The Ben Shapiro Show - How To Find Beauty In Suffering | Jordan Peterson

00:00:00.000 There's nothing better possible than what will happen to you if you tell the truth.

00:00:05.000 It doesn't matter how it looks to you.

00:00:08.000 And that's a terrifying thing, you know, because you obviously get in trouble for telling the truth.

00:00:12.000 That's why everyone lies.

00:00:14.000 And I believe that.

00:00:15.000 And how could it be otherwise?

00:00:17.000 What are you going to do?

00:00:17.000 You're going to make the proposition that you bring about the order that is good in the world by lying.

00:00:23.000 Who the hell believes that?

00:00:25.000 No one believes that. 0.65

00:00:26.000 They might think they can get away with it.

00:00:28.000 They might use it for manipulative purposes.

00:00:31.000 But no one thinks that the path to paradise is paved with lies.

00:00:37.000 If you believe that, it would destroy you, if you truly believed it.

00:00:40.000 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.

00:00:52.000 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.

00:01:04.000 From 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.

00:01:24.000 Jordan'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.

00:01:33.000 In his latest series, Foundations of the West, Jordan travels to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome to uncover the ancient roots of Western civilization.

00:01:39.000 I 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.

00:01:46.000 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.

00:01:55.000 It's always a pleasure and privilege to talk with Jordan.

00:01:57.000 I can't recommend enough his latest series, Foundations of the West, available right now at Daily Wire+.

00:02:02.000 Stay tuned.

00:02:02.000 Don't miss Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's latest insights on this episode of the Sunday Special.

00:02:06.000 Jordan, great to see you as always.

00:02:18.000 Good to see you, Ben.

00:02:19.000 Thanks for the invitation.

00:02:20.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:02:21.000 So let's talk about this series that we did one episode of together.

00:02:24.000 Maybe two episodes of together.

00:02:25.000 Yeah.

00:02:25.000 But you did a bunch of episodes.

00:02:27.000 Foundations of the West.

00:02:28.000 So you and I were in Jerusalem together and then you went to Athens with Spencer Clavin.

00:02:32.000 You went to Rome with Bishop Barron.

00:02:34.000 You went with Jonathan Pageau to pretty much all of these.

00:02:37.000 It was an amazing series.

00:02:38.000 What were kind of your biggest takeaways?

00:02:40.000 What were the most interesting things for you in terms of the filming?

00:02:43.000 That's a hard thing to specify because so much of it was remarkable.

00:02:47.000 I mean, how do you compare Athens, Rome and Jerusalem?

00:02:53.000 Those are high points.

00:02:54.000 I really enjoyed going through the archaeological expeditions with you.

00:02:58.000 That was a good day.

00:02:59.000 It was really exciting and interesting and somewhat terrifying to go up to the Al-Aqsa site.

00:03:07.000 The 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. 1.00

00:03:21.000 And so that was fascinating.

00:03:24.000 The dinners we had in those beautiful locations, those were, and we filmed them.

00:03:29.000 Of course, that's up on The Daily Wire now.

00:03:31.000 The episode you and I did in Jerusalem.

00:03:33.000 Going 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.

00:03:45.000 That was, you know, insanely interesting.

00:03:50.000 Then 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.

00:04:06.000 Peter'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.

00:04:17.000 What did you think?

00:04:18.000 I liked our dinner, too.

00:04:19.000 I loved it, too.

00:04:20.000 I 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.

00:04:33.000 And so, our sense of place and our sense of time has been warped by that.

00:04:37.000 I mean, many people who are my age don't even remember the Cold War.

00:04:40.000 And so, the idea of serious hardship, or the passage of people through time, or standing on the shoulders of history.

00:04:48.000 America is such a new country.

00:04:49.000 I mean, it really is.

00:04:50.000 It's an amazingly new country.

00:04:51.000 That 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.

00:05:00.000 And 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.

00:05:12.000 And 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.

00:05:18.000 And 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.

00:05:25.000 Yeah, well I think also I'm hoping that we did a good job of...

00:05:29.000 Juxtaposing 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.

00:05:50.000 I'm kind of hoping that we got more deeply into that philosophically and intellectually than Would be the case with the typical documentary.

00:05:58.000 I mean, we tried to do that because our conversations were unscripted.

00:06:03.000 You know, it's been interesting doing these documentaries and the series with The Daily Wire because our documentaries really are unscripted.

00:06:10.000 And 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

00:06:42.000 opportunity and a privilege to be able to undertake it.

00:06:44.000 And I would also like to say that, you know, I've been very impressed with the Daily Wire's entrepreneurial daring.

00:06:51.000 You 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.

00:07:02.000 And the answer from the Daily Wire people is always yes.

00:07:06.000 Which is really quite something, because it's not inexpensive, and it's very high risk, especially because it's not scripted.

00:07:13.000 And so, anyways, what did you think of it?

00:07:15.000 We had a great time in Jerusalem, you and I.

00:07:18.000 Yeah, it's a wonderful journey.

00:07:20.000 So 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.

00:07:26.000 I mean, that's how much content we've made with you and banked with you, and it really is all fascinating and spectacular stuff.

00:07:32.000 Some 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.

