The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Follow Whatever Glitters In The Corner

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00:00:30.000 what's that what's that and a warm new york welcome

00:00:37.460 thank you thank you it's so nice of you it's so good of you to be here tonight i know that

00:00:48.120 of all the people in the world who are blessed with opportunities to spend their time any way

00:00:52.960 they might choose you people are at the top of the list and i understand that you had many other

00:00:59.460 options for tonight's entertainment night really don't know what the hell you're doing here but

00:01:03.900 but i definitely i definitely appreciate the fact that you're here i'm going to tell you a story

00:01:10.940 it's it's one of the world's great stories it's a masterpiece of compression and depth

00:01:18.700 i've returned to it dozens of times in my lectures hundreds of times in my thinking

00:01:27.020 there's almost no limit to what can be discovered in it

00:01:31.220 even though it's only a few paragraphs long

00:01:33.200 it's hard to account for that precisely

00:01:37.260 although I'll try to account for that a little bit tonight

00:01:39.920 and to explain how such a thing can even be possible

00:01:43.520 that a story a few paragraphs long can be

00:01:46.660 in some ways inexhaustible

00:01:48.960 it doesn't exactly seem possible

00:01:57.020 You know, everything's inexhaustible in some ways, right?

00:02:02.220 Because everything is connected to everything else.

00:02:06.020 And if you love someone deeply, a child or your wife or your husband, a parent, sibling,

00:02:15.360 you can understand all of humanity as a consequence of that relationship.

00:02:22.240 if you investigate anything deeply enough you start to understand how it's connected to everything

00:02:28.620 and so everything that attracts your interest and is worthy of pursuit is a portal to the infinite

00:02:39.000 that's actually what the story of the burning bush means is a very good thing to know

00:02:45.920 and it's a good way of introducing the Cain and Abel story because

00:02:49.880 which is the story I'm going to tell you tonight

00:02:52.340 the Cain and Abel story

00:02:55.160 is a bottomless well of

00:02:56.840 revelation

00:02:57.440 and

00:02:59.360 it's a pointer

00:03:04.620 towards

00:03:05.460 the source of all

00:03:08.800 revelatory wisdom

00:03:10.660 in the story of Exodus

00:03:14.760 when Moses encounters

00:03:18.780 the burning bush

00:03:19.740 in some ways he's just an ordinary man now he has a strange parentage

00:03:26.620 he's the son of hebrew slaves and the adopted son of egyptian aristocrats and so that marks

00:03:35.180 him out in some ways is special he's a combination of what's lowest and what's highest but apart

00:03:41.440 from that when we encounter moses in the story of exodus at the time of the burning bush

00:03:47.040 he's just an ordinary man he actually has a relatively low status occupation he's a shepherd

00:03:54.400 now he has two wives and he's getting along with them fine and his he he has a good relationship

00:04:01.200 with his father-in-law whose name is jethro who's a very good man and he loves his wife and wives

00:04:07.620 and being a shepherd was a challenging occupation in ancient times

00:04:14.520 which is why the shepherd is a

00:04:18.020 icon of heroism

00:04:20.220 a shepherd has to

00:04:22.140 make his way with his wits

00:04:26.480 out in the wilderness

00:04:28.520 the wilderness of that time was characterized by

00:04:32.680 genuine danger

00:04:35.420 the not least of which were wolves and lions

00:04:39.720 and so if you're going to be a shepherd

00:04:41.800 you had to be the sort of man who could

00:04:44.340 live by his wits on the land

00:04:46.520 and who could protect

00:04:48.100 vulnerable, highly

00:04:50.420 edible

00:04:50.900 creatures from

00:04:53.760 predation and so

00:04:55.740 Moses is no pushover

00:04:58.200 but

00:04:59.140 he has an ordinary life

00:05:02.040 and then

00:05:04.260 something extraordinary

00:05:05.360 offers itself to him

00:05:07.860 okay, so

00:05:09.720 it's worthwhile understanding that

00:05:11.840 to understand how something

00:05:14.240 transcendent

00:05:18.180 offers itself to you.

00:05:22.280 Something magical.

00:05:24.260 What's something magical?

00:05:25.980 Something magical occurs in your life when

00:05:28.300 after you encounter it,

00:05:30.720 you play by a new set of rules.

00:05:33.360 That's the magic.

00:05:34.540 So, if you encounter someone

00:05:36.560 who lives in a world of conceptualization

00:05:39.400 that's radically different

00:05:40.600 than your current

00:05:41.720 world,

00:05:44.240 And what they can do looks magical to you, because not knowing their rules, not having their skills,

00:05:54.120 they're able to do things and perceive things in a way that's just not accessible to you.

00:06:00.440 Now and then in your life, you meet someone who transforms you profoundly.

00:06:05.420 That can happen in a relationship.

00:06:07.720 It often happens when you meet someone that you love or that you deeply admire.

00:06:11.900 Or someone who serves as a mentor, for example.

00:06:15.120 They're like a visitor from another kingdom.

00:06:17.500 And that new kingdom might be the kingdom that you would like to occupy.

00:06:21.820 If only you knew the rules.

00:06:26.680 Imagine that as you move through your life.

00:06:29.240 You transform sequentially.

00:06:31.060 There's really no end to that.

00:06:32.400 The amount that you can change.

00:06:33.700 The amount that you can develop.

00:06:36.900 Imagine that there's something in common.

00:06:39.120 among all the experiences

00:06:41.420 that magically transform you

00:06:43.280 from the smallest level

00:06:45.380 of magical transformation

00:06:46.560 to the cataclysmically transformative.

00:06:50.560 There are times in your life

00:06:51.960 where you have an experience

00:06:53.060 and you're not the same afterwards.

00:06:55.260 And that can be brutal,

00:06:56.420 although sometimes it can be very positive

00:06:58.040 or often it's both.

00:07:01.620 Moses is out

00:07:02.760 conducting himself as a shepherd

00:07:05.420 and he and something attracts his attention okay so that's the first thing to understand

00:07:14.420 you can be going about your business and something can attract your attention now this is a mystery

00:07:24.820 because we like to think that we're in control of our experience but that's truly wrong there are

00:07:33.760 some things that we're in control of but there's lots of things we're not in control of

00:07:37.200 for example you can fall in love with someone in a catastrophic way and that can easily happen to

00:07:44.620 you in some ways despite yourself you can find yourself foolishly entangled in a in an affair

00:07:50.980 let's say and if you escape from that unscathed which is highly improbable you could easily look

00:08:00.480 back and think especially if you got tangled up with the wrong person what the hell happened to

00:08:06.580 me and what happened to you is that the things that beckon to you have an autonomy this is a

00:08:16.100 very strange thing so let me make a reference to something else back in the late 1800s

00:08:25.460 Friedrich Nietzsche

00:08:27.900 the German philosopher announced that

00:08:29.840 announced the death

00:08:32.020 of God and what he meant by that was that

00:08:34.120 the unquestioned

00:08:35.860 faith that was

00:08:37.840 present in the West in relationship

00:08:39.880 to what we held highest

00:08:41.280 had become

00:08:42.500 intellectually

00:08:44.320 had become

00:08:46.840 was demolished

00:08:48.600 intellectually

00:08:50.100 God died

00:08:52.300 this was not something Nietzsche was pleased about

00:08:54.900 He thought that the consequence of that would be the rise of a murderous nihilism

00:09:00.840 and the emergence of ideologies of resentment like communism that would kill tens of millions of people.

00:09:10.680 When what's held highest disappears, new forces emerge to compete for that position of dominance.

00:09:19.160 Nietzsche's

00:09:22.920 diagnosis of that

00:09:27.700 and then offering of a cure

00:09:29.260 was that because there was no longer

00:09:30.960 anything of transcendent

00:09:33.060 divinity

00:09:35.200 we would have to 0.86

00:09:37.820 create our own values

00:09:39.260 we'd have to take on to ourselves

00:09:42.200 the burden of

00:09:47.380 generating

00:09:49.160 Meaning itself.

00:09:55.100 All of existential philosophy, in some ways, came out of that idea.

00:09:58.580 That human beings had to take on the burden of creating the meaning in their life themselves.

00:10:04.360 And that if we stepped forward, we could do that in a manner that would enable us to thrive,

00:10:10.420 despite having severed our connection with heaven, let's say.

00:10:14.280 it didn't take very long before the psychoanalysts

00:10:18.360 generated the most profound critique

00:10:23.340 of that proposition

00:10:25.720 Freud first and then Carl Jung

00:10:29.460 who was a real student of Nietzsche

00:10:30.920 both Freud and Jung noted that

00:10:34.320 you can't create your own values

00:10:37.100 because you're not in control of yourself

00:10:38.760 you're not the sort of creature that

00:10:42.060 can just tell yourself what to do.

00:10:45.880 You know that.

00:10:46.820 You're no more obedient to you

00:10:49.840 than anyone else around you is obedient to you.

00:10:52.220 You can have all the good intentions in the world,

00:10:54.200 but that doesn't mean you're going to follow them.

00:10:55.600 People make resolutions to improve themselves constantly,

00:11:01.320 and sometimes people do that,

00:11:02.540 but it's equally likely that you'll wander off in some direction

00:11:06.480 that's not only not the direction you decided was appropriate,

00:11:09.460 but really contrary to it you're a place you're a playhouse of demons that's one way of thinking

00:11:17.840 about it you're a war of competing proclivities and motivations and they have an autonomy you can

00:11:25.680 fall under their sway this certainly happens when you fall in love it's like well when what's

00:11:30.100 happening when you fall in love exactly when you're when you find yourself attracted to someone

00:11:34.880 Well, there's a sexual element, but it isn't exactly that that feels to you as something you've decided to do.

00:11:43.300 What it feels like is you encounter someone who's unbearably attractive, right?

00:11:47.280 It's the motive force of their attraction appears to you as something external.

00:11:55.360 It's certainly not under your control. 1.00

00:11:57.800 You can make an absolute bloody fool of yourself. 1.00

00:12:00.400 In fact, it's highly likely that you will. 1.00

00:12:02.480 despite your best efforts.

00:12:08.160 So you can see that with love.

00:12:10.000 You can see that with sexual attraction.

00:12:12.300 But you can also see it in a more mundane way,

00:12:16.280 arguably, with what you're interested in.

00:12:19.780 Like, you have to discover what you're interested in.

00:12:25.040 And maybe that makes itself manifest in your life

00:12:27.980 at a very early age.

00:12:28.940 I've interviewed many people who've been very successful in their life,

00:12:34.500 and asked them about how it was that they came to know what they were interested in.

00:12:39.140 Jocko Willink's a good example of that.

00:12:41.480 Jocko Willink is a Navy SEAL.

00:12:43.540 Very tough guy.

00:12:45.080 He's about four feet thick.

00:12:46.480 He looks like two Joe Rogans compacted together.

00:12:51.220 And he said he knew he wanted to engage in mayhem from the time he was three.

00:12:56.660 like that was

00:12:58.460 that was there for him

00:13:00.380 it called to him

00:13:01.300 and it's frequently the case that

00:13:03.340 there are things in our lives

00:13:05.800 that call to us

00:13:06.740 one of the definitions of God

00:13:08.960 that permeates the

00:13:10.860 biblical library is that

00:13:13.160 God is the source of all the things

00:13:15.980 that call to you

00:13:16.880 and here's a way of understanding that

00:13:20.220 there's going to be times in your life

00:13:21.840 where you're interested in one thing

00:13:23.280 and that'll lead you somewhere

00:13:24.540 and then when you get there

00:13:25.940 you'll be interested in something else. And so that interest changes, right? But the fact that

00:13:30.560 something's interesting, the fact that something interesting is calling to you, is stable across

00:13:37.620 your transformations. And what that implies is that there's a spirit of transformation

00:13:44.240 operating behind all the particular things that interest you, that guide you forward.

