The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - How to Become Who You Are Meant to Be

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00:01:00.000 Hello again, everybody. Today we're releasing the third lecture from my last tour.

00:01:05.580 Each of them stands alone, but together they provide a detailed analysis of the deepest,

00:01:11.640 most meaningful, and most influential stories ever told. Our attention turns today from Cain

00:01:18.340 and Abel and the discovery and significance of sacrifice to the conceptualization of life

00:01:24.640 as a romantic adventure.

00:01:27.460 This is captured in the great account of Abraham,

00:01:30.700 who was called, as we all are,

00:01:32.500 away from the security and familiarity

00:01:34.860 of our childhood surroundings

00:01:36.800 into the uncertainty and possibility

00:01:39.460 of our adult lives.

00:01:42.040 What could we possibly become?

00:01:43.980 What could we possibly offer

00:01:45.400 if we swore above all to aim up,

00:01:50.080 regardless of the catastrophe and tragedy of our lives?

00:01:53.880 Watch and see.

00:02:05.480 Thank you.

00:02:10.120 Thank you.

00:02:11.660 Thank you all for coming.

00:02:14.440 So I'm going to jump right into the story and then elaborate on it as we proceed.

00:02:23.000 I want to talk to you tonight about the story of Abraham, not all of it, just because it's

00:02:30.080 a long story.

00:02:31.340 We'll see how much we can get through.

00:02:34.100 I guess I'll start by telling you what a story is, because that'll lay open, thank you, thank

00:02:41.400 you, that'll lay open why I'm presenting the material that I'm presenting.

00:02:47.540 I didn't really expect when I first embarked on my career

00:02:54.060 that I would become interested in biblical stories.

00:03:04.280 It happened because I was fixated on the deepest problem that I could find,

00:03:16.780 which was the problem of evil

00:03:19.200 I became aware of what had happened

00:03:23.300 in Nazi Germany when I was about 13

00:03:26.600 and it was shocking to me

00:03:30.560 and I started to study

00:03:32.000 I started to study what had happened there

00:03:36.700 at that point

00:03:37.680 I didn't really know how to go about doing that

00:03:41.380 but I had a librarian there

00:03:43.820 who was quite literate

00:03:46.060 And she pointed me in some useful directions.

00:03:49.660 I read the first book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

00:03:53.160 I read when I was about 13.

00:03:54.600 It was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

00:03:56.720 And it was the first book that had come out of the Soviet Union,

00:03:59.180 really during a period of thaw in the early 1960s

00:04:04.400 that revealed what had happened under Stalin.

00:04:07.400 And then I read 1984 by George Orwell in Brave New World.

00:04:12.320 some Ayn Rand as well at that time starting to wrestle with the problem of good and evil

00:04:21.080 it's a variant of wrestling with God I suppose and that is a variant of wrestling with

00:04:29.280 decision making in general the landscape that you live in when you make decisions is the

00:04:35.800 landscape that has good and evil as its far reaching borders it's good to understand that

00:04:44.280 why would i say that well you you know that really because you know that

00:04:48.820 you can make a good decision or a bad decision and so the mere fact that you understand

00:04:57.920 what that descriptive phrase means indicates that you understand at some level that

00:05:05.100 when you're making a decision you inhabit a moral landscape and you know you can make decisions for

00:05:10.340 good reasons or for bad reasons and you also know that the consequences of your decisions can be good

00:05:20.340 or or not and so if you take that conceptualization and you just extend it to its ultimate reaches

00:05:30.300 so that you're characterizing the entire domain,

00:05:33.760 you get the landscape of good and evil.

00:05:36.940 And I was interested in the far reaches of the dark side of that continuum.

00:05:43.920 The problem with studying that, for me, eventually became,

00:05:48.960 it was what knocked me out of my sort of rationalistic moral relativism.

00:05:55.160 It wasn't easy for me to,

00:05:57.240 like i left the church when i was about 13 i i went to church with my mother up to that point

00:06:03.480 it's just a kind of middle of the road protestant exactly the kind of protestant church you'd expect

00:06:09.280 to characterize canadians was the united church you know which has got so woke you you can't

00:06:16.520 believe it it's just it's just done i think the woman who runs it is an atheist so you know that's

00:06:23.920 just not good yeah and they they they worship pride essentially so and and that that's also 0.63

00:06:36.660 it's also really not good it's hard to go more wrong than that you you have to really work to

00:06:42.560 go more wrong than that um anyways i studied totalitarianism for a long time and i even more

00:06:50.200 specifically because i didn't really think that the totalitarian problem was the problem so that

00:06:55.860 would be the problem of that's a political or economic or sociological problem in some sense

00:07:01.140 how do you characterize a authoritarian state or a totalitarian state maybe you're interested in

00:07:07.760 the economic conditions that might give rise to such a state what it's like politically

00:07:13.220 that's descriptive in some ways that isn't really what i was interested in i was interested in

00:07:18.760 the psychology of a totalitarian state and interested not only in that but in the dark

00:07:24.940 elements of the psychology of the totalitarian state because i was very curious about how people

00:07:32.040 could do terrible things to other people and i wasn't even curious about that i was curious about

00:07:38.200 how someone could do something terrible to someone else like truly terrible unimaginably terrible

00:07:45.700 and enjoy it and then more than that i was interested in how that was possible

00:07:53.560 see because to understand how that's possible you see this is the key thing you have to understand

00:08:00.280 how you could do it because until it's you it's irrelevant it's not it's not real it's you'll come

00:08:07.780 up with some explanation that divorces you from the phenomena you'll make the assumption for

00:08:13.240 example if you're watching schindler's list then you would have been oscar schindler it's like

00:08:18.000 that's just not how it would have worked out ladies and gentlemen you can tell that by watching

00:08:24.420 what happened during the so-called covid pandemic no wait people who stand up against the pathological

00:08:32.000 mob they're few and far between so how is it that you could participate in the ultimate atrocities

00:08:41.460 that the worst possible state could promote?

00:08:44.780 How is it that you would come to that?

00:08:47.020 Could you?

00:08:47.900 Could you come to that?

00:08:52.500 I didn't really understand.

00:08:54.740 I didn't understand exactly how you could come to that point

00:08:59.100 until I visited a maximum security prison.

00:09:05.420 I had this professor there at the University of Alberta.

00:09:08.820 He was an odd character.

00:09:10.540 he taught a he was an adjunct professor so not a full-time part-time professor he was the head

00:09:16.200 psychologist at this maximum security prison and it was a nasty place it was full of exactly the

00:09:23.140 sort of people you'd put in a maximum security prison you know repeat offenders you know one

00:09:28.080 percent of the criminals account for 65 percent of the crime say so everything has its specialization

00:09:34.580 and crime is like that and if you're there are criminals who are repeat offenders and then there

00:09:41.520 are criminals who are violent repeat offenders and they're the ones who generally end up in

00:09:46.680 maximum security prisons so they're tough places and i went to this prison a couple of times and

00:09:53.360 i met some people there that really made me think one time i was at i was i was in the gym in this

00:10:03.360 prison. Prison looked like a high school, which I thought was kind of indicative of what high

00:10:09.800 schools are like. And it had a gym and an exercise yard. And in the gym, mostly the gym was taken up

00:10:18.040 by weight benches. And there were a lot of monsters in there, guys who'd been pumping iron pretty hard

00:10:25.160 for a long time, and they were, you know, murderers and rapists and weightlifters, and

00:10:33.440 so pretty intimidating bunch, and I'd worn this preposterous get-up, I guess even then.

00:10:42.620 I'd gone to Portugal, and I bought this cape, and I went to this town that was basically

00:10:47.100 a castle on top of a mountain, and the place hadn't changed much since 1890, and this was

00:10:53.460 back in the 1980s and they sold these like dracula capes that were made out of wolves like sherlock

00:10:59.180 holmes and from the victorian era so i bought one of those capes i used to wear it around the

00:11:03.580 university in edmonton and i wore it out to this prison which might not have been the wisest choice

00:11:09.560 anyways i was in in the gym with these monsters and a bloody psychologist left because he was an

00:11:18.480 odd guy which you have to be an odd guy to be like a psychologist for a prison full of

00:11:24.660 murderers and rapists it's like you're not going to be your run-of-the-mill person to

00:11:30.900 to end up there and he definitely wasn't he's a great professor he's very eccentric and interesting

00:11:36.480 anyways he left so I was in there with all these prisoners and they surrounded me and

00:11:43.700 And then they started to offer to trade their clothes for mine.

