Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a world-renowned clinical psychologist, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, and online educator known for his influential lectures on religious belief, narrative mythology, and personality analysis. In 2016, Jordan s public criticism of Canada s Bill C-16 catapulted him into the limelight, but his academic expertise and talent for storytelling have made Dr. Peterson one of the world s most popular sources of moral guidance and self-improvement. From his best-selling books like 12 Rules for Life to his online programs and live lectures, Dr. Petersen has helped millions of people achieve their greatest potential. In his latest series, Foundations of the West, Jordan travels to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome to uncover the ancient roots of Western civilization. In today s episode, Jordan shares a few behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the series filming, his personal religious journey, and his observations on the biblical themes of risk and sacrifice. It s always a pleasure and privilege to talk with Jordan. I can t recommend enough his newest series, FOUNDATIONS OF THE WEST, available right now at Daily Wire+. Stay tuned for more episodes on this episode of the Sunday Special on The Daily Wire! Subscribe to The Sunday Special and subscribe to Sunday Special wherever else you get your news and information. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on PODCASTS Subscribe on Podchaser Subscribe on Itunes Learn more about your ad choices Subscribe on Acast Become a supporter of the show? Leave Us a Review on iTunes Learn More about the Podcasts That Will Reach You On The Same Audible And Subscribe On Social Media v=Apostle_co Subscribe To The Vinement Learn More About Itunes And More Like This And More On This Podcasts On The Podcasts And This And Other Places That Will Help Me Reach You Outcast Themselves On This And Others On This Is A Podcast On A Podcast Thank You And More On This Will Be A Good Place Thanks To Be A Friend And A Friend On This Story On This Same Story On A Plant And A Podcast And A Thank You And A Feline And A Recorded Recorded In A Podcast Outline Also A Good One On This Track On A Track And A Pepepepee And A Text To A Buffee On This Or A Bepee On A Burden And A Story And A Few Others
00:00:26.000They might think they can get away with it.
00:00:28.000They might use it for manipulative purposes.
00:00:31.000But no one thinks that the path to paradise is paved with lies.
00:00:37.000If you believe that, it would destroy you, if you truly believed it.
00:00:40.000Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a world-renowned clinical psychologist, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, and online educator known for his influential lectures on religious belief, narrative mythology, and personality analysis.
00:00:52.000In 2016, Jordan's public criticism of Canada's Bill C-16 catapulted him into the limelight, but his academic expertise and talent for storytelling have made Dr. Peterson one of the world's most popular sources of moral guidance and self-improvement.
00:01:04.000From his best-selling books like 12 Rules for Life to his online programs and live lectures, Dr. Peterson has helped millions of people Notwithstanding those tremendous accomplishments, Canadian courts are currently in pursuit of Dr. Peterson's medical license, mandating he undergo social media training to be able to continue to practice, a truly Orwellian intervention in violation of free speech.
00:01:24.000Jordan's partnership with us here at The Daily Wire was a natural extension of his outspokenness on subjects like gender, personal responsibility, political correctness, and academic freedom.
00:01:33.000In his latest series, Foundations of the West, Jordan travels to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome to uncover the ancient roots of Western civilization.
00:01:39.000I was glad to join Jordan in the first part of the series where we traverse the hills of Jerusalem and discuss the sacred stories at the heart of the West's early flourishing.
00:01:46.000In today's episode, Jordan shares a few behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the series filming, his personal religious journey, and his observations on the biblical themes of risk and sacrifice.
00:01:55.000It's always a pleasure and privilege to talk with Jordan.
00:01:57.000I can't recommend enough his latest series, Foundations of the West, available right now at Daily Wire+.
00:02:59.000It was really exciting and interesting and somewhat terrifying to go up to the Al-Aqsa site.
00:03:07.000The Temple Mount, that was weird in 15 different dimensions, not least because we were under the watchful gaze of the religious hypocrites and totalitarians, which is always extraordinarily pleasant.
00:03:24.000The dinners we had in those beautiful locations, those were, and we filmed them.
00:03:29.000Of course, that's up on The Daily Wire now.
00:03:31.000The episode you and I did in Jerusalem.
00:03:33.000Going down into the archaeological digs to see the palace of King David, to walk the pathway from the Pool of Siloam upward towards Temple Mount, the same pathway Christ walked on.
00:03:45.000That was, you know, insanely interesting.
00:03:50.000Then with Paggio, we walked the stations of the cross and ended up in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was Also crazily interesting and enlightening and then I was in St.
00:04:06.000Peter's with Bishop Barron and so that's a pretty good deal and walked around the Acropolis with Spencer Claven and I think the editing team did a lovely job of putting things together.
00:04:20.000I mean, it's just a beautiful series, and it is just a reminder that, you know, we in the West, we're sort of removed from history in the sense that all of the vicissitudes of history, we've been shielded from those really since the end of World War II.