00:13:50.260 carl jung believed that that was the same thing as the instinct to develop here's a way of thinking

00:13:58.080 about that as you're imagine you as a child or imagine your own children you know they get

00:14:03.940 interested in something they want to make a new friend they want to go to school they get

00:14:08.360 interested in a new toy and that interest motivates them to develop new skills and new ways of looking

00:14:15.820 at the world. And as a consequence, they become more than they are. And so you can see that

00:14:23.180 interest as the manifestation of the instinct that impels them towards development. And you

00:14:28.720 want to encourage that. You're generally pretty happy if your child takes an intense interest in

00:14:33.300 a sport, let's say, or a hobby, or a friendship for that matter. Because if they do that diligently,

00:14:40.660 the consequence of that will be that they're highly motivated which is a lovely thing to see

00:14:46.320 in your children but also that they'll become more than they are and so you can think of the

00:14:51.580 the calling as the manifestation of the spirit that calls you to develop that's what happens

00:15:00.660 to Moses so he's out there on the desert plain taking care of his sheep and something attracts

00:15:07.560 his attention and it's not a forest fire something that you could you couldn't ignore

00:15:15.200 at all it's not something absolutely overwhelming it's more like a gesture or an invitation that's

00:15:23.200 a good way of thinking about it an invitation it's something that glitters and gleams in the

00:15:29.840 corner of your eye that pulls you towards something new that compels you or invites you to step off

00:15:37.120 the beaten track and when you step off the beaten track that's when you're new somewhere new you go

00:15:42.080 somewhere new and that's when you develop and so your interest is one of the things that

00:15:46.940 pulls you off the beaten track towards

00:15:49.900 towards the new land you could inhabit if you became the new person you could become

00:15:56.800 so called peterson academy peterson academy peterson academy it's called peterson academy

00:16:03.300 Peterson Academy if you want an actual education with hand-selected professors from top universities

00:16:09.460 around the world bringing the best professors together making sure they're not censored in

00:16:14.340 any way giving them the audience and the remuneration and appreciation they deserve

00:16:17.580 and you were true to your word you gave me absolute intellectual autonomy I have had it

00:16:21.400 through every course we figure we can offer people a high quality university level education for

00:16:26.920 under $2,000 well congratulations Jordan it's honestly brilliant can't wait to enroll myself

00:16:31.360 I'll be doing that straight after this.

00:16:34.260 Fangio.

00:16:40.180 When God comes to Abraham,

00:16:42.860 Abraham is about 70 when this happens.

00:16:46.420 He's a rich, he's the son of rich parents.

00:16:49.920 And what that means is Abraham could just lull around the tent

00:16:52.660 and has for seven decades, failure to launch.

00:16:57.100 And there's no reason for him to leave

00:16:58.560 because all his needs are gratified.

00:17:03.760 And you might say, well, if all your needs are gratified,

00:17:06.620 then why do anything?

00:17:08.300 And that's a very good question for rich and privileged people.

00:17:13.020 And the answer to that is something like,

00:17:15.220 all your needs aren't gratified by having your needs gratified.

00:17:19.760 The need for difficulty, for example, the need for challenge,

00:17:22.960 the need for development, the need for play, the need for adventure.

00:17:28.560 Those might arguably be the most profound need, so to speak.

00:17:35.060 God comes to Abraham as the calling to adventure.

00:17:39.360 God comes to Abraham and says, look, you've been hanging around your tent there, buddy, for 70 years.

00:17:46.600 It's getting kind of ugly.

00:17:50.460 Leave your zone of comfort.

00:17:53.880 Leave your father's tent.

00:17:55.240 Leave your family.

00:17:56.160 Leave your community. 1.00

00:17:56.900 leave everything you know and venture out into the world in all its catastrophe and abraham commits

00:18:04.680 to that he agrees to that and he also agrees to make the sacrifices along the way that enable his

00:18:12.420 transformation as he pursues his adventure that's really what the story of abraham is about and god

00:18:18.800 makes him a deal which is a very interesting deal it's unbelievably worth knowing it's like the

00:18:24.740 secret to life, in a way. God says, if you commit yourself wholeheartedly to the spirit

00:18:34.260 of adventure, and you make the necessary sacrifices along the way, as you're called upon

00:18:41.220 to transform, you'll turn into who you most deeply are. And the consequence of that will

00:18:47.680 be that you're a blessing to yourself, so that's a good deal, that your reputation will

00:18:55.080 expand, your name will become known, but not in a narcissistic and shallow manner, you'll

00:19:02.420 become known as, you'll become known for the same reason that people who are capable and

00:19:10.940 competent and productive and generous and hospitable are known.

00:19:13.920 so you'll earn your reputation

00:19:17.420 it's the opposite of narcissism

00:19:19.740 and the fact that your reputation will expand

00:19:22.260 will increase your opportunities

00:19:23.680 obviously

00:19:24.860 but it'll increase them

00:19:26.580 and this is the next step

00:19:28.200 it'll increase them in a manner

00:19:31.400 that makes itself manifest in two ways

00:19:34.700 first is there's some reasonable probability

00:19:37.820 that you'll establish something permanent

00:19:39.740 so Abraham is offered the opportunity to father nations

00:19:43.000 So, the idea is that if he follows the calling to opportunity, that the consequence of that

00:19:54.540 will be that his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he'll establish the

00:20:00.660 pattern that radically increases the probability that his descendants will be numerous and

00:20:09.040 successful right and that's in keeping with the impetus to adventure and then this is the capper

00:20:17.080 god says and if you do all that you'll do it in a way that's a blessing to everyone else

00:20:20.920 and so there's a vision of like a multi-dimensional harmony and it's a very optimistic idea so imagine

00:20:28.760 that you threw caution to the wind let's say although not wisdom and and intelligence and

00:20:34.860 you said, well, I'm going to pursue adventure, the adventure that calls to me with no holds

00:20:40.920 part, what will happen? The offer is, well, you'll be way better for yourself. More than

00:20:47.600 you can even imagine. But, that will happen in a way that will expand your reputation

00:20:53.340 in a valid manner, that will increase the probability that you'll do something worthwhile

00:20:57.140 and permanent, and you'll do it in a way that's very, very useful and good for everyone else.

00:21:01.820 and so what the offering there is that

00:21:06.540 that courage to allow yourself to unfold and develop

00:21:12.660 which is probably what you want more than anything else anyways

00:21:16.420 because that's where all the adventurous joy in life is

00:21:19.260 that's identical if it's made manifest properly

00:21:22.800 to the pattern that sets the world in order socially

00:21:26.560 across the largest possible span of time

00:21:29.740 And then you might think, well, how could it be any other way?

00:21:32.400 Like, you know perfectly well with your children,

00:21:34.700 you want to encourage your children to develop and to become competent,

00:21:39.040 radically competent, so that they can live in the world without having to depend on you,

00:21:43.440 so that they can go out and encounter all the catastrophes of the world head-on,

00:21:47.720 and not only manage, but thrive.

00:21:51.320 You assume that if they did that in the best possible manner, that that would be good for them,

00:21:55.760 and that they'd have friends in consequence of that

00:21:59.440 and that they'd increase their probability of actual accomplishment and success

00:22:04.780 and that it would be good for everyone else.

00:22:08.280 And the alternative hypothesis would be something like,

00:22:11.860 well, if you followed the calling of adventure, 0.97

00:22:15.360 you'd be a deceitful, self-serving narcissist

00:22:18.800 and that instinct would set you at cross-purposes with everyone else.

00:22:23.060 and that just seems it just seems unlikely like how likely is it that the spirit that calls you

00:22:29.520 to become all you are isn't the same spirit that aligns us communally and socially across

00:22:35.960 the longest possible span of time it's sort of like a definition of an adaptation

00:22:41.880 if we weren't structured in that manner the best of us would produce the worst possible social

00:22:50.340 outcome well no obviously okay so moses goes and investigates the burning bush and

00:22:59.220 why is it a burning bush well everything alive is on fire

00:23:07.120 so it's it's life heightened that's a good way of hallucinogenically heightened it's the spirit

00:23:20.340 Because fire is an agent of transformation and something that's alive is burning, but staying the same at the same time

00:23:27.220 There's no difference between that metabolism and I would say in some ways you're most alive when you're most on fire

00:23:35.160 Right so that the the process of weirdly enough you're you're who you are most deeply when you're 1.00

00:23:41.640 Transforming as brutally as you can manage and so that's what Moses encounters he encounters the the spirit of 0.97

00:23:49.220 of what calls you to attend that transforms you.

00:23:54.860 And he investigates that.

00:23:56.640 Okay, so how does that roll out in your life?

00:23:59.300 Well, to the degree that you pursued anything genuinely in your life,

00:24:06.380 something called to you and you followed it.

00:24:09.260 You became fascinated by something, right?

00:24:11.880 Which means it grabbed you and you locked onto it.

00:24:15.540 You entered into a relationship with that thing that fascinated you.

00:24:18.740 And that took you down a pathway, and the pathway deepened as you investigated, didn't it?

00:24:25.180 And you learned more and more as a consequence of your commitment to it,

00:24:28.980 and the consequence of that was that you transformed.

00:24:32.040 Now, Moses does that to the ultimate degree.

00:24:36.720 Like Abraham, he's fully committed, and what happens to Moses is that the voice of God itself reveals itself to him.

00:24:43.960 And this is a definition.

00:24:45.420 so the idea is that if you attended without reservation in good faith and with courage

00:24:52.700 to those things that compelled you forward and you committed to that investigation that you would

00:24:59.080 look into the structure of reality so deeply that the underlying spirit that animated everything

00:25:05.340 would become known to you and you might say well i don't believe that it's like it's not so obvious

00:25:12.140 what we believe and what we don't believe, we know perfectly well that the best moments

00:25:17.500 in our life occur as a consequence of taking something like a calling with all due seriousness.

00:25:24.640 And we understand not only that that devoted serious attention does broaden our capacity

00:25:34.460 to understand and deepen our souls and our understanding of the world, but also makes

00:25:41.720 us more compelling to other people. One of the things, if you're talking to someone or

00:25:51.340 interviewing them, and you want the conversation to light on fire to be a transforming conversation,

00:25:59.740 you can ask people what they're interested in. And if you listen, they'll start telling

00:26:05.440 you, and when they start telling you, they light up. Everyone knows what that means.

00:26:09.960 and they get extremely interesting.

00:26:12.980 And, you know, if you can find out what someone loves,

00:26:15.500 which is what you do for someone that you do love,

00:26:18.500 is you find out what they love and you encourage that,

00:26:23.400 then the best of them comes out and they become charismatic.

00:26:31.600 So when Moses, when God reveals himself to Moses,

00:26:35.400 God tells Moses that now he's to become a leader.

00:26:39.940 And Moses says, well, I don't think so.

00:26:42.100 I'm slow of tongue.

00:26:43.660 Moses has, he's not a good communicator.

00:26:46.240 Maybe he has a speech impediment.

00:26:47.580 We don't really know.

00:26:48.440 But communication isn't his forte.

00:26:51.040 And God basically says to him two things.

00:26:53.940 First, that's your problem.

00:26:56.360 Like, you're called upon to resist tyranny and to lead yourself and your fellow man away from slavery,

00:27:05.080 no matter what your inadequacies.

00:27:07.340 and then god also says people will listen to you because you will tell them that you're coming in

00:27:14.900 my name and you might say well what does that mean well imagine the circumstances in your life where

00:27:22.220 people have listened to you now you can imagine that happening in two ways you're manipulating

00:27:27.320 them you're selling them something you're lying i mean selling in the you know manipulative manner 1.00

00:27:32.980 where you offer junk to idiots to take advantage of them. 1.00

00:27:36.840 That isn't what I mean. 1.00

00:27:38.120 I mean, imagine how effective you are as a model

00:27:44.920 when what you're offering to people in your communication

00:27:48.620 is a revelation of that which you find most deeply meaningful.

00:27:53.220 People will listen to you then

00:27:54.620 because the best of you is revealing itself

00:27:57.020 in a way that helps them reveal the best in them.

00:28:00.520 you certainly do that as a parent if you have any sense

00:28:03.540 it's often in those familial relationships that the best of us can make itself manifest

00:28:08.600 sometimes the worst too, but you get my point

00:28:12.020 is that insofar as you're capable of making an account of how what you've been

00:28:18.400 what you're committed to has transformed your life

00:28:22.060 and you do that honestly, people are going to listen to you

00:28:25.480 now it's kind of strange that that's the case

00:28:28.080 But, you know, when you hear someone speak, you can tell the difference, usually.

00:28:33.400 This can be game.

00:28:34.260 But you can tell the difference between when they're genuine and interesting.

00:28:37.860 And those two things really are very closely aligned.

00:28:40.520 And when they're false and dull.

00:28:42.800 And false is almost always dull.

00:28:45.200 Genuine is almost always compelling, even if it's inarticulate.

00:28:49.300 You know, you meet people now and then who are of stellar moral character,

00:28:52.060 but can't really make much of an argument.

00:28:54.080 But that doesn't, you still listen to them.

00:28:55.600 there's still something about the way they conduct themselves that's compelling

00:28:58.560 that's basically what God offers to Moses

00:29:00.940 he said well if you tell people that you've come in my name they'll listen

00:29:04.320 well people will listen to you if you tell the truth

00:29:07.880 so because their souls can discriminate between truth and falsehood

00:29:13.800 and so

00:29:15.220 and God tells Moses as a consequence of investigating this burning bush

00:29:22.060 that he's to go back to his wayward and enslaved people

00:29:28.520 and free them from tyranny and lead them away from slavery

00:29:32.880 and traverse the desert and head to the promised land.

00:29:37.200 And that's what a leader does.

00:29:39.080 A leader always stands up against tyranny.

00:29:42.880 Sometimes it's the tyranny of his own soul.

00:29:45.520 You can tyrannize yourself.

00:29:47.480 He always stands up against slavery, and the same thing applies there.

