The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Psychology of Redemption

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00:00:57.000 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:01:02.000 This is episode five, the psychology of redemption in Christianity.

00:01:09.000 This episode is a TV Ontario Big Ideas lecture from 2012 that was presented at the INPM conference on personal meaning.

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00:01:34.000 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, are available at self-authoring.com.

00:01:43.000 So people are possessed by a question, and it's part of our nature to be possessed by this question.

00:01:53.000 And so you can think about this as an archetypal question, if you like.

00:01:57.000 And the question is, what are we doing here?

00:02:02.000 And you can ask yourself that in relationship to this conference.

00:02:07.000 You're here to search for meaning, and to understand what that might mean.

00:02:12.000 But you also might ask yourself, well, why is it that you have to be here for your search for meaning?

00:02:20.000 Why is that something that drives human beings?

00:02:22.000 It isn't characteristic, for example, of animals. They don't seem to question their existence.

00:02:27.000 And so there's something about the very nature of human being that makes us feel as if something needs to be set right.

00:02:38.000 When that's being discussed historically, it's being associated with the term redemption.

00:02:45.000 People are in need of redemption.

00:02:47.000 In the modern age, we talk about positive psychology, and we talk about happiness, which is a much weaker word.

00:02:54.000 But our forefathers had a more profound sense of the problematic state of human existence, and they used more profound words.

00:03:07.000 And the idea that we have a need for redemption is a more profound idea.

00:03:11.000 Human beings, and I'm going to talk mostly about human beings in the West, because that's the literature that I'm most familiar with.

00:03:20.000 Human beings in the West have been meditating on the nature of human beings for thousands of years.

00:03:28.000 Perhaps ever since we became self-conscious.

00:03:32.000 Which is another thing that distinguishes us from animals.

00:03:35.000 And another thing that drives our search for meaning.

00:03:39.000 The consequence of this meditation, or one of the consequences of this meditation, has been the production of a series of books that people know as the Bible.

00:03:51.000 I realized years ago that people saw the world through lenses of belief.

00:03:58.000 And more recently, it's been demonstrated that that's actually inevitable, because you're a limited cognitive processor.

00:04:06.000 You have to frame your perceptions with beliefs.

00:04:10.000 What I learned is that the belief systems that people use to frame their perceptions have a structure, and that structure is religious.

00:04:22.000 A religious presupposition is one that you might even not notice that you make.

00:04:27.000 It's a predicate, or an axiom, or an assumption.

00:04:30.000 And the study of those axiomatic assumptions is what religion is about.

00:04:38.000 And one of your axiomatic assumptions, for example, is that life involves a search for meaning, and that's associated with the idea of redemption.

00:04:47.000 And you'll notice that you ask that question, because of course you're here.

00:04:53.000 But you might not notice how strange it is that all of you ask that question.

00:04:57.000 And the fact that all of you ask that question, that human beings have asked that question for as far back as we can understand,

00:05:04.000 is indicative of something profound about human nature.

00:05:07.000 It's lack of completion.

00:05:09.000 I'm going to walk you through the series of stories that make up this library of books known as the Bible,

00:05:20.000 because it presents a theory of redemption that, in a sense, is emergent.

00:05:26.000 It's a consequence of this insanely complicated cross-generational meditation on the nature of being.

00:05:36.000 It's not designed by any one person.

00:05:41.000 It's designed by processes that we don't really understand,

00:05:46.000 because we don't know anything about how books are written over thousands of years,

00:05:50.000 or what forces caused them to be compiled in a certain way,

00:05:53.000 or what narrative direction they tend to take.

00:05:56.000 Now, one of the things that's strange about the Bible, given that it's a collection of books,

00:05:59.000 is that it actually has a narrative structure.

00:06:01.000 It has a story.

00:06:03.000 And that story's been cobbled together.

00:06:06.000 It's like it's emerged out of the depths.

00:06:08.000 It's not a top-down story.

00:06:10.000 It's a bottom-up story.

