#108 - Sexual Hedonism & Creating a New Future | William Haines
“My past doesn’t determine my future. My future is still open and depends on how I respond to my present. I can create a different kind of future and a different kind of story.” -William Haines
We learn from our mistakes of the past, in the hopes of not replicating them in the future. In sexuality, understanding our wrong choices and skewed perceptions can help us correct our actions and build a healthier appreciation of something so personal and intimate, and this can guide us in our relationships and eventually marriages.
High Noon focuses on sexuality, wholeness, fulfillment, and connection. Pornography is one of the things that can greatly affect and corrupt a person's perception of sex, yet with the help of our organization, people like you can manage and eventually be set free from your addiction to live a life that honors God. The people around you have an impact on how you live your life, so it's vital to associate with people who can help and inspire you in creating a better and brighter future for yourself.
In Episode 108, we are joined by William Haines, co-founder of the International Educational Foundation in Russia. He co-authored a series of textbooks for spiritual and moral education in Russia. He is a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and the Scriptural Reasoning Society, secretary of the British Academy for World Peace, and a member of the Council of Christians and Jews.
William shares with us how the distorted views of sexuality came to be and some factors that influenced the way people talked about sex in the past. He discusses the importance of hearing or reading stories that can shape and influence us in creating our own perspective when it comes to fully understanding these topics.
Listen to Episode 108 to learn more!
Connect with the Guest:
Show Notes
How communism has influenced the way we talk about sex
The philosophical origins of the distorted views of sexuality
What is the Hellenistic worldview?
What is the Biblical worldview?
The impact of the repression of sexuality
Pythagoras views on the nature of reality
What is the moral overlay?
The distorted Fallen view of sexuality and the Fallen view of binaries
The Fallen aspect of being a man
Creating a new future
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love, Life and Legacy, the podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hypersexualized times of ours. And in today's episode, I had such a good time talking to this guy. He is one of the smartest people I've ever had the opportunity to sit down with and pick his brain. And his depth of knowledge is so helpful. You ask him more questions about a certain topic, and it just goes deeper and deeper. And he elaborates further and further. And he helps make sense of this wild world. His name is William Haines. He's from the United Kingdom. He's a renowned lecturer. He's a super-smart guy. And one thing to know, when you're listening to this, I would love for you to hear how out of my depth I was speaking to him. Because day in and day out, I'm either speaking to my three sons, or I speak to a bunch of early 20-year-olds trying to motivate them. And I'm not normally in the company of a 60+-year-old man who's highly adept in the art and crafts of intellectualism. So I felt like I was speaking gobbledygook at many points throughout this conversation. If you listen to the candor and the tone of my voice, I sounded like I was a perpetual cardiac arrest throughout. And the reason was, I was. I was just trying to catch up to him. But he gave me some insight in this episode that I just think is so incredibly valuable. Tying together some very big ideas in terms of culture, how we ended up here in terms of sex but also, how we can move forward. A very clear action step is at the very end of this episode. What you can do in terms of a takeaway to activate very clear power in your life. So please listen. Please listen to the whole thing. It's a longer episode. It's about an hour, but you won't regret it. You will feel smarter, just hearing him speak in that British accent of his. So please welcome William Haines and this wonderful conversation.
Andrew Love
Hi, welcome back everybody. Today, I'm going to be talking to somebody that I met a few times in Europe. I met him in Germany, I believe. But he's not from there. He's from the UK, United Kingdom. And if you could see him, if you're watching this video, you can tell that he is very stylish. And he's something, he's got a beard worth striving for, and a hat worth stealing. Very cool guy. But more importantly, we would meet, and I would find myself engaging in conversations with this guy. And really just asking more and more questions, getting more and more excited. The more that he spoke, because I realized his depth of knowledge, especially as it pertains to culture and understanding like how we got to this weird, confusing place in our society because it's not by accident. There's a series of decisions, whether they were conscious or unconscious that led us to this point in history. And especially as, you know, like with sex, with campuses teaching the stuff that they do, it all came from somewhere. And for a lot of us, it's very confusing. It's like, how can we ever get to this point? But to help unravel these conversations with Uncle William, I call him, I've always been very insightful. So always in the United Kingdom, somewhere in England, we will find out where is William Haines? Welcome, William.
William Haines
Thank you.
Andrew Love
Which part of England are you in specifically?
William Haines
I live in London, just on the outskirts. But where I live is in a 400-year-old cottage, which was in the countryside. But then London expanded and cottages are still here.
Andrew Love
In the city is the countryside.
William Haines
But a lot of the farmland got built on. I like it because just on the other side of the road, there's a stream. And there's on the other side of the stream was the floodplain so it doesn't flood on this side, it floods the other side. So that means on the other side of that the stream, on the other side of the river, on the other side of the road, there's lots of fields because that's where the cars are not allowed to build there because it might flood.
Andrew Love
So you can look out into nature.
William Haines
Yes, yes, and appear. And just walk across the road along the stream feel like I'm in the countryside, and then there's some woods and everything.
Andrew Love
Yes, it seems like most depictions of the future or something like that, it's very modern. But there's some remembering, there's some semblance of a memory of nature that you can touch like an outdoor museum.
William Haines
Makes such a difference. They also walk out and...
Andrew Love
Well, especially compared to London, where you walk out into somebody's chewing gum and a bunch of honking horns. So out there in this cottage of yours, do you think a lot now that you're at an age where you have a gray beard that you can stroke, do you find yourself thinking a lot or where does this wisdom come from? Do you read a lot or just ponder a lot? Or how do you spend your time, your intellectual time?
