The Ben Shapiro Show - We Who Wrestle With God | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

00:00:00.000 It's more definitive in the Old Testament accounts that whatever God is is beyond categorization.

00:00:08.000 God is outside our category structures.

00:00:11.000 Now, does that make him real?

00:00:12.000 Well, I would say God is hyper-real.

00:00:15.000 God is the reality upon which all reality depends.

00:00:18.000 That's a different kind of category.

00:00:20.000 It's an atheist game.

00:00:22.000 Is God real like a table is real?

00:00:24.000 Well, the insistence of the entire biblical library is that God is not real in that manner.

00:00:30.000 God is outside of time and space, for example, and all material objects are inside of time and space.

00:00:36.000 And so God is a reflection of the substrate that makes time and space themselves possible.

00:00:42.000 This week on the Sunday Special, I'm excited to welcome back Dr.

00:00:45.000 Jordan B. Peterson to discuss his latest book, We Who Wrestle with God.

00:00:48.000 Jordan has lectured on biblical symbolism for years, including with us here at The Daily Wire in his groundbreaking seminars on Exodus and the Gospels.

00:00:55.000 After the success of his previous bestsellers, Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, and Beyond Order, Jordan has at last put pen to paper to canvas the timeless lessons of the Old Testament.

00:01:04.000 In today's episode, Jordan describes what it means for man to be created in the image of God and what the Bible can tell us about our capacity for both tremendous sacrifice and tremendous folly.

00:01:11.000 He also reflects on his writing process and why he believes it is good enough to conduct himself as if God exists.

00:01:17.000 In his book, Jordan works through some of the most profound questions of all time.

00:01:20.000 We Who Wrestle with God is available everywhere on November 19th.

00:01:23.000 Stay tuned.

00:01:24.000 Don't miss this episode of the Sunday Special with the inimitable Dr.

00:01:26.000 Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

00:01:27.000 Well, Jordan, it's great to see you.

00:01:37.000 Great to see you, Ben.

00:01:38.000 Thanks for the invitation.

00:01:39.000 Yes, let's talk about your brand new book.

00:01:41.000 Obviously, it's burning up the bestseller charts already.

00:01:43.000 Yeah, that's the one.

00:01:44.000 That'd be the big one.

00:01:45.000 Yeah, I'm very happy about it.

00:01:46.000 I'm also perplexed.

00:01:49.000 So tell me about your perplexion.

00:01:52.000 Well, I don't know what people are going to make of it because...

00:01:57.000 See, I tried to do two things in the book.

00:02:00.000 I tried to make a case that was scientifically and theologically unassailable.

00:02:05.000 And, you know, people might be skeptical about whether or not, let's say, psychology qualifies as a science, but it does if you triangulate with enough precision.

00:02:17.000 So, the arguments that I'm making, I think, are, what would you say, they're viable arguments.

00:02:23.000 At a psychopharmacological basis, so with regards to brain chemistry and brain function, and also with what we know about perception and clinical practice.

00:02:36.000 And then they also make sense from a literary and religious scholarship perspective.

00:02:44.000 Now, that's what I think.

00:02:45.000 That's a lot of fields to cover and refer to, you know, and so am I a master in all those areas?

00:02:52.000 Well...

00:02:53.000 I suppose in each of those areas there are people who know more than me.

00:02:57.000 But across the areas, I'm not doing too bad.

00:03:00.000 And so I figured out some things that are very fundamental, I think.

00:03:05.000 And we'll see how people respond.

00:03:08.000 Like I figured out, for example, that...

00:03:13.000 I make a very strong case that it is now an unassailable fact that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story.

00:03:22.000 That's what a story is.

00:03:24.000 A story is actually a description of a weighting function.

00:03:27.000 You know how in large language models the relationship between words is specified statistically?

00:03:35.000 There's weightings.

00:03:37.000 That define the relationship between letters and words and concepts and sentences and paragraphs and A story is a description of the weighting function that someone applies to the facts.

00:03:49.000 So, for example, when you go to a movie and you see the protagonist in action, you watch how he attends to things and you watch how he conducts himself and you infer from that the manner in which he weights the facts that are presented to him.

00:04:06.000 And in consequence, you can internalize the story and then you can see the world that way.

00:04:12.000 And that's why that also accounts, by the way, for why we're so interested in narratives, right?

00:04:18.000 So the problem with the empiricist perspective, technically, is that the empiricists essentially presume that all facts are to be weighted equally, right?

00:04:29.000 And that's a value-free consideration of the facts at hand, but that's not viable for It's not viable psychologically.

00:04:40.000 Some things have to be more important to you than other things because otherwise you drown in the complexity of all of those facts.

00:04:48.000 So, I mean, just as a family man, you pay more attention to your child, for example, than someone else's child.

00:04:54.000 Well, that's a waiting function.

00:04:56.000 So, okay, so the first part of it is we see the world through a story, and I think that's incontrovertible.

00:05:02.000 I think, Ben, that's actually why we're in a culture war, most fundamentally, because there has been converging evidence from about six disciplines that Not least the literary theorists in France, the dread postmodernists, that have insisted that we see the world through a story.

00:05:20.000 Now, where they went wrong is that The story that is being put forth as canonical is one of power.

00:05:28.000 That's certainly the case for the mad Marxists and the French postmodernists fit into that category.

00:05:34.000 Or hedonic self-gratification or nihilistic collapse.

00:05:39.000 And all of those are self-defeating.

00:05:44.000 The proper story is one of sacrifice.

00:05:48.000 And I know why that is, too.

00:05:51.000 And I think I explained it.

00:05:53.000 There's two reasons that the fundamental story is one of sacrifice.

00:05:56.000 The first is that whenever you attend to one thing, you sacrifice everything else.

00:06:02.000 So every act of perception is a sacrifice.

00:06:06.000 That's why, for example, in the Christian, what would you say, conceptual universe, that the reality itself is Founded on sacrifice.

00:06:20.000 It's a very strange concept, right?

00:06:22.000 That's John making the case that Christ's sacrifice is identical to the word at the beginning of time, but the psychological significance of that proposition is that reality itself is predicated on sacrifice, and because attention is sacrificial, there's something about that that's deeply correct, but there's more than that.

00:06:43.000 There's no difference between work and sacrifice, because work is the sacrifice of the present to the future, and the sacrifice of the narrow self to the community.

00:06:57.000 And so you can imagine that for reality to unfold properly, and that would be the reality that is good or very good, as is portrayed, say, in Genesis 1, the appropriate sacrifice has to be made.

00:07:10.000 Sacrifices have to be made.

00:07:11.000 And then you can envision the biblical library from beginning to end as an analysis of sacrifice.

00:07:18.000 And I think that's all correct.

00:07:20.000 And so that's pretty damn terrifying because...

00:07:25.000 I don't know what it means for that to be correct.

00:07:27.000 I don't know what it means for there to be a convergence between neuroscience and our deepest theological presuppositions.

00:07:35.000 And I don't know what it would mean if people actually started to understand that the proper story is sacrificial.

00:07:41.000 But look, I'll just close with this, Ben.

00:07:44.000 Look, the community is founded on sacrifice.

00:07:49.000 Okay, justify that.

00:07:51.000 Well, if it's all about me...

00:07:54.000 In the most narrow way, then there's no community, right?

00:07:58.000 There's only the immediate gratification of my whims.

00:08:01.000 So I devolve into a set of whims and I have to impose those whims on other people using power because they're not going to cooperate voluntarily if it's all about me.