00:11:47.460 And I didn't like their clothes, but I wasn't exactly sure how to say no, as you might imagine.

00:11:55.240 And then this little guy came up.

00:11:57.980 He's, I don't know, five foot six or something.

00:12:00.780 And he said that the psychologist had sent him to get me, which was unfortunate phrasing as far as I was concerned.

00:12:09.580 But I thought I must go with him because it's like one of him and 20 of these guys.

00:12:16.380 And so we wandered out into the exercise yard.

00:12:19.360 And he was your normal sort of nondescript looking character.

00:12:23.260 You wouldn't have given him a second glance on the street.

00:12:25.680 And we got about 50 yards out into the yard.

00:12:29.420 And then the psychologist showed back up at the doors to the exercise yard and motioned us back.

00:12:36.960 And I was just relieved about that.

00:12:39.060 And then we went to his office, and he told, he said, you know that guy that took you out the yard?

00:12:43.300 I said, yeah.

00:12:44.040 He said, he took two cops out.

00:12:47.340 They stopped him on a road when he was driving.

00:12:51.760 They stopped him, and he was armed, and he pulled a pistol on the guards, on the policemen. 0.87

00:13:00.200 And he shot them both in the back of the head.

00:13:03.580 And one of them, well, he was describing the fact that he had two little kids.

00:13:11.260 And so that was rather shocking.

00:13:14.760 The shock, I suppose, was not just the brutality of what he had done, although that was plenty brutal.

00:13:21.800 It was the juxtaposition of that brutality with his apparent nondescript normality.

00:13:28.520 like this wasn't a guy that there was nothing intimate apart from the fact that he was in a

00:13:33.580 maximum security prison that there was nothing about him that marked him out of the ordinary

00:13:38.480 so that made me think a lot about the relationship between good and evil

00:13:43.480 as it pertained to a single individual and then I met this other guy he came into the

00:13:54.160 prison psychologist's office one day when we were sitting there and he was a real psychopath real

00:14:00.000 narcissist interesting person to watch as psychopathic narcissists are and you can tell

00:14:05.540 because there's so many movies about them he knew everything as far as he was concerned it was so

00:14:10.160 interesting to watch him because he'd been in prison for like 20 years a long time he didn't

00:14:15.220 really even know how the outside world worked anymore but there was nothing you could tell him

00:14:20.500 that he didn't know. And he was just 100% self-centered. And so it was interesting to

00:14:26.960 watch him. And the psychologist was playing with a deck of cards. And the prisoner said,

00:14:34.980 why don't you give me those cards? I'll show you a trick. And so the psychologist handed,

00:14:40.740 his name was Patrick Thauberger. The psychologist handed him the deck of cards and he

00:14:45.560 shuffled them and then he put the cards in front of me face down and then he named the first card

00:14:53.280 and flipped it and he was right and then he named the second card and flipped it and he was right

00:14:57.340 and he went through like a third of the deck and got every single card and I thought how the hell

00:15:03.160 did you do that he said I memorized them when I was flipping them he said don't ever play cards

00:15:08.680 with someone who's been in prison, I found out later that this same man and one of his

00:15:15.260 compatriots had identified someone in the prison they thought was a snitch, rightly

00:15:23.160 or wrongly, I mean, could have been the case, and they took him out with a lead pipe, and

00:15:29.900 what they did to him was lay him down and batter one of his legs into a pulp with a

00:15:36.940 lead pipe. And I thought about that. You know, it's a funny thing to think about. I thought

00:15:45.000 about that for, it really occupied my imagination for two weeks, I would say. This was while

00:15:51.440 I was reading Solzhenitsyn's book on the Gulag Archipelago and various accounts of totalitarian

00:15:58.580 brutality in Nazi Germany and so forth, and some psychoanalytic work. And that's where

00:16:05.200 The story part emerges.

00:16:07.420 Imagine your favorite lecture.

00:16:10.180 Dial that up on Macs, put that on steroids,

00:16:12.980 and then add some cinematic elements to it.

00:16:15.340 That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture.

00:16:20.740 I went to college because I had to.

00:16:22.700 I go to Peterson Academy because I want to.

00:16:24.620 I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago,

00:16:26.640 and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college.

00:16:30.060 In traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry.

00:16:33.260 They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.

00:16:37.600 It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you.

00:16:41.920 If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time.

00:16:45.560 That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself.

00:16:50.040 You have the opportunity to investigate that calling.

00:16:59.240 You know, at the same time, this is a hard thing to relate, actually.

00:17:03.260 At the same time, I had found myself possessed by some dark impulses that I didn't understand.

00:17:13.000 For example, when I was sitting in class, I would sometimes get the impulse to stick the person in front of me with a pen.

00:17:23.060 And I'd never done anything violent in my life.

00:17:26.220 You know, it was kind of an obsessive thought, and I had no idea what to make of that.

00:17:31.280 thought at all. And it was unsettling. It didn't happen very often. It wasn't very powerful. But

00:17:37.040 the mere fact that a thought like that could even enter my mind was upsetting. And that was

00:17:43.000 happening at about the same time. And it was related to what I was assessing, because I was

00:17:46.920 trying to, I was actually trying to come to terms with a human proclivity for evil. And that means

00:17:52.500 to come to terms with your own proclivity for evil. That's what it means. If you really want

00:17:56.600 the understanding it's personal it's not political it's not economic it's not sociological my first

00:18:02.340 degree was political science and i was interested in economic determinants of behavior to begin with

00:18:07.420 and political determinants but i soon realized that that wasn't where the action was the action

00:18:11.700 was in the soul that's a good way of thinking about it the the real answer to the deepest

00:18:16.840 problems were psychological and the deepest psychological problems are spiritual that's

00:18:22.720 like a definition of deep. And so all these things were tangled together. And I thought about what

00:18:29.360 had happened at that prison, and I imagined myself doing it, which is a, you have to break a barrier

00:18:38.440 to do that, right? You have to break the barrier that's the assumption that you aren't the sort of

00:18:43.060 person that could do that. But I wasn't so sure of that, because it looked to me, from what I had

00:18:49.180 read that if you put people in the appropriate circumstance, there's very little they won't do.

00:18:56.280 It's a rare person who won't go down that road when the opportunity makes itself known,

00:19:03.400 especially one little move at a time, which is how totalitarian states develop, right? It isn't

00:19:09.760 that you go from normal to Nazi in one leap. It's like, it's 10,000 little steps, and each step is 0.75

00:19:17.420 a little farther into the abyss than the previous one and nowhere along the way do you ever wake up

00:19:23.400 and say well that's just too much now if you examine the whole pathway from beginning to end

00:19:30.600 you'd think well that was too much but each little nudge you can rationalize with your silence or

00:19:38.760 with your acquiescence with the fact that you'll put up with it with the fact that you don't want

00:19:44.480 to take the trouble with the fact that you want to hide, with the fact that you want

00:19:49.980 to maintain your own pristine view of yourself.

00:19:55.460 Anyways, I thought about it for about two weeks, quite obsessively, because I can, if

00:20:01.360 I think about something, I tend to think about it like for 16 hours a day, you know, it's

00:20:06.980 just non-stop trying to crack the problem.

00:20:10.940 And that's how you crack problems, I suppose.

00:20:18.640 And I had the realization one day that I could do that.

00:20:23.500 And the impulses I had, the impulse that I mentioned, that went away.

00:20:29.400 And so that impulse was part of something within me

00:20:32.560 that was trying to make its presence known, right?

00:20:37.120 My capability for participating in abysmal acts.

00:20:48.980 People have dark fantasies, you know,

00:20:51.160 like you can watch them in yourself if you're willing to.

00:20:54.380 If you get angry, especially if it's resentful,

00:20:57.640 you can watch the background fantasies that are associated with that and

00:21:03.400 the temptations that are associated with that and if you are honest you can see that they'll

00:21:11.700 they'll take you to some very dark places and i think that's true of everyone it's particularly

00:21:18.180 true of the people who think it's not that it's not true of them so

00:21:22.880 I realized

00:21:26.200 that I could do that

00:21:27.040 and

00:21:27.840 and that helped make the problem

00:21:33.880 that I was wrestling with real

00:21:35.480 so I became convinced of two things

00:21:42.420 I became convinced that

00:21:44.020 the fundamental issue of malevolence

00:21:48.180 was an individual issue

00:21:51.040 So, the fundamental problem with Nazi Germany is the Auschwitz camp guard, who's a normal person, who enjoys his work.