00:07:48.000 connections and so on. And there was a point during dinner where there was a person in

00:07:52.000 a nearby house who was actually shining a laser pointer at us, I remember, during that

00:07:56.000 dinner and had figured out sort of what was going on. And there was a fair bit of tension

00:08:02.000 during the filming of those episodes. And I think that it's a reminder that, you know,

00:08:05.000 all of these streams of history that are crossed and that go back thousands of years, they

00:08:09.000 have very significant real world effects. And certainly in the episode that you and

00:08:14.000 I filmed together in Jerusalem, you could feel that. I mean, you mentioned going up

00:08:17.000 to the Temple Mount and obviously your wife was wearing a cross and she was told to put

00:08:21.000 that away by the authorities on the Temple Mount because of all of the hatred and rage

00:08:27.000 that emerges if people of one type pray there and that's not allowed and all of that sort

00:08:32.000 of thing. That sort of stuff is very real for folks. And so I think it's a really fascinating

00:08:38.000 combination of the ancient and the real world effects of that, which is, I think when you

00:08:43.000 and I spend a lot of time discussing politics, not just philosophy or psychology. And the

00:08:48.000 thing about politics is that politics is really just the very surface level of that. I was

00:08:53.000 discussing this actually recently with Spencer Klaben. And one of the things that we were

00:08:57.000 talking about was at the Democratic National Convention.

00:08:59.000 They opened the Democratic National Convention with a land acknowledgement.

00:09:03.000 And 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.

00:09:09.000 Yeah, it's not.

00:09:09.000 It's not at all.

00:09:10.000 Like, 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.

00:09:21.000 Well I'm really thrilled that we had the opportunity, well at a personal level, to actually just do it.

00:09:27.000 I mean that was a crazy opportunity!

00:09:30.000 And 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

00:09:59.000 piece 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.

00:10:14.000 A lot of that was Jonathan Hay.

00:10:15.000 Of course, he's not the only one, but, you know, kudos to them, that's for sure.

00:10:20.000 Yeah, and I'm really looking forward to the rest of the episodes.

00:10:22.000 You know, I haven't seen them, right?

00:10:24.000 I 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.

00:10:40.000 It was remarkably coherent 45 minutes of film, given that it was a spontaneous conversation.

00:10:50.000 And so, you know, a lot of the credit there is obviously due to you.

00:10:53.000 So, because you're such a remarkable conversationalist, but it was very gratifying to see that this is working.

00:11:00.000 And, 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.

00:11:21.000 You see what you see is what you get.

00:11:23.000 And there's something it's a lot harder to lie spontaneously.

00:11:28.000 You know, you kind of have to think through your lies.

00:11:31.000 And if you're engaged in an actual conversation, then you tend to say what you actually think.

00:11:35.000 Well, you tend to discover what you actually think in the course of the conversation.

00:11:40.000 We'll get to more with Jordan in just a moment.

00:11:41.000 First, here at Daily Wire, we've hired a lot of highly skilled people to be a part of this growing creative powerhouse.

00:11:47.000 Editors, attorneys, engineers, you name it.

00:11:49.000 Like Jake.

00:11:50.000 Jake started with us over a year ago, from traveling the world with me, forcing me to practice my Hebrew, and much more.

00:11:55.000 Yes, both of our Hebrews, not amazing. 1.00

00:11:57.000 But thanks to Jake, I've been able to continue creating thousands of leftist tears every day.

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00:12:38.000 So, yeah, and you said we're putting out a different piece of content, what, about every week now?

00:12:44.000 Yeah, pretty much every week all the way.

00:12:45.000 That I've made with you guys.

00:12:46.000 Yeah, and so there's the Foundations of Western Civilization, and there's about, what, six parts to that?

00:12:55.000 No, eight parts to that.

00:12:56.000 I think there'd be at least eight.

00:12:57.000 There'd be the four episodes that are geographically located.

00:13:03.000 Each of them is associated, I believe, with a dinner.

00:13:06.000 And then we have the Gospel Seminar, which is multi-part, like the Exodus Seminar was.

00:13:11.000 And I tell you, Ben, that went spectacularly well.

00:13:14.000 We missed you.

00:13:14.000 It would have been nice to have you there.

00:13:17.000 That obviously was extremely complicated.

00:13:20.000 But 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.

00:13:41.000 We did that in a week eh?

00:13:43.000 It 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.

00:13:59.000 And it was very demanding for everyone involved.

00:14:01.000 But, you know, we did.

00:14:03.000 We got we were on time with all the sessions and we got through the entire book and we didn't rush.

00:14:08.000 And 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.

00:14:22.000 You know, we doubled the length of the Exodus seminar.

00:14:26.000 And The Daily Wire went along with that immediately.

00:14:28.000 It's very daring.

00:14:29.000 And I guess the Exodus seminar was very successful.

00:14:32.000 I heard from, yeah, yeah, that apart from the Matt Walsh's What is a woman?

00:14:39.000 It was, what, maybe the second most popular thing that's been put out?

00:14:42.000 Yes, that's right.

00:14:43.000 So that's so cool.

00:14:44.000 Really, really successful.

00:14:45.000 And again, you exploring all these topics with such fascinating minds, obviously, there's a huge market for that.

00:14:50.000 And obviously, you're also extremely busy.

00:14:52.000 I mean, you're traveling.

00:14:53.000 I don't know how you have the energy to do it.

00:14:54.000 You're traveling the world.

00:14:55.000 You're giving lectures almost every night.

00:14:57.000 And then you have your book that's coming out at the end of the year in November.

00:15:02.000 Yeah.

00:15:02.000 We Who Struggle With God.

00:15:03.000 We Who Wrestle With God.

00:15:06.000 Good, yeah.

00:15:07.000 And 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.

00:15:15.000 How much of you, in terms of your own personal religious journey, is in that book?

00:15:20.000 Well, in some ways, it's saturated with that because what I'm doing is revealing my developing understanding of these stories.

00:15:29.000 I've been studying foundational narratives for a very long time.

