Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Hi, everybody. Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again. And today we're going to be talking about a story that is both tragic and horrific, a story which is both local and international.
[00:00:17] And why I want to talk about this story is because there is media coverage that has unfolded here in New Zealand over the last couple of days. This is not just a New Zealand incident. This is an international issue.
[00:00:30] But the New Zealand media coverage has neglected to include important details. We'll get more into those details in just a second. I'm not sure why, but I think those details are important and I think it's worth exploring the question of why they have not been included. Secondly, there are deeper realities at play here, and so I think it's important for us to look beyond just the headline, beyond just the incident itself, and perhaps understand some of the deeper philosophical realities at play here, because there are some bigger implications in all of this and it might tell us why. Well, certainly one of these deeper realities might tell us why certain details have not been included in this particular story. So let's jump in straight away and get to the details of this tragic and horrific event that unfolded here in New Zealand. And this is an article that was published in the New Zealand Post just yesterday, but it was also published in, I think most, if not all, of the mainstream media outlets I saw had coverage of this story. And all of them, as far as I could tell, they were lacking key details that we're going to talk about in just a second. Woman's death linked to online forum selling suicide poison. A woman who died at a remote Rangitiki location bought poison before her death, which she sourced from a website linked to Canadian man Kenneth Law. Savannah Oric was found dead on May 26, 2022, and a coroner has subsequently ruled her death a suicide. An inquest into the Auckland woman's death found she sourced the poison. And remember that word, poison. We'll come back to that in just a second. In the weeks prior her death, from an online forum connected to Law, a Canadian man accused of assisting suicides by enabling the distribution and marketing of materials and hosting discussion forums. So he's selling this poison and he is also providing details in online forums about how you can actually use it, how. How you can carry out your own suicide more effectively. Other suicides in New Zealand had links to his alleged offending. And coroner Alexandra Cunninghame said in her findings into Oric's death that work was already underway to prevent access to his websites. According to her medical history, Auric had previously been diagnosed with depression, post traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues and had earlier told friends about her intention to self harm. By, by the way, the way the Canadian euthanasia law is currently tracking, in a matter of months it would be legal, or it will be legal for someone in her situation to obtain euthanasia with that very diagnosis. On the day of her death, police found her hundreds of kilometres away from her home after she had booked herself into a room at a location now suppressed. And I'm assuming that's because it might be a private accommodation or an Airbnb or something along those lines.
[00:03:19] Um, it's not entirely clear, but I'm assuming that would be the obvious assumption here why they've suppressed this. In November 2023, Coroner Tracey Fitzgibbon. So this is a different New Zealand coroner now linked the deaths of four others, so four other New Zealanders to law's forum, his online suicide forum, and urged Te Whta Ora, the New Zealand Health Ministry, General Practitioners, First Responders, WorkSafe and the Environmental Protection Authority to work together to reduce the chance of further deaths occurring.
[00:03:48] A working group was established as a result and included customs in the Ministry for the Environment.
[00:03:55] I'll let you decide how you feel about that as a response. And it's kind of interesting here just to note as a side note, the way you see all of these different bureaucracies coming into play to try and address this issue. And again, I'll leave that to you to contemplate the world in which we live now and how bureaucracy and bureaucratic mechanisms are just all supreme. When to me it sort of feels like there's a deeper issue here.
[00:04:21] And as we'll see in just a second, maybe a bureaucratic response is just not enough. And certainly a working group. Well, we know in New Zealand what that meant. A working group was code. It became sort of a basically an ongoing regular joke in New Zealand with the previous labor government that if they formed a working group, that meant that nothing of meaning was really going to come of it. Coroner Cunninghame made no further recommendations. And so we're now back to the coroner from this specific case.
[00:04:49] So the first coroner we were talking about, we're back to her now and noted as Law's alleged defending was outside New Zealand, it was not in her jurisdiction. Okay, so that's fair enough. She can't have legal control. It's not just her, this is other countries as well are having the same issue with this guy. But then she goes on to say this. I am satisfied that it is not necessary for me to make further recommendations or comments pursuant to the act in relation to the use and importation of the poison for the purposes of suicide and the availability about information on this topic on the Internet. Other agencies are already working together to reduce the risk posed to vulnerable New Zealanders by discussions about suicide on Internet forums and by the poison in particular.
