The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Problem That Won’t Let You Go

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00:00:30.000 Hi, everybody. I'm pleased to let you know that we're going to release a lecture a week

00:00:36.760 from my extensive tour archive beginning this Sunday and then repeating every Sunday after that.

00:00:44.040 This allows me to do something interesting and useful while I'm otherwise incapacitated.

00:00:49.880 My health is such at the moment that I can't really return to podcasting or public lecturing.

00:00:54.920 but we recorded these with the express intention of preparing them for release and we've all

00:01:02.200 determined that this is a very good time to do that so that's what's going to happen i hope you

00:01:08.900 find them useful and compelling they'll be particularly attractive to those of you who

00:01:14.520 liked my early youtube work that was very lecture focused it's a return to my roots i suppose in

00:01:21.240 some ways, and I'm as happy as I can be under the current circumstances, given my ill health, to

00:01:26.760 be participating in this process and to have these lectures prepared for release.

00:01:32.420 Thank you very much for your continued interest and support.

00:01:38.700 There's no adventure without trouble, and the greatest adventure has the most trouble. And if

00:01:43.180 you took on the full trouble of your life, unstintingly, you'd have an adventure that

00:01:47.700 would justify the misery. Why do you need a why? Have you tried making your way forward without

00:01:53.080 meaning? What are you going to do? You're going to work with no purpose? You're going to sacrifice

00:01:56.620 with no purpose? You're going to suffer with no purpose? Present or absent, we wrestle with God.

00:02:03.100 And that's human destiny, all aimed at answering the same question. On what principle is the world

00:02:08.160 founded? And on what principle should the world be founded? If you gaze upon all the things that

00:02:13.440 terrify you simultaneously, then you become who you could be. And that would be the spirit that

00:02:19.660 could withstand death and hell and yet prevail.

00:02:43.440 Thank you.

00:03:01.040 So I was sitting backstage

00:03:03.260 trying to figure out how I would open this

00:03:08.260 50-city tour, new tour

00:03:11.740 and a phrase came into my mind

00:03:16.040 and that was

00:03:17.360 present or absent we wrestle with God

00:03:20.600 and that reminded me of an interview I did

00:03:25.020 a while back with a very urbane

00:03:28.560 and sophisticated English actor

00:03:31.260 Stephen Fry

00:03:32.540 and I did a debate with Stephen

00:03:37.600 he was on my side

00:03:38.840 at a forum called the Munk Center in Toronto.

00:03:43.620 I debated, we debated a New York Times journalist,

00:03:47.580 and you can imagine what that was like.

00:03:50.240 And a compatriot of hers.

00:03:55.140 And Mr. Fry was a delight.

00:03:58.940 He's educated the way that only educated Englishmen

00:04:02.840 are educated with their,

00:04:04.120 with the accent that makes them sound intelligent even if they're reading a telephone book

00:04:10.920 and uh he was witty and charming and brilliant and everything you'd hope a man might be

00:04:20.480 and we got to know each other a bit you know um and i interviewed him for my youtube channel and

00:04:27.760 he's a he's very interested in mythology he's he's very interested in stories well he's an actor so

00:04:36.120 that makes sense stories compel him and myths myths are the deepest form of stories that's a

00:04:42.820 good way of thinking about it and we'll talk about that a lot trying to get to the bottom of just what

00:04:48.460 a story is and steven said some things that were quite surprising to me he he said a lot i listened

00:04:54.220 to him a lot he needed to talk people really need to talk they really need to be listened to

00:04:59.700 and that's partly because we actually organize our brains at the highest level our psyches our

00:05:05.400 souls at the highest level of abstraction and unity with language and if we don't have someone

00:05:12.240 to listen and and to allow us to think on our feet we our brains get terribly disorganized and

00:05:19.360 our aim goes astray and we become chaotic and anxious and we wander off into the desert or off

00:05:26.640 a cliff it's it's not a good thing and Stephen is a very intelligent man and he had a lot to say and

00:05:36.600 he said something that I found extremely interesting there's a scene in Dostoevsky's

00:05:47.440 great book, The Brothers Karamazov, which is a classic scene.

00:05:51.720 The book features the brothers, obviously, two of whom are Ivan and Elosia, and Elosia.

00:06:00.120 And Elosia is a monastic novitiate, so he's a religious man.

00:06:06.940 And his brother, Ivan, is a charming materialistic atheist who can really wrap his brother up

00:06:15.020 in verbal arguments with no problem one of the things that makes this book so utterly remarkable

00:06:21.400 is that Ivan really has everything going for him on the arrogant intellect side

00:06:27.480 but Dostoevsky shows in the dramatization and characterization in the novel that Eliosha is the

00:06:35.400 better man and what he's trying to indicate there is that whatever constitutes the deepest form of

00:06:42.600 ethic is not necessarily the same thing that makes you the most effective verbal adversary

00:06:49.640 and also to make the point that just winning the argument doesn't mean you're right and that's

00:06:58.840 something to really remember with people it's really something to remember with your wife or

00:07:02.920 your husband but i'm dead serious about that you know the fact that you might be able to defeat

00:07:09.180 your wife in an argument or vice versa does not mean that you were right right and and if you're

00:07:16.280 wrong and you win that's a really bad thing because then you're wrong and you think you're

00:07:20.940 right and if you were unbearable before you're going to be a lot more unbearable after that and

00:07:25.580 so one of the reasons you really want to listen to your partner and maybe even help them make

00:07:30.840 their point is you know just so you could investigate the off probability that someone 1.00

00:07:37.340 as wonderful as you still has something to learn and you know the thing is if you're stupid and 1.00

00:07:44.180 you learn why even though it's painful the advantage is that you don't have to be stupid 1.00

00:07:48.620 again in the future and that's a big advantage you know and it's a really big advantage for your wife 0.97

00:07:54.800 so and so Ivan trounces Eliosha regularly when they have discussions about for example whether

00:08:05.000 or not God exists. And I started with this discussion with the proclamation that absent

00:08:13.960 or present, we wrestle with God. Ivan does something famous in this book. He mounts what's

00:08:22.280 probably the most powerful argument ever offered in the literary domain for the atheist claim.

00:08:31.000 and he does it essentially on moral grounds interestingly enough he tells this story that

00:08:36.840 dostoevsky actually took out of a russian newspaper about this four-year-old girl who

00:08:43.000 had tyrannical terrible brutal psychopathic tyrannical parents and one night to punish

00:08:50.900 their daughter they locked her in the outhouse and this was russia and it was like 40 below and 0.84

00:08:56.740 And she froze to death during the night while she was screaming to be released.

00:09:02.240 And that became a scandal in Russia.

00:09:05.980 And it was a well-publicized event, well-publicized horrifying event,

00:09:11.900 as the horchrous death of a child is self-evidently, we hope, a moral crime,

00:09:20.240 though we seem to be committing an awful lot of those recently.

00:09:23.240 and dostoevsky uses that event as an argument that ivan puts forth about the i would say about

00:09:34.120 the iniquity of existence essentially and he asks ivan asks his brother you know if

00:09:40.520 this god you believe you believe to be a moral being said is willing to torture even one child

00:09:48.280 to death regardless even if that holds up the whole world is that something you yourself would

00:09:57.640 do that's what he asks his brother and eliosha has no idea what to say because what do you say to

00:10:03.320 to a question like that and ivan says to his brother i know you wouldn't do that

00:10:09.680 but the god that you claim exists and that is good and that you worship apparently does and so

00:10:17.780 apart from the utter preposterousness

00:10:20.920 from a materialistic perspective

00:10:22.820 say that the deity is

00:10:24.700 a necessary supposition

00:10:26.260 I think your case

00:10:28.760 for his existence is shaky

00:10:30.600 on moral grounds

00:10:31.620 and Eliosia

00:10:33.680 is silent in the

00:10:38.300 onslaught

00:10:40.820 of that argumentation

00:10:42.020 but

00:10:42.820 it isn't obvious

00:10:46.500 that it shakes his faith and it's still the case that as the novel progresses he shows himself to

00:10:54.580 be the better man. Ivan being brilliant intellect is characterized by the pride that the brilliant

00:11:03.760 intellect has as its greatest sin. You know I've been thinking recently about how the cosmic scales

00:11:12.140 of justice are balanced let's say there's a gospel line that says that to those from those

00:11:19.300 to whom much has been given much will be expected or demanded and that's a very interesting line

00:11:28.640 you know because one of the things we wrestle with in the culture now let's say is the issue

00:11:33.800 of privilege maybe you're born wealthy maybe you're born tall maybe you're born caucasian

00:11:39.980 apparently that's an advantage maybe you're born asian maybe you're born good-looking you know

00:11:45.720 we are all awarded privileges that constitute a temperamental advantage or maybe a situational

00:11:54.460 advantage and there's something that seems unfair about that arguably it's certainly the case that

00:12:03.040 people differ painfully in their intellectual capacity for example it's also equally obvious

00:12:10.200 that that difference is a major determinant of success economically let's say as you move forward

00:12:17.940 even the trait conscientiousness which is associated with orderliness and industrious

00:12:24.400 industriousness and also predicts economic success has quite a substantial genetic influence which

00:12:32.240 means that it's really not attributable to the it's not a trait that's attributable to the person

00:12:37.900 that bears it it's a gift in some ways that's given to them at birth and you might say well

00:12:43.340 if talents are and abilities are distributed unequally how can there be any justice and the

00:12:50.660 answer to that might be if you're fortunate you better pay for it somehow and one of the things

00:12:57.560 you see with people who are very intelligent is that they fall prey to the temptation of pride

00:13:03.700 and that temptation for intelligent people is proportionate to the degree of their intelligence

00:13:09.480 and i would say the potential downside of their gift gone astray is sufficiently great

00:13:19.280 to be the factor on the other side of the scale now so if you're intelligent and you're proud

00:13:27.540 of that and you get arrogant that will take you places that you couldn't go if you weren't that

00:13:32.640 bright and those aren't going to be places that you're particularly going to enjoy being

00:13:37.260 imagine your favorite lecture dial that up on max put that on steroids and then add some

00:13:44.460 cinematic elements to it that's the best way i could describe a peterson academy lecture

00:13:48.860 i went to college because i had to i go to peterson academy because i want to i'm still

00:13:55.600 I've been paying off college from 10 years ago and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college.