00:29:50.960 You can be a slave to your own convictions. 1.00

00:29:54.560 You can be a slave to your idiot ideology. 1.00

00:29:57.560 You can be a slave in your marriage. 1.00

00:29:59.220 You can be a slave to your children. 0.95

00:30:01.160 You can be a slave in a totalitarian state.

00:30:04.220 You're going to have that dynamism of tyrant and slave in your life in all times.

00:30:10.140 Not the mere archaic biblical.

00:30:13.520 It's the same thing always.

00:30:14.920 And a leader is always the person who calls the slaves to adopt responsibility,

00:30:22.560 the responsibility that's ennobling, and who stands up against the tyrant.

00:30:27.240 And the injunction in the Exodus story is that if you attend to that which compels you forward,

00:30:37.300 you'll become the leader that is capable of doing exactly that.

00:30:41.960 and you know that too because of those times in your life where you've pursued what you've been

00:30:48.360 interested in without reservation and developed in consequence offers to you a kingdom within which

00:30:56.600 you're sovereign and a space in which you can speak about what you know in a manner that

00:31:03.320 compels and invites others.

00:31:06.800 So,

00:31:07.500 so that's the burning bush.

00:31:11.820 The burning bush is what calls you to adventure.

00:31:14.700 It's not all that calls you to adventure.

00:31:17.360 But it's one major element of what calls you to adventure.

00:31:20.660 In the biblical stories,

00:31:22.600 God is defined as the spirit of adventure.

00:31:26.960 Right?

00:31:27.620 This is very much worth knowing,

00:31:29.000 because modern people don't know where to find God, so to speak.

00:31:33.320 God comes to you with the offering of meaning

00:31:40.980 That's a good way of thinking about it

00:31:43.300 And the place that meaning reveals itself can transform

00:31:47.120 But the ultimate source of the meaning is constant

00:31:49.700 When you approach something that's meaningful

00:31:52.840 You might change enough so that that pursuit

00:31:55.520 You've exhausted that pursuit so it's no longer meaningful

00:31:59.240 and something new offers itself as your next destination.

00:32:04.280 But it's the same thing again.

00:32:07.500 And it's different for every person,

00:32:09.440 because what you're interested in isn't going to be what you're interested in.

00:32:12.240 There might be some overlap, but it's very particularized.

00:32:15.220 But it doesn't matter, because it's all pointing.

00:32:17.120 This is the monotheistic hypothesis.

00:32:19.060 It's all pointing to the same thing.

00:32:22.420 And so, okay, so what's a burning bush?

00:32:25.520 In relationship to what I'm going to talk to you about tonight.

00:32:27.800 The story of Cain and Abel is a burning bush.

00:32:31.400 It's a story that's been sufficiently interesting

00:32:35.980 so that people have remembered it and told it

00:32:39.160 for thousands and thousands of years.

00:32:40.800 We have no idea for how long.

00:32:43.520 It's a very, very old story,

00:32:45.360 and it's very old in its written form,

00:32:47.700 but the older a story is in the written form,

00:32:51.000 the more likely it is that it's way older than that in an oral form.

00:32:54.320 So like a story that's, say, 4,000 years old

00:32:57.260 is probably a story that's 50,000 years old.

00:33:01.220 So, partly because the farther you go back in time,

00:33:04.000 the slower things change.

00:33:06.140 So, if something exists at any point in the past,

00:33:08.680 it's very, very likely that it's existed for an immense amount of time.

00:33:12.660 Okay, so, let's unpack the story of Cain and Abel.

00:33:17.140 This burning bush.

00:33:19.160 And let's see where it takes us.

00:33:21.360 So, Cain and Abel are the first two human beings.

00:33:27.140 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:33:28.560 Now, you might think, well, no, it's Adam and Eve.

00:33:30.400 It's like, no, not really, because they're made by God.

00:33:33.480 And so they don't really count.

00:33:34.940 They're sort of, they're unique.

00:33:39.780 They're not born.

00:33:42.340 Cain and Abel are the first two people born after the fall when history starts.

00:33:49.600 Adam and Eve are made by God, and they live in the Garden of Paradise.

00:33:52.100 And that's not true for any of you.

00:33:53.940 and it's not true for Cain and Abel

00:33:56.780 so in a way, Adam and Eve are your ancestors

00:33:59.840 insofar as they're the primordial mother and father of all

00:34:03.600 but in history, in the fallen world

00:34:07.760 Cain and Abel are the first two human beings

00:34:11.900 okay, now they're brothers as well

00:34:14.640 now they establish a pattern

00:34:16.780 now when Eve gives birth to Cain and Abel

00:34:19.900 she says, I've gotten a man from God

00:34:22.980 And the reason she says that is it's a precursor, it's of the same pattern as Mary's proclamation in the Gospels that her son Christ is a consequence of her impregnation by God.

00:34:41.940 And so what does that mean, at minimum, psychologically?

00:34:44.940 Well, it means the father, biological father, contributes to reproduction, obviously,

00:34:54.940 but in some ways very little.

00:34:58.940 It's not a lot of work, right?

00:35:02.940 And in a way, you don't have much to do with it.

00:35:05.940 Like, you didn't create your body.

00:35:07.940 You didn't generate any of the biological processes that give rise to the baby.

00:35:13.940 The thing that you actually contribute is 10 million times smaller than the egg.

00:35:20.200 So that's a lot. 0.96

00:35:21.940 Actually, the definition of female is that sex which contributes most to reproduction.

00:35:27.140 That's a deeper definition than even the chromosomal definition.

00:35:31.660 And so the male contributes something necessary, but most of the work is God and the woman.

00:35:41.420 right and so that's all

00:35:45.600 see the man can make up for that as time goes by because he can stick around

00:35:53.900 that's what joseph does right that's what joseph does in good faith

00:36:00.060 and that's when his contribution is elevated beyond the merely whimsical let's say or beyond

00:36:07.760 beyond the realm of immediate gratification.

00:36:10.880 That's all prefigured in that very

00:36:12.900 condensed statement

00:36:16.020 that Eve makes about her gratitude

00:36:21.420 for having been given her sons.

00:36:26.840 Her sons are at war.

00:36:29.180 Okay, why?

00:36:31.700 Well, Cain and Abel represent

00:36:33.100 two diametrically opposed patterns of adaptation

00:36:36.360 to the fallen world okay so what do we know about the fallen world we know that it's a world that

00:36:43.200 requires sacrifice okay so when adam and eve are chased out of paradise actually when

00:36:49.640 they fall out of paradise as a consequence of their pride

00:36:53.960 god tells them that they're going to have to work that the woman's work in large part is going to

00:37:02.160 be centered around the sacrifices intended upon establishing a relationship with a man which is

00:37:09.800 by necessity in some manner dependent in contrast to him because she has to make herself vulnerable

00:37:17.060 in consequence of being a mother that's her fate and that's basically what god tells eve it's like

00:37:25.000 well you've mucked things up because of your pride you're now in the fallen world

00:37:30.260 now you're stuck with this man and you're going to be beholden to him he's not saying that's how

00:37:37.660 it should be he's saying that's how it's going to be and then he tells adam well you're in trouble 0.99

00:37:42.880 too because as a consequence of your idiocy and your pride not least in agreeing without resistance 0.99

00:37:52.180 to everything eve offered you and then blaming her for the corruption that emerged as a consequence 0.99

00:37:58.620 your life is going to your work is going to become painful and difficult and the world won't easily

00:38:06.980 bring forth its abundance to you so what does all that mean well one of the things it means is the

00:38:14.320 more prideful and arrogant you are the harder your work's going to be right so and you can imagine

00:38:20.180 this too you know even if you have a rough job if you were wise enough to have some gratitude for

00:38:28.240 that and you entered into it in the full spirit of sacrifice and you did your difficult job

00:38:37.680 without victimizing yourself and with full commitment, first of all, you might be able to

00:38:44.360 take some joy in that job and a joy that might be commensurate with the transformation of your

00:38:50.640 attitude. But it might also be the case that to the degree that you could accept your starting

00:38:56.080 point without bitterness and resentment and you could commit wholeheartedly to the task at hand

00:39:01.980 that you would start to transform in a way that would take you out of that lowly position very

00:39:08.480 rapidly i would say in most societies that are reasonably functional and the united states is

00:39:14.000 probably first and foremost in the world in this regard is that you can start in a pretty miserable

00:39:19.340 place and if you are careful and you make the proper sacrifices things can get better for you

00:39:27.920 very very rapidly now to the degree that your society is just and productive and generous and

00:39:34.260 stable that's increasingly likely but likely your country has done that better than any country's

00:39:40.960 ever done it and it's certainly in the situation now where you're still doing that better than it's

00:39:45.960 done anywhere else so okay so adam and or cain and abel they're born into a world where sacrifice

00:39:54.140 is a necessity okay so now we need to understand what that means because if you want to understand

00:39:59.980 the western the story of the west and you want to understand the stories upon which the west

00:40:06.420 itself is predicated you have to understand what sacrifice means because the entire biblical

00:40:11.420 corpus which is the foundational text of the west is a meta story about sacrifice and it's very hard

00:40:18.980 for modern people to wrap their heads around this because they don't know what the hell sacrifice

00:40:22.400 means so when i used to teach at the university of toronto i had a lot of immigrant kids in my

00:40:27.840 class most of them asians children of first generation immigrants and i would ask them when

00:40:33.720 i was trying to elucidate this i'd ask them what did your parents sacrifice to get you here and

00:40:39.880 believe me at least among the asian kids there there wasn't much doubt about that because their 0.99

00:40:45.560 parents had told them like 8 000 times what they had sacrificed to get them to that damn university 0.98

00:40:51.540 and part of that informing was screw up and you'll pay for it because we put everything on the line 0.98

00:40:58.640 for you and that was dead serious and so those kids were often firmly committed in a manner that

00:41:04.880 Was likely to make them more successful

00:41:07.140 But they knew what the sacrifice meant

00:41:09.140 Okay, but what

00:41:09.980 So

00:41:10.460 What does it mean that you sacrifice

00:41:12.780 Or even more than that

00:41:14.240 What does it mean that that's the pattern of human adaptation

00:41:16.580 Or even more than that

00:41:18.340 What does it mean that you sacrifice in relationship to God

00:41:22.120 Well, those are complicated questions

00:41:24.660 Well, let's start with sacrifice itself

00:41:26.840 There's no difference between sacrifice and maturity

00:41:29.820 Okay, so

00:41:32.180 You can even think about this

00:41:33.900 physiologically what happens to you when you mature is that you replace your subjugation

00:41:43.520 to your short-term self-centered biological whims with the ability to delay gratification

00:41:55.300 plan for the future and engage in reciprocal play in reciprocal offering so if if you and i are going

00:42:07.360 to play a game one of the sacrifices i make to play that game is you get to have a turn

00:42:13.680 and even more profoundly now and then you get to pick the game and so you see among children who

00:42:21.720 were radically unpopular, that the reason they're unpopular is because they don't ever

00:42:27.620 let anybody else have a turn, and no one else ever gets to pick the game. It's like my game

00:42:33.080 or no game, which is one of the claims that's at the heart of the current culture war, by

00:42:38.800 the way. I am whoever I say I am, and you better not get in my way. It's like, well,

00:42:46.120 that's all well and good for you, except nobody's going to want to play with you, because

00:42:51.600 Why would they?

00:42:52.920 It's like, you're going to run your marriage that way?

00:42:55.540 It's like, you're just whoever you are in whatever way you want to be at every given second,

00:43:00.460 and your partner doesn't get a say in the matter.

00:43:03.660 Well, first of all, you do that for a few years, and you're like,

00:43:07.040 you're so far away from the straight and narrow path that you're going to be in your own particular form of hell.

00:43:11.640 Because if you're ruled by nothing else than your immediate whim,

00:43:16.080 you're going to end up in a place that's brutally miserable and isolated.

00:43:21.100 Your identity is negotiated all the time.

00:43:24.300 If you're in communal relationship, if you have a wife or a husband,

00:43:28.260 if you have children, if you have parents, if you have friends,

00:43:31.680 you're taking turns and making sacrifices at every second.

00:43:36.520 And the better you are at that, the better those relationships are going to be.

00:43:41.860 You know, I mean, it's not a useful thing to turn yourself into a martyr

00:43:46.080 in relationship to your wife, but it's a very good thing to offer to your children

00:43:53.920 and your wife and your friends and your community the best that you have to offer.

00:43:59.460 It's a very good thing to forestall your demand for immediate hedonic self-gratification

00:44:05.400 for the sake of a higher unity.

00:44:08.540 when you're disciplining two-year-olds you're not punishing them for being selfish that's not

00:44:18.620 what you're doing not if you're doing it right what you're doing is freeing them from the

00:44:23.920 subjugation of their immediate whim so that could be their boisterousness it could be their sorrow

00:44:29.780 it could be their rage it could be their exhaustion and replacing that with the ability

00:44:37.660 to regulate their emotions in a manner that allows them to become

00:44:43.600 the sort of person who's eminently desirable as a friend and partner.

00:44:48.980 That's the purpose of discipline.

