In Episode 22, Dr. Jordan Peterson continues the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories Lecture Series with a look at the relationship between Adam and Eve. This episode is the fourth installment in Dr. Peterson's series, and focuses on the story of the creation of the world as we know it. This episode focuses on Adam & Eve, self-consciousness, evil, and death, and explores the concept of the post-modern dilemma, and how it relates to the stories of Genesis 1 and 2, and why we should all be trying to figure out how to make sense of the information contained in these tiny, one-page texts. As always, thank you for tuning into HYPEBEAST Radio and Business of HYPE. Please don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. Please also consider becoming a supporter of the show by becoming a patron patron patron. You can support these podcasts by making a monthly pledge of $1 or more, and we'll send you an ad-free version of our new podcast wherever you get your favourite podcast listening to your favourite podcaster listening to the show (hopefully). Thank you for listening and supporting the show! If you're struggling with depression or anxiety, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. -Jon B.B. Peterson of Daily Wire Plus now and start watching his new series on Dailywire Plus. of the Daily Wire PLUS now and starting to feel better, and more connected to the world you deserve a brighter, better future you're in control of your day-to-day life. -Jonah Peterson. Jonah B. Peterson, MD, PhD, PhD - The Bible Hyphen Series: The Biblical Stories lecture series, The Bible of God's Story of the Postmodern Dilemmas of the Bible of the Old and the New Testament of the Modern Era, The Book of Genesis and the Old Testament of Genesis, The Old and Eve's Journey Through the Old Testaments, The New Testament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part B, Part C, Part F, Part A, and Part II and Part V. of The Old Testament and Part III.
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00:00:54.940Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
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00:02:36.740The stories that I'm going to tell you tonight, I've been thinking about, well, like the ones last week, for that matter, for a very long period of time.
00:03:11.680And I think about it, and I think about it, and I think about it, and I think about it, and every time I think about it, another layer comes out from underneath it.
00:03:19.080And then another layer comes out from underneath it.
00:03:22.380You know, the rational approach that I've been describing to you is predicated on the idea that these stories have somehow encapsulated wisdom that we generated interpersonally and behaviorally,
00:03:35.860and then an image over very vast stretches of time, and then condensed it into very, very dense, articulated words that are then further refined by the act of being remembered and transmitted and remembered and transmitted and remembered and transmitted over vast stretches of time.
00:04:12.720And I think it's especially true with the story of Cain and Abel, because it works on the individual level, and it works on the familial level, and it works on the political level, and it works at the level of warfare, and it works at the level of economics.
00:04:25.860And that's a lot for a little tiny one-paragraph story to cover, man.
00:04:30.900Now, you know, you could object, well, with these stories, you never know what you're reading into it and what's in the story, right?
00:04:37.000That's part of, let's call it the postmodern dilemma, and fair enough.
00:04:41.440And there's really no answer to that, any more than there is an answer to, how do you know your interpretation of the world is, well, let's not say correct, but sufficient.
00:04:51.820It's sufficient if you can act it out in the world, and other people don't object too much, and you don't die, and nature doesn't take a bite out of you any more often than necessary.
00:05:01.460You know, those are the constraints within which we live, so you have some way of determining whether your interpretation is at least functionally successful, and that's not trivial.
00:05:14.060And I guess you can say the same thing to the interpretations that might be laid out on these stories, and at the moment, that's probably good enough.
00:05:21.980Hopefully, you find the interpretations functionally significant at multiple levels.
00:05:26.720And I also think the chance of managing that by chance is very, very small, you know, to be able to pull off an interpretation of a story that works at multiple levels simultaneously.
00:05:36.160You think, with each level that it applies, the chances that you've stumbled across something by chance have to be decreasing, right?
00:05:44.980There's a technical term for that in psychology.
00:05:47.100It's called something like multi-method, multi-trait method of determining whether or not something is accurate.
00:05:53.580And the idea is, the more ways that you can measure it and get the same result, the more confident you can be that you're not just diluting yourself with your a priori hypotheses.
00:06:05.680You know, that there's actually something out there.
00:06:08.200So I guess that's another part of this method, is that, and it's also a method that I use in my speaking, I think.
00:06:14.040I don't try to tell people anything that isn't personally relevant, you know, because you should know why you are being taught something, right?
00:06:21.200You should know what the fact is good for, and then it should be good for you personally, at least in some sense.
00:06:26.360And then, if you act it out in the world, it should be good for your family, and maybe should have some significance for the broader community.
00:06:32.440And I think that's what meaning means, and I don't really see the utility in being taught things that aren't meaningful, facts that aren't meaningful,
00:06:39.800because there's an infinite number of facts, and there's no way you're going to remember all of them.
00:06:43.320They have to be, they have to have the aspect of tools, essentially, something like that, because we are tool-using creatures.
00:09:35.260But Becker took the argument that the hypothesis of God is nothing but an attempt by human beings
00:09:43.680to recreate a quasi-infantile state of dependency, and to be able to rely on an all-knowing father,
00:09:51.480and to thereby recover the comfort, perhaps, that we experienced when we were young and had a hypothetically all-knowing father,
00:10:00.020for those of us who were lucky to have someone who vaguely resembled that.
00:10:05.280But the more I thought about that, the more that struck me as quite implausible across time.
00:10:11.800Charles Taylor, I think it was Charles Taylor, wrote an interesting book called the,
00:10:16.320I think it was called The Origins of the Modern Self.
