Ministry of Man

The Four Cardinal Virtues | Ep.10

• Isaac Anthony Turner • Season 1 • Episode 10

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We move from a quiet Christmas reflection and a parable about Christ to a hard look at a Sydney tragedy and the man who stopped a gunman. The throughline is simple and sharp: real manhood is virtue in motion when lives are on the line.

• somber Christmas mood and loneliness in public spaces
• the Man and the Birds parable and its meaning
• Australia’s shock after the massacre
• honouring Ahmed Al‑Ahmed’s decisive bravery
• the four cardinal virtues defined and applied
• prudence as tactical wisdom, not cunning
• justice as moral balance beyond titles
• courage between cowardice and rashness
• temperance as voluntary restraint
• the role of strength as implied by every virtue
• a call for men to be formed

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Welcome to episode 10 of Ministry of Man. And we have a doozy. I'm your host, Isaac Anthony Turner. And when I was in high school, I told everyone that my middle name was Goliath, and a lot of people believed it. And all I had to say to convince them was that, yeah, it's from the Bible. And then they stopped asking questions after that. They go, No, it's not. Your middle name's not Goliath. No way. And I go, yeah, it's from the Bible. And they go, Oh, okay. Oh, wow. Jeez, that's crazy middle name. And I um and I was tricking them all. But I was thinking of something this week. I've been getting like I've been getting really excited to read books lately. And I like my background is that I was not very good academically as a student. And I did not like to read. And I I wasn't very good linguistically either. So I was in like a special spelling class when I was in primary school because I was underdeveloped, one might say. And and now I'm excited, like in my if I have spare time, I get excited to read books. And I don't know, does that make me gay? Is that gay to be excited to read books? I'm gonna have to check with the boys. Siri, set a reminder, check with the boys that to ask if being excited to read books makes you gay. Okay. Um all fine, I'll figure that out later. But leaps and bounds, one might say, because I love to read now. It's a lot of fun. And um anyway, so it's almost Christmas. Can you believe another year down the drain, bro? No, obviously not down the drain. Um another year done, basically. But you know what? It is it's actually the most wonderful time of the year. People are putting up lights, people are walking. You know what is actually kind of oh, I had such a sad moment the other day. I'm walking through a shopping center, and there was this really somber Christmas song on. It was something like, um, what was it? Have yourself a merry little Christmas. You know that one? Uh, and I'm like, oh, that's such a beautiful song. But it was kind of it's kind of like slow. And I'm walking through, and I'm just looking around, and I saw so many people just sitting alone, and I'm like, oh, dude. And then like, but they were all just on their phones. I would have seen, and like all at different tables, I would have seen like eight or nine people in the space of 30 seconds just sitting alone at these tables, just on their phones, man. Where it's like, it was kind of dystopian in a sense. It's like, dude, it's the most wonderful time of the year, and then like everyone's alone. I was like, dude, that's like, yeah, that's a sad moment. But um, but I love Christmas, and I'm happy that it's nearly here. And in the spirit of Christmas, I want to tell a story. Because I, my last episode was about stories, and I love stories, dude. And I want to tell more stories, and if I can, I might even tell a new story every week. I don't know yet. We'll figure it out. I'll maybe get some feedback, or I'll just ask the good Lord, Lord, do you want me to tell stories every week? And if he says yes, then I'll tell stories every week, and if he says no, then I'll like maybe I pretend that I didn't hear that and just do the stories anyway. Um okay, so this story is called The Man and the Birds. So this particular man that this story is about, he wasn't a Scrooge, he wasn't a bad man, he was a decent, kind, and mostly good man. He was generous to his family and upright with his dealings with other men. He was good by most senses in what one might consider to be a good man, but he just didn't believe in all of the incarnation stuff that was spoken about by the churches at Christmas. He just couldn't wrap his head around the idea of God coming down to earth as a man. And he didn't want to pretend anymore that he did. He didn't just want to go along to the church services and just sit in the pews and go along with this thing that he felt wasn't true or that he just didn't believe. And he told his wife, he said, I'm I'm truly sorry, but I just can't go to church with you this Christmas Eve. I just I would feel too much like a hypocrite if I were to go. And he he said he would much rather just stay home. He said, I'll wait for you. They're going to do the midnight service, and I'm happy to wait until you guys get home. But for now, I think it's best that I stay here and you guys go. And so shortly after, the family drove away in their car and the snow began to fall. Now, he went to the