00:14:00.600 In traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry.

00:14:03.600 They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.

00:14:07.600 It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you.

00:14:12.600 If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time.

00:14:15.600 That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself.

00:14:20.600 You have the opportunity to investigate that calling.

00:14:25.600 and so with every gift comes a equivalent temptation and with every talent comes an

00:14:37.480 equivalent responsibility and i really do believe that's the case you know i think that

00:14:43.040 if nothing else if you are unfairly privileged and you don't make much of that if you don't

00:14:49.260 offer other people the benefit of your privilege then you'll take yourself apart in one way or

00:14:57.120 another and so ivan's a very intelligent man and he's very prideful as a consequence and

00:15:04.660 that doesn't work out very well for him and and uh he points to the suffering of children

00:15:11.220 as his evidence against the existence of god and when i was talking to steven fry

00:15:18.680 he did something that was similar and i found this extremely interesting because

00:15:25.380 first of all he talked about his interest in mythology and then he made a claim which i

00:15:32.360 believe to be untrue that the mythology upon which are the stories the deep stories because

00:15:37.900 that's what i mean when i say mythology the deep stories upon which our culture are predicated

00:15:43.080 the essentially the biblical stories were of perhaps inferior quality to other collections

00:15:50.640 of ancient stories that we have accumulated and that surprised me because that's by no means

00:15:55.960 evident to me and I know a reasonable amount about mythology and I've found great wisdom in

00:16:03.340 Taoism and in ancient Egyptian theology and in ancient Mesopotamian theology and many places

00:16:09.920 that I've looked but I certainly the case that I found a wealth of wisdom at least as rich in the

00:16:18.800 biblical corpus in the Judeo-Christian stories and I would say deeper and that's partly because

00:16:25.080 a lot of them were a lot of those stories were they're the culture part of the culture heritage

00:16:30.980 of Judaism and the Jews are smart and preternaturally smart in some ways and they were immensely

00:16:39.240 remarkable storytellers and the stories they told are unbelievably deep they're insanely deep and

00:16:46.920 we'll wander through a couple tonight and i'll show you some of that depth and i'll

00:16:53.440 and then fry did something interesting you know he he started talking about god and i said well

00:16:59.380 you know what what's your problem exactly with with god as a concept and i was expecting something

00:17:05.660 akin to the materialist atheist notion

00:17:08.620 that God is a superfluous hypothesis.

00:17:12.780 And, you know, that's a perspective,

00:17:16.120 but not a very deep perspective in my estimation,

00:17:20.240 and a very dangerous one, as we're finding out right now.

00:17:23.360 But Fry actually got angry.

00:17:25.660 And what he got angry about,

00:17:27.360 one of the things he pointed to,

00:17:28.540 was the suffering of children, just like Ivan.

00:17:30.540 he he talked about watching children with bone cancer suffer you know and uh how dreadful that

00:17:39.700 was and how preposterous it was to presume that in a world characterized by the suffering of

00:17:46.400 innocence that anything that could be regarded as a transcendent good might be held to exist

00:17:54.240 now but and fair enough you know you can understand that argument but what i found so

00:17:58.860 remarkable was he was actually angry about it he was angry about it he was morally outraged about

00:18:03.860 it he was shaking his fist at the sky well that's what you do to someone that you're angry about you

00:18:13.140 don't shake your fist at the rocks on the ground you shake your fist at the imaginary being in the

00:18:20.800 sky even if you're an atheist and that's an interesting thing because what it what it indicates

00:18:28.440 at least to some degree is that a even if you're atheistic you wrestle with god

00:18:34.840 and b even if you're atheistic you're at least unconsciously in a relationship

00:18:42.960 because why else bother with the anger why else what else is the source of the moral outrage and

00:18:50.300 you know one of the things i've noticed is that because i've read a lot of comments from atheists

00:18:55.360 like i don't know maybe more than anybody else in the world you know i'm dead serious about that

00:19:00.560 because i i've done a lot of analysis of biblical stories let's say online and i read i read most

00:19:07.640 of the comments that are put on my youtube channel and that's often like you know a thousand

00:19:12.320 five thousand comments a week a lot of comments and some of the arguments that the atheists mount

00:19:19.800 against what i'm elucidating let's say are rationalistic materialistic atheist objections

00:19:29.700 and but most of them are angry and a lot of them are written by people who were hurt by people who

00:19:38.000 purported to be religious at some point in their lives you know they had a tyrannical

00:19:42.060 they encountered the tyranny of dogmatic insistence in religious guys and that damaged them and left

00:19:50.360 them with with a resentment towards anything with a religious flavor let's say but even that that's

00:19:57.380 not a rational argument by the way let's point that out very clearly that's an emotional argument

00:20:02.240 and it's the kind of emotional argument that you would mount against someone that you were in a

00:20:07.180 relationship with now then you might ask yourself about that are we in a relationship with the

00:20:17.420 spirit of being and becoming that's a good way of thinking but i don't mean with the material world

00:20:23.420 that's not what i mean exactly because

00:20:25.960 the material world in some sense isn't the whole world you know and we all know that because well

00:20:34.560 first of all, we exist within the material world, and we're conscious, and we don't know how to

00:20:40.580 relate that to the material realm at all. Not at all. We have no idea. We don't understand the

00:20:45.900 relationship between consciousness and matter at all. And you might say, well, it can be reducible

00:20:52.580 to neurological function, and I would say most of the neurological function that characterizes you

00:20:59.400 has no consciousness and so how we distinguish between the neurological function that hypothetically

00:21:06.220 underlies consciousness and the neurological function that seems equally complex but has

00:21:11.500 no consciousness is not something that anyone knows and i would say the one undeniable truth

00:21:19.220 that we have at hand is the fact of our consciousness that was basically descartes

00:21:23.880 proposition he said i think before therefore i am but what he meant in more modern parlance is

00:21:31.740 something like the brute fact of my own consciousness is one is the most is the

00:21:37.400 deepest of undeniable realities and so what that appears to indicate is that

00:21:45.700 well you can make a materialist case that matter is at the bottom of being itself

00:21:51.780 but you can make an equally powerful case philosophically

00:21:55.560 that consciousness is at the bottom of things.

00:22:00.680 Not least, because I can't even imagine

00:22:03.720 how you could come up with an account of being

00:22:06.600 materialist or otherwise in the absence of consciousness

00:22:10.020 if there's no experience of what is there

00:22:14.960 and no materialist has ever come up with a satisfactory answer to that.

00:22:19.680 That's a complicated question.

00:22:21.780 And then, so there's the fact of consciousness, and that's a strange fact.

00:22:29.020 And then there's also the fact of the manner in which we're organized, we're constructed.

00:22:34.080 So human beings are personalities, and personalities exist in relationship.

00:22:40.880 and insofar as we're personalities we're our personalities speaking materialistically let's

00:22:51.400 say are an evolved function we're personalities because being a personality is what allows us to

00:22:58.000 orient ourselves in the world and so if at the highest level of our being we're personalities

00:23:06.440 how is it that we're not in relationship with the essence of reality otherwise it wouldn't work

00:23:14.400 so that's a very interesting that's a very interesting fact now here's another twist for

00:23:22.840 you so i've been in touch with richard dawkins who's probably the world's most famous living

00:23:28.600 atheist and he's like the avatar of the enlightenment mind he's the last standing

00:23:35.000 avatar of the Enlightenment mind. That's a good way of thinking about it. And formidable,

00:23:41.360 a formidable, a formidable intellect. And someone I actually like. I've met Richard a couple of

00:23:48.820 times. And he's an ornery bastard, you know. And he's tough as a boot. And you don't mess with him 1.00

00:23:55.560 lightly. And he's disagreeable enough to cut you into pieces like Englishmen can 1.00

00:24:00.480 at the drop of a hat but you know i think fundamentally he's a genuine scientist and

00:24:06.920 and that's a difficult thing to be and you have to be a dedicated pursuer of the truth to be a

00:24:13.060 scientist and there's a certain moral element to that a profound moral element to that um

00:24:18.480 and i i tried to get dawkins to talk to me a number of times and he put me off

00:24:23.040 you know in various ways for a while but then one day he he wrote me and he said i don't know what

00:24:28.240 the hell i can never understand what you're talking about peterson but but uh i don't know

00:24:33.020 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

00:24:37.800 think maybe you're interested in this and so he sent me a paper and i thought you son of a bitch 0.93

00:24:42.280 you know exactly why i want to talk to you and so it was a paper i actually knew about from about 0.92

00:24:48.520 30 years previously and he made a very interesting claim in that paper he said that every biological

00:24:54.600 organism is a microcosm of its environment by necessity, like a model, like a low-resolution

00:25:03.420 representation of its environment. And here's what he meant by that. So he said, imagine you

00:25:08.740 were an alien. Scientists like to imagine such things. They don't believe in angels or demons,

00:25:15.220 but aliens, man, those things are there for sure. Anyways, anyways, he said, imagine you gave an

00:25:22.040 alien scientist a bird a dead bird and he said what could this scientist conclude about what

00:25:28.680 could the alien who'd never seen the earth let's say conclude about the earth from analyzing the

00:25:34.260 bird and the answer is well a tremendous amount because you could you could calculate the density

00:25:39.480 of the atmosphere from its wings and if you analyzed its blood properly you would know the

00:25:43.360 composition of the atmosphere and you'd be able to calculate the gravitational pull of the earth

00:25:48.360 and its approximate mass, and by analyzing its DNA at a deep enough level,

00:25:55.940 you could reconstruct a lot of the tree of life that characterizes Earth itself.

00:25:59.840 I mean, a bird is a densely packed microcosm of its environment.

