy like you actually do envy them you wish
you had what they had but you would not want them to lose it it's it's a nice distinction and the
prophet salallahu he said only two people should be envied and he meant this joyful
admiration where you you wish you had what they had but and that was a a man who was given
wisdom and taught others that wisdom by day and night and
the other is a man who was given great wealth and used it to to to uh for the common good and and for
helping the the needy and so he said those two people were worth having env
this positive envy towards all these people who write about anger also break it down but
they all they're all rooted in aristotle you have a burst a momentary moment of anger then you have resentment and then
you have wrath which is the desire for vengeance but but aquinas and all those
people are writing out of aristotle so i mean so is the muslim tradition you know i think
aristotle had such an incredible impact on all of the abrahamic
uh traditions and and they used them in different ways and then obviously uh the uh there's a
platinus was actually translated into arabic as the theology of aristotle so
neoplatonism uh came in the back door that way and and but you have
you know it with anger you have this understanding that
of the concupiscible and the harassable soul from aristotle which is adopted by
both the christian and i think all three but but uh they understood that the
irascible soul was a positive uh force if it was guided by the
rational soul so they they they you know imam al-ghazali says you don't want to eliminate anger you want to make it like
a hunting dog where you release it at the proper time
to the proper object uh and for and for the right reasons so so um i think that's at the heart of of
uh of the spiritual practice of trying to tame uh that that irratible soul which was
placed in us to go to ward off evil and harm well that's the distinction between
righteous anger which which aquinas gregory you know all of them
accept as part of a life of faith well let me ask you something
why why because i think you know you and i probably i'm making this
assumption but just from because i've read a lot of your uh stuff um and
i think we both have a choleric temperaments um and
and prob i'm sure you have like i have worked over time to
to really exercise that temperament uh the negative aspects of it out but it
seems to me that we're living in a very choleric time like why are people so
angry well because they're they're so constricted i mean
uh their life is stagnant uh they don't see any hope for the future
uh they're under economic duress uh you know that that that's
you know that i know when i when my first book war is a force that gives us meaning after covering the war in el
salvador for five years i end up in an airport in costa rica
with my dog and the guy behind the counter says uh well
we don't have any crates we can't put your dog on the plane
and your dog will have to sit in a crate in the airport for a week uh and i flipped i left over the counter
i remember reading that story it had nothing to do with my dog it had to do with the accumulated
rage and trauma that i spent five years undergoing i
mean i had a i used to have a nervous twitch my eyes were would go like this you know all the time
so that's it that people you see it in prisons i mean irony i teach in prisons
and one of the ironies is that prisons are actually as institutions incredibly polite if you bump you never
touch anyone in a prison but if you were to bump into somebody in the hall you're profusely apologetic
and if you're not it's a fight right um because you're everything is so
bottled up and contained and that's one and number two is that people who become consumed by
wrath and this is emile durkheim they
they seek the annihilation of others but as durkheim points out
it is driven by desires for self-annihilation so
that's that great quote by ivagrius of pontus
where he says the demons arm themselves with evil actions once armed they treat harshly
those who arm them that you become by any of these
uh seven deadly sins seven deadly thoughts it is about having the demonic seize control um and
then you know that it controls you you don't control it uh and of course the danger of wrath and
vengeance is that the object you internalize that if it's a person let's say that object or that figure uh
essentially takes over becomes part of your own identity and i think that that notion of
the demonic you know because demons at least in in biblical literature is
often seen as as you know actual physical entities right loses the wisdom
yeah of the fact that the demonic is real that people can be seized by avarice right by
by envy by gluttony by wrath um and i loved actually you know because
with ivagus apontos he had eight thoughts and then they was later all
reconfigured by gregory but they erased um
um sadness melancholia yeah but that's but but for evagrius
that was self-pity um and that you know self-pity pride led
to wrath well you know i mean i i would say you know in homeopathy you have what
they call a causa occasionalis you know the triggering events so like
if if you get dust somebody has an asthmatic attack but it's not the dust really it's it's it's the
susceptibility because there's an underlying uh weakness in the immune system and it
seems to me that i think there's a lot more going on like
i appreciate the the analysis and i think there's a lot of truth to that but i still think their cause occasion