00:06:12.000 And I suppose that's why many of the world's major religions regard the Bible as a book that was revealed,

00:06:18.000 rather than one that was written.

00:06:20.000 It's a perfectly reasonable presupposition that it's revealed,

00:06:24.000 because it's not the consequence of the work of any one author.

00:06:27.000 It's not written according to a plan, or not a plan that we can understand.

00:06:33.000 But nonetheless, it has a structure.

00:06:35.000 It also has a strange structure, in that it's full of stories that no one can forget,

00:06:39.000 but that also, that no one can understand.

00:06:42.000 And the combination of incomprehensible and unforgettable is a very strange combination.

00:06:47.000 And, of course, that combination is basically mythological.

00:06:53.000 So I'm going to start out by telling you what Genesis has to say about why it is that you need to search for meaning.

00:07:00.000 Now, people are pretty familiar, as a general rule, with the basic stories in Genesis.

00:07:06.000 Genesis starts out with the word of God creating being from chaos.

00:07:15.000 That's a very complicated idea.

00:07:17.000 The idea is that whatever the word is, which is logos from a Christian perspective,

00:07:22.000 from a Western perspective, that logos, which is something like consciousness and something like speech,

00:07:27.000 has the power to pull order out of an underlying chaos.

00:07:31.000 Now, we do this all the time. People do this all the time.

00:07:33.000 That's, I suppose, in some sense why we're hypothetically made in the image of God.

00:07:38.000 We use our consciousness to constantly construct being out of chaos.

00:07:42.000 And according to the initial opening of Genesis, there's something about that that's akin to the construction of the world.

00:07:49.000 And so that means that, from the perspective of this book, consciousness itself plays a world-constructing role.

00:07:57.000 It's got a central place.

00:07:59.000 And human beings, in some sense, participate in that.

00:08:02.000 In some minor sense, I suppose.

00:08:05.000 But in a sense that nonetheless makes them akin to what the library of books called the Bible assumes is deity.

00:08:14.000 And once God, logos, extracts order out of chaos, he builds a little world and he populates it.

00:08:25.000 And then in the little world, he puts a garden.

00:08:28.000 A walled garden.

00:08:29.000 That's paradise.

00:08:30.000 Because paradise means walled garden.

00:08:31.000 Or Eden.

00:08:32.000 And Eden means well-watered place.

00:08:34.000 And you might think, well, why a garden?

00:08:37.000 And the answer to that is, a garden is the optimal combination of nature and culture.

00:08:42.000 Or chaos and order.

00:08:44.000 Because a garden is where nature flourishes, but it's also where nature flourishes in a safe and controlled environment.

00:08:52.000 And so that's like an optimal environment for people.

00:08:54.000 And so there's a garden and God puts the people in there and that's optimal.

00:09:00.000 And he warns them.

00:09:01.000 He says, this is a strange thing.

00:09:03.000 He says, well, now, you're in the garden.

00:09:06.000 That's where you should live.

00:09:07.000 And there's something you shouldn't do.

00:09:09.000 And what you shouldn't do is eat a particular fruit.

00:09:14.000 Now, I'm going to tell you something about vision.

00:09:21.000 Human beings have excellent vision.

00:09:24.000 First of all, we see color.

00:09:26.000 Hardly any creatures see color, but we do.

00:09:29.000 And not only do we see color, but our vision is tremendously acute.

00:09:33.000 The only other animals that can see as well as us are birds of prey.

00:09:37.000 For mammals, man, we can see like you wouldn't believe.

00:09:41.000 And for primates as well.

00:09:44.000 As we can see much better than our closest primate relatives.

00:09:48.000 And why that is is a bit of mystery.

00:09:50.000 But there's a woman in California who seems perhaps to have solved that.

00:09:54.000 Her name is Lynn Isbell.

00:09:55.000 And she was very interested in how human beings develop vision.

00:09:58.000 And she's interested in patterns of predation, predator-prey relationships.