00:26:05.320 And I thought, well, I don't know if you know this, Dr. Dawkins, 0.85

00:26:08.000 but there was a medieval conceit among Christians hundreds of years ago

00:26:12.680 that the human soul was a microcosm, right,

00:26:16.100 and which was a reflection of the cosmic order and your proposition as an evolutionary biologist is

00:26:21.780 that you can't adapt to an environment that you're not a microcosmic replica of that's exactly the

00:26:27.940 same claim that the christians made like in in the in the medieval period we're a microcosm our soul

00:26:34.020 reflects the cosmic order you might say well what the hell does that mean dr peterson it means that

00:26:39.080 if you're not in tune with the structure of reality at all of the levels at which it manifests itself,

00:26:48.680 then you die. That's what it means. And so I found that extraordinarily interesting,

00:26:56.700 especially because it has another implication, which is that if we are a microcosm of the cosmos

00:27:04.540 itself, and we're a

00:27:06.600 personality, then maybe the

00:27:08.700 deepest way that we can conceptualize

00:27:10.780 our relationship to

00:27:12.420 being and becoming itself is

00:27:14.760 as a covenant, as a

00:27:16.660 relationship, as a

00:27:18.200 as an understanding between

00:27:20.980 beings, rather

00:27:22.700 than as

00:27:23.340 an alienated

00:27:27.300 consciousness inhabiting

00:27:28.760 a cold and dead material world

00:27:30.780 and so

00:27:32.500 i was interested in that partly because there's an insistence in the old testament stories that

00:27:40.620 we're in relationship with being and becoming and you know and tammy made reference to that

00:27:50.860 in relationship let's say to prayer and it's easy to be cynical about such things especially if

00:27:58.040 you're a luciferian intellect but i would say that the thought that rationalists worship is

00:28:05.340 secularized prayer historically speaking and so why would i say that well you you fall along you

00:28:13.360 tell me if you think that this is incorrect i can't see a flaw in it as a scientist i might

00:28:20.680 ask myself well what do i what do i do when i'm generating a scientific hypothesis now this is a

00:28:27.040 very interesting question because scientists never discuss how they generate their hypotheses they

00:28:32.340 write down their experimental results and their methods and they just take the hypothesis part

00:28:40.320 for granted or maybe they make up some story about how they were driven to their hypothesis

00:28:45.600 by rational means and that's just not true that's not how it works at all i had a great student at

00:28:51.780 at Harvard, Shelley Carson. Shelley was creative and intuitive, and she'd come up with a bright

00:28:58.960 idea. And you can't just write your damn bright idea down in a scientific paper. You have to tell 0.99

00:29:04.900 people how you came to it logically. So then she'd have to invent a story about how she came to her

00:29:11.280 intuitive idea logically, and that was the introduction to her scientific paper. And

00:29:16.560 scientists do that all the time every single scientific paper is like that where do your

00:29:23.400 hypotheses come from your research question what grips your interest what compels you and calls

00:29:28.920 you forward and how does that make itself manifest zero instruction in that in the scientific realm

00:29:36.080 okay so let's take that apart a bit well the first thing that you need if you're a scientist

00:29:42.640 is a problem. It has to be a real problem. It has to be something. And how do you know if it's a

00:29:49.500 real problem? How do you know if you have a real problem? It won't let you go. Well, that's a funny

00:29:56.660 way of thinking about it. It's like, what won't let you go? You? Well, what do you mean that you

00:30:02.620 won't let you go? This is your conscience, let's say. It's you that won't let you go. Well, if you

00:30:08.640 can't let yourself go if you can't escape from a problem that besets you what makes it what makes

00:30:16.780 you think for a moment that it's you that's besetting you with the problem and you know this

00:30:22.300 perfectly well you know this perfectly well because many times in your life if you had the chance

00:30:27.480 of just saying to yourself you should let that problem go you would but you can't you can't for

00:30:36.620 example when your conscience calls you out or if you do you damage yourself by lying that deeply

00:30:43.340 and it's the same if something calls to you not so much besets you but grips your interest which

00:30:49.720 is something that happens to scientists all the time they're insanely called forward by some

00:30:55.780 phenomena and phenomena some set of phenomena phenomena means to shine forth they're called

00:31:02.900 forward by what shines forth to them and so you need that calling and conscience to specify your

00:31:09.440 problem and so you do that in relationship to what besets you and interests you and there's

00:31:16.740 an autonomy in that you know this too you can't decide what you're interested in

00:31:22.600 this is so weird this is part of what got me interested in psychoanalytics

00:31:28.840 thought so many years ago because Freud and Jung both said there are autonomous

00:31:34.280 there's an autonomy of spirit operating within you they put it in the unconscious

00:31:39.760 you're motivated by things that aren't under your voluntary control

00:31:43.480 they have an autonomy they call to you they they plague you you can't control it what the hell is

00:31:52.680 that so you need to have a problem and maybe it's a problem because you're fascinated by something

00:32:02.800 you're you're locked onto it by a force that's beyond your control or you're plagued by it your

00:32:08.940 conscience screams that you have to do something about the cancer of children for example because

00:32:15.040 someone needs to because the suffering is wrong that's a moral claim by the way not a scientific

00:32:21.420 claim from the purely scientific perspective the cancer cell has just as much right to live as you

00:32:27.460 do you start your investigation with an a priori set of moral claims all sorts of moral claims

00:32:34.300 the claim that the truth is at hand if you approach the problem properly the claim that

00:32:41.280 the truth is comprehensible you have to believe that to be a scientist the claim that your pursuit

00:32:47.080 of the comprehensible truth will make the world a better place that's an axiom of faith are we so

00:32:54.200 sure that our technology has made the world a better place well maybe we are now but if we

00:32:59.780 wiped ourselves out with hydrogen bombs we might rethink that hypothesis so it's not self-evident

00:33:06.600 you have to have a problem you know that's an interesting thing to know too you know because

00:33:13.020 you're going to have a lot of problems in your life and a problem approached comprehensively

00:33:20.640 is an opportunity and that's something very very useful to know and the deeper the problem is

00:33:28.580 the more it's going to hurt you but the more opportunity lurks in that problem because the

00:33:36.720 fact that it besets you means you could be the person to pursue the solution and that's something

00:33:42.420 very interesting to know it's akin to the claim that the dragon hoards the gold and implicit in

00:33:49.680 that is the notion that the larger dragons have the more valuable gold you know and tammy referred

00:33:55.260 to that to some degree tonight you know she's been in a situation over the last few years where

00:34:01.360 she's had to face very serious illness and death on a multitude of fronts in many many ways and

00:34:09.000 that's about as bitter as it gets although as bitter as it gets is a very deep form of bitterness

00:34:16.220 and it it's not too much to say that because she approached the problem on her knees let's say

00:34:27.060 that the net consequence of that suffering has been positive

00:34:34.280 and i suppose that's the secret to a life well lived isn't it because there's going to be no

00:34:42.320 shortage of serious problems that are coming your way and if you can't transform themselves

00:34:47.460 them into stellar opportunities then you're going to be left in the dust and you do that

00:34:53.320 at least not least by faith but also as a consequence of a certain form of humility

00:35:00.040 so we could get to that next you have a problem you're a scientist the next thing you have to

00:35:05.320 admit is you don't know the answer and that's not much different

00:35:13.020 semantically speaking than approaching the problem on your knees it's like you have a

00:35:19.840 problem it's a real problem it's an insufficiency you have an insufficiency you have to admit to

00:35:25.440 the insufficiency deeply you have to understand that it's an insufficiency that you would like

00:35:32.040 to have rectified you have to ask you have to knock you have to seek and the consequence of that

00:35:39.160 intensely pursued will be something like a revelation you know we say us moderns that

00:35:48.740 we say things like I thought this up and I would say that's not really very accurate

00:35:56.920 psychologically or spiritually if it was you that thought it up why didn't you know it to begin with

00:36:05.640 well that's a good question right where did that come from how did you call it forth or

00:36:12.780 under what conditions did it make itself manifest to you those are the same questions you're not

00:36:18.500 going to get much of an answer unless you ask the question you know and that's really what a prayer

00:36:23.680 is in in the final analysis it's an admission of insufficiency and it's a reaching into the beyond

00:36:30.660 for a revelation now thought itself doesn't end there because your prayers might be warped and

00:36:40.560 what that means to some degree is that the revelation you might be aiming at the wrong

00:36:44.840 thing and what that might mean is the revelation you receive might not precisely be from God

00:36:51.620 which is why you have to test the spirits so to speak to see if they're of God and there's

00:36:57.000 actually no difference between that critical thinking you know you'll ask yourself a question

00:37:01.980 hopefully a well-aimed one hopefully one that's aiming up not something like how can I take

00:37:08.540 advantage of this situation for myself in this moment maximally and to hell with everyone else

00:37:15.120 for example which isn't exactly a prayer to god let's put it that way and so you have to check

00:37:24.160 yourself and you do that with critical thinking of various sorts which is another manifestation

00:37:30.300 of the creative process and i don't see any difference between that on the scientific front

00:37:36.620 and prayer not on the hypothesis generating side and so and i think also it's completely

00:37:43.400 reasonable claim anthropologically and historically to generate the hypothesis

00:37:49.960 that the thought that moderns are capable of literate semantically sophisticated moderns

00:37:58.720 is a variant of the prayer which clearly preceded that historically.

00:38:06.860 So, you know, there's a gospel statement that says if you ask, you'll receive.

00:38:16.560 If you knock, the door will open.

00:38:18.740 And if you seek, you'll find.

00:38:19.940 But it's nested in another set of propositions, which is something like,

00:38:24.300 careful what you ask for.

00:38:26.560 and seriously.

00:38:30.360 And so, if you ask for what is highest,

00:38:33.200 you'll receive what is highest in return.

00:38:35.940 And if you ask for what is lowest,

00:38:37.960 you'll receive what is lowest in return.

00:38:40.400 And I wouldn't recommend that.

00:38:44.340 All right.

00:38:48.220 Well, that's a bit of preamble musing, let's say,

00:38:53.820 to set the stage.

00:38:55.320 I have one other thing I want to discuss with you before we get to the stories themselves.

00:39:00.880 I want to discuss with you what constitutes a story.

00:39:06.920 Now, you know, we're engaged in a culture war.

00:39:11.140 And part of the reason for that culture war is the clash of two claims about the structure of reality itself.