William Haines
Well, yes, I do think a lot. I have read a lot in the past. Not reading as much as I used to. The reason I got a beard, is I'm on chemo at the moment. It's just a year and a half ago, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Bowel Cancer. So I maybe think a lot about life and what I'm going to do. I spend quite a lot of the time gardening. Now, we've got a new garden. The first time I've ever had a garden of my own, I spent a lot of time there. And it's great for relaxing but also thinking. But in terms of my ideas, basically, they've evolved really over the last 45-50 years really, I would say. I first started thinking about these things when I was 13 years old.
Andrew Love
Oh, really?
William Haines
Yes. In 1970, I had the opportunity as a schoolboy to go on the very first tourist group that was ever allowed to go to the Soviet Union. And so, there's communist and they thought, well, we'll let some schoolboys in, kind of harmless. So I went there and went to Leningrad and Moscow. And I was profoundly struck by how another everything was. Everywhere, they were police, there were soldiers. You couldn't take photographs of what you wanted to take photographs of. All the churches are closed. They couldn't ask the tourist guides certain kinds of questions because he couldn't go there. And we went to Red Square and St Basil's Cathedral, and I said can we go there to visit it? Oh, no, it's closed. Why? For repairs. So instead, we went into Lenin's Mausoleum. And I couldn't understand why there was a queue. Thousands of people queuing up on Red Square to go into the square marble building, granite building. Because we were a tourist group, we were taken right to the very front. And we were told that it's an incredible honor. And so he filed in, and then inside this glass case was Lenin embalmed. And people are queuing along to look at him and pay him their respects. They've been queuing up for hours. And I thought, how weird. And everything was so other and so different in England. And so when I went back home, and as a teenager, I started trying to figure out why is it so different? Why is it so oppressive? Why is it so stifling? All these questions arose when you experience something completely different from your own background, your own upbringing, your own country.
Andrew Love
You probably unsettling too, right? It must have just been very restrictive and unperceivable possibly to a 13-year-old understanding, but you would be able to sense that something is off.
William Haines
Yes, because you couldn't go to the shops where you wanted to go. And when you went to the tourist shop, there was nothing to buy. There's nothing worth buying in terms of souvenirs. So when I went home to England I came across people who said it's communism. I say, what's that? Somehow I ended up reading Solzhenitsyn's book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, I think when I was 14 or 15 years old. And suddenly, I realized, this isn't history. This isn't what was going on 500 years ago. Suddenly, I realized, today, while I'm breathing the air freedom, I can think and read whatever I want, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the Gulag just for objecting to the government saying the wrong thing, or just being at the wrong class or having the wrong parents or believing in God. And suddenly, they get 15 or 25 years. And for me, this was shocking. Why is it like this? And that's really where my life started, I would say. This encounter with this extreme level of suffering and oppression tried to figure out why and felt I have a moral duty to try and dedicate my life to doing something about it.
Andrew Love
I would have to say, though, that of this group of young men who went and had the same experience that you did, you're probably the only one that was so struck that you felt the need to research, and that made a life of learning about this suffering. You're probably in a very unique place in your own journey to be able to be struck so deeply.
William Haines
Yes, it was a life-changing experience, I would say. It has set me off on this journey which I'm still on.
Andrew Love
That's a lot of our conversations centered around communism and how it's more than manifested in different ways in society. And in terms of High Noon's real focus on sexuality and wholeness and fulfillment and connection, the connection being the goal here, how has communism or that line of thinking influenced the way that we see sex or talk about sex or experience? Because I don't know if this is true. You might be able to validate or invalidate this but a friend of mine was telling me that he read a communist manifesto and talked about how they choose to influence society in a modern setting. And one form of control to hypnotize society was pornography. That was part of their expressed manifesto. And I never double-checked that. He was very sure that he read that but I don't know if sex has ever been formally used as a means of control to subdue a people, or if it's just a byproduct of our human urges manifesting in a weird suppressed society.
William Haines
It is interesting. Later on, I went there in 1992 with my family. We lived in Russia for seven years, in Moscow. And I was actually writing a series of textbooks, therefore. The spiritual-moral education of young people in a post-communist society. One of the books was more on personal development. The second book was all about love, marriage, and family. Yes, so I've thought a lot about these things and the influence of communism. In terms of pornography, I've heard that as well. But I've never, in Russia itself, the Soviet Union itself, certainly after the 1920s, it's incredibly puritanical about these matters. But certainly the previous roots, certainly, if you read Marx's and Engels' Communist Manifesto, it's incredibly critical of what we call the describes, The Bourgeois Family. And so the system of oppression, and so he was very critical about the dysfunctional family, which he said is very patriarchal. And man owned all the property of a woman who had property got married, and all the property that she might have inherited from her parents was transferred to him. In England, up until the 1950s, a woman was not allowed to open her own bank account without permission, either from her father or from her husband. And that's how women were often treated in that sense like property. And so the Marxist critique of that dysfunctional, you could say, the fallen family was very insightful.
William Haines
It wasn't critiquing an ideal family, it's just critiquing that kind of oppressive patriarchal family that has existed through much of history where women were abused, etc, etc, etc. Children were the property of their father and could be sold into slavery because he owned them just like he owned his wife. He could sell his wife into slavery. So that's what the Marxist critique was off, but then they didn't have a decent kind of alternative or vision of a good nuclear family with a loving husband and wife. And so instead, they said the family itself is the problem. So, what happened with marriage then is the problem, because it's inherently oppressive. Yes, so when the Communists took over in Russia, one of the things they did was to abolish marriage laws. Just like during the French Revolution, they decided to abolish a lot of the moral codes on sexuality which is embodied in legislation. So for example, after the French Revolution, incest was no longer a crime.
Andrew Love
So that's like going back to Leviticus. That's going back thousands of years.
William Haines
Yes, so this is Christian. It's oppressive. We want to get rid of all that stuff, so abolish the laws and incest. And the reason I'm saying this is just last week in France, there was a discussion about this. Maybe we ought to make incest illegal again. Seriously.