00:22:03.220 That's the problem.

00:22:04.740 Like, that's, if you boil it down and make it focal, that's the problem.

00:22:09.260 Now, then the question is, is that you, or is that someone else?

00:22:12.940 If it's someone else, that's kind of, if it's a psychopathic deviant who's barely human, you don't have a problem.

00:22:19.280 If that's you, and you think such things are a problem, you have a problem.

00:22:27.000 And I thought I had a problem.

00:22:29.340 It's like, okay, I see.

00:22:32.320 So this is a psychological or a spiritual problem.

00:22:36.640 So I became convinced of the reality of evil because I think it's very difficult to read

00:22:43.980 accounts of the ultimately barbaric acts that people perpetrated in the 20th century

00:22:51.260 totalitarian states without believing in the reality of evil. I think if you read through

00:22:58.760 those accounts, the summary of those accounts is something like an account of evil. I don't

00:23:06.140 care what you call it, that's what it ends up being. Is it real? Well, it's real enough

00:23:12.240 to kill millions of people and to torture millions more it's plenty real is it relevant to you it's

00:23:18.240 relevant to you if you're capable of engaging in it so then I became convinced that evil was real

00:23:24.440 and I became convinced that we had a personal responsibility for that I became convinced at

00:23:33.520 the same time that the pathway to the totalitarian state that motivates atrocity is associated with

00:23:45.000 deception with lie with the lie that a totalitarian state isn't a top-down oppression

00:23:53.440 of freedom-loving individuals by a small coterie of pathological elites but the grip of every

00:24:01.800 single person in this society by falsity and untruth. So here's a definition of a totalitarian

00:24:11.580 state. A totalitarian state isn't run by psychopathic thugs. A totalitarian state is

00:24:18.920 the state that exists when every single person in this society lies to themselves and everyone else,

00:24:27.620 including those that they love, about absolutely everything they think, say, and do.

00:24:34.960 And the more comprehensive that grip, the more thorough the totalitarian state.

00:24:42.740 And when the grip of the lie is complete, there's nothing that's beyond you.

00:24:49.300 okay so then i thought well how do you understand that proclivity for evil

00:24:57.740 does it indicate that there's an opposite proclivity right so you know nietzsche announced

00:25:07.040 so famously in the mid 1800s that god was dead that didn't get rid of the problem of evil

00:25:13.960 quite the contrary and he knew it wouldn't and one of his prophecies was that we would see the

00:25:20.640 deaths of a hundred million people in the 20th century as a consequence of the ideological

00:25:25.640 possession that would flood in to supplant what the concept of god had protected us from and that

00:25:33.140 absolutely 100 percent happened exactly the way he predicted it would same with dostoevsky same

00:25:38.940 prediction. We're left with the reality of evil, and we're left with the question of

00:25:45.920 ultimate good. Like the dissolution of God, the disappearance of God, the collapse of

00:25:50.440 religious belief is something like the disappearance of the transcendent good. But if you're stuck

00:25:55.480 with evil, the abysmal evil that was on display in the 20th century, the problem of good doesn't

00:26:06.720 go away it's even brought into more stark relief that's partly why you like to go to movies that

00:26:12.160 feature anti-heroes like really bad people the reason you want to go watch that unless there's

00:26:18.660 something off about you is to flesh out what the most terrible pattern of action represents so that

00:26:29.300 you can go the other way the thing about coming to the realization of the existence of evil is

00:26:35.860 that you've instantly, even if you don't know it,

00:26:38.740 come to the realization of a transcendent good

00:26:41.300 because the transcendent good is whatever gets you

00:26:43.460 the farthest possible away from that.

00:26:48.160 Okay.

00:26:50.140 Then I started to understand that that landscape,

00:26:55.080 which is the landscape of good and evil,

00:26:57.140 was the landscape of stories.

00:27:01.300 Right?

00:27:01.900 And then I started to understand that stories varied in their depth.

00:27:06.380 Now, we kind of know that, right?

00:27:07.900 You know that you can watch a shallow story,

00:27:09.920 you can watch a movie that's just light entertainment,

00:27:13.220 or you can read a book,

00:27:15.000 or you can watch a movie that moves you profoundly to the depths.

00:27:19.420 And so you know there's a hierarchy of depth

00:27:24.320 that characterizes the literary world.

00:27:28.680 As you're more sophisticated, you read deeper books,

00:27:31.940 they move you more profoundly,

00:27:33.380 they shift the structure of your perception more comprehensively.

00:27:38.760 It's effortful, like difficult things are effortful.

00:27:45.360 The deepest stories are religious.

00:27:49.200 Okay, that's a definition, right?

00:27:52.140 Because you could ask, even as an observant scientist,

00:27:55.660 what's the domain of the religious?

00:27:59.420 And it's characterized by many features.

00:28:02.000 So the domain of the religious includes the experience of awe.

00:28:09.940 That's a good marker.

00:28:11.980 The awe you experience when you look at the night sky or perhaps the Grand Canyon or when you're in love.

00:28:17.760 That's another indication of your ability to see what's beyond.

00:28:22.060 That's not a proposition.

00:28:25.040 It's not a set of beliefs.

00:28:26.960 It's an experience.

00:28:29.060 So that's part of the domain of the religious.

00:28:33.000 Our stories are often about what inspires awe.

00:28:37.680 People can inspire awe.

00:28:39.580 If you admire someone deeply, that's a form of awe.

00:28:45.980 And it's a compulsion to imitate.

00:28:49.020 And that's no different than the instinct to worship.

00:28:52.400 Those are the same thing.

00:28:53.400 That's all the same thing.

00:28:54.480 the domain of literature is the landscape of good and evil 0.88

00:29:02.160 and the deepest literary stories are religious

00:29:06.440 so I started to analyze stories

00:29:12.180 and I started to find out who was good at that

00:29:14.780 and the people I found that were the best at that

00:29:17.560 were the psychoanalysts

00:29:21.780 Freud, initially, and then his compatriot, Carl Jung, and the school that he established.

00:29:29.360 And so then I started reading everything I could get my hands on from that school and

00:29:34.140 as much mythology, religious story, as I could from all sorts of different cultures.

00:29:41.000 And I started, as well, walking through the biblical stories and starting to piece together

00:29:47.840 what they mean and what they signify.

00:29:51.780 And so, and I started to understand that along the way, a few other things.

00:30:03.100 You know, when you look at the world, you can't see all the world.

00:30:06.320 You understand that.

00:30:08.180 There's, the world's insanely complex.

00:30:11.760 This is why we can't be guided by facts alone.

00:30:15.220 People say follow the sciences because they don't understand this.

00:30:18.360 You can't follow the science because science is not a navigation tool.

00:30:25.480 Science is a descriptive enterprise.

00:30:28.540 And describing the landscape and figuring out how to navigate through it are not the same problem.

00:30:36.120 The facts alone can't tell you what to do.

00:30:39.120 No more than if someone drops you in a desert, the landscape around you can tell you what direction you should walk in.

00:30:45.840 when you are interacting with what's real

00:30:51.100 you have to choose what to attend to

00:30:54.600 and you have to choose what to ignore

00:30:56.020 you have to prioritize your attention

00:30:57.840 there's no difference between

00:31:04.480 the universe of value

00:31:08.880 and your prioritization of your attention

00:31:13.300 think about this for example

00:31:15.100 You go on a date with someone for the first time, and you're in a noisy restaurant, and there's 50 conversations, and you could listen to any of them.

00:31:24.940 Or you could look at your phone, because there's a million conversations on there.

00:31:31.120 But if you have any sense, that's not what you do.

00:31:33.940 What do you do?

00:31:34.740 You prioritize the conversation that you're having with the person that you're having dinner with.

00:31:40.240 That's what you do with your guests.

00:31:41.420 What that means is that you, of all the things you could attend to, you focus on the interactions between you and the person that you're attempting to shower with hospitality.

00:31:56.260 You eliminate from your perception a multitude of potential phenomena, and you highlight a tiny proportion of what you're offered.

00:32:09.060 You do that all the time.

00:32:10.840 Every time you focus your eyes, you do that.