00:08:11.000 Now, to the degree that I establish a voluntarily chosen and reciprocal community around me, then I'm sacrificing my narrow aims to that higher end.

00:08:24.000 Obviously, right?

00:08:26.000 I mean, it seems to me that once you understand these things, this is another thing that's very strange, is once you understand these things, they attain the much-vaunted status of self-evident.

00:08:41.000 We'll see what people think.

00:08:43.000 I ran it by Jonathan Paggio, and he's terrified with regards to some of the things that I said theologically, and so I'm sure I misstepped, you know, in various places, but...

00:08:55.000 We'll see.

00:08:56.000 I mean, the book certainly opens a bunch of these conversations, and certainly what you're talking about in terms of sacrifice and the story that we tell about our lives, that's true, because the place where you most obviously make your first sacrifice is in marriage, where you sacrifice your interest to the interest of something larger,

00:09:12.000 and then the place where you make your second sacrifice is when you start to have children, and a society that refuses to recognize that it's not a giant surprise, that a society that refuses to Yeah, well, and you might say, well, what's wrong with that?

00:09:39.000 Why can't I pursue my own ends?

00:09:42.000 And There's a variety of answers to that.

00:09:45.000 The first answer is, what do you mean by your ends?

00:09:49.000 Because actually what you're really proposing is that your immediate fragmented whims become the ruler of the world.

00:09:58.000 Right?

00:09:59.000 Because the my you're referring to is what you want now.

00:10:03.000 And it's sort of what you want now regardless of the consequences for your future self or for other people.

00:10:10.000 I mean, the whole issue of what I want begs the question of what is meant by I. What is this sovereign, self-evident I that in principle is...

00:10:21.000 What would you say is the highest possible source of value?

00:10:26.000 Well, that's by no means obvious.

00:10:28.000 You know, we're an internal war of competing motivations, and each of those motivations can emerge as dominant at any moment.

00:10:36.000 That's what you see in the behavior of two-year-olds, for example.

00:10:40.000 And to say that each emergent whim should be triumphant is to doom yourself to the same fate that a two-year-old who never grew up would be doomed to.

00:10:50.000 So what The simplest explanation for why your own desire can't be paramount is that that isn't a playable game.

00:11:01.000 Everyone will run away from you.

00:11:03.000 You will end up isolated and alone.

00:11:05.000 And a society that facilitates that will become corrupt and unmanageable overnight.

00:11:12.000 And I just don't see any way out of that.

00:11:14.000 One of the things I've really come to understand, Ben, is that, I think, is that I hate to get political, and I'll try to avoid that as much as possible, but I think part of the reason that a radical progressivism is eternal is because there's no difference between rule by whim and power and immaturity from a psychophysiological perspective.

00:11:41.000 They're the same thing.

00:11:43.000 And so any immaturity is going to find its political expression.

00:11:48.000 I mean, in many ways, that's what you see in the story of Exodus with the worship of the golden calf, right?

00:11:53.000 What happens when Moses departs from the Israelite polity, right?

00:11:59.000 And they have the habits of slaves.

00:12:01.000 And all that's left for the Israelites to attend to is the political voice. 0.81

00:12:07.000 That's Aaron.

00:12:08.000 And the political voice, without a connection to the divine, let's say, without being subordinate to what's properly highest, reverts to a A mirrored populism.

00:12:21.000 And just offers the Israelites, let's say, what they want. 0.87

00:12:25.000 But that isn't what happens.

00:12:27.000 What happens is the worst of the Israelites rise to the top and demand their immediate gratification. 1.00

00:12:34.000 And the Israelites end up partying naked. 0.98

00:12:38.000 Partying naked in the desert in the midst of an orgy in a manner that makes them, you know, contemptible to their enemies.

00:12:45.000 And if that doesn't echo for you with regards to the modern situation, you're not really thinking very hard.

00:12:52.000 And I think that's eternally the case, is that it makes perfect sense structurally and psychophysiologically, because if the If the form of order that unites us most thoroughly collapses, so that would be something equivalent to the disappearance or the death of God, then what happens is a war between competing underlying motivational states emerges.

00:13:18.000 And one of the things I've been thinking through, I'd like your opinion about this, is that so...

00:13:24.000 What is to be expected in the aftermath of the Nietzschean death of God?

00:13:29.000 What's to be expected psychologically?

00:13:31.000 Well, the most dominant subordinate motivational forces will vie for supremacy.

00:13:38.000 And that would be sexuality.

00:13:39.000 So now we have Freud.

00:13:41.000 Or power.

00:13:42.000 And that would give us, say, Nietzsche or even Alfred Adler to some degree.

00:13:46.000 Or the post-modernists or the Marxists.

00:13:49.000 Hedonism and power go hand in hand.

00:13:51.000 Because if you're a hedonist, you have to use power.

00:13:54.000 Because you can't get people to cooperate voluntarily.

00:13:56.000 Or the collapse of everything into a nihilistic mess.

00:14:00.000 And I also don't see any...

00:14:03.000 Like, how else could it possibly work?

00:14:05.000 If you lose the highest uniting value, things could collapse utterly.

00:14:09.000 And that's where you get a kind of nihilistic depression.

00:14:12.000 Or the next most powerful forces will emerge.

00:14:15.000 And I think it's inevitable that those are something like hedonistic sexuality and power.

00:14:21.000 I mean, what else?

00:14:22.000 What the hell else would rule when you remove, let's say, sovereign self-sacrifice as the highest order principle?

00:14:30.000 Yeah, I mean, that's all of what you're saying.

00:14:32.000 And as you say in the book, a lot of these are encapsulated in biblical stories.

00:14:36.000 I mean, that's sort of the story of the Tower of Babel versus the story of the society before Noah.

00:14:41.000 Versus the family-centered society that God chooses with Noah.

00:14:44.000 You basically have three competing stories.

00:14:46.000 You have sort of the hedonistic individualism of the society of all against all, in which sexual impropriety and robbery are common, and God decides to blot that out, and then he decides to uplift Noah.

00:14:57.000 Or you have the Tower of Babel, which is power consolidated top-down to build the great big thing, and God says, this is actually evil.

00:15:05.000 This is wrong.

00:15:05.000 It needs to be stopped.

00:15:06.000 And so the only alternative to that has always been and will always be family structure, which, as we discussed at the very beginning, what you were saying, that's the most sacrificial thing that you do, is the stuff that you do for your family.

00:15:16.000 It's where you make the biggest sacrifices.

00:15:18.000 It's the place where you subsume your own personal interests in favor of other people.

00:15:23.000 And God understands that, which is why the story of Genesis really is a family story more than any other type of story.

00:15:29.000 Well, you also laid out a remarkable...

00:15:33.000 narrative accomplishment by the editors of the biblical story because The story starts out, of course, with creation and the establishment of man and woman, and then the fall, and the fall is a consequence of overweening pride and overreach, right?

00:15:49.000 Adam and Eve bite off more than they can chew, and suffering enters the world, and that's very much worth contemplating because the degree to which suffering characterizes existence as a consequence of prideful overreach is an open question.

00:16:04.000 No, I mean, because we're mortal and fragile, a certain degree of suffering seems built into the structure of existence.

00:16:11.000 It's the finite against the infinite, that conundrum.

00:16:15.000 But true suffering has this hellish aspect that you can only attain if you bring it on yourself.