00:39:17.960 now the rationalists and the empiricists they make the claim that the world is composed of a

00:39:24.620 set of objective facts and that you can be guided by those facts you can follow the science for

00:39:29.860 example right into the right off the tyrannical cliff as you may have noticed um the world is

00:39:37.940 composed of a set of empirical facts and that was opposed starting in the 1970s

00:39:43.400 by the post-modernists who claim that no you see the world through a story

00:39:50.820 and turns out the facts support the post-modernists and not the scientists

00:39:59.160 and that isn't an opinion anymore because the same realization occurred simultaneously

00:40:07.340 in multiple fields of inquiry so the greatest neuroscientists in the world now regard each

00:40:14.300 word as a micro narrative let's say or as a tool the ai engineers learned that they could only

00:40:24.220 produce supercomputing intelligences by training them within the framework of something approximating

00:40:33.420 a hierarchy of values. The computational scientists learned that

00:40:43.420 it was impossible to generate a robotic machine that could function merely as a consequence

00:40:50.360 of modeling the facts. All of those things basically happened at the same time. And here's

00:40:56.620 why here's why 200 years ago something like that a scottish philosopher named david hume put forward

00:41:06.480 a very famous proposition which was that you couldn't derive an ought from an is which meant

00:41:12.060 something like no matter how many facts you aggregated around you you couldn't use those

00:41:18.380 facts as an unerring guide as as to where you should go so imagine this imagine that you're

00:41:24.960 dropped in the ocean and you're trying to determine which way to swim there's no set of

00:41:31.840 facts at your disposal that is going to map that territory for you the same is true if you're lost

00:41:38.460 in an expansive desert the geography itself will not signify to you your destination

00:41:45.200 now why is that what is the problem it seems like it's one of something approximating volume

00:41:53.120 the facts can't guide you because there's an infinite number of them

00:41:58.120 and if you rank order and prioritize them you're not in the domain of facts you're in the domain of

00:42:05.880 value so and you do this the perceptual scientists figured this out too you do this every time you

00:42:14.100 take a glance so and this is so interesting because the empiricists say well you just look

00:42:20.060 at the world and there are the facts but the perceptual scientists say no you can't even look

00:42:26.260 at the world without looking at the world through a lens of value now and so what do i mean by that

00:42:31.400 well imagine you're out on a date okay you're in a restaurant there is a lot of things you could

00:42:37.800 pay attention to you could pay attention to the waitress who happens to be more attractive than

00:42:42.920 your date let's say now that's not a strategy of value that's going to endear you to your date

00:42:50.800 right so what do you do if you're polite and you have a clue and this is what you do with 0.91

00:42:58.140 the person of the opposite sex say that you're with all the time is you 0.96

00:43:02.960 you attend to the facts that accompany them you prioritize your perception so that 0.98

00:43:10.860 in the restaurant for example you don't listen to the conversations two tables away although you

00:43:16.120 could you listen to what your date is saying and the way you do that is you focus on what it is

00:43:22.960 that she's uttering and you suppress into invisibility everything else and what that

00:43:28.100 means is that you put her utterances at the pinnacle of a structure of value and you subsume

00:43:34.240 everything else beneath that and you do that with every single glance you take you couldn't even

00:43:39.500 focus your eyes if you didn't do that as perception visual perception auditory perception

00:43:45.340 there they cannot be dissociated from action you don't see and then act because you can't

00:43:54.560 see without acting and it's the same with all of your senses and so you have to make a decision

00:44:00.020 about what's important literally with every glance even with the unconscious movements that keep your

00:44:08.220 eyes actually functioning because they're vibrating constantly even though you don't know that because

00:44:13.360 your brain corrects for it you have to live within a hierarchy of value you have to live within a

00:44:21.940 hierarchy of value there's no way out of that and once you know that and we know that and we know

00:44:29.580 that factually, we know that incontrovertibly, once you know that you live within a structure

00:44:38.420 of value, two questions might arise. How is that structure of value to be characterized?

00:44:46.720 And what should be valued? So to answer the first question, a description of a hierarchy

00:44:58.620 of value is a story that's why we're so interested in stories we want to see how other people see

00:45:06.080 the world we want to have them help us solve the problem of what to attend to

00:45:10.940 here's a scientific justification for that claim your eyes evolved so that other people can easily

00:45:19.240 see where you're pointing them that's why you have whites when you look at someone when you

00:45:26.800 talk to them, you look at their eyes. You look at their face, but mostly their eyes. And the reason

00:45:32.920 you look at their eyes is so that you can see where they're pointing their eyes. Because if you

00:45:37.460 can see where they're pointing their eyes, you can figure out what they're aiming at. And if you

00:45:41.760 can figure out what they're aiming at, you can figure out what they're up to. And if you can

00:45:45.880 figure out what they're up to, you can use your body to mimic their responses emotionally. And

00:45:53.440 that's how you understand them you say well how do you know that's true think what do you do when

00:46:01.380 you go to a movie you pay to go see a movie it's a story you'll even go pay to see a story that

00:46:08.960 horrifies and terrifies you that's how important it is for you to understand the broad landscape

00:46:16.740 of evaluation you'll go watch someone confront a horrifying death and you'll walk through those

00:46:22.900 emotions just so you can orient yourself in that landscape and you'll pay for it and the reason

00:46:29.160 you'll pay for it is because you'll pay for not doing it and you'll pay more so you go to a movie

00:46:34.840 and what do you do you watch the hero you watch the protagonist and you try to infer what's he up

00:46:41.740 to what's he doing why is he doing it what are his aims what's his moral structure and you lock on to

00:46:47.260 him and as soon as you start to understand his motivations assuming the movie is well written

00:46:51.920 and well portrayed you start to feel the emotions and that's because your body is

00:46:56.640 you're using your body as a computational landscape to mimic the state of being that

00:47:02.420 characterizes the protagonist and then you split yourself into all sorts of people

00:47:06.160 while watching the movie one person per actor and you experience all those emotions

00:47:14.900 and you absorb all those stories and why do you do that well maybe the

00:47:21.040 protagonist is an anti-hero like the joker in batman like heath ledger's joker

00:47:27.000 why would you watch the joker to learn how not to let the world burn pointlessly

00:47:33.280 how about that and why would you watch a superhero movie well maybe to ally yourself

00:47:40.000 with the central tenets of heroism per se.

00:47:44.120 I mean, if you have a better explanation,

00:47:46.280 what's the general explanation?

00:47:48.500 It's entertaining.

00:47:50.060 I enjoy it.

00:47:51.380 Don't make too much of it.

00:47:52.640 It's like, no, sorry, you're gripped by an instinct.

00:47:56.060 That's how a biologist looks at it, or a psychologist.

00:47:59.660 What else is dragging you to the movie theater?

00:48:02.620 You can't just brush it off as entertaining.

00:48:05.420 You're missing the point.

00:48:07.520 Why is it entertaining?

00:48:10.000 Why will you pay for that?

00:48:13.500 Here's an even deeper question.

00:48:15.100 You know that part of our attempt to build faster and faster computers

00:48:22.260 is so that we can have more and more realistic fictional simulations.

00:48:29.040 You don't need the newest supercomputer in your laptop.

00:48:32.800 You were pretty much taken care of on that front in 1995.

00:48:35.880 And so, what's driving our desire to build these insanely complex machines?

00:48:43.880 Well, how about the ability to play more realistic games?

00:48:47.880 Story-based games.

00:48:48.880 How about the ability to construct more and more realistic fictional worlds?

00:48:54.880 Why?

00:48:55.880 Because it matters.

00:48:57.880 It matters.

00:48:58.880 So then we might ask yourself, what are we to make of fiction itself?

00:49:04.880 And a thoughtless rationalist would say, well, fiction is the opposite of fact. 1.00

00:49:14.220 That's a stupid answer. 1.00

00:49:17.240 And here's one of the reasons. 1.00

00:49:19.160 It's because there's a lot of reasons.

00:49:23.020 But here's one.

00:49:25.640 We seem to recognize different levels of quality in fiction.

00:49:31.780 you know you'll go home when you're tired and watch a movie you know to be trivial light shallow and

00:49:37.820 foolish just entertaining right it doesn't move you doesn't require any effort on your part you're

00:49:44.400 probably even embarrassed to watch it but you know maybe you worked hard that day and that's pretty 0.98

00:49:49.440 much what's left of you you know you can lay on the couch and watch barbie and

00:49:54.400 i could only make it halfway through barbie by the way

00:50:01.440 but then you know you'll you'll see a movie for example that moves you to your depths that'll

00:50:09.120 that'll evoke tears that'll sometimes even change your life you'll you'll read a book like that a

00:50:13.920 fiction book of fiction and so we we have this instinct and this unerring sense and this knowledge

00:50:20.560 that there are levels of depth in fiction right there's there's levels of quality in fiction and

00:50:25.820 what that seems to indicate is at least even if fiction is the opposite of fact some fiction is

00:50:31.240 much more real than others and so i'm a great admirer of dostoevsky for example and

00:50:40.840 i loved clinical psychology i love being a clinical psychologist because i found

00:50:46.300 that if I listened intently to my clients,

00:50:48.820 they all turned into characters from a Dostoevsky novel.

00:50:52.200 You know, because people are so interesting.

00:50:54.240 If you get people to tell you the truth,

00:50:56.420 they're so interesting that you want to run away screaming.

00:51:00.380 And so that's why husbands and wives don't listen to each other.

00:51:03.860 By the way, it's...

00:51:05.860 They tell each other platitudinous half-truths

00:51:10.020 so that none of them are terrified enough

00:51:13.180 to leave the house in a fit of horror.

00:51:16.300 and they miss the best of the other person as a consequence of that cowardice.

00:51:22.640 You know, I mean, if you're bored of your spouse,

00:51:26.160 all that means is they're not letting you know who they are.

00:51:29.520 Because if they did, you'd be interested enough to stay awake at night worrying.

00:51:44.700 So here's the theory.

00:51:46.300 about fiction we have to see the world through a hierarchy of valuation and a description

00:51:54.340 of a hierarchy of valuation is the story you're looking at the world through the eyes of someone

00:52:02.040 else trying to adopt their frame of reference trying to understand their position their aim

00:52:07.200 their conclusions their emotions their motivations now imagine there's sets of stories

00:52:12.140 right and some are more compelling than others and then imagine you aggregate all the compelling

00:52:17.820 stories and you make super compelling stories out of that aggregation and those are the deepest

00:52:23.440 possible stories and the most real possible representations that's what mythology is

00:52:31.280 it's it's a it's it's a form of truth that surpasses the merely literal now you might say

00:52:39.500 well that's a preposterous claim nothing's more real than concrete reality really how about numbers

00:52:48.100 how about numbers what's more real the world of brute material facts or the world of numbers

00:52:57.580 how powerful are you if you are a master of the world of numbers well our computational devices

00:53:06.480 are a consequence of our mastery of the world of numbers.

00:53:09.460 Our technological prowess is a consequence of our mastery of the world of numbers.

