Lecture 01： Present or Absent We Wrestle with God
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 45 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
16
sentences flagged
Toxicity
60
sentences flagged
Hate speech
34
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, I talk about why you need a why, and why you should have a why. I also talk about a recent interview I did with actor Stephen Fry, and how the world is founded on the question, Why?
Transcript
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I'm pleased to let you know that we're going to release a lecture a week
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from my extensive tour archive beginning this Sunday
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This allows me to do something interesting and useful
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My health is such at the moment that I can't really return to podcasting
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or public lecturing. But we recorded these with the express intention of preparing them for
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release. And we've all determined that this is a very good time to do that. So that's what's going
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to happen. I hope you find them useful and compelling. They'll be particularly attractive
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to those of you who liked my early YouTube work that was very lecture focused. It's a return to
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my roots i suppose in some ways and i'm as happy as i can be under the current circumstances given
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my ill health to be participating in this process and to have these lectures prepared for release
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thank you very much for your continued interest and support
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there's no adventure without trouble and the greatest adventure has the most trouble and if
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you took on the full trouble of your life unstintingly you'd have an adventure that
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would justify the misery. Why do you need a why? Have you tried making your way forward without
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meaning? What are you going to do? You're going to work with no purpose? You're going to sacrifice
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with no purpose? You're going to suffer with no purpose? Present or absent, we wrestle with God.
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That's human destiny, all aimed at answering the same question. On what principle is the world
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founded? And on what principle should the world be founded? If you gaze upon all the things that
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terrify you simultaneously, then you become who you could be. And that would be the spirit that
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could withstand death and hell and yet prevail.
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I debated, we debated a New York Times journalist,
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He's educated the way that only educated Englishmen
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with the accent that makes them sound intelligent even if they're reading a telephone book
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and uh he was witty and charming and brilliant and everything you'd hope a man might be
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and we got to know each other a bit you know um and i interviewed him for my youtube channel and
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he's a he's very interested in mythology he's he's very interested in stories he's an actor so
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that makes sense stories compel him and myths myths are the deepest form of stories that's a
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good way of thinking about it and we'll talk about that a lot trying to get to the bottom of just what
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a story is and steven said some things that were quite surprising to me he he said a lot i listened
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to him a lot he needed to talk people really need to talk they really need to be listened to
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and that's partly because we actually organize our brains at the highest level our psyches our
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souls at the highest level of abstraction and unity with language and if we don't have someone
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to listen and and to allow us to think on our feet we our brains get terribly disorganized and
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our aim goes astray and we become chaotic and anxious and we wander off into the desert or off
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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
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he said something that i found extremely interesting there's a scene in dostoevsky's
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great book, The Brothers Karamazov, which is a classic scene.
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The book features the brothers, obviously, two of whom are Ivan and Elyosha.
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And Elyosha is a monastic novitiate, so he's a religious man.
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And his brother, Ivan, is a charming materialistic atheist
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who can really wrap his brother up in verbal arguments.
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with no problem one of the things that makes this book so utterly remarkable is that
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Ivan really has everything going for him on the arrogant intellect side
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but Dostoevsky shows in the dramatization and characterization in the novel that Eliosha is the
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better man and what he's trying to indicate there is that whatever constitutes the deepest form of
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ethic is not necessarily the same thing that makes you the most effective verbal adversary
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and also to make the point that just winning the argument doesn't mean you're right and that's
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something to really remember with people it's really something to remember with your wife or
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your husband but i'm dead serious about that you know the fact that you might be able to defeat
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your wife in an argument or vice versa does not mean that you were right right and and if you're
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wrong and you win that's a really bad thing because then you're wrong and you think you're
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right and if you were unbearable before you're going to be a lot more unbearable after that and
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so one of the reasons you really want to listen to your partner and maybe even help them make
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their point is you know just so you could investigate the off probability that someone
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as wonderful as you still has something to learn and you know the thing is if you're stupid and
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you learn why even though it's painful the advantage is that you don't have to be stupid
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again in the future and that's a big advantage you know and it's a really big advantage for your wife
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so and so Ivan trounces Eliosha regularly when they have discussions about for example whether
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or not God exists. And I started with this discussion with the proclamation that absent
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or present, we wrestle with God. Ivan does something famous in this book. He mounts what's
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probably the most powerful argument ever offered in the literary domain for the atheist claim.