00:04:33.000And so, our sense of place and our sense of time has been warped by that.
00:04:37.000I mean, many people who are my age don't even remember the Cold War.
00:04:40.000And so, the idea of serious hardship, or the passage of people through time, or standing on the shoulders of history.
00:04:51.000That when you're walking streets that are 3,000 years old, and when you're uncovering sites that are going back, you know, A thousand years before the birth of Christ.
00:05:00.000And then when you're walking through Athens or Rome and you're discovering the deep roots of your civilization, it is something I think that's going to be new for a lot of people who tend to think of the West as a new place, when in reality the West is a very, very old place.
00:05:12.000And I think that the fact that so many people in the West don't even know about their own roots is really kind of shocking.
00:05:18.000And that only becomes clear to you when you actually walk the sites and you're standing next to stones that were piled atop those other stones several thousand years ago.
00:05:25.000Yeah, well I think also I'm hoping that we did a good job of...
00:05:29.000Juxtaposing the beauty of those sites and the spectacular depth that's uncovered, say, in the archaeological digs with some conversation about the significance of the axis between Athens and Jerusalem and Rome and its determinative effect on Western civilization.
00:05:50.000I'm kind of hoping that we got more deeply into that philosophically and intellectually than Would be the case with the typical documentary.
00:05:58.000I mean, we tried to do that because our conversations were unscripted.
00:06:03.000You know, it's been interesting doing these documentaries and the series with The Daily Wire because our documentaries really are unscripted.
00:06:10.000And so it's quite a testament to the skill of the editing team and also to all of the technicians who are recording audio and video that we can walk around like that have those spontaneous conversations have them recorded on audio and video and then edited into something that well I think it looks very it doesn't look very professional it is very professional and impactful so I was very pleased with it and it was an incredibly interesting
00:06:42.000opportunity and a privilege to be able to undertake it.
00:06:44.000And I would also like to say that, you know, I've been very impressed with the Daily Wire's entrepreneurial daring.
00:06:51.000You know, I make these proposals, like the Foundations of the West proposal, or the Exodus seminar, or the seminar that we recently did on the Gospels, which is coming out relatively soon, too.
00:07:02.000And the answer from the Daily Wire people is always yes.
00:07:06.000Which is really quite something, because it's not inexpensive, and it's very high risk, especially because it's not scripted.
00:07:13.000And so, anyways, what did you think of it?
00:07:15.000We had a great time in Jerusalem, you and I.
00:07:20.000So again, this series, for folks who haven't seen it, is Foundations of the West, and we're bringing out a piece of new content with you literally every week for the rest of the year.
00:07:26.000I mean, that's how much content we've made with you and banked with you, and it really is all fascinating and spectacular stuff.
00:07:32.000Some of the backstory for people who may not have seen the episode or stuff that didn't necessarily make it to film, when you and I are sitting up atop City of David, which is right over a very controversial area in East Jerusalem called Silwan, which is, you know, there are a lot of Yeah.
00:07:48.000connections and so on. And there was a point during dinner where there was a person in
00:07:52.000a nearby house who was actually shining a laser pointer at us, I remember, during that
00:07:56.000dinner and had figured out sort of what was going on. And there was a fair bit of tension
00:08:02.000during the filming of those episodes. And I think that it's a reminder that, you know,
00:08:05.000all of these streams of history that are crossed and that go back thousands of years, they
00:08:09.000have very significant real world effects. And certainly in the episode that you and
00:08:14.000I filmed together in Jerusalem, you could feel that. I mean, you mentioned going up
00:08:17.000to the Temple Mount and obviously your wife was wearing a cross and she was told to put
00:08:21.000that away by the authorities on the Temple Mount because of all of the hatred and rage
00:08:27.000that emerges if people of one type pray there and that's not allowed and all of that sort
00:08:32.000of thing. That sort of stuff is very real for folks. And so I think it's a really fascinating
00:08:38.000combination of the ancient and the real world effects of that, which is, I think when you
00:08:43.000and I spend a lot of time discussing politics, not just philosophy or psychology. And the
00:08:48.000thing about politics is that politics is really just the very surface level of that. I was
00:08:53.000discussing this actually recently with Spencer Klaben. And one of the things that we were
00:08:57.000talking about was at the Democratic National Convention.
00:08:59.000They opened the Democratic National Convention with a land acknowledgement.
00:09:03.000And that just feels like kind of, at this point in American life, you know, whatever, it's like a throwaway thing that you do because you went to university or whatever.
00:09:10.000Like, that actually has deep philosophical roots, and to understand the deep philosophical roots of both the West and the people who oppose the West, you actually have to learn about it, investigate it, and in many cases go to these places.
00:09:21.000Well I'm really thrilled that we had the opportunity, well at a personal level, to actually just do it.