00:53:14.600 Are numbers more or less real than what they represent?

00:53:18.800 Well, I think the proper answer to that question is

00:53:21.840 it depends on your definition of real.

00:53:24.760 It depends on the purposes toward which you're putting the levels of abstraction. 0.99

00:53:29.840 But you're a bloody fool if you think the answer to that question is simple. 0.99

00:53:33.660 And you're certainly a fool if you think that making the claim that the realm of numbers is real is a preposterous claim. 1.00

00:53:41.620 That just means that you have a definition of reality that you really know nothing about. 0.98

00:53:46.820 Abstractions can be plenty real.

00:53:49.440 And deep fiction is the ultimate abstraction of value.

00:53:54.100 And that's crucial because we see the world through a structure of value.

00:53:57.980 Now, the post-modernists figured this out in the 1970s.

00:54:03.660 why well how about because they were literary critics now you'd think literary critics no

00:54:10.020 wonder they're in the university nothing more useless than a literary critic

00:54:13.800 what if you live by stories then there's nothing more powerful than a literary critic

00:54:21.940 especially one that takes the stories your culture is predicated upon apart which is exactly where

00:54:29.360 we are now it's worse than that even though the post-modernists got their central claim correct

00:54:36.120 that we see the world through a web of stories let's say they got their answer wrong and that

00:54:44.640 was because they were possessed by the spirit of luciferian pride they put the cart before the

00:54:51.940 horse they thought well we have to see the world through a story now remember these same people

00:54:58.420 they're all Marxists and I'm not making this up go look it up for yourself we're talking about

00:55:06.260 France in the 1970s okay so that in itself should be a clue right and we know perfectly well that

00:55:15.580 the universities have been left-leaning since the 1960s and that that was particularly true of

00:55:24.200 France during the 1970s, and probably no more true, true more among the humanities-oriented

00:55:33.680 French intellectuals of the 1970s than anywhere else.

00:55:37.820 And if they weren't outright Marxists, they were implicit Marxists, and they said that

00:55:43.880 themselves.

00:55:45.160 And when Solzhenitsyn came out and demolished the moral pretensions of the communist universe,

00:55:51.120 They kind of scuttled underground, but not really.

00:55:55.040 They just invented a kind of metamarxism that would have made old Carl,

00:56:00.520 had he lived to understand its spin,

00:56:03.520 and hopefully at a very rapid and uncomfortable rate for all of eternity.

00:56:10.000 What did the postmodernists claim?

00:56:13.420 The central story that possesses us is one of power and nothing else.

00:56:18.780 well

00:56:20.540 fair enough in some ways you know i mean

00:56:27.140 certainly there isn't anyone here there's no one alive who hasn't been tempted by

00:56:34.980 there's people who are unable to utilize power and they're just useless and then they might

00:56:45.740 mask their lack of uselessness with a moral veneer i'd never use power and my objection 0.99

00:56:52.060 would be well it doesn't really matter to me one way or another because you're so incompetent you

00:56:58.580 don't have the opportunity and so that's not a moral claim that was something nietzsche pointed

00:57:03.880 out in the late 1800s when in his critique of morality as cowardice you know if you're weak

00:57:12.680 and useless the best justification you have for it is that you don't do terrible things because 0.95

00:57:17.620 you're good it's like no you don't do terrible things just because you're useless now that 0.89

00:57:21.980 doesn't mean that's necessarily the only reason that people don't do terrible things that is not

00:57:26.900 what i'm saying i'm just saying that the accusation thrown by the post-modernists at the human race

00:57:33.360 that our fundamental motivation is one of self-serving power this power properly defined

00:57:39.140 has to be self-serving otherwise it's not power it's cooperation so i need to exercise power if

00:57:44.780 i'm trying to compel you to do something you don't want to do maybe that's all we do you're out for

00:57:50.960 your power i'm out for my power it's a bloody nightmare of power competition and whatever

00:57:57.340 stability we manage to attain is merely a consequence of the balance of our fundamentally

00:58:03.220 competing interests and that ethos is core to the unholy alliance between the post-modernists and

00:58:11.040 the marxists there's no genuine reality there's no genuine morality there are a variety there's

00:58:17.600 there's no genuine reality there's nothing but a set of competing claims to power and then there's 0.95

00:58:23.760 the oppressed and the victimized and then there's the victimizer and that's a power dynamic and you

00:58:28.780 can understand marriage that way and you can understand the family that way and

00:58:33.220 you can understand history that way and it's nothing but power and as I said

00:58:39.420 fair enough you know human beings are pretty damn brutal and you look at a

00:58:43.120 regime like the National Socialist regime or Maoist China or Stalinist

00:58:48.640 Soviet Union you think or the degeneration of great institutions in

00:58:53.140 the West and you think powers on the March and maybe there's nothing else 0.86

00:58:58.780 There are a group of people who use nothing but strategies of power.

00:59:05.120 Psychopaths.

00:59:07.820 They're about 3% of the population.

00:59:11.580 Cross-culturally.

00:59:13.680 And that fact in itself is pretty damn interesting.

00:59:16.460 Because if there was nothing but power,

00:59:20.200 why wouldn't the people who use nothing but power be the majority and be dominant?

00:59:28.780 And they're not.

00:59:31.200 Psychopathy turns out to be a very counterproductive strategy.

00:59:35.160 Many psychopaths land up in prison.

00:59:44.080 Psychopaths can't cooperate.

00:59:45.960 If I interact with you and I get what I want from you on our first interaction 1.00

00:59:50.320 and then to hell with you, you're not going to interact with me again. 1.00

00:59:54.080 So psychopaths are itinerant. 1.00

00:59:55.700 even psychopathic chimps don't do very well the idea that the fundamental human motivation is one

01:00:03.460 of power is about the most cynical and self-serving story that you could possibly tell now it's a bit

01:00:11.100 compelling eh it's compelling because when a human social organization goes wrong it degenerates in

01:00:20.160 the direction of power. You know, if you and your wife are not getting along, you can't

01:00:26.460 cooperate, you can't communicate. That's all off the table. You're left with the relationship

01:00:32.380 of tyrant to slave. And maybe you swap those roles, but it's in the degeneration of the

01:00:39.240 institution that the manifestation of power takes place. I suppose it can degenerate into

01:00:45.220 a kind of

01:00:46.680 puerile and infantile

01:00:48.040 hedonism, too.

01:00:50.160 Now, if you can't

01:00:51.040 organize yourself

01:00:51.960 at some relatively

01:00:52.960 high level of sophistication,

01:00:54.700 you can degenerate

01:00:55.820 into the situation

01:00:56.620 where you do nothing

01:00:57.460 but allow yourself

01:00:58.460 to be possessed

01:00:59.240 by your basest whims.

01:01:01.580 There's not much difference

01:01:03.280 between that

01:01:03.980 and being psychopathic, 0.82

01:01:05.240 by the way. 0.94

01:01:07.020 It's an unbelievably

01:01:08.540 corrosive doctrine.

01:01:12.900 But then you might object.

01:01:15.220 that's naive because everything runs on power.

01:01:18.300 I don't think it's naive at all, by the way.

01:01:20.440 But a more fundamental objection would be,

01:01:22.700 well, if it's not power that the world is founded on,

01:01:26.120 if it's not the war of all against all,

01:01:29.880 then on what principle is the world founded?

01:01:36.960 And on what principle should the world be founded?

01:01:41.600 and that's what the biblical corpus investigates i say biblical corpus because

01:01:49.200 it's a body like a body of laws it's a body of stories it's a body of animating stories

01:01:56.900 that's another way of thinking about it and all stories contain within them an animating spirit

01:02:02.000 that's the moral of the story by the way the seed around which the entire story organizes itself or

01:02:08.640 the seed from which it grows, the seed that is planted in you when you hear a story or tell a

01:02:15.140 story. Over millennia, our ancestors aggregated stories that burned themselves into their memory,

01:02:25.520 all aimed at answering the same question. Toward what should sacrifice be devoted?

01:02:32.840 Now that archaic terminology grates on our modern ears.

01:02:38.680 We think of burnt altars and smoking carcasses

01:02:42.960 and primitive gods that enjoy the smell of high quality roasted fat

01:02:52.000 and we fail to investigate.

01:02:56.920 To what end should sacrifice be devoted?

01:02:59.640 What does that mean?

01:03:00.460 you will wrestle with that question your entire life

01:03:04.320 there is no difference conceptually between sacrifice

01:03:08.940 and work they're the same thing work the sacrifice of the present to the future

01:03:20.880 right if you're doing something for fun if you're engaged in the present if you're captivated by

01:03:27.720 the moment you're not working you're enjoying yourself you're being entertained you're playing

01:03:33.600 what are you doing when you're working you're striking a bargain with the future or you're

01:03:39.800 striking a bargain with the spirit of the future and the bargain is i'll give up something i want

01:03:45.700 and value now on the understanding that it will be returned to me manifold in the future

01:03:52.500 that's why you work and so then the that's in in in the garden of eden when adam and eve are

01:04:00.400 tossed out of paradise because of their sin of pride god informs them that in this fallen world

01:04:07.600 they will have to work they will have to toil in the fields they'll have to toil to bring forth

01:04:15.100 children they'll have to work it's the human destiny to work why how about because we're aware

01:04:21.160 of the future how would that be above all other animals we understand that we we stretch across

01:04:28.460 time that you have to save for your retirement because the you now will be the you that's 65

01:04:35.440 and damn soon and you have this perspective on the world that spans the ages so to speak

01:04:41.880 and you have to make a bargain between what's neat and correct and enjoyable and fills you 0.94

01:04:47.460 with enthusiasm at the moment and how you have to organize yourself into the future to make a

01:04:53.380 bargain with your future self to strike the same bargain with everyone else and all their future

01:04:58.440 selves and balance all that in the moment with work what kind of work that's the story of Cain

01:05:05.760 and Abel what sacrifice best pleases God Abel's sacrifices are accepted his life goes well Cain's

01:05:16.580 sacrifices are rejected he becomes resentful arrogant bitter murderous and then genocidal

01:05:23.900 sound familiar those two things are laid out those two pathways of adaptation those two pathways of

01:05:31.940 narrative valuation are laid out at the outset of the biblical corpus in about 20 of the most

01:05:40.700 tightly written sentences ever penned the story of Cain and Abel is inexhaustible it sets the

01:05:48.940 pattern of the battle between the hostile brothers between Batman and and the Joker

01:05:54.980 between Superman and Lex Luthor between the Hobbit and Sauron between Harry Potter and Voldemort

01:06:05.260 It's the eternal battle of good against evil.