00:44:51.040 And there's no difference between that and cortical maturation.

00:44:55.100 Those are the same things.

00:44:56.380 You're born into the world a warring battleground of short-term motivation and emotion.

00:45:04.200 That's what a two-year-old is.

00:45:05.380 There's something fascinating about that.

00:45:07.040 It's fun to be around two-year-olds because they're so alive, right?

00:45:11.380 When they're angry, it's like they're 100% angry.

00:45:14.400 It's kind of a miracle.

00:45:15.820 They can lay on the ground and kick and hold their breath until they turn blue.

00:45:21.080 That's, if you ever saw an adult do that, it would take you like five years to recover.

00:45:29.100 So, and there are forms of adult pathology where the person afflicted is so immature

00:45:34.940 that they're capable of having that kind of fit of rage it's a terrifying thing

00:45:39.560 to observe you certainly don't want to see that ever let alone every day people

00:45:45.860 who are very afflicted by a pathologically prolonged immaturity will

00:45:51.080 use the threat of that to obtain what they want don't upset your mother

00:45:56.360 whatever you do don't upset your mother could be your father too but you know

00:46:01.380 what I mean is that behind that threat is the notion of explosive emotionality wielded as a

00:46:07.400 weapon. When you help your child mature, you help them substitute the kind of integration that

00:46:14.940 enables them to regulate all their emotions and their motivations with an eye to the long run

00:46:22.240 so that they don't do things in the short term that hurt them in the medium to long run,

00:46:27.660 but also in a manner that makes them eminently desirable socially.

00:46:32.780 So they can have friends.

00:46:34.420 That's all sacrifice.

00:46:36.240 So human beings, when we became aware that we were naked and mortal,

00:46:41.100 when we became aware that we were subject to pain and death,

00:46:45.840 when we started to understand that,

00:46:47.480 when we knew we had a boundary in time,

00:46:50.460 we started to sacrifice.

00:46:52.500 And what did we do?

00:46:53.320 We started to work.

00:46:55.240 There's no difference between sacrifice and maturity.

00:46:57.900 But there's also no difference between sacrifice and work.

00:47:01.060 They're the same concept.

00:47:03.020 Why?

00:47:03.720 Well, work is sacrificial.

00:47:05.540 Well, why?

00:47:06.520 Well, because when you work, you sacrifice the present for the future.

00:47:10.060 It's like the definition of work.

00:47:11.560 It's like you're not doing exactly what you want to do right now at this moment,

00:47:16.200 because that would be play.

00:47:18.920 What you're doing instead is foregoing the need for immediate self-gratification

00:47:24.260 so that things will be better for you in the medium to long term

00:47:29.080 in a way that's also better for your wife and your kids and your community.

00:47:33.560 And that's sacrificial.

00:47:34.640 And there's a certain pain that's associated with it.

00:47:37.420 People are relieved when it's Friday, you know,

00:47:39.600 so they can let their hair down a little bit so they're not in harness,

00:47:43.080 even though it's necessary to be in harness.

00:47:45.260 We know that our life is sacrificial.

00:47:47.260 So part of the mystery of our life is, well, how do we conduct ourselves sacrificially in the highest manner?

00:47:53.660 Which is, what sacrifices are optimally pleasing to God?

00:47:57.580 It's the same question.

00:47:59.880 And what does that pattern of optimal sacrifice, how does it appear?

00:48:06.660 Well, this is exactly the mystery that's presented in the story of Cain and Abel.

00:48:12.580 So, Cain is an agriculturalist, and Abel is a keeper of, he's a shepherd.

00:48:20.520 We talked about shepherds already.

00:48:22.260 He's a shepherd.

00:48:24.100 And Cain and Abel make offerings to God.

00:48:28.060 So they both have their jobs, and they both make offerings.

00:48:32.460 Well, your job is an offering.

00:48:34.760 Your job is not only an offering, it's a covenantal offering.

00:48:38.000 It's a contractual offering.

00:48:40.220 Here's why.

00:48:41.880 You assume, if you work, that you're banking the consequences of your work in the future.

00:48:48.620 You're making a contract with the future.

00:48:51.640 The contract is, if I give up, if I work, if I give up my hedonic self-gratification in the present,

00:48:58.980 and I invest, let's say, that that will pay off.

00:49:02.900 Okay, so pay off in what way?

00:49:04.800 Well, if your society is well-organized, it'll pay off because the deal is that no one will steal what you've worked for.

00:49:17.120 That's a really hard thing to establish.

00:49:19.520 Because the default is, well, you have something I don't. 0.99

00:49:22.720 You took it from me, and it's okay to kill you to get it back. 0.98

00:49:28.200 Like, that's the fate of mankind almost everywhere, almost always. 0.98

00:49:32.040 You have to have one sophisticated society before it's default okay that people bank up their wealth.

00:49:39.620 But if that isn't okay, then you don't have any wealth.

00:49:43.600 Because if the rule is you have some wealth as a consequence of sacrifice and then you die,

00:49:49.860 no one is going to work, obviously.

00:49:53.120 And so you can imagine that that sacrificial covenant is a contractual arrangement with the future and with the community that if you make the proper offering, you'll be rewarded in proportion.

00:50:16.000 That's your faith in your community.

00:50:18.200 That's your faith in the future.

00:50:19.380 Look, we know that as someone's life becomes more radically unpredictable and unstable,

00:50:24.860 because their community is degenerating,

00:50:27.540 they'll turn to short-term gratification as a strategy.

00:50:30.920 And it's because if you can't rely on your community,

00:50:35.420 you can't store anything of value up.

00:50:37.940 Why in the world would you make any sacrifices? 1.00

00:50:40.240 You're just a fool then. 1.00

00:50:42.220 You sacrifice in the present so you have no short-term gratification, 1.00

00:50:46.660 but there's no payoff.

00:50:47.580 well no one's going to do that you want to set up your society so that your

00:50:52.060 sacrificial offerings are banked and stored the best way to do that by the

00:50:58.820 way is not in money but in reputation the the best storehouse of wealth for

00:51:07.020 sacrifice is in your reputation for generosity hospitality and productive

00:51:14.160 self-sacrifice. Is if people think highly of you, genuinely, then you're protected against every

00:51:22.240 storm in a way that nothing else can protect you. And that's how what's moral and highest

00:51:30.680 lines up perfectly with the spirit of the highest possible sacrifice. Okay, so Cain and Abel,

00:51:37.780 sacrifice. Now, we don't hear much about Cain's sacrifices. We only know that he offers up the

00:51:43.220 fruits of the soil the story doesn't say much else about that it does say a fair bit about abel's

00:51:48.320 sacrifice it says that what abel does is he takes the best of the best and he offers that to god

00:51:53.740 so he has unblemished perfect animals and he takes the cuts of meat from those animals that 0.63

00:52:01.300 are of the highest quality and then he cuts off the parts of those that are of the highest quality

00:52:09.900 the fattiest cuts, and he offers them to God. Okay, and so how does he do that? Well, he does

00:52:15.360 that on an altar. He burns them. Okay, so first of all, the burning. Remember, people are acting

00:52:20.800 this out, eh? They're trying to grapple with something they don't understand, which is the

00:52:24.880 spirit of sacrifice. People are learning that they can sacrifice the present for the future,

00:52:29.900 that they can store value. They're trying to figure out what that means. They do it the way

00:52:35.260 children do it in some ways. They dramatize it. They play it out. And it's all an attempt to

00:52:39.900 come to understand it more and more explicitly. It's the dream. It's the dream of the

00:52:47.160 representation of sacrifice. They offer it to God. They offer Cain, Abel, offers his best to God.

00:52:54.020 Okay, what does that mean? It means that if you offer your best, you're most likely to be accepted.

00:53:01.180 That's the deal.

00:53:02.860 Now, you might be cynical about that.

00:53:05.140 Say, well, I'm best punished for my virtues.

00:53:07.260 I've tried very, very hard, and I haven't been accepted.

00:53:09.720 But let's take that apart a little bit.

00:53:12.340 Look, if you have a son, and you love him, you don't say to him, ever,

00:53:16.540 really, even if you're a criminal, although there's some, you know,

00:53:21.320 deviation from this among criminal subcultures,

00:53:23.860 you don't say to him, look, kid, here's how you should conduct yourself.

00:53:28.340 You should lie and cheat and steal whenever you get a chance. 0.97

00:53:30.820 deceit is your best move forward you should always stab a friend in the back if it's going 0.89

00:53:37.320 to be useful to you if you're on a sports team hog the glory and distribute the blame

00:53:42.540 and manipulate and short change at every opportunity okay first of all you'd never 0.67

00:53:49.880 say that to anyone you love even if you're pretty damn bent and people who are criminal

00:53:55.520 even at the extremes, are generally not so delusional that they'll teach those lessons

00:54:04.520 directly to their own children. Now, I understand that, as I said, that you can be so lost that

00:54:09.580 you'll actually want to corrupt even your own son. But you get my point. No one with the vague

00:54:18.280 bit of soul left, thinks that the proper lesson for your children is the lesson in the least

00:54:25.660 possibly desirable sacrifice. What do you tell them instead? You say, well, look, kid,

00:54:31.880 maybe they're off to play baseball for the first time. You say, look, what do you say?

00:54:39.460 Do your best. Right? And that's, you want to go watch your child playing a sport, and

00:54:47.360 you want to see him do his best. And so what does that mean? Okay, what does it mean for him to do

00:54:52.080 his best? Well, it could mean to be highly skilled, right? Because it'd be fun if you have a child

00:54:58.240 who's very skilled athletically and is the star on the field. But even if he is the star, there

00:55:05.960 would have been a period of time where he had to develop that. What you want to see is that your

00:55:09.280 kid's out there pushing himself so that with each practice he gets better. So he's in this zone of

00:55:15.300 proximal development right he's beyond his zone of comfort and he's unfolding himself in relationship

00:55:21.020 to skill but that's not all you want to see in fact it's not even the most important thing you

00:55:26.640 want to see me you can imagine going to a sports event with your son and he's clearly the star

00:55:33.220 and uh he never he's playing soccer he never passes the ball even when one of his teammates

00:55:40.120 is open. He's always trying to hog the glory for himself. If he does score a goal, maybe he scores

00:55:45.680 three of them and is genuinely the hero of the game. He comes off the field and bitches and 1.00

00:55:50.420 complains about all the losers on his team, and he wants all the attention. And if you have any 1.00

00:55:55.860 sense as a parent, you're pretty appalled by that, even if he is the star. And you think, you know,

00:56:03.120 kid, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It matters how you play the game. And that's a

00:56:08.760 sacrificial piece of advice because what you're basically saying is you're not trying to win this

00:56:14.260 game kid you're trying to win the game in a manner that makes you most desirable as a play partner

00:56:21.200 and so what would that mean well what would you want to see for your son you'd want to see

00:56:25.340 well when he has the opportunity he tosses the ball over to someone else to give them a chance

00:56:30.480 and i don't mean in the kind of condescending manner i mean in a manner that would help the

00:56:34.460 team be better across time and you want to see him encouraging people when they push themselves

00:56:40.040 and you want to see him inviting the people who are less well integrated in the team into the

00:56:47.020 community and you want to see him emerging as team captain so he's a leader and then maybe if he's

00:56:53.260 highly skilled and a leader it's like you've got yourself a good deal right and so and then you'd

00:56:59.600 say, well, he did his best. He offered his best. And Cain, Abel, offers his best. So the

00:57:08.360 moral injunction in the story of Cain and Abel is that the proper pattern of sacrifice is to

00:57:17.720 offer your best. Cain doesn't do that. Okay, so what does it mean not to offer your best?

00:57:23.820 well it's lazy obviously and what does lazy mean it means

00:57:30.440 it means you're doing less than you could well how's that going to work

00:57:37.280 if you have any sense you know that your life is impossibly difficult and to to offer what's less

00:57:47.640 than what's your best is to make the assumption that you are so remarkable that you're going to

00:57:55.340 be able to establish yourself properly in life with a second-rate effort. Well, you know,

00:58:03.780 good luck to that because life is impossible and you'll barely get through it unscathed

00:58:11.000 and won't, actually, even if you do offer your best, and if you're playing a second-rate game,

00:58:19.080 you haven't got a chance. And then, if you play a second-rate game, there's a lot of things that

00:58:23.740 go along with that. You have to assume that other people are too stupid to see through that, 1.00

00:58:28.620 and so then you get arrogant. And you also have to assume that, and you have to lie to yourself, 1.00

00:58:34.180 so that you don't have to face the unpleasant truth that you're offering less than your best,

00:58:40.660 And so that makes you delusional.

00:58:43.820 And then you have to propose and act out the proposition that you're so much the center of things

00:58:51.560 that you can offer less than your best, and that will even fool God.

00:58:57.140 Because you're going to get away with it.

00:59:00.200 And so, well, so that's what Cain does.

00:59:05.460 And then it doesn't work.