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and he does it essentially on moral grounds interestingly enough he tells this story that
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dostoevsky actually took out of a russian newspaper about this four-year-old girl who
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had tyrannical terrible brutal psychopathic tyrannical parents and one night to punish
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their daughter they locked her in the outhouse and this was russia and it was like 40 below and
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And she froze to death during the night while she was screaming to be released.
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And it was a well-publicized event, well-publicized horrifying event,
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as the horchrous death of a child is self-evidently, we hope, a moral crime,
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although we seem to be committing an awful lot of those recently.
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and dostoevsky uses that event as an argument that ivan puts forth about the i would say about
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the iniquity of existence essentially and he asks ivan asks his brother you know if
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this god you believe you believe to be a moral being said is willing to torture even one child
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to death regardless even if that holds up the whole world is that something you yourself would
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do that's what he asks his brother and elio she has no idea what to say because what do you say
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to to a question like that and ivan says to his brother i know you wouldn't do that
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but the god that you claim exists and that is good and that you worship apparently does and so
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that it shakes his faith and it's still the case that as the novel progresses he shows himself to
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be the better man. Ivan being brilliant intellect is characterized by the pride that the brilliant
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intellect has as its greatest sin. You know I've been thinking recently about how the cosmic scales
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of justice are balanced let's say there's a gospel line that says that to those from those
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to whom much has been given much will be expected or demanded and that's a very interesting line
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you know because one of the things we wrestle with in the culture now let's say is the issue
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of privilege maybe you're born wealthy maybe you're born tall maybe you're born caucasian
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apparently that's an advantage maybe you're born Asian maybe you're born good-looking you know we
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are all awarded privileges that constitute a temperamental advantage or maybe a situational
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advantage and there is something that seems unfair about that arguably it's certainly the
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case that people differ painfully in their intellectual capacity for example it's also
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equally obvious that that difference is a major determinant of success economically let's say as
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you move forward even the trait conscientiousness which is associated with orderliness and
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industrious industriousness and also predicts economic success has quite a substantial genetic
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influence which means that it's really not attributable to the it's not a trait that's
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attributable to the person that bears it it's a gift in some ways that's given to them at birth
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and you might say well if talents are and abilities are distributed unequally how can
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there be any justice and the answer to that might be if you're fortunate you better pay for it
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somehow and one of the things you see with people who are very intelligent is that they fall prey
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to the temptation of pride and that temptation for intelligent people is proportionate to the
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degree of their intelligence and i would say the potential downside of their gift gone astray
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is sufficiently great to be the factor on the other side of the scale now so if you're intelligent
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I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college.
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The traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry.
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They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.
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It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you.
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If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time.
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That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself.
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You have the opportunity to investigate that calling.
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and so with every gift comes a equivalent temptation and with every talent comes an
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equivalent responsibility and i really do believe that's the case you know i think that if nothing
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else if you are unfairly privileged and you don't make much of that if you don't offer other people
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the benefit of your privilege then you'll take yourself apart in one way or another
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and so Ivan's a very intelligent man and he's very prideful as a consequence and that doesn't
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work out very well for him and and he points to the suffering of children as his evidence
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against the existence of God, and when I was talking to Stephen Fry, he did something that
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was similar, and I found this extremely interesting, because first of all, he talked about his interest
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in mythology, and then he made a claim, which I believe to be untrue, that the mythology
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upon which are the stories, the deep stories, because that's what I mean when I say mythology,
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the deep stories upon which our culture are predicated
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and many places that I've looked but I certainly the case that I found a wealth of wisdom at least