01:06:09.280 And that's the most fundamental narrative trope.

01:06:13.700 And it's the meta story that burns us,

01:06:18.160 that's burned itself into our imagination and our memory.

01:06:21.920 And why?

01:06:23.960 Because that's your story, whether you know it or not.

01:06:28.780 And no matter where you are in that story, you're in that story.

01:06:33.040 And no matter which side you're on or what stance you take, you're in that story wrestling with God.

01:06:39.520 And that's human destiny.

01:06:41.720 There's probably no one who thinks of God more than a committed atheist.

01:06:47.980 Right, and that's not accidental.

01:06:51.060 All right, so I'm going to walk you through a bit of the first story in the biblical corpus.

01:06:57.720 just to give you a flavor of

01:07:00.500 of exactly how this works

01:07:03.220 in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth

01:07:06.180 and the earth was without form and void

01:07:10.760 and darkness was upon the face of the deep

01:07:12.700 and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters

01:07:15.240 a few sentences

01:07:18.500 a relatively radical claim

01:07:21.500 so let me delve into this a little bit

01:07:24.540 without form and void

01:07:26.200 and darkness was on the face of the deep.

01:07:28.200 It's a juxtaposition of a sequence of metaphors.

01:07:31.400 The original Hebrew word was tohu vabohu.

01:07:35.600 And tohu vabohu means something like formless potential.

01:07:39.140 The Spirit of God is that which wrestles with,

01:07:44.360 which confronts and battles and differentiates

01:07:54.280 formless chaos into the manifest structures of the world okay now and you're made in that image

01:08:02.060 what does that mean well it's a claim about the fundamental structure of reality itself

01:08:08.760 and it's not a materialist claim and not in the least

01:08:12.600 first of all it claims the existence of something that in some sense is non-material

01:08:20.620 and i would say the closest straightforward word we have of understanding what that is is

01:08:27.860 consciousness that's the brute fact of your awareness but more than that the brute fact

01:08:33.860 of the fact that your awareness is integrally involved with the fact of being itself

01:08:39.240 and more and more that the being of your consciousness gives rise to the world okay

01:08:46.120 so let's just take that apart for a minute you you follow along with me and you tell me what

01:08:50.260 you think about this what is it that faces you when you wake up in the morning that's the dawn

01:08:56.740 of the new day right god creates the world in seven days units of time you wake up in the morning when

01:09:02.540 the sun rises and the light reappears what confronts you in the morning and because you're

01:09:08.120 a material materialist you think well my bed my the furniture in my room my my rug my the artifacts

01:09:17.460 around me and i would say really when when you get up in the morning the first thing that you

01:09:26.180 perceive and conceive is the furniture that you're a hundred percent familiar with

01:09:31.720 or how about this how about this this is what confronts you how about if you think about the

01:09:37.420 last time you were depressed or anxious there's a that's a good that's a good way in what confronts

01:09:43.580 you when you wake up in the morning how about the malformed potential of your life how about the

01:09:50.980 wasted potential of your life how about the increasingly chaotic and demented chaos of your

01:09:58.260 life how about all those opportunities you could have made something of had you chosen to

01:10:04.160 how about all the wasted opportunities that saturate your house all the closets that haven't

01:10:11.640 been organized all the fights you haven't had with your wife all the issues you haven't settled with

01:10:17.100 your children all of that formless chaotic anxiety provoking terrifying potential well that's on the

01:10:25.120 negative side you might say that's the dragon that is there in the morning when you awaken you can

01:10:30.520 paint a positive picture that's equally compelling maybe you're at a peak in your life and you wake

01:10:35.560 up in the morning? Filled with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm. That means to be filled with the

01:10:41.460 Spirit of God. Enthus. Thus is theos. Deus. God. To be filled with the Spirit of God. To be joyfully

01:10:50.560 abounding in faith and hope. And why? Because you see a new business opportunity make itself

01:10:59.680 manifest. Or maybe you're in love with someone and the first thing you think about is the potential

01:11:04.000 of that future relationship even if that's the date that night or maybe you have a new child

01:11:09.960 and you're deeply in love with that child and you think about the joys that the new day might bring

01:11:14.820 if you only conducted yourself properly and so what do you confront when you wake up in the

01:11:19.200 morning how about a field of potential maybe that's what your consciousness is for your

01:11:27.300 consciousness is the mechanism that confronts a field of potential and casts it into reality

01:11:33.420 that makes it tangible now do you believe that well do you make decisions do things happen as

01:11:40.960 a consequence of your choices is that not part of assembling and forming the world and don't we all

01:11:47.180 know that the world that we aggregate around us in is in some wise a consequence of what we've aimed

01:11:52.880 at of our own free choice and you might say well i don't believe in free choice it's like do you

01:11:59.040 believe in your wife's free choice try treating her like an automaton for a week and see how well

01:12:05.220 your relationship goes well dear i know that you really can't help how you are and you're just

01:12:10.240 moving robotically through the motions and no matter how disarrayed our relationship happens

01:12:16.360 to be i can't attribute any responsibility to you because i know at your core you're nothing but a

01:12:21.800 mindless deterministic robot it's like you can't even have a relationship with yourself with that

01:12:28.280 attitude much less someone else and so you might claim to be a determinist which by the way is not

01:12:35.160 a useful scientific stance because the universe is not a deterministic place and it can't be

01:12:40.020 conquered by algorithmic calculation so and we know that and that's actually a fact not an opinion

01:12:47.360 because at the quantum level the world is fundamentally indeterministic and that

01:12:51.800 indeterminism makes it self-manifest to all the levels of reality it doesn't work technically

01:12:58.840 and it doesn't work practically it's a preposterous scheme and you mostly want to

01:13:04.460 believe it so that you don't have to take responsibility for light for your life but

01:13:08.180 the catastrophe of that is that that potential that you encounter when you awaken is in that

01:13:15.560 potential. It's everything that could ever possibly be offered to you if you only knew how to seize it.

01:13:23.300 And you know that because you're beckoned forward into the future by the fact that something new

01:13:30.120 and redeeming could still make itself manifest. And if you don't have that, you can't get out of bed.

01:13:37.780 You say, I'm hopeless. I have no hope. I have no enthusiasm. The joy has gone out of my life.

01:13:44.640 the neurological systems that signal movement forward to a desired end have shut down

01:13:52.020 and left you suffering left you with nothing but the bitterness of

01:13:57.500 the potential that's going to make itself manifest in the most negative possible way

01:14:04.280 if you can't organize yourself and confront the world and that's the same spirit that's the same

01:14:13.760 spirit that's claimed in the great book of Genesis to make itself manifest at the beginning

01:14:19.220 of time, the spirit that confronts potential itself, and casts itself, and casts that potential

01:14:31.620 into tangible order. And not only order, this is repeatedly insisted upon in the text,

01:14:38.860 the order that is good so imagine that you're conducting yourself as a proper conscious moral

01:14:45.840 agent in your family what are you doing you're taking the raw potential of your children and

01:14:52.140 your family and you're transforming them into the order that is good and how do you do that well

01:14:58.600 do you love your children i didn't ask if you like them

01:15:04.700 do you love your children and you say well at least i'd like to you know and i'm not being

01:15:15.360 cynical about that we're all imperfect and none of us love our children with the depth that we

01:15:19.980 should but you see the best of people i would say in the love that they manifest for children

01:15:25.640 and what does it mean to love a child i mean even if you're if you don't have much hope for yourself

01:15:30.560 even if you've given up on yourself, even if you're bitter about the fact that you've wasted

01:15:35.340 your potential, you have a child and you think, if only, God willing, things could be better

01:15:42.680 for him. The potential that I see inside him that constitutes the core of my love,

01:15:49.000 that vision of potential, that could make itself manifest in a manner I was never able to manage.

01:15:55.540 And you pray that that occurs and it hurts you when you see your child deviate from that path.

01:16:00.560 and so what does that mean it means when you orient yourself by love you strive to bring about

01:16:06.320 within the confines of your family the order that is good or even very good and what that implies

01:16:13.700 too is that the ultimate aim of the spirit that would best make use of potential is the spirit

01:16:20.340 that acts in love and that's why there's an insistence in the judeo-christian tradition

01:16:25.820 that the ordering spirit at the base of reality itself

01:16:29.680 is precisely the spirit that acts in accordance with the highest dictates of love.

01:16:36.780 And you ask yourself, well, if you wanted to bring about a world

01:16:39.840 that was good or very good, what else could you possibly be oriented by?

01:16:45.440 And that love would not only be love for your children and for your wife,

01:16:49.180 but even for yourself.

01:16:50.640 But for yourself in the deepest possible sense, right,

01:16:53.480 as the love for yourself as someone who carries within them the same flame that your son carries.

01:17:03.640 And that you need to manifest when you're caring for your son so that he can manifest what's within him.

01:17:10.880 And then you could ask yourself too, if you were oriented, God willing, by nothing but that love,

01:17:19.600 what could you make of your life?

01:17:21.500 now there is a prayer

01:17:24.420 if I was oriented by nothing but the highest love

01:17:27.760 what could I make of my life

01:17:29.560 it's a terrifying question to ask

01:17:32.480 because if you ask and you want to know

01:17:34.560 everything that interferes with that

01:17:37.920 will burn away from you

01:17:39.360 and that might mean that there's precious little left standing

01:17:44.240 this idea of the spirit of God descending upon the chaotic waters people ask well there was no

01:17:56.620 water at the beginning none of this makes sense it's like you just don't know what you're talking

01:18:01.620 about you have no idea what constitutes a metaphor what exists this potential that exists at the

01:18:09.160 beginning of everything isn't water. It's just that water's a useful metaphor. Well, why? You can

01:18:15.340 draw things up from the water. The water is unknown. The water is dark, and it's deep, and it's

01:18:20.020 mysterious, and it's bountiful. You can drown in the water. You can sail on the water. The water is

01:18:27.380 the, the water is, the water is a necessity of life. Use some imagination, like the poets do.

