For the past few months, I've been doing a lot and trying to explain what is wrong with the world. And if you've been following the news these past few weeks, it seems as though things are getting more and more dire. The war in Iran is about to heat up. The war in Ukraine is escalating. There are these riots and protests and revolts throughout Europe. We don't know what's happened in Africa, but a few months from now there's expectation that you will have the beginnings of a mass famine in Africa. Throughout South America, there are these anti-incumbent right-wing revolutions going on. Lula will lose to Flávio Bolsonaro very soon.

And so it seems as though things I've been predicting or forecasting for the past couple years, they are manifesting. Even though I may get some details wrong, the general direction is correct. And it's all very depressing, and I think that things will really escalate starting next year.

What I want to do for the next few months is begin a series of lectures on what we can do as a community and what the hope for the world is and what I think the world will look like after everything collapses. I want to focus today's lecture on education, specifically the meritocracy. The meritocracy is the idea that the best and the brightest should go to the best universities, and once they graduate, they should become the leaders of society and lead society forward in a progressive manner.

I myself am a product of the meritocracy. I'm very thankful for my education at Yale. I received a full scholarship to study at Yale and it really changed my life. I wouldn't be here today if I didn't go to Yale. I'm sure there are many of you who are also products of the meritocracy. But I want to focus my lecture on a criticism of the meritocracy, which some of you may find offensive. And again, the point of these meetups is to have discussion and debate. As you know from my lectures, I'm a very open person.

If there are things that I'm saying that you want me to clarify or you want me to explain, we can have a conversation. We can have a debate. I'm really happy to. Feel free to interrupt me as I make my argument.

And my central thesis is that the meritocracy is failing society. It's failing everyone. And this is a counterintuitive argument because, again, you think that the meritocracy is fundamentally about fairness. But what I want to show you today is that it is not fair. It's failing our children. And I want to propose a different path forward, and we can together, as a community, start to conceptualize and start to imagine what this path forward could look like.

My personal story

First of all, what I want to do is tell you my personal story. Some of you know the contours of my story, but I want to emphasize certain points about my journey to this point, to today.

I was born actually not far from Hong Kong. I myself am Cantonese. I was born maybe 2 hours somewhere across the sea, in a place called Toisan, Taishan. And it was a poor fishing village, and the year was 1976. This is at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, and I was born in July, and a couple months later Chairman Mao will die, which will basically mark the end of the Cultural Revolution.

And my father, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, immigrated over to Toronto, Canada, because he wanted a better life for his family. He went over, he was a dishwasher, and he stayed a dishwasher for his entire life. I went over when I was 6 years old, and I didn't speak any English when I went over. My family didn't speak English at home. I went over and I started grade one, and that entire year I didn't understand anything the teacher said. I was daydreaming. I was just looking outside the window. I was making friends.

At the end of my first year in Canada, my teacher, who was a very nice person, called my mother in for a conversation, and my mother didn't speak any English. There was a translator there. There were four of us in the empty room because this is the end of July, and everyone is outside on vacation.

And my teacher said to my mother, "Your son, he's a really nice and polite kid, but this entire year, he did not learn anything. His English has not improved at all."

My mother is not educated, but it's pretty obvious where the teacher was going to go with this. My mother said, "Do you mean to say that my son should repeat grade one?"

And my teacher said, "No, actually I think your son should go to kindergarten."

And I hear this and I am embarrassed. I'm shocked. I was a proud boy. I'm still a proud person. And my mother should have agreed with the teacher because if you go to kindergarten, you basically fit in better. You'll be older, you have time to learn English. But there was something about me: I didn't want to go to kindergarten and lose face. And my mother did something really unusual.

Rather than say, "You're the teacher. You're right. You're the professional," she turned to me—and I'm 6 years old and I have absolutely no idea about anything. She turns to me and asks me, "What do you want to do?" And I'm like, "I want to go on to grade two. I don't want to go to kindergarten and I don't want to be grade one. I want to go to grade two." And my teacher was like, "That's a terrible, terrible idea."

In fact, she was right because I did go to grade two. Things got worse for me because not only was I not doing well in school, but I was also bullied on the playground. I was not fitting in. I started to cheat in order to get by in school. And it really created a really traumatic childhood for me because of bullying. I would continue to perform badly in school.

But even today, I'm really thankful because I think that in education, it's not about doing well in school. It's about being the master of your own learning destiny. It's about making your own choices and making mistakes and learning from your mistakes. So even though I did have a traumatic childhood, even though I suffered a great deal, looking back at my childhood, I really felt that it was more important that I made my own mistakes, have my own freedom, than to very smoothly do well in school. I'm very thankful to my mother.

Another person I'm really thankful to is my substitute teacher. I can't remember her name. I don't even remember what she looks like, but she changed my life because in grade 10, this is high school. I am at this point a very troubled teenager. I am not doing well in school. My English is pretty bad. And at home I have a lot of issues with my father because my father, he’s a very angry man. I’m a very angry young man. And so we fought a lot, and the police have to come in, and it's just a tough time for me, and I felt really hopeless.

But when that substitute teacher came in, there was something about her that made me want to perform or want me to do better in school. Previously, all I did was watch TV. That one week in English class—and again, English is my worst subject—I really tried hard. And at the end of the week, the teacher, substitute teacher, took me outside for 10 minutes. And those 10 minutes changed my life because she asked me a question no one's ever asked me before. She asked me, "Where do you want to go for college?" And I'm like, "I don't know. I mean, does it matter? I'm not a good student."

She told me I was special, and there was something about me, and if I really worked hard, then I could climb to great heights. And maybe she told this to every student she met. Maybe she didn't know what she was talking about because she was in her early 20s. She was an intern. She wasn't even a real teacher. But I believed her, and those words sparked something in me, because from then on I really wanted to do well in school. And over the course of the next 3 years I transformed myself from a very shy kid who was not very motivated in school and who did not speak very good English.

And somehow I got into Yale on a full scholarship. And when I got into Yale on a full scholarship, I was very thankful to the idea of a meritocracy. I am a product of meritocracy, and I think that I prove the meritocracy works because I came from a poor family, and through my hard work, through my perseverance, through my resilience, I was able to get into one of the best universities in the world and then embark on my career.

But looking back, and looking at my time at Yale, I asked myself: would I want my three kids to go to Yale to experience what I did in university? And my answer is no. I have classmates, I have friends who are hellbent on getting their kids to Harvard and Yale, and they are exceptional kids. We're talking kids who are maybe 14, and they're able to read at a university level. They're state athletes. The kids today are incredible, and they will do very well at Harvard and Yale, and these are very gifted kids. But I would not want my kids to experience what I experienced at Yale.

Three problems with the meritocracy

Today I want to explain my problems with the meritocracy. And in a very broad, general perspective I have three major issues with the meritocracy. And again some of you will disagree. I want us to engage in conversation and debate.

Fairness

My first major issue with the meritocracy is: when we hear the word meritocracy, we think fairness. But I think the meritocracy is the opposite of fairness because it discriminates heavily in favor of a certain group of kids, and they obviously have high IQ, they have good memory, and it discards everyone else. And I think a much fairer system is one in which all students, all children are able to prosper regardless of his or her interests, regardless of his or her particular characteristics. I think that right now we value IQ, reason, logic too heavily. But look, we know this in life: you don't need high IQ to succeed. You just need to work hard. You need to have a passion for learning. You need to have curiosity.

Emotional intelligence is probably much more useful or effective than a high IQ. But for whatever reason we only discriminate in favor of high IQ through standardized testing, the SAT. I don't think it's a very fair system.

Intellectual habits

Second thing about the meritocracy—and I know this is going to be very controversial—but my second problem with the meritocracy is that it is anti-intellectual. For me, universities ought to be a place where you develop intellectual habits. And the idea of intellectual habits means to be curious about the world and to be imaginative and to speculate and make mistakes, to fail so that you learn from your mistakes, to engage in open and honest debate. Guess what, guys? They don't do that at university. Why? Because when you go to Harvard and Yale, you are embarked on a path to success.

Success means getting a Washington internship. It means getting to a law school. It means getting to medical school. It means being the best possible. Being the best possible means you can't fail. And it's a really silly thing because these universities, they are places where we should develop intellectuals, our future intellectuals. But having been at Yale, knowing a lot of people who are Ivy League, I have to say that a lot of my classmates, a lot of people in Ivy League, are anti-intellectual in that they're unwilling to engage in open debate and they're not willing to learn new ideas.

They're not very curious. They have a very narrow definition of success, and they live their lives in a very narrow way in order to achieve their success. And I think that's wrong because if Harvard is like this, where are society’s intellectuals coming from?

Look around the world today, and there are very few public intellectuals. You guys know this, but I think a major reason why my YouTube channel blew up—I have almost three million subscribers—and the reason why I get invited on so many podcasts is I'm basically one of the few public intellectuals in the world today. I'm not right about most things, but I'm a curious person and I'm imaginative. I'm willing to engage people in debate as long as they do so with good faith. And so that, to me, is very disappointing because we spend so many resources on these elite universities, and we produce very few public intellectuals. We produce a lot of Wall Street bankers, a lot of lawyers, a lot of doctors, but very few public intellectuals, and I think it's because these elite universities have a very narrow definition of success. That's my second problem with these universities.

Involution

My third problem is the idea of involution. If I applied to Yale today, there's no way I could get into Yale. When I applied to Yale in 1995, acceptance rate at that time was 20%. Today, it's like 5%. And the applicants, their résumés are just getting better and better. Why? Because parents insist on creating a résumé for their child from day one. And as we know, because we're in Hong Kong, this has led to the death of childhood for children. Children are not allowed to play anymore because you have to learn your vocabulary. You have to learn your math in kindergarten so you can get into a good primary school so you can get into a good high school so you can get into a good university.

And it's really destroyed the happiness and mental health of children. I went back to North America and I thought that there were issues in Chinese education. There are issues in Western education, period. I was at McGill University touring and talking to students and they don't even go to class. They smoke cannabis, they play video games and I think a lot of these kids, they're burnt out. From day one, they've been helicopter parented. They have very few freedoms to fail. Failure is not an option for these families. And so I would say that the meritocracy has been very bad for children but it's been also very bad for society. We are spending so many resources on educating a few elite.