00:10:04.000 And she knew that our tree-dwelling ancestors millions of years ago

00:10:11.000 were frequently preyed upon by snakes.

00:10:14.000 In fact, there's some evidence that our tree-dwelling ancestors and snakes co-evolved.

00:10:20.000 And that our visual system is particularly good at picking up the patterns of camouflage

00:10:25.000 that snakes use to hide in trees or in the undergrowth.

00:10:29.000 And what Isbell showed was that if you looked at primate populations around the world,

00:10:35.000 where there were more predatory snakes, the primates could see better.

00:10:42.000 It's a very high correlation.

00:10:44.000 And so she concluded that the reason that human beings can see so well is because of snakes.

00:10:51.000 Now, she thought the association between that and the snake story in Genesis was interestingly coincidental.

00:11:00.000 But it's much more than that.

00:11:02.000 You know, we don't know how the Adam and Eve story came about.

00:11:05.000 We know it's very ancient.

00:11:06.000 But there's something about it that sticks in our memory and in our culture.

00:11:10.000 And the reason for that seems to be that in some strange way,

00:11:13.000 it's an extraordinarily accurate summation.

00:11:16.000 Snakes gave us vision.

00:11:20.000 What about fruit?

00:11:22.000 Well, the reason we can see colors is because our visual system evolved to detect ripe fruit.

00:11:29.000 What about women?

00:11:31.000 Well, you have to be pretty weak to outsmart a woman.

00:11:37.000 So there's this weird interconnection in Genesis between women, fruit, and snakes.

00:11:45.000 And the idea is that the interplay between the three, and remember women are gatherers too,

00:11:50.000 or were gatherers historically speaking, and they shared food with men.

00:11:55.000 And that's a strange thing, eh?

00:11:56.000 Because human beings share food and hardly any other animals do.

00:11:59.000 And so women did tempt men with fruit.

00:12:02.000 And they did make them self-conscious along with the snake and the fruit.

00:12:07.000 And that was a catastrophe.

00:12:10.000 And what happens in Genesis is that when people become self-conscious when they eat the fruit,

00:12:16.000 their vision improves, the scales fall from their eyes,

00:12:18.000 and all of a sudden they can see in a way that no other animal has ever seen.

00:12:22.000 And one of the things they can see is that they're naked, and that that's a big problem.

00:12:29.000 And you might ask, well, what does being naked mean?

00:12:31.000 And that's quite straightforward.

00:12:33.000 People often dream, for example, of being naked in front of a crowd.

00:12:37.000 And to be naked in front of a crowd is to have all your frailties and vulnerabilities revealed to judgment.

00:12:43.000 And that's a nightmare for people.

00:12:46.000 And so to become self-aware is to wake up into a nightmare.

00:12:51.000 And the nightmare involves a profound realization of individual vulnerability.

00:12:59.000 And the consequence of that in Genesis is that people are banished from paradise and are from then on in need of redemption.

00:13:09.000 And that they have to work.

00:13:11.000 And that's how man comes to be in a fallen state.

00:13:15.000 And you don't have a need for redemption or a need for meaning or a quest after meaning unless you're in a fallen state.

00:13:21.000 And everyone, strangely enough, has this intuition that they're in a fallen state.

00:13:27.000 That something is wrong with the world that needs to be put right.

00:13:30.000 And more than that, or something is wrong with being that needs to be put right.

00:13:33.000 And more than that, that in some weird sense, weird way, they have a moral obligation to participate in that process.

00:13:40.000 And that drives us, like it's beneath what drives us.

00:13:45.000 It's an axiomatic presupposition.

00:13:48.000 The next thing that happens in Genesis is that Abel and Cain are born.

00:13:54.000 And they're really the first two human beings.

00:13:57.000 Because Adam and Eve are made by God, whereas Cain and Abel are born.

00:14:03.000 They're the first people that are born in history.

00:14:05.000 And interestingly enough, what happens between Cain and Abel, which is jealous resentment against God followed by murder,

00:14:16.000 is the first pattern of behavior that human beings manifest once they become self-conscious.