01:18:39.160 when christ is baptized by john the baptist the spirit of

01:18:46.480 the spirit descends upon him what does that mean next slide please

01:18:53.460 oh i'll tell you about this first

01:18:57.720 this is the same story told from a different perspective

01:19:05.520 so what do you confront your life

01:19:08.640 well a monstrous eternal infinite mess of multi-headed snakes you tell tell me that's

01:19:19.080 never happened in your life you wake up in the morning and think oh my god i wish i was asleep

01:19:24.420 snakes everywhere right so what does the hero do

01:19:29.780 confronts the snake right more than that this is even implicit still in the biblical

01:19:38.340 Echocorpus, there are echoes of the representation of God

01:19:41.900 as the primordial deity who slayed the serpent

01:19:46.640 that existed at the beginning of time

01:19:49.100 and made the world out of its pieces.

01:19:53.180 Leviathan.

01:19:55.640 What does that mean?

01:19:57.540 Well, it means that we're hunters.

01:20:00.500 It means that we make our clothes out of animal skins.

01:20:03.660 It means that we establish the order that is habitable

01:20:08.700 by confronting the predators and making use of them,

01:20:13.840 taming them, or destroying them.

01:20:16.520 We establish order as a consequence of a conflict with potential.

01:20:22.880 It's echoed in the story of the dragon and the gold.

01:20:26.020 You confront what's terrifying and possible,

01:20:29.820 and you gain what's valuable and necessary.

01:20:34.820 And that's the eternal story of the heroic element of the human spirit.

01:20:40.580 And when we hear a story like that, it echoes deep inside us.

01:20:46.100 That's why the stories are so compelling.

01:20:48.700 It's like the baptismal scene in The Lion King

01:20:54.420 when Simba is adolescent and deluded and power mad and confused

01:20:58.800 and his father appears in the sky and says remember who you are well that's what the

01:21:04.800 ancient stories do they remind you who you are right your children of god made in the image of

01:21:11.580 the creative being that sits at the center of reality itself reflected in your soul and you've

01:21:19.340 forgotten in your mis-aimed presumptions your pretension your pride and your ignorance and

01:21:27.780 And the stories, the ancient stories, call to you to wake up and understand who you are,

01:21:34.380 to adopt that responsibility, and to put that foremost above everything.

01:21:41.480 Confront the terrible, catastrophic dragon of chaos,

01:21:46.340 dressed in your suit of lion skin and your armor,

01:21:50.900 so that you can render the void and the desert habitable

01:21:55.960 for your family, yourself, and your community.

01:22:00.120 That's the adventure of your life, you might say.

01:22:04.140 Life is suffering, and it's bitter, and I should turn against it.

01:22:09.400 And the rejoinder to that is,

01:22:11.780 there's no adventure without trouble.

01:22:15.820 And the greatest adventure has the most trouble.

01:22:18.480 And if you took on the full trouble of your life,

01:22:20.900 unstintingly you'd have an adventure that would justify the misery that's the offer it's not

01:22:28.380 comfort you want comfort dostoevsky figured this out in 1880 when he was criticizing utopian

01:22:35.580 delusion delusional utopianism he said look if you took the typical person and you you just gave

01:22:44.780 them everything they wanted so they could do nothing with their life but sit around and eat

01:22:50.040 sweet cakes and sit in pools of bubbling water he obviously had a vision of california and

01:22:56.260 and do nothing but busy yourself with the continuation of the species

01:23:02.520 what then said well we know what would happen then

01:23:08.920 human beings ungrateful to the core unable to tolerate anything like a brief

01:23:18.540 respite from their troubles

01:23:20.680 would in no time whatsoever

01:23:23.260 smash everything to smithereens

01:23:25.160 just so they had something interesting to do.

01:23:29.300 Well, have you never had

01:23:31.540 the false adventure of trouble you caused

01:23:34.220 just because you had nothing better to do?

01:23:37.140 I mean, that's really...

01:23:38.320 that's like the definition of 80% of life.

01:23:42.000 Well, what would happen if you had a real adventure?

01:23:45.500 What would happen, for example,

01:23:47.060 if you told the truth?

01:23:48.540 Because that's a real adventure.

01:23:50.600 You have to let everything go if you're going to tell the truth.

01:23:53.460 You don't get to predetermine the outcome if you're going to tell the truth.

01:23:57.280 You get to say what you need to say and cast yourself on the briny deep

01:24:04.360 and let the waves take you where they're going to.

01:24:07.760 And that's a bit on the destabilizing side, you might say,

01:24:12.480 but it's no shortage of exciting.

01:24:15.420 And maybe that's what you're built for.

01:24:18.540 right? Viking adventure over the high seas and not the idiot comfort that were promised by our 1.00

01:24:25.520 tyrant wannabes. That's what it means to be made in the image of God, to make that creative, 0.99

01:24:34.340 contending, adventurous spirit suffused with love manifest within you in everything that you say and

01:24:43.220 do that's the dawn of the kingdom of heaven that's laid upon the earth that men are too blind to see

01:24:51.740 next slide please good thing we didn't miss that one eh

01:24:57.320 christ is baptized by john the baptist and the symbolic representations are that

01:25:11.160 a dove descends from

01:25:13.020 on high

01:25:13.980 the Holy Spirit and

01:25:16.440 comes to reside within him

01:25:19.260 that's when he goes to the desert

01:25:23.280 by the way

01:25:24.980 you ever had that

01:25:27.120 time in your life where you woke up a little bit

01:25:29.160 you realized that you were

01:25:31.560 living a false life

01:25:33.560 and

01:25:35.520 and something revealed itself

01:25:39.420 to you to let you know that you were on the wrong path and what was the price you paid for that

01:25:45.880 how about an an interregnum of confusion how about a period of not knowing which way was up

01:25:53.640 that's the price you pay for letting go of your tyrannical of the tyrannical propositions that you

01:26:00.200 use to imprison yourself out of the tyranny as it says in exodus into the wasteland and desert 1.00

01:26:08.020 why do people cling to their foolish presuppositions because knowing something stupid is more comforting 1.00

01:26:16.180 than knowing nothing at all and the price you pay for the realization of your own ignorance is 1.00

01:26:21.660 a brief exposure to the fact that you're entirely lost but you can wake up as a consequence right

01:26:28.880 you can re-establish your relationship with the creative spirit that makes what's good out of

01:26:34.540 potential that's a rediscovery that revelation of your own ignorance your own bitter ignorance

01:26:40.140 that's a re-contact with the ground of being itself that's why it strikes you so hard that's

01:26:45.760 why it can be life-changing when you recognize your own insufficiency this is part of what prayer

01:26:51.480 calls you to do all the time to pray to pray on what's what do you pray if you're sensible 1.00

01:26:57.800 What am I doing that's stupid? 1.00

01:27:01.580 Well, there's a source of inexhaustible wisdom, 1.00

01:27:06.360 precisely proportionate to your stupidity. 1.00

01:27:09.500 And you might say, why bother? 1.00

01:27:11.260 Well, we covered that already.

01:27:14.200 So you don't fall into a pit.

01:27:17.660 If you could do nothing but aim high

01:27:20.860 and look within yourself for everything that stopped you

01:27:25.800 from moving forward,

01:27:27.800 and you did that full heartedly unreservedly and you made that the the leitmotif of your life

01:27:36.380 what would you be like in a year in five years in 10 years in 20 years would you be headed for

01:27:44.220 sainthood itself is that not something that is a possibility that resides within you you know

01:27:51.280 perfectly well that there are times in your life where you took a turn for the better

01:27:55.460 what if that was the pattern of your existence

01:27:58.600 nothing but the constant turn

01:28:00.680 for the better and then you might also ask

01:28:02.580 yourself would there be any difference

01:28:04.560 between living a life that was composed of

01:28:06.560 nothing but constant turns for the better

01:28:08.340 and existence in the kingdom of heaven

01:28:10.580 itself a place where everything

01:28:12.520 is good and still getting better

01:28:14.720 that's

01:28:18.120 the identification with

01:28:20.580 the spirit of revelation

01:28:22.220 that descends

01:28:24.080 that replicates the conditions that obtain at the beginning of time and space itself.

01:28:31.820 That's the central core message of the first four sentences of the biblical corpus.

01:28:40.980 Thank you very much.

01:28:42.540 so you know when you came out when you came out on stage you said that you were going to talk

01:28:56.900 about 12 rules hey but you talked about this even if you didn't notice it because

01:29:02.720 that whole story that you told was wrestling with god yep right so you you got that exactly right

01:29:09.860 just so you know it no problem yeah

01:29:11.860 all right here's a question what or who is behind the anti-semitic surge in the u.s

01:29:22.360 it's not just in the u.s and in particular amongst ivy league academia well satan obviously

01:29:34.860 okay

01:29:39.860 And I actually mean that, and I can explain why to some degree.

01:29:51.460 Cain abides by the narrative of victim and victimizer, right? 0.94

01:29:57.420 And Cain is resentful and bitter and arrogant and murderous and deicidal and genocidal. 0.51

01:30:12.880 And the reason for that is that he construes himself as an eternal victim of innocence 0.96

01:30:18.160 and everyone else, God included, as a victimizer.

01:30:23.600 And that story leads to hell.

01:30:27.420 So, that's the theological level of explanation. 1.00

01:30:31.220 More prosaically, it's a consequence of idiocy and moral degeneration. 1.00

01:30:40.920 So, the idiocy part is the willingness of ignorant people to swallow hyper-simplified, idolatrous rationalizations. 1.00

01:30:52.420 And here's one. 1.00

01:30:53.920 The world is founded on power.

01:30:57.420 There's nothing but victims and victimizers.

01:31:01.020 How do you identify the victimizers?

01:31:04.620 Well, what's most convenient if you're a failure?

01:31:08.520 How about the successful?

01:31:10.120 The successful are victimizers.

01:31:13.900 What does that imply?

01:31:16.580 The hyper-successful are hyper-victimizers.

01:31:20.760 They're the worst.