00:15:36.000 I got... how did I learn to do that?

00:15:39.000 By 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.

00:15:48.000 If 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.

00:16:02.000 They 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.

00:16:30.000 You 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?

00:16:42.000 So repressed content would come out in symbolic form.

00:16:48.000 That's almost true in the way that many of the things Freud said were almost true, and it was a useful error.

00:16:54.000 But 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.

00:17:11.000 So, for example, the concept which.

00:17:16.000 would 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.

00:17:41.000 I'm showing the patterns of ideas that are encapsulated inside the story.

00:17:46.000 So I walk through about 10 of the Old Testament Biblical Narratives.

00:17:50.000 The 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.

00:18:13.000 You know, I knew the Genesis stories pretty well.

00:18:18.000 The creation story, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the story of the flood.

00:18:25.000 I 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.

00:18:40.000 And so, and it's the engineers that build the Tower of Babel, by the way, in the biblical account, which is extremely interesting.

00:18:46.000 And 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.

00:19:03.000 Because 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.

00:19:19.000 Like, 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.

00:19:31.000 And 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?

00:19:44.000 The proper sons of Adam and Eve. 0.78

00:19:47.000 So Abraham is the first true individual. 0.75

00:19:51.000 He's the archetypal individual, just like Moses is the archetypal leader.

00:19:55.000 And 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.

00:20:13.000 And that turns out not to be a selfish enterprise at all.

00:20:16.000 Quite the contrary.

00:20:17.000 It's a pattern of sacrifice that's exemplified by Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac.

00:20:24.000 And it marks out the multi-generational commitment of human beings to their offspring.

00:20:30.000 And 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.

00:20:41.000 And that's not true.

00:20:42.000 It's true for mosquitoes, and it's true for puffballs, but it's not true for human beings, because we're high-investment reproducers.

00:20:50.000 And 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.

00:21:10.000 And 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. 0.59

00:21:27.000 And so, anyways, that's just a fraction of what's in the book.

00:21:30.000 I 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.

00:21:38.000 I really developed a much deeper understanding of how the divine is characterized in the Old Testament.

00:21:45.000 I think the best immediate characterization is that the divine is the

00:21:52.000 dynamic between conscience and calling and you can even think about that as the dynamic between

00:21:57.000 positive and negative emotion you know, because that locks it into the instinctual realm,

00:22:02.000 so the calling, what interests you, has its autonomy, right?

00:22:07.000 Because you don't really pick what interests you, it picks you.

00:22:10.000 And it calls to your positive emotion.

00:22:12.000 It calls to what compels you forward, which is the definition of positive emotion from a neuroscience perspective.

00:22:19.000 And so that's part of the manifestation of the autonomous divine.

00:22:22.000 But 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.

00:22:30.000 This 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.

00:22:38.000 The pillar of light is the light that shines in the darkness that compels you forward.

00:22:43.000 And the pillar of darkness is the warning, even in the midst of plenty, that there's darkness to be contended with.

00:22:51.000 And it's the dynamic between those two things that guides you when you escape from tyranny and you're lost.

00:22:58.000 And that's so cool!

00:22:59.000 Like, 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.

00:23:12.000 And I'm hoping that this book is a major step forward in exactly that endeavor, and I actually think it is.

00:23:19.000 So, I'm really excited about its launch.

00:23:22.000 Get to more on this in just a moment.

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00:24:32.000 It's awesome.

00:24:32.000 And 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.

00:24:39.000 Because, 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.

00:24:48.000 And 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

00:25:01.000 not united with history.

00:25:03.000 And religious people have taken it that way, and so they've dissociated from the scientific community

00:25:08.000 in large ways, and the scientific community has taken it that way, and so they've dissociated

00:25:11.000 from religion in large ways.

00:25:13.000 And so the idea of just actually looking at the text, examining the text, and seeing what there is to see

00:25:18.000 is an amazing thing that you've done in reopening the book for people,

00:25:22.000 for both, who are religious, to sort of a scientific neurocognitive perspective,

00:25:27.000 and people who are scientific, to, hey, maybe there's a reason that these pieces of data

00:25:32.000 have lasted for thousands of years, and been central to the development of the civilizations

00:25:37.000 Well, 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.

00:25:50.000 So 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.

00:26:12.000 You can look at it either way, and probably you should look at it both ways simultaneously.

00:26:17.000 And 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.

00:26:23.000 It'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.

00:26:37.000 And 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.

00:26:50.000 And the universal response was that it had done nothing but deepen their faith.

00:26:56.000 And so that's also extremely exciting.

00:26:58.000 And it's also given me a much more profound understanding of the organic relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

00:27:06.000 You 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.

00:27:13.000 But, 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.

00:27:25.000 And 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.

00:27:38.000 This 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.

00:27:50.000 And I actually think that's true.

00:27:52.000 I think we might be able to demonstrate that statistically at some point, actually, given the progress of these large language models.

00:27:59.000 But I'd like to discuss with you, once you do take a look at the book, exactly what that signifies, what you make of it.

00:28:08.000 Let me give you a quick example of that.

00:28:10.000 So this is so cool, Ben.

00:28:12.000 This is so...

00:28:15.000 The fundamental message of the Old Testament, maybe there's two.

00:28:20.000 One is that we live in relationship with something.

00:28:23.000 Like the human mode of being is relationship.

00:28:27.000 Okay, so do we have a relationship with the transcendent?

00:28:30.000 Well, we have a relationship of one sort or the other because we're finite and we face what's infinite.

00:28:37.000 So we have a relationship.

00:28:38.000 It might be one of negation.

00:28:40.000 It might be nihilistic.