00:32:13.800 Every time you take a step forward, every glance you take,

00:32:22.340 you sift the world through a structure of value.

00:32:28.400 The way you do that habitually, that's your character.

00:32:31.240 That's your personality.

00:32:32.240 A representation of that, a statable representation of that, that's a story.

00:32:41.620 The reason you like stories, the reason you need to hear them, is because you want to know how people prioritize their attention and their perceptions.

00:32:50.060 Their attention and their actions.

00:32:52.440 And the reason you want to know that is because there's nothing more valuable to know than that.

00:32:58.300 That's why when you talk to someone, you look at their eyes.

00:33:00.980 you look at their eyes so you can see where they're pointing their eyes you look at their

00:33:07.560 eyes so you can see what they're attending to you look at what they're attending to so that you can

00:33:12.820 understand what they're prioritizing you do that so that you can gain insight into their character

00:33:17.660 and understand them that's how we do it when you go see a movie you watch someone act out the

00:33:25.860 priorities of their attention and action. And that's the characterization in the movie. And

00:33:32.200 you do that so that you can benefit from observing the consequences of that characterization.

00:33:39.440 The deeper the movie, the more general significance the characterization has.

00:33:47.820 So I could say that every decision you make reflects the decision between good and evil

00:33:53.860 in a attenuated way, such that the, your description of the micro decisions you make

00:34:04.740 might not be that interesting. But if I took a set of decisions that people made, that a set of

00:34:10.480 people made, and I distilled those decisions to their essence, and I extracted out a characterization

00:34:16.480 in consequence, that distilled characterization would be of general utility and general interest.

00:34:23.060 And that's what a good storyteller does. And you know this because a good storyteller maybe writes a villain, and a complex and compelling villain. And so that villain is, first of all, the distillation of everything that could be villainous about one person, because the filmmaker will just show you the essence of that.

00:34:44.020 But then even more than that is that a very well-developed fictional villain

00:34:48.420 will be villainous in the way that ten villains in the world might be, right?

00:34:54.780 It's a distillation of the essence of villainy.

00:34:59.440 It's a purification.

00:35:01.260 That's what stories do.

00:35:03.480 They distill and purify the moral landscape.

00:35:06.520 and you want to watch them because

00:35:09.680 the representation of the distilled moral landscape

00:35:15.880 is a powerful, generalizable tool.

00:35:18.340 It's an abstraction.

00:35:20.760 And then we go again.

00:35:22.120 Once again, the deepest distillations

00:35:25.100 are religious characterizations.

00:35:29.780 So,

00:35:31.560 the ultimate fictional character becomes a god.

00:35:36.520 Now, you have to understand what I'm not saying. I'm not trying to reduce the domain of the religious to the fiction that people juxtapose against fact. I'm trying to make a claim for what we do when we fictionalize.

00:35:50.460 what we do when we fictionalize is we abstract that's not the replacement of fact with falsehood

00:35:57.220 that's the sifting sifting and winnowing of fact until nothing remains but the purified essence

00:36:05.280 it's the most real not the least now you know this already because you know if that wasn't

00:36:12.900 the case then there'd be no such thing as deeply profound literature right because if

00:36:19.140 If fiction was the falsification that bore no relationship to reality, then there'd be no such thing as deep literature.

00:36:34.640 It wouldn't have any bearing on the world.

00:36:37.420 But we know that that's opposite of the truth.

00:36:42.340 The deepest literature has the most bearing on the world.

00:36:44.480 and again even as a matter of definition the deepest literature is religious what happens

00:36:51.380 in the biblical corpus it's a series of characterizations what are their characterizations

00:36:57.060 well they're they're twofold essentially there's a characterization of what should be put in the

00:37:03.320 highest place it's an investigative inquiry into the nature of that which should be put in the

00:37:10.340 highest place. So that's a series of characterizations. And then it's a characterization

00:37:14.800 of man's character in relationship to that. That's what the biblical corpus is. And it's

00:37:26.560 a distillation of such characterization that has made itself manifest over some tens of

00:37:35.720 thousands of years, at least. Longer. At least that. At least that in story form. Way longer

00:37:43.240 in behavioral form. Way longer than that. So let's talk about this characterization.

00:37:50.600 Well, I can, I'll start with this story. 0.98

00:37:58.100 And the Lord said unto Abraham, get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and 0.98

00:38:04.480 from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee. Okay, so now that's, it's 0.94

00:38:10.460 one line. Okay, so what happens in this line? Well, we know some things about Abraham. He's

00:38:17.940 old. He's like 75. And where does he live? Well, he lives in his father's house, among

00:38:26.120 his family, in his country. And he's 75. So what are we to make of that? Well, it's a

00:38:32.880 little old to be in your father's house, right? There's a serious problem of failure to launch

00:38:38.880 here, right? Okay. So now we could delve into that and see what that signifies. Okay. So now

00:38:44.920 we know that Abraham's father is a wealthy man. And what that means is that Abraham is provided 0.85

00:38:53.780 with everything he needs. Okay. Now imagine that you're offered a political utopia. This is the

00:39:00.960 standard political utopia offering what did dostoevsky say about the the the political

00:39:07.960 utopians so imagine we can arrange your life so and this is dostoevsky's word so that you had

00:39:12.760 nothing like description of california you had nothing to do except to sit in hot tubs of

00:39:19.820 bubbling water to eat cakes and busy yourself with the continuation of the species right so

00:39:27.320 that's dostoevsky's characterization of the utopia so and he analyzes this and okay well

00:39:32.400 imagine we could bring that about what would human beings do in response and dostoevsky's

00:39:38.160 answer was this is in notes from underground a study of resentment he said human beings would

00:39:44.880 immediately do something destructive and insane just to break that utopia that hedonistic utopia

00:39:56.620 just so something interesting would happen.

00:39:59.760 And he said, and isn't that for the best?

00:40:03.840 That's a very interesting critique.

00:40:05.860 It's a very sophisticated critique.

00:40:08.280 You know, often you hear critiques of utopian socialism.

00:40:11.680 A critique will be, well, what is on offer is impossible.

00:40:15.440 And, of course, that's true.

00:40:16.900 But that's perhaps not the deepest critique.

00:40:19.280 The deepest critique is that's not what you want.

00:40:22.260 Or maybe even one level below that, that's not what you should want.

00:40:25.900 and you might say well why wouldn't i want to have everything i need delivered to me with no effort

00:40:33.120 and the answer is because you're not an infant in a crib

00:40:37.280 right and if you're 75 years old and you're living like that it's like

00:40:42.820 something's gone wrong and seriously wrong well then you think well is that in accordance with

00:40:50.400 your experience. It's like, well, think about what we do when we go watch movies. We don't

00:40:55.940 watch people shop. We don't watch people eat. We don't watch people sleep, even in security

00:41:02.380 and comfort, right? We're not that interested in watching satiated people in their unconsciousness,

00:41:11.520 which is an infantile existence. What we want to see on the screen is romantic adventure.

00:41:17.440 And so then you might think, well, that's what we're built for, actually, that the ideal life isn't the utopia of infantile satiation, but something like the life of romantic adventure.

00:41:34.800 So let's assume for a moment that that's the case, just for the sake of nurturing the hypothesis, and then we'll add an additional observation.

00:41:46.680 So now there's a characterization of man that we already described.

00:41:52.000 Abraham is living this life of infantile satiation.

00:41:55.440 And at some point, it's insufficient for him.

00:41:58.660 A little late, but better late than never.

00:42:01.900 And there's actually an optimism in that, because in this, the story puts forward the claim that it is better late than never.

00:42:10.240 And then maybe it's never too late.

00:42:11.640 and so even if you lived a life of infantile dependency you could still wake up and

00:42:20.520 go have your life go have your adventure now you know you think about what you do

00:42:26.320 for your kids you know you know if you have any sense

00:42:28.720 what did my mother say when i left home i left home about 16 my mother's a very nice person

00:42:36.220 and she said something on my life went better when I left home I was having some friction with

00:42:43.440 my father for a variety of reasons many of which had to do with me many of which had to do with

00:42:50.280 being 16 some of which had to do with it was time for me to go and when I went it was much better

00:42:56.180 and I got along with my parents much better and my mother who's a very nice person said if things

00:43:02.020 were too good at home you'd never leave and now and then my mother you know she could strike with

00:43:07.520 her tongue like a snake even though she's a very nice person and that was one of the times that i 1.00

00:43:12.860 saw her the stronger character in her underneath her maternal solicitude because she was the kind 1.00

00:43:21.220 of mother who wanted her kids to go have your life right that's the maternal sacrifice that 0.84

00:43:29.380 that a true mother is called upon to offer her children to the world, right? 0.65

00:43:37.600 And my mother was good at that.