00:16:21.000 And the best way to do that is through pride.

00:16:23.000 And I think the story of Adam and Eve, the fall of Adam and Eve, actually details out the The particularities of the prideful sin that each sex is most prone to. 0.82

00:16:34.000 So it's a kind of hyper-compassionate all-inclusion on the part of Eve, and it's a part of pathological attempt to impress the other on the part of Adam, cowardly, and then to blame.

00:16:46.000 And that produces this collapse of paradise.

00:16:50.000 Then you get the establishment of these two sacrificial patterns in the story of Cain and Abel, Which is brilliant, brilliant, immediate follow-up from a narrative perspective.

00:17:00.000 And then, as you said, you get a story of the forms of society that are likely to prevail if prideful overreach is the name of the game.

00:17:11.000 You get a collapse into chaos, and that's clearly the story of Noah.

00:17:15.000 That's all of its symbolic associations.

00:17:17.000 Or you get the rise of the all-seeing eye of Sauron, and that's the Tower of Babel.

00:17:22.000 And the consequence of the rise of the totalitarian state is that words themselves lose their meaning.

00:17:29.000 And we're certainly at that point in our society because we can't even agree on what constitutes a man and a woman, which is, I think, by the way, the most fundamental perceptual distinction.

00:17:39.000 I think it might be the distinction upon which all other distinctions rest.

00:17:43.000 It's certainly the case from the symbolic perspective.

00:17:46.000 Well then, in keeping with your analysis, the story of Abraham is presented as the alternative pathway to the flood and the Tower of Babel.

00:17:57.000 And Abraham is the story of upward spiraling sacrificial offering, right? 0.72

00:18:03.000 And so you can say, well, at each stage of your life, you're in a new narrative.

00:18:09.000 So it's a new episode.

00:18:11.000 And each episode concludes with something approximating a psychological transformation, so you become more than you were.

00:18:19.000 And then the new episode is marked by a re-establishment of your sacrificial relationship with what's highest.

00:18:26.000 That's what Abraham does when he builds the altar.

00:18:29.000 Every time he moves into the space of a new adventure, he...

00:18:34.000 Reaffirms his commitment to the highest possible sovereign principle.

00:18:39.000 In Abraham's case, it's really construed as something approximating the spirit of adventure.

00:18:44.000 And the consequence of that is God offers him a bargain.

00:18:48.000 God comes to Abraham with a deal. 0.64

00:18:51.000 That's the covenant.

00:18:51.000 It's a really good deal.

00:18:53.000 And it's so cool because I think it works psychologically again.

00:18:58.000 God tells Abraham that if he leaves his zone of comfort...

00:19:03.000 Then he will be a blessing to himself.

00:19:06.000 So that's a good deal because people seldom are.

00:19:09.000 He will have a name that's renowned among his peers and justifiably so.

00:19:15.000 So that's a good deal because we want to be known.

00:19:19.000 That's not exactly right.

00:19:20.000 We want to develop a stellar reputation.

00:19:24.000 That's the treasure that's stacked up in heaven by the way that the gospels refer to, right?

00:19:29.000 Because it's the best place to store your wealth is in your reputation, clearly.

00:19:36.000 He'll establish something permanent, in Abraham's case, a dynasty, so now he becomes the pattern of fatherhood itself, and he'll do that in a way that's of benefit to everyone else.

00:19:47.000 So it's a great deal.

00:19:48.000 Way better than the zero-sum Malthusian nightmare that the apocalypse mongers foist on us.

00:19:54.000 And so then Abraham does that.

00:19:56.000 He swears to do that.

00:19:57.000 And at each stage of his development, he reaffirms his commitment to that spirit of adventure.

00:20:02.000 And then he transforms himself through a process of sacrifice.

00:20:06.000 And what that means is that every time your personality expands, because you have a new opportunity, you have to leave things that aren't worthy behind.

00:20:16.000 In the dust, so to speak, right?

00:20:18.000 And so Abraham does that.

00:20:19.000 He does it so thoroughly, he literally becomes a new person because he gets a new name.

00:20:25.000 And then he's called upon to offer his son to God.

00:20:28.000 And that's the stumbling point for, say, most skeptical atheist readers.

00:20:32.000 But I also understand what that means, I think, because...

00:20:36.000 Mostly because I'm thinking about Michelangelo's paeta.

00:20:40.000 You know, there's this tremendous statue in St.

00:20:43.000 Peter's that Michelangelo carved when he was like 23.

00:20:47.000 And it shows Mary holding the broken body of her adult son in her arms.

00:20:53.000 And I would say offering him to the world.

00:20:57.000 Or to God, offering Him to the highest.

00:21:00.000 And that is what you do if you have children, if you have any sense, right?

00:21:05.000 You sacrifice your children, let's say, their whims, their immediate desires, all of that, even your relationship with them, their dependency on you, you sacrifice that to the highest possible aim.

00:21:18.000 And If you do that properly, you get them back.

00:21:23.000 And that's also true, because if you encourage your children to go out into the world in this Abrahamic way, then they become competent and stable, and they're appreciative of you, and once they're adults, they can establish a Long-lasting friendship at that point.

00:21:41.000 It's more than friendship, but it's at least that.

00:21:44.000 And so, Abraham, he's the archetypal individual, and his pathway forward, him and Sarai, that's definitely offered as the alternative to the catastrophe of the flood and the all-seeing eye of the state.

00:22:00.000 The coherence of the biblical story is so deep that it's It's spellbinding and absurd.

00:22:10.000 It's surreal.

00:22:11.000 Folks, you know what the radical left will never understand?

00:22:13.000 The profound and unshakable bond between Christians and Jews in the United States. 1.00

00:22:17.000 While the secular left pushes their anti-religious agenda, religious Christians and Jews have stood together, defending our shared values and religious liberties.

00:22:23.000 That's why I'm proud to partner with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

00:22:27.000 For over 40 years, they've been doing something remarkable, building bridges between our communities through faith, shared values, and mutual respect.

00:22:33.000 And the fellowship doesn't just talk, they act.

00:22:35.000 Right now, they're on the ground providing real help to vulnerable Jewish families and elderly around the globe.

00:22:40.000 We're talking about food, medical care, emergency assistance, and security to those who need it most.

00:22:43.000 Look, as someone who spent years talking about Judeo-Christian values, I can tell you, this organization represents exactly what makes our alliance so powerful.

00:22:50.000 It's about religious Christians and Jews coming together to do what our faiths command, helping people in need.

00:22:55.000 If you want to be part of this incredible mission, visit benforthefellowship.org.

00:22:58.000 That's benforthefellowship.org.

00:23:01.000 There are people suffering on the ground right now in the Holy Land.

00:23:03.000 The Fellowship is doing amazing work helping them out.

00:23:05.000 Now you can help out as well.

00:23:07.000 Head on over to benforthefellowship.org.

00:23:09.000 Again, that's benforthefellowship.org, doing amazing work in the Holy Land and all over the world.

00:23:14.000 God bless and thank you.

00:23:16.000 Jordan, obviously you wrote Maps and Meaning.

00:23:18.000 You talked before about how Maps and Meaning was a very difficult book to write.

00:23:21.000 I've read Maps and Meaning.

00:23:22.000 It's a very dense book.

00:23:24.000 It's not the easiest book to read.

00:23:26.000 You've also written, obviously, huge bestsellers like 12 Rules for Life.

00:23:29.000 Where does this one stack up in terms of the writing process?