00:10:19.340He's a McGill philosopher, and I wouldn't necessarily call him a friend of classic religion, but it doesn't matter.
00:10:25.800He made a very interesting point about Christianity in particular.
00:10:28.600He said, well, if you're going to invent a religion that offered you nothing but infantile comfort,
00:10:34.940why in the world would you bother with conceptualizing hell?
00:10:38.340That just seems like an unnecessary detail to add to the whole story, right?
00:10:41.700If it's all about comfort, why would you hypothesize that the consequence of serious error was eternal torment?
00:10:51.540That doesn't really sound very, it isn't the sort of thing that is likely to make you feel comfortable.
00:10:58.980James Joyce, when he wrote about that, said he had terrible nightmares when he was a child,
00:11:02.540because of the hellfire sermons the Jesuits used to spout, spew forth, let's say.
00:11:09.260And he wrote down what he remembered of them, and they were pretty hair-raising.
00:11:13.440I think in James Joyce's book, I think it was Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man.
00:11:17.220Man, he talked about the Jesuits telling him that hell was like a prison with walls that were seven miles thick,
00:11:24.440that was always in darkness and consumed by fire,
00:11:27.580and that the people who were trapped there were continually burnt by this dark fire that gave new light,
00:11:34.060which also simultaneously rejuvenated their flesh, so that it could be burnt off eternally.
00:11:39.620In case you were wondering how it was going to be burnt off eternally, that's apparently the process.
00:11:44.480It's not easy for me to see that as an infantile wish fulfillment, I'm afraid.
00:11:48.380Now, you could, well, you could be a cynic about it,
00:11:51.280and Elaine Padgels, who wrote a book on the devil, was cynical about it in this manner.
00:11:56.700She thought that the Christians, so to speak, invented hell as a place to put their enemies.
00:12:02.180And, you know, yeah, fair enough, but no, that's not accurate, really.
00:12:08.540Although it's convenient to have a place to put your enemies.
00:12:11.380Charles Taylor did point out, for example, that the modern terror of loss of self,
00:12:17.580let's say the existential loss of self and loss of meaning,
00:12:20.300was perhaps roughly paralleled by the medieval terror of hell, you know, in terms of existential intensity.
00:12:27.440And so it wasn't, hell wasn't merely a place where those people that you didn't care for would end up.
00:12:31.580It was the place where you were going to go if you didn't walk their line properly.
00:12:35.540And so I don't think Freud's, Freud's critique really holds water in the final analysis.
00:12:41.280And then Marx's critique, of course, was that religion was the opiate of the masses.
00:12:45.540And he made an argument that was similar to Freud's, although somewhat earlier.
00:12:49.260And made the, based upon the presupposition that religious beliefs were stories told to the gullible masses
00:12:56.580in order to keep them pacified and happy while their corporate overlords, for lack of a better purpose,
00:13:05.160continued to exploit them and weaken them.
00:13:08.560And, you know, I find the critique of human institutions as driven entirely by power very, let's say, questionable to say the least.
00:13:22.980And, of course, every human institution is corrupted by, corrupted, is corrupt, for one reason or another.
00:13:30.740And it's also corrupt, specifically, by such things as deception and arrogance and the demand for unearned power.
00:13:39.060And the same thing, of course, can be applied to religious systems, but that doesn't mean that they are, in some special way, characteristic of those faults.
00:13:48.380And maybe you think they are, and, you know, maybe you can make a case for it, but it's not prima facie, I think that's how you say that, evident, that that also is a particularly useful criticism.
00:14:02.380I don't buy it. I think there's, I think that's far too cynical.
00:14:08.300I think that the people who wrote these stories, first of all, what are you going to do?
00:14:12.440You're going to run a bloody conspiracy for 3,000 years successfully?
00:14:19.300You can't run a conspiracy for 15 minutes without somebody ratting you out, you know, it's impossible.
00:14:24.620So, whatever's at the basis of the construction, not only of these stories, but of the dogmatic structures that emerged from them,
00:14:33.220I think that it's a terrible mistake to reduce them to unidimensional explanations.
00:14:37.400In fact, I generally think that reducing any complex human behavior to a unidimensional explanation is often the sign of a seriously limited thinker.
00:14:45.880And, you know, I say that with some caution, because Freud did do that with religion, at least to some degree, and Freud was a serious thinker.
00:14:52.000And Marx, I suppose, was a serious thinker, too, even though, well, yeah, he's someone you just, if you have any sense, Marx just leaves you speechless.
00:15:08.340So, anyway, so that's all to say that I don't think there's any simple explanation for how these stories have the power that they have.
00:15:17.540I really don't. I don't think you can reduce it to political conspiracy, that's for sure.
00:15:23.040I don't think you can reduce it to psychological infantilism.
00:15:26.800I think you can make a case, like I have, that they are repositories of the collective wisdom of the human race.
00:15:34.580I had an interesting letter this week from someone. I get a lot of interesting letters.
00:15:38.460I think I'm going to make an archive out of them and put them on the web at some point, with people's permission, obviously.
00:15:46.580And he said that he'd been following my lectures and noted that I had been making what you might describe as a quasi-biological or evolutionary case
00:15:54.380for the emergence of the information that the stories contain.
00:15:59.060And he said, well, how do you know that someone from a different religious tradition, or speaking of a different religious tradition,