windows and he saw that the snow and the wind was starting to get a little bit heavier and a little bit heavier, and then he decided to have a seat next to the fire and read the newspaper. All of a sudden, he just starts hearing a thud. Then he hears another thud, and then another thud. And at first he thought someone was like throwing snowballs at his landscape window that was covering the lounge. And so he walked over to investigate, and what he saw was that there was birds that were running into the window. And that had that was what had been making the thudding sounds. See, what had happened is they'd been caught in the storm that was brewing. And they were trying to find somewhere safe to go. And he thought, okay, well, I need to do something about this. It's freezing cold out there. I know that we have a barn that the children have their ponies in. I'm going to go out and I'm going to open the barn. I'm going to let these birds fly in so they can have that shelter. And so he grabs his coat and he grabs his boots and he puts them on. He trudges out into the snow, into the storm, and he opens up the barn and he turns the light on. He's like, this is going to provide some warmth for them. He turns on the light in the barn and he waits for the birds to come in, but they don't come in. They're still just flocking and flying around outside. He thought, well, okay, they're not going in. Maybe I can get some food to entice them to come in. So he goes into the house and he comes back out with some breadcrumbs and he starts leading them in with breadcrumbs. He's laying a trail of these breadcrumbs into the barn, but they don't follow. They don't see the breadcrumbs. They ignore the breadcrumbs and they keep doing whatever they're doing and they're flying around still. So he tried catching them, but to no avail. He tried to shoe them in. Then they they were just afraid of him. And he wasn't able to do anything. Anything that he tried, he he wasn't able to get them to go into the barn where the light and the warmth was. And he realized that these birds were actually afraid of him. They were afraid of him. And he realized, he's like, to them, I'm this strange creature. Like I must be terrifying to them. If only there was a way that I could let them know, if I could somehow get them to trust me and let them know that I'm not trying to hurt them, but I'm trying to help them. But how? He said, how can I do this? Any any move that he made either frightened them or confused them, and they just wouldn't follow. They just wouldn't follow him. They wouldn't be led, they wouldn't be shooed. They feared him. And he thought to himself, if only if I was a bird and I could mingle with them and tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them. I could show them the way and the way to be safe into the warm barn. But I would have to be one of them. Wouldn't I? So they could see and hear and understand. At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sound of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells, feeling the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow. Dude, I love that story, man. If that doesn't get you going, and then I don't know. But I'm gonna keep telling more stories like that because that's a beautiful story. It's one of my favorite stories. Um okay. Anyway, so in Australia, we just had, or probably like we there was a uh a shooting, there was a massacre, and it was a devastating tragedy, and it kind of shook the well, it went worldwide news, obviously, but it shook the nation like pretty dramatically because we haven't really had that. Like there was the Port Arthur shooting that everyone knew about many, many years ago, but they outlawed guns, and so anytime there has been a shooting, it might just be like a person gets shot. We've had some tragic things happen over the years, but this is definitely like on a scale that people are not familiar with or used to uh by any stretch of the imagination. So I do want to talk about some things because in the the great tragedy that it was, there was a man that stuck out as being he's being hailed as a hero because he is, he's a hero. He exhibited traits that not many people would actually have today, I don't think. And definitely not in Australia. I think Australians, for the most part, a large majority, if you compare to other countries around the world, Australians seem to be somewhat apathetic towards really doing much. Like we're kind of a bit of a pushover. Australians have this have delusions of thinking that they're so strong and tough, and they really only are when they drink and get drunk. And then, but when it comes to genuine problems, like real-world things that are coming that are that putting your life on the line, kind of thing, or just putting in effort to maybe push back against tyranny, like during the whole COVID thing, Australians just crumbled, like like there were so many people that were adamant that, like, yeah, I'm not getting a shot. And then they go, Well, you can't go to the pub, and they go, Oh, well, I guess if I I'll get one there now, though. If I can't, you didn't say that, like I was gonna say no to the machine, and then but then they said, Oh, I can't go to a restaurant uh for a few months. So, yeah, juice me up, baby. Pathetic, dude. Honestly, like, no respect at