00:28:41.000 It doesn't matter.

00:28:42.000 It's a relationship of some sort.

00:28:44.000 And so, having established that, you might say, well, how is the relationship characterized in the biblical corpus?

00:28:53.000 And it's characterized sacrificially.

00:28:56.000 And I understood what that meant, because there's an insistence in the biblical text that the community is predicated on sacrifice.

00:29:06.000 And of course that's true, and here's why.

00:29:10.000 Of course it's true.

00:29:12.000 The reason for that is that, well, if you're in a community, it's not all about you.

00:29:19.000 If you're a solitary animal, it's all about you.

00:29:24.000 If you're a two-year-old, Although there are some social instincts that start to make themselves manifest, it's all about you.

00:29:32.000 As 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.

00:29:51.000 And you have to do that, because otherwise you're not a communal being.

00:29:56.000 You're a solitary being.

00:29:58.000 Okay, so now you understand that the community is predicated on sacrifice.

00:30:02.000 Well, the next question arises immediately, which is, okay, what's the most effective possible form of sacrifice?

00:30:10.000 And that's actually what the biblical stories investigate.

00:30:13.000 That'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.

00:30:23.000 But here's a rereading of that.

00:30:25.000 It's like, well, first of all, Abraham doesn't have to sacrifice Isaac, right?

00:30:31.000 When push comes to shove, God intervenes so that the actual sacrifice isn't necessary.

00:30:38.000 Okay, so how do you understand that?

00:30:40.000 Well, here's the issue.

00:30:43.000 Do you offer your children up to what is highest or not?

00:30:48.000 And the answer to that is, well, if you're a good parent, you offer your children up to what's highest.

00:30:53.000 You don't protect them.

00:30:55.000 You 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.

00:31:06.000 You have to let your children go, you have to offer them to the world in order to raise them properly.

00:31:12.000 Well, and what's the implication of the biblical story?

00:31:16.000 If you do that properly, if you sacrifice your children properly, what's highest, you get them back.

00:31:24.000 Yeah, that's exactly right, man.

00:31:27.000 It's clear part of that sacrificial process is the willingness of the parent to expose their children voluntarily to the Cataclysmic adventure of existence.

00:31:41.000 That's a sacrificial gesture.

00:31:44.000 And so you see the stages set.

00:31:46.000 So 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.

00:31:53.000 You could offer yourself, you could offer your child.

00:31:56.000 You know, in the Christian passion, you see those two things come together.

00:32:01.000 That's the theological insistence on the Christian side.

00:32:03.000 But in the Old Testament corpus, Abraham sacrifices his son to God.

00:32:08.000 Because 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.

00:32:20.000 He has to offer something more fundamental in order to continue the process

00:32:26.000 of personality transformation upward.

00:32:27.000 And that's true, man.

00:32:28.000 That's exactly how life works.

00:32:30.000 The story of Abraham and Isaac, one of the most fascinating things about it.

00:32:34.000 And there are tons of things about it that are really fascinating.

00:32:36.000 There are a couple that come to mind immediately.

00:32:39.000 One is that, obviously, the worst thing you can do in the ancient world according to Judaism is sacrifice your child. 0.85

00:32:44.000 Sacrifice to Molech is considered literally the worst thing you can do in the Bible.

00:32:48.000 This is what distinguishes the Israelites from surrounding nations, for example. 0.89

00:32:52.000 Also, we have a story of Abraham literally trying to argue God out of doing something that he thinks might be immoral.

00:32:58.000 When God decides to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, it's Abraham who says, God, you might be killing too many innocents there.

00:33:03.000 You might want to be careful there.

00:33:05.000 And then they have a negotiation over exactly how many would be the whole city versus innocents and all that.

00:33:11.000 So 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?

00:33:16.000 That'd be a perfectly obvious conversation to have.

00:33:18.000 God 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.

00:33:25.000 I'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.

00:33:32.000 Why does a neighbor have a conversation with God?

00:33:34.000 Why does he say, well, hold up, I thought that I was... I thought child sacrifice is bad.

00:33:38.000 This is a thing we're not supposed to do.

00:33:39.000 Why are you now telling me to do the reverse of all the things that you've educated me to do to this point?

00:33:44.000 Instead, he immediately acts, right?

00:33:46.000 It says, with alacrity, he gets up, he saddles the donkeys, he puts together the team, and he starts to move.

00:33:51.000 And the only way I think that you can explain the entire sentiment is that it is It is just a reality.

00:33:59.000 This is something I explained to, I remember I had this conversation with a person

00:34:03.000 who I was in law school with.

00:34:04.000 He's a secular Jew, and we were talking about whether he should raise his kids Jewish or not. 0.99

00:34:10.000 And he was saying, well, it would be stupid of me to raise my kids Jewish, 0.99

00:34:12.000 because it turns out that people really don't like Jews. 0.99

00:34:15.000 A lot of people, as it turns out, who hate Jews, and it's a much more dangerous world 0.79

00:34:18.000 if your kid is raised Jewish, and if you're visibly Jewish, 0.87

00:34:20.000 it's even more dangerous than that.

00:34:22.000 And 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. 1.00

00:34:27.000 It would be to have my kid, you know, be raised secular or some other form of religion.

00:34:32.000 And 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. 0.98

00:34:42.000 Right, exactly.

00:34:43.000 And 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.

00:34:56.000 You have to do that.

00:34:57.000 This is what defines you as a human being.

00:34:59.000 And it's not... That's the same as exposure to the bronze serpent.

00:35:03.000 Exactly.

00:35:03.000 It's the same message.