Other education systems

And you’re like, well, is there a better system? There are lots of better systems out there. You go to the Nordic countries, Finland. Do you know where they spend most of the resources? On vocational colleges, on training plumbers, electricians, because that's where the majority of people want to go to school. The reality is the majority of people don't want to go to school to read books. They want to go to school to learn a craft, in order to get a job, in order to support a family. Most people want a good job and a good family. They don't want to read Plato and Kant and Dante. That's most people, and I think that if you want to grow and prosper, you should be accommodating to most people. So you should spend most of your resources on what most people want and that's what the Nordic countries do.

Also before the meritocracy, there was a better system. In the United States they had three types of universities. The first type was the Ivy League. That's where the rich people went. Only if you were rich did you go to the Ivy League.

It was a social club. Then you had the research universities where smart people went. This included Chicago and Johns Hopkins. Smart people went there to become professors and scientists and they did a great job. They're still doing a great job today. The third type are what we call an A&M, which are basically state schools to train farmers and engineers, which is what you need in order to grow an economy. So 100 years ago, the United States had a great education system, and that's what allowed the United States to prosper so quickly. If you go to the northern countries they have a pretty good system as well.

The occult origins of the meritocracy

So the question for us is: why do we have the meritocracy? And you can cynically say, well, it's because these universities, Yale, Harvard, have all the power, and so they're able to warp or manipulate society to their benefit. And that is the logical explanation. That's what most people believe.

But what I want to argue to you today is that doesn't explain everything. Doesn't explain how a few private schools in the United States are able to control the entire education system. Doesn't explain to us why the SAT became so prevalent. I'm going to offer you another explanation, which is the real reason why we have the meritocracy has to do with the occult or eschatology.

That's my argument to you today. The powerful people in the United States, they are Freemasons and they have a particular understanding of the cosmos and they believe that they can do certain things in order to bring about the end times or to bring about heaven on earth. And the meritocracy was really the plan to create heaven on earth. So that's the first thing I'm going to do. Second thing I'm going to do is explain why the meritocracy or this occult eschatology is actually really bad for children. And the third thing I'm going to do is offer an alternative vision for the future because the meritocracy is collapsing.

Those are the three things I want to do today, and I'll open the floor to questions. The first thing I want to do is explain to you the occult background to the meritocracy. Then I want to explain what's bad for children, for students, for humans in general actually. And the third thing I want to do is provide an alternative vision that we can as a community discuss and ruminate on over the next few months, over the next few years.

Medieval Europe and modernity

To explain the meritocracy, we need to go back a thousand years. And this is medieval Europe. And medieval Europe, to our eyes, it's a very strange place because it's a very static, hierarchical society. The Catholic Church is in charge, but even in other religions, it's a very static world. And the reason why is at this time humans are taught that the world that we live in, it is fallen, it is evil. Why is it fallen? Why is it evil? Because Adam and Eve ate that fruit when God told them not to eat it, so we were banished from paradise and now we are in hell.

And so whether it's the Catholic Church or Jewish rabbis, they say the same thing, which is we must redeem ourselves. So therefore we must do penance.

We come here and we live our lives and our lives kind of suck because we're basically slaves and serfs or peasants. It's a terrible, terrible life. But that is the plan of God because God is punishing us for the fall. And so we'll do like 40, 50 years of a hard life on earth where we do not commit any sin, but after we die, we will have spiritual happiness. So the most important thing is to respect the church or obey the law.

And this is, again, for a thousand years almost, how the Western world understood life and meaning and purpose. As you can imagine, there are lots of people who did not like this idea. There were lots of rebellions. And this ultimately led to the Protestant Reformation. And what people don't appreciate was what a radical revolution the Protestant Reformation is because it really reconceptualized reality.

Think of a metaphor where, for whatever reason, for months and months you go on a very strict diet. You only drink water. You only eat salad. Well, I guarantee you, you have this hunger for fatty, salty food, right? And that hunger will just build and build and build as you repress yourself more and more. Well, that's the same that happened in human history, where for centuries the Catholic Church and the Jewish rabbis were repressing their people, and the people, the zeitgeist, the culture want to rebel against all authority and assert its independence.

And so, starting after the Reformation, you have rebellions all over the place. John Milton wrote his classic Paradise Lost, which was an inversion of the traditional story of the Fall, right?

Rather than say the fall was what doomed humanity, John Milton was trying to say no, Satan actually liberated us from prison. And that was a very romantic reading of John Milton's Paradise. And if you read William Blake and other romantic poets, they believe that Satan was actually the hero of the story. So you have John Milton, Paradise Lost, then you also have like in the Jewish tradition, people like Shabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank arise to say the rabbis are dictators. We should ignore the law because we have a direct connection to God. Then you have the Freemasons arise in order to pursue science, liberty, individualism. Then you have the French Revolution. So rather than say there's one direct cause for modernity, what we can say is for centuries spiritual authority was able to repress human emotion, the human desire for freedom, for truth, for individuality.

And over the span of 100 years this desire for individual truth and freedom just exploded and it's created the world that we live in today. So the radical departure created by modernity is the idea that we as individuals can become God and create paradise on earth. Before everyone was taught that we are fallen, we are sinful.

Therefore, we cannot be trusted. We just do our penance and then we die and then we go to heaven. Now it's like, no, I am an individual, and I have the capacity to imagine a better world, and I have a divine responsibility to build a better world. And there are lots of people who believe this including the pilgrims who went to United States in order to build the New Jerusalem. And America was founded by these pilgrims. And there were lots of Freemasons who went over to United States.

Kabbalah and reason

And there was certain eschatology, and the eschatology derives from the Kabbalah. In previous lectures I've talked a lot about the Kabbalah. But I'll just summarize very quickly what the Kabbalah is. Basically the Kabbalah takes Gnostic or Hermetic philosophy and applies it to the Bible. In the Bible you have lots of these stories: Adam and Eve, the patriarchs, King David, and these are all really interesting stories. But what the Kabbalah is trying to explain is the cosmic significance of these stories, and it uses Gnostic philosophy in order to explain it.

Gnosticism, for those of you who don't understand, it's basically the idea that we are all consciousness. It's an inversion of what we believe. We believe that the body is what gives rise to consciousness. But what they believe is that consciousness gives rise to the body. And if you believe that the world is conscious energy as opposed to material bodies, then you see the world in a very different place. If you see the world materialistically, you see us as divided. You can also see us as reducible.

Simple. But if you see us as all energy, then we are all connected and we are beyond time and space. I don't have time to go into Gnosticism, but I will later on. But just know that the Kabbalah is trying to apply Gnostic philosophy to the Bible. And in doing so, it comes to a radical idea. And the radical idea is this: God created the world in order to complete itself, to know itself. But during this process of creating the world, because we are too egotistical, because we are unredeemed, we defy God, and that broke the world. And so if you want to repair the world, if you want to save the world, if you want to end the world, if you want to bring God to earth, what we need to do is repair ourselves.

Redeem ourselves. In the Freemasonic tradition, the idea is if we create a system in which reason triumphs, reason becomes God, then the world can be perfected. And in their eschatology, what is reason? Reason is the meritocracy.

The history of the SAT

Let me explain very quickly the history of meritocracy. So what happened again? 100 years ago you had these three different types of universities. You had the Ivy League for rich kids. You had research universities for smart kids. You had A&M state schools for everyone else. And the system worked really well. But the Ivy League then became dominant. It became dominant because it used something called the SAT and the SAT was pioneered by two people. The first is James B. Conant, who was president of Harvard in the 1930s. And Harvard is obviously the most influential university in the United States at this time, and James Conant wanted to create a scholarship program to find the best and brightest students from all over the United States.

So he tasked a man named Henry Chauncey with creating the SAT. Henry Chauncey will go on to become president of something called ETS, Educational Testing Service. He was the first president. You may not know who he is, but I'm pretty sure you know ETS, right? They're the ones behind TOEFL, GRE, SAT, and the MCATs. So, they are a company, a private company that specializes in standardized testing.

So they create the SAT in order to find the best and the brightest and what we know is both are descendants of Pilgrims, but we can suspect that they were also Freemasons. Because this is a Freemasonic ideal of creating a temple, right? And how do you create a temple? Well, you need to have perfect cubes, right? Because once you have perfect cubes, you can stack them on top of each other. But how do you get perfect cubes? Well, you have to do so for reason. And how do you promote reason? You promote reason through a concept called the IQ.

IQ and the meritocracy

Here's a fun fact that you guys may not know, but the idea of IQ, it is very, very unscientific. It has absolutely no basis in anything at all. It is something that was completely made up. So, IQ comes to us because, a French psychologist was worried about social inequality. So he created a concept called IQ and his name was Binet by the way. So that's why there's something called the Binet–Stanford IQ test. But basically his idea was this: there has to be like a threshold where you can't go under. Otherwise you'll have a lot of social problems, like diet issues and maybe mental health issues. So he just said IQ should be a threshold. You go under it's problematic, but other than that, it's not a really useful measure.

For a reason, the Americans took the idea of IQ and turned it into a standard. The reason why, of course, is that it aligned with the idea of reason. So the idea was to use the SAT to find the people with the highest IQ, make IQ the standard for academic performance and then by that you slowly pervade yourself, spread yourself throughout the education system, and then everyone becomes smarter, right? And then once everyone becomes smarter, then through that mechanism you are able to perfect society.

It didn't turn out that way. Because what we discovered is the IQ, it is exclusionary. And what they believe is that IQ can't be changed. But the original conception of the meritocracy was to use IQ and the SAT and the Ivy League to transform society in a way that allows for the spread of reason. But in practice, through IQ, through standardized testing, it's led to a more divisive, more unequal society.

From the meritocracy to AI

So if you are a Freemason, if you are the secret societies in power that believe all this, you don't believe that, oh, IQ was a failure or this entire project was a failure. What you believe is we need to discount other factors from the equation, including family, including culture, including race.

What these people believe is the meritocracy failed not because IQ is a flawed concept or the meritocracy itself is a flawed concept or the entire project is a flawed concept. What they believed is there were these external factors we cannot control that corrupted our experiment, our mission, including the family. So if you are one of these guys, you're like, the solution moving forward is to negate or remove the influence of the family, of culture, of community from the equation.