00:23:33.000 Well, the writing was much easier, Ben.

00:23:38.000 Because I've done so much of it now and because also I was writing this book while I was lecturing continually and on a lecture tour and the ideas flowed much more easily.

00:23:49.000 I would say in terms of difficulty this book is probably midway between Maps of Meaning and Twelve Rules.

00:23:54.000 It's not a simple read but Well, it's as simple as I could make it, you know?

00:24:00.000 And I would also say the same about Maps of Meaning.

00:24:02.000 Like, I wasn't trying to be opaque.

00:24:04.000 I was trying to figure something out.

00:24:06.000 Now, with 12 Rules and Beyond Order, I was more explaining something than trying to figure it out, although there was some of the latter in it.

00:24:14.000 With this book, it's sort of halfway between.

00:24:16.000 You know, I was definitely entering new territory, much deeper analysis of many more biblical stories.

00:24:24.000 And so there's a fair bit of investigation on my end there, and that tilts it more towards the academic direction.

00:24:32.000 But I think that, like 12 Rules or Beyond Order, the book is extremely practical.

00:24:39.000 Like, if you understand the things that are in We Who Wrestle with God, it'll change your life.

00:24:44.000 And I don't say that lightly, and I also say it knowing it's true, because Hundreds and hundreds of students at Harvard and the University of Toronto told me year after year for 20 years, informally and formally in the course evaluations, that the Maps of Meaning course changed their entire life.

00:25:06.000 It changed the way they looked at everything.

00:25:08.000 And then I also know from the tours and the thousands of people that I've spoken to, or even tens of thousands of people, that The Twelve Rules for Life and Beyond Order have had the same effect.

00:25:20.000 And, like, I think this is a...

00:25:22.000 Well, this is a deeper book in that it unites, as I said, it unites modern science with the deepest of our theological traditions.

00:25:32.000 If that's true, like, that's a preposterous claim, right?

00:25:36.000 It's really, it's a preposterous claim.

00:25:38.000 But I also think, Ben, like, I think we are on the cusp of something truly new because I think the Enlightenment has come to an end.

00:25:46.000 I think in my wilder moments that that was signified in some ways by my discussion with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

00:25:56.000 And the reason that those discussions happened and the reason that they attracted a certain amount of attention was because there is something new under the sun.

00:26:06.000 And it is that what's new is Our understanding now, our emergent understanding that there's no escaping from the story.

00:26:17.000 So let's talk about that.

00:26:18.000 I mean, those debates were really fascinating because, again, what you hear from sort of the new atheist crowd is that when you talk about truth or when you talk about symbolism, that that's an attempt to avoid the questions that they're asking about the quote-unquote hard science.

00:26:34.000 But that's not really the case that you're making.

00:26:36.000 So why don't you explain for people who missed it?

00:26:39.000 Well, first of all, there is now a hard science of symbolism.

00:26:43.000 The large language models have mapped out the symbolic world.

00:26:47.000 And what they have mapped out is the probability that ideas will co-occur.

00:26:52.000 And what a symbol is, is like a central symbol would be the center point of a network of statistically associated ideas.

00:27:01.000 And then I would say every perception is a network of that sort.

00:27:06.000 So when you perceive an object, you perceive the object in relationship to its embodiment or incarnation of the ideal.

00:27:14.000 So every object is platonic, it's a platonic idea, but it seems to be, it actually seems to be literally the case.

00:27:21.000 This is actually how you perceive.

00:27:23.000 You perceive every pillow, or there's a pillow in this room that I'm looking at, you perceive every pillow as a reflection of the ideal central form of pillow, which is something like an amalgam of its practical function and its objective qualities.

00:27:40.000 It's both of those.

00:27:42.000 And every perception has that element.

00:27:44.000 There's a center and a fringe around every perception.

00:27:48.000 And that's not a matter of opinion.

00:27:51.000 That's how the large language models work.

00:27:54.000 And they've modeled human linguistic cognition far better than anything we've ever created by many orders of magnitude.

00:28:01.000 So we can map out the symbolic world objectively now.

00:28:05.000 But the best way to think about it is just...

00:28:08.000 The symbolic world is the weighting of ideas.

00:28:12.000 So, for example, I use this example in the book.

00:28:16.000 If you hear the word witch, you instantly know witch, w-i-t-c-h. 1.00

00:28:23.000 There are a plethora of images and words that co-occur with that. 0.88

00:28:27.000 Like, it's witch and swamp.

00:28:29.000 It's not witch and glass-enclosed, high-rise penthouse apartment.

00:28:34.000 Now, you could play with that.

00:28:36.000 Like, you could play with the witch representation by having a witch who was witchy in all regards except she lived in a penthouse.

00:28:43.000 You know, and that would be an interesting twist.

00:28:45.000 But you have to stay within the realm of the symbolic representations in order for the portrayal to make sense.

00:28:52.000 And so, and I think I asked one of the world's top neuroscientists flat out.

00:28:59.000 Can I remember his name off the top of my head?

00:29:03.000 Anyways, it'll come to me.

00:29:04.000 I asked him if every perception was a micro-narrative and he said yes.

00:29:09.000 And so that's very interesting.

00:29:11.000 This is revolutionary because, of course, the atheist reductionist materialists like Dawkins assume that there is a self-evident fact level somewhere and that you can reduce everything that's value predicated to this level of incontrovertible self-evident fact.

00:29:29.000 That level doesn't exist.

00:29:31.000 It's interpretation all the way down.

00:29:34.000 Now, The weird thing about that is that, in a sense, that's what the postmodernists have been claiming.

00:29:41.000 But what they got wrong was that that interpretation level itself, the weighting level, also has a structure.

00:29:49.000 And one of the things I tried to tell Dawkins...

00:29:52.000 Was that that's the structure of the meme world.

00:29:56.000 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:29:58.000 Like the world that we've abstracted up in linguistic representation and imagination, it has a structure.

00:30:04.000 That's the Jungian collective unconscious.

00:30:06.000 And that's the consequence of the competition between memes across...

00:30:12.000 Hundreds of thousands of years.

00:30:15.000 And so, one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to Richard Dawkins, and I had spoken with Brett Weinstein in some detail before that, was that Dawkins' meme idea is way more significant than he thinks.

00:30:27.000 But he won't take that step, because if he steps beyond, like he said, a meme is a backwards baseball cap.

00:30:34.000 It's like, Jesus, Richard, really?

00:30:37.000 I mean, come on, give yourself some credit.

00:30:40.000 You're talking about the manner in which abstract representations war for supremacy in the space defined by abstract human cognition.

00:30:48.000 You can do better than backwards baseball cap.

00:30:52.000 You know, I tried to let him know that Mircea Eliade, who's a great historian of religion, has mapped out something like the structure of the war between gods in heaven across multiple cultures.

00:31:04.000 And it's a very stable pattern.

00:31:07.000 You get a polytheistic interpretation of the world.

00:31:11.000 Which is something like the narrative embodiment of different value structures.

00:31:16.000 And then they vie for supremacy.

00:31:18.000 And that probably happens as isolated tribal groups come together in larger civilizations.

00:31:24.000 You know, so there's actual war on the ground.

00:31:26.000 But there's also conceptual war in the space of imagination.

00:31:30.000 And then that tends towards the emergence of a monotheism across time.

00:31:35.000 If the culture manages to unite itself.

00:31:38.000 And then that monotheism has certain properties.