00:59:07.880 his sacrifice is rejected by god because it's not of the highest quality and so then what happens

00:59:14.820 well it's exactly what happens in life so what happens if people fail as a consequence of their

00:59:22.380 second-rate sacrifices well they get unhappy and miserable and bitter and so that's what

00:59:29.500 happens to cain it says in the story that his countenance falls so he's depressed and embittered

00:59:34.940 and possessed by rage and vengeful.

00:59:39.860 And that's just where things get going.

00:59:42.680 And then he shakes his fist at God and challenges him.

00:59:46.400 In the story of Job, Job is visited by all the catastrophes of life.

00:59:53.040 And very unfairly, even by the admission of God,

00:59:58.000 his businesses collapse, his family's destroyed,

01:00:02.700 he gets a terrible disfiguring illness,

01:00:04.940 He's sitting in the ashes, bereft of hope, and then his friends come along and tell him that, well, he deserved what happened to him.

01:00:13.860 Because nothing happens without a reason, and they're kind of happy about it, you know, in that horrible way that makes bitter people thrilled

01:00:24.060 when something they respect is destroyed so that they don't have to bear the burden of that ideal.

01:00:31.320 And Job is so bereft that his wife says to him, 0.90

01:00:37.200 there's nothing left for you except to shake your fist at God, curse God, and die. 0.94

01:00:44.040 And why? 1.00

01:00:45.140 Well, curse God because the world has revealed itself,

01:00:48.360 the created order has revealed itself as entirely antithetical to anything you might desire.

01:00:53.840 And there's going to be times in your life where you feel exactly that,

01:00:56.920 you know, where you're apparently putting in the effort and things have still gone sideways for

01:01:02.120 you. And it can get to the point where it's so demoralizing that you are unhappy and demoralized

01:01:10.620 and also angry. And Job takes that on and says, I don't care what happens to me. I'm not going to

01:01:18.660 lose faith in the essential goodness of my being. And I'm not going to lose faith in the spirit that

01:01:25.400 gave rise to the created order. No matter what. That's the key issue in the story of Job. No

01:01:33.320 matter what. There's a moral lesson there, which is you are required to maintain your faith in

01:01:39.380 yourself and in the essential goodness of the spirit that creates order, regardless of the

01:01:46.580 circumstances of your life. Not least because if you don't do that, it'll be worse. Because you

01:01:51.760 could imagine this, you know, imagine everything falls apart around you. You won't have to imagine

01:01:55.640 that because there'll be times when that happens. But imagine that everything falls apart around you

01:01:59.660 and unfairly. And then imagine that you let that make you bitter. You say the facts themselves

01:02:05.780 speak to the necessity for my bitterness. You let that make you bitter. It destroys your faith in

01:02:11.680 yourself. And it makes you angry about the fact of reality itself. Well then, along with your

01:02:18.080 suffering, you have the collapse of everything that could conceivably move you forward. And so

01:02:25.960 you're no better off. You still have all the suffering. Plus, you've lost faith. And so the

01:02:31.340 hell you were in is way deeper now. The story of Job is the proclamation that you maintain faith

01:02:40.100 no matter what. That's a hell of a thing to think through. No matter what. Partly because that's

01:02:46.960 your best bet it's that's not the only reason but it's partly because that is genuinely your best

01:02:53.600 bet now you know that you admire people who can do this you see people who've been dealt a

01:02:59.500 miserable blow by fate and they maintain themselves ethically they continue to strive

01:03:07.160 upward under their unbearable load and you think there's really something to behold there and if

01:03:14.760 you have any sense, you pray that in similar circumstances, you'd have the nobility to manage

01:03:19.720 the same. Cain does the opposite. He goes to God and he says, look, buddy, I'm not very happy about

01:03:30.360 your world. I'm breaking myself in half here, shouldering my load, and nothing's working out

01:03:39.260 for me. And that Abel of yours, who you seem to favor, he doesn't have to do anything, really. And

01:03:45.820 the sun shines on him all the time. His life is easy. That's the statement of bitterness.

01:03:54.440 All success is due to unfair ease. Well, that's what Cain tells God. You accept Abel's sacrifices,

01:04:04.400 you don't accept mine. That has nothing to do with me. Quite the contrary. There's something wrong

01:04:11.200 with you. And you know, that's a problem because he's talking to God. And in some ways, it doesn't

01:04:19.020 even matter if he's right. He's not, but it doesn't matter. It's like, you don't get to question the

01:04:25.780 moral order. That's what Eve does. That's what Adam does. That's their sin. That's what knocks 1.00

01:04:32.340 them out of paradise they take they incorporate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil they

01:04:39.220 take it onto themselves to define the moral order you don't get to do that that's not within your

01:04:46.400 purview so to speak as a created entity you're to discover the moral order and abide by it

01:04:53.220 and but that's not cain's suggestion cain's suggestion is things aren't working out for

01:04:59.040 me because you, God, made a mistake when you established the foundations of the earth.

01:05:03.580 Now, that's a hell of a thing to say, right? It's Luciferian in its presumption. Because Cain is

01:05:10.320 saying, think about that. He's saying that his failures are an indication of a flaw in the

01:05:15.760 structure of reality itself. There isn't anything more prideful that you could possibly say than

01:05:21.600 that. Now, you can understand why he might want to say it, because it'd be pretty damn convenient,

01:05:25.720 pretty convenient if everything

01:05:27.440 every time everything went wrong for you

01:05:29.420 was actually God's fault

01:05:30.960 and that you were actually perfect

01:05:33.540 in every possible way

01:05:35.240 and all of your failures were

01:05:37.160 a direct reflection of the

01:05:39.680 inadequacy of God

01:05:41.420 and being itself

01:05:42.720 you gotta ask yourself like who the hell 0.96

01:05:45.640 do you think you are? 0.69

01:05:47.200 well that's exactly the situation

01:05:49.540 that Cain finds himself in

01:05:50.960 so he goes to God with all these complaints

01:05:53.060 and God says

01:05:54.400 if you did well, you'd be accepted.

01:05:58.420 Okay, now, you know, you could debate that

01:06:00.560 because it isn't immediately obvious

01:06:04.240 that we reap a reward every time we do something right.

01:06:08.640 But here's something that I decided to experiment with many years ago.

01:06:17.400 Here's a proposition.

01:06:18.900 You can tell me what you think about this.

01:06:20.980 You can think about this.

01:06:21.800 If you tell the truth, whatever happens to you, in consequence, is the best thing that could happen, even if you can't see it at the time.

01:06:35.420 Right? So that's a statement of faith.

01:06:38.160 It's a hypothesis about the way reality is structured.

01:06:42.800 So, you know, people lie because they don't want to face the consequences of telling the truth.

01:06:46.920 obviously. When a child lies, it's because he wants to get away with something that he shouldn't get

01:06:51.700 away with, or he wants to have the world deliver him something he doesn't deserve. Entirely

01:06:57.360 understandable why people lie. Well, then why not lie? Well, one answer is, even though you're not

01:07:05.320 wise enough to see it, there is no better pathway forward than the truth. And so God's statement to

01:07:11.140 Cain, strangely enough, is something like,

01:07:14.440 you don't have a better deal than doing your best.

01:07:19.320 There's no alternative to that.

01:07:21.260 Or, all alternatives to that lead to hell.

01:07:27.180 When Job is tortured, he gets everything back.

01:07:31.820 Because he maintains faith.

01:07:33.540 It takes a while, and it isn't obvious that the fact that he gets everything back justifies the torture.

01:07:39.720 Right?

01:07:40.040 It's not an ends justify the means sort of thing.

01:07:43.620 It's more a reflection of the fact that,

01:07:46.720 regardless of the circumstances of your life,

01:07:49.620 you're called upon to offer your best.

01:07:51.380 Even when things are most dire.

01:07:53.420 Maybe particularly when they're most dire.

01:07:56.740 So that's what God tells Cain.

01:07:58.380 It's like, if you did well, you'd be accepted.

01:08:00.460 And then he says something.

01:08:02.180 This is all very subtle in the text.

01:08:04.140 He says... 0.98

01:08:09.320 sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, 0.99

01:08:14.720 and you invited it in to have its way with you. 0.98

01:08:17.900 You know, and yet you could say that Cain could excuse his behavior.

01:08:22.440 He could say, look, God, I know I'm bitter and resentful and miserable and dangerous,

01:08:27.120 but I've been tortured a lot,

01:08:30.140 and there's a causal connection between the degree of my misery,

01:08:34.500 even though it might be someone warranted,

01:08:36.400 there's a causal connection between how miserable I've been

01:08:39.140 and how unhappy and bitter and resentful I've become.

01:08:42.740 I couldn't help it.

01:08:43.740 Anybody in my situation would have done the same thing.

01:08:46.720 Okay, so I've met people.

01:08:48.940 I interviewed a friend of mine, Charles Joseph, on my YouTube channel

01:08:51.840 who was brutalized in a residential school in Canada

01:08:56.520 in a manner that brings to mind nothing more than Auschwitz. 0.55

01:09:00.180 It was absolutely nothing less than Auschwitz.

01:09:02.440 It was absolutely brutal.

01:09:03.880 You can't listen to what happened to him without it, like, just taking you out.

01:09:10.060 And it really hurt him, unsurprisingly.

01:09:13.200 And he was on the streets for a long time and was an angry guy and no wonder.

01:09:17.640 But, you know, he decided that he became an artist.

01:09:22.260 You know, that was his burning bush.

01:09:24.060 He became a great artist.

01:09:25.760 He quit drinking.

01:09:26.700 He got himself off the street.

01:09:28.280 He's managed to have a family.

01:09:29.740 He's good to his kids.

01:09:30.980 He's a good person. 0.99

01:09:31.860 He had every reason to be every goddamn nightmare you could possibly imagine. 0.99

01:09:37.840 And with full justification. 0.98

01:09:40.020 But the thing is, there is no justification for that.

01:09:43.000 No matter what happens to you, there's no justification.

01:09:46.280 That's what God tells Cain.

01:09:47.900 He says, look, you would like to think that the reason that you're unhappy and miserable

01:09:52.140 and bitter and resentful and fratricidal and murderous

01:09:56.580 is because your life has been so difficult

01:09:58.960 That anyone would have been transformed into a monster merely as a consequence of suffering what you suffered

01:10:05.120 But that's not how it worked at all buddy

01:10:07.940 You had an option here was the option the temptation to become that way

01:10:14.020 made itself manifest on

01:10:17.720 Just outside the door of your house and it made you an offer

01:10:22.580 which was

01:10:24.160 Possession by the spirit of murderous resentment and you didn't have to open the door

01:10:31.360 But you did and you didn't just open the door

01:10:35.660 You hopped into bed with that beast and you let it have its way with you and

01:10:42.000 So now I've studied people who've done terrible things and I've had more than a few of them as clients and I

01:10:48.600 Can tell you if you want to get to a place where you're going to do something truly terrible

01:10:52.680 terrible like shoot up a high school or an elementary school you're going to spend like

01:10:58.700 2 000 hours fantasizing about it right you're going to take your bitterness and your resentment

01:11:04.960 because of your rejection let's say because of your suffering and we could even say that's

01:11:09.640 warranted you were rejected and you were suffering that's not the point is that along with that

01:11:15.520 rejection and suffering came a temptation and the temptation was to open the door to the spirit that

01:11:22.080 would enable you to capitalize on that and then you invite that in and you enter into a creative

01:11:28.740 union with it and you start to dwell and brood on it and you start to fantasize about your revenge

01:11:35.360 and you start to presume that you're in a position to judge man mankind and god and you put yourself

01:11:44.920 in a position where your murderous and then suicidal outburst is the culmination of the

01:11:52.560 darkest fantasies produced by your miserable sacrifices and unaccepted sufferings and your

01:12:01.600 consorting with the devil that you've invited into your soul. And that is how these things work.

01:12:08.800 And so, that's what God tells Cain.

01:12:12.300 And Cain is not very happy about that.

01:12:15.880 Because it's the last thing he wants to hear.

01:12:18.140 What he wants to hear is,

01:12:19.480 Sorry, Cain.

01:12:22.060 This is God speaking.

01:12:24.480 I obviously made a mistake when I established the foundations of the world.

01:12:28.500 And you've borne the brunt of that with the misery of your life.

01:12:31.540 And I'll do everything I can to make it up to you.

01:12:35.300 And none of this is your fault.

01:12:37.080 And that isn't what God tells Cain at all.

01:12:39.780 He says, hey, buddy, this is on you, and you know it,

01:12:44.640 and you invited it in, and you didn't have to.

01:12:47.640 And you decided to enter into a creative union

01:12:54.620 with the heart of darkness itself. 0.99

01:12:56.640 And that's why you're miserable. 0.52

01:12:58.640 And Cain, he leaves that conversation. 0.93

01:13:01.640 He wasn't very happy to begin with.