[00:05:31] Two things to note, you'll see there that they have included the word the poison instead of the actual substance. We'll get to that point point in just a second and why that might be the case.
[00:05:41] But secondly, I don't know about you, but I'm not particularly comforted by this as an official response, because I actually do feel that there is more that needs to be done here and I can't help but ask myself, why would they not be pressing this issue? It seems to me there's a very real threat here. Four New Zealanders have been linked, their suicides have been linked to what's gone on here.
[00:06:04] Now, I'll tell you in a second why I think they might not be pressing this. This is purely just an assumption on my part, but it is a, I think, a good faith assumption about why I think this is happening. This is not me just plucking stuff wildly out of thin air. But I don't think that this is really an acceptable response. I am satisfied that it is not necessary for me to make further recommendations or comments pursuant to the act in relation to the use and importation of the poison for the purposes of suicide and the availability about information on this topic on the Internet. It seems this would be the very moment when the coroner would make serious recommendations because the issue, the threat here is so very real and so serious, it is very bizarre to me to see what feels like a far too laissez faire, hands off approach being taken. And what's interesting is when she comments, other agencies are already working together to reduce the risk posed to vulnerable New Zealanders by the discussions about suicide on Internet forums and by the poison in particular.
[00:07:01] Now, two things to note here. Todd Stevenson, the ACT MP currently in Parliament, has a bill sitting in the ballot waiting to be drawn to try and expand and worsen legalised euthanasia here in New Zealand. And one of the very things that that bill would be proposing and would allow is for the open discussion and promotion of assisted suicide and euthanasia. So that's just something to keep in mind as we think about this particular issue.
[00:07:24] But it's interesting to me to note that she's just said, well, other agencies are already working together to reduce the risk.
[00:07:30] This, to me sounds an awfully lot like the working group mentality has once again produced a bad outcome for New Zealand. Remember, it's back in 2023. It is November 2023. So we're talking two years ago that this issue was raised by a previous coroner and a working group was formed back then. And what this sounds like to me is that there hasn't been much of a concrete response. Now, I could be wrong, there could be more here that we just haven't understood. But the coroner basically just seems to be implying, well, I don't need to do anything because other groups are already working on this, they're addressing it, they're doing something like there's that. That they're exploring ways in which they can reduce the risk.
[00:08:12] That doesn't sound like a final solution has been reached to me in this situation.
[00:08:16] Now, when I first heard about this man, Kenneth Law, who supplied the poison, quote, unquote, and we'll come back to that in just a second about what we're actually talking about here, my first instinct was this man absolutely is going to have connections to Philip Nitschke, Australia's Dr. Death.
[00:08:37] And that was exactly the case.
[00:08:41] Kenneth Law and Philip Nitschke, Australia's Dr. Death. He's the pro assisted suicide, pro euthanasia campaigner who is not just in Australia, but has gone global with his organization, Exit International.
[00:08:54] This has the hallmarks of their aberrant behaviors all over it. And sure enough, that's exactly what they are like. These two men are thick as thieves. Now, you might not be as familiar with Dr. Philip Nitschke as I am. You may have heard his name or you might think, why is that name familiar to me? It's possibly because of the recent coverage and you'll remember that we talked about this on a previous episode of the Sarco Suicide Pod. This is the Sarco Suicide Pod here. And this is Dr. Philip Nitschke, Dr. Death, inside his invention, the Sarco Suicide Pod. It is this dystopian, futuristic euthanasia pod that you climb into and it will kill you. So that's who Dr. Philip Nitschke is. So, as you can imagine, when I heard about Kenneth Law, and this is a case, by the way, it's been going for a couple of years and his activities overseas, my initial thought was, I think Dr. Philip Nitschke is involved in this Somehow he's got a connection to him. And sure enough, that is exactly the case.