all. Like for that, for the people that that cave for that reason, just the the amount of respect that I have for like those people is just literally none at all. Um like because I know people that are like supporting a family and they held out for as long as they could, they were gonna lose their job, and they had like a wife and children relying on that particular income. And so that's a little bit different to oh, I suppose, you know, it's it's in I'm slightly inconvenienced, so I'm just going to throw my convictions away. Like there was definitely levels to it, but anyway. So I what okay, so I'm gonna break down a few things. There's a few things that I want to point out. This guy was a hero. His name is Ahmed Al-Ahmed, I think I'm saying that right. And I think I think he exhibited what it really means to be a man in the sense of the the ideological man. When someone might say something like, be a man, this is the kind of behavior that they're trying to encourage when they say be a man. James Isaac Vance talks about in a book called Royal Manhood. He says we don't need more lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, pastors, politicians. We need more men. That's what we need. Obviously, there's important jobs and things to have, but he's saying we need men in the sense that like our identity can't be in these titles that at the end of the day, when real tragedy strikes, what is the make of the man in the in those moments where you don't have the title to rely on? There was an epitaph of a Frenchman mourning a wasted life, and all it said on his gravestone was, born a man, died a grosser. And he was he was lamenting over the fact. He was lamenting over the fact that he didn't live up to the potential of the life that he could have lived. He spent too much time just working, and his identity was just in his vocation or in his job. And there are levels to becoming a man. And so I think that this hero of Sydney, this Ahmad Al-Ahmad, he wasn't just a fruit shop owner, as his job title was. He was a man. And so I want to go through the the clip when you watch the clip and break down how he exhibited the four cardinal virtues. So the the four cardinal virtues. So cardinal just means of great importance or fundamental. And these virtues have been spoken about in ancient history for thousands of years. So Plato wrote about them in his book Republic. Aristotle wrote about it in Nicomachian Ethics. They've been listed in Judero-canonical books or apocryphal scriptures, depending on who you're talking to. So uh I'll go through them. So the four virtues is prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. So prudence is just translated now, probably better as like a practical wisdom. So it's a it's like a uh rational choice to make decisions in the moment, almost what what to say and what not to say at the right times, or what to do and what not to do at specific times. Justice is obviously your sense of fairness, like what is just, what is right, being in right standing. Courage is obviously behavior, wise behavior in the face of danger, and temperance is similar to self-control. So some of the old scriptures that talk about this. So, so in the wisdom of Solomon, this is a book that is not in the Bible, but I'll just read it first and then I'll explain why it's not in the Bible. So it just says, If anyone loves righteousness, her labors are virtues, for she teaches self-control and prudence, justice and courage. Nothing in life is more profitable for mortals than these. So then in 4 Maccabees, it's uh 1 verse 18 to 19, it says, Now the kinds of wisdom are rational judgment, so that's prudence, justice, courage, and self-control. Rational judgment is supreme over all of these, since by means of it reason rules over the emotions. It's basically saying prudence is kind of like it's prioritizing prudence uh in in this regard. So just before when I said this, so you might hear, so if I can explain this, you might hear people say sometimes there's been certain books that have been removed from the Bible. So it's partly true in one sense. So there is a list of books, I think there's about 16 of these books, perhaps, somewhere in the in that range, that are considered the Apocrypha. And in Catholicism and Orthodox faith, or in like Eastern Orthodox churches, they actually have these books still in their Bibles and they call them the Judero-canonical books. And the reason that they have them is that the early church used these books. So when you go back and you look at the early church fathers, they read from these books and they use these books. The reason that Protestant Christians took them out of the Bible is basically they what happened during the Reformation is that they looked at uh where the church had kind of gone and they go, they go, okay, we want to go back even further than that. So what was the book that Jesus was reading? So, what were the Jews of the day reading at the time? And they weren't so the Hebrew originals didn't use those books, they were added in after. So this is why Judaism doesn't have these apocryphal books. So you can either call them Judero-canonical books or apocryphal books, and they're basically talking about the same thing. It's just that Catholics and Orthodox consider them to be canon, and uh Protestants and Judaism doesn't. I