01:13:03.180 he's seriously not happy after that conversation

01:13:07.160 and so then he goes to Abel

01:13:08.920 and he says

01:13:09.740 hey bro

01:13:11.040 let's go out in the field and do some work

01:13:14.400 you know we'll engage in a productive enterprise together

01:13:17.880 using his position as his brother

01:13:20.920 to facilitate that interaction

01:13:23.740 and he kills Abel

01:13:26.220 and so what does that mean?

01:13:28.600 it means that bitterness and resentment kills the ideal

01:13:34.500 now Cain and Abel are the two patterns of

01:13:37.760 sapphic official adaptation that characterize humanity

01:13:40.660 there's in their extreme

01:13:43.520 there's the all in spirit which is I will do whatever

01:13:47.600 necessary to aim up I'll offer whatever's

01:13:50.940 necessary to put things right I'll do my best

01:13:54.240 in every gesture and every word I'll do that

01:13:57.800 in good faith with an eye to the future

01:13:59.740 in a communal spirit

01:14:01.560 with no holds barred

01:14:03.400 and the other pattern is

01:14:05.120 I'll cheat and lie and prevaricate

01:14:09.820 and manipulate and offer

01:14:11.680 what's second rate and deceitful

01:14:13.960 and I'll

01:14:16.120 trumpet

01:14:17.660 my bitterness and resentment as a moral

01:14:19.720 virtue and

01:14:21.400 I'll develop

01:14:23.560 the spirit that becomes

01:14:25.680 the enemy of God and the enemy of what's

01:14:27.780 good. It's

01:14:29.640 Christ and Satan in their

01:14:31.180 nascent forms. And that

01:14:33.620 pattern is established as the fundamental

01:14:35.480 pattern of mankind at the beginning

01:14:37.580 of the biblical narrative. Two

01:14:39.460 attitudes towards work.

01:14:41.500 Two attitudes towards sacrifice.

01:14:43.720 One which leads to

01:14:45.060 the pathway that Abel

01:14:49.500 walks on, which is

01:14:50.820 walking with God

01:14:53.640 in the garden and proceeding

01:14:55.420 uphill in the proper

01:14:57.500 sacrificial attitude and the other is the other is the pathway that leads to you not only killing 0.94

01:15:02.920 your brother killing your productive successful generous and productive brother because he's

01:15:11.080 productive and successful and generous to spite him and god even if it involves your own destruction 0.97

01:15:19.040 or maybe even because it does look you watch these people shoot up high schools and then kill

01:15:24.700 themselves and you think why didn't you just do the world the favor and reverse

01:15:28.460 the order and the answer is well that's not the proper dramatic statement because

01:15:33.100 the proper dramatic statement is something like well i care nothing for

01:15:37.620 my own life i've already given that up but i'm making the dramatic point about

01:15:45.040 my resentment and moral superiority a lot more effectively if i take out the 0.58

01:15:49.780 people you love and then shoot myself as well to show just how little i 0.95

01:15:54.660 care and you know maybe you can't understand that you should understand it because you need to

01:16:03.480 because you need to be afraid of that so you don't do it it's understandable why you wouldn't want to

01:16:09.220 see that and would never want to think that you could approach that kind of conceptualization but

01:16:16.100 In your most embittered moments, the spirit that motivates that kind of action is there offering itself, offering an invitation to you.

01:16:29.880 And that's true of everyone.

01:16:31.480 That's why these two spirits, Cain and Abel, they're you.

01:16:36.020 Right? In the deepest possible sense.

01:16:40.280 So, Cain kills Abel.

01:16:45.340 And then God calls him on it.

01:16:47.480 And Cain says, am I my brother's keeper?

01:16:49.600 And the proper answer to that is yes.

01:16:53.000 But Cain sloughs off his responsibility.

01:16:55.540 But he also says to God at the same time,

01:16:58.400 my punishment is greater than I can bear.

01:17:01.020 Well, why?

01:17:02.420 Well, if you destroy your own ideal,

01:17:08.480 well, Cain's bitter because he wants to be able.

01:17:10.900 in the most fundamental

01:17:14.420 at the most fundamental level

01:17:17.920 Cain admires

01:17:20.660 worships everything Abel represents

01:17:23.420 and then he goes and destroys that

01:17:25.620 well if a society turns on those who are

01:17:29.600 properly sacrificial and successful

01:17:33.200 the society disintegrates into utter chaos

01:17:36.220 if you define success itself as

01:17:38.840 exploitative

01:17:40.500 or pathological or indicative of the fundamental unjust injustice of the world itself then your

01:17:47.840 society is doomed if you murder the spirit that represents the best in you what's left for you

01:17:58.080 there's nothing left for you well that's what happens to cain god says you will now visit the

01:18:04.120 land of nod you'll now be an inhabitant of the land of nod nod is the land of the wandering

01:18:09.600 okay so when do you become an inhabitant of the land of the wandering well that's what a psychopathic 0.98

01:18:16.620 itinerant does the drifter who moves from place to place well why well you know i can screw you

01:18:25.420 over once but the second time is harder and the third time might be impossible and so if i'm going

01:18:31.340 to allow the spirit of malevolence and bitterness to take root in me the only way i can survive is

01:18:38.660 to wander. That's why

01:18:40.640 the strange loner who moves

01:18:42.680 from place to place is a literary trope.

01:18:45.300 If your

01:18:45.740 sacrifices are second

01:18:48.740 rate and

01:18:49.620 your fundamental orientation is

01:18:52.480 embittered and selfish, 0.97

01:18:54.380 you're consigned to wandering. 0.99

01:18:57.160 Okay.

01:19:01.260 And it's obvious

01:19:02.560 too, because if you're...

01:19:04.180 If the pattern of proper sacrifice

01:19:06.420 is maturity, and it's the

01:19:08.560 maturity upon which the stability of the future and the community depends. If engaging in that

01:19:13.980 process of sacrifice is what makes you welcome in the community, rejecting it entirely is going to

01:19:19.340 make it impossible for you to have a community, for you to have a wife, for you to have a family,

01:19:24.360 for you to have any friends, for you to be welcome anywhere. Because you've rejected exactly that.

01:19:29.400 You've rejected the sacrifice that would enable you to become desirable to others. And so of

01:19:35.140 course you're going to wander. And that is exactly the fate of the criminal psychopath, 0.99

01:19:41.140 let's say, the bitter criminal psychopath, who thinks he's smarter than everyone else, 0.98

01:19:45.280 who's always unhappy and miserable, who's shaking his fist constantly in a cynical 0.99

01:19:51.900 manner about the validity of the created order. Well, that isn't where the story ends.

01:19:59.340 Cain's descendants

01:20:02.760 are worse 0.61

01:20:05.360 than him

01:20:05.960 so imagine now

01:20:09.380 that Cain is the

01:20:11.360 pattern that

01:20:12.180 punishes the successful

01:20:15.380 and

01:20:17.360 rebels against God

01:20:18.740 the descendants 0.76

01:20:21.380 of Cain would be the

01:20:22.880 consequences of that decision

01:20:24.880 Lamech is one of the 0.98

01:20:29.200 descendants of cain if you kill if you bother cain he kills you if you bother lamech he kills seven

01:20:41.040 of you okay so so what does that mean it means that once that pattern of murderous resentment

01:20:48.740 gets established it spreads you wonder how a society deteriorates that's how it deteriorates

01:20:58.540 you get that pattern establishing itself.

01:21:02.620 Then it has children, and the children are worse,

01:21:05.400 and the grandchildren are worse yet. 1.00

01:21:07.460 You get a situation like Rwanda, 0.98

01:21:11.780 where the entire country is overwhelmed with murderous brutality 0.50

01:21:18.420 in a three-week period, and a million people are brutally decimated.

01:21:24.480 Societies deteriorate like that all the time.

01:21:27.060 What's the biblical message in the story of Cain and Abel?

01:21:30.660 Make second-rate sacrifices.

01:21:33.240 End up bitter and resentful.

01:21:35.060 Shake your fist at God.

01:21:37.640 Invite in the spirit that motivates your desire to destroy everything successful and good. 0.75

01:21:44.720 Give rise to the children that are genocidal and let everything vanish.

01:21:54.960 What's the next story?

01:21:56.600 the flood

01:21:59.860 well

01:22:04.340 so that's the story of Cain and Abel

01:22:07.460 two patterns of sacrifice

01:22:09.440 right one that leads upward

01:22:11.100 one that is in keeping

01:22:13.780 with the proper covenantal relationship

01:22:15.780 with self

01:22:17.740 mankind and God

01:22:19.760 the other that's

01:22:21.620 prideful bitter

01:22:23.400 deceitful 0.92

01:22:25.520 vengeful, murderous, fratricidal, and then genocidal.

01:22:33.300 And that's the battle between good and evil

01:22:37.560 that characterizes the narrative landscape

01:22:41.100 that is the best possible representation of the world that we actually inhabit.

01:22:49.780 Because the patterns that are portrayed in that narrative representation

01:22:54.860 are the fundamental patterns of sacrificial adaptation.

01:23:00.780 And that's the pattern of human being and becoming.

01:23:06.120 And that's the prescription for a life properly lived.

01:23:10.580 Offer your best to God.

01:23:12.660 Or face the consequences.

01:23:16.060 And so, that's the end of that story.

01:23:22.040 Thank you very much, everyone.

01:23:24.860 All right, so Constantine is going to come out.

01:23:37.680 He's going to...

01:23:38.460 I brought Constantine along in part to push me on these ideas.

01:23:47.720 I'm running this tour in part to reintroduce an appreciation for sacred stories.

01:23:54.860 among the people who are at least listening to this lecture series,

01:23:59.220 who will read my book.

01:24:01.460 It's a very contentious enterprise.

01:24:07.460 Why the story? Why these stories?

01:24:11.340 What does it mean that we should or do or must believe in them?

01:24:16.440 Why should we accept that?

01:24:17.720 Well, Constantine's a good critic, and it's useful to be pushed.

01:24:22.940 and so he's going to come out

01:24:24.580 and harass me

01:24:25.920 and then he's going to

01:24:27.660 go through the questions

01:24:31.000 that you all so kindly offered

01:24:32.700 and we're going to discuss them

01:24:33.860 and that'll bring the evening

01:24:35.680 to a close

01:24:36.300 so that's the plan

01:24:38.660 come on out sir

01:24:40.760 hello everybody

01:24:42.380 thank you

01:24:43.360 give it up for Jordan

01:24:46.980 one more time everybody 0.55

01:24:48.120 all right so harass you say jordan you'd like me to harass you

01:24:57.040 all right well i agree with everything you said uh by the way jordan invited me along to disagree

01:25:04.800 with him we've had one show together i haven't landed a glove on him yet but we'll try i agree

01:25:10.360 with everything you said it was a great lecture about how to live your life what i don't understand

01:25:14.400 is why you called your tour

01:25:15.820 We Who Wrestled With God.

01:25:17.780 Everything you said,

01:25:19.300 you know,

01:25:20.680 engage with the challenge

01:25:23.420 that seeks you out.

01:25:25.100 Do so with passion.

01:25:27.300 You know, we can go down the stories.

01:25:29.000 Everything you said,

01:25:29.700 sacrifice in the way 0.92

01:25:31.960 that the parents of the Asian kids did.

01:25:34.280 All of the things you talked about

01:25:35.620 is great advice.

01:25:36.720 But what does that,

01:25:38.060 you didn't explain in any way

01:25:39.480 why God is necessary for any of that.

01:25:41.520 it's great it's great advice as a clinical psychologist you could be sitting here

01:25:47.000 why is it god up there um i would say most profoundly

01:25:52.500 when we finally heal the wound that's divided the west say between the enlightenment and the

01:26:00.740 religious enterprise people will look back and wonder why it ever existed because they'll draw

01:26:07.360 the same conclusion you did which is well obviously that's true in the biblical corpus

01:26:13.980 what god is is continually defined so

01:26:19.040 in the final analysis the god that's presented both in the old and the new testament is ineffable

01:26:28.160 right his his fundamental nature is unknowable it's conceptualized as something that you have

01:26:34.940 a relationship with so it's relational but apart from that all you ever see is god's back like

01:26:41.940 moses does you never get a glimpse of the totality you get hints of the manifestation of the spirit

01:26:50.480 of the cosmic order in different partial manifestations and what the biblical library

01:26:57.440 does is walk you through those manifestations and so the story of cain and abel isn't an argument for

01:27:04.600 the existence of God, exactly.

01:27:06.620 It's a definition of what constitutes God.

01:27:10.200 Okay, so God in that story is

01:27:12.600 the spirit that rewards proper sacrifices.

01:27:18.560 God is the spirit that punishes deceitful presumption.