00:14:21.000 That's an awful story.

00:14:23.000 And it's a prototypical story, in a sense, because what it says is that there are two patterns of reaction to tragic self-consciousness.

00:14:31.000 And one is associated with a murderous state of resentment.

00:14:34.000 Resentment towards life.

00:14:36.000 The kind of murderous resentment that drove the killer in Colorado, for example.

00:14:41.000 Murderous resentment against life.

00:14:43.000 And the other, typified by Abel, has something to do with the establishment of the antithesis of murderous resentment.

00:14:54.000 So you can associate murderous resentment, in a sense, with hell.

00:14:57.000 And you can associate Abel's path, his choices, with heaven.

00:15:01.000 And so what happens is that as soon as people become self-conscious, being divides into a domain that has hell on one end and heaven on another.

00:15:11.000 And that's what we hinted at in the second story in Genesis.

00:15:16.000 After that, everything dissolves into a flood.

00:15:20.000 That's Noah.

00:15:21.000 Into a flood, nature comes in, tears everything down, and the Tower of Babel is erected.

00:15:27.000 And that's a meditation on pride.

00:15:29.000 People build a structure that reaches up to where God is.

00:15:33.000 It's a presumptuous act.

00:15:34.000 And there's reason for that, too.

00:15:36.000 One of the consistent warnings that emerges in the biblical writings is warnings against the sin of pride.

00:15:43.000 And the sin of pride is an intellectual sin.

00:15:45.000 And it's associated with the presupposition that you know enough to do without the transcendent.

00:15:52.000 And the biblical stories state very, very clearly, continually, that that is catastrophically dangerous.

00:16:02.000 That you always have to be aware that there's something transcendent that supersedes the domain of your knowledge.

00:16:09.000 And what might you think of people who don't believe that?

00:16:14.000 Well, they're totalitarians.

00:16:16.000 Because they believe that their belief is total.

00:16:19.000 And we know what happens when people become totalitarian.

00:16:22.000 What happens is you get the instant creation of something on earth that very closely resembles hell.

00:16:28.000 And that was hammered home in the 20th century.

00:16:32.000 If you want to derive one lesson from the 20th century, it's that totalitarian states and totalitarian ideologies are not a good way to entrap or search after meaning.

00:16:48.000 That's a mistake.

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00:17:19.000 And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.

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00:19:36.000 After the flood.

00:19:42.000 The flood is, before the flood, that's prehistory.

00:19:45.000 That's so far back in time we can't even imagine it.

00:19:47.000 After the flood there's a new beginning in a sense and that's when history really starts from a biblical perspective.

00:19:53.000 And the way the Old Testament lays itself out then is that it's kind of a classic hero myth.

00:19:59.000 A hero myth that's associated with the establishment of states.

00:20:03.000 And generally speaking, when societies mythologize the beginning of their state, they imagine a set of heroes.

00:20:11.000 It's sort of happening with people like George Washington in the United States.

00:20:14.000 It happens automatically that the founders of the state are mythologized as the great heroes of the past.

00:20:21.000 It's the great heroes of the past, our forefathers, who established the state.

00:20:26.000 And of course that's true and there were millions of them, but you can't tell a story about millions of people.

00:20:31.000 So all the actions of those millions of people are collapsed and condensed and compressed and turned into a kind of fiction that's more real than truth.

00:20:39.000 That describes the patterns that characterize how the state was founded.

00:20:45.000 And the Old Testament runs us through that.

00:20:50.000 The heroes like Abraham, for example.

00:20:53.000 And Jacob.

00:20:55.000 Who are crucially involved in the establishment of the polity of the actual state.

00:21:01.000 But something always happens as this state is established.

00:21:07.000 And what happens is the state's established.

00:21:13.000 And then people get off course.

00:21:16.000 And the leadership gets off course.

00:21:18.000 And then the state collapses into a state of chaos.

00:21:21.000 And then there's a prophetic revelation warning of that danger.