[00:09:52] Here's an article from the Times detailing how close these two men are. And there's no conjecture or circumstantial anything about this.
[00:10:04] Let's read the details in here from Dr. Philip Nitschke himself. Philip Nitschke told a seminar in London that he had introduced the poison to the Canadian chef in Kenneth Law. Nitschke, an Australian former GP nicknamed Dr. Death, said law had discovered the poison when he attended one of Nitschke's assisted suicide seminars in Toronto. So Nitschke is the actual source of this? Not really Kenneth Law, and I'll get to this important detail in just a second. This is one of the key details that's not covered in this story and it is important. Nitschke said he had published details of the poisonous substance which. Which he described as a cheap and reliable way to have a peaceful death in an online suicide handbook, which was then shared widely on the Internet and seen by teenagers. He said the information had only been intended for members of Exit International, his pro euthanasia organisation, but rejected criticism from parents of teenagers who ended their lives using the poison that he should never have published how to use it.
[00:11:08] This is, by the way, a track record that has been going on with Philip Nitschke for many years now.
[00:11:14] I attended a seminar in Australia where I was a guest speaker, and I met the mother of a young man who died and took his own life overseas in Europe using one of these euthanasia suicide forums from Exit International. He got on the forum and he got all of the details that he needed about how to end his life. And. And they were very specific with him. They gave him all of the details about which airport to travel through, so your bags wouldn't be checked, so you're more likely to get away with it. They told him about where to go to source this particular. In this case, it was a drug. It's different to what they've used here that he had used. And they told him how to book other tours and events so you look like a tourist and no one would be suspicious about why you were only there a short period of time. They told him how to carry out the act and he followed these details.
[00:12:07] And in a similar sort of twist of fate to what we've seen here, the coroner in Australia who was overseeing the death when the family, they discovered this by accident, all of these details. They discovered the chat logs from the suicide forums. They provided all that information to the coroner. The coroner did not link this or did not include this evidence in the final finding.
[00:12:28] So the sort of. There was like a downplaying of what's gone on here. There was something similar. And. And other young people, as this article indicates, have discovered Dr. Philip Nitschke's suicide handbook, and they have followed his advice in this case. This is not a drug. We'll talk about what the substance is in just a second. I will not name it for obvious reasons, but I will talk about what the specific substance is. But they use this particular substance in those cases. So this has been a history that has been ongoing and he has been actively helping to facilitate suicides. And this is all done. This is the important bit. This is all done by a pro euthanasia lobby group. This is done in the name of euthanasia and assisted suicide. It's not separate from it, far from it. It's actually fundamental to it.
[00:13:16] It's essentially intertwined with that particular movement. And as you can see here, Dr. Filip Nitschke is now basically talking down his nose to. To the family members of dead victims who were people experiencing mental health crises, who went and used this particular advice. Nitschke defended Law's alleged action. So this is Kenneth Law now, the Canadian man connected to the New Zealand case. Nitschke defended Law's alleged actions, claiming he was simply trying to give people a choice of how to die.
[00:13:48] Describing how Law first came across the poison, Nitschke said, an entrepreneurial character who, who came to my workshop in Toronto a while ago, when I told them about this wonderful new substance, decided, sorry, to start selling it. A chap called Ken Law. And he sold it and sold it and sold it to anyone who wanted it. Nitschke further revealed how Exit International later told its members in its handbook how to contact Law. So they're providing direct contact details to obtain the poison. So they're putting people in touch with Kenneth Law. They are active facilitators, as you can see. This is not sort of circumstantial. This is him saying, yeah, he's one of us. And we worked with this guy. We published Ken Law's contact details in the book. Nitschke said. We said, look, Amazon, don't sell it anymore. Amazon withdrew the book for obvious reasons. Go to Ken Law. And so they did.
[00:14:44] So this is Philip Nitschke who is intimately involved in. In this particular issue.
[00:14:50] And it's quite astounding to me that these details have not been published in the New Zealand coverage about this incident.