Once you are able to do that, then you're able to achieve the holy empire of reason. You're able to make everyone reasonable. And so what we're seeing is they're shifting the focus from the meritocracy, which has been a failure by the way, to AI, artificial intelligence. This is why you're seeing a massive growth of data centers because the eschatology is still the same, but now they're switching tactics. Rather than try to change people through the schooling system, through the meritocracy, they're like, "Now we're going to change people. We are going to make people reasonable through AI."

As you know, Facebook has been promoting a new service called Muse, right? What is Muse? It's a personal AI. It's an AI service, right? And so imagine the moment you're born, there's an AI, and you can pretend the AI is your soulmate or your daemon or an angel, or who cares? It doesn't really matter. But you trust this AI, and this AI tells you to be a good person, to work out, to be healthy, to do well in school. And because you don't even know what this AI is, and you just think that this AI is God, you just do exactly what the AI tells you. And if everyone does this, then in theory, we should be able to achieve reason in the world.

Everyone will be a good person doing good works, right? That's a theory, right? That's the history of the meritocracy. Now what I'm going to do is show you why this is actually a really bad idea, why AI will make things actually much worse for everyone.

Children and education

I want to talk about children and education. I think there are three major beliefs that everyone thinks are really simple and intuitive, right? The first is all children are blank slates, right? They're blank vessels. They're empty vessels. And what we need to do is pour things into them to fill them up, right? That's what's driving the education system we have today, where children as young as like three or four, they're doing mathematics in China. They're doing sports, right? Because the idea is they're just blank. So just fill them with stuff and then they'll be great.

That's the first idea that we have. The second idea that we have is that the children are just a mini-me, right? If you're a parent, then the children are just you, but a smaller you. And so a lot of parents are like, well, I failed at ballet or I failed at tennis, so I want my kid to be successful at ballet and tennis. And if my kid starts earlier, then my kid should succeed. The third thing is the idea of critical thinking or creativity, right? Everyone's like, oh, in a time of AI, what we need to do is teach our kids critical thinking and creativity because that will make us better than AI.

AI can do all the simple algorithmic tasks but we humans are creative and therefore we should teach our kids how to be creative. So these are the three major ideas that drive parenting education today. And what I will show you is all three ideas are actually wrong and counterproductive. It leads to unhappy children.

Critical thinking and creativity

Let me first focus on the idea of critical thinking and creativity. What people don't appreciate is that how kids are taught in school to be critical thinkers, it doesn't actually make them critical thinkers because if you look at how this is taught in schools, it's really about reduction and categorization. What I'm doing is I'm taking phenomena and breaking them down into their constituent parts, categorizing these parts and then trying to analyze their logic together. That's what we mean by critical thinking. And this is reductive and this is completely the wrong approach. If you really want kids to be creative, and they're creative, what you want them to do is synthesize rather than reduce.

And so think of this: if you actually follow the scientific method, you'll get nowhere. Because creativity, it's really about the leap of the imagination. What creativity really is is what we call channeling. If you go and look at the great scientists in history, whether it be Newton or Einstein or Galileo, they didn't believe in the scientific method because it was too reductive, too rigid for them. What they believed is if you want true knowledge, you have to channel it. You have to speak to the divine and the divine will give you knowledge. So in other words, rather than teach kids to be critical thinkers, we need to teach them to appreciate their own divinity and live a life that allows them to connect more to the divine. That's the first idea.

Children and consciousness

Second idea is, if that's true, then kids aren't blank slates. Kids have an intimate connection with the divine. They're consciousness like we are, and the consciousness that they have is, like us, infinite, and they are so from day one. Let me tell you a story about my kids. I have three kids, and they fight all the time, and my middle son, he was about three when my daughter was born. And the two keep on fighting with each other. One day my daughter learned how to walk and she's about one year old. My son is like three and a half, and the three of us are together for a reason. She learned how to walk, but she can’t speak yet. My daughter slaps my son, and I look at my daughter, angry, and say, "You apologize now." And my daughter looks at me and she starts, "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." And I’m like, "What’s going on here?"

Clearly she's trying to bullshit me. She's trying to explain why, "Oh, I was really hitting him." But when she was talking, she suddenly realized, "I actually can't speak." So when you have children, you realize that their consciousness is higher than their capacity to express themselves. Again, if you have young children, you will notice this.

The other thing about children is they're excellent judges of character. They will know right away who's a good person, who's a bad person, who to trust and who not to trust.

What we've done is we have socialized ourselves into self-deceit. So, we know this person is a bad person, but we're like, "Well, but he’s my boss or he’s my sister’s husband," so you put up with this crap. Children don’t do that. Children are like, "You’re a bad person, so I should stay away from you." So, children are not blank slates. They have their own conception of the universe, which is often more pure and more truthful than ours.

Children and purpose

And this leads us to the third point, which is we assume that children come from us. But I think that if you think about it, if you just extrapolate, then what you recognize is that children come from God. Children come here with a purpose and they are here to achieve their purpose. We don't know what their purpose is. They themselves may not even know what their purpose is, but they come here with a purpose. Let me tell you an interesting story. Last week I was having dinner with a Toronto doctor, and he's had decades of experience, and I asked him, as a doctor, what is one of the most unusual things that you've noticed during your practice? And he told me something really interesting that I never really understood before.

Once he told it to me, it really blew my mind. It made a lot of sense. And what he said to me was this: having known people for decades, just charting their lives for like 40 years—because he's a doctor, he sees patients regularly—he says this: having seen them with kids, he recognizes that everything that they've done has led them to a point of having a child so that they could take care of this child.

So what this means is—and I know this is hard for you guys to accept—is maybe this child, this soul came to us for a reason, and that child picked us as a parent because we were the best equipped to help that child achieve his or her purpose. So it's almost like all things are preordained or predestined.

Meaning the life you have led has allowed you to become the best parent for the child that you have if you choose to have a child. And that's really true for my life because I have three kids and all three are very sensitive children with their own very specific needs. I say to my wife, I've been in education for like decades. I've read hundreds, possibly thousands of books on education. Our children make no sense to me. I don't know how if our kids were with someone else, how they could survive, because my wife doesn’t work and my job allows me a lot of flexibility to spend a lot of time on my kids. And both my wife and I spent most of our time discussing the kids, strategizing on how to take care of them. And so the idea is, well, no one else could take care of our kids.

And so this tells us that our kids came to us intentionally. It was all designed. Our kids couldn't go anywhere else and we couldn't have any other kids. It means that our lives are very stressful and very demanding, but this is how the universe works.

So if you're a parent, what I will say to you is you are the best parent for your child. Don't listen to anyone else's advice. Don't listen to teachers. Don't listen to doctors. Don't read these books. Trust your heart because everything that you have, everything that you have done, everything that you've experienced, every pain, every trauma, every triumph that you've experienced in the past has led you to this moment so you can be the best parent for your child. And that's something that I just learned last week, but I think it makes a lot of sense. I think that I am the best parent for my children, and I should just trust in my instincts. And so think of a society in which parents have the freedom to be the best parent to their child because we don't have that society today.

Today we have the meritocracy, in which case parents are told to defer to authority. They are told to listen to teachers or to doctors or to professors because authority, experts know better. But in reality we, the parents, if you have children, we know the best. Only we can actually take care of the child to the best of our ability.

So moving forward, that's what I think the solution is. The fundamental bond of society, what allows society to function, is the love between a parent and a child, and society should be structured around that love because it's the most beautiful.

It's the most powerful force in the world. A bond between a parent and a child, and all society should revolve around this bond and make it possible. You're the parent. You know what's best for the child. The child is here to be taken care of by you.

So we have to ask ourselves rather than try to build a meritocracy, rather than trying to make everyone the same, how can we better appreciate and celebrate our diversity, our difference? And we all came here for our own individual purpose. All three of my children are different. And honestly, I don't actually agree with some of their purposes, but what I've learned is you can't actually fight them. So I have my middle child, Bo. He is very stubborn, and my wife is like, "Oh, he’ll be a rich person one day." And I was like, "But I don’t want that for my children." I want my children to be intellectuals. I want them to be teachers. I want them to be writers.

I want them to contribute to society rather than be a rich person who steals from society. And for the longest time I was trying to teach Bo to be a good person. And he would always be naughty, and he would always make me angry, and eventually I came to the conclusion, he would rather die than not be him. He doesn't care. He's like, "Well, I know I came from another world and I'm just in this body to have my purpose and if I don’t achieve my purpose, then what’s the point of being here? So I’d rather just die, come back at a later time."

And children aren't afraid of death. If you are a parent, you know this. Children are not afraid to die because they remember being reincarnated. They remember a different life. And they know, if I die, I’ll just go back. Later on, you're conditioned to fear death, but as a child, you're not afraid to die. So through a lot of painful mistakes, I've come to this conclusion where our children are going to live the lives they want, and we as parents should enable and empower them to live the lives that they want.

A framework for a new school

I will really quickly provide a conception, a framework for what a new school should look like. And remember the idea is how do you make the purpose of the child the center of the school? How do you protect and nourish the love between a parent and a child? And if you accomplish these two things, I guarantee you the school will be successful and it will probably unleash an incredible amount of human creativity in the world. So really simple conception. There are three things that are not taught in schools today that need to be the fundamental basis for any school.

And these three things are:

1. Nature.
2. The occult.
3. The great books.

Nature

What is nature? Nature is the best teacher in the world. You go into the biographies of these great scientists and you will find a very common pattern, which is they grew up in nature. They grew up on farms. They grew up understanding how the world works. Today kids grow up in cities. Cities are abstractions. They remove you from the logic of the universe. If you are in nature and you observe birds, trees, if you just explore, what you're really doing as a child is digging into or uncovering the mind of God. The mind of God which permeates the entire universe. And if you do that, you have an intuitive understanding of the mind of God. And that will drive your further study.

So if you want the child to be a great scientist, the child must grow up in nature. The child must know where food comes from. The child must know how to make his own food. And children love that. The problem today is that we put kids in a room all day and we feed them food. They have absolutely no idea where the food comes from. We give them knowledge, they have absolutely no idea where the knowledge comes from.