00:43:40.280 And so if you're treating your children properly,

00:43:46.400 you don't entice them into a prolonged state of dependency and infantile satiation.

00:43:54.040 That isn't good for them.

00:43:56.740 You know it.

00:43:57.360 That isn't what you want for them.

00:43:58.680 And that's an interesting thing, too, because you could imagine that you want nothing more than to shelter your child from all possible harm and damage.

00:44:06.760 But you don't want that.

00:44:13.660 You don't want to protect them from serpents.

00:44:17.140 That's a way of thinking about it symbolically.

00:44:19.060 You want to make them into snake handlers.

00:44:22.220 That's a more profound form of security.

00:44:24.880 So if you make your child, if you encourage your child to become adventurous and alert and awake and undaunted and faithful and courageous, then that actually provides them with the best form of security possible because it means they're going to be able and ready for whatever comes their way.

00:44:45.900 And that's way more secure in the final analysis than anything you could produce by maintaining them in a state of suspended infantile satiation.

00:44:57.100 Freud was very good at analyzing this.

00:44:59.800 He characterized the mother who enticed her child into a relationship that was too close, let's put it that way, as oedipal and devouring.

00:45:12.860 Okay, so what do we know from these first lines?

00:45:14.960 We have a characterization of man and God.

00:45:21.180 Man, as represented by Abraham, might fall prey to the temptation of infantile security,

00:45:27.460 but will eventually become dissatisfied with that.

00:45:32.580 What's God in this characterization?

00:45:35.280 God is the voice of adventure that calls even to the unwilling.

00:45:40.580 Okay, now what you have to understand, you have to understand this.

00:45:43.880 this is a definition

00:45:45.960 okay

00:45:48.220 this is what modern people don't understand

00:45:50.280 about these stories

00:45:51.160 there are multiple characterizations

00:45:54.080 of what God is in the

00:45:55.960 opening stories of

00:45:58.120 Genesis in the initial

00:45:59.920 Genesis story God is the spirit that

00:46:02.200 brings order to chaos

00:46:04.140 which is what you do in your household

00:46:05.960 he's the spirit that

00:46:07.540 that

00:46:09.400 that Adam walks with

00:46:14.720 unselfconsciously in the garden

00:46:16.520 which is what you do when you're

00:46:19.280 attempting some

00:46:21.640 recreation in your backyard

00:46:23.320 he's the

00:46:26.720 spirit that

00:46:29.320 calls the unworthy

00:46:31.180 out for the

00:46:32.940 poor quality of their sacrifices

00:46:36.960 that's the God

00:46:39.040 that makes himself manifest in the story of Cain and Abel.

00:46:42.480 So these are definitions.

00:46:44.020 So what the writers of the biblical stories are trying to wrestle with is

00:46:49.020 what character should be placed in the highest place

00:46:54.280 and how do you conceptualize that

00:46:56.000 and then how do you exist in relationship to that?

00:46:58.200 And so there's a hypothesis that underlies it

00:47:00.300 and the hypothesis is monotheistic.

00:47:02.260 It's that all these different characterizations

00:47:05.340 are united in one thing that's properly put in the highest place.

00:47:10.660 And so the hypothesis would be that the spirit that makes order out of chaos,

00:47:15.700 the spirit that punishes the prideful,

00:47:18.460 the spirit that calls out those who make second-rate sacrifices,

00:47:23.040 the spirit that warns of the impending flood,

00:47:26.240 that's the story of Noah,

00:47:27.500 the spirit that punishes the tyrant,

00:47:29.780 that's the story of the Tower of Babel, 0.56

00:47:31.740 those are all the same thing.

00:47:33.920 and that if you have any sense you exist in relationship to that thing and devoted to it

00:47:40.220 devoted to its manifestation within your own life devoted to allowing that to possess you

00:47:46.280 in the course of your decisions and then that story is elaborated further in the story of

00:47:50.660 Abraham and so Abraham is living a semi-life and a voice comes to him or an impulse or a feeling

00:47:59.200 doesn't really matter, and says, get out there. Now, what makes Abraham faithful? He listens.

00:48:11.060 Okay, so now you've got to ask yourself this about your belief. That voice makes itself manifest

00:48:18.580 to you all the time. Whenever you're in a relatively comfortable situation, and you could

00:48:27.180 stay there. You could dwell there. You could

00:48:30.540 rot there. You could 0.88

00:48:32.840 you could cease

00:48:38.520 moving forward

00:48:39.540 or you could

00:48:41.980 hearken to the call of further adventure

00:48:44.660 and then enact

00:48:46.720 that. Okay, so what are you doing in those

00:48:48.680 two circumstances? Well, you're

00:48:50.440 placing faith in one

00:48:52.120 spirit or another.

00:48:55.160 One is a spirit of

00:48:56.580 stasis and comfort, and the other is the spirit of adventure. So you might say, well, do you believe

00:49:01.280 in that? It's like the belief is represented in your decision. That's the belief. The belief isn't

00:49:08.600 your statement about whether or not you think that that voice exists. That's a secondary concern.

00:49:15.560 The primary concern is when something deep within you issues the command to move forward,

00:49:24.580 Do you attend?

00:49:28.280 And if the answer is yes, then the next thing that happened, the next thing happens.

00:49:33.920 So God says, essentially, if you hearken to the voice of adventure, I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and I will make thy name great and thou shalt be a blessing.

00:49:48.720 Now, that's quite an offer.

00:49:51.120 So let's see if we can take that apart.

00:49:53.180 Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

00:49:56.480 People certainly know that.

00:49:58.440 It's like, how is it that you begin the journey, let's say, to greatness,

00:50:04.640 to whatever greatness you might conceive of or manage?

00:50:09.760 What would greatness be?

00:50:11.140 Well, in this story, it's conceptualized as the founding of not only a nation,

00:50:16.060 but perhaps a multitude of nations, right?

00:50:18.080 So that the actions that you undertake are the foundation of a great enterprise.

00:50:24.820 How does that make itself manifest as the call to adventure?

00:50:30.940 So we might ask, well, how does that make itself manifest?

00:50:34.660 Because it's good to nail these things down so you really understand them.

00:50:38.980 Well, there are other characterizations in the biblical corpus of the nature of God's voice.

00:50:46.000 So I'll give you an example.

00:50:47.420 this is a very good example so before Moses becomes a leader like Abraham let's say he

00:50:54.980 encounters the burning bush okay so what does that mean exactly well he's just going along his

00:50:59.480 business he's a shepherd at this point and and a shepherd is a is the beginnings of a leader right

00:51:05.520 because a shepherd is a caretaker and a shepherd in biblical times was also someone who was

00:51:09.760 keeping the lions and the wolves at bay right it wasn't a job for this faint of heart and you had

00:51:15.720 to live off the land at the same time. It was a tough job. He's a shepherd, and that's going

00:51:21.240 pretty well, and he's wandering around by Mount Sinai one day, which is the place of holy encounter,

00:51:26.760 by the way, and something catches his attention out of the corner of his eye, and he decides to

00:51:33.000 leave the beaten track and go investigate. Okay, so how does that work in your life? Well,

00:51:40.520 are you interested in some things well yes did you choose them or did they choose you

00:51:51.020 now that's a weird question right because my sense is that well try to make yourself

00:51:58.160 interested in something you're not interested in right right that's very now that's weird right

00:52:03.360 because if you were yours you could just do that you just say look i need to do this so now i'm

00:52:08.800 interested in it, and then away you'd go, and you, there'd be no resistance, you'd just tell

00:52:14.020 yourself what to do, and away you'd, that is not how it works, not in the least, you can't tell

00:52:20.420 yourself what to do any more effectively than you can tell anyone else, maybe even less effectively,

00:52:26.100 and that's strange, because, well, it certainly indicates that you're, you're not under your own

00:52:30.980 control, and that's a, then what, who controls you then? There's a question for the ages,

00:52:37.760 and and more strangely even if you can't control what you're interested in what controls it

00:52:47.200 it's not random it's not random unless you're insane and and even then it's not random it's

00:52:54.420 more random that's for sure but what calls you is not random so what is it well the biblical

00:53:02.920 answer to that is, what calls you is God. Definition. Okay, now you've got to think

00:53:09.860 about that in the context of your own life. Ask yourself, consider the success that you

00:53:21.940 have insofar as you have success. And then ask yourself, what was the pathway to that

00:53:28.420 success. How much of that was a consequence of following your calling? Now, if you have a job

00:53:34.180 that pays you well and you hate it, you're not interested in it, that's not exactly success.