know, at least with Protestants, it's not seen as being inspired scripture, but it's not necessarily looked at as being wrong as well, or being untrue. It may, it's not, it's not claiming that it's untrue by being an apocryphal scripture, it's just claiming that it's not the inspired word of God, like God-breathed scripture, if that makes sense. Yes. So looking at these things, so we're gonna look at the first one of the four cardinal virtues. The first one being prudence. So this is practical wisdom. Now, this is seen as being like the mother of all virtues. So as it's said in that in four Maccabees, it says, now the kinds of wisdom are rational judgment, justice, courage, and self-control. Rational judgment is supreme over all these, since by means of it, reason rules over the emotions. So it really does hail prudence being kind of at the start. So whenever you read the lists, prudence always starts the list. And typically in ancient scriptures or ancient texts, at least as far as the Bible is considered, the highest valued thing in a list is seeing is always put at the start. For example, the fruit of the spirit that it talks about in Galatians in the Bible, it starts with love, like love being the first one. This is the most important one. So it does that quite a lot when it's trying to get a point across. There's there's not it's not an arbitrary list of things. They put effort into what order they mention things. It's also why they would would typically put sexual immorality as being one of the worst things because they're trying to put an emphasis on it. So a lot of lists of these things are sin or. If you do these things, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. A lot of the time it will start with sexual immorality, which is interesting. So, anyway, going back to prudence. So, Epicurus says, prudence is the foundation of all things and is the greatest good. Thus, it is more valuable than philosophy and is the source of every other excellence. So Epicurus really had a high regard for prudence as well. The reason that this is, I think that it's so important is because if you don't have practical wisdom, what's the point of having anything at all? So if you don't know how to implement, say if you have a wealth of knowledge, you just know everything, but you you don't know when to say it, it's kind of pointless to have it. You would you could come across being very foolish if you aren't wise and prudent in your speech or in your actions. Let's say someone is grieving and you have the knowledge to know that, well, humor would cheer someone up. And so you try to make a joke to cheer them up, but you haven't really read the room and it's too soon, they're not in the mood to laugh. Maybe this maybe something tragic happened that day, and you the the wise thing might be to mourn with them, to mourn alongside them and to just accompany them. So uh you might, let's say, be really, really strong and have even courage, as I'll go through courage in a moment. But if you don't have the wisdom to know when to implement, let's say your strength, let's say you're a strong person. If you don't have the practical knowledge or the practical wisdom, the prudence to know when to use your strength, then it just could be wasted strength. It might go to complete waste. You've just put this effort in for nothing. So it is imperative to have, to make sure that you are able to be wise in practice, not just in being able to identify things or have have some wise thoughts. It's practical. Like when you act out your behaviors, is that the right thing to do in the right moment? Now, one thing that we could see in the video, in the clip of this guy, was that he was using prudence perfectly. So you can see him in the video. He's crouching at the beginning and he's hiding behind a car, and he starts to sneak up and he gets a look. And he's also on a particular side where the angle, the guy is um, his body is turned away from the angle that Ahmed is coming in on. So he wouldn't even be able to see him in his peripheral vision because his body is is turned. So he's coming over this side of the over the back of his shoulder. When he does that, he sneaks up on him, he grabs his neck and pulls his head back and grabs the gun with his other hand. So he's grabs the gun, he's pointing it away, and he grabs his neck and pulls him as he's like tries to wrestle and fights, uh fights this guy off and grabs the gun. So as far as being wise in that moment, like he was tactical in his approach. So he was he didn't just run head onto the guy, he didn't just try and charge him with brute force. He didn't just, let's say, go straight for the gun itself and give the other guy a chance to fight him off or something. He kind of was able to incapacitate the guy while also grabbing and pointing the weapon down. It's pretty crazy the way that he did it. Uh so I thought that his ability to be prudent and wise in that moment was the best showcase of using practical wisdom. There is a distinction between prudence and cunning. Because you can, let's say, be tactical in a certain approach, but it be almost dishonorable in a sense. So it's prudence as opposed to cunning, it's it's the use by reasonable means. There is honor in what you're doing still. So it might be wise, let's say, to learn how to be a good communicator