00:35:05.000 And 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.

00:35:16.000 There's a ram that's discovered.

00:35:18.000 The ram will be brought as a sacrifice instead.

00:35:21.000 By the way, the Hebrew of sacrifice is korban.

00:35:24.000 The root of that is karov, which means to become near.

00:35:27.000 Sacrifice is to become nearer to.

00:35:29.000 Just like in love, if you make a sacrifice, you become nearer to the person.

00:35:32.000 You 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.

00:35:39.000 But 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.

00:35:56.000 The reality is that throughout the centuries, very often the kid does not get saved.

00:36:00.000 That that is a very real risk.

00:36:01.000 And to ignore that risk in favor of sort of the happy ending is to ignore the story.

00:36:05.000 Because you're like, why have the story at all?

00:36:07.000 What's the point of the story?

00:36:07.000 And the point is that it could have gone the other way.

00:36:10.000 And that would not have obviated the thing that Abraham did. 0.74

00:36:14.000 Right?

00:36:15.000 The thing that Abraham does is he says that the risk must be taken.

00:36:18.000 You see an analogous image to that in St.

00:36:21.000 Peter's in Rome, and it's something that Bishop Barron and I discussed in the Foundations of the West.

00:36:28.000 So there's a famous statue by Michelangelo, of course, in St.

00:36:31.000 Peter's of Mary, who's the mother of God, right?

00:36:34.000 So an archetype of the mother as such, right?

00:36:38.000 The accepting mother who what? 0.81

00:36:42.000 Who 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

00:37:11.000 And what does that mean?

00:37:12.000 Well, the maternal instinct is to protect and shelter, right?

00:37:16.000 But the problem is, if you protect and shelter for too long, you weaken and destroy.

00:37:21.000 That's the devouring mother. 1.00

00:37:22.000 That's the terrible, eatable mother that Freud's intuition pointed out to him so dreadfully accurately.

00:37:30.000 And 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

00:38:02.000 good 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.

00:38:34.000 And that's a very consistent motif.

00:38:36.000 One of the things that really struck me about going through the Old Testament stories was the stunning underlying consistency of the message.

00:38:45.000 It's so cool, you know, because you see all these multiple characterizations of divinity.

00:38:50.000 And so, in Genesis, the divine is the force that confronts chaotic potential and makes the order that's good with truth.

00:38:59.000 God, that's a great definition of the divine.

00:39:02.000 And then, The then the divine is the judge that bars the way to paradise so that nothing that is insufficient can make entry.

00:39:11.000 It's like, well, yeah, obviously nothing that isn't paradisal can make its way into heaven.

00:39:16.000 That's the sword that turns every which way.

00:39:19.000 And then in the story of Cain and Abel, God is the divine is the the goal and aim of all proper sacrifices, all the

00:39:28.000 sacrifices that set the world straight, perfect, and the judge of all those who don't bring the

00:39:33.000 best to the table.

00:39:34.000 And then in the story of Noah, God is the spirit that comes to the wise to tell them to prepare when chaos is about to

00:39:45.000 descend.

00:39:46.000 It's like, do you believe in that?

00:39:48.000 And then in the story of the Tower of Babel, the divine is the force that brings the totalitarian Luciferian to his knees.

00:39:58.000 And then the biblical authors collate those and say all of those manifestations are of the same underlying unity and then the unity is explored

00:40:08.000 as the text progresses it's so deep it's so deep that it's well there's no end to the amount of

00:40:17.000 exploration that can be done within the It was fascinating.

00:40:20.000 One of the things that, you know, people always ask is sort of, who's the central character of the Bible?

00:40:24.000 I'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.

00:40:29.000 The central character of the Bible is God.

00:40:32.000 The central character of the Bible is not, in fact, Abraham.

00:40:34.000 It is not Noah.

00:40:35.000 It is not Moses.

00:40:37.000 The central character is God.

00:40:38.000 And God is, that's why, The idea of God being angry or God having pain.

00:40:45.000 All 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?

00:40:56.000 But the idea that what the Bible really is is a series of snapshots from various different angles.

00:41:03.000 Of the living God.

00:41:04.000 That's obviously true, and it's openly described in Exodus, right?

00:41:07.000 When 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. 0.99

00:41:21.000 And Moses says, no, if you are going to do that, you need to obliterate me also from your book.

00:41:27.000 And God offers him, I'll make a new nation of you.

00:41:30.000 And Moses is like, well, nope.

00:41:30.000 No, it's your nation.

00:41:31.000 You know, I don't like them. 1.00

00:41:32.000 I think they're jerks also, but you know what? 1.00

00:41:34.000 This is your nation and that's not the way this can work. 1.00

00:41:38.000 And then God accepts that.

00:41:39.000 And then he says, is there anything else you want?

00:41:41.000 And Moses says, I want to see your face, which is just, again, I think it's the most romantic.

00:41:44.000 It's the most romantic part of any literature ever written.

00:41:46.000 When Moses says to God, I want to see your face and God says, no one can see my face and live.

00:41:51.000 And so then God puts him in the cleft in the rock and it says he walks by him.

00:41:57.000 And the basic idea is that Moses can see his back.

00:42:00.000 That's such an unbelievable idea that you can only get a glimpse of God very often in retrospect and in the distance.

00:42:08.000 The idea, like, no one can see the fulsomeness of God and live.

00:42:13.000 It's not possible.

00:42:14.000 Human beings are not made to take all of that in.

00:42:17.000 But 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.

00:42:26.000 And that's why all these stories matter so much.

00:42:30.000 Well, it does that.

00:42:30.000 Well, 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.

00:42:43.000 And 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.