00:53:39.840 And the security that the money hypothetically provides, which would be part of that

00:53:45.820 provision of infantile gratification, it's insufficient. If you hate what you have to do

00:53:58.220 to provide that? If you're not engrossed by what you're sacrificing, you know that you're much more

00:54:08.920 likely to commit to something if it grips you. Okay, so then you've got to ask yourself, what

00:54:13.520 does that imply? I can tell you what it implies in the biblical context, because the voice of God

00:54:17.840 is characterized as the interplay between two forces frequently. One is what pulls you forward,

00:54:24.060 right it's an invitation it's a calling it's what makes itself manifest behind everything that

00:54:30.180 interests you you can think of everything that interests you as a portal through which the divine

00:54:35.880 light shines that's a very good way of thinking about it and you know that the thing you're

00:54:40.120 interested isn't the thing itself because you can pursue something you're interested in and then

00:54:45.020 your interest will shift which shows you that whatever it was that was pulling you forward was

00:54:50.000 not that specific thing but that that thing was a pointer to something else right interest is not

00:54:57.460 enough right because your interest can lead you astray especially if you're not disciplined so

00:55:02.040 you need conscience as well and there's ample characterization of god in the biblical corpus

00:55:08.540 as the voice of conscience and so then you could imagine that what calls you forward is the

00:55:13.840 interplay between calling and conscience, right? Conscience keeps you on the, your calling attracts

00:55:22.220 you forward and defines the path, and your conscience keeps you on the straight and narrow.

00:55:27.440 And the interplay, it's a definition again, the interplay between those two things, which aren't

00:55:32.020 exactly you, you're subject to them, that's why they're not you. They have an autonomy, which is

00:55:40.460 why they're not you. You can't tell your conscience what to do. It tells you when you

00:55:46.660 make a mistake. That's not the same thing at all, and it's akin very much to the phenomenon

00:55:51.060 of interest. It's like, you can't, you can respond to what you're interested in. You

00:55:57.280 can even pervert what you're interested in. But it's very difficult to make it out of

00:56:01.600 whole cloth. It's something that you abide by or not. The insistence in the first few

00:56:11.540 sentences of this story is that if you follow the voice of adventure, the voice that calls

00:56:19.760 you forward, if you commit yourself to that fully, fully, then you will become a great

00:56:29.940 nation, blessed, with a great name, and someone that does nothing but good. That's a pretty good

00:56:38.860 deal. That's a good deal. And that's the deal that's on offer. And that's a very strange thing

00:56:44.900 to think that that's the deal that's on offer. Because maybe that is the deal that's on offer.

00:56:50.040 Because you could imagine, you can ask yourself, this is a good question. You ask yourself,

00:56:53.640 If you attended to everything that interested you, who could you become?

00:56:59.520 If you took it seriously, if you noticed that that was what was calling you forward,

00:57:04.160 if you didn't shrug off that opportunity and responsibility, which are exactly the same thing,

00:57:10.020 if you were full-heartedly committed to that,

00:57:13.260 if you were willing to make the sacrifices necessary to walk that path, no matter what,

00:57:21.060 who could you become?

00:57:22.120 there's been studies of what people regret when they're old they don't regret so much the mistakes

00:57:30.580 they've made they regret more the mistakes they didn't allow themselves to make right they they

00:57:36.300 regret banal normality and i think part of the reason they regret that is because life is too

00:57:46.680 crucial

00:57:48.980 to be satisfied with

00:57:52.520 banal normality. It's

00:57:54.540 too difficult. There's too much suffering

00:57:56.440 intrinsic to it. The burden

00:57:58.520 is too heavy.

00:58:00.360 What justifies the weight of life?

00:58:04.360 Security?

00:58:07.380 There are always times

00:58:08.580 when people long for security, but security

00:58:10.560 doesn't secure you. You're still

00:58:12.600 faced with the problem of mortality.

00:58:14.560 You're still faced with the problem of malevolence.

00:58:16.680 And what can justify that?

00:58:18.900 Well, how about a great adventure?

00:58:21.340 You act like that's the case because you'll go watch people have a great adventure on a screen.

00:58:27.800 So then you might ask, well, where do you find your great adventure?

00:58:30.520 Well, that's part of what the biblical stories are trying to represent.

00:58:38.440 Calling.

00:58:39.680 So what happens to Moses is he goes off the beaten track.

00:58:43.180 So you can imagine this in your own life.

00:58:44.700 You know, maybe you have a job that's providing for you, and it's providing a certain degree of stability, but you feel that something is missing.

00:58:51.200 You're in Abraham's position.

00:58:53.180 And you have these interests that have always lurked in the back of your psyche, you know, and that maybe you've been afraid to pursue.

00:58:59.300 You don't think enough of yourself.

00:59:00.700 Maybe you think they're a bit crazy.

00:59:02.860 Maybe they're too daring. 0.84

00:59:04.280 Maybe you think people laugh.

00:59:05.440 God only knows what you think.

00:59:07.380 You think whatever you think that stops you.

00:59:10.140 That's plenty of things.

00:59:11.480 It's usually fear of failure, fear of success, fear of opinion, fear of the effort.

00:59:18.020 Who knows?

00:59:21.280 But let's say in the depths of your despair at your too constrained life,

00:59:31.200 you allow yourself to be gripped by something that compels you.

00:59:37.420 But that's what Moses does.

00:59:38.580 he goes off the beaten track and he looks at this he looks at what calls to him and what is it it's

00:59:45.280 a burning bush okay what does that mean well the tree it's a tree it's a tree of life a tree is a

00:59:51.200 symbol of life and it's burning because things that are alive burn right that's metabolism

00:59:56.900 everything that's alive is on fire and things can living things can make the self-manifest

01:00:03.280 with hallucinogenic intensity. That's what happens when you fall in love. That's what happens when

01:00:09.200 you have a child. You see the life burning in a manner that's compelling. So Moses, he goes to

01:00:16.960 investigate this thing that calls to him, and he gets closer and closer to it, which means he

01:00:21.460 interacts with it more. He approaches it, and then he realizes that he's starting to tread on sacred

01:00:26.760 ground. Okay, so what does that mean? It means if you follow your interest, it will take you down

01:00:32.540 into the depths. No matter what the interest is, it will discipline you and broaden you

01:00:38.560 and deepen you until you get to the bottom of things. He takes off his shoes and he approaches

01:00:44.680 closer and he takes off his shoes. That's a shedding of his old identity. Shoes are emblematic

01:00:50.600 of identity. You can walk a mile in someone's shoes and then you can understand them. He

01:00:55.100 takes off his shoes. He doesn't know where he's going. It's a symbol of humility. It's

01:00:59.660 a symbol of willingness to learn more. He takes off his shoes and continues his intense

01:01:06.080 meditation, and the voice of God itself speaks to him from the midst of the bush,

01:01:11.620 and it reveals itself as the spirit of being and becoming. I am that I am. I will be what I will

01:01:18.440 be. It's both of those. All the Hebrew in that announcement of God's identity is without tense.

01:01:24.440 i am i am what i was i am what i am i am what will be that's the spirit of being and becoming

01:01:31.880 what does that mean it means if you pursue whatever calls to you with enough intensity

01:01:36.380 you'll get to the bottom of things the voice of god itself the spirit of being itself will make

01:01:41.940 itself manifest to you and what's the consequence of that for moses that's when he becomes a leader

01:01:47.340 so here's a question that pertains to our question at the beginning of the lecture

01:01:52.060 what's the opposite path to the hellish abyss of totalitarian atrocity

01:01:58.660 you become the leader who can lead people out of tyranny and slavery across the desert to the

01:02:06.040 promised land and you become that by following the calling that takes you to the depths that

01:02:13.940 enables the structure of existence itself to reveal itself to you that motivates you to become

01:02:21.740 a leader despite your inadequacies. Moses was a man who couldn't speak. He had a speech

01:02:26.300 impediment. There's something wrong with his ability to communicate. And God basically

01:02:30.040 says to him, that's your problem. Sort it out. And that's a fair statement, because

01:02:37.280 like, if you're called upon to be a leader, there's going to be things about you that

01:02:41.580 are inadequate. That's your problem. Find someone to help you. Build a team. You don't

01:02:48.460 have an excuse. And this is what Moses

01:02:50.480 has done, is he allies himself with his brother

01:02:52.420 Aaron, who's a public speaker

01:02:54.580 essentially, a politician.