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as rich in the biblical corpus in the Judeo-Christian stories and I would say deeper
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and that's partly because a lot of them were a lot of those stories were they're the culture
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part of the culture heritage of Judaism and the Jews are smart and preternaturally smart in some
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ways and they were immensely remarkable storytellers and the stories they told are
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unbelievably deep they're insanely deep and we'll wander through a couple tonight and i'll show you
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some of that depth and i'll and then fry did something interesting you know he he started
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talking about god and i said well you know what what's your problem exactly with with god as a
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concept and i was expecting something akin to the materialist atheist notion that god is a
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superfluous hypothesis um and uh you know that's a perspective but not a very deep perspective in
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my estimation and a very dangerous one as we're finding out right now but fry actually got angry
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and what he got angry about one of the things he pointed to was the suffering of children just like
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ivan he he talked about watching children with bone cancer suffer you know and uh how dreadful
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that was and how preposterous it was to presume that in a world characterized by the suffering
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of innocence that anything that could be regarded as a transcendent good might be held to exist
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now but and fair enough you know you can understand that argument but what i found so
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remarkable was he was actually angry about it. He was angry about it. He was morally outraged about
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it. He was shaking his fist at the sky. Well, that's what you do to someone that you're angry
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about. You don't shake your fist at the rocks on the ground. You shake your fist at the imaginary
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being in the sky, even if you're an atheist. And that's an interesting thing because what it
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what it indicates at least to some degree is that a even if you're atheistic you wrestle with god
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and b even if you're atheistic you're at least unconsciously in a relationship
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because why else bother with the anger why else what else is the source of the moral outrage and
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you know one of the things i've noticed is that because i've read a lot of comments from atheists
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like i don't know maybe more than anybody else in the world you know i'm dead serious about that
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because i i've done a lot of analysis of biblical stories let's say online and i read i read most of
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the comments that are put on my youtube channel and that's often like you know a thousand five
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thousand comments a week a lot of comments and some of the arguments that the atheists mount
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against what i'm elucidating let's say are rationalistic materialistic atheist objections
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and but most of them are angry and a lot of them are written by people who were hurt by people who
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purported to be religious at some point in their lives you know they had a tyrannical
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they encountered the tyranny of dogmatic insistence in religious guys and that damaged them and left
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them with with a resentment towards anything with a religious flavor let's say but even that that's
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not a rational argument by the way let's point that out very clearly that's an emotional argument
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and it's the kind of emotional argument that you would mount against someone that you were in a
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relationship with now then you might ask yourself about that are we in a relationship with the
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spirit of being and becoming that's a good way of thinking but i don't mean with the material world
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the material world in some sense isn't the whole world you know and we all know that because well
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first of all, we exist within the material world, and we're conscious, and we don't know how to
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relate that to the material realm at all. Not at all. We have no idea. We don't understand the
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relationship between consciousness and matter at all. And you might say, well, it can be reducible
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to neurological function, and I would say most of the neurological function that characterizes you
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has no consciousness and so how we distinguish between the neurological function that hypothetically
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underlies consciousness and the neurological function that seems equally complex but has
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no consciousness is not something that anyone knows and i would say the one undeniable truth
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that we have at hand is the fact of our consciousness that was basically descartes
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proposition he said i think before therefore i am but what he meant in more modern parlance is
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something like the brute fact of my own consciousness is one is the most is the
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deepest of undeniable realities and so what that appears to indicate is that
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well you can make a materialist case that matter is at the bottom of being itself
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But you can make an equally powerful case philosophically
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materialist or otherwise in the absence of consciousness
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And no materialist has ever come up with a satisfactory answer to that.
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And then, so there's the fact of consciousness, and that's a strange fact.
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And then there's also the fact of the manner in which we're organized, we're constructed.
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So human beings are personalities, and personalities exist in relationship.