00:31:41.000 Like in Mesopotamia, for example, a god named Marduk rose up out of the realm of polytheistic combat.

00:31:51.000 And Marduk was characterized by eyes all the way around his head.

00:31:55.000 So attention and by the capacity to speak magic words, the words that transform night into day, which is very similar to the conception of Yahweh at the beginning of time.

00:32:07.000 But there's a reason for that.

00:32:09.000 It's that as these underlying value structures vie for supremacy.

00:32:14.000 What emerges as superordinate and stable is structured.

00:32:19.000 And I think the reason for that, Ben, is that imagine that you had to...

00:32:23.000 Imagine that you took the set of all possible playable games and you extracted out what playable meant.

00:32:31.000 Playable would mean something like infinitely iterable, improving as you played it, and voluntarily chosen.

00:32:39.000 Well, that's a very tight set of constraints around what would constitute an acceptable game.

00:32:45.000 And there's no reason to assume that wouldn't reemerge continually as the world of playable games battled What would you say?

00:32:57.000 As battles raged in the world of potentially playable games.

00:33:00.000 It makes perfect sense.

00:33:02.000 Dawkins kind of got excited about that idea near the end of our discussion because we talked about how that might function biologically.

00:33:11.000 So once you establish a story as supreme, then people can compete within that framework for reproductive supremacy.

00:33:23.000 And that would mean that the reproductive victory would confer an advantage on the genes that match that story.

00:33:33.000 So that's how biological evolution can chase the Structure of narrative.

00:33:40.000 Well, Dawkins, he figured that when we talked about that, this was only the last half an hour or so, he saw how that might work, which I thought was, well, I couldn't have asked for a better end to our discussion than now.

00:33:52.000 It's like, that's also an explanation for the emergence of the Jungian collective unconscious, right from the genetic level all the way up to the conceptual.

00:34:01.000 I think it's indisputable that these sorts of things have occurred.

00:34:07.000 It can't not be the case.

00:34:09.000 It has to be the case.

00:34:10.000 And I think it has to be the case biologically.

00:34:13.000 Once human beings opened up the capacity for abstraction, and we created worlds of representation in abstraction, Then the fact of the existence of those worlds is going to start to have a determining effect on the course of biological evolution.

00:34:31.000 The alternative hypothesis is that the fact that human beings can think is independent of their reproductive status and their biology. 0.99

00:34:40.000 That's a stupid theory. 0.99

00:34:42.000 Obviously, that's not true. 1.00

00:34:44.000 So, I think we're in a revolution, a conceptual revolution, Ben, and...

00:34:50.000 I think all this political drama, all the culture war is a reflection of something much deeper going on underneath the surface.

00:34:57.000 Everyone has that feeling anyways, you know?

00:35:00.000 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:35:01.000 And you're seeing competing stories, as you say, being told in the political sphere that really are just happening at the top of the iceberg.

00:35:07.000 There's a much bigger story that's happening much deeper.

00:35:10.000 Jordan, one of the questions that you get asked a lot is about your own personal view of God.

00:35:14.000 Because you've talked about what you think of religion in terms of sort of useful truth or utilitarian truth or various types of truth.

00:35:23.000 And once again, you know, the accusation is, well, you're avoiding the question of, like, factual truth.

00:35:28.000 Do you factually believe that God exists?

00:35:30.000 Are you trying to end around that question?

00:35:31.000 Obviously, we've seen a number of high-profile conversions, and the recent pastor wife became a recent convert to the Catholic Church.

00:35:39.000 What do you make of that question, and how do you answer it?

00:35:41.000 Well, my answer to that always is, you know, I act as if God exists, and people don't like that, because they say, well, what do you believe?

00:35:49.000 What do you think is true?

00:35:51.000 It's like, well...

00:35:52.000 It's perfectly reasonable to have a debate about what constitutes the basis of faith.

00:35:58.000 As far as I'm concerned, and it's an existential claim, what you believe to be true is what you stake your life on.

00:36:04.000 It's what you act out.

00:36:07.000 See, I think that's really a hangover in some ways from A Protestant view of belief.

00:36:15.000 And I'm not trying to single the Protestants out here.

00:36:17.000 The Protestants did more than anyone else, arguably, although you've got to give credit to the Jews on this front, too, to bring literacy to the world, right?

00:36:26.000 It was the combination of the printing press and the Protestant insistence that everyone could have direct contact with the Word of God that made the whole world literate.

00:36:35.000 And that is not an overstatement.

00:36:37.000 That's a historical fact.

00:36:38.000 But the problem with the Protestant approach, in some ways, because it's so hyper-linguistic, is that belief gets transformed into something like the willingness to mouth a set of propositions.

00:36:51.000 And I just don't think, like, that's true in a way, but it's not fundamentally true.

00:36:57.000 You know, and Christ himself says in the Gospels that not everyone who says, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven.

00:37:04.000 Like, the mere...

00:37:05.000 Verbal, mere verbal assent to a statement of belief is not sufficient to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.

00:37:14.000 It's a matter of commitment and action.

00:37:16.000 It's a matter of actual sacrifice.

00:37:18.000 And then I would say to people who want to know what I believe is, well, first of all, it's not like I'm hiding anything.

00:37:24.000 Here's a book.

00:37:25.000 It explains what I believe.

00:37:27.000 That's why I wrote the book.

00:37:29.000 And it's one of four books.

00:37:31.000 And all of those books are my attempts to make What I believe to be the case as clear as possible.

00:37:37.000 People seem to assume that there's some secret hidden underneath that.

00:37:43.000 Maybe there is, but if there is, I don't know what the hell it is.

00:37:46.000 But it's even more like there's, look, I get trolled online a fair bit, as you do, no doubt, and of course.

00:37:54.000 And the worst trolls are two types. 0.96

00:37:58.000 The atheistic reductionist materialists, they're Luciferian beyond belief, and every time I interview a scientist, the Simpsons comic book guys come out of the bloody, out from underneath their rocks and whine about how the fact that they're smart hasn't made them king of the world in their bitter and resentful troll-demon Epithets. 0.98

00:38:22.000 And the other ones are the Christian fundamentalists. 0.96

00:38:26.000 And they're equally intolerable.

00:38:30.000 Peterson's almost there.

00:38:32.000 It's like, well, hey, great.

00:38:34.000 Glad you think so.

00:38:36.000 What have you done lately?

00:38:38.000 We'll get to more with Jordan in just a moment.

00:38:39.000 First, folks, let's talk about dressing sharp without sacrificing comfort.

00:38:42.000 If you're tired of choosing between looking professional and feeling relaxed, I've got great news for you.

00:38:47.000 Collars& Co.

00:38:48.000 is revolutionizing menswear with their famous dress collar polo.

00:38:51.000 Imagine this, the comfort of a polo combined with the sharp look of a dress shirt.

00:38:54.000 It's the best of both worlds, giving you that professional edge without the stuffiness.

00:38:57.000 Gone are the days of floppy collars that make you look like you just rolled out of bed.

00:39:00.000 These polos feature a firm collar that stands up straight all day long.

00:39:03.000 The four-way stretch fabric means you can move freely and comfortably throughout the day.

00:39:07.000 It's office approved, so you can look professional without feeling like you're trapped in a suit.

00:39:10.000 And it does travel well, so whether you're commuting to work or jetting off for a business trip, you'll arrive looking crisp and feeling great.

00:39:16.000 Collars & Co. isn't just about polos.