00:42:52.000 The philosophers weren't the only people that figured this out, because the cognitive neuroscientists have figured it out, too.

00:42:57.000 And so have the robotics engineers.

00:43:00.000 The structure we perceive the world... First of all, we perceive the world through a structure.

00:43:06.000 If you describe that structure, that's a story.

00:43:09.000 So the postmodernists were right that we inhabit a story.

00:43:12.000 They were wrong in that we don't inhabit the Marxist story of power.

00:43:19.000 Right.

00:43:19.000 And so they got the mystery right.

00:43:23.000 We see the world through a story.

00:43:24.000 And then they jumped immediately to a conclusion, which was, well, the story is obviously one of power.

00:43:29.000 It's like, no, that's the Luciferian story, boys and girls.

00:43:33.000 And you should be very careful before you presume.

00:43:36.000 That the fundamental motivating force in the world is power.

00:43:39.000 There is no more pathological claim.

00:43:44.000 Theologically, that's a claim that Satan is the ruler of the cosmos.

00:43:48.000 Because he's the usurper who uses nothing but power.

00:43:51.000 And that's an unbelievably dangerous claim.

00:43:54.000 proposition 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.

00:44:22.000 And none of those stories work.

00:44:24.000 And the story that's put forward in the biblical corpus is that sacrifice is the basis of not only community, but maturity and meaning.

00:44:33.000 And I can't see any way that that's wrong.

00:44:36.000 You know, like, I took... I do take what I do very seriously, you know.

00:44:43.000 There 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.

00:44:51.000 I only left sentences that I could not dispute.

00:44:55.000 You 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.

00:45:25.000 I just, I don't know what's going to happen.

00:45:27.000 Maybe 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. 1.00

00:45:34.000 I really believe that.

00:45:36.000 I think that the argument can be made unassailably that community is based on sacrifice and that the human relationship to existence is a relationship.

00:45:49.000 Right, and I think that, you know, that point, it's really fascinating.

00:45:52.000 I know that so many people have asked you before about your personal belief system.

00:45:55.000 What is it you believe?

00:45:57.000 Do you believe in God?

00:45:57.000 Are you a Christian?

00:45:58.000 And the argument that I've always made when people ask why I believe in God is that that phraseology is just wrong in its essence.

00:46:09.000 I don't believe in God in the same way that I believe in a tautology like 2 plus 2 equals 4 or something.

00:46:14.000 That's not the way that you interact with God.

00:46:16.000 The way that you interact with the world is the way that you interact with God.

00:46:20.000 You live, what I've said before is, I don't believe in God, I live in God.

00:46:23.000 And the truth is, even most of the people who don't believe in God live in God.

00:46:26.000 Meaning, they live a set of premises.

00:46:28.000 In their lives that are godly premises and cannot exist absent the premise of God.

00:46:33.000 As opposed to the sort of Laplace argument that God is a hypothesis of which there's no necessity.

00:46:38.000 It's precisely the opposite.

00:46:39.000 It's the only hypothesis that's necessary.

00:46:41.000 Because once you have a God, then the idea that there is a structure to the universe that is worth exploring.

00:46:47.000 The idea that your choices matter.

00:46:48.000 That there's a meaning in life.

00:46:49.000 That there's something that's actually worth pursuing.

00:46:52.000 Those are literal definitions of God, as far as I'm concerned.

00:46:55.000 Right?

00:46:56.000 And I think you're absolutely right.

00:46:57.000 Like, we've made the huge mistake in the West.

00:46:59.000 This is a massive mistake.

00:47:01.000 And it's a consequence of a shallow and naive rationalism that belief is to be defined propositionally.

00:47:10.000 It's like, no!

00:47:12.000 The theological belief is what you stake not your life on.

00:47:16.000 That's not enough.

00:47:18.000 What you believe theologically is what you stake your soul on.

00:47:22.000 And you might say, well, you know, why soul and not life?

00:47:25.000 Because isn't life enough?

00:47:26.000 It's like, no, because there are things that you'll stake your soul on that you would die for.

00:47:32.000 So when you'll die for your children, for example.

00:47:35.000 And so, well, how can that be?

00:47:36.000 How can anything be more important to you than your life?

00:47:39.000 Well, what is it that's more important than your life?

00:47:41.000 Well, how about the divine is what's more important to you than your life?

00:47:46.000 And that's a definition.

00:47:47.000 And one of the things I do in the book, insistently, is to point out we've been arguing about the wrong thing.

00:47:53.000 And this goes for the New Atheists double, even. 0.96

00:47:57.000 You know, God is an old man with a beard in the sky. 0.95

00:48:00.000 It's like, no, there's nothing that points to that in the biblical stories.

00:48:04.000 That's a complete bloody fabrication.

00:48:06.000 It's the straw man argument of the worst kind.

00:48:10.000 As you pointed out, for example, when push comes to shove in the biblical stories, the authors insist that God is fundamentally ineffable.

00:48:19.000 Right?

00:48:19.000 Beyond definition.

00:48:20.000 And that's why Moses, who's a great prophet, can only get a glimpse of him.

00:48:24.000 And then you can see, well, God is reflected in these multiple characterizations, but he's hardly reduced to that.

00:48:31.000 And 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. 0.98

00:48:42.000 It's so pathetic. 0.99

00:48:43.000 Those texts are insanely deep. 0.94

00:48:46.000 And 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.

00:49:02.000 I tied that into Christ's revelation of himself as the bronze serpent in the desert, which is an insane association, right?

00:49:11.000 It makes no sense.

00:49:13.000 It spans 3,000 years.