01:31:22.360 Who's most hyper-successful statistically? 1.00

01:31:25.860 Jews 1.00

01:31:27.660 right 0.98

01:31:29.660 end of argument

01:31:31.360 why Ivy League people

01:31:33.840 well because all they do is

01:31:36.000 perpetrate the victim victimizer

01:31:37.840 narrative and so

01:31:39.820 here we are

01:31:41.280 how do I

01:31:49.880 know when I'm wrestling with God

01:31:51.620 versus wrestling with myself

01:31:53.420 if it's about what you want then you're wrestling with yourself

01:32:02.620 you know here i'll tell you something cool

01:32:08.100 so psychologists have spent a long time with early large language models statistical modeling

01:32:17.940 that's a good way of thinking about it looking at the relationship between concepts the meaning

01:32:23.340 of concepts of clusters of concepts and we identified 30 years ago a pattern of clusters

01:32:30.900 of concepts of personality and laid out a somewhat inadequate but useful five-dimensional picture of

01:32:41.900 human personality there's an important dimension missing but we won't go into that at the moment

01:32:49.240 one of the dimensions is negative emotion and so negative emotion you can think of your emotional

01:32:55.920 systems as a tree with two trunks one trunk branching into two branching into many

01:33:02.480 one half of the trunk or one of the separate trunks is positive emotion and the other is

01:33:09.140 negative emotion and they're independent neurological systems each with their own

01:33:16.180 biochemistry and they cross talk because it's hard to be miserable when you're happy although

01:33:22.440 you can laugh and cry at the same time right the the relationship can be quite closely juxtaposed

01:33:28.940 and paradoxical you can weep with joy the negative emotions all cluster together coming as they do

01:33:40.120 from the same trunk let's say sorrow grief pain frustration disappointment shame anxiety horror

01:33:49.120 disgust contempt etc and if you're more likely than most to feel any of those you're more likely

01:33:58.180 than most to feel all of them there's a normal distribution of sensitivity to negative emotion

01:34:04.680 with some people being relatively immune and so very resistant to depression and anxiety

01:34:13.920 but also somewhat opaque to signals of distress and threat others extraordinarily sensitive to

01:34:22.060 danger but suffering because of a surfeit of negative emotion with most people in the middle

01:34:27.720 that's the normal distribution that's neuroticism one of the big five traits

01:34:33.420 tell me the question again i knew that you can ask me how do i know when i'm wrestling with god

01:34:39.900 oh yes so one of the okay so i outlined i outlined a sequence of

01:34:45.620 negative emotions that were associated with the trait proclivity for negative emotion here is another

01:34:54.080 self-consciousness

01:34:58.780 there is no

01:35:02.180 technical difference

01:35:04.400 between thinking

01:35:06.740 about yourself 0.97

01:35:07.640 and being miserable 0.93

01:35:10.040 right 0.74

01:35:12.080 so if you're

01:35:14.300 thinking about yourself

01:35:16.880 you're

01:35:18.860 wrestling with yourself

01:35:20.240 in misery

01:35:21.940 when tammy was talking about dealing with her grief what did she say she said she was feeling

01:35:29.600 bitter and resentful because people weren't delivering to her what she felt was due her

01:35:34.900 in her suffering now you can kind of understand that you know because her father had just died 1.00

01:35:39.460 and you could think what kind of a son of a bitch husband would leave his wife under such 0.99

01:35:43.980 circumstances look it was a question we wrestled with because there was conflicting moral obligations 0.99

01:35:49.420 at that moment but what she realized was that she realized what only she could realize which was that

01:35:58.160 insofar as her suffering was a consequence of her fault the reason for that suffering is that her

01:36:07.100 aim was inappropriate she wasn't looking up enough so she looked up and she said well

01:36:14.780 i need to re-establish my relationship with what's highest i need to realign my aim

01:36:22.840 away from bitterness and resentment towards only that which is optimally good

01:36:30.520 that's a good definition of god a definition of god note

01:36:35.900 and what was the consequence she got more than she expected

01:36:43.420 right

01:36:45.520 in the

01:36:49.000 Gospels on the Sermon on the Mount

01:36:51.460 Christ says something strange

01:36:53.320 he says God takes care of the sparrows

01:36:55.220 and clothes the

01:36:57.180 lilies of the field and

01:36:59.020 you faithless ones do not

01:37:01.160 presume that you are of sufficient

01:37:02.940 worth so that that could happen to you too

01:37:05.240 and he sounds like Jesus

01:37:07.000 the hippie you know

01:37:08.460 if you were just a flower or a bird

01:37:10.940 you know the sky

01:37:12.980 Daddy would take care of you 0.99

01:37:14.940 under his wing.

01:37:16.500 That's not what that means.

01:37:18.340 It's not what it means.

01:37:20.540 It means that

01:37:21.740 if your aim is true

01:37:24.480 there's nothing that won't be revealed to you.

01:37:30.940 Even in the agonies of your misery

01:37:33.200 there's enough

01:37:35.740 there's more than enough

01:37:41.020 at hand

01:37:42.600 to provide everything that you need.

01:37:47.580 And why would we assume anything other than

01:37:51.020 the world we understand so poorly

01:37:53.960 is anything but a well of inexhaustible plenitude?

01:37:59.880 I mean, certainly you'd see

01:38:01.640 the miracles that have occurred over the last hundred years,

01:38:06.380 the feeding of billions of people,

01:38:09.860 the technological revolution that seems to have no end,

01:38:12.380 the intensification of our computational ability able to do more and more with less and less all

01:38:19.940 the until what until what until we can do everything with nothing at all that's what

01:38:23.900 god did at the beginning of time if it's about what something in you that you've allowed to

01:38:35.800 possess you once right now, you're wrestling with the lowest parts of yourself.

01:38:44.580 If you reorient yourself and aim at only what is best, then you're attempting communion with God.

01:38:54.080 And you might ask yourself, well, how do you do that? And I would say, well, try to do it.

01:38:58.980 Just try to do it. 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.

01:39:28.980 And practice that and ask yourself, why in the world would you not do that?

01:39:34.780 Why in the world would you not want to make the most out of every possible moment?

01:39:39.640 And there's no difference between making the most out of every possible moment and aiming up with as much vision and love and hope and faith as you can possibly.

01:39:58.980 muster and you might say well faith that's for people who are too weak to rely on the facts it's

01:40:06.120 like what facts did you rely on when you got married you know your your knowledge of who

01:40:13.760 a woman was or a man what the hell did you know about the facts you gamble in life you stake your

01:40:23.580 soul on your bet. You make your way forward with faith. You don't know how your new job is going

01:40:30.820 to turn out. You don't know how your new friendships are going to unfold. You assume

01:40:36.700 that if you navigate properly over even the stormiest of seas, you can eventually get to

01:40:42.120 your destination. And that's an action of faith. And you have to make your life, you have to make

01:40:50.140 faith manifest in your life unless you want to manifest the opposite, partly because you're

01:40:55.060 steeped in ignorance. It's like, what the hell do you know? And so you're always facing the plenitude 0.93

01:41:02.540 of the unknown in relationship to your own ignorance. That's like the definition of being

01:41:07.000 mortal. And how do you step forward when you don't know where to step? You're like the fool

01:41:15.420 in the tarot cards. You look up 1.00

01:41:16.880 and you walk off the cliff.

01:41:20.000 And you do that while you're

01:41:21.460 looking up.

01:41:23.020 And you do that with every step you take.

01:41:25.820 And if you look up towards

01:41:27.360 the highest possible heights,

01:41:29.540 then every step you take

01:41:31.220 will have the firmest of all

01:41:33.400 possible foundations underneath it.

01:41:35.740 And you can do that with every

01:41:37.540 glance and every word.

01:41:39.700 And if you did that, you would

01:41:41.500 set the world right.

01:41:45.420 Last question.

01:41:56.220 You often talk about the ideal masculine, but what about ideal feminine?

01:42:01.740 How can the divine feminine be integrated into society to make it greater, if it can?

01:42:07.800 Hammy and I were in Rome 0.66

01:42:13.340 six months ago

01:42:16.480 and in St. Peter's Basilica

01:42:18.720 which is perhaps the most remarkable

01:42:20.780 building ever built

01:42:21.900 there's a remarkable sculpture

01:42:24.460 by Michelangelo

01:42:25.480 who's carved this particular sculpture

01:42:27.600 when he was a very young man

01:42:28.740 and it's the Paeta

01:42:29.580 it's the Virgin Mary

01:42:31.180 the Divine Mother

01:42:33.900 the archetype of feminine perfection

01:42:37.360 if you'll have it that way 1.00

01:42:39.340 and what does she have 1.00

01:42:42.240 in her arms 1.00

01:42:43.600 she has the broken body

01:42:46.100 of her perfect son 1.00

01:42:47.940 that's the female 0.99

01:42:52.000 crucifixion 0.95

01:42:52.920 what's the

01:42:56.160 highest possible offering

01:42:57.580 what's the highest possible

01:43:00.320 offering to God

01:43:01.460 child

01:43:03.160 and self

01:43:05.320 and what does that mean

01:43:08.580 for motherhood

01:43:10.740 well the good mother

01:43:13.340 offers her child to the world

01:43:14.740 to be broken

01:43:15.440 and to be redeemed

01:43:18.220 the good mother

01:43:21.180 cannot protect her child

01:43:23.220 from the adventure of his life

01:43:25.560 she has to facilitate that

01:43:29.400 no matter what the cost

01:43:31.240 and the courage that's intrinsic

01:43:35.040 to that is the

01:43:36.940 core of female heroic 0.98

01:43:39.140 being 0.99

01:43:39.600 it's not the only aspect

01:43:42.700 but it's the

01:43:45.220 most feminine aspect 0.92

01:43:46.400 the woman who doesn't 1.00

01:43:49.260 do that just 1.00

01:43:49.860 the woman who does nothing but protects her child 0.89

01:43:53.060 destroys her child 0.99

01:43:54.160 the woman who offers her child to God 0.98

01:43:56.540 receives her child back

01:43:58.920 and that

01:44:01.080 story is the

01:44:03.080 core of

01:44:04.760 the divinity 0.99

01:44:07.940 and femininity

01:44:08.820 and every mother worth her salt 1.00

01:44:11.880 knows that

01:44:12.560 and that's that

01:44:17.120 thank you all

01:44:28.580 thank you very much everyone

01:44:31.500 it was very good to see you

01:44:33.780 thank you for your time and attention

01:44:39.060 what if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day

01:44:46.460 with pray.com you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers inspiring bible stories

01:44:56.060 and messages created to strengthen your faith whether you need peace encouragement or a fresh

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01:45:07.300 life. Download

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 21, 2026

The Problem That Won’t Let You Go

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