01:02:56.260 Moses is a prophet, and Aaron is a politician.

01:02:58.920 And that's a nice dynamic

01:03:00.340 because the prophet keeps

01:03:02.460 the politician in line, right?

01:03:04.520 But the politician gives voice to the prophet.

01:03:06.940 It's a good partnership, and it

01:03:08.320 works out quite well for them, and for the

01:03:10.360 Israelites. 0.71

01:03:13.020 Moses asked, why will the 0.65

01:03:14.560 Israelites 0.90

01:03:16.720 listen to me, and God says, tell them God sent you. And you might say, well, why would 1.00

01:03:23.100 someone believe that? And the answer is, it would depend on how you said it. And I'm dead

01:03:29.500 serious about that, right? And so if what you said wasn't a lie, maybe people would

01:03:36.680 listen. And you might say, well, how is it that God would speak to me? I know the answer

01:03:42.220 that. Listen. To what? To the voice of your own soul. How's that? And what's so terrible

01:03:56.160 about that, in a sense, is that there's nothing you want to do more than that. And what's

01:04:01.900 the consequence? Well, the consequence for Abraham is that I will make of thee a great

01:04:08.240 nation. I will bless thee and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing, and I

01:04:11.720 will bless them that bless thee, and I will curse them that curse thee, and in thee shall

01:04:17.760 all families of the earth be blessed. Wow, that's quite the bloody offer. So imagine

01:04:23.100 this. So here's the deal. If you attended to what called you forward, hemmed inappropriately

01:04:28.220 by your conscience, you would become the sort of person whose pattern of action would

01:04:32.600 be so beneficial that every single person would benefit from it. It would be the best

01:04:38.740 thing that could possibly happen to you, but simultaneously would be the best thing that

01:04:42.740 could possibly happen to everyone else. That's a good deal. You might think that's worth taking

01:04:48.600 some risks for. Well, the funny thing about risks is, like, you're taking risks. You walk across

01:04:58.080 the street, right? You have children. You're going to die. You're in this. So the question of risk

01:05:06.700 isn't the issue. The risk is already there. The question is, what do you do with the risk?

01:05:14.100 And you have an adventure with it. And maybe that's in some perverse sense why the risk

01:05:20.800 is there, because there's no adventure without risk. And maybe you could have an adventure

01:05:26.540 that was so glorious that it would justify the risk. The secret to life, is that the

01:05:33.520 secret to life, to have an adventure so superlative that you say to yourself, that was difficult,

01:05:39.720 but I'd do it again. It was worth it. It's what you want for your children, right? You see your

01:05:45.120 children struggling forward, and that's painful. And what you want for them is to have a life that's

01:05:50.540 so full and abundant and rich and varied and remarkable and miraculous that the price they

01:05:56.720 have to pay for it which is their mortality let's say is you can celebrate that and in the all

01:06:06.700 shall all families of the earth be blessed it's a lovely statement of the harmony that could obtain

01:06:13.660 between the psyche and this and society it's a representation of the kingdom of heaven is the

01:06:18.760 kingdom of heaven is a place where you're doing exactly what you should do and so things are good

01:06:24.120 but they're getting better and at the same time what you're doing is doing exactly that to everyone

01:06:28.680 who's around you right so that's a harmonious balance it's not a competition between you and

01:06:34.060 everyone else because it's not a zero-sum game it's a game that returns more the more you give

01:06:41.920 that's a sacrificial motif life is a game that

01:06:46.520 whose returns are dependent on your offering.

01:06:50.940 Exactly that.

01:06:52.640 That's what God tells Cain and Abel.

01:06:55.400 Your return is dependent on the quality of your sacrifice.

01:06:59.120 What's the ultimate sacrifice?

01:07:00.700 Then that's the question there.

01:07:01.800 What's the ultimate sacrifice?

01:07:02.600 Actually, the biblical corpus as a whole

01:07:05.100 proceeds to that revelation.

01:07:08.560 What's the ultimate sacrifice?

01:07:11.740 Child and self.

01:07:14.880 Right?

01:07:15.360 So that happens in the story of Abraham.

01:07:18.100 Abraham is called upon to sacrifice his son.

01:07:20.460 Why?

01:07:21.760 Because you have to give up everything to what's highest.

01:07:25.040 What happens when he decides to do that?

01:07:26.960 He gets his son back.

01:07:28.940 And it's part of the process by which he establishes the great nation that's blessed,

01:07:34.620 that makes his name a blessing.

01:07:36.500 The willingness to offer up everything, even what you love most dearly,

01:07:40.200 to what's properly highest is the most abundant pathway forward.

01:07:48.360 It's a terrifying idea.

01:07:51.300 God approves of the proper sacrifice.

01:07:53.280 I was thinking about this.

01:07:54.820 Maybe I'll close with this.

01:07:59.080 God punishes Cain because Cain makes second-rate sacrifices.

01:08:03.200 Okay, so that means that God is the agent who punishes the second-rate sacrifice.

01:08:07.720 It's a definition.

01:08:08.740 Do you believe in that? Well, you can ask yourself these questions instead of assuming you know the answer. Do you believe that you can get away with second-rate offerings? Has that ever worked for you? Or we could make the question more pointed. Have you ever got away with a second-rate offering in a manner that makes you proud of what you did when you look back, when you're desperate?

01:08:34.180 because i know what you look to when you're desperate you look back through the detritus

01:08:40.660 of your life to see if there's some evidence that at some point in your life you made a worthy

01:08:47.480 offering that was accepted properly that produced at least for some moment the this the stability

01:08:56.120 of your own psyche and the spread of what was good among the people around you and that can

01:09:02.620 get you through a dark night and so you can ask yourself well what would happen if you did that

01:09:07.100 all the time full with full commitment you're fully committed anyways you're you're you're

01:09:15.240 you're that's your destiny your destiny is to be fully committed in actuality but perhaps not by

01:09:21.500 choice you might as well align the choice with the inevitability

01:09:26.300 abraham has to offer his son that's what god himself does in the christian venture

01:09:33.960 right it's an echo of that idea that the proper relationship between human beings and what's

01:09:40.640 highest is a sacrificial relationship and christ is the icon of the offering of the self to god

01:09:47.860 and what does that mean it means it means exactly that it means that the offering that's most

01:09:55.940 pleasing to God is yourself. Obviously, like it's obvious that that's the case. It's like

01:10:03.180 you have to reveal everything that's in you. You have to offer everything that's in you.

01:10:12.520 And you have to do that in a sacrificial manner. And so what do I mean by that? That's a deeper

01:10:16.440 level of sacrificial realization. You might think that when you learn, you're ignorant and you 1.00

01:10:23.180 learned. So you're ignorant and something is added to you. But that isn't how it works. 1.00

01:10:27.400 The way it works is that you're wrong. You run smack headfirst into that error.

01:10:37.140 A new realization reveals itself. And to accept that, you have to allow what you were wrong about

01:10:44.980 to die. You wonder why people cling to their old habits, even when they know that

01:10:52.400 they're destructive and the answer is they don't want to let they don't want to let go of what

01:10:59.180 they're pathologically clinging to they don't want to let go of what they've pathologically

01:11:03.840 raised to the highest place they're not willing to offer the sacrifice of what's unworthy to progress

01:11:10.520 there's a insistence at the end of the story of adam and eve adam and eve are thrown out of

01:11:17.900 paradise because of their pride and god bars the gates of paradise he puts an angel on each side

01:11:26.680 a cherub and the cherubs hold a sword the cherubs are accompanied by a sword that's on fire that

01:11:34.100 turns every which way so what is that what is a sword that turns every which way that's on fire

01:11:39.580 well fire burns fire burns away dead wood a sword cuts a flaming sword cuts and burns

01:11:47.440 a flaming sword that turns every which way is the sword that cuts and burns from which there's no

01:11:52.700 escape well that's obviously guards the bars the pathway to paradise because in paradise nothing

01:12:01.480 that's insufficient is allowed to exist and so if you're taking your steps towards paradise you're

01:12:08.560 going to encounter the sword that burns and cuts, and you have to allow all of that that's

01:12:14.340 unworthy to be sacrificed. And that's pleasing to God. You can see why people resist enlightenment.