00:49:15.000 It comes out of the blue, and it's dead on point.

00:49:19.000 It's dead on point.

00:49:20.000 And I defy anyone to explain how that came about, to read the explanation.

00:49:27.000 The explanation is something like you need to confront what terrifies you in order to thrive.

00:49:34.000 And 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. 0.88

00:49:45.000 Like, it's the ultimate tragedy.

00:49:47.000 And so, Christ portrays himself as the bronze serpent in the desert, because the details of his life involve everything that people are terrified of.

00:49:56.000 And the insistence is, if you're willing to voluntarily confront that, God walks with you.

00:50:02.000 And I think that's right!

00:50:05.000 What's the alternative, Ben?

00:50:07.000 You get stronger by turning away from things? 1.00

00:50:11.000 That's a stupid theory! 1.00

00:50:14.000 No one believes that. 1.00

00:50:15.000 And all the clinical evidence suggests the opposite.

00:50:18.000 You get stronger by adopting maximal responsibility with open arms.

00:50:25.000 Right?

00:50:25.000 And that's a sacrificial process.

00:50:28.000 And 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...

00:50:40.000 and 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.

00:50:51.000 Well, 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.

00:51:02.000 Well, I guess we'll see when I publish it, because all my mistakes will be public, but I couldn't break it.

00:51:08.000 And it's very exciting.

00:51:09.000 It's been a ridiculously exciting endeavor.

00:51:12.000 So, after having spent all this time with the biblical text, who is the character who you find your heart with the most?

00:51:19.000 Not God.

00:51:20.000 Everybody else.

00:51:21.000 You've gone through a wide variety of these characters.

00:51:23.000 Who do you see yourself in, or who do you sympathize with the most, or whose story do you find yourself drawn back to?

00:51:30.000 Maybe Jonah.

00:51:33.000 Maybe Jonah, you know, because Jonah gets swallowed by hell because he refuses the call of his conscience.

00:51:40.000 And 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.

00:51:55.000 You know, even though if you speak the words of truth that you're called upon to speak, that may endanger you.

00:52:03.000 But remaining silent in the face of a divine command is even more dangerous.

00:52:09.000 And there may be times in your life where you have to pick between competing dangers.

00:52:14.000 You know, there's no safe pathway forward.

00:52:16.000 Often, if you're compelled to speak, that's the situation.

00:52:20.000 But the story of Jonah indicates very clearly that Here's what it indicates, Ben, and this is an axiom of religious faith.

00:52:30.000 There's nothing better possible than what will happen to you if you tell the truth.

00:52:37.000 It doesn't matter how it looks to you.

00:52:40.000 And that's a terrifying thing, you know, because obviously you get in trouble for telling the truth.

00:52:44.000 That's why everyone lies.

00:52:46.000 But there's an insistence, especially in the story of Jonah, which is you don't see everything.

00:52:53.000 You see the same thing in the story of Job.

00:52:55.000 You don't see everything.

00:52:56.000 Your purview of perception is not broad enough.

00:53:00.000 If you understood, you would see that there is no order better than the order you call forth with the words of truth.

00:53:07.000 And I believe that.

00:53:08.000 And how could it be otherwise?

00:53:09.000 What are you going to do?

00:53:10.000 You're going to make the proposition that you bring about the order that is good in the world by lying. 0.52

00:53:16.000 Who the hell believes that?

00:53:18.000 No one believes that. 0.65

00:53:19.000 They might think they can get away with it.

00:53:21.000 They might use it for manipulative purposes.

00:53:24.000 But no one thinks that the path to paradise is paved with lies.

00:53:30.000 Even the worst criminal knows that that's a fundamental misapprehension of the structure of existence itself.

00:53:39.000 If you believed that, it would destroy you, if you truly believed it.

00:53:42.000 You 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?

00:53:56.000 Nineveh, which is in Assyria, is an enemy to the Israelite kingdom at this time.

00:54:00.000 Right, right.

00:54:01.000 And so what Jonah is being told by God is you need to go and have these people repent,

00:54:05.000 even though the likely outcome of their repentance is going to be their mastery of the people you live with.

00:54:12.000 I mean, it's gonna be bad for you.

00:54:13.000 It's gonna be bad for your nation.

00:54:14.000 You still have an obligation to go and repent.

00:54:17.000 This is why Jews read Jonah on Yom Kippur, this on the day of atonement, 1.00

00:54:21.000 because the idea is that everyone is worthy of atonement, even people who are gonna go on to do bad things,

00:54:26.000 that atonement is a continual process and that atonement is in fact such a high goal

00:54:33.000 that we don't even look beyond what happens beyond the atonement.

00:54:37.000 Like once the atonement is done, you've atoned, you're pure in that moment.

00:54:41.000 What happens next?

00:54:42.000 You know, that's up to you.

00:54:43.000 And so he rejects the call because he doesn't want, He doesn't want the people to atone.

00:54:49.000 It's not that he believes that he's going to be killed by the people in this area.

00:54:52.000 He believes they're actually going to do the thing.

00:54:54.000 And the idea is the future is not in your hands.

00:54:56.000 All that's in your hands is the thing that you have to do that's right in front of you that God instructs you to do.

00:55:01.000 You can't control what's going to happen five years from now.

00:55:03.000 You can't control the thing that is right in front of you today.

00:55:06.000 Or you do control it insofar as you can by uttering the words that your conscience compels you to utter.

00:55:13.000 That's the best you've got.

00:55:16.000 There's no up above that.

00:55:18.000 There's no rationalistic manipulations that are strategic on your part that's going to pave a pathway forward better than just the stark truth.