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and insofar as we're personalities we're our personalities speaking materialistically let's
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say are an evolved function we're personalities because being a personality is what allows us to
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orient ourselves in the world and so if at the highest level of our being we're personalities
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how is it that we're not in relationship with the essence of reality otherwise it wouldn't work
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so that's a very interesting that's a very interesting fact now here's another twist for
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you so i've been in touch with richard dawkins who's probably the world's most famous living
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atheist and he's like the avatar of the enlightenment mind he's the last standing
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avatar of the enlightenment mind that's a good way of thinking about it and uh formidable a
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formidable uh a formidable intellect and someone i actually like i've met richard a couple of times
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and uh he's an ornery bastard you know and he's tough as a boot and you don't mess with him
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lightly and he's disagreeable enough to cut you into pieces like englishman can
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at the drop of a hat but you know i think fundamentally he's a genuine scientist and
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and that's a difficult thing to be and you have to be a dedicated pursuer of the truth to be a
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scientist and there's a certain moral element to that a profound moral element to that um
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and i i tried to get dawkins to talk to me a number of times and he put me off
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you know in various ways for a while but then one day he he wrote me and he said i don't know what
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the hell i can never understand what you're talking about peterson but but uh i don't know
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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
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think maybe you're interested in this and so he sent me a paper and i thought you son of a bitch
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you know exactly why i want to talk to you and so it was a paper i actually knew about from about 30
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years previously and he made a very interesting claim in that paper he said that every biological
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organism is a microcosm of its environment by necessity like a model like a like a low resolution
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representation of its environment and and here's what he meant by that so he said if imagine you
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were an alien scientists like to to imagine such things they don't believe in angels or demons but
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aliens man those those things are there for sure anyways anyways he said imagine you gave an alien
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scientist a bird a dead bird and he said what could this scientist conclude about what could
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the alien who'd never seen the earth let's say conclude about the earth from analyzing the bird
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and the answer is well a tremendous amount because you could you could calculate the density of the
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atmosphere from its wings and if you analyzed its blood properly you would know the composition of
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the atmosphere and you'd be able to calculate the gravitational pull of the earth and its approximate
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mass and and you by analyzing its dna at a deep enough level you could reconstruct a lot of the
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tree of life that characterizes earth itself i mean a bird is a densely packed microcosm of its
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environment and i thought well i don't know if you know this dr dawkins but there was a medieval
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conceit among christians hundreds of years ago that the human soul was a microcosm
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right and which was a reflection of the cosmic order and your proposition as an evolutionary
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biologist is that you can't adapt to an environment that you're not a microcosmic replica of that's
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exactly the same claim that the christians made like in in the in the medieval period
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we're a microcosm our soul reflects the cosmic order you might say well what the hell does that
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mean dr peterson it means that if you're not in tune with the structure of reality at
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all of the levels at which it manifests itself then you die that's what it means and so i found
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that extraordinarily interesting especially because it has another implication which is that
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if we are a microcosm of the cosmos itself and we're a personality then maybe the deepest way
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testament stories that we're in relationship with being and becoming and you know and tammy
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made reference to that in relationship let's say to prayer and it's easy to be cynical about such
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things especially if you're a luciferian intellect but i would say that the thought that rationalists
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worship is secularized prayer, historically speaking. And so why would I say that? Well,
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you follow along, you tell me if you think that this is incorrect. I can't see a flaw in it.
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As a scientist, I might ask myself, well, what do I do when I'm generating a scientific hypothesis?
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Now, this is a very interesting question, because scientists never discuss how they generate their
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hypotheses they write down their experimental results and their methods and they just take the
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hypothesis part for granted or maybe they make up some story about how they were driven to their
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hypothesis by rational means and that's just not true that's not how it works at all i had a great
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student at harvard shelly carson shelly was uh creative and intuitive and she'd come up with a
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bright idea and you can't just write your damn bright idea down in a scientific paper you have
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to tell people how you came to it logically so then she'd have to invent a story about how she
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came to her intuitive idea logically and that was the introduction to her scientific paper
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and scientists do that all the time every single scientific paper is like that
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where do your hypotheses come from your research question what grips your interest what compels
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you and calls you forward and how does that make itself manifest zero instruction in that in the
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scientific realm okay so let's take that apart a bit well the first thing that you need if you're
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a scientist is a problem it has to be a real problem it has to be some and how do you know
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if it's a real problem how do you know if you have a real problem it won't let you go well
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that's a funny way of thinking about it's like what won't let you go you well what do you mean
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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
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you can't let yourself go if you can't escape from a problem that besets you what makes it
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what makes you think for a moment that it's you that's besetting you with the problem and you know
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this perfectly well you know this perfectly well because many times in your life if you had the
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chance of just saying to yourself you should let that problem go you would but you can't you can't
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for example when your conscience calls you out or if you do you damage yourself by lying that deeply
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and it's the same if something calls to you not so much besets you but grips your interest which
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is something that happens to scientists all the time they're insanely called forward by some
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phenomena and phenomena some set of phenomena phenomena means to shine forth they're called
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forward by what shines forth to them and so you need that calling and conscience to specify your
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problem and so you do that in relationship to what besets you and interests you and there's an
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autonomy in that you know this too you can't decide what you're interested in this is so weird
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this is part of what got me interested in psychoanalytics thought so many years ago because
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freud and jung both said there are autonomous there's an autonomy of spirit operating within
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you they put it in the unconscious you're motivated by things that aren't under your voluntary control
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they have an autonomy they call to you they they plague you you can't control it what the hell is
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that so you need to have a problem and maybe it's a problem because you're fascinated by something
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you're you're locked onto it by a force that's beyond your control or you're plagued by it your
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conscience screams that you have to do something about the cancer of children for example
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because someone needs to because the suffering is wrong that's a moral claim by the way not a
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scientific claim from the purely scientific perspective the cancer cell has just as much
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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
00:36:33.320
If it was you that thought it up, why didn't you know it to begin with?