00:21:27.000 And then there's a terrible period of chaotic disruption.

00:21:33.000 And then there's the regeneration of the state.

00:21:36.000 That story is foreshadowed in the Old Testament by Exodus.

00:21:41.000 Moses' story.

00:21:43.000 Egypt's a tyranny.

00:21:45.000 A leader rises to pull everyone out of tyranny.

00:21:48.000 There's a terrible chaotic interlude.

00:21:51.000 The wandering in the desert.

00:21:53.000 And then there's the reestablishment of the state.

00:21:56.000 That's an archetypal pattern.

00:21:59.000 And that happens to all of you.

00:22:02.000 It happens to every country.

00:22:04.000 And the pattern is you're in your system of belief.

00:22:08.000 Which is yours and a collective belief.

00:22:11.000 And something arises like a snake.

00:22:14.000 Analogous to a snake.

00:22:16.000 To disrupt it.

00:22:18.000 Because the state is insufficiently adapted to the environment.

00:22:22.000 It doesn't have all the answers.

00:22:25.000 It ages and becomes corrupt.

00:22:28.000 And then it's prone to collapse.

00:22:31.000 And that collapse is a catastrophe.

00:22:33.000 A chaotic catastrophe.

00:22:35.000 That happens to you every time, for example, that your dreams are shattered.

00:22:39.000 Or that you encounter a great tragedy.

00:22:41.000 It happens to people when their spouse dies.

00:22:43.000 Or when they're diagnosed with a very dangerous illness.

00:22:47.000 Or when their children are damaged.

00:22:49.000 That event, analogous, as I said, to a snake.

00:22:54.000 And that's partly because the circuits in your brain that detect snakes.

00:22:58.000 That other animals use to detect snakes.

00:23:00.000 Or the same circuits that we use to detect things that go wrong.

00:23:04.000 And things are always going wrong for us.

00:23:06.000 And we're always collapsing into a state where we're wandering through a desert.

00:23:10.000 And a desert is a state that's bereft of meaning and bereft of ideas.

00:23:14.000 And in that state then we're desperately seeking for, well, for the establishment of another state.

00:23:20.000 And a state that we hope will be a better state.

00:23:22.000 It'll be like the last state, except there'll be more to it.

00:23:24.000 And everyone will finally be happy.

00:23:26.000 And that's part of our utopian dream.

00:23:28.000 And it's impossible not to be in that story.

00:23:34.000 You're either in a state of order or you're in a state of chaos.

00:23:38.000 And that's why the Taoists, for example, believe that the world is made out of order and chaos.

00:23:43.000 It's because you're always in one of those two places.

00:23:46.000 What happens in the Old Testament is that the limitations of the state itself start to become apparent.

00:23:53.000 And they become apparent in that the state is established, but it always collapses.

00:23:59.000 And then it's reestablished, but it always collapses.

00:24:02.000 It's never permanent.

00:24:04.000 And there's repetitions of this, continual repetitions of this.

00:24:08.000 An upshot of the Old Testament, at least the way that it's been constructed in Christianity, is that the state itself is flawed.

00:24:19.000 It cannot provide the final answer to the question, what constitutes genuine redemption?

00:24:27.000 Well, this is an important issue.

00:24:30.000 It's an important issue psychologically.

00:24:32.000 It's an important issue politically.

00:24:34.000 Is the state the final answer?

00:24:37.000 Well, it's a totalitarian claim.

00:24:40.000 We know that it was claimed by people like Stalin.

00:24:42.000 It was certainly claimed by the communists.

00:24:43.000 It was claimed by people like Hitler, that the state was the final answer.

00:24:47.000 It's still claimed in many ways in places like China today.

00:24:50.000 The individuals subsumed underneath the state organization.

00:24:54.000 And the state, well, under Stalin, the state was already in a state of perfection.

00:25:00.000 If you complained about its imperfection, then you were going to be killed.

00:25:03.000 So the idea that the state is perfect, although it's a tremendously flawed idea, can be pursued so hard by people who are gripping their narrow viewpoints that the state itself becomes murderous.