00:09:30.000And then also to bring it to this wide public audience and so that's extremely exciting and again my kudos to the editing team you guys have at The Daily Wire, I guess us, we have extremely Professional high quality editors and I really want to highlight the difficulty of editing because we shot a lot more footage than we used and it takes real discrimination and judgment to
00:09:59.000piece together a conversation, to edit it down to something approximating 50 minutes, to make that coherent, to keep the vitality alive during all of that, to give it a narrative arc, to select the proper images, and they did a bang-up job.
00:10:24.000I saw the trailer, and then I just watched our episode Two days ago, both the walk around that we did and our investigation underground into the archaeological digs, which are spectacular, but also the dinner we had, which I also thought worked out quite nicely.
00:10:40.000It was remarkably coherent 45 minutes of film, given that it was a spontaneous conversation.
00:10:50.000And so, you know, a lot of the credit there is obviously due to you.
00:10:53.000So, because you're such a remarkable conversationalist, but it was very gratifying to see that this is working.
00:11:00.000And, you know, it's also interesting this technique of doing it without a script, because, of course, one of the things that makes the kind of conversations we're having right now, and also the conversations that, say, Rogan and people like that conduct on YouTube so compelling to people, is that they're not subject to manipulative editing.
00:12:01.000Enough feelings for one day, but the facts are, if you're looking for amazing hires like Jake and our entire Daily Wire team, you need to go to ZipRecruiter, where its smart technology excels at finding top talent for all your roles fast.
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00:13:14.000It would have been nice to have you there.
00:13:17.000That obviously was extremely complicated.
00:13:20.000But I'm very curious to see what the editing team will have done with that, because one of the things I encouraged them to do was to take it up a notch from what we did with Exodus, and to intersperse more interviews with the people who participated and also to use more images and you know to give it a bit more of a documentary feel so I'm very curious to see how that turned out.
00:13:43.000It was a crazy week man because we were recording four hours a day and that's a lot and I was trying to was in the middle of my tour I was trying to juggle the conversations and to keep us on track through the gospel narrative and make sure that we were on time.
00:13:59.000And it was very demanding for everyone involved.
00:14:03.000We got we were on time with all the sessions and we got through the entire book and we didn't rush.
00:14:08.000And that's also a testament to Daily Wire, because one of the things that you guys did that was really useful was allow the time for the conversation to unfold In its necessary way.
00:14:22.000You know, we doubled the length of the Exodus seminar.
00:14:26.000And The Daily Wire went along with that immediately.
00:15:07.000And that's gonna be fascinating as well, especially because there's been so much speculation about your own religious worldview and your own religious journey and where you are in that.
00:15:15.000How much of you, in terms of your own personal religious journey, is in that book?
00:15:20.000Well, in some ways, it's saturated with that because what I'm doing is revealing my developing understanding of these stories.
00:15:29.000I've been studying foundational narratives for a very long time.
00:15:39.000By reading Freud, by reading Jung, by reading Mircea Eliade, by reading Eric Neumann, the same thing applies to Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religions.
00:15:48.000If the Academy, if the Western institutions of higher education would have taken the Neumann-Eliade-Jung approach to literary interpretation, we wouldn't be in the culture war we're in now.
00:16:02.000They were right, and they were right, they got it right, and I think we're actually going to reveal that with large language models eventually, because it's come to my attention that what the psychoanalysts were doing with their association work, free association in dream interpretation and narrative interpretation and amplification, is identical in the cognitive realm to what the large language models are doing with their mapping of the statistical regularity between concepts.
00:16:30.000You know, and so the best way to think, Freud thought about a symbol, say a sexual symbol, as a substitute for a deeper truth that was a consequence of repression, right?
00:16:42.000So repressed content would come out in symbolic form.
00:16:48.000That's almost true in the way that many of the things Freud said were almost true, and it was a useful error.
00:16:54.000But Jung took a completely different approach, and the best way to conceptualize that in modern terms is the way the large language models conceptualize it, is that any given concept is going to have a ring of associated concepts around it.
00:17:16.000would be statistically associated with concepts like night and swamp and cats and brooms and potions and that's part of the complex of ideas and The Jungian-influenced psychoanalysts were very good at delineating the nature of these complexes, and partly what I'm doing in the book, this new book, is exactly that.
00:17:41.000I'm showing the patterns of ideas that are encapsulated inside the story.
00:17:46.000So I walk through about 10 of the Old Testament Biblical Narratives.
00:17:50.000The next book will be on the Book of Job and the Passion, and it's mostly written already, but this one concentrates mostly on Old Testament stories, and that was really exciting because it, especially with the lecture tour too, because that enabled me to develop expertise in the analysis of a multitude of stories that I hadn't been that familiar with.