[00:14:59] Now, we'll come back to why that might be in just a second. But first of all, I'm not going to name the substance here, just in case someone vulnerable comes across this particular episode and might be in such a difficult and dark place that they might be tempted to seek it out and use it. But the substance, the way the reporting covers this.
[00:15:18] So in New Zealand, they talk about this idea of Kenneth Law, who was selling poison. And what it sounds like is that that coverage, I think, could easily give people the false impression that Kenneth Law is selling people some sort of banned substance or some sort of illegal drug, some deadly drug, and they've illegally imported it, et cetera, et cetera. In actual fact, what Ken Law was selling people is a food additive.
[00:15:50] The food additive, in low doses, there's no issue, but when you take it in high doses, it is lethal to the human person.
[00:15:59] And so this is an important detail because when you realize that, you realize, okay, hold on, this is. This sort of sounds a little bit like someone who might be a serial killer or someone who is running some truly repugnant and evil like, like some dark web type fetish suicide site. And, and you know, it sounds like that kind of a thing, but that's not really what's going on here. And I think this is important to understand because I'm assuming that they haven't named the substance because just like me, they are weary of the possibility of someone actually going and trying this for themselves. And if that's the case, that's responsible. But I feel still like there's details here that really matter, because the unintended consequence of this is you get a false impression that maybe this is some sort of weird, extreme dark corner of the Internet type activity when that's not going on at all. And especially when you couple that with the fact that they have not included the connection of Philip Nitschke, one of the most well known pro euthanasia campaigners, is directly involved with all of this. And they haven't mentioned him. And this is absolutely relevant. This is a man who is constantly making headlines for the controversial behaviors he has been involved in, and most recently the Sarco suicide pod death that he was involved with. So this man is no stranger to journalists. And it feels to me like these important details should have been included. And it prompts me to ask the question, why were these details not included here?
[00:17:33] It seems to me that, okay, one possible answer is that they are literally just rushing to print the Basic, bare minimum details that they have. No one's just probing any deeper.
[00:17:44] But it seems to me that basic journalistic curiosity at the very least should be asking the deeper why here. There is a deeper why here. There's more. There's clearly more to the story and it, it is framed in such a way as we're not really getting the typical journalistic basic. I'm not talking about, you know, months and months of investigative journalism here. You can easily find these details. They are EAs easily available to anybody, anywhere in the world about Kenneth Law and his motivations and his behavior and his connection to Dr. Philip Nitschke. And it seems to me there is an obvious deeper why here. Because people don't just do this things like they don't set up suicide forums and they don't sell people these kinds of drugs. There is a bigger story here and it would be obvious, I think, to any journalist who is worth their salt, that there is more to this and there is more to that should be told here in the reporting. But no one has done that in this case. And that raises a question of why.
[00:18:45] Why would they not be covering this?
[00:18:48] Was this the journalist who decided not to go any further? Was this just sloppy reporting that doesn't really give us all the details? Or was this an editorial decision because of the obvious links between this and.
[00:19:04] And legalised euthanasia?
[00:19:06] Because this speaks to the deeper realities at play in all of this.
[00:19:10] You see, there's a big problem here for those who are pro legalised euthanasia and our mainstream media, they really nailed their colours to the mast during the euthanasia debate here in New Zealand when they published editorials saying we are actually advocating for law change and then trying to claim that somehow they could also maintain neutrality and balance in their reporting. And by the way, that's not what we saw at all. There wasn't proper b balance in the coverage of this.
[00:19:37] But these are the same organizations now who are covering this story.
[00:19:41] And the reason why there might be, I think, a very slim coverage of key details here with other important details missing.