analysis for for the anger of modern society i think there's deeper
i think you know in some ways people have more today even poor people
than i mean i lived in west africa and you've been to some of the poorest countries in the world and you know in
where i lived in west africa they had over 50 percent um unemployment and yet
i was just amazed at how joyful the people were generally um
this was in in mauritania and i think people are they're angry because they've
been deprived of so much there has to be some sense of entitlement to to get angry you're
getting angry because you feel like i've been deprived of something like somebody cuts the line they're taking
time that should be yours and they're forcing you to wait longer
and so some people will just say you know what a jerk or and just let it go but other people
will will really go into a state of uh of uh of anger and sometimes it'll lead
to even uh death yeah i would say you're right i except i would i would go back to durkheim when
he talks about anime and social bonds that there are many social bonds that integrate us into the society work being
highly important and john paul ii not a pope i loved particularly but he did
write a very fine encyclical on work and he understood the he actually said
that in order to sustain the family one needs meaningful
work with a living wage he actually talks about the loss of uh of work as
one of the contributors to the breakdown of the family and i think this is true so there are many many social bonds i
mean i i would agree with you um but there but when all of these social
bonds become ruptured when when you have no place within the society to actualize yourself
in any way then it creates this very self-destructive anatomy and
of course durkheim in his book on suicide asks the question what is it that drives individuals and societies to
carry out acts of self-annihilation uh and he said it is
wrath in essence uh because all of these you know uh you know those who seek the
annihilation of others are driven by these desires for self-destruction so um
yes i think that that i mean modernity is part of the problem because it's it's essentially it
holds up all of the values that if you want to take the seven deadly sins were warned against i mean what is
everything in a corporate capitalist culture i mean you see it on reality television shows what values do we
celebrate as a culture well it's every value that all of the great metaphysical writers have warned us lead to
self-destruction so it's about the cult of the self it's about gaining
wealth it's about gaining power it's about uh the the hedonism of the narcissism of you know being eternally
young and that is just on every level and when
you fail and most people fail now given the the you know the seizing up or the
ossification of uh of our democracy and this massive uh social inequality it's
always your fault so it it it this is you know positive psychology it's it's
something's wrong with you nothing's wrong with the system so that self-loathing uh is just exponentially increased and i
think you see it expressed in mass shootings the nihilism of people who just go in and kill uh everyone around
them irrationally and and uh and i think it comes from uh
these feelings that you know the society at large has just cast you aside as human refuse
well again i mean i i agree and i think that's all true and i wouldn't disagree uh by and large
but i still feel that there's something deeper going
on i just i feel like the loss of of god in people's lives the loss of
even just religious practice if you look at you know look at give me
the stories that you tell and i'll and i'll give you your culture i mean look at the type
films the the the music that people listen to talk about demonic thoughts
um and and just i people are being filled with this on a day-in day-out
basis how like violent porn
it's just you wrote a whole chap that chapter i wish i never read i thought you should have had you should have had
a trigger warning before that chapter because that chapter haunts me to this
day and and i just that's the type stuff that these kids are
are absorbing in a culture and i just don't see how you could have anything but
filth come out of some people and we live in a culture that thrives off the
deadly sins we sell everything with the deadly sins and and in in the past
cultures actually recognized human weakness and tried to help people overcome
their natural inclination towards that sinfulness and i just i don't see it
it's not uh we have so many films about angry people that go out and just
you know uh man of wrath i think is the latest one um
or well we celebrate we celebrate them that's what i mean i mean there's a real celebration and so i just feel like
you know the theology of today is demonology it's not it's not it's not
the study of god it's really the study of of demons and that's what people
absorb and i just don't see how young people especially um
how they're taught you know the whole like stepping on toes is a good example you know i didn't know about stepping on
toes although i should have you know elvis had that song don't step on my blue suede shoes right
and but i did not know and i was in atlanta and i i was coming out and i was with
him i'm sad shacker and and i was coming out of uh the baggage claim and i felt a little
bump you know because i had one of those drag bags i felt a little bump but i didn't turn around i just thought i hid