00:25:18.000 The Old Testament sort of sums itself up in the book of Job.

00:25:22.000 And it's a problematic summing up because Job is tormented in all sorts of ways.

00:25:27.000 Everything that could possibly be terrible that happens to any person happens to Job.

00:25:33.000 They can't understand why.

00:25:35.000 So Job is in, like, a final state of unredeemed being.

00:25:38.000 The state's not the answer.

00:25:43.000 Well, so then, if being is order and being is chaos, and chaos is intolerable, and the state, order, is not the answer, what do you have left?

00:25:56.000 That's the question the New Testament attempts to solve.

00:26:00.000 One of the problems with the Soviet Union, for example, was their inability to correct errors.

00:26:07.000 See, when you start out with an a priori hypothesis about what constitutes the truth, and that structures your life,

00:26:15.000 it's very difficult to make the kind of micro-corrections that a state has to make on a continual basis in order to remain dynamic and fluid.

00:26:24.000 So, in order to stay adapted to reality, not only do you have to have a viewpoint, but you have to engage in a process of modifying that viewpoint.

00:26:32.000 And the way that you engage in the process of modifying that viewpoint, there's two ways, really.

00:26:37.000 One is continual minor adjustments as a consequence of paying attention.

00:26:41.000 So, for example, if you're having a conversation with your wife or a friend, or maybe it's a difficult conversation,

00:26:47.000 there's a couple of ways that conversation can go.

00:26:50.000 One is, you can take your viewpoint, and you can impose it on that person.

00:26:53.000 And often, when people are talking, that's what they're trying to do.

00:26:56.000 They're not having a conversation.

00:26:58.000 What they're doing is attempting to impose a viewpoint that they already hold dear on the person that's listening.

00:27:03.000 And if they're a tyrant or a bully, they'll do that and pay no attention whatsoever to the person's response.

00:27:07.000 And, in fact, they'll get irritated and even violent if the person doesn't accept their a prior reframing.

00:27:14.000 Is there an alternative?

00:27:16.000 Well, there is an alternative.

00:27:18.000 The alternative is to pay attention and to listen on the off chance that the person that you're talking to might tell you something you don't know.

00:27:28.000 But in order to listen, you have to be already convinced that the little theory that you're using to orient yourself in the world isn't good enough.

00:27:36.000 Because if it was good enough, then why would you bother listening?

00:27:39.000 So you have to be deeply aware of your own ignorance, and that's what humility means.

00:27:42.000 Humility means to be deeply aware of your own ignorance.

00:27:45.000 It doesn't mean to slink around in an ashamed manner.

00:27:48.000 It means to make the presupposition that you may still have something left to learn, and that this annoying person in front of you might have something to teach you if you would just listen.

00:27:58.000 And so you're discussing a problem, and a problem is a time when the things you think aren't working.

00:28:05.000 That's what constitutes a problem.

00:28:07.000 It's a problem.

00:28:08.000 So you have a little problem, and you're discussing it, let's say, with your wife.

00:28:11.000 And she offers you her opinion.

00:28:14.000 And you can brush it off, in which case your little state stays intact.

00:28:19.000 It doesn't move.

00:28:20.000 It's still made out of stone.

00:28:21.000 It's pillars.

00:28:22.000 And you're still a tyrant.

00:28:23.000 Or you can listen, and you can think, oh, I see.

00:28:26.000 There's a micro-correction that I need to make in one of the peripheral elements of my belief.

00:28:32.000 And that's a little painful, because it means you have to let something go, your presumption, and then you have to be a little chaotic as you adjust to the new information, and then you have to reconstitute yourself.

00:28:45.000 And what that means, interestingly enough, is that you have to make a sacrifice.

00:28:49.000 And God likes sacrifices, especially if they're of the proper kind.

00:28:53.000 And the proper kind of sacrifice is the one that you make of your micro-belief when you're faced with evidence of error.