00:55:28.000 And so and like, yes, that's right.

00:55:32.000 The stories were fun.

00:55:33.000 It's so fun to take apart the story of Jonah.

00:55:35.000 It's such a complex story.

00:55:36.000 It's very, very comical too.

00:55:38.000 And it's very realistic.

00:55:39.000 I mean, the biblical stories are hyper-realistic.

00:55:42.000 It's very interesting to go through them.

00:55:45.000 So yeah, that's very exciting, Ben.

00:55:47.000 And what we're producing with The Daily Wire, that's very exciting.

00:55:50.000 And the Gospel Seminar, that's a ridiculous opportunity.

00:55:52.000 And we launched this online university two weeks ago, Peterson Academy.

00:55:58.000 And we've got 25,000 students already.

00:56:00.000 And so that's like...

00:56:03.000 And people are happy with it by all appearances.

00:56:06.000 And so all the courses come out real soon.

00:56:08.000 And now we have enough capital to, we're going to find the best professors in the world on an ongoing basis.

00:56:14.000 And we're going to film them at the highest possible quality.

00:56:18.000 And we're going to distribute that at the lowest cost and educate everyone who wants to be educated.

00:56:24.000 So that's fun.

00:56:26.000 That's ridiculously entertaining.

00:56:28.000 I mean, You know, 15 years ago, is this what you imagined that you would be doing?

00:56:33.000 I mean, it is kind of amazing, the trajectory from teaching psychology in Canada to doing what you're doing today.

00:56:40.000 Well, Ben, I knew, like, students reacted to the material I was teaching in a way that was very unlike their reaction to most courses.

00:56:51.000 And 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.

00:57:00.000 And of course, that eventually happened.

00:57:02.000 But I knew, I knew that What I was describing had a revelatory quality.

00:57:10.000 Now, I'm not attributing that to me.

00:57:12.000 You 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.

00:57:20.000 It's very hard to understand unless you know what he's talking about.

00:57:23.000 And what he's talking about specifically in that essay is the danger of attributing the power of archetypal narrative to yourself.

00:57:32.000 Right?

00:57:33.000 And 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.

00:57:46.000 And it's a very strict warning.

00:57:48.000 And so I was always very careful to understand that there's a very big difference between the messenger, let's say, and the message.

00:57:55.000 And the fact that I was unveiling the deeper meanings of these archetypal stories, The power in that wasn't me.

00:58:07.000 But 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.

00:58:20.000 Because you can't delve into those stories without encountering the burning bush.

00:58:26.000 You can't.

00:58:28.000 And there's nothing that reveals itself with more might than, as Solzhenitsyn said, than a single word of the truth.

00:58:35.000 And so, I could see that.

00:58:39.000 You know, the typical student comment in my courses was, this course changed everything I thought.

00:58:45.000 Right?

00:58:45.000 And that's a hell of a... And then it wasn't the course, it was the walking through the archetypal narratives.

00:58:52.000 And that's what they're supposed to do.

00:58:54.000 Now we've forgotten them because we misapprehend them in the way that you described.

00:58:58.000 We think that they're propositional hypotheses.

00:59:02.000 They're not!

00:59:04.000 They're descriptions of the structure through which we see the world.

00:59:08.000 And so, and now I think we can consciously understand that in a way that wasn't possible before.

00:59:13.000 And that's a ridiculously exciting thing to participate in.

00:59:17.000 So Jordan, I would be remiss if I didn't get the update on the Canadian attempt to come after you using the mechanisms of DEI law.

00:59:26.000 I know, I know.

00:59:27.000 So what is the latest update on the- Well, my lawyers are in touch with the college.

00:59:34.000 The 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.

00:59:41.000 So I don't know who the hell to contact.

00:59:43.000 And 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.

00:59:56.000 And 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.

01:00:09.000 You 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. 0.99

01:00:33.000 But 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.

01:00:45.000 And 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. 0.99

01:00:59.000 So, 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. 1.00

01:01:11.000 I don't need that trouble and harassment and all the expense and idiocy that goes along with it. 0.98

01:01:16.000 But I think I have a moral obligation to see the show out to its end, whatever that might be.

01:01:24.000 I 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.

01:01:32.000 That's for sure.

01:01:34.000 So we'll see, Ben.

01:01:36.000 Maybe I'll get Matt Walsh to re-educate me.

01:01:39.000 He's a DEI certified whatever the hell you are when you're DEI certified.

01:01:44.000 And so It's true.

01:01:47.000 It's true.

01:01:47.000 He has the qualifications.

01:01:49.000 He does.

01:01:50.000 He has all the qualifications.

01:01:51.000 Yeah, and so if he continues along this path, we will have to exile him to Canada.

01:01:54.000 But Jordan, it's always great to see you.

01:01:56.000 I can't wait to read the new book.

01:01:58.000 Obviously, 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.

01:02:05.000 Amazing stuff.

01:02:05.000 Jordan, great to see you.

01:02:07.000 Yeah, good to see you, Ben.

01:02:08.000 Maybe I'll send you a copy of the book if you don't mind.

01:02:10.000 That sounds great.

01:02:11.000 Look forward to it.

01:02:21.000 Associate producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick.

01:02:24.000 Production intern is Sarah Steele.

01:02:26.000 Editing is by Jeff Tomlin.

01:02:28.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

01:02:29.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

01:02:31.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

01:02:34.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:02:37.000 Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

01:02:39.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

01:02:41.000 Executive producer Justin Siegel.

01:02:43.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.

01:02:45.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - September 01, 2024

How To Find Beauty In Suffering | Jordan Peterson

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