00:18:13.000You know, I knew the Genesis stories pretty well.
00:18:18.000The creation story, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the story of the flood.
00:18:25.000I learned a lot more about the story of the Tower of Babel, which is actually a description of the construction of a totalitarian state as an alternative to Worship of the one true God, you might say.
00:18:40.000And so, and it's the engineers that build the Tower of Babel, by the way, in the biblical account, which is extremely interesting.
00:18:46.000And so, and then I learned, I really learned the story of Abraham, which I actually think compromises a rejoinder, an irrefutable rejoinder to Richard Dawkins' concept of the selfish gene.
00:19:03.000Because partly what the story of Abraham does is lay out the nature of the multi-generational, non-selfish commitment that's integral to actual reproductive success.
00:19:19.000Like, it's so cool, man, because what God promises Abraham when he decides to go out for the adventure of his life, one of the things he promises Abraham is that he'll become the father of nations.
00:19:31.000And so you can think of the story of Abraham, first of all, as a delineated account of how you live if you're Abel or Seth, right?
00:19:47.000So Abraham is the first true individual.
00:19:51.000He's the archetypal individual, just like Moses is the archetypal leader.
00:19:55.000And the story of Abraham delineates a pattern of upward striving sacrifice that establishes the pattern of paternity that best ensures reproductive success over the longest possible span of time.
00:20:13.000And that turns out not to be a selfish enterprise at all.
00:20:17.000It's a pattern of sacrifice that's exemplified by Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac.
00:20:24.000And it marks out the multi-generational commitment of human beings to their offspring.
00:20:30.000And so that was really fun to take apart, and I think it's unassailable, because the mistake Dawkins made in The Selfish Gene was assuming that reproduction and sex were the same thing.
00:20:42.000It's true for mosquitoes, and it's true for puffballs, but it's not true for human beings, because we're high-investment reproducers.
00:20:50.000And so, and I think this is irrefutable scientifically, because part of the explanation the evolutionary biologists have for our lifespan is that grandparents, perhaps particularly grandmothers, but also grandfathers, are necessary for the successful propagation of children.
00:21:10.000And so, the mere fact that we live much longer than we're fertile, especially in the case of women, is an indicator that there's a pattern of non-selfish sacrifice that's key to establishing reproduction that's successful across the generations.
00:21:27.000And so, anyways, that's just a fraction of what's in the book.
00:21:30.000I had a blast taking apart the story of Jonah, which is a story of the costs of remaining silent when your conscience tells you to speak.
00:21:38.000I really developed a much deeper understanding of how the divine is characterized in the Old Testament.
00:21:45.000I think the best immediate characterization is that the divine is the
00:21:52.000dynamic between conscience and calling and you can even think about that as the dynamic between
00:21:57.000positive and negative emotion you know, because that locks it into the instinctual realm,
00:22:02.000so the calling, what interests you, has its autonomy, right?
00:22:07.000Because you don't really pick what interests you, it picks you.
00:22:10.000And it calls to your positive emotion.
00:22:12.000It calls to what compels you forward, which is the definition of positive emotion from a neuroscience perspective.
00:22:19.000And so that's part of the manifestation of the autonomous divine.
00:22:22.000But the same is true of conscience, which is more like negative emotion, which warns you when you're wandering off the straight and narrow path.
00:22:30.000This also helped me put two and two together with regards to the pillar of light and the pillar of darkness that guides the Israelites across the darkness.
00:22:38.000The pillar of light is the light that shines in the darkness that compels you forward.
00:22:43.000And the pillar of darkness is the warning, even in the midst of plenty, that there's darkness to be contended with.
00:22:51.000And it's the dynamic between those two things that guides you when you escape from tyranny and you're lost.
00:22:59.000Like, it's completely understandable, and I think it's profoundly true, and it unites the divine and the instinctual, which is, like, if truth is a unity, the biological and the theological are eventually going to unite.
00:23:12.000And I'm hoping that this book is a major step forward in exactly that endeavor, and I actually think it is.
00:23:19.000So, I'm really excited about its launch.
00:24:32.000And the fact that, you know, you've spent so much time taking the biblical text seriously, I think, for a lot of religious people, is an amazing thing.
00:24:39.000Because, for years, I mean, for generations, basically there's been this false dichotomy that's been drawn between, quote-unquote, the reasonable and then the faith community.
00:24:48.000And it's been propagated through myths like the Galileo, sort of rewriting of history, this idea that faith is dramatically opposed to reason, sort of a, you know, bizarre enlightenment idea that is really
00:25:13.000And so the idea of just actually looking at the text, examining the text, and seeing what there is to see
00:25:18.000is an amazing thing that you've done in reopening the book for people,
00:25:22.000for both, who are religious, to sort of a scientific neurocognitive perspective,
00:25:27.000and people who are scientific, to, hey, maybe there's a reason that these pieces of data
00:25:32.000have lasted for thousands of years, and been central to the development of the civilizations
00:25:37.000Well, one of the things I really tried to do in the book, and this was for me as well, is I tried to make sure that every point I made could be just as justified from the material and biological upward as from the divine downward.