It's all abstraction, and that is the worst way for kids to learn. If you just put kids out in a forest somewhere, they create their own games, they do their own science experiments, they just explore and learn in a way that is beyond our own imagination. So nature has to be a very important part of it. Look, maybe it's possible to create a self-sufficient school community, right? Where imagine that it's a school, but it's really a self-sufficient community where the adults and the kids have to create their own electricity, have to grow their own food, right? You're just off the grid, you're by yourself. And imagine the power that would have on the kid's imagination because the child is able to see the entire cosmos in a little village. So that's nature.

The occult

The occult is key because all humans come to this world with three questions. There are inside your heart three pressing questions: where do I come from? What am I doing here? What is my purpose? Where am I going? We all in our hearts strive for a complete mythology of the cosmos. And that's why eschatology is so powerful because it is a story that is complete, and you can participate in this story. And eschatology will always undergird society because the powerful need eschatology, mythology, in order to structure society.

That’s why we need to appreciate the occult origins of the meritocracy. So if you really want kids to learn, you have to teach them this cosmos, this cosmology. And then they’ll be like, "Now I know why I’m learning." If you just say, "You need to learn in order to get a job to make money," they’ll be like, "Well, yeah, but you have money, so why can’t you just support me for the rest of my life?" You have to tell them exactly where they came from, why they're here, where they're going. Then that activates their drive.

With the occult it’s really about studying religion. Rather than make science and math the core of your curriculum, you make religion and the occult the core of your curriculum and you study different religious traditions including the Kabbalah including the Hindu tradition, the Buddhist tradition, the Taoist tradition, the Shinto tradition. You try to be as broad as possible because what you will find is that different traditions all say the same thing, which is we all come from the source and we all aspire to return to the source and we should be thankful and grateful for the time we have on this planet. So carpe diem, seize the day. Work hard, enjoy your life here, because the experience that you have here is completely unique.

It is unique and is different from anywhere else in the cosmos. That is the occult.

The great books

Now last is the great books. Some of you know that I taught a seminar on Dante. I think every child should read the Bible. Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, Milton. Why? Because ultimately, the great books, it's a portal into the mind of God. The great books, don't just think of them as physical things. What they are are spiritual portals into the divine consciousness. And so the more you read Dante, the more you approach the mind of God. Nature is what gives you insight into the mind of God. Nature is what compels you to better understand God. But the great books is what fully allows you to enter the mind of God.

So if you do these three things, make nature, the occult and the great books the center of your school, and you make helping the child find his or her purpose and maintaining or nurturing the love between parent and child, then I think that you could create a school where you educate a new generation of intellectual artists, writers, poets, thinkers, intellectuals that could lead humanity forward. And that is the vision that I want to work on over the next few years and maybe even build over the next few years.

Audience questions

Elite universities and the great books

Audience question:

I’m quite curious: given your interest in cultivating intellectualism, given your interest in getting more people to read the great books, how do you reconcile your critiques of these institutions with the fact that the Ivy League is probably one of the only places on the earth where great works and great texts are given the attention that they deserve?

Professor Jiang:

Let me summarize the question. I say the great books are key to a great education, to nurturing a great mind, yet if you look at the world today, it’s really these elite universities—Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard—that protect the great books. Maybe that was true when I went to Yale; that was true when you went to a good school, but it’s no longer true today. Today the Ivy League has abandoned their mission of teaching and promoting the great books. Maybe there’s an elite group of students within these campuses that still read the great books, but the thing to remember, and this is hard, is that all the great poets were first and foremost democrats.

Why did Dante write the Divine Comedy in a vernacular? Because he wanted to spread the truth to everyone. These poets were prophets who were also revolutionaries. They felt that what was stunting human growth, what was destroying innovation in society, was the fact that you had an elite that monopolized knowledge and literacy. And if you really wanted society to prosper, if you want humanity to flourish, you need to destroy this monopoly and spread truth to everyone. That’s something that every poet, every prophet has taught. Dante taught this; Homer taught this. Jesus taught this; Muhammad taught this; the Buddha taught this. You need to democratize knowledge.

What I’m saying is, yes, before I did believe that only if you went to Yale could you read and appreciate the great books, because they’re so complex. You need a very special environment to foster this sort of learning. But having taught the great books in China, having taught Dante and Homer in China—and these are kids who don’t speak English that well and who are far removed from the Western culture experience—but they loved it.

The three great writers that my students loved and still rave about are Dante, Homer, Plato. And I’m like, that makes no sense, because they never heard of these three guys before. When they read the Iliad, they identified with Achilles. When they read Divine Comedy, they’re so drawn into the cosmos that Dante created. And that’s what I’ve done with this community as well, where YouTube has really democratized the great books to a wide range of people. The response to my lectures on YouTube has demonstrated that there’s a real thirst to learn. I get a lot of comments on YouTube, which is, ‘You know what? I’m at university, but I don’t go to class. I just watch your YouTube lectures.’

Another very common comment is, ‘I have ADHD, but I can sit down and watch you for two hours.’ I think the very idea of an elite education is problematic. I think that each and every one of us wants to learn, but this learning has to resonate. It has to speak some truth. That’s why I think that the great books can be read by anyone and everyone. I’ve said this in the past before, but I want to make it my mission to make sure that everyone is able to read Dante.

Reason, capital, and Freemasonry

Audience question:

I think my question regards your introduction of Freemasons. I was wondering—I personally didn’t really understand the leap that they took from wanting to bring God to earth, and then reason being the thing they want to uplift in everyone, and how that relates to the function of society rather than consciousness or religion.

Professor Jiang:

Unfortunately, because time is limited, I’m doing a lot of leaps. Let me provide some background. The first idea is this massive shift away from medieval society into modernity. Basically, this massive rebellion against the structure and authority and hierarchy of society. But for the shift to happen, there have to be new interest groups that benefit from the shift. Shifts don’t happen just automatically. There have to be new constituencies, new vested interests that facilitate the shift. Otherwise, the authority can just clamp down.

Who are these groups that facilitate the shift? And the answer is the merchant class, or what we call the bourgeois, or middle class. Previously it was the priests, the rabbis, the aristocracy that was in charge, and they wanted things to stay the same. But now you have this new group of people, the merchant class, that wanted to change society in a way that benefited them. The shift was happening, and again, there’s this zeitgeist for individuality, for truth, for connection to God. But for this process to be facilitated, the merchant class had to come into power. And the main mechanism that they use to obtain more power is transnational capital.

Transnational capital allowed them to force the aristocracy to work with them, right? Because now, if you’re a king, you want to fight a war, you need financing from these merchants. Capital is now this new force in society. But again, people want religious truth. You can’t just be like, ‘Oh, money.’ You have to cloak this thing in a form of religious truth to appeal to as many people as possible. Rather than to say the word capital, they came up with the word reason, right? And now for the first time in human history—we’ve never seen this before—but there’s a dichotomy between reason and emotion.

If you just read every writer before the 16th century, they all appreciate that reason and emotion were the same thing. You can only have reason from emotion, right? Chinese, the word is xin, right? Reason comes from the heart. But it wasn’t just the Chinese. It was also the Indians, the Greeks. Everyone appreciated that reason and emotion were one and the same. You could not actually think without emotion, because emotion was your experiences, your life. But now you have this dichotomy between reason and emotion. Why? Because reason represented capital and emotion represented forces that prevent the spread of capital. These forces include religion, include the family, include prejudice, include the nation-state, include the king. These are all traditions that blocked or obstructed the movement of capital, right?

Now you have this dichotomy, but once you have this dichotomy, you now need a new organization in order to spread reason throughout the world. And this new organization is what we call Freemasonry. Freemasonry is the religion of capitalism. Emotion is tied to old religion. But for reason to spread, you need a new religion, and the new religion is called Freemasonry. Who created science? The Freemasons did, right, in order to spread reason. They created science, but they also created the meritocracy. Now they’re creating AI.

This is a really complicated story, but I’ll try to make this as simple as possible. I’m explaining this in a very simple way. But this is a process that takes centuries, and there are different ideologies at work. The Freemasons were created, but then you also have the Kabbalah as well. And then you have the Jesuits. What’s happening is that as these new ideas are spreading, as these new organizations are forming, they influence each other, and then they coalesce together.

Freemasonry is a religion of capital. It wants to spread reason. And then they merge with the Kabbalah. And the Kabbalah is what we call messianic eschatology: the belief that humans can force the end times through certain actions. The Freemasons believe that, yes, we have reason, and therefore we now have a duty to exercise our reason in order to bring about heaven on earth. And how do we do that? By making sure that everyone has reason. And how do you do that? Through education.

This is how it all ties together. But one thing that we need to appreciate is that ideas change over time, but you always need mechanisms in order to spread these ideas. And then what happens is these mechanisms will then corrupt the ideas. It’s a very organic, very convoluted, complicated process.

Audience follow-up:

How do the people square that, where they believe that there’s a consciousness, but then also through reason they have no trust for anything, because they’re using this reason lens? They don’t have any trust in other people, but they believe we’re all one. How do they think that?

Professor Jiang:

Let me explain what reason is from a Kabbalistic perspective. God created everything, but because of the Fall, God left us. When God left us, there’s still an element of him in us, the spark of him in us, because he created us, right? Remember how in the Bible it says that God created Adam by breathing life into him, right? There’s a remnant of God in us, and that is what we call reason. Reason is a capacity to think like God, in which case reason is our creative force. If we can harness our reason, then we can be like God and shape the world in a way that we want.

Now you’re going to argue about how many people have reason. If that is the case, then these people should just be eliminated. That’s why the idea of the meritocracy is important, because the idea of the meritocracy is meant to be a filtration system to seek out those with reason, and then the meritocracy is meant to harness and develop their reason to the full potential. And if you don’t have reason, if you’re not capable of reasoning, then you should just be eliminated. And once we go through this process of filtration, elimination, then we should in theory be able to create a perfect world where reason is dominant.

The meritocracy and social mobility

Audience question:

Let’s say we mentioned that you want to remove meritocracy in the entirety, and let’s say…

Professor Jiang:

Guys, I am not a revolutionary. I am not here to spark a revolution, like, ‘Let’s burn down Yale.’ No, guys, no. This is a process that will happen anyway, because it’s a dead idea. Just like how the medieval age gave us modernity, I think this modern age will now die and new ideas will come out. And often what happens is the pendulum swings widely. Maybe today we are too materialistic, and maybe we are now looking for more spirituality.