[00:19:52] And I don't want to cast aspersions. This is me just making what I think is a reasonable assumption, is that one of the possibilities is unless this is sloppy reporting, the only other possibility is that a deliberate editorial decision has been made not to make that connection between this and legalised euthanasia. Because this reasoning employed here by this young woman is the exact same reasoning that drives legalised euthanasia. She has looked at her life and her circumstances. And she has said, I don't believe that my life is worth living anymore. There is no dignity, there is no value or worth in my life or why should I be forced to carry on in suffering? I don't want that anymore. I should be able to exercise my quote unquote right to die. It's not a right to die. Of course death comes to all of us. You can't claim it as a right. What they are talking about is a so called right to suicide, which of course is not a human right. It can't be. Because if you're going to say that only certain people who meet certain criteria are allowed to, to exercise their quote unquote right to suicide, then what you're actually saying is that it's not really a human right. If it was a universal human right, then everyone should be able to have access to that quote unquote right anytime they want to. So there's a clear problem here. This woman has just employed the same reasoning that is employed. The reasons are slightly different for why the underlying condition, but the reasoning is the same. And this creates a big problem. And this is an issue that, that has never been resolved because there is no reasonable answer, there's no logical answer from the pro euthanasia lobby to that particular problem. Why shouldn't a 16 year old who no longer sees dignity and meaning in their own life, why shouldn't they do the same thing as say a 75 year old with a terminal illness who doesn't see any meaning or purpose in carrying on anymore? Why should we treat them differently? They can't give an answer to that, a coherent answer to that at all. And, and what you have seen is a deliberate distancing or an attempt to distance, through the use of euphemisms and other things to try and distance the act of assisted suicide and euthanasia from actual suicide.
[00:22:01] And they have tried to claim, oh, they know they're not suicides. This is something different altogether. When in actual fact one is a medical suicide, the other one is a non medical suicide. But they are both still forms of suicide. And here's the key point in all of this. Kenneth Law is almost certainly going to argue this as his defence. I would be very surprised, I'd be shocked in fact, if he did not. When the court case finally comes before the courts make this very argument, he is connected with Dr. Philip Nitschke. He has talked about in his own previous story. Again, this is on the public record. If the journalists wanted to go and do their Due diligence, they would know this he has talked about and he has made the claim that, that what really sparked for him an interest in this was the fact that his mother had a stroke and she carried on living for some number of years after that and she had a feeding tube and other things. And he said that her life didn't have dignity. But her husband, his father was a religious man and was opposed to euthanasia. And so he's talked about this as part of his story. Now we've had another member of the family apparently who has disavowed him over this. But this is the claim that almost certainly he is going to repeat in his court case. Any. And he is going to repeat and he's going to talk about the fact that he met Dr. Philip Nitschke and Dr. Philip Nitschke at one of these pro euthanasia how to seminars, gave him the advice that he needed about how to actually go about this, and then formed a connection with this man and they were working together. He is going to claim that he was not running some random nefarious suicide site or some random nefarious dark, you know, fetish, you know, like serial killer type behavior online.
[00:23:37] That this man believed he was helping people and that he was doing a good altruistic thing because he was just helping them to facilitate euthanasia. Remember, we've claimed that that's a good thing now and this is almost certainly going to be his defence. And the problem is that those who are pro legalised euthanasia, they don't have a compelling or objective response to this.
[00:23:58] All they can offer is arbitrary and subjective replies to this.
[00:24:03] They cannot give a compelling reason why he should not be considered in this way. The best they can come up with are arbitrary things like, oh, well, it wasn't officially approved, didn't have government oversight. We can't just have anybody doing this. Only the government can help people to end their lives, that kind of a thing. And then the more you dig, the deeper the problems get for them. They'll say, well, only certain people should be allowed to do this.
[00:24:26] Okay, but why only those people?
[00:24:29] And the more you go down the rabbit hole, the more you start pulling at the string on this jumper, the quicker it starts to unravel.
[00:24:37] And so I can't help but wonder if that's why the coverage of this is so sparse. And it makes this sound like some bizarre, strange, totally unrelated to anything else type dark web behavior when it's actually not that at all. And these details I think they are important.
[00:24:55] Now there's another deeper reality at play here. And that's how this was all able to unfold and to understand that, I think. I mean, obviously you're going to say, well, you know, people went and they got stuff online and they facilitated transactions and sales and shipping and stuff like that. Sure, that's the technical, practical aspects of how it all happened, how they got their hands on the stuff. And Harry promoted it to people.
[00:25:20] But there's also something deeper at play here and I think it's important to think about that.