00:39:17.000 They've expanded their line impressively.

00:39:19.000 They've got merito sweaters, quarter zips like this one.

00:39:21.000 Look at this, nice.

00:39:22.000 Stretch chinos, even this performance blazer.

00:39:24.000 They call this the Maverick.

00:39:25.000 And it's awesome.

00:39:26.000 Look at me.

00:39:27.000 I am just an incredible piece of masculine virility in this menswear.

00:39:32.000 It's versatility at its finest.

00:39:33.000 These pieces look great by themselves under a sweater or with a blazer.

00:39:36.000 So, if you want to look sharp, feel comfortable, and support a fast-growing American company, head on over to collarsandco.com.

00:39:42.000 Use code BEN for 20% off your first order.

00:39:44.000 That's collarsandco.com, code BEN, collarsandco, because you shouldn't have to choose between looking good and feeling good.

00:39:49.000 One of the things that I always say to these questions is really that, you know, when it comes to how people actually act in the world, that is the best, as you're saying, that is the best adjudication of what they actually believe, right?

00:40:00.000 This is true in everything from psychology to survey data, that revealed preference is significantly more important than what you think of yourself.

00:40:09.000 And so people spend an awful lot of time thinking like, what do I think?

00:40:13.000 What do I believe?

00:40:14.000 The truth is that the vast majority, and this is a point that's made by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the vast majority of what we do in the world has very little to do with a conscious belief system that directs us toward doing the thing.

00:40:24.000 Much of it is inherited.

00:40:26.000 Much of it is taught to us by our family.

00:40:28.000 Much of it is so deeply embedded that it becomes near instinctive.

00:40:31.000 But the thing that you do in the world, the choices that you make in the world, are the best characterization of the thing that you believe.

00:40:38.000 This is why whenever people will say, like, do you believe in God?

00:40:41.000 That's a weird proposition.

00:40:42.000 The idea that I believe in God the same way that I believe in a proposition like 2 plus 2 equals 4.

00:40:47.000 Well, I mean, 2 plus 2 equals 4 doesn't actually demand anything of me.

00:40:51.000 It doesn't demand any sort of action on my part.

00:40:55.000 The belief in God demands action on my part, and that action is either taking place in the world or it's not taking place in the world.

00:41:02.000 And if it's not taking place in the world, of what use is the belief system?

00:41:05.000 It's completely anodyne.

00:41:06.000 It's an idea that exists in the realm of uselessness.

00:41:09.000 You put your finger on something of crucial importance there with regards to the nature of both the real and belief.

00:41:16.000 2 plus 2 equals 4 doesn't demand anything of you.

00:41:20.000 And that means it isn't a proposition that is translatable immediately into a value proposition, let's say.

00:41:30.000 Not with regard to your own action.

00:41:32.000 Well, things that are deeply true have implications for action.

00:41:36.000 This is something that I tried to lay out in Maps of Meaning.

00:41:39.000 There's a structure of perception that has to do with action.

00:41:43.000 And that's a different form of Belief.

00:41:46.000 It's a much different form of belief.

00:41:48.000 It's even instantiated differently neurologically.

00:41:52.000 We also have to understand, for the religious types that are listening, especially the more literal-minded religious types who are propositionalized beyond belief, The God in the Old Testament and the New, for that matter, is ineffable.

00:42:08.000 He's beyond category.

00:42:10.000 And so to say, is God real?

00:42:12.000 In some ways, it isn't a genuine question because God doesn't have the same order of reality as the profane things that are littered about God.

00:42:23.000 The landscape.

00:42:24.000 God isn't real the same way a table is real.

00:42:29.000 I'm not inventing this up and out of whole cloth.

00:42:34.000 There's an insistence that's continual, and I think it's more definitive in the Old Testament accounts that whatever God is is beyond categorization.

00:42:48.000 This is why even Moses can only get a glimpse of God.

00:42:52.000 So, God is outside our category structures.

00:42:56.000 Now, does that make him real?

00:42:58.000 Well, I would say God is hyper-real.

00:43:00.000 God is the reality upon which all reality depends.

00:43:04.000 That's a different kind of category.

00:43:06.000 And it's not exactly comprehensible.

00:43:08.000 It's certainly not It's an atheist game.

00:43:12.000 Is God real like a table is real?

00:43:14.000 Well, the insistence of the entire biblical library is that God is not real in that manner.

00:43:20.000 God is outside of time and space, for example, and all material objects are inside of time and space.

00:43:26.000 And so, God is a reflection of the substrate that makes time and space themselves possible.

00:43:32.000 That's clearly in the Hebrew text.

00:43:35.000 I mean, the text, you know, the name of God, which in Hebrew, you know, as a religious Jew, I'm not actually supposed to even spell it.

00:43:42.000 The letters would be Yud, and then He, and then Vav, and then He. 0.60

00:43:46.000 But what that encompasses in the Hebrew is Hayahov, meaning that in Hebrew that means what was, what is, and what will be, right?

00:43:54.000 Are united in the name of God, right?

00:43:56.000 And then when the description that God gives to Moses at the burning bush is, I will be what I will be.

00:44:03.000 I like that.

00:44:04.000 That's the best description that God can give to a human being is like, I am what I am, basically, and I will be what I will be.

00:44:09.000 And, you know, you're just going to have to deal with that, which is the answer at the end of the book of Job as well, which is, you know, you can't understand me because we're of a completely different kind.

00:44:19.000 And that insistence by God is also then baffled by the biblical text in which God takes an active role in history, is talking to people.

00:44:29.000 God is too mysterious for any of these categories that are attempted for God.

00:44:34.000 It's why I think that some of the Neoplatonic arguments, they do some solid work in terms of establishing a logical predicate for believing in God.

00:44:41.000 But they don't do all the work in the sense that a Christian or a Jew would want them to do, or even a Muslim. 0.96

00:44:45.000 That God is active in the world, that God has perspectives, that God does things, that a sort of Neoplatonic God that floats above everything and doesn't have any intervening impact, that God is barren and doesn't have a lot to say about what humanity constitutes.

00:45:01.000 And that's not the God that, according to the scriptures, built the world and maintains it.

00:45:07.000 Well, so one of the...

00:45:10.000 Issues that I wrestle with in this book is actually something I derived from Dawkins, because Dawkins is at pains, not least in his new book, to establish the proposition that every organism is a microcosm of its environment.

00:45:26.000 And I think that that's actually key to solving the mystery that you just described.

00:45:30.000 He said that not only is that so, this is Dawkins, but it's necessarily so.

00:45:35.000 So, for example, if an alien ever got a hold of a bird, an earthly, a terrestrial bird, it could derive A tremendous amount of knowledge about the constituent nature of the Earth from analyzing the bird.

00:45:49.000 The bird's DNA has encoded its entire evolutionary history, for example, and the ratio of bird wingspan to body weight It describes the atmosphere, and the fact that the blood is oxygen-dependent describes the chemical nature of the air through which it propels itself, etc., etc.

00:46:10.000 Its eyes speak a certain language about the sun.

00:46:14.000 So every organism is a reflection of the environment to which it is adapted.

00:46:20.000 And there's an ancient medieval idea that the human soul is a microcosm, and I don't see that those ideas are different at all.

00:46:29.000 You know, the Genesis insistence is that we're made in the image of God, and I don't see that that's any different whatsoever than Dawkins' claim that every organism is a microcosm of its environment.