Andrew Love
That's a daring approach.
William Haines
Yes.
Andrew Love
So it's still legal?
William Haines
Yes.
William Haines
In France?
William Haines
Yes. And so in Russia then, they abolished marriage. And then a woman's comment, she said we should abolish marriage and replace it with free love in relationships between men and women. So it's no marriage, no commitment, none of the oppressive stuff, just free love. Obviously, the results were pretty devastating, especially for women. A lot of women started objecting to the fact that they were left pregnant without anybody to take responsibility to look after them and their children. And this was the way it was right up until I think, the 1930s. I met somebody there while I was there. Very interesting lady. Her parents were from Bella Russia. Then during the 19th century, they emigrated to New Hampshire in America. And then when the Communists came to power in Russia, then they went back to the Soviet Union as a good communist. And she had been born in America. But anyway, her parents are very idealistic. They moved there. And he was a professor of agriculture. Set up an institute there. And she went to the local, one of the first young pioneers and comes from all and etc, etc, etc. She's a very brilliant pianist. She went to the conservatory. Anyway, when she's an adult, she met a communist from Britain who's there doing business. And they got married, but there were no marriage laws, and they had a child. But then he was accused of being a spy so he was deported. And he returned to the UK. He has no idea what happened to his wife. And he settled back in England, Cambridge, I think. Got married, had another family, and I have no idea. She, on the other hand, had been deported to Siberia, to exile in Siberia, where she had another son. Eventually, she moved back. So anyway, so I met her daughter. The daughter of her whose father had been a British citizen. And so this American lady, and she'd been stuck in the Soviet Union. She wasn't allowed to progress beyond a primary school teacher in terms of teaching music because her husband, should have been exiled during that time. And then she wasn't able to get out of the country. And so it wasn't until Perestroika, she was finally able to approach the American Embassy. Just finally able to get proof of her that she had a birth certificate, proving she'd been born in America. And then she could get an American passport. And then eventually, I was able to help her to emigrate and go back to America. But her daughter, though, couldn't. Her father was British. But because there was no marriage law, then even though a parent wasn't married, she couldn't prove anything even though it's set up. And so the way it was, okay, so the British authorities understanding this that, okay, if you can produce seven people who remember your parents and that they were married, even though there's no legal marriage that they were married, then you will give your British citizenship. But of course, by this stage in the 1990s, they're all dead. Even though her mother was American, a father's British, she was stuck there. Anyway, eventually, she was able to get American citizenship through a mother. Even though she preferred to get British. And so that was the kind of reality, the kind of trying to abolish this kind of marriage laws, and the kind of consequences for people 60 or 70 years later. It's really horrendous and awful.
Andrew Love
Yes, and short-sighted. I think a lot of the time, these new ideas, they come from a place of feeling stuck. We're stuck. This is not working, so let's throw away everything other than the bad start from scratch without any evidence that this is a remotely good idea. But it's very emotional. And we can tell that things are not broken. And that exists in every society, every culture, even every organization, church, every religion goes through something similar to this reformation. But it's like that balance between not throwing away the old but modifying not just obliterating. That's what we're seeing today, too, with a lot of cultural norms is like, hey, let's throw away everything that we know without any real evidence that this is a good idea but it feels right. It's kind of scary stuff. And history has already repeated itself too many times for us to not see where that ends up culturally.
Andrew Love
So we were discussing before the philosophical origins of the distorted views of sexuality. It's like a long way of saying this like, we can see already in that story that the short-sightedness of the reactionary policymaking and all that is, you don't even think a factor in practical issues like residency through parents. It's a very, very logistical reason why marriage is good. There are also very practical reasons. So we get to this point sexually, where did a lot of this distortion come from? Because we've talked on this podcast about it. In America, for sure, the Puritan spirit that you alluded to was very strong here. And it created a lot of dysfunctionality in the area of sexuality, because it's very repressive and there weren't many outlets if things weren't going right. So it's like that. They call it kereru in Japan where it's just like this in the boiling pot that's just eventually going to explode kind of situation. And so, the result was the hippies who are just like, let's throw it all out the window and reinvent the wheel. And then that fell apart quickly. So where do you feel philosophical under like, where things started to unravel and we started to really go off-kilter?
William Haines
People often talk about people often say, well, it's the Bible story of Adam and Eve. But I don't think it is there at all. Because within the Bible, the equality of men and women is emphasized many, many times. Page one, God created man in His image and likeness, male and female. So there you have the equality of masculine to femininity. Both of them are good, both of them and expressions of the Divine. That's page one. That's equal value and sacredness, you could say, of masculine and feminine. And then fast forward into Exodus, you should honor your father and your mother. So again, within the family, equal authority and value of the father and the mother within the family. So the biblical vision is not patriarchal. It's not the man is represents God, it's not the man as one owns his wife. Completely different to that when you actually unpack it all. So my question was, why do people get this idea that the Bible is like that? So obviously, there's some kind of assumptions that people have about the nature of the relationship between men and women which they're then I would say, reading into the Bible. And so, the Bible and is one source of assumptions about life and the relationship of God and the relationship between God and human beings. But there are also other places where a lot of our assumptions in the European tradition come from. And that's basically from Greek myths and Greek stories. And people have been reading Jordan Peterson a lot in his book. He wrote another book, Maps of Meaning. I don't know if you've come across it.
Andrew Love
Seen it but haven't read it.