01:12:26.240 I mean, if it, you've got to ask yourself, like if it was a simple matter of

01:12:30.540 incremental forward progression towards an ever more enlightened state, everyone would just do

01:12:37.000 it. If there's no cost, well, what's the cost? Well, maybe you're 95% dead wood, right? And so

01:12:46.360 that's a lot to shed to move forward, especially when every cut is going to be painful. You know

01:12:52.560 that that's the case. If you're arguing with your wife, you're arguing with your husband, 0.65

01:12:55.480 and you come to the realization that you were wrong, you'll dissolve in tears. And the reason

01:13:00.760 for that is because you have to let that part of you, the tears are grief for the part of

01:13:08.060 you that has to die. The stupid part of you that has to die. And you can easily get into 1.00

01:13:14.760 a situation where that's so much of you that you're unwilling to undergo the winnowing

01:13:19.700 process. And then you live in purgatory. So Abraham departed as the Lord has spoken unto

01:13:29.920 him, which is what you did when you left home, however imperfectly. And Lot went with him,

01:13:38.380 his nephew. And Abraham was 75 when he departed out of Haran. And he took his wife and Lot,

01:13:43.640 his brother's son, and all their substance they had gathered, and all the souls that

01:13:48.140 they had gotten in Haran. And they went forth to go into the land of Canaan. And into the

01:13:52.960 land of Canaan, they came. What's the land of Canaan? It eventually becomes the promised

01:14:02.460 land, by the way, in the story of Exodus. Canaan is the land of the future. That's a

01:14:08.320 good way of thinking. That's where you're headed. And Canaan is the land of the future

01:14:12.300 that's inhabited by... The Canaanites in the biblical tradition are descendants of Cain. 0.64

01:14:20.040 and they're citizens of the hedonistic and tyrannical society. 0.99

01:14:30.480 That's what you're headed towards when you move into the future.

01:14:33.540 You know that because what you contend with when you're moving forward

01:14:36.500 to try to establish yourself is the occupancy of the place

01:14:42.680 that you wish to establish by the forces that already rule there.

01:14:48.280 it's a universal story of mankind

01:14:52.340 the impetus in the biblical corpus

01:14:56.780 is that you're to assume that

01:14:59.600 if you abide by the dictates

01:15:02.760 of the voice that calls you to adventure

01:15:04.500 and you're willing to make the proper sacrifices

01:15:06.680 that the inhabitants of Canaan 0.80

01:15:10.080 will scatter as you approach

01:15:11.660 let's simplify that for a moment imagine you have a high school sports team it's the theme of every

01:15:25.540 one in every 10 american movies high school sports team and maybe there's two characters

01:15:32.300 on the sports team there's like this two skilled young men um one of whom is a great team player

01:15:39.640 and the other who is maybe slightly more skilled, but sort of narcissistic and arrogant, right?

01:15:44.680 And the story lays out the triumph and the trials of the boy who is not only skilled at the

01:15:53.580 requirements of the game, but skilled at lifting up the spirits of his teammates, playing the game

01:16:00.540 fairly, and placing his athletic success in the proper context. So he's playing a multitude of

01:16:09.080 games, none of which are subsumed by the athletic contest. The plot, if it's a comedy, a redemptive

01:16:17.300 story, is that the good sport prevails. Do you believe that? Imagine you have a son who's playing

01:16:29.180 on a sports team and he's highly skilled. Maybe he's talented, spectacularly talented, but he's

01:16:34.380 kind of a prick you know and so when he's running down the soccer pitch with his scoring opportunity

01:16:41.960 and one of his teammates has a stellar opportunity himself he doesn't pass he takes the shot for 0.91

01:16:48.840 himself and if he does score even in some spectacular manner he has a celebration by

01:16:54.420 himself and after the game he complains about his teammates and you see this making itself

01:16:59.580 manifest on the playing field, and he's celebrated and rightly so for his skill, but you're deeply

01:17:09.960 ashamed of his conduct. Why? Because you believe that your son should act like, you believe that

01:17:19.380 if your son acted properly, that the inhabitants of the land of Canaan would scatter as he

01:17:24.460 approached and when you fail to see that make itself manifest it makes your soul ache because

01:17:31.000 you don't want him merely to be skilled unless you're a narcissist who's collecting his trophies

01:17:35.640 you want him to be skilled in a way that makes him into a man and that's what you want and that's

01:17:41.280 the call to adventure that abraham undertakes and abraham passed through the land unto the place of

01:17:49.920 seek him unto the plain of mora and the canaanite was then in the land and the lord appeared unto

01:17:54.520 abraham and he said unto thy seed will i give this land and there builded he an altar unto the

01:17:59.640 lord who appeared unto him i'll close with this abraham advances in good faith with each advancement

01:18:09.980 there's a sacrifice okay you know that makes sense have you ever advanced in your life without

01:18:17.680 to sacrifice. Is it the case that if the sacrifices are of the highest possible quality, the advance

01:18:24.880 is more rapid and aimed in a better direction? If you're called upon to do more than your

01:18:35.020 discipline now allows you to do, and you're willing to sacrifice the bad habits that are

01:18:39.200 holding you back, the painful sacrifice of your pride and your hedonism that that might entail,

01:18:44.320 does that not make your pathway forward smoother? And isn't it the case that you're more in tune

01:18:50.520 with your soul when you do that? And isn't it the case that everyone around you is thrilled to death

01:18:56.580 if they're not bitter and resentful at the fact that you had enough character to drop the foolishness

01:19:02.440 that was impeding your progress when the opportunity to be better presented itself?

01:19:07.980 And isn't that exactly what you want for your children and for those you love? And that's

01:19:13.300 exactly what Abraham dramatizes. Each adventure he undertakes is slightly more difficult. The

01:19:19.420 sacrifice he's called upon to make slightly more profound. Well, it culminates in the

01:19:24.280 necessity to sacrifice his only son, despite the fact that he's been promised the destiny

01:19:30.680 of being the father of nations. He's called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice, as we

01:19:36.660 all are, right? By inevitability, voluntarily or involuntarily, in celebration or kicking

01:19:45.740 and screaming. And the notion, a fundamental notion is that if it's in celebration, then

01:19:50.900 it doesn't have to be kicking and screaming. Okay, so let's recap.

01:20:06.660 stories represent characters in motion a character is the pattern of attentional

01:20:13.840 prioritization action and attentional prioritization it's a representation of what's

01:20:20.660 important to that person when you go watch a movie you watch what it is that the lead character is

01:20:25.280 aiming at and you infer their character from your analysis of their aim and you embody them

01:20:32.520 to understand them

01:20:34.280 when you understand their aim.

01:20:39.860 The deepest stories

01:20:41.380 represent the most profound characterization.

01:20:48.100 The character of what is to be put

01:20:50.280 in the highest place

01:20:51.280 and to be imitated

01:20:53.060 is represented in the biblical corpus

01:20:55.520 in a multitude of fashions

01:20:57.540 that converge on a single characterization,

01:21:00.120 One aspect of which is laid out in the story of Abraham, which presents man as the spirit that, no matter how sheltered, can still respond to the call of adventure, and God as precisely that call.

01:21:19.360 with the insistence underlying the narrative that

01:21:28.460 the proper sacrificial heeding of that call

01:21:32.680 makes of each man the master of an infinite destiny.

01:21:41.340 So that's worth thinking about.

01:21:42.880 there's a Christian injunction 0.91

01:21:49.980 that you're to pick up your cross

01:21:51.220 and carry it voluntarily

01:21:52.300 that's the adventure of your life

01:21:55.300 that's the possibility of your life

01:21:58.300 it's the catastrophe of your life

01:22:00.860 they're the same thing

01:22:02.260 in that catastrophe

01:22:04.720 is the seeds of adventure

01:22:06.100 if the adventure is undertaken

01:22:09.660 with sufficient faith

01:22:11.660 the catastrophe is

01:22:15.480 forestalled.

01:22:21.820 That's a good place to end.

01:22:41.660 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 05, 2026

How to Become Who You Are Meant to Be

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