[00:25:24] And that is the reality of the myth of progress. We've talked about this on recent episodes. Actually, most recently would be the conversation that I had in the very latest episode just before this one, actually about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And the myth of progress is that, you know, we would no longer seek our hope and our salvation in, you know, through redemption in Christ, through hope in God. We would now try and force our way back into the Garden of Eden with science and technology.
[00:25:53] The kingdom of man, not the kingdom of God, would save us. Science and technology would save us. They would be the things that would save us. And so morality and theology and moral philosophy and moral theology, they become things associated with this other worldly religious stuff.
[00:26:09] But not this worldly stuff, the practical, material stuff, that's the sciency stuff. The sciences tell us about the material world. And so this religious stuff, this moral stuff, that's otherworldly and so it gets privatized and sidelined and all of a sudden technology takes front and center. But what we don't have is technology and progress governed by morality.
[00:26:31] And so we also stop looking at the world through a good sound lens. And we forget that this is a classic example that none of this would have been possible if it wasn't for modern technology.
[00:26:46] This man has been linked now globally to 131 different deaths. There's only four here in New Zealand. I suspect there might be more globally and even here in New Zealand because that number and the operation he was running, it seems conceivable that there would be more. But he's been linked to at least 131. Now he's only been charged, I think it's about 13 he's been charged for because this is Canada and they have jurisdiction over him there. But, but even that said, we don't have jurisdiction in these other places, so we can't charge him.
[00:27:21] But even those 13 in Canada, how many of those could he actually have facilitated, let alone the full 131, if it wasn't for modern technology, how would these victims have become victims? Without the Internet, without these.
[00:27:37] Well, I'm not gonna name what it is, but this particular reasonably modern food additive, without these online suicide forums, without international currency transfer technologies that allowed people to exchange money and then also receive goods via another country. Now these things all have legitimate and good uses, apart from obviously, suicide forums. But the point is that we often forget that technology in and of itself is not a good.
[00:28:10] Technology can be used for good or it can be used for evil. And often I think this points to something else that's really important. A deeper reality here is that we can often, without realizing it, like frogs boiling in a pot, the water gets hotter and hotter and we don't realize because the water is slowly being turned up and we're boiling the whole time without even being aware of what's going on culturally, something similar can happen. And we can fail to recognize that we are starting to develop dystopian tendencies in our culture.
[00:28:42] And there is a dystopian edge to this technology.
[00:28:45] Yeah, sure, we can use this to facilitate good things, but we can also, in this case, produce dystopian results where people are able to be facilitated very quickly, very easily and widespread.
[00:28:57] It's not just a new technology.
[00:29:00] Like if I take an axe, for example.
[00:29:03] An axe is an axe is an axe. Well, kind of. Right. But I can develop the technology of an axe and I might be able to make it easier and more efficient in the swing. And so that allows me to use that tool a lot better.
[00:29:15] But I can't chop down any more trees with one single axe. You can make that axe as efficient as possible.
[00:29:24] And it might allow me to maybe, you know, cut down a tree quicker and then maybe I can add a couple extra trees if I'm working in a day or something like that. And it might make the job a bit easier and smoother for me in the way that I work.
[00:29:36] But I can't do widespread damage.
[00:29:39] It still doesn't allow me to very quickly chop down an entire forest. It just doesn't allow me to do that.
[00:29:45] But these kinds of technologies we are talking about, not just a new technology that quote, unquote, makes things easier, but also has a anti communitarian, a global dimension to it, which means that evil actions can be quick and widespread.
[00:30:01] And that's different. You know, one ax is still just one axe and it's got to be wielded by a person who gets tired and all those other kinds of things. This technology is a bit different. And so I think it's important to remember that that's. That's a deeper reality at play here. The myth of progress fails to account for the way in which, in actual fact, often we are not simply receiving benefits, we are also receiving very bad outcomes. And this is one example. This man would not have been able to facilitate this crime and this victimization and this atrocity on this scale without that technology. It is just that simple. He may have had a handful. You could have counted them probably on one hand, potentially of victims, and they would have been local. That probably would have been the extent of it. But because of the technology, things have changed. And of course, there is the great existential crisis which underpins all of this.
