So in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the ensuing protests and riots,

and with all the craziness that happened afterwards, including the destruction of statues,

I wanted to take a little bit of time before I gave you some of my analyses on the situation.

I'm going to separate this into a few videos. I'm going to talk about the toppling of statues.

I will probably put out a patron video about the watching of feet, but for this first

video I want to look at the narrative, how it played out, how it connects very much to

symbolic patterns, to our religious impulse, to things like human sacrifice

and catharsis, all of these patterns that we find in human behavior and religion and in narrative.

And so hopefully we can navigate through that and do it in a way which will not be polarizing,

but will help us understand how things are playing out in terms of storytelling.

This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.

So in order to understand what is happening in terms of the protests, we of course cannot separate it from the coronavirus pandemic and the narrative which surrounds this pandemic,

the way that it has separated society, the way that, especially in North America, there has been some

polarizing discussion.

Much of the problem of the pandemic, of its how serious it was, how bold we can be facing

it, became politicized very fast.

And so it was difficult to navigate through the facts and through the scientific

analyses without giving in to narrative. It was almost impossible. I would say that I have not heard

anybody who has succeeded because although science can tell you facts, how many people are dying,

how many people are sick, how many hospital beds there are, the science cannot tell you facts how many people are dying, how many people are sick, how many

hospital beds there are. The science cannot tell you what is acceptable, cannot tell you how many

people should die, cannot tell you, cannot help you weigh between the death of innocence

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