in the hopes of maybe convincing someone of your ideas or giving yourself the best chance for your ideas to be received well. As opposed to cunning, which might just be straight up lying to someone to for the same reason of trying to give yourself the best chance of this person believing what you're saying or receiving what you're saying, they might exaggerate something or throw in a few little lies here and there. That's deceptive and that's cunning, and there's no that's not an honorable approach. So um, there is obviously a time and place for you need to look at what is the highest value in this sense of what this man was doing, because you had the the highest value in that moment is to preserve life. So let's say, for example, if he was to tell a lie in order that this person stops shooting civilians and children, then that would also be fine. It's it's also, I suppose, wisdom in knowing if and when to ever do that, if if it was ever necessary. So that's what is the difference between prudence being a virtue and cunning being unmaybe unvirtuous. Matthew 10, 16 says, Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. So the it's interesting because the serpent is very patient. The way that a serpent might hunt is that they are they are tactical, they're quiet, they hide, they wait, they're very patient in in what they do, and they they uh they meditate their uh attack, I suppose. And in the Bible, when it says the word wise, it's saying the word prudent there. It's saying to be thoughtful or sensible in the in the sense of having good sense. Like, are you s are you having good discretion in the moment? Senses in like I'm sensing what's happening right now, right? Like sensible in I can think through this immediately. Okay. The second one is uh justice. So obviously, this guy uh had a sense of justice because that you need a sense of justice to be able to act to begin with. Because the guy acted, we know that he exhibited that he has a good sense of justice. What he saw was something unfair happening and it needed to stop. And so that was his idea of or his knowing that this is a wrong thing happening, is that he knew that there was an injustice taking place. So typically, justice is just described as what is fitting for, let's say, you know, the punishment fits the crime kind of thing. If someone does good work, they get good compensation. If someone does bad work, they get bad compensation. It's kind of the idea behind it, pretty self-explanatory. It's so justice is found mostly between selfishness and selflessness. So it's it's inside the parameters of having more and having less. Injustice is just outside of what is morally right or fair. So Proverbs speaks of this in a number of different Proverbs in the Bible. It says, but this one particular one, Proverbs 11:1 says, a false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight. So obviously, a false balance is talking about an unequal weight, like so balance in terms of a scale. So like the scaling things, what is just, like a just weight, is the Lord's delight. So the sense of justice is, and specifically moral justice is a great virtue, and I and why it's listed is one of the four, because it's one of the highest states of having any kind of ethical framework in a looking at a moral sense outside of anything else. It's your internal sense of justice. So when I spoke in there's a previous episode, I spoke about Kohlberg's six stages of moral development, and moral justice is actually linked with the sixth stage. So the highest form of your sense of morality is bound with a sense of moral justice, understanding okay, what is right, even like with or without the law of what it says. Okay. Next one is courage. Courage is good, man. Like obviously, this guy was courageous. He's running up to a gunman with another gunman in sight as well. Like, he's it he's within range of this other gunman as well. But he's putting his life at risk. So there isn't anything more courageous than that. And what I love is this is it's one of the most like it's universally idolized or universally loved by people. They they all around the world in every culture, courage has just seemed seemed to be such a high-ranking virtue that people really respect. The Bible in in 1 Corinthians 16 13, it says, be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. When it says act like men, if you look up in the Greek writing, it pretty much just translates to being courageous, to be brave. That's what it's saying. There's a professor who's studied psychological courage named Daniel Putman. He says, courage involves deliberate choice in the face of painful or fearful circumstances for the sake of a worthy goal. That's exactly what was being exhibited. A deliberate choice in the face of painful or fearful circumstances. So you're what you're faced with, you can't, it's not courageous if there's no fear or potential pain involved in the process. It's not, being courageous isn't just not being afraid of things. It's being afraid of something, it's it's being afraid of something and then just doing it anyway. If you aren't faced with fear, danger, or pain, then it's just simply not courage. So, for example, it doesn't take any courage for me to drive my car, even though there's a certain risk involved in doing it because car crashes happen all