00:46:40.000 And what that would mean, Ben, is that, possibly, imagine that there's a layer of reality that's divine.

00:46:48.000 And it's outside the realm of human conception.

00:46:51.000 And you don't believe in that the same way that you believe in the existence of an object. 0.99

00:46:56.000 I mean, that's just an idiot atheist game anyways. 0.99

00:46:58.000 Because what the atheists want to do is, they want you to say, well, I believe in God like I believe in a table. 1.00

00:47:04.000 And then the atheist says, well, there's no material evidence for your God the way there is for a table. 1.00

00:47:10.000 So you're a fool. 1.00

00:47:11.000 It's like, no, you're a fool. 1.00

00:47:12.000 Because the game that you're playing is the game of a fool. 1.00

00:47:17.000 So there's a divine level that's beyond human understanding. 0.97

00:47:21.000 And I would also say that's potentially the realm, let's say, that people contact when they're...

00:47:29.000 Under certain psychophysiological conditions that are replicable, all sorts of exercises can put people in touch with that strata of reality, not least prayer.

00:47:41.000 And so, and above that, there's a material level, and then there's a social level and a psychological level, and those are all, what would you say, the divine patterning is reflected in the patterning at each of those emergent levels, and that's all That all echoes in the human soul.

00:48:02.000 And can you speak with that?

00:48:04.000 I think you can.

00:48:07.000 Look, here's another strange proposition.

00:48:09.000 And I believe this to be true.

00:48:13.000 The spirit that will reveal itself in consequence of your inquiry is the spirit that the aim of your inquiry is calling upon.

00:48:27.000 So imagine this.

00:48:28.000 We can walk through this very logically.

00:48:30.000 So imagine that I'm having an argument with my wife, and I allow myself to be possessed by the spirit of anger.

00:48:37.000 And I call on it for...

00:48:40.000 Revelation of my pathway forward.

00:48:43.000 Well, my head is going to fill with aggressive images and I'm going to strive for domination and victory, even over someone I love.

00:48:51.000 And that's because I called on the spirit of anger to reveal itself to me as I'm moving forward.

00:48:58.000 Or I could call on the spirit of pride.

00:49:01.000 Or I could call on the spirit of immediate sexual gratification.

00:49:05.000 We do this when we're plotting our pathway forward continually.

00:49:10.000 So imagine instead that I oriented myself so that I was communing with the highest possible spirit.

00:49:17.000 That was my aim.

00:49:19.000 Even if I left that somewhat ineffable, the goal would be I want to do what would be best in the next moment all things considered.

00:49:28.000 What would that be?

00:49:30.000 Well, I believe that our perceptual and cognitive systems are set up so that the spirit that that aim...

00:49:39.000 The spirit that responds will be the spirit that your aim conjures.

00:49:45.000 Even conjures out of the void.

00:49:47.000 And that's a very...

00:49:49.000 I truly believe that's the case.

00:49:51.000 I can't see how it could be otherwise.

00:49:53.000 Because our perceptions and our conceptions...

00:49:57.000 Do orient us toward our aim.

00:49:59.000 Otherwise, what the hell good would they be?

00:50:01.000 And so the spirit that responds to your inquiry is going to be the spirit of your aim.

00:50:06.000 Jesus, man, once you understand that, The whole world changes.

00:50:11.000 So then why wouldn't you aim for the highest possible good?

00:50:14.000 Because then that's the spirit that's going to respond.

00:50:17.000 See, in the Gospels, that's what Christ refers to as the pearl of great price, that the wealthy man would sell everything he owns to possess.

00:50:24.000 It's like, if you had that, why would you want anything else?

00:50:28.000 And the promise, the eternal promise in the Biblical corpus is that pursuit of that highest aim is simultaneously the pursuit that brings life more abundant.

00:50:38.000 And I also think that's incontrovertibly true in that The best long-term strategy is virtue.

00:50:47.000 The best practical long-term strategy is virtue.

00:50:51.000 Jordan, one of the things that you mentioned earlier with regard to the various layers of reality, I think that's the argument that's being made at the beginning of Genesis.

00:50:59.000 So one of the weird things in the original sort of eating the apple story is that when you read just the text of it, one of the things that you see is that the snake actually doesn't lie.

00:51:09.000 At no point does the snake lie.

00:51:11.000 He actually tells a series of truths.

00:51:12.000 He says, if you eat from this apple, then you'll be like God.

00:51:15.000 You'll be able to distinguish good from evil, which is something that God later repeats.

00:51:18.000 He says, if they've eaten from it, now we have to banish them from the tree of life because they'll be like us, distinguishing good from evil.

00:51:25.000 He says, you surely won't die.

00:51:27.000 They've been told they'll die.

00:51:28.000 And the snake says you won't die, which is true.

00:51:30.000 God doesn't immediately just kill Adam and Eve.

00:51:32.000 Instead, he allows them to live.

00:51:33.000 So the real question is, what's the sin of the snake?

00:51:35.000 So this leads to my favorite pun in probably all of the Bible in Hebrew. 0.66

00:51:40.000 So there's a dual pun that's used to describe the snake and then Adam and Eve.

00:51:44.000 So the word in Hebrew is arum.

00:51:46.000 So the word arum means, in Hebrew, both cleverness and nakedness.

00:51:49.000 So it says that Adam and Eve are in the garden, and they're naked.

00:51:53.000 Everything's hunky-dory, right?

00:51:54.000 Then the next thing that happens says, and then there is the snake, and the snake is arum. 0.56

00:51:59.000 He's the most arum of all creatures, right?

00:52:00.000 He's the most clever of all creatures.

00:52:02.000 So what's the connection between nakedness and cleverness?

00:52:05.000 So the argument the snake is actually making is...

00:52:08.000 You can discern from your own wants, needs, and desires what is appropriate for you.

00:52:13.000 And because you can discern that, even if you have the explicit order of God, he's clearly lying to you.

00:52:19.000 God is clearly not telling you the truth.

00:52:20.000 If God says don't eat of that tree, but God's created a desire within you to eat from the tree, then clearly he wants you to follow your desire.

00:52:26.000 He created you that way.

00:52:28.000 You can sort of make the Dawkins argument that looking inside your own soul, that you know better than God does, even if God explicitly gives you the rule not to eat from this thing.

00:52:37.000 So in your own nakedness, in your own sort of material physical being, lies the root of cleverness.

00:52:42.000 And cleverness is bad.

00:52:43.000 And so the first thing that happens, obviously, is they discover that they're naked, but not naked in the way that they thought they were, as in, like, all-powerful and that material reality can overcome what God wants of them.

00:52:53.000 Naked in the sense that they're actually vulnerable, which is why the first thing that God does after, you know, he has this big conversation with them is he sews them a skin, right? 0.83

00:53:00.000 He sews them a coat that is designed specifically to shield them from the elements.

00:53:04.000 So the story, I think, of the beginning is really about good parenting because God lets them suffer the natural consequences of their decisions.

00:53:12.000 He says, you've made yourself vulnerable and naked.

00:53:14.000 I'm going to help shield you from that by giving you a coat.

00:53:16.000 But the reality of being vulnerable and naked in the world is that the environment is no longer your friend.

00:53:21.000 If you thought that you could simply manipulate, that your desire for what is good magically manifests, that's not true.

00:53:29.000 You now work in a world in which the ground resists you.

00:53:32.000 Where you work the ground, the ground resists you.

00:53:34.000 You work in a world where childbirth does not come easily to you.