00:25:50.000So as far as I'm concerned, and that's especially true because I believe that there is a unity of knowledge underlying everything, That all the points I made had to be justifiable from both those perspectives and I don't care personally whether the material world strives upward towards the divine or the divine world descends downward into the material.
00:26:12.000You can look at it either way, and probably you should look at it both ways simultaneously.
00:26:17.000And one of the things I'm trying to do in the book, which I actually think I do successfully, is to explain exactly what that means.
00:26:23.000It's interesting too, Ben, you know, I know a lot of evangelical Christians in Washington, a very admirable community of people that I know there, and they're much more biblically literalist than I'm inclined to be.
00:26:37.000And I asked a number of them the last time I was in Washington, Because they come to my lectures, for example, and I've got to know this community quite well, you know, how they're responding to the sorts of interpretations that I've been laying out.
00:26:50.000And the universal response was that it had done nothing but deepen their faith.
00:26:56.000And so that's also extremely exciting.
00:26:58.000And it's also given me a much more profound understanding of the organic relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
00:27:06.000You know, I mean, there's plenty to work out on that front, and that's for sure, which was partly why it would have been nice to have you in the Gospel Seminar.
00:27:13.000But, you know, one of the unfortunate elements of a certain kind of Christianity is the insistence that there's quite a delineation between the New Testament and the Old Testament.
00:27:25.000And there's truth in that in some ways, but in many ways, It's not the case that this stage is set in the Old Testament in a very profound way, and also in a way that I think is inevitable.
00:27:38.000This is actually something I want to discuss with you in detail at some point, maybe after you read the book, because, you know, there is an idea a religious idea that the passion is implicit in the Old Testament.
00:29:12.000The reason for that is that, well, if you're in a community, it's not all about you.
00:29:19.000If you're a solitary animal, it's all about you.
00:29:24.000If you're a two-year-old, Although there are some social instincts that start to make themselves manifest, it's all about you.
00:29:32.000As you mature and you establish reciprocal relationships with other people, and you extend your viewpoint into the future, so you establish a relationship with your future self, you sacrifice your short-term impulsive hedonistic whims.
00:29:51.000And you have to do that, because otherwise you're not a communal being.
00:29:58.000Okay, so now you understand that the community is predicated on sacrifice.
00:30:02.000Well, the next question arises immediately, which is, okay, what's the most effective possible form of sacrifice?
00:30:10.000And that's actually what the biblical stories investigate.
00:30:13.000That's why you have that strange spectacle of Abraham offering Isaac to God, which, you know, the atheist types point to the malevolence of a God who would demand that.
00:30:55.000You don't over-shelter them, you put them out into the world, you have them confront the catastrophic chaos of reality, and you orient them towards what's highest.
00:31:06.000You have to let your children go, you have to offer them to the world in order to raise them properly.
00:31:12.000Well, and what's the implication of the biblical story?
00:31:16.000If you do that properly, if you sacrifice your children properly, what's highest, you get them back.
00:31:27.000It's clear part of that sacrificial process is the willingness of the parent to expose their children voluntarily to the Cataclysmic adventure of existence.
00:31:46.000So one of the highest forms of sacrifice, obviously, if you're going to offer up something valuable, a child would be very high in that hierarchy.
00:31:53.000You could offer yourself, you could offer your child.
00:31:56.000You know, in the Christian passion, you see those two things come together.
00:32:01.000That's the theological insistence on the Christian side.
00:32:03.000But in the Old Testament corpus, Abraham sacrifices his son to God.
00:32:08.000Because the other thing that happens as Abraham develops, the quality of sacrifice that he's called upon to offer, increases with every transformation of character.
00:32:20.000He has to offer something more fundamental in order to continue the process
00:33:05.000And then they have a negotiation over exactly how many would be the whole city versus innocents and all that.
00:33:11.000So one of the big questions that gets asked by a lot of the biblical commentators is, so why doesn't Abraham have that conversation with God about Isaac?
00:33:16.000That'd be a perfectly obvious conversation to have.
00:33:18.000God says to him, I want you to take your son to a place that I'm going to show you, which by the way is similar language to I'm going to take you to a land I will show you.
00:33:25.000I'm going to take your son three days distance to a place that I'm going to show you and then sacrifice him on that mountain.
00:33:32.000Why does a neighbor have a conversation with God?
00:33:34.000Why does he say, well, hold up, I thought that I was... I thought child sacrifice is bad.
00:33:38.000This is a thing we're not supposed to do.
00:33:39.000Why are you now telling me to do the reverse of all the things that you've educated me to do to this point?
00:34:22.000And so it seems to me that if I really care about my kid and I want to keep my kid safe, then the best thing I can do is not raise my kid Jewish.
00:34:27.000It would be to have my kid, you know, be raised secular or some other form of religion.
00:34:32.000And by the way, this was not an uncommon thought for Jews for multiple centuries, was the best way out of the tribe was convert, get out, and that makes sure that your kid stays safe.
00:34:43.000And so what the Bible is saying is that there is an inevitable reality and that reality is that you must be willing to subject your kids to additional levels of danger in pursuit of the highest goal.
00:35:05.000And it's not a matter of, you know, it really is not a matter of speculation, because the reality is in this particular story, God says to Abraham, okay, your kid is going to survive.
00:35:29.000Just like in love, if you make a sacrifice, you become nearer to the person.
00:35:32.000You sacrifice something, you make a korban, you become karov to it, and you become close to it, meaning you become closer to God through sacrifice.
00:35:39.000But the bottom line is that for Jews throughout the centuries, and for Christians throughout the centuries, as it turns out, and for anybody who's a true religious believer, particularly in a minority area, that is not a It's not necessary that the outcome is that your kid gets saved.
00:35:56.000The reality is that throughout the centuries, very often the kid does not get saved.
00:36:42.000Who brings her child into the world willingly and gratefully knowing full well that he'll be broken in every way and that's the display of Mary and which is essentially I think equivalent to the female crucifix or crucifixion and that's why it ended up in Saint Peter's and the thing is is that the psychoanalysts figured this out in the first part of the 20th century because they said the good mother necessarily fails
00:37:22.000That's the terrible, eatable mother that Freud's intuition pointed out to him so dreadfully accurately.
00:37:30.000And the good mother exposes her child fully to the catastrophe of the world, in an embracing spirit and this is not a trivial thing you know the the antinatalists for example and there's a huge antinatalist spirit in our culture make the case formally that existence itself is so brutal that the moral thing to do is to strive to take consciousness out of out of the picture to cease reproducing because the pain of existence overwhelms the
00:38:02.000good in the utility of existence that's part of the problem of construing existence in terms of pain and pleasure which is already a pathological thing to do but Mary is the absolute antithesis of the antinatalist doctrine but she's also the mother who accepts deep in her heart that she's bringing a child in the world to be betrayed and broken and die and so and that's Well, that's part of the mystery of the sacrifice of the child upward towards what's highest, and part of the mystery of existence.
00:38:36.000One of the things that really struck me about going through the Old Testament stories was the stunning underlying consistency of the message.
00:38:45.000It's so cool, you know, because you see all these multiple characterizations of divinity.
00:38:50.000And so, in Genesis, the divine is the force that confronts chaotic potential and makes the order that's good with truth.
00:38:59.000God, that's a great definition of the divine.
00:39:02.000And then, The then the divine is the judge that bars the way to paradise so that nothing that is insufficient can make entry.
00:39:11.000It's like, well, yeah, obviously nothing that isn't paradisal can make its way into heaven.
00:39:16.000That's the sword that turns every which way.
00:39:19.000And then in the story of Cain and Abel, God is the divine is the the goal and aim of all proper sacrifices, all the
00:39:28.000sacrifices that set the world straight, perfect, and the judge of all those who don't bring the
00:39:48.000And then in the story of the Tower of Babel, the divine is the force that brings the totalitarian Luciferian to his knees.
00:39:58.000And then the biblical authors collate those and say all of those manifestations are of the same underlying unity and then the unity is explored
00:40:08.000as the text progresses it's so deep it's so deep that it's well there's no end to the amount of
00:40:17.000exploration that can be done within the It was fascinating.
00:40:20.000One of the things that, you know, people always ask is sort of, who's the central character of the Bible?
00:40:24.000I'll talk about the Old Testament because, again, my knowledge of the New Testament is more limited, but it's true of the New Testament as well.
00:40:29.000The central character of the Bible is God.
00:40:32.000The central character of the Bible is not, in fact, Abraham.
00:40:38.000And God is, that's why, The idea of God being angry or God having pain.
00:40:45.000All these things are analogical in the sense that God doesn't have pain in the same way that you or I have pain, but it's kind of the nearest way that we can understand what exactly is happening with God, because how else could we understand any of it?
00:40:56.000But the idea that what the Bible really is is a series of snapshots from various different angles.
00:41:04.000That's obviously true, and it's openly described in Exodus, right?
00:41:07.000When you and I went through Exodus and the Exodus series, what I think is the most moving segment of the entire Old Testament, which is where Moses, after he's been offered by God, God says, I want to get rid of the Jews, I want to get rid of the Israelites, not interested in them anymore, they've sinned too many times, done.
00:41:21.000And Moses says, no, if you are going to do that, you need to obliterate me also from your book.
00:41:27.000And God offers him, I'll make a new nation of you.
00:42:14.000Human beings are not made to take all of that in.
00:42:17.000But what the Bible is attempting to do is show you a bunch of different angles on God so that you can better understand the universe in which you live that God built for you and built for you to live in.
00:42:26.000And that's why all these stories matter so much.
00:42:30.000Well, the other case that I make, and this is also, like, I do believe that we're at the end of the Enlightenment, especially the French Revolution, rationalist slash empiricist Enlightenment, because they were wrong.
00:42:43.000And the postmodernists, oddly enough, on this front were correct, because the postmodernists, and they weren't the only discipline, by the way, that figured this out.
00:42:52.000The philosophers weren't the only people that figured this out, because the cognitive neuroscientists have figured it out, too.
00:43:44.000Theologically, that's a claim that Satan is the ruler of the cosmos.
00:43:48.000Because he's the usurper who uses nothing but power.
00:43:51.000And that's an unbelievably dangerous claim.
00:43:54.000proposition and so the question arises if it's not power then what is it and freud would say well it's sexuality and to some degree that's what richard dawkins does too but they make the mistake of assuming that the reproductive instinct is identical with the sexual instinct and that's just not true it's it's way over simplified or maybe there's no story and that leaves you Being a nihilist, or maybe the story is one of pure pleasure, and that leads you to be a hedonist.
00:44:24.000And the story that's put forward in the biblical corpus is that sacrifice is the basis of not only community, but maturity and meaning.
00:44:33.000And I can't see any way that that's wrong.
00:44:36.000You know, like, I took... I do take what I do very seriously, you know.
00:44:43.000There isn't a sentence in this new book, and I think this is true of all the books I've written, that I didn't try to break apart with the biggest hammer I could find.
00:44:51.000I only left sentences that I could not dispute.
00:44:55.000You know, when I tried to attack the problem from a variety of different disciplines, You know, political disciplines and scientific disciplines and from the theological perspective to the degree that I was capable of that, and that's dangerous because it requires a multidisciplinary perspective, but I only left standing what passed all those tests, those multiply derived tests.
00:45:25.000I just, I don't know what's going to happen.
00:45:27.000Maybe nothing, because God only knows what happens when you publish a book, Ben, but I don't think the atheists are going to have a leg to stand on.
00:45:36.000I think that the argument can be made unassailably that community is based on sacrifice and that the human relationship to existence is a relationship.
00:45:49.000Right, and I think that, you know, that point, it's really fascinating.
00:45:52.000I know that so many people have asked you before about your personal belief system.
00:48:20.000And that's why Moses, who's a great prophet, can only get a glimpse of him.
00:48:24.000And then you can see, well, God is reflected in these multiple characterizations, but he's hardly reduced to that.
00:48:31.000And to think about that as some old man in the sky that grants your wishes, that is the hypothesis of an arrogant 13-year-old with no theory of mind.
00:48:46.000And the other thing that I've done in the book is I pointed out some of the connections between the stories in the book, like the story of the bronze serpent in the desert that Moses asks his people to gaze upon so that what's poisonous can't affect them.
00:49:02.000I tied that into Christ's revelation of himself as the bronze serpent in the desert, which is an insane association, right?
00:49:20.000And I defy anyone to explain how that came about, to read the explanation.
00:49:27.000The explanation is something like you need to confront what terrifies you in order to thrive.
00:49:34.000And one of the things that's characteristic of the Christian passion, the way the story lays itself out, is that there isn't anything more horrifying than that pattern of death.
00:49:47.000And so, Christ portrays himself as the bronze serpent in the desert, because the details of his life involve everything that people are terrified of.
00:49:56.000And the insistence is, if you're willing to voluntarily confront that, God walks with you.
00:50:28.000And so, well... You know, I tested this book out on tour, because I did like 60 lectures, and I brought people along, like Jonathan Paggio, and Douglas Murray, and...
00:50:40.000and John Vervaeke, and Constantine Kissin, because I wanted to see how they would react to the ideas, you know, because some of them are more on the atheist end of the distribution.
00:50:51.000Well, that was extremely interesting, too, because I wanted to see if the ideas could be destroyed, cracked, you know, if there was some flaw in them that I hadn't discovered.
00:51:02.000Well, I guess we'll see when I publish it, because all my mistakes will be public, but I couldn't break it.
00:51:33.000Maybe Jonah, you know, because Jonah gets swallowed by hell because he refuses the call of his conscience.
00:51:40.000And it's a great story because the story lays out the multiple motivations why someone might run from their conscience, but also points out that there isn't anything more dangerous that you can do than that.
00:51:55.000You know, even though if you speak the words of truth that you're called upon to speak, that may endanger you.
00:52:03.000But remaining silent in the face of a divine command is even more dangerous.
00:52:09.000And there may be times in your life where you have to pick between competing dangers.
00:52:14.000You know, there's no safe pathway forward.
00:52:16.000Often, if you're compelled to speak, that's the situation.
00:52:20.000But the story of Jonah indicates very clearly that Here's what it indicates, Ben, and this is an axiom of religious faith.
00:52:30.000There's nothing better possible than what will happen to you if you tell the truth.
00:52:37.000It doesn't matter how it looks to you.
00:52:40.000And that's a terrifying thing, you know, because obviously you get in trouble for telling the truth.
00:53:19.000They might think they can get away with it.
00:53:21.000They might use it for manipulative purposes.
00:53:24.000But no one thinks that the path to paradise is paved with lies.
00:53:30.000Even the worst criminal knows that that's a fundamental misapprehension of the structure of existence itself.
00:53:39.000If you believed that, it would destroy you, if you truly believed it.
00:53:42.000You know, the story of Jonah is fascinating also because what Jonah is really seeking to avoid, I mean, just historically speaking, is the conclusion that God is saying to him, which is that the area in which you live will be conquered by your enemies, right?
00:53:56.000Nineveh, which is in Assyria, is an enemy to the Israelite kingdom at this time.
00:55:18.000There's no rationalistic manipulations that are strategic on your part that's going to pave a pathway forward better than just the stark truth.
00:56:28.000I mean, You know, 15 years ago, is this what you imagined that you would be doing?
00:56:33.000I mean, it is kind of amazing, the trajectory from teaching psychology in Canada to doing what you're doing today.
00:56:40.000Well, Ben, I knew, like, students reacted to the material I was teaching in a way that was very unlike their reaction to most courses.
00:56:51.000And I was always kind of shocked that I got away with it, both at Harvard and at the University of Toronto, because I thought, boy, if anybody ever figures out what I'm teaching, there's going to be hell to pay.
00:57:00.000And of course, that eventually happened.
00:57:02.000But I knew, I knew that What I was describing had a revelatory quality.
00:57:12.000You know, I read an essay by Carl Jung a long while back called The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious, and it's a very interesting essay.
00:57:20.000It's very hard to understand unless you know what he's talking about.
00:57:23.000And what he's talking about specifically in that essay is the danger of attributing the power of archetypal narrative to yourself.
00:57:33.000And so he warns against that very explicitly, that that's the pathway to like a manic inflation or a pathological populism, a self-aggrandizement that's luciferian.
00:57:48.000And so I was always very careful to understand that there's a very big difference between the messenger, let's say, and the message.
00:57:55.000And the fact that I was unveiling the deeper meanings of these archetypal stories, The power in that wasn't me.
00:58:07.000But I did understand a very long time ago, probably when I first cracked some of these codes, so to speak, that there would be a stunning consequence of that.
00:58:20.000Because you can't delve into those stories without encountering the burning bush.
00:59:27.000So what is the latest update on the- Well, my lawyers are in touch with the college.
00:59:34.000The college told us to get in touch with whoever's going to re-educate me, but they redacted the person's name in the document.
00:59:41.000So I don't know who the hell to contact.
00:59:43.000And so I've got my lawyers Straightening that out so that I can reach out to the social media expert, whatever the hell that is, so that I can be re-educated.
00:59:56.000And so, you know, I don't exactly know how that's going to proceed, but I'm going to go along with the show At least in part out of morbid curiosity.
01:00:09.000You know, and my attitude towards it has changed slightly because I'm increasingly embarrassed to be identified as a professional psychologist because my colleagues have manifested such a shortage of spine In the face of the onslaught, let's say, by the gender-affirming care liars, that it's an embarrassment to have the profession that I have now, which I think increasingly does more harm than good.
01:00:33.000But by the same token, I'm not going to let a bunch of half-wit, DEI, radical leftist, utopian, lying pricks take my license away without a war.
01:00:45.000And so, so far my hand has been stayed, at least to some degree, by the necessity of behaving properly while the legal battle unfolded, but now it's sort of, well, all the gloves are off, boys and girls, and we're bloody welcome to see how that turns out.
01:00:59.000So, it's very annoying, and there's a part of me, maybe this is why I identify with Jonah, let's say, is I'd just as soon flee to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I have a house, and say, to hell with you, pikers.
01:01:11.000I don't need that trouble and harassment and all the expense and idiocy that goes along with it.
01:01:16.000But I think I have a moral obligation to see the show out to its end, whatever that might be.
01:01:24.000I can tell you the end isn't going to be what the people who are driving this strategic machination think it's going to be.
01:01:58.000Obviously, folks, go check out Foundations of the West along with all the other Jordan content, a new piece of Jordan content dropping every single week from now until the end of the year.