the time. But it did take a certain amount of courage to jump out of a plane when I went skydiving because I was afraid of heights. So there was fear invoked, but the I suppose the courageous element is when you decide I'm not going to allow the fear to stop me from doing this thing. I mean, it's probably less courageous when there's nothing really on the line. So skydiving is obviously like something to do for entertainment, not necessarily to save a life or something, but it's still good to practice as any kind of human, if you want to become better equipped at pushing past the fear, it's good to do that in control areas if you can, to practice when you're faced with that feeling of fear, to not let it drown you or to not let it stop you. You're able to feel that feeling because you don't get to feel that often. Like most days, I'm not, I don't have fear. So it's really helpful to simulate it and so you can know what it's like to feel the fear and then make a decision to go through and do the thing anyway. So that's one thing. So courage is is found as well. This is an important distinction to make. Aristotle talks about something called the golden mean, which is virtue is found in the middle of the extremities of each side of whatever the virtue might be. So in in let's say um honesty is somewhere in between lying and maybe oversharing. Uh let's say generosity might be in between stinginess and profligacy. Uh, you might have love is somewhere in between selfishness and enablement. So when it comes to courage, that's found in between cowardice and rashness. Because if you have so much courage, let's say, that you just are completely rash and you're just running in with all this courage, it's kind of it's not really the virtue that's being spoken about in the cardinal virtues. It's really not even respected at all as being a virtue. If you're just rash, that's not like a good, that's not a virtue at all. So someone could have seen, just been filled with so much courage and go, I'm gonna break through this fear and I'm gonna run head on to this gunman who's like 50 meters away and I'm just running in a straight line, you're getting like that's not gonna go good. You're gonna that's not gonna achieve anything. Like you're just gonna get gunned down. So it's not just blind stupidity or carelessness. You also have to know your capabilities, by the way. If you know that you are not capable of doing anything with that courage, it's still not really courage. So it's it that's still seen as being rash. So for me, for example, if I was like, okay, I'm going to stop these 20 bodybuilders from picking on someone, and I go and pick a fight with them, like I'm just going to get destroyed. But it's like there's no scenario where I'm going to win a fight against 20 people. Like, if it's 20 fully grown men, I'm just not gonna, this is not gonna be a victory. So that's stupidity, that's not courage. There's also to clarify as well, and to just sort of make sure that the virtue is being shown in the right light. Fear isn't a vice, or fear isn't an iniquity, it's not a negative thing necessarily. You need to know how to, it's just you just need to know how to read the sign correctly and in what your body is telling you where what this fear is, why this fear is being simulated, and if it's appropriate fear. So you might have fear of going on a roller coaster, you might have fear of asking someone out on a date, you might have fear of these days making a phone call for some reason. So these things are not worthy fear to acknowledge. You can't go, oh, well, I've got this fear, and so I'm not going to like, so fear is there to signal to you something is unsafe so that you don't do the unsafe thing. That's the purpose of fear, is like, okay, my I'm getting fearful, I should back away from this thing. It's like a protective mechanism. But when it's misplaced, so let's say fear of making a phone call, then you know, okay, I need to implement some courage, as hard as that can be for some people, and just make the phone call. So you push past it. Um, because you do have the capabilities to be able to call someone. It's not like you, yeah, nothing bad is gonna happen. Oh, okay. So anyway, this guy was very courageous. Next one temperance. Now, this is a really cool one because obviously, like when you saw the guy, after he disarmed the guy, he pointed the gun at him, but he didn't shoot. Now, I've had conversations about this, whether or not that's a good thing. So, in this particular instance, he didn't shoot. Some people say he should have, some people say he shouldn't have. We don't know what the guy was going to do. Maybe in hindsight, he might have, you know, incapacitated the person. He maybe didn't need to shoot, but he maybe could have prevented him from getting away. Needless to say, what he did without knowing the circumstances of what was going to take place after that, he showed temperance. He showed moderation, he showed voluntary restraint. That's what temperance is. It's voluntary restraint. I mean, it's yeah, it's primarily related to restraint, restraining from going too far, maybe, or to let particular impulses take over, maybe. So another thing to point out as well that that maybe have might have been more of a prudent act was that he put the gun down. He didn't have it for too