01:27:24.700 and god is this the target of all proper sacrifice those are definitions

01:27:36.320 they're definitions hold on a second well why is it necessary because the stories

01:27:41.760 and the met let's say that they're just good metaphors they're good metaphors for teaching

01:27:46.060 our children how to behave in the world life is a marshmallow to sacrifice now so that you will

01:27:50.880 benefit later and the people around you do act in a way that uh enhances your your proper reputation

01:27:58.020 with other people these are all good lessons why does this have anything to do with god why are

01:28:02.400 they good lessons because they're practically useful why are they practically useful we

01:28:06.820 empirically observe that they are because they reflect the fundamental moral order

01:28:11.640 the well that but that's the what that's the practical answer is that see this is something

01:28:20.240 that jonathan pageau has helped me more deeply understand is that at some point the fact of

01:28:26.380 the practicality of the metaphor is a pointer to something that's more than metaphorical

01:28:33.660 so and it's a weird it's a strange thing because it's partly definitional it's partly metaphorical

01:28:41.460 but it's it's not it doesn't exhaust itself in the metaphor these are practical lessons because

01:28:47.720 they most deeply reflect the fundamental nature of reality.

01:28:51.660 You could also think about that as definitional.

01:28:54.000 You could think of the fundamental, of fundamental reality as being something like a meaningless

01:28:59.740 material substrate with a moral order on top of it.

01:29:03.240 That's one way of looking at it.

01:29:05.460 The Judeo-Christian, the biblical corpus inverts that, says, no, the moral order is fundamental.

01:29:12.680 If you conceptualized reality properly, you would see a hierarchy of moral order with something united at its pinnacle.

01:29:21.660 That you should embody that in every gesture and every word.

01:29:26.200 And that will put you in alignment with not only the created order that's good, but the spirit that gives rise to the created order that's good.

01:29:39.380 It's a definition.

01:29:41.120 It's a proposition about what's most real.

01:29:44.920 You see, the question you ask comes from the position,

01:29:49.880 you've already made an axiomatic decision of faith.

01:29:54.260 Your axiomatic decision is, the meaningless material order is most real.

01:30:00.140 There's a moral order on top of that.

01:30:02.380 Well, that's one way of looking at things.

01:30:04.160 But the problem with looking, one of the problems with looking at it that way is that,

01:30:08.980 well why does it work it wouldn't work if it wasn't this is a definition of true if it really

01:30:18.700 works it's true if it's really true it points to that which is deepest now i don't exactly

01:30:27.860 understand that because to some degree i'm in the same conundrum as most materialist atheists you

01:30:33.480 know i don't know how to understand the relationship between the 14 billion years that the cosmos

01:30:38.960 has made itself manifest, and the fact that consciousness has only existed,

01:30:43.460 well, at least, at maximum, since life itself emerged.

01:30:47.340 I have no idea how to conceptualize what was there before there was anything conscious.

01:30:51.340 I don't even know at all what role consciousness itself plays in the cosmic order per se.

01:30:57.200 But by the same token...

01:30:59.200 If you have the best possible map

01:31:10.300 If the map you have is the ultimate treasure map

01:31:14.480 That's a good way of thinking about it

01:31:16.260 And if you follow the direction that that treasure map specifies

01:31:22.240 And it leads you to the treasure

01:31:24.000 Then not only is it the best possible map

01:31:28.000 It's the map that best represents the underlying territory.

01:31:33.500 Sure.

01:31:33.940 Right.

01:31:34.280 So the underlying territory would have the moral order built into it,

01:31:37.540 rather than something that's epiphenomenal.

01:31:40.920 Even if it's an emergent property,

01:31:42.980 it'd be a reflection of something even deeper.

01:31:46.640 Now, I wouldn't say that I understand that completely,

01:31:49.160 but I would say that your instinct for meaning, for example,

01:31:53.360 is a pointer in that direction.

01:31:54.760 Like, it is the case that your attention is captured by markers that move you to the ultimate treasure.

01:32:03.740 That's how you're set up physiologically.

01:32:06.540 So even if you're a materialist, for example, you have to contend with the fact that

01:32:10.900 the evolutionary process itself has shaped you into something that fundamentally perceives the world as a story.

01:32:19.960 so Pajot

01:32:22.440 Jonathan Pajot's

01:32:23.380 objection would be

01:32:24.120 well

01:32:24.360 how is the world

01:32:26.780 not a story

01:32:27.440 if perceiving it

01:32:28.720 as a story

01:32:29.320 is the most

01:32:29.880 functional possible

01:32:30.760 mode of perception

01:32:31.600 because our brains

01:32:34.880 are quite primitive

01:32:36.180 in relation to

01:32:37.080 the reality

01:32:37.680 that we're attempting

01:32:38.400 to process

01:32:39.200 why is

01:32:44.220 okay

01:32:44.600 the fact that

01:32:48.100 I need to tell

01:32:48.780 myself a story

01:32:49.660 about this infinite selection of stimuli

01:32:53.860 and I need to pick out the ones

01:32:55.580 that I need to tell the story

01:32:56.860 that helps me in the current moment

01:32:58.140 does not mean that the world is a story.

01:33:00.900 It means my primitive brain

01:33:02.080 is only capable of experiencing it as a story.

01:33:07.380 Then your presumption is that

01:33:09.300 your pathway forward to maximal adaptation

01:33:12.860 is necessarily predicated on something that's false.

01:33:17.300 So then the metaphysical presumption

01:33:18.860 underneath that is that in order for you to thrive in the world you are obligated to adopt

01:33:25.120 a falsehood what is the falsehood well you said that the presumption that there's an implicit

01:33:33.360 moral order is merely a consequence of let's say our primitiveness we have to there's there's lots

01:33:39.220 of psychological schools that have taken that tack the terror management theorists believe that for

01:33:44.200 example, is that life is fundamentally pointless in the final analysis, that everything we

01:33:51.820 do comes to naught, that the existential reality of that is so cataclysmic that we have to

01:33:58.420 delude ourselves practically and philosophically into abiding, into inhabiting necessary delusional

01:34:06.160 fictions in order to reconcile ourselves to the fundamental horror of existence.

01:34:14.160 And, you know, I can understand why people, I don't think it's true.

01:34:21.140 My sense is that...

01:34:22.100 Nor do I.

01:34:22.600 Okay, okay, okay.

01:34:24.020 Nor do I.

01:34:24.520 Okay.

01:34:25.060 Let me try this a different way and maybe bring it back into the real world.

01:34:28.600 So one of the things, obviously, you and I have both talked about a lot is the malaise that seems to be affecting the West.

01:34:34.520 Yeah, that's a good example.

01:34:35.540 And your argument is that Christianity or Judeo-Christianity, let's say, is the water in which we swim and having removed the water, the fish are now floundering. Is that fair? It's a massive oversimplification.

01:34:51.760 Sure, that'll do.

01:34:52.420 but but fair right what if as our good friend louise perry has written in her book the case

01:35:02.080 against the sexual revolution this is simply a product of the fact that in the 60s we invent

01:35:07.180 and roll out the pill the pill has massive repercussions on women the way their brain works

01:35:13.480 the way they choose mates uh and that has a downstream consequence on the family unit the

01:35:20.560 breakdown of the family and really what we're facing is a crisis of meaning because people 0.98

01:35:25.380 the thing that gay people meaning which is the reproduction of their genes someone like Dawkins 0.89

01:35:31.940 might argue right and as a new father I certainly agree with that that's the most meaningful thing

01:35:36.900 I've ever done what we're facing is a society in which I use the word advisedly the sacred bond

01:35:44.160 between men and women has been ruptured what's the moral precondition for the invention and

01:35:47.960 distribution of the pill when does that become allowable more when does it become desirable

01:35:54.920 under what circumstances that does that become desirable because birth control itself was

01:36:00.080 illegal many places for a very long time so before you get the pill you get a revolution in ethics

01:36:06.040 that makes the pill possible and then desirable and then necessary what is that revolution in

01:36:11.020 your opinion that's what i'm asking you what do you think what i don't know how about um pleasure

01:36:16.400 without consequence how about pleasure without responsibility how about the deepest possible

01:36:22.720 pleasure with the least amount possible with the least amount of responsibility possible

01:36:27.220 how about that as an ethical transformation that makes that makes it even okay to investigate the

01:36:34.320 pill now look i agree with you by the way that the pill itself has had incalculable an incalculable

01:36:41.500 effect on our society we know for example that women who are on the pill like men who aren't the

01:36:48.160 men they would like if they weren't on the pill yeah this is not a trivial problem we know that 0.78

01:36:54.160 women on the pill like less masculine men facially let's say and and temperamentally

01:37:00.540 so here's a question for you is the antipathy how much of the antipathy of feminists towards

01:37:09.380 Masculine men is a consequence of the birth control pill. The answer is

01:37:14.020 Don't know

01:37:15.220 We have no idea. I mean

01:37:17.820 Messing with hormones is like that's a fundamental. That's a fundamental revolution

01:37:22.980 We have no idea how fundamental we have no idea for example if it's the sort of revolution that destroys the world 0.96

01:37:28.740 I could easily be because it's equivalent to the fact that women now have control over the reproductive function is equivalent to a 0.87

01:37:36.420 A revolutionary genetic mutation. 0.72

01:37:40.560 Okay, but that's not exactly the issue.

01:37:42.920 The issue is, what moral transformations have to take place before the offering of such a solution becomes morally desirable?

01:37:53.100 And I would say, we know what happened.

01:37:55.700 Everyone knows what happened.

01:37:57.440 What happened when the pill emerged?

01:37:59.880 Okay.

01:38:00.400 the family fell apart and that started in the socio-economically marginalized and moved up the

01:38:11.260 socio-economic hierarchy and now the only people not affected are basically the wealthy who are

01:38:17.480 married to the same degree that they were in 1960 but all the other classes aren't yeah okay so then

01:38:23.540 what else what happened well we have the sexual revolution well what was the sexual revolution

01:38:28.600 The sexual revolution was, you can pursue pleasure of the short-term kind with whoever the hell you want to,

01:38:36.880 under any conditions whatsoever, at any time and place, and that's not only allowable, but desirable.

01:38:43.040 Okay, so here's a technical problem with that.

01:38:46.100 This is very much worth knowing.

01:38:49.000 So, in the biological community at large, the community of living things that sexually reproduce,

01:38:58.600 There's a distribution of reproductive strategies on the one end are puffballs and mosquitoes and that's the

01:39:07.900 Make lots of offspring and invest nothing in them strategy. So a 0.91

01:39:12.760 mosquito will have millions of

01:39:14.860 Offspring and all of them die, but like one and so we have a kind of constant supply of mosquitoes, but

01:39:22.120 the ratio of life to death among

01:39:24.840 juvenile mosquitoes is very, very low. They all die. Puffballs, same thing. No investment

01:39:34.880 in offspring, massive production of numbers. On the other end, literally on the other end

01:39:42.520 are human beings. We produce very few offspring at a very high price and we invest in them

01:39:48.960 Multi-generationally, so we're high investment. Our reproductive strategy is a high investment sacrificial strategy

01:39:57.120 Okay, now so we'll establish that just biologically so in order for human beings to propagate themselves. We've adopted a

01:40:05.840 long-term monogamous child-centered 0.78

01:40:10.180 Sacrificial multi-generational

01:40:13.020 Strategy for the rearing of children now if that falls apart children don't do well the clinical literature on that are

01:40:18.960 It's crystal clear.

01:40:20.960 Like fatherlessness, for example, it's a catastrophe.

01:40:23.960 And any clinician who proclaims otherwise is either deluded or deceitful.

01:40:29.960 Because there's almost nothing documented better in the developmental literature than that.

01:40:34.960 Okay, why? Well, children are difficult.

01:40:37.960 It's hard. It takes like 18 years before they can more or less make their way.

01:40:42.960 Or 40 years.

01:40:44.960 And it's too much for one person.

01:40:47.960 especially in their early years, because if you're the mother,

01:40:53.220 which you will be if you gave birth to the child,

01:40:55.760 then you're going to be economically compromised in a deadly serious way

01:40:59.540 for, you know, five months during the pregnancy,

01:41:02.500 and then for, like, at least four years after that,

01:41:05.540 and way more than that if you have multiple children,

01:41:08.200 and so you need someone along to help with that,

01:41:10.120 and maybe the minimum person you need is the father.

01:41:13.240 You probably need some, like, friends and grandparents and so forth.

01:41:17.220 Okay.

01:41:17.960 So we have this multi-generational sacrificial strategy.

01:41:21.860 Okay, so now just imagine you take just human beings

01:41:24.460 and you divide them into two mating strategies.

01:41:28.840 Short-term zero investment and long-term sacrificial.