Again, my own personal experience is my YouTube lectures are very popular because people are drawn to my spiritual aspects. Yeah, I do biblical analysis, but a lot more people are drawn to my spiritual teachings as well.

Audience follow-up:

I’m just thinking about the social mobility. Let’s say we saw the benefits of the meritocracy, like some poor people who are in the village, and they come back and build the village, let’s say.

Professor Jiang:

That’s a great point that you make. Maybe there are really talented people out there and the meritocracy allows them to leave their circumstances and reach their full potential. What I'm trying to say is that our full potential is realized when we help others, when we share ourselves with others, when we embrace our spirituality. That is how we achieve our true creative potential. The meritocracy doesn't do that. The meritocracy forces us to compete against each other. It forces us to only focus on material wealth rather than spiritual truth. So you're right in that yes in theory the meritocracy should be helping people achieve their creative potential and that could in the long run be good for society. But in my experience, I find that going to Yale and Harvard makes people very stubborn, very narrow-minded, very materialistic and almost very anti-intellectual. I find that people instead who go to art school or who don't really have a formal education, they tend to be more curious. They tend to ask good questions and they're willing to admit they're wrong. Whereas if you are part of a meritocracy, you're always looking for reasons to prove you are right.

Competing systems after collapse

Audience question:

Say we create a more spiritual and more perfect world. How do you see it competing against other tribes or societies that are more efficient? Have you talked about that?

Professor Jiang:

The idea is that we are not going from one system to another. What we’re experiencing is a total system collapse. When that happens, you have new systems emerge, and these systems are very diverse. You will have obviously an AI surveillance state in some places. You also have the meritocracy, but you also have corporate states. Someone like Peter Thiel is promoting something called the network state. The idea of a network state is just basically a society run by a corporation. Rather than run by people, have it run by a corporation. Is that a lot better?

You have a lot of different models out there, and a lot of these models will compete against each other. What I’m trying to say is that if we go with this model, basically communities that focus on building the love between parent and child and helping the child find purpose, this will unleash the greater potential of all children. And this will make this framework, this model, much more flexible than other models, and therefore able to navigate the conflict amongst these different systems. Basically, another way of saying this is, yes, there will be different models, different systems out there. But they are all seeking creativity. They’re all seeking intellectualness.

And the main product of this system is to provide an intellectual energy to other systems as well. And that’s how you navigate the conflicts amongst these systems. Rather than compete against these other systems directly, maybe try to be much more flexible and strategic in how you negotiate with these other systems.

World war and China

Audience question:

Two questions. Question one is, do you think we are already in World War III?

Professor Jiang:

I’ve said this before, but I think that we’re already in World War III. And look, if you go back to World War II, they didn’t know they were in World War II. I mean, if you went to World War I, they didn’t know they were in World War I. Later on, historians will simplify matters, but it’s clear that right now the world is falling apart. This war in Iran, it is disrupting global supply chains, and the world runs on global supply chains. Next year I think you’ll start to see inflation, but you’ll also see empty shelves.

You might also see some famines in the world. We’re heading towards a very tough time.

Audience follow-up:

Do you think that China will be forced or voluntarily be in the war?

Professor Jiang:

My understanding of Chinese culture, right—and we can disagree with this—is China tends to be insular. Whenever there’s a global crisis emerging, China chooses to turtle up or close its borders so as to avoid involving itself in international conflicts. Because if you are the elite in China, from your perspective, the greatest mistake you can make is to involve yourself in a global conflict, because then you are just vulnerable to risk. What China does is, I mean, completely reasonable. But then the question is, why do Western nations constantly involve themselves in these geopolitical messes? And the answer is messianic eschatology.

You cannot explain the Iran war from a geopolitical perspective. You can only explain it through the lens of a messianic eschatology.

Having children in an uncertain world

Audience question:

You’re talking about kids, you’re talking about education. You have three kids. Are you worried at all? And if you were to suggest for other parents or future parents, would you tell them that they should wait a bit instead of starting a family right now? Because I do understand it’s important for us to be based around families.

Professor Jiang:

The question is, obviously the world’s falling apart, and I have three kids, and would I recommend others to have kids themselves? I would not be here speaking to you today were it not for my children. I’ve had a very tough life. Maybe this past year I’ve become very successful, I’ve become very famous, but I’m 50 years old, and for 49 years I had a very, very tough time. I talked about my very traumatic childhood in Toronto. But when I went to Yale, it was not a good time either.

It was also very traumatic because I thought that I’d go to Yale and meet intellectuals and meet a lot of friends, and I didn’t. I was alienated at Yale, and Yale was in many ways far more traumatic than Toronto. At Yale I had impostor syndrome. I felt like a fraud. I’m like, ‘What am I doing here? I’m not that smart. I’m not that rich. I shouldn’t be here. They made a mistake in letting me in.’ And my greatest fear was that one day they’ll knock on my door and say, ‘Sorry, you have to leave because we made a mistake. We shouldn’t have let you in.’

That was my greatest fear. But being at Yale made me want to prove myself, and I wanted to prove myself right away. In China I worked as a journalist trying to become famous, and I met a lot of people who did become famous. I’m sure you guys know Peter Hessler, but we were working as journalists at the same time, and six months or a year after we met each other in Beijing—we were both at that time freelance journalists in Beijing—his book River Town came out. It was an instant bestseller. It made him famous. He started writing for The New Yorker, and I was obviously very envious, very jealous of his success, and I didn’t understand why I was struggling when he was in fact so successful.

My journalism career didn’t work out. I got thrown out of China. I tried other fields. I was a complete failure, and I was not very successful. Things changed when I had children, because now I’m like, ‘You know what? I can’t do this for myself.’ Before, I wanted to be famous to prove I was better than everyone else. I wanted to prove to my Yale classmates that I did belong and I could be successful. It was always about me. But when you have children, you experience something called ego death, which is, everything you do now is not for you but for your child. And it doesn’t really matter what the reward is. I think that I’m very fortunate that I succeeded at 50 years old when I have three kids, because I don’t care anymore.

People keep on asking me, ‘How does it feel to have three million subscribers on YouTube?’ I don’t care. It’s not relevant to me. What’s relevant to me is the fact that I have to be a good role model to my children, and I have to work hard to build a better future for my children. I have a clear purpose in my life, and it’s all driven by my love for my children. The fact that I’m famous, the fact that I get invited on podcasts, the fact that I could make a lot of money, it’s not relevant to me. What’s relevant to me is, how are my children doing? Am I being a good role model to my children? Am I loving them? Do they know that I love them?

Am I working hard to build a better future for them? Again, look at my life. I have to believe that everything was predestined. The universe didn’t want me to succeed when I was young, because that fame, that success would have corrupted me. And I know this because I know really a lot of famous people. And it’s not a good idea to be famous when you’re young. Rob Lowe, who’s a very famous actor, once said this. He said, ‘Fame freezes you in time.’

And it’s really true. Fame freezes you in time. Meaning, if you got famous at 16, you stay 16 for the rest of your life. The reason why is people expect you to be that person when you’re 16. You can’t actually grow and make mistakes and be a different person, because then you defy people’s expectations. And I don’t have that problem. I can constantly change as I need to. I’m not beholden to the public perception of who I am.

If you watch my podcast appearances, I’ll go on stupid podcasts. I once went on a podcast by Matan Even, and he’s just a troll. And it’s like, ‘Why’d you go on the podcast?’ Because it’s different, right? I go on Sam Hyde, Kurt Metzger. I’ll do these comedic podcasts because I want to broaden my perspective. I’ll talk to Nick Fuentes for three hours because I want to hear what he has to say. But maybe if I were younger, I wouldn’t do that, because I’d be very afraid of my reputation. I’d be afraid that I’d be criticized by other people. But I don’t have that problem because my ego has died. Everything I do is focused on ensuring a better future for my children. Everything I do is to be a good role model to my children. And that’s what having children means. If you really want to be who you truly are, you will have children, because then once you have children, your purpose is crystallized, and you just go and do it.

No more doubt, no more anxiety, no more ego. The two worst things in life that are holding you back from your full potential are your fear and your ego. And it’s a really strange thing, because you would think that having children would make you more afraid, more conservative, more cautious, and it’s not. No, no. Having children, having the love of the family empowers you to achieve what you’ve always wanted to achieve. I recommend everyone to start a family. And you have to ask yourself, why are we really here? Is it to become a billionaire? Is it to become famous? I think we’re all here first and foremost to have a family and take care of children, because if you think about our world, what is that one experience you can have here you can’t have anywhere else in the cosmos? And the answer is a family. This is something that Homer taught me.

If you read the Odyssey—I taught the Odyssey—the entire focus is on how family is the purpose of life. Fame will go away. The money is just an illusion. Power is a disease. But the family, the children, is what makes you who you truly are.

Communities and alternative systems

Audience question:

This coming transition of systems, and commenting on the off-grid—do you have a perspective of how those alternative systems can rise, how people can gather to transform their environment and their relationships?

Professor Jiang:

I will say that right now there are three major forces at work that are trying to destroy the current system. In previous lectures I’ve said that this current system, it’s controlled by global financial capital, global transnational capital. And there are three major forces that are trying to disrupt and destroy the monopoly of transnational capital. And these three forces are nationalism, religion, and technology, AI. Understanding this, then we can understand how, in the breakdown of systems, what arises. Well, once the global order breaks down, then you will have the reemergence of nationalism, religion, and artificial intelligence. In a lot of places you’ll have the emergence of an AI control grid, digital ID, digital currency. You’ll also have the rise of religion.

More and more young people will turn to religion. More and more people will turn to religion in this time of chaos. And you also have nationalism. I would say these are the three major trends. We’ll see.

Audience follow-up:

But I mean, in the aspect of whole community ascending, families gathering, do you see tribes being formed by all this revolution of systems?

Professor Jiang:

There will be almost a great variety of new systems. Right now the world’s divided into nation-states, and this won’t last, because the nation-state itself is an artifice. Most places aren’t actually natural nation-states. What will emerge from the chaos are maybe city-states. For example, Hong Kong is a city-state. But there are other places that are city-states. Singapore is a city-state. I think in the future maybe Toronto will become a city-state. Maybe New York will become a city-state. Places that are autonomous, but which are also working in collaboration with the surrounding areas. City-states are one new phenomenon. Another new phenomenon is a merger of AI and religion, an AI god. Network states, basically. And this is promoted by Peter Thiel: network states.