long. In case maybe he was mistaken for being one of the shooters himself, he put the gun down and kind of was no longer having that. So yeah, so in there's a there's a Bible verse that says in in 2 Peter 2, verse 19 says, for whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. So in this instance, if if something overcomes you and you're not able to restrain yourself, you're not only a slave, as the Bible would suggest, you're also just not exhibiting the virtue of temperance. So your your ability to be able to restrain from being overcome or going too far is where temperance lies, is where the virtue is. So self-control is actually listed as one of the fruits of the spirit in Galatians, in Galatians 6. It also Proverbs 25, 28 says, A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls. So I love that proverb, man. It is just like self-control is your defense. Like left without walls, if you don't have self-control, you're essentially defenseless. Like you can go any which way, you can be dragged anywhere, you can just be overcome by anything. Like self-control is such a valuable virtue, dude. I love these virtues. If you're a if you're a guy, look into these four virtues because these are virtues that would change your life for the best. And it's the type of thing that we need in a culture. Like, imagine if we had a culture that taught men these virtues, not even to mention there's three theological virtues, which is faith, hope, and love. I'll maybe go into that another day. But just a society or a culture that raised men up, or just men and women, to have these virtues embedded into the society, into the structure of society, having prudence, justice, courage, and whatever the last one is, temperance in the society that that like the make of the men in that society. Would just be such a better place to live. Like, uh now, also within all of this, one thing that's not mentioned in any of this is strength. But strength is implied almost in and in any of these virtues. There is an element of strength that you need to have in order to act out some of these virtues. So let's say your courage, for example, is useless if you didn't have strength. So this man was able to fight off this guy. So after he, if this guy that had this courage and the sense of justice and the temperance and the prudence, all of this stuff, he sneaks up and he gets the drop on the guy. And but he's this like weak, scrawny little soy boy. He's not gonna do anything. Like you can have as much courage in in the world, but when you go and you grab the person to actually know, hey, am I gonna be able to overpower this guy to get the gun? So it's implied in that sense. Voluntary restraint as well, it's also implied that you have something to restrain, that you are capable of even restraining yourself. There needs to be something to be restrained. It's not temperance or self-control if you aren't capable of behaving in any other way. So if you don't have it within you to be able to, let's say, pull the trigger, then you're not exhibiting temperance. That's just regular fear or regular cowardice, perhaps. Maybe. Nietzsche says, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought of themselves good because they have no claws. It's a lot of what Jordan Peterson used to talk about in regards to meekness and knowing how to use your sword, but having it sheathed anyway. Not having the ability to be dangerous or to inflict harm doesn't make you good. That just makes you weak. So that is the idea, anyway. So it is this sense of yeah, having strength is kind of it's it's an implication that in order to have these four virtues or be able to act on these four virtues, there is a sense of strength that needs to be had to begin with. So that is why I love these virtues. So this man was a hero, and he had a sense of justice, he had a sense of wrongdoing, he saw something wrong happening, and he had the sense to bring upon justice. He had wisdom as he planned his attack in vital points and placed the gun down. He had courage to put himself in harm's way when he was faced with incredible danger. And he did it alone. He did it alone. He he did it with great risk involved. He had temperance and restraint to not use excessive force when the guy was then disarmed. And I think, I think every man alive should watch and learn from that guy. He was not a good-looking, you know, objectively good-looking man. He was, you know, kind of overweight, balding guy in his 40s. It doesn't matter. No amount of looks maxing, or no amount of money, or financial success, or no amount of fame or fortune, no matter what it is, you don't need any of that. And it's it's vanity. It is a waste of time if you aren't able to do what that man did when when you're needed to. If you live in a society where people can just come in and just unload their and and just start slaughtering innocent people, and we have a country full of cowards, what do you think is gonna happen? So shout out to that man because he saved lives that day. He saved lives. So I think if you want homework to do, look into the cardinal virtues because they're amazing. So I'll end it there. And just remember this it's all trash and garbage except for three things Christ is King, Jesus loves you, and he's coming back soon. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.