William Haines
It's really interesting. His hard work is a really solid piece of academic research. Anyway, so he's not unique in this. Joseph Campbell came up with this about the importance of myths. And someone called Alison McIntyre, English, later became a Catholic Philosopher, talked about stories. And that basically, we are storytelling creatures. Because naturally, if you have children, you know that boys always asking why. And you answer the question, they just say why. And you answer that, and they say why. So just born with these questions, when you are trying to make sense of the nature of reality. So how do you explain to people, why is this here? When you tell a story, why is this like this? Well, there's a story behind why it is like this. Why do we do this? Well, there's a story behind it. And basically, there's a story behind everything. When you can put something in the context of the story, then it becomes meaningful. It's no longer random. It's no longer nihilistic in that sense. It has a meaning. And so calls from the beginning of time, people have asked the question, why are we here? Where did the world come from? And people in different parts of the world have come up with different stories to answer those kinds of questions. And these different stories, we can call them myths, explain about God or gods, the world, the relationship between God and the world, of men and women, and the relationship between men and women. And you can see one of those stories is the story of Adam and Eve. But you can find other stories and other cultures which also try to express something about the relationship between God and man and woman and the world. And some of these stories are really quite dysfunctional, dystopian, I would say.
Andrew Love
Is that a reflection of where people were at when they were telling these stories to try to explain their own dysfunction?
William Haines
Yes, I would say so. They're trying to explain also, of course, why is it evil in the world? Why is there suffering in the world? How do we explain that? How to explain the fact that nature seems to be okay, but human beings do all these terrible things to each other and to nature? So yes, so these appear stories. And then sometimes, they get transferred into philosophy. So for example, the Greeks, you know, okay, this happens. Do we have free will or not? This is obviously a question, am I free to do whatever I want? Or am I determined by something? And so lots of Greek plays, investigate this like the story of Oedipus Rex. There's this King Laius and his wife, Jocasta, they have a boy. Then somebody comes along and says, when your son grows up, he's going to kill his father and marry his mother. What a horrendous thing to hear your son's going to grow up, going to kill his father, marry his mother. Do you think we're never going to let this take place? They say to one of the servants, you know, take this little boy. Take our son and drown him. The servant doesn't have the heart to do that. So instead of that, he takes him for miles and just leaves them outside of the shepherd's heart. And the shepherd looks after the son and eventually is brought up in another palace.
William Haines
Anyway, one day, father and mother find out that actually their son hadn't been drowned, hadn't been put to death, and the father thinks well, I better make sure this prophecy doesn't take place. I'm going to leave the palace. I'm going to wander around. The game, basically, a wanderer. Anyway, the son also decides that he wants to go on a journey. So he travels around Greece. He's having to meet this old man across roads against an argument and a fight. And he ends up killing this old man. He carries on wandering along, and it comes to this city. And there's a sphinx there, and he solves this riddle. And then as a reward, he's able to marry the queen. And then, later on, somebody comes along and explains something. And then he discovers and he finds out, actually, he killed his father and he married his mother, and it basically goes horrendous. The meaning of the story is there's fate and you cannot escape your fate. So that's like, and that sense of future is closed. It doesn't matter what you do, the outcomes always going to be the same because it's all determined. So in the Greeks, it was fate, Moira.
William Haines
Later, these kinds of ideas then entered into Christianity as predestination. From God is predestined, whether you go to heaven, or you go to hell. It doesn't matter what you do, the outcome is already decided by God. It's all part of God's plan. And then this feeds then, this basic assumption about the nature of reality then feeds into things like scientific determinism. If we knew everything, we'd be able to predict the future perfectly. If we knew the place of every single atom because there are the laws of physics. The future then is contained within the present. There's no free will. To free will then just becomes an illusion. You think you're making a decision but actually, all these chemicals in your head are just following the laws of physics and chemistry. And you think you're free but actually, it's all predestined. It's all predictable. So this idea of fate then leads into predestination, leads into scientific determinism, economic determinism, which is what Marxism was about. Oh, you can't expect them to be any different. I'm determined by my past. This basic assumption about the nature of reality from this kind of story.
William Haines
So you can see this kind of story then was a biblical story. And Adam and Eve, if God says to Adam and Eve, don't eat the fruit. If you do, you're going to die. So God says to them, this is the way the world works. If you eat this fruit, you're going to die. So he gives them the choice. They have free will. They can choose whether to eat the fruit or not eat the fruit, that's their choice. And so embedding the biblical understanding as human beings have free will. That's a basic assumption about nature. The future's not close, the future is open. My past may have been horrendous, but I can change the way I think. I can change the way I feel. I can change this, and I can change my future. Where the Greek view about fate, it doesn't matter what you do, they all come already predestined. So the story then becomes embodied in certain philosophical assumptions about nature of reality. And the same about sexuality as well. But the certain stories, Greek stories about sexuality, and they also become transferred into European culture. And I would say, a lot of these Bible stories and a read through the lens of a distorted view of sexuality which has come from the Greeks, not from the Bible.
Andrew Love
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's a lot that you just said. A lot of important stuff. So my understanding is if you really subscribe to this predetermined worldview, and it is interesting because there are people like Richard Dawkins who are self-proclaimed science-driven men who also have that pre-determinism, that sense that if they sound very religious when they speak some of these people because it seems like all those worldviews seem to lend themselves to like, well, it doesn't matter anyway like a nihilism, or at least a pacifism. Because like, what am I to do if everything is already foretold?
Andrew Love
Yes, it leads to that. It seems almost embedded in the world just because you throw your hands in the air because I guess, I don't have any say in the matter anyway. But in terms of sexuality, do you feel like there is a certain level of sexual nihilism that is prevalent in our culture these days where it doesn't really matter? Before, it used to be a big point of shame if you were to be caught in some sort of sexual scandal. Young people are willingly putting themselves online sexually to make money. There are websites, specifically, it's called Porn 2.0. And this is a new paradigm for pornography that they just don't even care about. It's like, I can make $1,000, why not? But, to me, that's just a form of nihilism where you don't even feel the potential future repercussions because you just don't feel anything in a sense.
William Haines
Yes, you become numb.