00:53:37.000 You want to live in the animal world, you now live in the animal world.

00:53:41.000 And because you'd ignored the Word of God, and you instead decided that you were akin to God, now you have to live the animal part of your existence in a very real way, which is why you have to be banished from the Garden of Eden.

00:53:50.000 You're now subject to all the rules of the animal.

00:53:53.000 You see this relationship between cleverness, let's say, and nakedness manifest itself very directly in people's lives.

00:54:01.000 So, a common nightmare for people is to be naked on stage.

00:54:07.000 And so that's to have all your vulnerabilities, your bare self exposed to the evaluative eye of the social community.

00:54:14.000 Okay, so now imagine that you are on stage and you become self-conscious.

00:54:20.000 And there's no difference between becoming self-conscious and becoming aware of your vulnerability.

00:54:26.000 Then you might say, well, what's the preconditions for being self-conscious on stage?

00:54:31.000 And the answer is, well, as soon as it's about you, when you're on stage, you're self-conscious, right?

00:54:37.000 How am I doing?

00:54:38.000 Am I winning the argument?

00:54:39.000 What do people think of me?

00:54:41.000 You know, am I performing properly?

00:54:43.000 Is this going to further my career?

00:54:44.000 Those are all prideful I don't think there's any difference between that and walking with God in the eternal garden.

00:55:08.000 And that's because you're allowing that deep reflection of the structure of reality within yourself to make it manifest in your words.

00:55:17.000 And there's no reason for self-consciousness then because it's a sacrificial gesture.

00:55:21.000 It's not about you.

00:55:23.000 It's about wherever the truth will take you, let's say.

00:55:27.000 And the biblical insistence, the voice of adventure that comes to Abraham is no different than the voice of truth that comes to Jonah, let's say.

00:55:39.000 It's the same thing.

00:55:40.000 It's the voice of conscience that comes to Elijah, right?

00:55:44.000 And it's the thing that can and should possess you.

00:55:49.000 And it's the thing that Eve and Adam try to usurp in the Garden of Eden.

00:55:53.000 And they do bring undue suffering into the world in consequence.

00:55:57.000 And so...

00:56:00.000 All of these things can be seen fairly directly once you understand a few, what do you say, key concepts.

00:56:07.000 And that's ridiculously exciting.

00:56:09.000 I had a better time writing this book than any book I've written.

00:56:14.000 I mean, partly because my health is much better.

00:56:16.000 I was very ill when I wrote the last book I wrote, and I'm much better now.

00:56:21.000 But this was also almost entirely an exciting venture.

00:56:25.000 When I wrote Maps of Meaning, I was really still...

00:56:29.000 Dealing with the depths of malevolence and ignorance, let's say.

00:56:35.000 You know, the darkness that characterizes human beings, because this question I was trying to answer in the final analysis was something like the origin of evil.

00:56:46.000 And that's a very dark endeavor.

00:56:52.000 With we who wrestle with God, I was more investigating the nature of the good.

00:56:56.000 That's a lot more joyful an endeavor, that's for sure.

00:57:04.000 And it was a series of continual optimistic revelations as the structures of the texts revealed themselves because the news is so good.

00:57:16.000 While the covenant, for example, that covenant that Abraham makes with God or that God makes with Abraham.

00:57:22.000 Here's the cool thing about that, Ben, because we can do a counter proposition.

00:57:28.000 So imagine that the divine in the story of Abraham is conceptualized as the spirit of adventure that impels people forward into the world.

00:57:36.000 So that would be the same spirit that makes your child exploratory and courageous, even on a playground when he has to meet new people or when he's mastering a new skill.

00:57:46.000 And you're trying to foster that as a good father.

00:57:49.000 Okay, so now imagine that that spirit of adventurous exploration is the best pathway forward to the expansion of the child's character.

00:58:05.000 Okay, a genuine character in the most positive possible way.

00:58:09.000 Well, then you'd say that the instinct for development is the same instinct that fleshes out possibility most important.

00:58:16.000 Well, the counter-proposition would be the spirit of adventure that drives a child to explore has no relationship with the psyche or society or the world. 1.00

00:58:26.000 Well, that's a stupid theory. 0.99

00:58:28.000 Obviously, that can't be the case. 0.99

00:58:30.000 Okay, so now imagine that the world is structured so that if you followed the voice of adventure fully, which is the spirit you would encourage as a good father, and of course, Abraham is the archetypal father as well, then you would Entice or invite people down the pathway that makes them a blessing to themselves.

00:58:50.000 That helps them establish something permanent.

00:58:55.000 That makes their name renowned among other people for good reason and that does that in a way that brings benefit to everyone.

00:59:00.000 Well, how could it be, given that we're social creatures, how could it be that our deepest instinct for developing ourselves and moving into the world, how could it be other than aligned with what brings the optimal social order?

00:59:16.000 Because it would mean that we're maladapted to the social environment, right?

00:59:20.000 Well, that's obviously not!

00:59:23.000 That doesn't mean there isn't a niche for psychopaths, for example. 0.94

00:59:27.000 You know, I mean, once you establish a playable and productive game, people can take the role of parasite and scavenger, and they can eke out a pathetic, cane-like existence. 0.99

00:59:39.000 By doing that, they have to be wanderers in the land of Nod.

00:59:44.000 But you can do it.

00:59:45.000 But that's...

00:59:48.000 The perversion of the postmodernists is that the path of Cain is the only story that rules.

00:59:54.000 Well, no.

00:59:56.000 That doesn't...

00:59:57.000 No!

00:59:58.000 And, you know, I detail that out quite radically in the book, too.

01:00:02.000 Not least from talking to people like Franz de Waal and knowing the work of people like Yacht Panksepp.

01:00:07.000 Power doesn't even work to structure the social relations of chimpanzees.

01:00:12.000 Even in chimps, you see the emergence of something like a reciprocal ethos. 0.96

01:00:18.000 At least you see that in the behavior of the chimps who establish relatively stable and peaceful reigns and troops. 0.86

01:00:27.000 They're not power-mad, chest-thumping Hitlers.

01:00:31.000 Those chimps meet a vicious end.

01:00:36.000 And that's part of that, the self-defeating nature of a game that's predicated on power.

01:00:42.000 Folks, the book is amazing.

01:00:43.000 I mean, you should go check it out right now.

01:00:45.000 Jordan poured his heart and his soul into it.

01:00:47.000 You can see that directly in the book, and it's We Who Wrestle with God.

01:00:50.000 It's available right now.

01:00:51.000 It's soaring up the bestseller list, as all of Jordan's books always do.

01:00:54.000 Go check it out.

01:00:54.000 It's going to open your mind, and you're certainly going to experience something new while you read it.

01:00:58.000 Jordan, really appreciate the time.

01:00:59.000 Can't wait to talk to you soon.

01:01:00.000 Hey, man, I'm looking forward to it, too, Ben.

01:01:02.000 And we've got lots more to talk about.

01:01:04.000 The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp.

01:01:13.000 Associate Producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick.

01:01:16.000 Editing is by Austin Davenport.

01:01:17.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koremina.

01:01:20.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

01:01:21.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Christina.

01:01:24.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:01:26.000 Production intern is Sarah Steele.

01:01:28.000 Production coordinator is Jessica Kranz.

01:01:30.000 Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

01:01:33.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

01:01:35.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

01:01:37.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:01:39.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 17, 2024

We Who Wrestle With God | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript