The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:36.500 Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game?

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00:00:40.100 Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions. 0.99

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00:01:01.480 Hi, everybody.

00:01:03.380 I'm pleased to let you know that we're going to release a lecture a week

00:01:08.060 from my extensive tour archive beginning this Sunday

00:01:12.340 and then repeating every Sunday after that.

00:01:15.480 This allows me to do something interesting and useful

00:01:18.740 while I'm otherwise incapacitated.

00:01:21.440 My health is such at the moment that I can't really return to podcasting

00:01:25.240 or public lecturing. But we recorded these with the express intention of preparing them for

00:01:32.020 release. And we've all determined that this is a very good time to do that. So that's what's going

00:01:37.900 to happen. I hope you find them useful and compelling. They'll be particularly attractive

00:01:44.800 to those of you who liked my early YouTube work that was very lecture focused. It's a return to

00:01:51.260 my roots i suppose in some ways and i'm as happy as i can be under the current circumstances given

00:01:56.940 my ill health to be participating in this process and to have these lectures prepared for release

00:02:03.180 thank you very much for your continued interest and support

00:02:07.060 there's no adventure without trouble and the greatest adventure has the most trouble and if

00:02:14.480 you took on the full trouble of your life unstintingly you'd have an adventure that

00:02:19.000 would justify the misery. Why do you need a why? Have you tried making your way forward without

00:02:24.420 meaning? What are you going to do? You're going to work with no purpose? You're going to sacrifice

00:02:27.920 with no purpose? You're going to suffer with no purpose? Present or absent, we wrestle with God.

00:02:34.380 That's human destiny, all aimed at answering the same question. On what principle is the world

00:02:39.460 founded? And on what principle should the world be founded? If you gaze upon all the things that

00:02:44.740 terrify you simultaneously, then you become who you could be. And that would be the spirit that

00:02:50.960 could withstand death and hell and yet prevail.

00:03:14.740 Thank you.

00:03:32.420 So I was sitting backstage

00:03:34.540 trying to figure out how I would open this

00:03:39.540 50 city tour, new tour

00:03:43.040 and a phrase came into my mind

00:03:47.340 and that was

00:03:48.660 present or absent we wrestle with God

00:03:51.880 and that reminded me of an interview I did

00:03:56.320 a while back with a very urbane

00:03:59.860 and sophisticated English actor

00:04:02.560 Stephen Fry

00:04:03.840 and I did a debate with Stephen

00:04:08.900 he was on my side

00:04:10.140 at a forum called the Munk Center in Toronto.

00:04:14.900 I debated, we debated a New York Times journalist,

00:04:18.880 and you can imagine what that was like.

00:04:21.540 And a compatriot of hers.

00:04:26.440 And Mr. Fry was a delight.

00:04:30.240 He's educated the way that only educated Englishmen

00:04:34.140 are educated with their,

00:04:35.420 with the accent that makes them sound intelligent even if they're reading a telephone book

00:04:42.220 and uh he was witty and charming and brilliant and everything you'd hope a man might be

00:04:51.780 and we got to know each other a bit you know um and i interviewed him for my youtube channel and

00:04:59.060 he's a he's very interested in mythology he's he's very interested in stories he's an actor so

00:05:07.400 that makes sense stories compel him and myths myths are the deepest form of stories that's a

00:05:14.120 good way of thinking about it and we'll talk about that a lot trying to get to the bottom of just what

00:05:19.740 a story is and steven said some things that were quite surprising to me he he said a lot i listened

00:05:25.500 to him a lot he needed to talk people really need to talk they really need to be listened to

00:05:31.000 and that's partly because we actually organize our brains at the highest level our psyches our

00:05:36.700 souls at the highest level of abstraction and unity with language and if we don't have someone

00:05:43.540 to listen and and to allow us to think on our feet we our brains get terribly disorganized and

00:05:50.660 our aim goes astray and we become chaotic and anxious and we wander off into the desert or off

00:05:57.940 a cliff it's it's not a good thing and steven is a very intelligent man and uh he had a lot to say

00:06:06.360 and

00:06:07.900 he said something that i found extremely interesting there's a scene in dostoevsky's

00:06:18.740 great book, The Brothers Karamazov, which is a classic scene.

00:06:23.020 The book features the brothers, obviously, two of whom are Ivan and Elyosha.

00:06:31.380 And Elyosha is a monastic novitiate, so he's a religious man.

00:06:38.240 And his brother, Ivan, is a charming materialistic atheist

00:06:42.740 who can really wrap his brother up in verbal arguments.

00:06:48.740 with no problem one of the things that makes this book so utterly remarkable is that

00:06:54.500 Ivan really has everything going for him on the arrogant intellect side

00:07:00.180 but Dostoevsky shows in the dramatization and characterization in the novel that Eliosha is the

00:07:06.580 better man and what he's trying to indicate there is that whatever constitutes the deepest form of

00:07:13.860 ethic is not necessarily the same thing that makes you the most effective verbal adversary

00:07:20.940 and also to make the point that just winning the argument doesn't mean you're right and that's

00:07:30.140 something to really remember with people it's really something to remember with your wife or

00:07:34.220 your husband but i'm dead serious about that you know the fact that you might be able to defeat

00:07:40.480 your wife in an argument or vice versa does not mean that you were right right and and if you're

00:07:47.580 wrong and you win that's a really bad thing because then you're wrong and you think you're

00:07:52.240 right and if you were unbearable before you're going to be a lot more unbearable after that and

00:07:56.880 so one of the reasons you really want to listen to your partner and maybe even help them make

00:08:02.120 their point is you know just so you could investigate the off probability that someone 1.00

00:08:08.640 as wonderful as you still has something to learn and you know the thing is if you're stupid and 1.00

00:08:15.480 you learn why even though it's painful the advantage is that you don't have to be stupid 1.00

00:08:19.900 again in the future and that's a big advantage you know and it's a really big advantage for your wife 0.97

00:08:26.080 so and so Ivan trounces Eliosha regularly when they have discussions about for example whether

00:08:36.300 or not God exists. And I started with this discussion with the proclamation that absent

00:08:45.260 or present, we wrestle with God. Ivan does something famous in this book. He mounts what's

00:08:53.580 probably the most powerful argument ever offered in the literary domain for the atheist claim.

00:09:02.300 and he does it essentially on moral grounds interestingly enough he tells this story that

00:09:08.140 dostoevsky actually took out of a russian newspaper about this four-year-old girl who

00:09:14.300 had tyrannical terrible brutal psychopathic tyrannical parents and one night to punish

00:09:22.200 their daughter they locked her in the outhouse and this was russia and it was like 40 below and 0.84

00:09:28.040 And she froze to death during the night while she was screaming to be released.

00:09:33.540 And that became a scandal in Russia.

00:09:37.260 And it was a well-publicized event, well-publicized horrifying event,

00:09:43.280 as the horchrous death of a child is self-evidently, we hope, a moral crime,

00:09:51.560 although we seem to be committing an awful lot of those recently.

00:09:54.540 and dostoevsky uses that event as an argument that ivan puts forth about the i would say about

00:10:05.420 the iniquity of existence essentially and he asks ivan asks his brother you know if

00:10:11.800 this god you believe you believe to be a moral being said is willing to torture even one child

00:10:19.580 to death regardless even if that holds up the whole world is that something you yourself would

00:10:28.940 do that's what he asks his brother and elio she has no idea what to say because what do you say

00:10:34.360 to to a question like that and ivan says to his brother i know you wouldn't do that

00:10:40.980 but the god that you claim exists and that is good and that you worship apparently does and so

00:10:49.060 apart from the utter preposterousness

00:10:52.220 from a materialistic perspective

00:10:54.160 say that the deity is

00:10:56.000 a necessary supposition

00:10:57.540 I think your case

00:11:00.060 for his existence is shaky

00:11:01.900 on moral grounds

00:11:02.920 and Eliosia

00:11:04.980 is silent in the

00:11:09.600 onslaught

00:11:12.100 of that argumentation

00:11:13.320 but

00:11:14.120 it isn't obvious

00:11:17.800 that it shakes his faith and it's still the case that as the novel progresses he shows himself to

00:11:25.860 be the better man. Ivan being brilliant intellect is characterized by the pride that the brilliant

00:11:35.060 intellect has as its greatest sin. You know I've been thinking recently about how the cosmic scales

00:11:43.440 of justice are balanced let's say there's a gospel line that says that to those from those

00:11:50.600 to whom much has been given much will be expected or demanded and that's a very interesting line

00:11:59.920 you know because one of the things we wrestle with in the culture now let's say is the issue

00:12:05.100 of privilege maybe you're born wealthy maybe you're born tall maybe you're born caucasian

00:12:11.260 apparently that's an advantage maybe you're born Asian maybe you're born good-looking you know we

00:12:17.360 are all awarded privileges that constitute a temperamental advantage or maybe a situational

00:12:25.760 advantage and there is something that seems unfair about that arguably it's certainly the

00:12:33.820 case that people differ painfully in their intellectual capacity for example it's also

00:12:39.640 equally obvious that that difference is a major determinant of success economically let's say as

00:12:48.360 you move forward even the trait conscientiousness which is associated with orderliness and

00:12:54.920 industrious industriousness and also predicts economic success has quite a substantial genetic

00:13:02.520 influence which means that it's really not attributable to the it's not a trait that's

00:13:07.840 attributable to the person that bears it it's a gift in some ways that's given to them at birth

00:13:13.140 and you might say well if talents are and abilities are distributed unequally how can

00:13:20.640 there be any justice and the answer to that might be if you're fortunate you better pay for it

00:13:26.800 somehow and one of the things you see with people who are very intelligent is that they fall prey

00:13:33.040 to the temptation of pride and that temptation for intelligent people is proportionate to the

00:13:39.700 degree of their intelligence and i would say the potential downside of their gift gone astray

00:13:48.980 is sufficiently great to be the factor on the other side of the scale now so if you're intelligent

00:13:57.880 and you're proud of that and you get arrogant,

00:14:00.640 that will take you places that you couldn't go

00:14:03.000 if you weren't that bright.

00:14:04.780 And those aren't going to be places

00:14:06.100 that you're particularly going to enjoy being.

00:14:09.220 Imagine your favorite lecture.

00:14:11.960 Dial that up on Macs, put that on steroids,

00:14:14.860 and then add some cinematic elements to it.

00:14:17.200 That's the best way I could describe

00:14:18.640 a Peterson Academy lecture.

00:14:22.580 I went to college because I had to.

00:14:24.560 I go to Peterson Academy because I want to.

00:14:26.360 I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college.

00:14:31.860 The traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry.

00:14:35.360 They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.

00:14:39.360 It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you.

00:14:43.860 If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time.

00:14:47.360 That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself.

00:14:51.860 You have the opportunity to investigate that calling.

00:14:56.360 and so with every gift comes a equivalent temptation and with every talent comes an

00:15:08.760 equivalent responsibility and i really do believe that's the case you know i think that if nothing

00:15:15.140 else if you are unfairly privileged and you don't make much of that if you don't offer other people

00:15:21.720 the benefit of your privilege then you'll take yourself apart in one way or another

00:15:28.800 and so Ivan's a very intelligent man and he's very prideful as a consequence and that doesn't

00:15:36.700 work out very well for him and and he points to the suffering of children as his evidence

00:15:45.220 against the existence of God, and when I was talking to Stephen Fry, he did something that

00:15:52.140 was similar, and I found this extremely interesting, because first of all, he talked about his interest

00:16:00.000 in mythology, and then he made a claim, which I believe to be untrue, that the mythology

00:16:05.940 upon which are the stories, the deep stories, because that's what I mean when I say mythology,

00:16:11.140 the deep stories upon which our culture are predicated

00:16:14.380 essentially the biblical stories

00:16:16.780 were of perhaps inferior quality

00:16:20.100 to other collections of ancient stories

00:16:23.760 that we have accumulated

00:16:24.800 and that surprised me

00:16:25.960 because that's by no means evident to me

00:16:28.660 and I know a reasonable amount about mythology

00:16:31.380 and I've found great wisdom in Taoism

00:16:35.140 and in ancient Egyptian theology

00:16:37.480 and in ancient Mesopotamian theology

00:16:39.520 and many places that I've looked but I certainly the case that I found a wealth of wisdom at least

00:16:48.360 as rich in the biblical corpus in the Judeo-Christian stories and I would say deeper

00:16:54.620 and that's partly because a lot of them were a lot of those stories were they're the culture

00:17:00.880 part of the culture heritage of Judaism and the Jews are smart and preternaturally smart in some

00:17:08.200 ways and they were immensely remarkable storytellers and the stories they told are

00:17:15.020 unbelievably deep they're insanely deep and we'll wander through a couple tonight and i'll show you

00:17:21.980 some of that depth and i'll and then fry did something interesting you know he he started

00:17:29.040 talking about god and i said well you know what what's your problem exactly with with god as a

00:17:35.020 concept and i was expecting something akin to the materialist atheist notion that god is a

00:17:40.860 superfluous hypothesis um and uh you know that's a perspective but not a very deep perspective in

00:17:50.720 my estimation and a very dangerous one as we're finding out right now but fry actually got angry

00:17:56.200 and what he got angry about one of the things he pointed to was the suffering of children just like

00:18:01.520 ivan he he talked about watching children with bone cancer suffer you know and uh how dreadful

00:18:10.740 that was and how preposterous it was to presume that in a world characterized by the suffering

00:18:17.480 of innocence that anything that could be regarded as a transcendent good might be held to exist

00:18:25.540 now but and fair enough you know you can understand that argument but what i found so

00:18:30.160 remarkable was he was actually angry about it. He was angry about it. He was morally outraged about

00:18:35.160 it. He was shaking his fist at the sky. Well, that's what you do to someone that you're angry

00:18:43.600 about. You don't shake your fist at the rocks on the ground. You shake your fist at the imaginary

00:18:50.800 being in the sky, even if you're an atheist. And that's an interesting thing because what it

00:18:58.160 what it indicates at least to some degree is that a even if you're atheistic you wrestle with god

00:19:06.120 and b even if you're atheistic you're at least unconsciously in a relationship

00:19:14.260 because why else bother with the anger why else what else is the source of the moral outrage and

00:19:21.580 you know one of the things i've noticed is that because i've read a lot of comments from atheists

00:19:26.660 like i don't know maybe more than anybody else in the world you know i'm dead serious about that 0.60

00:19:31.840 because i i've done a lot of analysis of biblical stories let's say online and i read i read most of

00:19:39.080 the comments that are put on my youtube channel and that's often like you know a thousand five

00:19:44.720 thousand comments a week a lot of comments and some of the arguments that the atheists mount

00:19:51.100 against what i'm elucidating let's say are rationalistic materialistic atheist objections

00:20:01.000 and but most of them are angry and a lot of them are written by people who were hurt by people who

00:20:09.300 purported to be religious at some point in their lives you know they had a tyrannical

00:20:13.360 they encountered the tyranny of dogmatic insistence in religious guys and that damaged them and left

00:20:21.660 them with with a resentment towards anything with a religious flavor let's say but even that that's

00:20:28.680 not a rational argument by the way let's point that out very clearly that's an emotional argument

00:20:33.540 and it's the kind of emotional argument that you would mount against someone that you were in a

00:20:38.480 relationship with now then you might ask yourself about that are we in a relationship with the

00:20:48.700 spirit of being and becoming that's a good way of thinking but i don't mean with the material world

00:20:54.700 that's not what i mean exactly because

00:20:57.260 the material world in some sense isn't the whole world you know and we all know that because well

00:21:05.860 first of all, we exist within the material world, and we're conscious, and we don't know how to

00:21:11.860 relate that to the material realm at all. Not at all. We have no idea. We don't understand the

00:21:17.200 relationship between consciousness and matter at all. And you might say, well, it can be reducible

00:21:23.880 to neurological function, and I would say most of the neurological function that characterizes you

00:21:30.700 has no consciousness and so how we distinguish between the neurological function that hypothetically

00:21:37.500 underlies consciousness and the neurological function that seems equally complex but has

00:21:42.800 no consciousness is not something that anyone knows and i would say the one undeniable truth

00:21:50.500 that we have at hand is the fact of our consciousness that was basically descartes

00:21:55.160 proposition he said i think before therefore i am but what he meant in more modern parlance is

00:22:03.040 something like the brute fact of my own consciousness is one is the most is the

00:22:08.680 deepest of undeniable realities and so what that appears to indicate is that

00:22:17.000 well you can make a materialist case that matter is at the bottom of being itself

00:22:23.800 But you can make an equally powerful case philosophically

00:22:26.840 that consciousness is at the bottom of things.

00:22:32.000 Part not least, because I can't even imagine

00:22:35.000 how you could come up with an account of being

00:22:37.900 materialist or otherwise in the absence of consciousness

00:22:41.320 if there's no experience of what is there.

00:22:47.200 And no materialist has ever come up with a satisfactory answer to that.

00:22:50.960 That's a complicated question.

00:22:53.080 And then, so there's the fact of consciousness, and that's a strange fact.

00:23:00.320 And then there's also the fact of the manner in which we're organized, we're constructed.

00:23:05.380 So human beings are personalities, and personalities exist in relationship.

00:23:12.180 and insofar as we're personalities we're our personalities speaking materialistically let's

00:23:22.680 say are an evolved function we're personalities because being a personality is what allows us to

00:23:29.300 orient ourselves in the world and so if at the highest level of our being we're personalities

00:23:37.740 how is it that we're not in relationship with the essence of reality otherwise it wouldn't work

00:23:45.700 so that's a very interesting that's a very interesting fact now here's another twist for

00:23:54.120 you so i've been in touch with richard dawkins who's probably the world's most famous living

00:23:59.860 atheist and he's like the avatar of the enlightenment mind he's the last standing

00:24:06.300 avatar of the enlightenment mind that's a good way of thinking about it and uh formidable a

00:24:12.860 formidable uh a formidable intellect and someone i actually like i've met richard a couple of times 0.95

00:24:20.440 and uh he's an ornery bastard you know and he's tough as a boot and you don't mess with him 0.96

00:24:26.860 lightly and he's disagreeable enough to cut you into pieces like englishman can 0.99

00:24:31.760 at the drop of a hat but you know i think fundamentally he's a genuine scientist and

00:24:38.200 and that's a difficult thing to be and you have to be a dedicated pursuer of the truth to be a

00:24:44.360 scientist and there's a certain moral element to that a profound moral element to that um

00:24:49.780 and i i tried to get dawkins to talk to me a number of times and he put me off

00:24:54.340 you know in various ways for a while but then one day he he wrote me and he said i don't know what

00:24:59.540 the hell i can never understand what you're talking about peterson but but uh i don't know

00:25:04.300 why you want to talk to me and i don't think i'd have the patience for it anyways but uh i kind of 0.99

00:25:09.100 think maybe you're interested in this and so he sent me a paper and i thought you son of a bitch 0.92

00:25:13.580 you know exactly why i want to talk to you and so it was a paper i actually knew about from about 30 0.92

00:25:20.100 years previously and he made a very interesting claim in that paper he said that every biological

00:25:25.900 organism is a microcosm of its environment by necessity like a model like a like a low resolution

00:25:34.660 representation of its environment and and here's what he meant by that so he said if imagine you

00:25:40.040 were an alien scientists like to to imagine such things they don't believe in angels or demons but

00:25:46.780 aliens man those those things are there for sure anyways anyways he said imagine you gave an alien

00:25:53.620 scientist a bird a dead bird and he said what could this scientist conclude about what could

00:26:00.140 the alien who'd never seen the earth let's say conclude about the earth from analyzing the bird

00:26:05.840 and the answer is well a tremendous amount because you could you could calculate the density of the

00:26:11.140 atmosphere from its wings and if you analyzed its blood properly you would know the composition of

00:26:15.320 the atmosphere and you'd be able to calculate the gravitational pull of the earth and its approximate

00:26:20.400 mass and and you by analyzing its dna at a deep enough level you could reconstruct a lot of the

00:26:28.740 tree of life that characterizes earth itself i mean a bird is a densely packed microcosm of its

00:26:35.640 environment and i thought well i don't know if you know this dr dawkins but there was a medieval

00:26:40.700 conceit among christians hundreds of years ago that the human soul was a microcosm

00:26:46.080 right and which was a reflection of the cosmic order and your proposition as an evolutionary

00:26:52.220 biologist is that you can't adapt to an environment that you're not a microcosmic replica of that's

00:26:58.580 exactly the same claim that the christians made like in in the in the medieval period

00:27:02.780 we're a microcosm our soul reflects the cosmic order you might say well what the hell does that

00:27:08.760 mean dr peterson it means that if you're not in tune with the structure of reality at

00:27:15.740 all of the levels at which it manifests itself then you die that's what it means and so i found

00:27:25.840 that extraordinarily interesting especially because it has another implication which is that

00:27:31.700 if we are a microcosm of the cosmos itself and we're a personality then maybe the deepest way

00:27:40.700 that we can conceptualize our relationship

00:27:42.820 to being and

00:27:44.820 becoming itself is as

00:27:46.720 a covenant, as a relationship,

00:27:49.260 as an

00:27:50.360 understanding between

00:27:52.280 beings rather than as

00:27:54.660 an alienated

00:27:58.600 consciousness inhabiting a cold

00:28:00.600 and dead material world.

00:28:03.360 And so

00:28:03.780 I was interested in that partly 0.95

00:28:08.500 because there's an insistence in the Old

00:28:10.560 testament stories that we're in relationship with being and becoming and you know and tammy

00:28:19.720 made reference to that in relationship let's say to prayer and it's easy to be cynical about such

00:28:27.720 things especially if you're a luciferian intellect but i would say that the thought that rationalists

00:28:35.400 worship is secularized prayer, historically speaking. And so why would I say that? Well,

00:28:43.440 you follow along, you tell me if you think that this is incorrect. I can't see a flaw in it.

00:28:49.760 As a scientist, I might ask myself, well, what do I do when I'm generating a scientific hypothesis?

00:28:57.740 Now, this is a very interesting question, because scientists never discuss how they generate their

00:29:02.720 hypotheses they write down their experimental results and their methods and they just take the

00:29:10.420 hypothesis part for granted or maybe they make up some story about how they were driven to their

00:29:16.300 hypothesis by rational means and that's just not true that's not how it works at all i had a great

00:29:22.500 student at harvard shelly carson shelly was uh creative and intuitive and she'd come up with a

00:29:30.040 bright idea and you can't just write your damn bright idea down in a scientific paper you have

00:29:35.780 to tell people how you came to it logically so then she'd have to invent a story about how she 0.95

00:29:41.800 came to her intuitive idea logically and that was the introduction to her scientific paper

00:29:46.480 and scientists do that all the time every single scientific paper is like that

00:29:53.280 where do your hypotheses come from your research question what grips your interest what compels

00:29:59.520 you and calls you forward and how does that make itself manifest zero instruction in that in the

00:30:06.340 scientific realm okay so let's take that apart a bit well the first thing that you need if you're

00:30:13.400 a scientist is a problem it has to be a real problem it has to be some and how do you know

00:30:20.420 if it's a real problem how do you know if you have a real problem it won't let you go well

00:30:27.460 that's a funny way of thinking about it's like what won't let you go you well what do you mean

00:30:33.280 it you won't let you go this is your conscience let's say it's you that won't let you go well if

00:30:39.740 you can't let yourself go if you can't escape from a problem that besets you what makes it

00:30:47.280 what makes you think for a moment that it's you that's besetting you with the problem and you know

00:30:53.380 this perfectly well you know this perfectly well because many times in your life if you had the

00:30:58.380 chance of just saying to yourself you should let that problem go you would but you can't you can't

00:31:07.760 for example when your conscience calls you out or if you do you damage yourself by lying that deeply

00:31:14.640 and it's the same if something calls to you not so much besets you but grips your interest which

00:31:21.020 is something that happens to scientists all the time they're insanely called forward by some

00:31:27.080 phenomena and phenomena some set of phenomena phenomena means to shine forth they're called

00:31:34.200 forward by what shines forth to them and so you need that calling and conscience to specify your

00:31:40.740 problem and so you do that in relationship to what besets you and interests you and there's an

00:31:48.180 autonomy in that you know this too you can't decide what you're interested in this is so weird

00:31:56.660 this is part of what got me interested in psychoanalytics thought so many years ago because

00:32:02.540 freud and jung both said there are autonomous there's an autonomy of spirit operating within

00:32:09.500 you they put it in the unconscious you're motivated by things that aren't under your voluntary control

00:32:14.780 they have an autonomy they call to you they they plague you you can't control it what the hell is

00:32:23.960 that so you need to have a problem and maybe it's a problem because you're fascinated by something

00:32:34.080 you're you're locked onto it by a force that's beyond your control or you're plagued by it your

00:32:40.240 conscience screams that you have to do something about the cancer of children for example

00:32:45.400 because someone needs to because the suffering is wrong that's a moral claim by the way not a

00:32:52.240 scientific claim from the purely scientific perspective the cancer cell has just as much

00:32:57.760 right to live as you do you start your investigation with an a priori set of moral claims

00:33:03.840 all sorts of moral claims the claim that the truth is at hand if you approach the problem

00:33:11.020 properly the claim that the truth is comprehensible you have to believe that to be a scientist the

00:33:16.920 claim that your pursuit of the comprehensible truth will make the world a better place

00:33:22.460 that's an axiom of faith are we so sure that our technology has made the world a better place

00:33:28.640 well maybe we are now but if we wiped ourselves out with hydrogen bombs we might rethink that

00:33:34.460 hypothesis so it's not self-evident you have to have a problem you know that's an interesting

00:33:42.620 thing to know too you know because you're going to have a lot of problems in your life

00:33:46.040 and a problem approached comprehensively is an opportunity and that's something very very useful

00:33:57.020 to know and the deeper the problem is more it's going to hurt you but the more opportunity lurks

00:34:05.380 in that problem because the fact that it besets you means you could be the person to pursue the

00:34:11.540 solution and that's something very interesting to know it's akin to the claim that the dragon

00:34:17.660 hoards the gold and implicit in that is the notion that the larger dragons have the more valuable

00:34:24.400 gold you know and Tammy referred to that to some degree tonight you know she's been in a situation

00:34:30.600 over the last few years where she's had to face very serious illness and death on a multitude of

00:34:38.300 fronts in many many ways and that's about as bitter as it gets although as bitter as it gets

00:34:44.980 is a very deep form of bitterness and it it's not too much to say that because she

00:34:54.100 approached the problem on her knees let's say that the net consequence of that suffering has been

00:35:06.800 positive and i suppose that's the secret to a life well lived isn't it because

00:35:12.240 there's going to be no shortage of serious problems that are coming your way and if you

00:35:17.360 can't transform themselves them into stellar opportunities then you're going to be left in

00:35:22.560 the dust and you do that at least not least by faith but also as a consequence of a certain

00:35:30.460 form of humility so we could get to that next you have a problem you're a scientist the next

00:35:36.060 thing you have to admit is you don't know the answer and that's not much different

00:35:44.320 semantically speaking than approaching the problem on your knees it's like you have a

00:35:51.140 problem it's a real problem it's an insufficiency you have an insufficiency you have to admit to

00:35:56.740 the insufficiency deeply you have to understand that it's an insufficiency that you would like

00:36:03.320 to have rectified.

00:36:05.100 You have to ask. You have to knock.

00:36:07.100 You have to seek.

00:36:08.940 And the consequence of that,

00:36:12.600 intensely

00:36:13.060 pursued, will be something

00:36:14.380 like a revelation.

00:36:18.140 You know, we say,

00:36:19.140 us moderns, that

00:36:20.040 we say things like, I thought

00:36:23.100 this up.

00:36:25.040 And I would say, that's not really

00:36:27.180 very accurate, psychologically

00:36:29.460 or

00:36:31.060 spiritually.

00:36:33.320 If it was you that thought it up, why didn't you know it to begin with?

00:36:37.840 Well, that's a good question, right?

00:36:40.000 Where did that come from?

00:36:42.180 How did you call it forth?

00:36:43.920 Or under what conditions did it make itself manifest to you?

00:36:47.900 Those are the same questions.

00:36:49.420 You're not going to get much of an answer unless you ask the question.

00:36:53.740 You know, and that's really what a prayer is in the final analysis.

00:36:56.820 It's an admission of insufficiency.

00:36:58.380 and it's a reaching into the beyond for a revelation now thought itself doesn't end there

00:37:06.340 because your prayers might be warped and what that means to some degree is that the revelation

00:37:14.720 you might be aiming at the wrong thing and what that might mean is the revelation you receive

00:37:20.480 might not precisely be from God which is why you have to test the spirits so to speak to see if

00:37:27.000 there of god and there's actually no difference between that critical thinking you know you'll

00:37:32.080 ask yourself a question hopefully a well-aimed one hopefully one that's aiming up not something like

00:37:38.460 how can i take advantage of this situation for myself in this moment maximally and to hell with

00:37:45.560 everyone else for example which isn't exactly a prayer to god let's put it that way and so

00:37:53.660 you have to check yourself and you do that with critical thinking of various sorts which is

00:38:00.640 another manifestation of the creative process and i don't see any difference between that on

00:38:06.980 the scientific front and prayer not on the hypothesis generating side and so and i think

00:38:13.600 also it's completely reasonable claim anthropologically and historically to generate

00:38:20.160 the hypothesis that the thought that moderns are capable of literate semantically sophisticated

00:38:29.080 moderns is a variant of the prayer which clearly preceded that historically so

00:38:38.400 you know there's a gospel statement that says if you ask you'll receive if you knock the door

00:38:49.280 will open and if you seek you'll find

00:38:51.260 but it's nested in another set of

00:38:53.260 propositions which is something like

00:38:54.960 careful what you

00:38:57.320 ask for

00:38:57.860 and seriously

00:39:00.400 and so if you ask

00:39:03.340 for what is highest you'll receive

00:39:05.240 what is highest in return

00:39:06.780 and if you ask for what is lowest

00:39:09.080 you'll receive what is lowest in return

00:39:11.340 and I wouldn't recommend that

00:39:13.380 alright

00:39:16.280 alright

00:39:19.280 Well, that's a bit of preamble musing, let's say, to set the stage.

00:39:26.600 I have one other thing I want to discuss with you before we get to the stories themselves.

00:39:32.120 I want to discuss with you what constitutes a story.

00:39:38.160 Now, you know, we're engaged in a culture war.

00:39:42.260 And part of the reason for that culture war is the clash of two claims about the structure of reality itself.

00:39:50.140 Now, the rationalists and the empiricists, they make the claim that the world is composed of a set of objective facts.

00:39:57.660 And that you can be guided by those facts.

00:39:59.760 You can follow the science, for example, right off the tyrannical cliff, as you may have noticed.

00:40:08.200 The world is composed of a set of empirical facts.

00:40:11.100 And that was opposed, starting in the 1970s, by the postmodernists who claimed that, no, you see the world through a story.

00:40:23.460 And turns out, the facts support the postmodernists and not the scientists.

00:40:31.180 And that isn't an opinion anymore, because the same realization occurred simultaneously in multiple fields of inquiry.

00:40:41.100 So the greatest neuroscientists in the world now regard each word as a micro-narrative, let's say, or as a tool.

00:40:51.260 The AI engineers learned that they could only produce supercomputing intelligences

00:40:59.620 by training them within the framework of something approximating a hierarchy of values.

00:41:06.060 the computational scientists learned that it was impossible to generate a robotic machine that

00:41:18.940 could function merely as a consequence of modeling the facts all of those things basically happened

00:41:25.720 at the same time and here's why here's why 200 years ago something like that a scottish

00:41:35.140 philosopher named david hume put forward a very famous proposition which was that you couldn't

00:41:40.920 derive an ought from an is which meant something like no matter how many facts you aggregated around

00:41:47.080 you you couldn't use those facts as an unerring guide as as to where you should go so imagine

00:41:54.900 this imagine that you're dropped in the ocean and you're trying to determine which way to swim

00:42:01.060 there's no set of facts at your disposal that is going to map that territory for you the same is

00:42:08.220 true if you're lost in an expansive desert the geography itself will not signify to you your

00:42:15.680 destination now why is that what is the problem it seems like it's one of something approximating

00:42:23.860 volume the facts can't guide you because there's an infinite number of them

00:42:29.420 and if you rank order and prioritize them you're not in the domain of facts you're in the domain of

00:42:37.160 value so and you do this the perceptual scientists figured this out too you do this every time you

00:42:45.400 take a glance so and this is so interesting because the empiricists say well you just look

00:42:51.360 at the world and there are the facts but the perceptual scientists say no you can't even look

00:42:57.560 at the world without looking at the world through a lens of value now and so what do i mean by that

00:43:02.700 well imagine you're out on a date okay you're in a restaurant there is a lot of things you could

00:43:09.100 pay attention to you could pay attention to the waitress who happens to be more attractive than

00:43:14.220 your date let's say now that's not a strategy of value that's going to endear you to your date

00:43:22.100 right so what do you do if you're polite and you have a clue and this is what you do with 0.91

00:43:29.420 the person of the opposite sex say that you're with all the time is you 0.96

00:43:34.260 you attend to the facts that accompany them you prioritize your perception so that 0.98

00:43:42.160 in the restaurant for example you don't listen to the conversations two tables away although you

00:43:47.400 could you listen to what your date is saying and the way you do that is you focus on what it is

00:43:54.260 that she's uttering and you suppress into invisibility everything else and what that

00:43:59.400 means is that you put her utterances at the pinnacle of a structure of value and you subsume

00:44:05.540 everything else beneath that and you do that with every single glance you take you couldn't even

00:44:10.780 focus your eyes if you didn't do that as perception visual perception auditory perception

00:44:16.640 there they cannot be dissociated from action you don't see and then act because you can't see

00:44:26.180 without acting and it's the same with all of your senses and so you have to make a decision about

00:44:31.640 what's important literally with every glance even with the unconscious movements that keep your eyes

00:44:39.820 actually functioning because they're vibrating constantly even though you don't know that

00:44:44.100 because your brain corrects for it you have to live within a hierarchy of value you have to live

00:44:52.840 within a hierarchy of value there's no way out of that and once you know that and we know that

00:44:59.960 and we know that factually we know that incontrovertibly once you know that you live

00:45:08.220 within a structure of value two questions might arise how is that

00:45:14.980 structure of value to be characterized and what should be valued so to answer

00:45:25.720 the first question a description of a hierarchy of value is a story that's why

00:45:33.620 we're so interested in stories we want to see how other people see the world

00:45:37.780 we want to have them help us solve the problem of what to attend to here's a

00:45:44.920 scientific justification for that claim your eyes evolved so that other people

00:45:49.780 can easily see where you're pointing them that's why you have whites when you

00:45:56.800 look at someone when you talk to them you look at their eyes you look at their

00:46:02.200 face but mostly their eyes and the reason you look at their eyes is so that

00:46:05.400 you can see where they're pointing their eyes.

00:46:08.140 Because if you can see where they're pointing their eyes,

00:46:10.200 you can figure out what they're aiming at.

00:46:12.600 And if you can figure out what they're aiming at,

00:46:14.320 you can figure out what they're up to.

00:46:16.640 And if you can figure out what they're up to,

00:46:18.200 you can use your body to mimic their responses emotionally,

00:46:24.040 and that's how you understand them.

00:46:27.780 You say, well, how do you know that's true?

00:46:31.820 Think, what do you do when you go to a movie?

00:46:33.360 you pay to go see a movie

00:46:36.220 it's a story

00:46:37.480 you'll even go pay to see a story

00:46:40.040 that horrifies and terrifies you

00:46:42.340 that's how important it is

00:46:44.280 for you to understand

00:46:46.480 the broad landscape of evaluation

00:46:48.760 you'll go watch someone

00:46:50.220 confront a horrifying death

00:46:52.620 and you'll walk through those emotions

00:46:54.620 just so you can orient yourself

00:46:56.620 in that landscape

00:46:57.380 and you'll pay for it

00:46:59.460 and the reason you'll pay for it

00:47:01.120 is because you'll pay for not doing it

00:47:03.360 and you'll pay more. So you go to a movie, and what do you do? You watch the hero, you watch

00:47:08.720 the protagonist, and you try to infer what's he up to, what's he doing, why is he doing it,

00:47:15.080 what are his aims, what's his moral structure, and you lock on to him. And as soon as you start

00:47:20.340 to understand his motivations, assuming the movie is well written and well portrayed, you start to

00:47:25.420 feel the emotions. And that's because your body is, you're using your body as a computational

00:47:30.040 landscape to mimic the state of being that characterizes the protagonist. And then you

00:47:35.680 split yourself into all sorts of people while watching the movie. One person per actor.

00:47:44.040 And you experience all those emotions. And you absorb all those stories. And why do you do that?

00:47:49.760 Well, maybe the protagonist is an anti-hero, like the Joker in Batman, like Heath Ledger's Joker.

00:47:58.760 And why would you watch The Joker?

00:48:01.420 To learn how not to let the world burn pointlessly.

00:48:05.120 How about that?

00:48:07.080 And why would you watch a superhero movie?

00:48:09.560 Well, maybe to ally yourself with the central tenets of heroism per se.

00:48:15.400 I mean, if you have a better explanation.

00:48:17.840 What's the general explanation?

00:48:19.660 It's entertaining.

00:48:21.340 I enjoy it.

00:48:22.600 Don't make too much of it.

00:48:23.900 It's like, no, sorry, you're gripped by an instinct.

00:48:26.860 that's how a biologist looks at it or a psychologist what else is dragging you to the

00:48:32.680 movie theater you can't just brush it off as entertaining you're missing the point why is it

00:48:39.580 entertaining why will you pay for that well here's something even deeper question you know that

00:48:46.880 part of our attempt to build faster and faster computers is so that we can have more and more

00:48:56.500 realistic fictional simulations you don't need the newest supercomputer in your laptop

00:49:03.500 you were pretty much taken care of on that front in 1995 and so what's driving our desire to

00:49:11.540 build these insanely complex machines well how about the ability to play more realistic games

00:49:18.280 story-based games how about the ability to construct more and more realistic fictional

00:49:25.120 worlds why because it matters it matters so then we might ask yourself what are we to make of fiction

00:49:34.260 itself and a thoughtless rationalist would say well fiction is the opposite of fact 0.93

00:49:42.400 that's a stupid answer and here's one of the reasons is because 0.99

00:49:50.840 there's a lot of reasons but here's one 1.00

00:49:55.120 we seem to recognize different levels of

00:50:00.080 quality in fiction you know you'll go home when you're tired and watch a movie you know to be

00:50:07.420 trivial light shallow and foolish just entertaining right it doesn't move you

00:50:13.380 doesn't require any effort on your part you're probably even embarrassed to watch it 0.82

00:50:18.080 But, you know, maybe you worked hard that day,

00:50:20.140 and that's pretty much what's left of you.

00:50:22.300 You know, you can lay on the couch and watch Barbie.

00:50:25.480 And I could only make it halfway through Barbie, by the way.

00:50:35.700 But then, you know, you'll see a movie, for example,

00:50:38.520 that moves you to your depths, that'll evoke tears,

00:50:41.920 that'll sometimes even change your life.

00:50:43.860 You'll read a book like that, a book of fiction.

00:50:46.420 and so we we have this instinct and this unerring sense and this knowledge that there are levels of

00:50:53.300 depth in fiction right there's there's levels of quality in fiction and what that seems to indicate

00:50:58.100 is at least even if fiction is the opposite of fact some fiction is much more real than others

00:51:06.880 and so i'm a great admirer of dostoevsky for example and i loved clinical psychology i love

00:51:15.600 being a clinical psychologist because i found that if i listened intently to my clients they

00:51:20.180 all turned into characters from a dostoevsky novel you know because people are so interesting

00:51:25.360 if they if you get people to tell you the truth they're so interesting that you want to run away

00:51:30.120 screaming and so that's why husbands and wives don't listen to each other by the way it's

00:51:36.000 they tell each other platitudinous half-truths so that none of them are terrified enough to

00:51:44.680 leave the house in a fit of horror and they miss the best of the other person as a consequence of

00:51:51.780 that cowardice you know i mean if you're if you're bored of your spouse all that means is

00:51:58.540 they're not letting you know who they are because if they did you'd be interested enough to stay

00:52:06.140 awake at night worrying so here's the theory about fiction we have to see the world through

00:52:21.360 a hierarchy of valuation and a description of a hierarchy of valuation is the story

00:52:29.520 you're looking at the world through the eyes of someone else trying to adopt their frame of

00:52:35.060 reference trying to understand their position their aim their conclusions their emotions their

00:52:40.260 motivations now imagine there's sets of stories right and some are more compelling than others

00:52:46.340 and then imagine you aggregate all the compelling stories and you make super compelling stories out

00:52:52.380 of that aggregation and those are the deepest possible stories and the most real possible

00:52:58.080 representations that's what mythology is it's it's a it's it's a form of truth that surpasses

00:53:08.240 the merely literal now you might say well that's a preposterous claim nothing's more real

00:53:13.340 than concrete reality really how about numbers how about numbers what's more real

00:53:23.940 the world of brute material facts or the world of numbers how powerful are you if you are a master

00:53:33.400 of the world of numbers well our computational devices are a consequence of our mastery of the

00:53:39.660 world of numbers our technological prowess is a consequence of our mastery of the world of

00:53:44.820 numbers are numbers more or less real than what they represent well i think the proper answer to

00:53:52.380 that question is it depends on your definition of real it depends on the purposes toward which 0.99

00:53:58.620 you're putting the levels of abstraction but you're a bloody fool if you think the answer 0.99

00:54:03.620 to that question is simple and you're certainly a fool if you think that making the claim that the 0.99

00:54:09.420 realm of numbers is real is a preposterous claim it's that just means that you have a definition 0.94

00:54:15.120 of reality that you really know nothing about abstractions can be plenty real and deep fiction

00:54:21.720 is the ultimate abstraction of value and that's crucial because we see the world through a

00:54:27.580 structure of value now the post-modernists figured this out in the 1970s why well how about because

00:54:37.240 they were literary critics now you'd think literary critics no wonder they're in the

00:54:41.920 university nothing more useless than a literary critic what if you live by stories

00:54:48.780 then there's nothing more powerful than a literary critic

00:54:53.220 especially one that takes the stories your culture is predicated upon

00:54:57.720 apart which is exactly where we are now

00:55:01.300 it's worse than that even though the post-modernists got

00:55:04.900 their central claim correct that we see the world through

00:55:09.620 a web of stories let's say they got their answer wrong

00:55:14.720 and that was because they were possessed by this

00:55:18.780 spirit of Luciferian pride. They put the cart before the horse. They thought, well, we have to

00:55:26.220 see the world through a story. Now remember, these same people, they're all Marxists. And I'm not

00:55:32.380 making this up. Go look it up for yourself. We're talking about France in the 1970s. Okay, so that

00:55:41.060 in itself should be a clue right and we know perfectly well that the universities have been

00:55:49.080 left-leaning since the 1960s and that that was particularly true of france during the 1970s

00:55:57.880 and probably no more true true more among the humanities oriented french intellectuals of the

00:56:06.660 1970s than anywhere else and if they weren't outright marxists they were implicit marxists

00:56:13.980 and they said that themselves and when solzhenitsyn came out and demolished the moral pretensions

00:56:20.580 of the communist universe they kind of scuttled underground but not really they just invented a

00:56:27.500 kind of meta-marxism that would have made old carl had he lived to understand its spin 0.82

00:56:34.200 and hopefully at a very rapid and uncomfortable rate

00:56:38.320 for all of eternity.

00:56:41.320 What did the postmodernists claim?

00:56:44.760 The central story that possesses us

00:56:47.480 is one of power and nothing else.

00:56:51.580 Well,

00:56:53.260 fair enough in some ways, you know, I mean,

00:56:59.160 certainly there isn't anyone here,

00:57:03.300 There's no one alive who hasn't been tempted by.

00:57:10.480 There's people who are unable to utilize power. 0.99

00:57:13.620 And they're just useless. 0.96

00:57:15.980 And then they might mask their lack of uselessness with a moral veneer. 0.98

00:57:20.920 I'd never use power.

00:57:22.640 And my objection would be, well, it doesn't really matter to me one way or another.

00:57:28.100 Because you're so incompetent, you don't have the opportunity.

00:57:31.000 and so that's not a moral claim that was something Nietzsche pointed out in the 0.99

00:57:35.840 late 1800s when in his critique of morality as cowardice you know if you're weak and useless

00:57:44.580 the best justification you have for it is that you don't do terrible things because you're good 0.61

00:57:49.540 it's like no you don't do terrible things just because you're useless now that doesn't mean

00:57:53.820 that's necessarily the only reason that people don't do terrible things that is not what I'm

00:57:58.520 saying i'm just saying that the accusation thrown by the post-modernists at the human race that our

00:58:05.280 fundamental motivation is one of self-serving power this power properly defined has to be

00:58:11.080 self-serving otherwise it's not power it's cooperation so i need to exercise power if i'm

00:58:16.260 trying to compel you to do something you don't want to do maybe that's all we do you're out for

00:58:22.260 your power i'm out for my power it's a bloody nightmare of power competition and whatever

00:58:28.640 stability we manage to attain is merely a consequence of the balance of our fundamentally

00:58:34.500 competing interests and that ethos is core to the unholy alliance between the post-modernists and

00:58:42.340 the marxists there's no genuine reality there's no genuine morality there are a variety there's

00:58:48.900 there's no genuine reality there's nothing but a set of competing claims to power and then there's 0.95

00:58:55.060 the oppressed and the victimized and then there's the victimizer and that's a power dynamic and you

00:59:00.060 can understand marriage that way and you can understand the family that way and you can

00:59:04.760 understand history that way and it's nothing but power and uh as i said fair enough you know human

00:59:12.100 beings are pretty damn brutal and you look at a regime like the national socialist regime or

00:59:17.220 maoist china or stalinist soviet union you think or the degeneration of great institutions in the 0.99

00:59:24.540 west and you think power's on the march and maybe there's nothing else there are there are a group

00:59:31.320 of people who use nothing but strategies of power psychopaths they're about three percent of the

00:59:40.880 population cross-culturally. And that fact in itself is pretty

00:59:46.940 damn interesting, because if there was nothing but power, why

00:59:52.280 wouldn't the people who use nothing but power be the majority 0.98

00:59:57.280 and be dominant? And they're not. Psychopathy turns out to be

01:00:03.760 a very counterproductive strategy. Many psychopaths land up

01:00:08.840 in prison psychopaths can't cooperate if i interact with you and i get what i want from you 1.00

01:00:19.980 on our first interaction and then to hell with you you're not going to interact with me again 0.99

01:00:24.900 so psychopaths are itinerant even psychopathic chimps don't do very well the idea that the 0.99

01:00:32.700 Fundamental human motivation is one of power,

01:00:35.700 is about the most cynical and self-serving story that you could possibly tell.

01:00:41.540 Now, it's a bit compelling, eh?

01:00:43.260 It's compelling because when a human social organization goes wrong,

01:00:50.400 it degenerates in the direction of power.

01:00:52.780 You know, if you and your wife are not getting along,

01:00:56.580 you can't cooperate, you can't communicate.

01:00:59.800 That's all off the table.

01:01:01.200 you're left with the relationship of tyrant to slave

01:01:05.120 and maybe you swap those roles

01:01:07.400 but it's in the degeneration of the institution

01:01:11.120 that the manifestation of power takes place.

01:01:14.500 I suppose it can degenerate into a kind of

01:01:17.960 puerile and infantile hedonism too.

01:01:21.460 Now if you can't organize yourself

01:01:23.260 at some relatively high level of sophistication

01:01:25.820 you can degenerate into the situation

01:01:27.920 where you do nothing but allow yourself

01:01:29.740 to be possessed by your basest

01:01:31.580 whims. There's not

01:01:33.620 much difference between that and being

01:01:35.640 psychopathic, by the way.

01:01:38.320 It's an unbelievably

01:01:39.840 corrosive doctrine.

01:01:44.200 But then you might object.

01:01:46.960 That's naive

01:01:47.800 because everything runs on power.

01:01:49.600 I don't think it's naive at all, by the way.

01:01:51.760 But a more fundamental objection would be,

01:01:53.980 well, if it's not power that the world

01:01:55.820 is founded on,

01:01:56.700 if it's not the war of all against all 0.76

01:01:59.920 then

01:02:01.440 on what principle is the world founded

01:02:06.460 and on what principle

01:02:09.720 should the world be founded

01:02:12.920 and that's what the biblical corpus

01:02:16.160 investigates

01:02:17.040 I say biblical corpus because

01:02:20.500 it's a body like a body of laws

01:02:23.580 it's a body of stories

01:02:25.100 it's a body of animating stories that's another way of thinking about it and all stories contain

01:02:31.780 within them an animating spirit that's the moral of the story by the way the seed around which the

01:02:37.960 entire story organizes itself or the seed from which it grows the seed that is planted in you

01:02:43.600 when you hear a story or tell a story over millennia our ancestors aggregated stories

01:02:53.880 that burned themselves into their memory,

01:02:56.820 all aimed at answering the same question.

01:03:01.140 Toward what should sacrifice be devoted?

01:03:05.720 Now that archaic terminology grates on our modern ears.

01:03:09.540 We think of burnt altars and smoking carcasses

01:03:14.260 and primitive gods that enjoy the smell of

01:03:18.200 high-quality roasted fat.

01:03:23.880 And we fail to investigate.

01:03:28.320 To what end should sacrifice be devoted?

01:03:30.940 What does that mean?

01:03:32.840 You will wrestle with that question your entire life.

01:03:36.240 There is no difference conceptually between sacrifice and work.

01:03:44.300 They're the same thing.

01:03:47.860 Work.

01:03:49.760 The sacrifice of the present to the future.

01:03:53.300 Right?

01:03:53.560 If you're doing something for fun, if you're engaged in the present,

01:03:57.740 if you're captivated by the moment, you're not working.

01:04:01.780 You're enjoying yourself. You're being entertained. You're playing.

01:04:05.380 What are you doing when you're working?

01:04:07.620 You're striking a bargain with the future.

01:04:10.500 Or you're striking a bargain with the spirit of the future.

01:04:13.000 And the bargain is, I'll give up something I want and value now

01:04:18.120 on the understanding that it will be returned to be manifold in the future that's why you work

01:04:26.200 and so then the that's in in in the garden of eden when adam and eve are tossed out of paradise

01:04:32.800 because of their sin of pride god informs them that in this fallen world they will have to work

01:04:41.140 they will have to toil in the fields they'll have to toil to bring forth children they'll have to

01:04:47.600 work it's the human destiny to work why how about because we're aware of the future how would that

01:04:54.040 be above all other animals we understand that we we stretch across time that you have to save for

01:05:02.420 your retirement because the you now will be the you that's 65 and damn soon and you have this

01:05:09.620 perspective on the world that spans the ages so to speak and you have to make a bargain between

01:05:14.960 what's meet and correct and enjoyable

01:05:18.060 and fills you with enthusiasm at the moment

01:05:20.040 and how you have to organize yourself into the future

01:05:23.840 to make a bargain with your future self,

01:05:26.180 to strike the same bargain with everyone else

01:05:28.760 and all their future selves

01:05:30.260 and balance all that in the moment with work.

01:05:34.060 What kind of work?

01:05:36.060 That's the story of Cain and Abel.

01:05:38.340 What sacrifice best pleases God?

01:05:43.380 Abel's sacrifices are accepted.

01:05:45.560 His life goes well.

01:05:47.280 Cain's sacrifices are rejected. 0.88

01:05:49.900 He becomes resentful, arrogant, bitter, murderous, and then genocidal. 0.69

01:05:55.520 Sound familiar? 0.90

01:05:57.780 Those two things are laid out.

01:05:59.800 Those two pathways of adaptation,

01:06:01.780 those two pathways of narrative valuation are laid out at the outset of the biblical corpus.

01:06:09.260 in about 20 of the most tightly written sentences ever penned.

01:06:14.860 The story of Cain and Abel is inexhaustible.

01:06:19.580 It sets the pattern of the battle between the hostile brothers,

01:06:23.200 between Batman and the Joker,

01:06:26.980 between Superman and Lex Luthor,

01:06:29.820 between the Hobbit and Sauron,

01:06:32.840 between Harry Potter and Voldemort.

01:06:35.620 it's the eternal battle of good against evil and that's the most fundamental narrative trope

01:06:43.900 and it's the meta story that burns us that's burned itself into our imagination and our memory

01:06:52.540 and why because that's your story whether you know it or not and no matter where you are in

01:07:02.280 that story you're in that story and no matter which side you're on or what stance you take

01:07:07.540 you're in that story wrestling with god and that's human destiny there's probably no one

01:07:14.300 who thinks of god more than a committed atheist right and that's not accidental all right so

01:07:23.000 i'm going to walk you through a bit of the first story in the biblical corpus

01:07:29.040 just to give you a flavor of

01:07:31.800 of exactly how this works

01:07:34.520 in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth

01:07:37.480 and the earth was without form and void

01:07:42.060 and darkness was upon the face of the deep

01:07:43.980 and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters

01:07:46.540 a few sentences

01:07:49.800 a relatively radical claim

01:07:52.800 so let me delve into this a little bit

01:07:55.840 without form and void

01:07:57.500 and darkness was on the face of the deep.

01:07:59.480 It's a juxtaposition of a sequence of metaphors.

01:08:02.700 The original Hebrew word was tohu vabohu.

01:08:06.900 And tohu vabohu means something like formless potential.

01:08:10.440 The Spirit of God is that which wrestles with,

01:08:15.660 which confronts and battles and differentiates

01:08:25.560 formless chaos into the manifest structures of the world okay now and you're made in that image

01:08:33.360 what does that mean well it's a claim about the fundamental structure of reality itself

01:08:40.060 and it's not a materialist claim and not in the least

01:08:43.880 first of all it claims the existence of something that in some sense is non-material

01:08:51.920 and i would say the closest straightforward word we have of understanding what that is is

01:08:59.160 consciousness that's the brute fact of your awareness but more than that the brute fact

01:09:05.160 of the fact that your awareness is integrally involved with the fact of being itself

01:09:10.520 and more and more that the being of your consciousness gives rise to the world okay

01:09:17.420 so let's just take that apart for a minute you you follow along with me and you tell me what

01:09:21.560 you think about this? What is it that faces you when you wake up in the morning? That's the dawn

01:09:28.020 of the new day, right? God creates the world in seven days, units of time. You wake up in the

01:09:33.440 morning when the sun rises and the light reappears. What confronts you in the morning?

01:09:38.820 And because you're a materialist, you think, well, my bed, the furniture in my room,

01:09:46.100 my my rug my the artifacts around me and i would say really when when you get up in the morning

01:09:55.420 the first thing that you perceive and conceive is the furniture that you're a hundred percent

01:10:02.160 familiar with or how about this how about this this is what confronts you how about if you think

01:10:08.320 about the last time you were depressed or anxious there's a that's a good that's a good way in what

01:10:14.380 confronts you when you wake up in the morning? How about the malformed potential of your

01:10:20.180 life? How about the wasted potential of your life? How about the increasingly chaotic and

01:10:27.260 demented chaos of your life? How about all those opportunities you could have made something

01:10:33.600 of had you chosen to? How about all the wasted opportunities that saturate your house? All

01:10:41.640 the closets that haven't been organized all the fights you haven't had with your wife all the

01:10:46.920 issues you haven't settled with your children all of that formless chaotic anxiety provoking

01:10:53.140 terrifying potential well that's on the negative side you might say that's the dragon that is there

01:10:59.620 in the morning when you awaken you can paint a positive picture that's equally compelling

01:11:04.180 maybe you're at a peak in your life and you wake up in the morning filled with enthusiasm

01:11:09.380 enthusiasm that means to be filled with the spirit of god

01:11:13.560 enthuse thuse is theos deos god to be filled with the spirit of god

01:11:20.340 to be joyfully abounding in faith and hope and why because you see

01:11:28.260 a new business opportunity make itself manifest or maybe you're in love with

01:11:32.760 someone and the first thing you think about is the

01:11:34.840 potential of that future relationship even if that's the date that night

01:11:38.580 or maybe you have a new child and you're deeply in love with that child and you think

01:11:43.240 about the joys that the new day might bring if you only conducted yourself properly and so what

01:11:49.080 do you confront when you wake up in the morning how about a field of potential

01:11:53.380 maybe that's what your consciousness is for your consciousness is the mechanism that confronts a

01:12:01.420 field of potential and casts it into reality that makes it tangible now do you believe that

01:12:08.220 well do you make decisions do things happen as a consequence of your choices is that not part of

01:12:15.460 assembling and forming the world and don't we all know that the world that we aggregate

01:12:20.080 around us in is in some wise a consequence of what we've aimed at

01:12:24.480 of our own free choice and you might say well i don't believe in free choice it's like do you

01:12:30.320 believe in your wife's free choice try treating her like an automaton for a week and see how well

01:12:36.500 your relationship goes well dear i know that you really can't help how you are and you're just

01:12:41.520 moving robotically through the motions and no matter how disarrayed our relationship happens

01:12:47.640 to be i can't attribute any responsibility to you because i know at your core you're nothing but a

01:12:53.100 mindless deterministic robot it's like you can't even have a relationship with yourself with that

01:12:59.580 attitude much less someone else and so you might claim to be uh determinist which by the way is

01:13:06.200 not a useful scientific stance because the universe is not a deterministic place and it

01:13:10.860 can't be conquered by algorithmic calculation so and we know that and that's actually a fact not an

01:13:18.240 opinion because at the quantum level the world is fundamentally indeterministic and that

01:13:23.100 indeterminism makes it self-manifest to all the levels of reality it doesn't work technically

01:13:30.140 and it doesn't work practically it's a preposterous scheme and you mostly want to

01:13:35.760 believe it so that you don't have to take responsibility for light for your life but

01:13:39.480 the catastrophe of that is that that potential that you encounter when you awaken is in that

01:13:46.860 potential is everything that could ever possibly be offered to you if you only knew how to seize it

01:13:53.920 and you know that because you're beckoned forward into the future by the fact that something new

01:14:01.400 and redeeming could still make itself

01:14:03.460 manifest and if you don't

01:14:05.640 have that you can't get out

01:14:07.560 of bed

01:14:08.180 you say I'm hopeless

01:14:10.740 I have no hope I have

01:14:13.540 no enthusiasm the joy has gone out of my

01:14:15.580 life

01:14:15.960 the neurological systems that

01:14:19.220 signal movement forward to a

01:14:21.520 desired end have shut down

01:14:23.320 and left you suffering

01:14:25.580 left you with nothing but the

01:14:27.360 bitterness of

01:14:28.800 the potential that's going to make

01:14:32.320 itself manifest in the

01:14:34.220 most negative possible way

01:14:35.560 if you can't organize yourself

01:14:37.760 and confront the world

01:14:39.140 and that's

01:14:41.380 the same spirit

01:14:43.660 that's the same spirit that's claimed

01:14:46.240 in the great book of Genesis

01:14:47.980 to make itself manifest at the

01:14:50.260 beginning of time

01:14:51.120 the spirit

01:14:54.220 that confronts

01:14:56.380 potential itself

01:14:57.960 and casts itself and casts that potential into tangible order.

01:15:05.120 And not only order, this is repeatedly insisted upon in the text,

01:15:10.640 the order that is good.

01:15:12.420 So imagine that you're conducting yourself as a proper conscious moral agent in your family.

01:15:19.160 What are you doing?

01:15:20.500 You're taking the raw potential of your children and your family

01:15:23.960 and you're transforming them into the order that is good.

01:15:27.960 And how do you do that?

01:15:29.660 Well, do you love your children?

01:15:33.940 I didn't ask if you liked them.

01:15:37.420 Do you love your children?

01:15:39.560 And you say, well, at least I'd like to.

01:15:44.860 You know, and I'm not being cynical about that.

01:15:47.580 We're all imperfect and none of us love our children with the depth that we should.

01:15:52.340 But you see the best of people, I would say, in the love that they manifest for children.

01:15:57.360 And what does it mean to love a child?

01:15:59.440 I mean, even if you don't have much hope for yourself,

01:16:01.940 even if you've given up on yourself,

01:16:03.780 even if you're bitter about the fact that you've wasted your potential,

01:16:07.420 you have a child and you think,

01:16:09.560 if only, God willing, things could be better for him.

01:16:15.420 The potential that I see inside him that constitutes the core of my love,

01:16:20.300 that vision of potential,

01:16:22.140 that could make itself manifest in a manner I was never able to manage.

01:16:26.060 and you pray that that occurs and it hurts you when you see your child deviate from that path

01:16:31.640 and so what does that mean it means when you orient yourself by love you strive to bring about

01:16:37.620 within the confines of your family the order that is good or even very good and what that implies

01:16:45.000 too is that the ultimate aim of the spirit that would best make use of potential is the spirit

01:16:51.620 that acts in love and that's why there's an insistence in the judeo-christian tradition

01:16:57.120 that the ordering spirit at the base of reality itself is precisely the spirit that acts in

01:17:04.700 accordance with the highest dictates of love and you ask yourself well if you wanted to bring

01:17:10.420 about a world that was good or very good what else could you possibly be oriented by

01:17:16.100 and that love would not only be love for your children and for your wife but even for yourself

01:17:21.500 but for yourself in the deepest

01:17:23.460 possible sense, right, as

01:17:24.940 the love

01:17:27.640 for yourself as someone who carries

01:17:29.440 within them the same flame that your

01:17:31.500 son carries

01:17:33.680 and that

01:17:35.620 you need to manifest when

01:17:37.540 you're caring for your son so that he can manifest

01:17:39.600 what's within him

01:17:40.660 and then you could ask

01:17:43.440 yourself too, if you were

01:17:45.560 oriented, God

01:17:47.480 willing, by nothing but

01:17:49.480 that love? What could you make of your life? Now there is a

01:17:55.380 prayer. If I was oriented by nothing but the highest love,

01:17:59.060 what could I make of my life? It's a terrifying question to ask

01:18:03.780 because if you ask and you want to know, everything that

01:18:08.240 interferes with that will burn away from you. And that might

01:18:12.540 mean that there's precious little left standing.

01:18:19.480 this idea of the spirit of god descending upon the chaotic waters people ask well there was no

01:18:27.920 water at the beginning none of this makes sense it's like you just don't know what you're talking

01:18:32.920 about you have no idea what constitutes a metaphor what exists this potential that exists at the

01:18:40.460 beginning of everything isn't water it's just that water's a useful metaphor well why you can draw

01:18:46.920 things up from the water. The water is unknown.

01:18:49.200 The water is dark and it's deep

01:18:50.740 and it's mysterious and it's bountiful.

01:18:53.900 You can drown in the

01:18:55.080 water. You can sail

01:18:56.900 on the water. The water is the

01:18:58.900 water is

01:19:00.100 a necessity of life.

01:19:03.620 Use some imagination

01:19:04.720 like the poets do.

01:19:12.500 When Christ is baptized

01:19:14.160 by John the Baptist, the spirit

01:19:16.860 of the spirit descends upon him what does that mean next slide please oh i'll tell you about this

01:19:28.540 first

01:19:29.020 this is the same story told from a different perspective

01:19:36.820 so what do you confront your life well a monstrous eternal infinite mess

01:19:46.180 of multi-headed snakes you tell tell me that's never happened in your life you wake up in the

01:19:52.720 morning you think oh my god i wish i was asleep snakes everywhere right and so what does the hero

01:20:00.580 do confronts the snake right more than that this is even implicit still in the biblical corpus there

01:20:10.280 echoes of the representation of God

01:20:13.180 as the primordial deity

01:20:16.020 who slayed the serpent

01:20:17.940 that existed at the beginning of time

01:20:20.400 and made the world out of its pieces.

01:20:24.480 Leviathan.

01:20:26.940 What does that mean?

01:20:28.840 Well, it means that we're hunters.

01:20:31.800 It means that we make our clothes

01:20:34.040 out of animal skins. 0.99

01:20:35.960 It means that we establish the order

01:20:38.900 that is habitable

01:20:39.980 by confronting the predators and making use of them,

01:20:45.140 taming them, or destroying them,

01:20:48.080 we establish order as a consequence of a conflict with potential.

01:20:53.800 It's echoed in the story of the dragon and the gold.

01:20:57.320 You confront what's terrifying and possible,

01:21:01.620 and you gain what's valuable and necessary.

01:21:05.380 and that's the eternal story of

01:21:08.220 of the heroic element of the human spirit

01:21:11.900 and when we hear a story like that

01:21:14.500 it echoes deep inside us

01:21:16.820 that's why the stories are so compelling

01:21:19.360 it's like

01:21:20.560 the baptismal scene in the Lion King

01:21:25.700 when Simba is adolescent and deluded

01:21:28.300 and power mad and confused

01:21:30.100 and his father appears in the sky and says

01:21:32.920 remember who you are

01:21:34.560 well that's what the ancient stories do they remind you who you are right your children of

01:21:41.460 god made in the image of the creative being that sits at the center of reality itself

01:21:47.140 reflected in your soul and you've forgotten in your miss aimed presumptions your pretension

01:21:56.960 your pride and your ignorance and the stories the ancient stories call to you to wake up and

01:22:03.340 understand who you are to adopt that responsibility and to put that foremost above everything 0.74

01:22:10.740 confront the terrible catastrophic dragon of chaos dressed in your suit of lion skin

01:22:20.920 and your armor so that you can render the void and the desert habitable for your family yourself and

01:22:29.720 your community that's the adventure of your life you might say life is suffering and it's bitter

01:22:38.720 and i should turn against it and the rejoinder to that is there's no adventure without trouble

01:22:46.360 and the greatest adventure has the most trouble and if you took on the full trouble of your life

01:22:52.240 unstintingly you'd have an adventure that would justify the misery that's the offer it's not

01:22:59.720 comfort you want comfort dostoevsky figured this out in 1880 when he was criticizing utopian

01:23:08.440 delusion delusional utopianism he said look if you took the typical person and you you just gave

01:23:15.960 them everything they wanted so they could do nothing with their life but sit around and eat

01:23:21.320 sweet cakes and sit in pools of bubbling water he obviously had a vision of california and

01:23:29.720 And do nothing but busy yourself with the continuation of the species.

01:23:35.660 What then?

01:23:37.700 He said, well, we know what would happen then.

01:23:42.080 Human beings, ungrateful to the core, unable to tolerate anything like a brief respite from their troubles,

01:23:52.580 would in no time whatsoever smash everything to smithereens just so they had something interesting to do.

01:24:00.680 Well, have you never had the false adventure of trouble you caused

01:24:05.520 just because you had nothing better to do?

01:24:08.420 I mean, that's really, that's like the definition of 80% of life.

01:24:13.180 Well, what would happen if you had a real adventure?

01:24:16.880 What would happen, for example, if you told the truth?

01:24:19.860 Because that's a real adventure.

01:24:22.080 You have to let everything go if you're going to tell the truth.

01:24:24.540 You don't get to predetermine the outcome if you're going to tell the truth.

01:24:28.340 you get to say what you need to say and cast yourself on the on the on the briny deep and

01:24:36.120 let the waves take you where they're going to and that's a bit on the destabilizing side you might 0.94

01:24:43.360 say but it's no shortage of exciting and maybe that's what you're built for right viking adventure 0.99

01:24:51.640 over the high seas and not the idiot comfort that were promised by our tyrant wannabes 0.98

01:24:58.140 that's what it means to be made in the image of god to make that creative contending adventurous 0.99

01:25:06.980 spirit suffused with love manifest within you in everything that you say and do

01:25:14.800 that's the dawn of the kingdom of heaven that's laid upon the earth that men are too blind to see

01:25:23.040 next slide please

01:25:26.520 good thing we didn't miss that one

01:25:28.400 Christ is baptized

01:25:37.000 by John the Baptist

01:25:38.660 and the symbolic

01:25:40.960 representations are that

01:25:42.460 a dove descends from

01:25:44.320 on high

01:25:45.260 the Holy Spirit and

01:25:47.740 comes to reside within him

01:25:50.540 that's when he goes to the desert

01:25:54.580 by the way

01:25:56.280 you ever had that time in your life

01:25:59.320 where you woke up a little bit

01:26:00.460 you realized that you were

01:26:02.860 living a false life

01:26:04.860 and

01:26:06.820 and something revealed itself to you

01:26:11.120 to let you know that you were

01:26:13.220 on the wrong path

01:26:14.320 and what was the price you paid for that

01:26:17.180 how about an

01:26:18.800 an interregnum of confusion how about a period of not knowing which way was up that's the price

01:26:25.780 you pay for letting go of your tyrannical of the tyrannical propositions that you use to

01:26:32.060 imprison yourself out of the tyranny as it says in exodus into the wasteland and desert

01:26:39.320 why do people cling to their foolish presuppositions because knowing something 1.00

01:26:45.580 stupid is more comforting than knowing nothing at all and the price you pay for the realization of 1.00

01:26:51.940 your own ignorance is a brief exposure to the fact that you're entirely lost but you can wake 1.00

01:26:58.700 up as a consequence right you can re-establish your relationship with the creative spirit that

01:27:04.440 makes what's good out of potential that's a rediscovery that revelation of your own ignorance

01:27:10.300 your own bitter ignorance that's a re-contact with the ground of being itself that's why it

01:27:15.480 strikes you so hard that's why it can be life-changing when you recognize your own

01:27:19.920 insufficiency this is part of what prayer calls you to do all the time to pray to pray on what's 1.00

01:27:26.840 what do you pray if you're sensible what am i doing that's stupid 0.99

01:27:31.400 well there's a source of inexhaustible wisdom 1.00

01:27:37.080 precisely proportionate to your stupidity 1.00

01:27:40.460 and you might say why bother 1.00

01:27:42.440 well we covered that already

01:27:43.840 so you don't fall into a pit

01:27:47.460 if you could do nothing but aim high

01:27:52.140 and look within yourself

01:27:54.660 for everything that stopped you

01:27:57.080 from moving forward

01:27:58.580 and you did that full heartedly unreservedly and you made that the the leitmotif of your life

01:28:07.680 what would you be like in a year in five years in 10 years in 20 years would you be headed for

01:28:15.520 sainthood itself is that not something that is a possibility that resides within you you know

01:28:22.580 perfectly well that there are times in your life where you took a turn for the better

01:28:26.760 what if that was the pattern of your existence

01:28:29.900 nothing but the constant turn for the better

01:28:32.480 and then you might also ask yourself

01:28:34.200 would there be any difference between living a life

01:28:36.900 that was composed of nothing but constant turns for the better

01:28:39.620 and existence in the kingdom of heaven itself

01:28:42.340 a place where everything is good

01:28:44.460 and still getting better

01:28:46.000 that's the identification

01:28:50.880 with the spirit of revelation

01:28:53.520 that descends

01:28:55.380 that replicates the conditions

01:28:57.700 that obtain at the beginning

01:29:00.200 of time and space itself.

01:29:03.100 That's the central core message

01:29:05.700 of the first four sentences

01:29:08.820 of the biblical corpus.

01:29:12.260 Thank you very much.

01:29:22.240 So, you know, when you came out on stage,

01:29:25.380 age you said that you were going to talk about 12 rules hey but you talked about this even if you

01:29:32.880 didn't notice it because that whole story that you told was wrestling with god yep right so you

01:29:39.660 got that exactly right just so you know what no problem yeah

01:29:43.140 all right here's a question what or who is behind the anti-semitic surge in the u.s

01:29:53.680 It's not just in the U.S., and in particular amongst Ivy League academia.

01:30:00.220 Well, Satan, obviously.

01:30:12.700 And I actually mean that, and I can explain why to some degree.

01:30:18.040 Cain abides by the narrative

01:30:25.440 of victim and victimizer

01:30:26.740 right

01:30:28.720 and Cain

01:30:31.100 is resentful

01:30:33.400 and bitter 1.00

01:30:35.120 and arrogant 1.00

01:30:36.720 and murderous 1.00

01:30:38.760 and deicidal 0.86

01:30:41.600 and genocidal

01:30:43.180 and the reason for that

01:30:45.980 is that he construes himself

01:30:47.400 as an eternal victim of innocence

01:30:49.440 and everyone else, God included,

01:30:52.680 as a victimizer.

01:30:54.520 And that story leads to hell.

01:30:58.720 So that's the theological level of explanation.

01:31:02.840 More prosaically,

01:31:06.160 it's a consequence of 1.00

01:31:08.900 idiocy and moral degeneration. 1.00

01:31:12.760 So the idiocy part is 1.00

01:31:15.140 the willingness of ignorant people 1.00

01:31:17.600 to swallow hyper-simplified 1.00

01:31:20.260 idolatrous rationalizations.

01:31:23.880 And here's one.

01:31:25.480 The world is founded on power.

01:31:28.800 There's nothing but victims and victimizers.

01:31:32.340 How do you identify the victimizers?

01:31:35.920 Well, what's most convenient

01:31:37.560 if you're a failure?

01:31:39.820 How about the successful?

01:31:42.100 The successful are victimizers.

01:31:45.140 What does that imply?

01:31:47.900 The hyper-successful are hyper-victimizers.

01:31:51.980 They're the worst.

01:31:53.660 Who's most hyper-successful, statistically? 1.00

01:31:58.140 Jews. 1.00

01:32:00.060 Right. 0.91

01:32:01.640 End of argument.

01:32:03.240 Why Ivy League people?

01:32:05.100 Well, because all they do is perpetrate the victim-victimizer narrative.

01:32:10.640 And so, here we are.

01:32:15.140 How do I know when I'm wrestling with God

01:32:22.900 versus wrestling with myself?

01:32:26.180 If it's about what you want,

01:32:32.440 then you're wrestling with yourself.

01:32:37.360 You know, here I'll tell you something cool.

01:32:41.500 So psychologists have spent a long time

01:32:44.620 with early large language models statistical modeling that's a good way of thinking about it

01:32:50.700 looking at the relationship between concepts the meaning of concepts of clusters of concepts and

01:32:57.060 we identified 30 years ago a pattern of clusters of concepts of personality and laid out a

01:33:06.840 somewhat inadequate but useful five-dimensional picture of human personality there's an important

01:33:16.940 dimension missing but we won't go into that at the moment one of the dimensions is negative emotion

01:33:23.000 and so negative emotion you can think of your emotional systems as a tree with two trunks

01:33:29.240 one trunk branching into two branching into many one half of the trunk or one of the separate

01:33:38.480 trunks is positive emotion and the other is negative emotion and they're independent

01:33:44.280 neurological systems each with their own biochemistry and they cross talk because it's

01:33:50.880 hard to be miserable when you're happy although you can laugh and cry at the same time right the

01:33:56.420 the relationship can be quite closely juxtaposed and paradoxical you can weep with joy

01:34:04.560 the negative emotions all cluster together coming as they do from the same trunk let's say sorrow

01:34:13.680 grief pain frustration disappointment shame anxiety horror disgust contempt etc and if you're

01:34:24.180 more likely than most to feel any of those you're more likely than most to feel all of them

01:34:31.600 there's a normal distribution of sensitivity to negative emotion with some people being

01:34:37.480 relatively immune and so very resistant to depression and anxiety but also somewhat opaque

01:34:47.840 to signals of distress and threat others extraordinarily sensitive to danger but

01:34:54.320 suffering because of a surfeit of negative emotion with most people in the middle that's the normal

01:35:00.380 distribution that's neuroticism one of the big five traits tell me the question again i knew

01:35:07.700 that you've been asking how do i know when i'm wrestling with god oh yes so one of the okay so i

01:35:14.880 outlined a sequence of negative emotions that were associated with the trait proclivity for

01:35:23.240 negative emotion. Here is another. Self-consciousness. There is no technical difference

01:35:35.700 between thinking about yourself and being miserable right so if you're

01:35:45.600 thinking about yourself you're wrestling with yourself in misery

01:35:53.240 when Tammy was talking about dealing with her grief what did she say she said she was feeling

01:36:00.900 bitter and resentful because people weren't delivering to her what she felt was due her

01:36:06.180 in her suffering now you can kind of understand that you know because her father had just died 1.00

01:36:10.760 and you could think what kind of a son of a bitch husband would leave his wife under such 0.99

01:36:15.260 circumstances look it was a question we wrestled with because there was conflicting moral obligations 0.99

01:36:20.720 at that moment but what she realized was that she realized what only she could realize which was that

01:36:30.900 Insofar as her suffering was a consequence of her fault,

01:36:35.760 the reason for that suffering is that her aim was inappropriate.

01:36:39.980 She wasn't looking up enough.

01:36:43.740 So she looked up and she said,

01:36:45.920 well, I need to reestablish my relationship with what's highest.

01:36:51.860 I need to realign my aim away from bitterness and resentment

01:36:56.920 towards only that which is optimally good.

01:37:02.580 That's a good definition of God.

01:37:05.120 A definition of God, note.

01:37:09.720 And what was the consequence?

01:37:12.740 She got more than she expected.

01:37:16.220 Right.

01:37:19.360 In the Gospels, on the Sermon on the Mount,

01:37:23.100 Christ says something strange.

01:37:24.600 He says, God takes care of the sparrows and clothes the lilies of the field.

01:37:30.220 And you faithless ones do not presume that you are of sufficient worth so that that could happen to you too.

01:37:37.020 And he sounds like Jesus the hippie.

01:37:39.520 You know, if you were just a flower or a bird, you know, the sky daddy would take care of you under his wing.

01:37:47.840 That's not what that means.

01:37:49.640 It's not what it means.

01:37:50.880 It means that if your aim is true, there's nothing that won't be revealed to you.

01:38:02.040 Even in the agonies of your misery, there's enough.

01:38:10.620 There's more than enough at hand to provide everything that you need.

01:38:16.320 And why would we assume

01:38:20.620 Anything other than

01:38:22.300 The world we understand so poorly

01:38:25.260 Is anything but a well of inexhaustible plenitude

01:38:29.100 I mean certainly you'd see

01:38:32.920 The miracles that have occurred

01:38:35.780 Over the last hundred years

01:38:37.500 The feeding of billions of people

01:38:41.020 The technological revolution

01:38:42.420 That seems to have no end

01:38:43.660 The intensification of our

01:38:45.940 computational ability

01:38:47.940 able to do more and more

01:38:50.000 with less and less

01:38:51.020 until what, until what

01:38:52.520 until we can do everything

01:38:53.620 with nothing at all

01:38:54.600 that's what God did

01:38:55.640 at the beginning of time

01:38:56.760 if it's about

01:39:02.040 what something in you

01:39:05.300 that you've allowed

01:39:06.820 to possess you

01:39:07.920 wants right now

01:39:09.940 you're wrestling

01:39:11.680 with the lowest parts

01:39:13.820 of yourself

01:39:14.580 If you reorient yourself and aim at only what is best, then you're attempting communion with God.

01:39:25.200 And you might ask yourself, well, how do you do that?

01:39:27.440 And I would say, well, try to do it.

01:39:31.700 Just try to do it.

01:39:33.220 Decide that before you look, before every word you speak, you place yourself in relationship to what makes itself manifest to you as the highest possible aim at that moment.

01:39:59.300 and practice that and ask yourself why in the world would you not do that why in the world

01:40:07.160 would you not want to make the most out of every possible moment and there's no difference between

01:40:12.660 making the most out of every possible moment and aiming up with as much

01:40:17.860 vision and love and hope and faith as you can possibly muster and you might say well faith

01:40:32.700 that's for people who are too weak to rely on the facts it's like what facts did you rely on when

01:40:40.000 you got married you know your your knowledge of who a woman was or a man what the hell did

01:40:47.720 You know about the facts.

01:40:51.060 You gamble in life.

01:40:53.940 You stake your soul on your bet.

01:40:57.220 You make your way forward with faith.

01:41:00.420 You don't know how your new job is going to turn out.

01:41:03.460 You don't know how your new friendships are going to unfold.

01:41:07.040 You assume that if you navigate properly over even the stormiest of seas,

01:41:12.040 you can eventually get to your destination.

01:41:15.420 And that's an action of faith.

01:41:16.960 and you have to make your life you have to make faith manifest in your life unless you want to

01:41:23.920 manifest the opposite partly because you're steeped in ignorance it's like what the hell

01:41:28.740 do you know and so you're always facing the plenitude of the unknown in relationship to

01:41:35.800 your own ignorance that's like the definition of being mortal and how do you step forward

01:41:42.000 when you don't know where to step. 1.00

01:41:45.620 You're like the fool in the tarot cards. 1.00

01:41:47.620 You look up and you walk off the cliff. 1.00

01:41:51.280 And you do that while you're looking up.

01:41:54.300 And you do that with every step you take.

01:41:57.080 And if you look up towards the highest possible heights,

01:42:00.460 then every step you take will have the firmest

01:42:04.260 of all possible foundations underneath it.

01:42:07.000 And you can do that with every glance and every word.

01:42:10.280 And if you did that, you would set the world right.

01:42:21.900 Last question.

01:42:26.800 You often talk about the ideal masculine, but what about ideal feminine?

01:42:32.880 How can the divine feminine be integrated into society to make it greater if it can?

01:42:40.280 ham and i were in rome

01:42:44.680 six months ago and in saint peter's basilica which is perhaps the most remarkable building ever built

01:42:53.220 there's a remarkable sculpture by michelangelo who who's carved this particular sculpture when

01:42:59.100 he was a very young man and it's the paeda it's the virgin mary the divine mother the archetype

01:43:06.480 feminine perfection

01:43:08.660 if you'll have it that way 1.00

01:43:10.640 and what 1.00

01:43:11.760 does she have in her arms

01:43:14.900 she has the 1.00

01:43:16.640 broken body of her perfect 1.00

01:43:18.800 son 0.87

01:43:19.240 that's the

01:43:22.900 female crucifixion 1.00

01:43:24.220 what's the highest possible offering 0.93

01:43:28.860 what's the highest

01:43:30.980 possible offering to God

01:43:32.760 child

01:43:34.460 and self

01:43:36.600 and what does that mean

01:43:39.880 for motherhood

01:43:42.040 well the good mother

01:43:44.640 offers her child to the world

01:43:46.040 to be broken

01:43:46.740 and to be redeemed

01:43:49.500 the good mother

01:43:52.460 cannot protect her child

01:43:54.520 from the adventure of his life

01:43:56.840 she has to facilitate that

01:44:00.680 no matter what the cost

01:44:02.520 and the courage that's intrinsic

01:44:06.320 to that is the

01:44:08.120 core of female heroic 0.98

01:44:10.420 being 0.99

01:44:10.900 it's not the only aspect

01:44:13.980 but it's the

01:44:16.520 most feminine aspect 0.92

01:44:17.700 the woman who doesn't 1.00

01:44:20.560 do that just 1.00

01:44:21.160 the woman who does nothing but protects her child 0.89

01:44:24.360 destroys her child 0.99

01:44:25.460 the woman who offers her child to God 0.98

01:44:27.840 receives her child back

01:44:30.220 and that 1.00

01:44:32.520 Story is the core of the divinity and femininity. 0.93

01:44:41.480 And every mother worth her salt knows that. 0.99

01:44:46.940 And that's that.

01:44:58.380 Thank you all.

01:44:59.860 Thank you very much everyone. It was very good to see you.

01:45:07.860 Thank you for your time and attention.

01:45:12.860 When you travel well, your KLM Royal Dutch Airlines ticket takes you to more than just your destination.

01:45:19.860 It takes you to front row views, voices lost in the music and new shared memories.

01:45:25.860 memories. And when the last song fades, the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines crew is here to ensure

01:45:34.520 your journey home hits all the right notes. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. When you travel,

01:45:42.320 travel well.

Lecture 01： Present or Absent We Wrestle with God

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