Andrew Love
I don't mean to say that's everybody. But there is this really strong pull in that direction where pornography lends itself to numbing yourself if you're a viewer, but also the people in the industry are often on drugs or whatever. So is this stemming from somewhere, or is this just this machine that's evolving? And this is the natural evolution of such a self-destructive machine where in order to create this porn machine, we have to put humans in it, and they have to come out on the other end, probably worse off, not better off.
William Haines
Okay, a lot of this nowadays, Instagram, and pornography is part of it. But people showing pictures of they're doing this or doing that, or the other, and very much about image, what you look like on the outside. So where's that concern about the outside that your image is what counts, where does that come from? So again, this is basically by Hellenistic Greek view. The Greeks then, were into architecture, into art, into sculpture. An extraordinary, beautiful sculpture of the human form. And then, of course, they would exercise in the nude. The Olympic Games have always done on the nude way back. This contrast is very much with the biblical view where what was important is not what you look like on the outside but what was going on on the inside. So that expressing things like hearing the Word of God. You, listen. The important is the truth comes through listening to the Word of God and to thinking. And it's not like the truth is out there. A picture never lies, that kind of idea. That's all from the Greek. So the biblical view is always like that. And so that's why the Middle East people would always dress very modestly because they're concerned, you should be evaluating me not according to what I look like, my physical dimensions or my statistics, or whatever. But you should be evaluating me according to my conversation, on what's going on the inside.
Andrew Love
That's really interesting.
William Haines
So with the decline in the biblical worldview, comes the rise of the reappearance of the Hellenistic worldview. All accounts as what's on the outside beauty, and doesn't matter what's on the inside.
Andrew Love
I was going to ask, have there been like parallel histories where there's been this push and pull between those two worldviews? Let's say, biblical worldview and the Hellenistic worldview. And they may be taking different shapes throughout history. But when one is more dominant, it's more obvious in a culture that the focus is on the internal and vice versa.
William Haines
Yes, one which is most Hebraic in one sense. You could say as fundamentalist Islam, is the rejection, the non-denial of modernity. The greatest moments in human culture have been where people could synthesize the two where you could take the Greek forms of art, but infuse them with Christian values. And then you get Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, the great composers because they're taking the forms of Greek art. But they're infusing the Christian values. But then with the decline of Christian culture, you still got the same forms but then now, infused with other values.
Andrew Love
That's so perfect because we were just in this podcast. We're continually trying to understand ourselves. We're not just trying to educate, we're trying to really sincerely understand where are we at culturally, where are we at historically? And one thing that we've noticed is that the repression of sexuality always causes societal ills. But also, the full expression unfettered also leads to disasters. So that balance, that scary, frightening balance in the middle is where we're trying to head. I feel like that's where two parents were trying to take us as much as they could. But culturally, yes, we're really being confronted because if you look, there are so many people now who have been over-exposed to sexuality. They're oversexed. And we're seeing a society that has never existed before. Because even in the time of the Greeks, they might have had orgies or whatever, but they didn't have a cell phone. They didn't have millions of phones.
William Haines
Yes, that's true.
Andrew Love
So we're experiencing the other side of numbness where you're just empty completely like further past numb is empty. Where you just have nothing left to give. That's really interesting that the fear of sexuality is what drove the kind of Puritan expression of sexuality. But the fear of monogamy, it seems like, or the commitment, love, giving yourself, you're internal. So, I guess, the fear of the external form of sexuality is the Puritans in the form of the internal connection of sexuality, fears, or drives the kind of Hellenistic worldview so that balance of fearing neither, but embracing the external form of sexuality with the internal connection that is meant to provide. That's harmony right there.
William Haines
That's right. It's a similar thing, it's science and religion. You need science, but it needs to be informed by spiritual values. Whereas some religious people, reject science. And then you end up with religious fundamentalism. You got Galileo and various other things. And of course, you get a reaction against that. And sometimes people just emphasize science, scientific materialism, and you end up with secular communism. And the thing is, as you say, to get the balance. So you get incredibly technologically advanced and developed society, but it's also one in which people are living very meaningful lives. And science is used for goodness.
Andrew Love
And what gave birth to Hellenism? What was the precursor to Hellenism? Because that's probably an expression of something out.
William Haines
So that's one of my interests then is about the word of the Hellenistic world you come from, I said like, philosophers are always asking why, why this? Why that? And of course, the pre-Socratics, want to know what's the nature of reality? What are things made of? Some would say it was the fire. Some would say it's water. Some air. You have a whole variety of different ways of trying to make sense of the nature of reality. And one of the greatest of these philosophers was Pythagoras. We all come across right-angle triangles. The Pythagoras didn't just do geometry. It tries to make sense of nature of reality is also a religious leader. Had his own religious cult. And of course, there were teachings, and he tried to explain, this is how he saw the nature of reality. But it wasn't just the way he saw nature of reality, it's a common way in which people in Greece saw the nature of reality. And so Bertrand Russell described Pythagoras as the most influential philosopher ever. And he shaped what goes on in silo in a world. And he influenced basically, Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, and everybody.
William Haines
So Pythagoras tried to describe the nature of reality. He came up with what he calls a Table of Opposites. Aristotle recorded this table of opposites. And it's Table of Opposite, so you got, okay, something's either male or female, either left or right, either up or down, either square or oblong, either left or right, and also either good or evil. And so these two columns, in one column was male, right, good, order. And the other column was chaos, female, left, evil, and various other things. And Aristotle himself said everything in the one column is associated with goodness and everything in the other columns is associated with evil. And think about it, what is the right thing to do? Right is good. What is the Latin word for left? It's sinister or evil. What happened to left-handed people through history? They were regarded with suspicion trying to make and force them to write with the right hand. The word truth in Russian is Pravda, it also means right. And so from Pythagoras, then there's this moral overlay on the language. So would you like to be described as a positive person or a negative person?