A society that is run by a corporation. Multinationals, basically. You’ll have religious cults, a lot of messianic cults arising. It’ll be very, very diverse. And you have a range. It’ll be complete chaos.

Positive eschatologies

Audience question:

Is there anyone in history who’s had a positive eschatology? Or would you consider heaven on earth positive?

Professor Jiang:

I mean, it depends on who you talk to, because no one will say their eschatologies are bad, right? From the Freemasonic perspective, this is a very positive eschatology. The reason why these eschatologies end up being negative is just human psychology, which is, the more power you have, the less empathy and imagination that you have. The problem with eschatologies is that they are also often promoted by powerful people, and powerful people do not like diversity, right? They want everyone to be the same, because then this is easier to control. And that’s why these eschatologies that are dominant are eschatologies that demand conformity, obedience, servitude. But what they believe is, once we learn to obey, then the world will be much more peaceful, much nicer to live in. And there’s obviously a lot of truth to that, because, I mean, again, I don’t want to be offensive, but compare maybe New York City with Hong Kong.

I mean, it’s pretty safe in Hong Kong, right? Would we agree? People follow the rules. There’s very little crime. It’s very nice to live in. And then you go to New York City, where it’s pretty dangerous, right? And what’s the difference? Well, I mean, the population in Hong Kong is much more compliant than the population in New York City, right? From the perspective of the elite, would you rather have New York City or Hong Kong? I personally would rather live in New York City, because New York City is a very vibrant, diverse, creative place. But I’m not the elite. The elite are trying to create a world in which, from their perspective, it’s just easier to govern, and that’s why they have these eschatologies.

Remember, the takeaway is ideas spread through mechanisms. And then these mechanisms will corrupt the idea, right? The eschatology is the idea, but they spread through secret societies. The secret societies want to use this eschatology in order to amass more power for themselves. And that’s why these eschatologies end up the way they do.

AI and surveillance

Professor Jiang:

I think AI is not what people think it is. I don’t think AI is actually conscious. AI is just a recursive statistical loop. And if you actually study AI, it’s actually not as impressive as they make it out to be. What they want to use AI for is digital currency and digital ID to track everyone, everything. Let me tell you a story. I come into Hong Kong, and I pass through immigration, and while I’m talking to the immigration officer, he’s like, ‘Oh my God, we’ve run out of paper,’ and it’s a crisis. The supervisor comes, like, ‘Oh, you’ve run out of paper.’

‘Well, then, close the line, and we’ll take his passport and we’ll go to the back of the room and we’ll figure it out there.’ They take me and my son to the back of the room, and we wait for 50 minutes for them to print out a piece of slip, a piece of paper. Clearly it was all theater. I don’t know why they go through all this trouble. They think they’re being very smart about it. Clearly I’m a very influential person, and they want to track me, right? And maybe 10 years ago, what would happen is they would have bugged my hotel. They would send a couple of agents to follow me around Hong Kong to make sure I was not causing a revolution here, right?

But nowadays they don’t have to do that, because all they do is basically, in the system, put in all my passport details. When I went to the hotel, it took me 10 minutes to check into my hotel. Basically the hotel was inputting my data into the system as well. And now, with cameras everywhere, my movements are all tracked because of the facial recognition technology. They don’t have to bug my room. They don’t have to send agents. They know exactly where I am, what I’m doing, just by following my movements with their surveillance technology.

That’s what AI is. That’s the world we live in, where all your actions are tracked, and then these actions create metadata. And what metadata is, I don’t need to listen in to your conversation. It doesn’t matter. All I need to know is who you associate with and what your behavior is, where you go for lunch. Do you take the MTR? And from that, the AI is able to categorize you as a certain person, to create a psychological profile on you, which then is able to predict how you will behave moving forward.

And that is the world we live in today. As time passes, the system will become much more sophisticated.

The individual spiritual journey

Audience question:

To go back to education, and you got into it with speaking of your history: I feel like when you go on a spiritual journey, it’s inherently alone, inherently difficult, and you’re uncertain the whole time. It’s always up to them in the end.

Professor Jiang:

The question is, this spiritual journey has to be an individual journey, and that’s a really important thing that people don’t actually appreciate, because a lot of people look to me to provide spiritual guidance. And I’m sorry, but you have to go through this journey yourself, right? It’s like Plato’s cave, where if I come down, I tell you, ‘Oh, there’s some light up there, and let me tell you what it’s like,’ right? That does nothing for you. What you have to do is painfully, traumatically climb out of the cave yourself and be blinded by the light and suffer a crisis of identity, a crisis of faith. And this is a very long process.

And then only after that can you emerge on the other side and know what reality truly is. You yourself have to choose to take the red pill, right? I’m giving you a choice, the blue pill or the red pill, but you have to choose to take the red pill yourself. And then you have to go through a very long process of painfully waking up to reality. And this is the most painful thing anyone can do in this life. Nothing beats this in terms of pain, trauma, agony. That said, once you’ve made the choice, you can never go back. And that’s what makes it so painful, because you also, during this process, recognize that, ‘Oops, I can’t ever go back to my ignorant, blissful life anymore.’

What I’m really conscious of is, I don’t want to start a cult, because first of all, every cult ends up a sex cult, which is not good. But also, look, if I want to build a better world, I need everyone to seek the truth himself or herself. I can’t actually give it to them. And cults are really about personality cults, right? And it’s really about me imposing my will on everyone. And there are a lot of people who like that, because it’s easier than climbing out of the cave yourself and into the light. But that defeats the entire point of what I’m trying to do. And again, I’m not doing this for myself. I’m not doing this for fame, money, or power. I’m doing this for my children. I want to be a good example to my children. For me, failure doesn’t really matter. But the effort, the attempt, is what matters.

Preventing a school from becoming a cult

Audience question:

I have two questions. Maybe following up from just now: you mentioned before that you want to start a school of prophets, right? I want to ask you, how do you prevent that school from being a cult or having radical extremist views? And then probably my second question is predictions for Southeast Asia. One thing is, I come from Indonesia, and if you have any two cents.

Professor Jiang:

How do I prevent whatever I do from just degenerating into a cult? What I believe is in openness and transparency. I basically want to do the opposite of a secret society, which is, I want to tell everyone what I’m doing and just go do it, right? And this openness and transparency is what holds me to account. That’s one strategy, which is, I’ve already told you what I’m going to do. I’ve already told you what the plan is. And now I have to go execute it.

And if I don’t execute it in this way, then I can be held to account, right? You’ll be like, ‘Wait a minute. In a public forum you said this, and we have a recording because we put it on YouTube,’ right? That’s one mechanism. The other mechanism that I have is predictions. How do you know I’m not bullshitting you? How do you know I’m telling the truth? Because I make these predictions based on my model. I’m not saying all my predictions will turn out correct, because some are actually kind of crazy. But my predictions and my model provide a framework for us to have discussion and debate, right? Then you know exactly who I am and if I’m trustworthy or not, because if you just look at these secret societies, they always have a lot of nonsense in them in order to basically lock you into the cult.

And I don’t want that. I make these predictions, and if they turn out correct, then you know that what I say has some validity. If they don’t turn out correct, then you can just ignore me, right? I did make three predictions two years ago that have turned out to be fairly accurate. I predicted that Trump would win, that he would start a war against Iran, and that he would lose his war.

But since then, I’ve also made a lot more predictions. We’ll see if they turn out. My biggest prediction that I’ve made, of course, is that Trump will get a third term. This is the litmus test. This is how you can test and validate who I am. If Trump in fact gets a third term, then everything I have said makes sense. And it’s going to force you to reflect and ask yourself, why is the world like this? And this might start your own journey. You have to take the red pill.

If Trump doesn’t get a third term, he dies in office, guess what, guys? We’re good. You can just ignore me, and I think things may go back to normal. I put this out there. And you know what? I will continue to make predictions, because making predictions is also a way for me to keep myself honest, right? Because what I believe is this: my predictions don’t come to me through my analysis. They come to me through divine inspiration.

I’m channeling these predictions. Why am I able to make these predictions? Because the universe favors me. Because the universe thinks that I could be a vessel for change in this world. And they picked me, I think, because I proved myself to be virtuous. I proved myself to seek truth regardless of the consequences. I proved myself to be an honest and good person. If I become corrupt, if I start to pursue too much money, if I start to be too egotistical, I’m pretty sure the universe will cut me off, right? In which case I would no longer have these predictions, or my predictions would fail. For me, it’s important I make predictions as well to judge for myself how in tune I am with the intentions of the universe.

Southeast Asia

My predictions for Southeast Asia? You don’t want to know. It’s not good, man.

Teaching in China

Audience question:

Can you talk about the teaching experience in China, especially Beijing? Can you summarize it? The difficulty you met, specifically.

Professor Jiang:

My China experience has been very weird, because when I first went to China, I was sure that I would be very successful and famous right away, because I’m a graduate of Yale. I was an English literature major, and I went to China to teach English, right? I thought that my knowledge would spread really fast. And I was also very selfless in that I was going and giving lectures for free. I was trying to spread as much truth and knowledge as possible.

And then what I realized is, they just want a white guy. I mean, it took me a very long time to figure this out, but they don’t want knowledge. They want a white guy who is also pretty tall and good-looking as well. They want a Dashan. They don’t want me. They want Dashan. I struggled with that for a very, very long time, and it of course made me very bitter, very resentful. I left the Chinese education system for a while. But because I have children, I needed a job. I went back to teach in the classroom, even though I didn’t want to, because I knew that if you work at an international school in China, if you are Asian, you’ll be discriminated against by the parents, by the administration.

But I went back in order to make sure my children are fed. Basically, I needed a job. And I was working as a high school teacher, and I found a school that was not very good, but the good thing is, they let me do what I want, because I didn’t even know what the great books were. I taught the great books, I taught my history class, and then I uploaded to YouTube, and then we are here today. But no one in China—this is really important—no one in China thought that I would be successful one day except my wife. But she’s an angel. She was sent down from the universe to guide me and help me.

But the vast majority of Chinese people didn’t think that I’d be successful. And the great irony is now a lot of Chinese people want to meet me because in America, in the United States, I’m very famous. I mean, it’s something that I struggle with. It’s something that I struggle with: why is it that Chinese care so much about what white people think?