something on the floor and i almost got killed by this guy who
thought that i did it on purpose i mean it was pretty intense experience but i think that state there are so many
people that are in that state of where their sense of dignity is is
so low as a human being and i and i i feel that at the root of
that is not knowing that they are a creation you know that
that that has this divine spark of life and that no matter what i mean
if you look uh you know at anger ecclesiastes says that anger uh is
is it you know be do not have the spirit of anger for it resides in the breasts of fools and i
think you know that's a powerful truth that what is a fool but somebody who doesn't
know who they are or where they're going i i yeah i totally agree i mean i look at you know
where we are is the culture of death uh you know in theological terms as you
know wading into these kinds of discussions in a relentlessly secular society especially
if you come out of the left as i do and you know religious prejudice is the last
acceptable prejudice in the left i have to tread very lightly because you know people are
uncomfortable now even in this society addressing these issues but i think that
tilik had it right that there are fundamental realities about human nature
and human society that can only be expressed in theological or religious terms
right but no i totally agree and
that is part of the rise of this kind of culture of
sadism um i mean really that's the best way to describe it
uh you know whether it's i mean we're a fortified society which of course as you know i've written about as you cited um
uh the the celebration of violence i mean all these a lot of these mass shooters spend a lot of time playing
these video games like call to duty i i may have it wrong i've never played a video game in my life but you know these
violent video games which models a kind of behavior but but
the whole gun culture becomes and violence becomes a way of self-empowerment
or a false kind of sense of self-empowerment when all the other avenues seem closed and of course we we
fetishize weapons in this country for that reason it's a myth but you know
they take away every other form of self-empowerment but we still have our arsenal my family's from maine i mean i
have neighbors in maine who have like one of them has 23 weapons in his house it's a false sense of empowerment but
it's it's why the second amendment is so contentious because
um take away that gun and every sense of empowerment is is gone you know it's interesting
there's i've been in societies where they all the men have weapons you know just
as a part of but but they rarely use them because they have such a profound sense of the sanctity of life
and again i think you know if you grow up watching apparently a a 15 year old has seen
about 18 000 murders uh on on television and and the way that they kill people
there's one of the most popular i don't know if it is anymore but when i read about it and i like you have never played one of these games but i did read
quite a bit about them uh during a period and one of the game most popular games is was auto theft
something auto theft and they had you got points for running over old ladies with grocery baskets and
they and they have one scene where the guy picks up a prostitute abuses her and
then literally beats her to death with with with a uh with a baseball bat
and and this is like a popular game that kids play
and and they are kids playing these games even though they're supposedly for 18 and older they all get them
you know so i i really i i feel like you know
iceland one of my favorite countries i don't know if you know a lot about iceland but
you know iceland they brought in that notorious anti-semite you know the chess player
um and and their view on it was anybody that can play chess that good we're going to ignore his politics this bobby
fischer bobby fischer yeah but but they actually outlawed it's one of the most
secular societies in the world and they outlawed pornography you know you can't sell pornography uh
because if they just saw it as a very destructive force and i think one of the things
about this country is that we really fail to look at the the social sciences that i mean for
instance pamela paul uh who wrote that book pornified and and i actually had her at ris you've been
there uh in canada one of the things that she found is that people that watched a lot of pornography over about
a 10-year period ended up in in pedophilic material like it was a natural progression or an unnatural
progression to because the the threshold for stimulation gets higher and higher and a
lot of a lot of them had self-loathing yeah well you know at the end of that
chapter in empire of illusion on porn i end it with these people who buy these silicon silicon dolls you know
that are these whatever they call them you know because for me porn is about necrophilia
it's about death it is about the death of the soul of the other woman um so you're right and and
and porn today doesn't bear any resemblance to porn of a few decades ago i went to kink.com
in the last book which is uh they used they've sold it but it used to be the old national armory in san francisco in
the mission district and you would live people live stream in and pay money to have women waterboarded beaten tortured
tied up and this isn't simulated this is real i really think we're in the grips of
demons and i think if we don't recognize that we're not we're not able to address it because it's only a supernatural