Andrew Love
Yes, positive.
William Haines
So if you think about, are protons, good and electrons, evil?
Andrew Love
I'm going to take a neutral stance on that debate.
William Haines
So positive and negative, and they're neutral. There's no moral overlay at the level of atoms. But then when it comes to this other level, suddenly, positivity like right, like male, like, etc, becomes morally good. And negatives associated with evil. So when we look at the unification view of your characteristics, you have male, female, etc, etc, etc. But there's no moral overlay. There's no good and evil in those columns. Then in Pythagoras columns, there was. This is the way the Greeks were dualists. This is the way the soul of nature of reality. In one of the first stories, the first woman is associated with evil because she was beautiful evil. And there's an association that femininity with evil. And then these ideas and permeate the stories, and then they feed into European culture. And that's where the Puritans got their stuff from. That's what Augustine got his view of sexuality from.
Andrew Love
It's bananas because these people, these marks, they're digging in the right place and they're finding some real important discussion points that we need to address. But their conclusions are always because they themselves are highly dysfunctional people. So, therefore, we must kill these people. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You kind of missed it.
William Haines
So that's why people say I'm non-binary. So you have to say, well, what do you mean by that? What are the binaries of which you are not? Well, people reject binary opposites? Well, what are binary opposites? Well, that's Pythagoras, male and female. And so from Pythagoras then you get these stereotypes either in this column or on that column. So along with a male, in terms of the physical form comes certain expectations of gender. A man is this, a man is that a man is the other, along with woman, as well as be evil got, again, certain kinds of roles that a woman is expected to conform to certain kinds of stereotypical thing. So as a moral overlay, but also you get these gender stereotypes, they should be like this, they should be like that. And of course, that's the fallen. The way the fallen world was assumed to be normal. And so those fallen stereotypes became what regarded as what the way things should be. You should conform to our gender expectations. So when people are saying, I'm non-binary. What they're rejecting is the dysfunctional, distorted fallen view of sexuality and a fallen view of binaries which are binary opposites. And so, the whole thing with Pythagoras is good and evil says it's constant conflict between good and evil, between right and left, between male and female. And so fast forward 2000 years, and you got Marx thesis antithesis. One trying to destroy and eliminate the other.
Andrew Love
Man, we need to sit down as Pythagoras. We need that time machine and just give him a talk. You're a smart guy. Yes, that's really insightful because that duality is always perceived as a conflict. Like you're saying, there's insecurity because one doesn't know the other. There's a lack of communication. And therefore, there's misinterpretation which leads to conflict. It's almost like prophecy. Whereas that duality is actually meant to be complimentary. It's meant to be like a dance. That's really interesting. And yes, just that moral overlays like a filter that you're adding to this topic that just screws everything up, that distorts everything. But it's interesting when you were saying this thing about the binary discussion which is so heated, and people say, I'm non-binary, that discussion is always so binary. You either agree with me, because I say this or you're bad is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, can we just discuss where are you coming from this? Again, that lack of conversation and understanding is where we start a conflict.
William Haines
That's right. That's the whole dynamic of Pythagoras. It's either decided his domination that way. But now swung back, oh, let's get rid of all the dead white males, and now it swung the other way. But they're both locked when at the same dialectic. It's either we're dominating you or you're dominating us. And that's what you get with Marx as well. And you're right. That's where you get canceled culture from. So again, from Aristotle and the way that Pythagoras is interpreted, one side tries to eliminate the other. And Pythagoras has been described as one column trying to eliminate the other column.
Andrew Love
Endlessly, endlessly. It just takes different shapes that manifest in different ways. But again, I hate to bring it back. We're kind of steeped in that is essentially where porn lives are, it's always about the dominance of one over the other. And one person has to lose importantly. There's no mutual beneficiary's important. There's always somebody that has to lose in order for a point to serve its purpose, which is a game of dominance.
William Haines
Yes, again, it's male who should be dominating the female. And that's a lot of where it comes from. And of course, that feeds into what we would call a fallen nature, fallen aspects of what it is to be a man. So Arcangelic nature wants to dominate to control.
Andrew Love
Can we unravel that a bit though? Because there are certain characteristics that are more common to men because of the way that our brains operate. There are certain expressions of masculinity that are actually natural. That's such a dangerous word to use. Natural, but like that are inborn. But then there are many that are interpreted like soft voices to be effeminate. That is characterized as having something to do with your sexuality. But it's just a different expression of masculinity. But it's quite confusing because there's epigenetics plays into this or genetics in general. There's upbringing, there's like, who your parents were? There's exposure to like, how do you sort all that out? That's pretty messy.
William Haines
Righ. And again, going back to Pythagoras, you're either in one column or the other. The principle of view of the nature of reality is your characteristics like the Yin and Yang symbol. Within every Yang, there's a little Yin. Within a Yin, there's a little Yang. So within every man, there are feminine aspects. Within every woman, there's a masculine aspect. And so it's not based on this idea of this or that. And so yes, some men have, especially as they get older, they're more feminine softer nature women. Some women have more of a masculine character. But that doesn't mean they're in the wrong body. It just means there's a spectrum. When you look at the spectrum, there's an overlap. There are some men who are quite feminine, and some women are quite masculine. But they're still men and they're still women.
Andrew Love
They got in the Yin Yang symbol the degree of black and white. And each half, it's not necessarily the same as it's drawn. Where like, the black inside the white can be much bigger than just the little ball. Because the way that that conjures is, yes, we know that chemically that every man has some amount of estrogen. That's the chemical, but the degree to which he is feminine in substance. I guess that's the question I have is like, we associate even like a walk, or men or speaking like a cadence with a gender. So is that fallen? Is that just the assumption? That's a little confusing for me.