Predictions and manifestation

Audience question:

My question is, do you believe in manifestation? Because you make your own predictions, right?

Professor Jiang:

Guys, it’s not my fault. Just to be absolutely clear, it’s not my fault Trump is president. It’s not my fault that the Iran war is happening. A lot of people think this. A lot of people say, ‘Well, it’s because you spoke it that it manifested in reality.’ I think that there are different people with different powers. I do know people who are extremely charismatic, and they impose their reality onto other people, people like Steve Jobs, Donald Trump. They say that Steve Jobs has something called a reality distortion projector. He’s able to speak, and then he’s able to warp reality according to his ideas, and I think Donald Trump has the same superpower.

I’m different. My power is my sensitivity in that I’m able to—and I know this sounds really quacky—but I’m able to hear or know someone’s thoughts from a long way. I’m able to know what someone is thinking a long way away. I have tremendous insight into the character and the thinking process of a lot of people, and I know what they’re thinking even though they themselves may not know it. There are different character types in this universe.

It’s the same: you have people who are warriors, and you have people who are intellectuals, you have people who are entrepreneurs. I think in the occult you have the same thing. We have different people who are able to manifest different powers.

Education, employment, and mass society

Audience question:

Professor, in your education proposal, religion or cult, what kind of person does this produce? And assuming he gets through meritocracy, how does a government or corporation abandon the meritocracy hiring process or selection process? There’s some risk that the religion or the thinking comes into this person’s decision-making. Governments just use meritocracy, just look at the paper qualification, and corporations, where they employ, maybe they look at the same metrics. What student has your proposed thing produced?

Professor Jiang:

We live in a unique moment in history called mass industrial society, where you have eight billion people. If you have eight billion people, then you need to categorize these people, and the best way to categorize these people is through the meritocracy, right? If you went to an elite university, well, then you should be given preferential treatment in society. We live in a mass society, and we have different mechanisms in order to govern this mass society. What I’m trying to say is that we are moving to a world where mass industrial society is going to collapse, where you don’t have eight billion people anymore, because you don’t have enough food to feed them. We have too many wars going on.

And when you make this transition, rather than try to differentiate people, rather than try to filter out people, what you’re really trying to do is you’re trying to harness or maximize each individual’s creative potential. Everyone’s like, why is it that the Jewish people, which is, I don’t know, like two percent of the total global population, why do they have so much influence in society? Well, what the Jewish people do that no one else does is say every Jew matters.

We as Jewish people have a responsibility to take care of each and every other Jewish person, because in each Jewish person is God. When one Jewish person dies, then all Jewish people die. And there’s this heavy investment in the community to make sure that every person that is Jewish has a path to success. And no other society does that. I mean, you can criticize Jews all you want, but it is clear that the Jewish people work hard to ensure that each and every one of them has a successful life. And if they can do that, why can’t other people do that? That is the proposal here: to create a school that then becomes possibly a society in which every person is valued for who he or she is, and this diversity, this individuality is celebrated in the community, as opposed to being ignored or repressed.

Family and single people

Audience question:

I feel very lost today because you said that the purpose of life is centered on having a family. How about singles like myself?

Professor Jiang:

Having a family doesn’t necessarily mean having children. Having a family just means taking care of people who you love. And if you’re a teacher, then that’s also like having a family, because before I had a family, I loved going into the classroom every day because I loved sharing myself with young people. If you don’t have a family, then you will find the same happiness in volunteering, in teaching, in giving yourself to others. And that’s also the idea of a community I’m trying to create, where it’s all a family, where everyone is committed to helping each other.

Children, purpose, and evil

Audience question:

Do you think you have good faith in your children? What if your child or this generation was born to be evil, might come here to do evil things?

Professor Jiang:

It’s a really interesting question, which is, I just said that children come here with a purpose, and what if the purpose is to do evil, right? And it is true that the people in power are pretty evil, that they’re psychopaths. And my wife and I talk about this all the time, because we see this compulsion to do evil in our middle child. My wife and I think he’s a lizard person. He’s always talking about how to make money, and he said to my wife, ‘When Dad comes home, I want him to give a concert. I want him to sing.’ And my wife is like, ‘Well, he knows you’re famous.’

‘He doesn’t know why you’re famous, but he wants to monetize your fame.’ And he’s five years old. The guy is five years old. And we think he’ll be very rich one day. And again, I was concerned about this, because I don’t want my child to become materialistic. I don’t want my child to become a lizard person. And what I’ve realized is that the universe doesn’t work straight. The universe works through thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It’s never a straight path. And there are a lot of Jewish people who believe this. There are Jewish people who believe the path to goodness is not by negating evil or refusing to do evil.

The path to goodness is through evil. And this is something that they use the Bible to explain. I’m not sure if you guys know the Bible that well, but if you’re Jewish, there are some very important figures in the Bible. Moses is obviously the most important. Then you have David, you have Jacob, you have Abraham. And you have Elijah. There are many different figures. What you will find is this: in the Bible, it’s actually a pretty consistent pattern.

Those who have done nothing but good, those who are the most devoted to God, the most loyal to God, people like Moses, God doesn’t like. It’s really, really strange. Moses dedicated his entire life to freeing God’s people from Egypt. And all he wanted from God is an opportunity to set foot on the Promised Land. And God said, ‘No, you’re not getting that, Moses. I’ll let you look at the Promised Land from a mountaintop, but you will never set foot on it, Moses.’ And it’s the strange thing: why is it that the most devoted to God, Moses, is not rewarded in any way by God? Then you have two very controversial figures.

King David, who is the most beloved of God, right? Israel is the kingdom of David, and you have Jacob, who gave his name to Israel. And these are two very problematic figures in the Bible. Again, if you know the Bible, Jacob was very deceitful. He stole the birthright and the blessing from his brother Esau, the older brother, and then he has to run off where he meets Rachel, falls in love with Rachel, and marries Leah, and they start the 12 tribes of Israel. It’s a really weird thing where Jacob is a very deceitful, very manipulative person. He was a lizard person. But then he is forced into exile where he meets the love of his life, and then he gives birth to Israel. King David is also a very manipulative, very deceitful person, right? He steals the throne from King Saul. He kills his own son Absalom.

He manipulates himself into power, and he steals Bathsheba from her husband and kills her husband as well, but because of all his crimes, God punishes him. The punishment forces him into deep reflection, which then makes him beloved to God. The deep reflection builds a connection to God. Again, everyone is here on his or her own journey. I don’t know what other people’s journey is. I only know my own journey. It’s not my place to judge other people’s journey, because it’s possible that person’s journey is what will lead him or her to God.

Even though that journey may seem mysterious or evil in our eyes. Evil is a concept that doesn’t really exist in the universe. It’s something that we’ve created in our world in order to maintain authority. But the fundamental principle of the universe is free will, and we all have to go on our own journey. And there are a lot of Jewish Kabbalists who believe that the only path to good is through evil, because by committing evil, you’re forced to engage in reflection. You’re forced to build a strong connection to God.

Digital currency and digital ID

Professor Jiang:

The question of digital currency and digital ID: already the system is being formulated. The current system is controlled by the banks, because it’s the banks that have the power to print money by issuing loans. This power is now shifting over to the corporations like Google and Apple, because they can issue tokens, right? You can use their digital currency through Apple Pay. There’s this shift going on, and obviously the banks don’t want to give up this power. And then you ask the question, how do you actually get people to comply? And the simple solution—I’m not saying this is going to happen—but the simple solution is, let’s pretend the economy collapses all around the world. You have 20 percent, 30 percent unemployment. Government steps in and says, ‘We need to issue UBI, universal basic income.’ Well, that’s digital currency, guys.

If you want to eat, you have to adopt the system, right? Right now people don’t want to adopt the system, but if a major crisis happens, the government is forced to come in and issue UBI, then digital currency, digital ID will be very easy to implement. You can’t stop this.

Hong Kong and Southeast Asia

Audience question:

I just watched one of your previous lectures. I think you mentioned, you talked a little bit about Hong Kong, and you mentioned that we have a certain attitude towards Hong Kong that I would say is not very positive. But I’m not sure exactly what’s your stance on it. Is it because you don’t like it because of this, more economic system-wise, or people are more materialistic?

Professor Jiang:

My attitude towards Hong Kong is that it’s a very interesting place, because this is a crossroads of culture. It’s a very cosmopolitan, very open, very efficient, very well-organized place. And Hong Kong is probably much more resilient than other places. But I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think Southeast Asia has a good future, because there are a lot of structural contradictions within Southeast Asia. First of all, you have a lot of people here with very few resources. If you look at a map of Southeast Asia, most people get their fresh water supply through the Tibetan Plateau, right?

Let’s just say that there’s a major crisis, and now people fight over the water. This could really quickly spiral out of control. Right now we fight over oil, but I guarantee you in 10 years’ time we’ll be fighting over water. And I think Southeast Asia is extremely vulnerable because of its very limited water supply. Southeast Asia gets water downstream from the Tibetan Plateau, and right now China controls the Tibetan Plateau. I’m just saying, geopolitically, Southeast Asia is in a lot of trouble.

Too many people, too few resources, too many ethnic conflicts in the area.

Audience follow-up:

Is that a place to be?

Professor Jiang:

No comment. No comment. I am conscious of where I am. No comment.

The nuclear family and matriarchy

Professor Jiang:

The nuclear family: man, wife, children. What do I think of that? This is a question that I struggle with, because if you look at human history, there was a long stretch when society was actually run by women. It was a matriarchal society, and it makes sense, because let’s just say in a mass industrial society, you need to have things like patriarchy and property in order to organize society, because you’re trying to breed as many children as possible, right? But in a world of scarcity where having children is precious, then women have all the power, because women need to be taken care of in order to have children. And also what’s really interesting is, if you look at a matriarchy, the idea of family is much more fluid. The matriarch would have a husband, which they recognize, but then she’d be free to sleep with basically anyone she wants to.

And the reason why that happened is to disguise paternity, right? Because if you have few people, if it’s not a very big community, then everyone needs to participate in taking care of the children. And the way to incentivize people to do that is by disguising paternity, where sex relations were very free. If it’s free, then no one knows whose child that is. And if you actually go around the world, there are still societies like that. And from a Western perspective, that’s horrifying.