[00:30:51] People who have lost hope, and these victims here in New Zealand are people who lost hope.
[00:30:56] And that loss of hope is not just a mental health crisis that affects only certain people. That loss of hope is a reality that plays out all around the culture and is about more than simply mental health issues. That loss of hope is a crisis that impacts people across the spectrum and across the culture because those people have lost a deeper sense of existential meaning and purpose in life. Because the myth of progress, what we did was we no longer put our hope in God. We put our hope in our own successes and our own powers and our own dominance over nature and our technology, etc.
[00:31:37] And it turns out, as we've discovered, it couldn't deliver. It can't deliver what we desire.
[00:31:43] It can deliver certain benefits and certain comforts, but it cannot give us hope. And why is that? Well, because hope is only actually a virtue, and therefore it only finds its fullness. Because hope is a theological virtue, a Christian theological virtue. The theological virtues are faith, hope and love.
[00:32:04] And Joseph Pieper, the great Christian philosopher, who wrote a very important work on the theological virtues called faith, Hope and Love. In his book on hope, he makes this very salient and important point, that hope is only a virtue precisely because of Christianity, because it is a theological virtue directed towards God. It is only hope in God that allows hope to become a virtue.
[00:32:29] He contrasts this, for example, with justice. Now, justice can be a natural virtue. And the reason why justice can be a natural virtue doesn't have to be a theological one. To be a virtue is because a virtue has one essential character that must be satisfied for something to be a virtue. It can only be orientated towards the good. If something can be orientated towards both good and evil, then that thing can't be a virtue. And justice for Example can only be orientated towards the good. So if you're in a courtroom and the actions going on in that courtroom are orientated towards the good, then you have justice. If the actions in that courtroom are orientated towards evil, there is no justice and there is no virtue present.
[00:33:15] But as Yosef Pieper points out, hope is not like this, because in the natural, you can hope for things that are good, or you can hope for things that are evil. You could be someone living in 1930s or 1940s Germany, and you could have an unrelenting hope that the Nazis will win the war and complete their genocidal program against the Jewish people.
[00:33:40] That would be real hope, but it would be hope and evil. And so, as Yosef Pieper points out, because hope can be directed in either direction at a natural level, then hope is not a virtue. The only reason hope becomes a virtue is because of Christianity and because Christianity elevates it into a theological virtue orientated towards God. And this is important because what this means is that hope only really finds its fullness in human society. That essential component for existential meaning is only found in our society because of the Christian religious tradition.
[00:34:20] And when you strip that out of society, hope is no longer. It can't be a virtue in the natural.
[00:34:27] You can hope for things that are disordered, that are wrong.
[00:34:32] The grandeur of hope is stripped out of your society.
[00:34:36] And this matters. And you can see this playing out in this situation.
[00:34:40] And there's not just this, but plenty of other examples in our culture as well.
[00:34:45] So it's important to keep that in mind. Just to finish with, when you read about things like this, look a bit deeper. These are not just events or incidents that have happened. What you are seeing here is both a grand arc of history, something much bigger and bigger forces, cultural currents, ideologies and philosophies out working themselves at a practical level.
[00:35:05] And what that means is that metaphysics, they are always at play.
[00:35:11] This is the thing that the myth of progress robbed us of. It told us that we would not only seek our salvation in the natural material world, but it told us to put our hope there and to look only there.
[00:35:21] And sure, people, if they want to, they can focus on that otherworldly faith stuff, but that's just a private matter.
[00:35:28] And what's happened is we've forgotten reality. We are now looking through far too narrow a lens, and we are diminished as a result.
[00:35:36] We look only at material causes. We look only for material answers. We look only to the sciences.
[00:35:44] We're missing the full spectrum of truth. We. We are missing the full spectrum of the human experience as a result. And we are in a state of grave crisis as a direct result of this reductionist and destructively reductionist view of the human person and reality and the movement of human history itself. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the Dispatches.