William Haines
Yes, so you say some of these things are biological. Either you're XY or XX. And the number of people who are confused or chromosomal level is microscopic, usually, they can't reproduce anywhere. It's either XX or XY. But then on top of that biology, then there's the certain physical body shape, where then as well you have certain kind of cultural assumptions about a man or a woman. And sometimes people feel they don't fit with these cultural assumptions that people are imposing on them, and then they can get confused. So the problem, I would say, is when we look at these cultural assumptions, what it is to be a man or what is to be a woman, well, you know, the classic 1950s. The man is polishing his car, and the woman is polishing the source. And both of them are really happy. So a lot of women didn't want to fit into that. And so the problem is that the cultural assumptions, I would say, are fallen. And people often reject and rebel, it's have fallen assumptions and cultural expectations. But at the same time, they may end up getting confused. So they may think, well, I feel like this and this and this. Maybe I'm a woman in a man's body, or maybe I'm a man in a woman's body. And that leads to that kind of confusion because they think, well, I don't conform to these cultural expectations. Therefore, maybe there. So I think the problem is that a lot of cultural expectations have fallen anyway.
Andrew Love
It also seems to point back to Pythagoras. What if I don't fit into this, then therefore I must fit into this other alternative that is being projected by society.
William Haines
Either one or the other.
Andrew Love
Yes, because like this morning, before this call, I made breakfast for the family. I made lunch for everybody. I packed their stuff. I put it all neatly into little bins, and I sent them off to school. And I was like a typical housewife. But then now, I'm also doing this. So this is the confusing time where there's no precedent, because everything we have a reference point to, we don't really fit into. I think a lot of people don't. So then we're discovering what masculinity is, in a sense. What is true masculinity? And that's quite confusing. Or, I don't know. Not confusing, but it's new territory. And there's going to be a lot of debate, I would say.
William Haines
Alright, so you need new stories, I would say.
Andrew Love
Okay. And in the form of what?
William Haines
Great novels, great literature like Jane Austen, Tolstoy. You can see these characters developing. And women, you can see the good ones. You can see the ones which are flawed, whatever it's flawed in some way or another. And I think through good literature, which expresses this kind of vision of a different kind of masculinity and femininity, I think that can appeal to people.
Andrew Love
It makes so much sense.
William Haines
For myself, as a teenager, I see lots of classic romantic stuff. The Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Jane Austen, etc, etc. And for me, reading this, woke all kinds of emotions and feelings that I never experienced before because entering into these different characters and feeling what they're feeling sometimes I'll be laughing. Sometimes they'll be crying. But just in that safe environment as able to explore all these very intense kinds of emotions. And then, of course, it's not with another human being, just actually exploring these things. And of course, you read Thomas Hardy and you see, well, you go that way, you end up feeling ugh. I just remember reading one Thomas Hardy novel and after that, I'm feeling so depressed. But then I realized it's because of what sexuality is in that relationship. And that's where it ended up. So in that sense, these classic authors, were very realistic because they were describing, this as the way life really is. It's not like James Bond. He goes around sleeping with everybody with no consequences.
Andrew Love
Sure, sure.
William Haines
These classical authors, were describing the nature of reality. If you go along this path, you end up here. If you go along that path, you end up here. And a good author has a variety of characters, and they start off in certain places and they end up in different places. And where they end up depends upon the decisions that they make and the kind of relationship they get involved with.
Andrew Love
But what you're suggesting, what started this topic of conversation was that we need new stories. So we do have some very creative people that listen to this in our community who, honestly, you and I, and I would say most of the listeners are of the mind that we're on the precipice of a new world. One which has no precedent and that needs some definition. And we need to provide that information by projecting what we would like to see exist in the future. Understanding the mistakes that we made in the past, but also really starting to define, and that's what sexual integrity is to us is like having a very strong vision for what it means to be a healthy individual as it pertains to sex.
Andrew Love
So these stories, if we don't have the novel's necessarily yet in existence, we need to start, I guess, it starts with conversations like this. And then elaborating and understanding, digging in figuring out what this means to us. And then also, creating songs, creating art to help us remember the future that doesn't yet show itself. I was just listening to this guy. I was talking about the fact that when you're a part of a system, any system, it doesn't matter how small the piece of the system is, if that piece reacts in a certain way it impacts the entire system, that's of a human body. But it's also of, you know, he was talking in terms of Totalitarianism where even if you're just a small piece in this big machine, your actions do matter. There is a cascade effect. So if that's true, which I do believe it is, then every single time we start sorting through what it is that we would like to be building this future that makes sense, what does it mean to be a man in a healthy society and a healthy community. We have to start defining that and practicing that in order for it to ever come about. The stories that we are being exposed to regularly are from Netflix, Disney+, it's all the streaming services are now our bastions of information. And I don't think they're going to come up with the answers. Every once in a while, they'll be like, wow, Pixar seems to have some nuggets of wisdom. But I don't think these stories exist yet is what I'm getting at. But I don't know how to get them out into the world necessarily.