01:41:33.440 Okay, short-term zero investment, that's the one-night-stand crowd. 0.71

01:41:38.620 Most of them are men. 0.99

01:41:40.560 Because women pay a much higher price, obviously, for sexual promiscuity. 0.97

01:41:46.560 now hypothetically the pill eradicates that but and in some ways it does that's 0.92

01:41:51.900 why we have a sexual revolution but in many ways it doesn't okay that's fine so

01:41:56.460 let's say it doesn't matter because once you have the pill it's okay to engage in

01:42:00.300 short-term mating strategies the pursuit of pleasure without responsibility

01:42:04.500 partly because the pill eliminates the consequences so then who cares then let's

01:42:09.660 party well that was like the 1960s well you know we had an epidemic of sexually

01:42:15.300 transmitted diseases oops and that was aids in its most severe uh manifestation and that could

01:42:22.080 have wiped us all out it didn't but that's more good fortune than anything else so you know nature

01:42:28.140 had its revenge in that regard let's say because the problem with sex is it's a great vector for

01:42:33.580 the transmission of diseases and that's a major problem but the whole 60s sex party kind of came

01:42:41.900 to a tawdry end by the mid 70s and everyone more and that went along with the increased

01:42:50.780 proliferation of pornography and so forth okay so what's wrong with that i mean if we can get

01:42:56.800 away with it why not do it so how have psychologists addressed this they've looked at the personality

01:43:03.420 characteristics of short-term haters so imagine you are temperamentally inclined or you teach

01:43:10.840 yourself to adopt a hedonistic orientation towards sex okay so what does that look like

01:43:17.800 well we know what it looks like it looks like the dark tetrad so what's the dark tetrad

01:43:24.020 it's a constellation of personality traits that have to do with the exploitation of self and other

01:43:32.320 in pursuit of short-term gratification well you might say who cares about that like if you can

01:43:39.860 obtain pleasure in the short term and there's no consequences because of the pill then

01:43:44.360 have at her okay fair enough who are these people

01:43:47.720 they're narcissistic which means they want reputational status without doing any of the

01:43:55.500 work necessary to obtain it genuinely they're machiavellian which means that they use their 0.87

01:44:01.460 words for no other reasons than to manipulate for short-term gain they're psychopathic so that's fun

01:44:09.220 that means they're parasitic predators they'll steal what you have and they'll live off you with

01:44:15.520 no work and that was the dark triad that was how that was identified first and then the researchers

01:44:21.240 delved even more deeply into it because they hadn't got to the bottom of hell yet and it turned out

01:44:28.020 that an additional constellation of personality traits had to be added to that sadistic a sadistic 0.91

01:44:35.760 person takes positive delight in the suffering of others dark tetrad types preferentially

01:44:43.040 pursue short-term mating strategies but it's the reverse is true too if you preferentially 0.99

01:44:49.240 pursue short-term mating strategies that's who you turn yourself into all right so it

01:44:55.360 could easily be that the pill has produced a breakdown of familial structure an irresponsible

01:45:02.940 breakdown of familial structure a proliferation of pornography and all sorts of associated

01:45:07.980 social cataclysms but i would say that in itself is reflective of something even more fundamental

01:45:14.320 which is a breakdown of the social order that's predicated on the primacy the necessary primacy of

01:45:22.960 the optimal long-term sacrificial pattern well i don't understand how you made that leap but i

01:45:29.320 I want to get some audience questions.

01:45:30.500 And by the way, when you were describing that type of person, 1.00

01:45:33.480 every woman in the audience is going,

01:45:34.860 yeah, I've had an ex-boyfriend like that.

01:45:36.880 Oh, well, the other thing I could tell you in that regard is that,

01:45:40.840 so these, the men who adopt this pattern,

01:45:44.940 the narcissistic types,

01:45:46.240 they're like Gaston in Beauty and the Beast.

01:45:49.180 So they, I mean that,

01:45:50.500 that's a representation of this sort of man.

01:45:53.260 Those men mimic sacrificial competence.

01:45:57.460 So they're confident, right? 0.60

01:45:59.140 Now, women look at men to see if they're confident, because they use confidence as a marker for competence. 0.94

01:46:06.940 But a deceitful, narcissistic psychopath has confidence without the competence. 0.94

01:46:16.420 And naive women can't tell the difference. 0.99

01:46:20.060 And so we know that narcissistic psychopaths, dark tetrads, short-term maters, 0.98

01:46:25.680 are much more successful with naive young women

01:46:28.660 than with women who've had some maturity and experience

01:46:31.380 because with maturity and experience,

01:46:33.600 the women learn to tell the difference

01:46:34.800 between the tameable beasts and the narcissists.

01:46:40.260 Jordan, very quickly,

01:46:41.220 because I do want to get a couple of audience questions,

01:46:43.040 but just explain to me so that I understand,

01:46:45.380 if nothing else,

01:46:46.500 why is it that the technology of the pill,

01:46:49.220 the sexual revolution,

01:46:50.220 the dropping testosterone levels in men,

01:46:51.880 which we see from generation to generation,

01:46:54.400 Why is that not enough to explain everything that's happening?

01:46:57.120 Why do you say that the shift in cultural attitude had to come first?

01:47:02.240 Because you wouldn't have even had the pill as a phenomenon

01:47:04.680 if we hadn't already decided at a cultural level

01:47:08.060 that we could prioritize short-term sexual gratification over everything else.

01:47:11.940 But that probably wouldn't have been how it was perceived at the time. 0.73

01:47:15.320 It was like, here's this new technology that gives women autonomy.

01:47:17.440 Yeah, I know. Yes and no. 1.00

01:47:19.720 look there was some notion and perhaps some warranted notion that wouldn't it be a wonderful

01:47:24.840 thing if people could plan their families intelligently right and i think we're still

01:47:30.600 sorting that out you know because i could understand my wife used birth control we use

01:47:36.880 birth control i can understand why that's desirable so there was that there was well

01:47:42.340 wouldn't it be good if we could if we could plan our lives out more particularly and you can

01:47:48.360 And understand why people think that's a good idea.

01:47:51.000 Whether or not it's a good idea is a different question.

01:47:53.160 Because another idea is, if you could choose to have children, would you?

01:48:00.140 And the answer appears to be no, because we're way below replacement in terms of production

01:48:09.480 of children in the West.

01:48:11.420 And some of that, part of that's partly because, well, when's a good time to have children?

01:48:16.180 And the answer is, well, never is a good time, obviously.

01:48:19.900 And also, you know, should you bring a child into a world such as this?

01:48:24.940 And at least that's sufficiently disputable to forestall the decision.

01:48:32.180 So perhaps it was a good idea for that choice to open up, but it's not self-evident that

01:48:36.520 it was a good idea.

01:48:37.520 But at the same time, there were all sorts of social currents making themselves manifest

01:48:42.200 in the early 60s that were tilting us hard in the direction of a much more hedonistic society.

01:48:47.880 And it wasn't many decades before that that birth control, per se, was illegal.

01:48:53.160 And part of that was, and I'm not saying it should have been, that's not my point,

01:48:56.920 you had to have a conjunction of the notion that the pursuit of sexual pleasure

01:49:03.400 without responsibility, per se, was at least allowable and perhaps even desirable

01:49:08.360 before even research on the pill could have taken place.

01:49:13.040 There had to be a transformation in moral view

01:49:14.840 before the technology could possibly make itself manifest.

01:49:18.620 To be continued.

01:49:21.960 One person enjoyed that. Great.

01:49:29.000 Christina says,

01:49:30.220 what is your favorite verse in the Bible and why?

01:49:33.420 Make this one quick because I want to get a couple more in.

01:49:37.620 Okay.

01:49:38.360 probably the truth will set you free.

01:49:44.020 That's a good one.

01:49:45.960 Yeah.

01:49:49.480 Can I explain why briefly?

01:49:51.960 It's your show, man.

01:49:55.640 You can do whatever the hell you want.

01:49:58.280 Well, if you imagine that,

01:50:01.120 if what's true

01:50:05.980 most accurately represents

01:50:07.700 if true words most accurately

01:50:12.140 map the territory well how could you

01:50:13.940 possibly be more free than that

01:50:15.520 I mean you're going to run into

01:50:18.020 the fewest possible obstacles

01:50:19.940 now that could easily not be none

01:50:22.000 right because

01:50:23.360 getting through life without running into obstacles

01:50:26.020 you can just give that up

01:50:27.160 but in terms of optimized

01:50:30.100 strategy it could easily be that just the truth is the best and I think that's true

01:50:37.560 one of the things you see in the story of Abraham too is that there's an insistence this kind of

01:50:43.700 builds in the biblical corpus overall there's an insistence that the call to adventure and

01:50:50.320 the truth are the same thing that's part of the monotheistic hypothesis hypothesis the logos that

01:50:56.680 gives rise to the created order at the beginning

01:50:58.740 of time is the spirit of

01:51:00.660 truth. And it's, the spirit

01:51:02.660 of truth is deemed identical to

01:51:04.680 the spirit of adventure, right?

01:51:06.840 So, this, the

01:51:08.000 accumulation of the stories

01:51:10.520 builds up a portrait of the unified

01:51:12.460 of the unified

01:51:16.400 character that sits at the pinnacle of the moral

01:51:18.480 hierarchy.

01:51:20.660 Truth most accurately maps the

01:51:22.560 territory and provides the most

01:51:24.180 adventurous journey forward.

01:51:26.680 well that is free that's the right kind of freedom see the thing about telling the truth

01:51:32.880 this is a wonderful thing to understand is you don't know what's going to happen

01:51:36.060 like you're not calculating and you might think well what if i don't get what i want it's like

01:51:42.800 what the hell do you know like how many times have you got what you wanted and that didn't work out

01:51:47.620 for you because your aim was off to walk to have the spirit of truth guide your words is

01:51:56.460 It's to follow the spirit where it listeth.

01:52:01.720 It's to go where truth takes you.

01:52:04.660 And there's kind of no burden in that.

01:52:07.540 Because you can just say what you think.

01:52:10.900 And then you can see what happens.

01:52:12.640 And God only knows what will happen.

01:52:14.240 But at minimum, it's going to be a surprise.

01:52:17.460 And sometimes it'll be troublesome.

01:52:19.800 But that usually turns out to be troublesome in an extremely useful way.

01:52:23.800 so it's a very good deal

01:52:26.560 if you know that truth and adventure

01:52:28.360 are the same thing

01:52:29.220 that's a really useful thing

01:52:30.560 if you just take that away from this lecture

01:52:33.060 then that's well worth the ticket price

01:52:35.200 let's say

01:52:35.760 here's one

01:52:42.860 I wish more people were asking Jordan

01:52:44.840 I think you probably do as well

01:52:46.140 how do you know when you're ready to get married

01:52:48.380 that's easy

01:52:51.140 your girlfriend thinks it's time

01:52:54.680 so the answer is the time to get married is right now you look you know yeah right well you never

01:53:05.400 you never know like how in the world are you going to know that you don't know your

01:53:10.420 your girlfriend and even if you do you don't know what she's going to be like when she's your wife

01:53:15.960 like that's a whole different universe and so you know your your your your commitment to be married

01:53:23.280 is a it's a flinging yourself off the cliff in faith i'm dead serious about that it's like 0.93

01:53:31.060 you you you take this person that's foolish enough to pick you and you link yourself together and you

01:53:38.500 leap off the edge and you say something like maybe we can play intelligently together on the way down 0.95

01:53:45.220 and do you know what's going to happen well you know what's going to happen when you hit the

01:53:49.540 bottom do you know what's going to happen well no you don't ever know what's going to happen

01:53:55.060 in any of the major decisions you take in your life this is partly why there's such an emphasis

01:53:59.460 for example in the biblical stories on faith it's like you take every decision that's

01:54:06.640 cataclysmic in your life in good faith it's the same when you have kids it's the best and worst

01:54:11.680 decision you'll ever make and marriage is certainly like that and then you might say well

01:54:16.000 maybe there are some things you could have faith in that would increase the probability that your

01:54:23.180 fateful journey forward would be desirable and productive and i would say well yes you know

01:54:29.400 you should have faith in the truth for example you know you're if you ground your marriage in truth

01:54:37.140 then you'll set up the dynamism between you

01:54:42.580 that enables you to radically adapt

01:54:46.780 to the transforming circumstances

01:54:48.680 that are unpredictable

01:54:50.180 that will constitute your life, right?

01:54:52.500 And you can't compute that beforehand

01:54:54.200 because life really is unpredictable.

01:54:56.500 A future genuinely is unpredictable.

01:54:58.960 It's not reducible to a set of...

01:55:00.980 There's no set of rules that you can use

01:55:03.360 to compute the future.

01:55:04.860 you have to dance with it

01:55:07.360 and if you're going to dance with your wife

01:55:09.820 on the edge of the abyss in truth

01:55:11.800 then

01:55:12.600 the utility of the truth is

01:55:15.080 she brings her best to the conversation

01:55:17.440 and you bring your best

01:55:18.700 and the exchange of information

01:55:20.320 that that commitment enables

01:55:23.640 makes you both

01:55:24.920 wiser and more resilient

01:55:26.720 than either of you would be alone

01:55:28.200 and that's your best bet

01:55:30.060 and

01:55:30.920 it's better

01:55:35.060 to just get on with it.

01:55:41.680 Well, young man, you've got your

01:55:43.000 marching orders.

01:55:45.600 Dr. Jordan Peterson, everybody.

01:55:49.040 Thank you, sir.

01:55:55.400 Thank you, everyone.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 04, 2026

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