‘Oh my God, anyone can sleep with everyone? That’s disgusting. Where’s the moral on that?’ When you actually talk to these people who actually live in these communities, they think that it’s a good thing, because everyone looks after every child. Everyone feels a distinct responsibility to every child. I myself would not want to live in something like that. I prefer the nuclear family. But maybe it’s because I grew up in an environment which taught me that women should not be allowed to have sex with anyone they wanted, that women should be loyal to the husband.

But maybe from another perspective, maybe that’s a better system. I myself am conflicted. I’ve talked to my wife about this, and my wife doesn’t like that system either. She prefers a nuclear family. But I think also that if you did have a crisis where you did need to grow the population, where there just weren’t enough people, that system probably makes more sense than the nuclear family.

Bad parents and state intervention

Audience question:

At the end of the lecture, you provided a vision system that maximizes the potential of a lot of children, their innate good or their innate purpose. What about parents? You said that a child chooses parents. What about cases where the parents are ill-prepared, or they are just bad parents, or they don’t want to take care of their child?

Professor Jiang:

The question, just so everyone knows, is, what do you do about bad parents? You guys may have known, last week there was this Dubai princess in England, in London, and she got high on cocaine, and she was lying on the street, and she has a toddler who was running around. The state had to come in and just say, ‘You’re an incompetent mother, and we’ll take care of the child.’ The state needed to intervene. And look, the reality is, you have a lot of parents who are like that. They’re irresponsible. Maybe they get drunk and they drive. And also, there are lots of abusive parents. I know because I grew up in an abusive household. You’re absolutely right in that, yeah, there are bad parents, but what I would argue is, why are they bad? Why is it that when I was growing up, my dad hit me? Well, it was because I was misbehaving. I was a very independent and very mischievous child.

But also, his life sucked, man. He went to a restaurant where he was systematically racially abused in the workplace by his white superiors. And he had all this frustration. Maybe I’m naive, but I think that parents want to do a good job, and parents, if you let them focus on the child, they will do a good job. Because again, I think the way the universe is structured, the child picks a parent, and the parent has lived a life to be prepared for receiving the child. And there are these external factors at work that create stress and anxiety and fear that disrupt the bond between the parent and the child. Again, maybe I’m naive, but I think that if you just leave people alone and just allow them to follow their instincts, then they will do a good job.

And if they don’t do a good job, then maybe that was a plan of the universe as well. I think that the idea of a mass industrial society, it is unique in human history. I think it’s very anti-human. I mean, at the end of the day, you have eight billion people. No one’s life is worth anything, right? There’s no sense of struggle, and how people obtain power is by exploiting other people as opposed to being creative. I personally think this mass industrial society system won’t last. It’s going to break down. And the state bureaucracy will break down as well, in which case you have no choice but to believe the parents’ love for the child is very strong.

Right now I think there’s just too much state interference. The state bureaucracy is too intrusive, too cumbersome.

Resilience and self-forgiveness

Audience question:

We talk about evil. How does one become more resilient to such forces?

Professor Jiang:

I think that what I’ve learned that has brought a lot of resilience, a lot of happiness to my life is, I believe God exists. I have faith in God, and I believe that God, the Monad, is a source of everything. And this Monad is fundamentally loving, open, generous, merciful. You can commit no wrong in his eyes. The toughest problem that people have in life is self-forgiveness. Shame, guilt are powerful, powerful psychological forces. You need to believe in God. You need to believe in Jesus, basically, in order to be able to forgive yourself, because often you yourself don’t have the power to forgive yourself. You think that, ‘I’m not worthy. I’ve done so much evil. I’ve done so much wrong that no one can possibly love me, and I should just double down, man. I’ve done so much evil. I’m going to hell anyway.’

‘I might as well just enjoy my life and commit as much evil as possible. And also, maybe if I get enough money, I won’t have to die.’ We’re run by an elite who committed so much evil to get those billions of dollars. They know all the evil that they’ve committed in their hearts, and they’re like, ‘Well, then I should keep on going, double down, because I’m going to burn in hell anyway. And it’s possible if I keep on going, I will discover the secret of longevity, right? If I just worship Satan, if I just worship these demons, maybe I will live forever,’ right? But once you know that God is all-forgiving and you’re here just to experience life, then you’re much more willing to take risks. You’re much more resilient.

You have to be able to forgive yourself for everything you do. When you make a mistake, you’re like, ‘This is all part of the learning process. This is what God wants me to do.’ Whereas if you don’t believe in God, you’re like, ‘I made a mistake. My parents are going to be angry. My classmates are going to laugh at me.’ And this sense of shame and guilt just builds and builds and builds and forces you into a life of fear.

Audience follow-up:

How would you go about getting someone like Elon to get forgiveness, or Trump or something?

Professor Jiang:

Trump, I think, has actually said this, right? It’s like, ‘Well, I’m going to burn in hell anyway, so who cares?’ I think it’s not an exact quote, but I think he said something very similar along those lines, which is, ‘Look, I know I’m going to hell, so who cares? I just keep on doing what I’m doing in the hope that maybe Satan will redeem me.’ I think that if you’re of that power level, like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, you live in a very different mentality.

I’m not sure if you guys have read the book Faust by Goethe, right? And it’s a very interesting epic poem, because it is considered the greatest epic poem in the German language, and it was very influential, and a lot of elite read it. And the story is basically, this is a man, a scholar, Faust, and he is on the quest for absolute knowledge. He has this insatiable curiosity about the world. He makes a deal with the devil, Mephistopheles, and the deal is basically that as long as you keep on struggling and striving, the devil cannot claim your soul. But the moment that you lose this desire for striving, as long as you become complacent, then the devil can claim your soul. And this deal is made, and Mephistopheles gives Faust a lot of powers, the power to travel across time and space, the power to conduct magic. And he lives a very interesting life with a lot of achievements. And at the end of his life, he becomes satisfied with who he is. He wants to live in the moment. Now the devil can come and claim his soul. But the moment that the devil comes to claim his soul, God intervenes, sends angels, and sends Faust to heaven.

The elite don’t really see things the way that we see things. They think they’re doing God’s work because they are contributing to the development of humanity, right? Elon Musk is like, ‘I have Starlink, I have Tesla, I have SpaceX, right? And no matter how much evil I commit in the pursuit of these things, God will ultimately forgive me, right? And it’s only if I stop struggling that the devil can claim my soul. As long as I keep on pushing, then I’m good.’ And Trump’s the same way, right? Look, the guy’s 80 years old, and look at how much trouble he’s caused the world this past year, right? Every day it’s a new drama with this guy. Every day. And they believe in the purpose of life is struggle, right? It’s a very Faustian conception of the world. Some people would use the word satanic, but that’s how they see the world. And they’ve been taught to see the world this way ever since they were young. The elite have a different mythology than we do. They see things differently than we do. It’s not really like, ‘How do I forgive myself?’

It’s like, ‘God will forgive me.’

Audience follow-up:

How would you reverse that? Because I think that’s an important change…

Professor Jiang:

They have this mindset, and it’s a really bad mindset, because it just leads to so much evil in the world. But let’s just use a thought experiment. Let’s just say we’re in a forest. In a forest, there are different animals. There are wolves, there are rabbits, there are deer. And we know that wolves are bad, are evil, because they eat rabbits and they eat deer, right? Would we come in and kill all the wolves or try to reengineer the wolves in a way that makes them peaceful? We wouldn’t, because we appreciate that there’s a logic and an order to nature.

And if we kill the wolves, then that might destroy the forest because you have too many rabbits breeding, and then the ecosystem collapses, because these rabbits eat all the vegetation, right? And maybe, I don’t know, but maybe we live in a similar dynamic where you’ll always have wolves, and these wolves will always become the elite because they’re psychopaths. But maybe they allow us to truly discover the meaning of life and truly discover humanity, because we know Elon Musk is not a happy person. There’s no way Elon Musk is a happy person, because he’s got 13 kids who hate him.

He’s switching wives all the time. I don’t think Donald Trump is a happy person either. But knowing why they’re not happy allows us to pick a different path. And also, I will point this out, which is, in a mass industrial society you will always have people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump in charge, because only psychopaths can rise up in a mass industrial society, because a mass industrial society is basically a hierarchy where the top exploit the bottom. But what I do believe is the next five years, next 10 years, mass industrial society will collapse, and you will need a new generation of leaders to rebuild civilization after it collapses. And these people need to have imagination and empathy, which is the opposite of what the elite have. The elite are going to maybe go into the bunkers and have orgies and all that. But this will break down, and they will die off. And then it’s the people who choose to dedicate themselves to the preservation, promotion of human knowledge and human creativity that will prosper and thrive in this new era. I think we are heading into the age of prophets.

And that’s why I say, I want to build a university for prophets, because I think that humanity will need prophets.

Happiness and purpose

Professor Jiang:

What is happiness, right? I think that happiness is just the harmonization of who you are. What I mean by that is that if we look at the consciousness, when the consciousness is aligned, the body is healthy. And this is something that is taught in traditional Chinese medicine and other ancient medical practices as well. Meaning, our consciousness, meaning the body, soul, and spirit, when they’re aligned together, then you’re a happy person, because you are fulfilling your telos, your purpose. And why we’re unhappy is we’re betraying who we are. We’re doing something that we don’t want to do, but we feel we have to do it because our parents made us, or our teachers made us, or we have to do this in order to get what we want. But when you engage in active betrayal of yourself, that makes you a very unhappy person and often leads to medical ailments like cancer.

Happiness is just the connection between your body, your soul, and your spirit, where you’re aligned together, right? Basically, happiness is just doing what you want to do. Having the freedom and the courage to do what you want to do regardless of what other people think, to let go of your ego and your fear and just pursue your purpose in life, right?

Some people want to be bakers, right, but end up being accountants, and they’re like, ‘I don’t want to be an accountant. I want to be a baker.’ Well, then you should just go and be a baker, and that is what will make you a happy person. If you betray yourself, and you’re like, ‘I want to be a baker, but I’m an accountant,’ you will probably get cancer at some point. You will have an unhappy family life. You will not get along with your friends. I think the number one thing is to always do what you want to do. Just listen to your heart. Don’t betray yourself.