00:36:43.920
Or under what conditions did it make itself manifest to you?
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.
00:36:58.380
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
00:39:19.280
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.
00:39:42.260
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.
00:39:59.760
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
00:46:08.140
Because if you can see where they're pointing their eyes,
00:46:12.600
And if you can figure out what they're aiming at,
00:46:18.200
you can use your body to mimic their responses emotionally,
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.
00:48:01.420
To learn how not to let the world burn pointlessly.
00:48:09.560
Well, maybe to ally yourself with the central tenets of heroism per se.
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
00:50:00.080
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
00:50:22.300
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,
00:50:43.860
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
00:55:01.300
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
00:57:03.300
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
00:57:15.980
And then they might mask their lack of uselessness with a moral veneer.
0.98
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
01:00:35.700
is about the most cynical and self-serving story that you could possibly tell.
01:00:43.260
It's compelling because when a human social organization goes wrong,
01:00:52.780
You know, if you and your wife are not getting along,
01:01:01.200
you're left with the relationship of tyrant to slave
01:01:07.400
but it's in the degeneration of the institution
01:01:23.260
at some relatively high level of sophistication
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
01:03:05.720
Now that archaic terminology grates on our modern ears.
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.
01:03:53.560
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.
01:04:10.500
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
01:05:20.040
and how you have to organize yourself into the future
01:05:49.900
He becomes resentful, arrogant, bitter, murderous, and then genocidal.
0.69
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.
01:06:19.580
It sets the pattern of the battle between the hostile brothers,
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
01:07:34.520
in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth
01:07:43.980
and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters
01:07:59.480
It's a juxtaposition of a sequence of metaphors.
01:08:06.900
And tohu vabohu means something like formless potential.
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
01:14:57.960
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,
01:15:12.420
So imagine that you're conducting yourself as a proper conscious moral agent in your family.
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.
01:15:44.860
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.
01:15:59.440
I mean, even if you don't have much hope for yourself,
01:16:03.780
even if you're bitter about the fact that you've wasted your potential,
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,
01:16:22.140
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
01:17:37.540
you're caring for your son so that he can manifest
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.
01:19:16.860
of the spirit descends upon him what does that mean next slide please oh i'll tell you about this
01:19:29.020
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
01:20:39.980
by confronting the predators and making use of 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.
01:21:34.560
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
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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.
01:23:42.080
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
01:24:08.420
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?
01:24:22.080
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
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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
01:26:18.800
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
01:27:58.580
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
01:28:34.200
would there be any difference between living a life
01:28:36.900
that was composed of nothing but constant turns for the better
01:29:25.380
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.
01:30:12.700
And I actually mean that, and I can explain why to some degree.
01:30:58.720
So that's the theological level of explanation.
01:31:53.660
Who's most hyper-successful, statistically?
1.00
01:32:05.100
Well, because all they do is perpetrate the victim-victimizer narrative.
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.
01:36:45.920
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
01:37:24.600
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.
01:37:39.520
You know, if you were just a flower or a bird, you know, the sky daddy would take care of you under his wing.
01:37:50.880
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.
01:38:25.260
Is anything but a well of inexhaustible plenitude
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?
01:39:33.220
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
01:41:00.420
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,
01:41:16.960
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
01:41:57.080
And if you look up towards the highest possible heights,
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.
01:42:26.800
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?
01:42:44.680
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
01:44:21.160
the woman who does nothing but protects her child
0.89
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
01:44:59.860
Thank you very much everyone. It was very good to see you.
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
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