William Haines
Good classical Christian literatures are like that. It's very uplifting and lifts up the soul. It gives us a vision of what it is to be a perfect person. I have a perfect soul. Nowadays, the emphasis is on what it is to have a perfect body. Good Christian literatures are like what was I talking about is emphasizing developing your soul, developing your attitude, developing how you relate to people, and preserving your sexual purity amongst other things, and explaining what it is to be chaste. Not in a puritanical kind of way that sex is bad, but in a very good kind of way with a vision of beauty and sexual love after marriage. Ivan Ilyich who's an Australian Catholic Priest Nanika, said, if you want to change the world, you have to change the story. And that's true. So I don't know what kind of stories your children are reading at school, but a lot of the new storybooks that children are given at school reflect the modern, politically correct, woke culture and vision of sexuality and family and sexual relationships, etc. So these kinds of ideas were introduced very, very early through those kinds of storybooks. So we need to have other storybooks that present right from the beginning for children and classical Christian stories like that. There was a king and a queen, they were unhappy. Why were they unhappy? Because they didn't have any children. And one day, Queen became pregnant. Baby is born, and they're really happy. So when a child hears that, for him, the king and the queen, that's mom and dad. Before I was born, mom and dad were unhappy. When I was born, mom and dad were really happy because I'm the fruit of their love. And of course, as the story goes on, the princess meets a prince. And of course, there are all kinds of challenges that both of them go through until they end up with a happy ending. So again, the vision at the end is of marriage. These kinds of things are now regarded as being politically incorrect. But we need to recover that classical Christian literature, as well as generate our own. Because when you read some of these things, they're quite archaic in the language. They need to be rewritten. But it needs to preserve the same, original and better values, you might say.
William Haines
So can you repeat exactly, he said, if you want to control the world, you control the story? Or you change all you want to change the world?
William Haines
If you want to change the world, you have to change the story. Because the stories that we hear, just populate our world. If you read the Greek myths, that affects your world. This is your worldview based upon those stories. If you read Grimm's fairy stories, that affects your whole inner world, psychologically. Those are stories in which we understand ourselves. We relate to ourselves. We tell our own life in terms of a story. We are in that sense, we're a story. And the stories that we hear shape our inner world. And of course, that's why it's so important that children should be growing up with good stories.
Andrew Love
I agree. Yes.
William Haines
So if you think about what Father Moon was doing, right and towards the end of his life, he went traveled around the world, and gave these peace messages. And also, all he's doing is just retelling the story of Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel. But he is retelling the old story, but he's telling it differently. So I would say, the way that Christians have understood that story of Adam and Eve is mistaken to what Father's doing is taking the old story, but he's retelling the story in a different way. And so, by telling us also in a different way about Jesus as well, is changing the way in which people think about all these things.
Andrew Love
I love it. I really do love that a lot. I took a deep breath when you said it the first time. Because that's primarily what we're working on an individual basis. We have many groups going for husbands or wives, for young people who are unplugging from their online life and a lot of what they do in their time because it's giving them this chaotic feedback. And we're trying to help them plug into something that gives them vitality. And that really is changing how they feel about themselves. And we also have to help them figure out what they want to think about themselves. That's the story about themselves. What we've seen also is the more people that do this work, the more that the cascade effect takes place. And because people are believing that if they can do it, I can do it, because the overarching story of what's possible changes. And that's really, really important. A lot of people, honestly, don't believe that marriage is possible. They want it, they deeply want it. I know many friends, personally, who would never admit it but it's what they want most. And it's what they fear most, so it's what they reject first. Because the story they have in their head is that it's impossible because that's what we get from movies, is marriage is the hardest thing in the world and it's not worth it. Don't even try.
William Haines
Most movies are not about marriage anyway. It's about people sleeping around with each other.
Andrew Love
Yes. Anyway, I think that is so, so important. And storytelling is changing. There's the meme storytelling of the TikTok generation. There's a longer form through YouTube. There are still books being produced and all that. But if you're listening to this, I really challenge you to think about the stories that you believe about what's possible for yourself, your own life. But also think about the future that we're creating together and like, what do you think is possible? And what story are you telling about the future? Because if you go to certain storytellers like the news, they'll tell you that there's nothing good possible for the future. All dead, just don't even try.
William Haines
A story is so important because if someone tells me about yourself, they'll tell you the story. And you hear a person's story that is an expression that attitudes to the world, or assumptions. Two people can go through the same experience but tell it very differently. Why are they telling it differently? Because they experience it differently. Because they have certain different assumptions. And then again, as you say, if you listen to somebody else's story, then you can be inspired and think, wow, that person did that. I can do that too. That's why I often listen to people's stories and read biographies, autobiographies. You can realize then, okay, just because this is my past, it doesn't mean my future is predestined or determined. Because you look at people, all kinds of people come from a terrible kind of background or for background, but they end up doing extraordinary things. And he realized, well, my past does not determine my future. My future is still open depending upon how I respond to my present. I can create a different kind of future. And the stories end up in a different kind of story.
Andrew Love
Yes, I really do love it. So please, everybody, pay attention to the stories that you're listening to. I was just on a call yesterday with somebody who realized that the music that they listen to, they're all stories, these are short stories, but they're hypnotic because they're melodic. And they really sink into you because you repeat it again and again and again. But these are all stories. They're all just different forms of stories. So how are you ingesting stories? What is it telling? What is all this accumulating inside of you into? What are you believing? And how can you change the story of this world to be something more positive? That's a huge outcome that I think we can all take away. Because absolutely, you can start right now with digging into the stories that you believe and also rewriting the stories that you believe based on what you would like to believe. So optional, participation-based. So that was a lot. I think there's so much there. That was really good. I didn't anticipate us going to some of these places, but I'm really glad we did. Do you like it when people email you? Should we include your email?
William Haines
I always reply. I love it when people ask questions or give me comments. So yes, I love that.
Andrew Love
Awesome. So we'll include your email in the show notes. So everybody, if you have questions, please ask Uncle William. This is, by the way, just a typical conversation. I remember, we met under the stairs in Bad Camberg. And I think we're supposed to be going somewhere but we stopped, and I just couldn't stop asking you questions. So this is great.
William Haines
We had some really good conversations. I remember them very well.
Andrew Love
Yes, me as well. So thank you. Thank you for showing up and for enlightening us all. And if you guys have any questions, again, we'll include his email. And he likes the question so inundate him with questions. He's got a lot of answers.
William Haines
Thanks, Andrew. God bless you. God bless everyone. Thanks. Take care.
Andrew Love
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