00:28:59.000 And if you make those sorts of micro-sacrifices, then God stays pleased with you.

00:29:04.000 And the reason for that is that your models of the world stay up to date.

00:29:08.000 Now, one of the things that happens in the Old Testament all the time is that people are making sacrifices to God.

00:29:13.000 And modern people, they just have no idea what...

00:29:15.000 Like, why does God want burnt lamb smoke?

00:29:20.000 It's not obvious to modern people, but, you know, your ancestors weren't stupid.

00:29:25.000 They were dramatizing something.

00:29:27.000 They were dramatizing this tremendous realization that no other creature has ever managed,

00:29:32.000 which is that there are things you can do to your being that change the nature of reality.

00:29:39.000 And if you do them properly, you can make reality better.

00:29:42.000 It's mind-boggling.

00:29:44.000 And they acted that out because they didn't really understand it.

00:29:47.000 They noticed that if things weren't going right, you had to sacrifice something valuable.

00:29:53.000 And that seemed to make God happy.

00:29:56.000 Well, it might have been a firstborn calf or a firstborn son for that matter.

00:30:01.000 For modern people, it's more like an idea.

00:30:03.000 You have to sacrifice an idea that you hold dear in order to progress.

00:30:08.000 Because the ideas that you hold dear are exactly what are making you suffer if you're suffering.

00:30:13.000 So you have to sacrifice them, and then you have to let them go.

00:30:18.000 And the consequence of that is that you enter into this little period of chaos,

00:30:21.000 and then maybe you pop out of that, and that's a good thing.

00:30:23.000 And so, here's an interesting observation.

00:30:29.000 That process of being in a state and identifying an error and correcting it,

00:30:34.000 that's a little death and rebirth.

00:30:36.000 That's like the phoenix.

00:30:38.000 The phoenix dissolves itself into ashes, and then pops back up as a new bird.

00:30:44.000 In the New Testament, there's this weird idea that you have to identify with a person who continually dies and is reborn.

00:30:55.000 Well, what does that mean?

00:30:57.000 It means that the idea that redemption itself is not the consequence of being in a state.

00:31:05.000 It's the consequence of participating in a process.

00:31:08.000 And the process is the willingness to continually have yourself sacrificed, chaotic, and then reborn.

00:31:18.000 And that's what keeps things alive.

00:31:20.000 Now, in the passion story, there are other elements, and the elements are important.

00:31:27.000 So, for example, the story of Christ is predicated on the assumption that the person who is making the ultimate sacrifices

00:31:37.000 performs a number of acts or undergoes a number of processes, and one is a disciplined apprenticeship.

00:31:44.000 So, for example, in order to have some ideas that you can let go and then reconstitute, you have to have some ideas.

00:31:53.000 You can't just be all chaotic and unformed.

00:31:57.000 And so, in the New Testament, Christ is a master of tradition.

00:32:01.000 He's a master of the law.

00:32:03.000 And you have to be disciplined.

00:32:05.000 You have to be a master of something before you're formed at all.

00:32:08.000 You have to be imbued with the spirit of your ancestors, we'll say.

00:32:12.000 You have to take on that burden.

00:32:15.000 You see this reflected in popular culture, for example, in the movie Pinocchio.

00:32:20.000 At the end of the movie, when Pinocchio is about to become a real boy, his last challenge is to rescue his father.

00:32:27.000 And he does that.

00:32:28.000 And to rescue the father means to make peace with your culture and to embody it.

00:32:32.000 But then not to assume that that's absolute.

00:32:35.000 It's a necessary process of discipline.

00:32:38.000 The next idea that underlies the passion ideas in the New Testament is that the ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of yourself to God.

00:32:54.000 Now, that's a very strange idea.

00:32:57.000 It's a very, very sophisticated idea because what happens in the Old Testament is there's the constant sacrificing of something else.

00:33:06.000 This requires a different order of being.

00:33:10.000 What does it mean to offer yourself up as a sacrifice to God?

00:33:14.000 Well, you can think of God as an ineffable representation of the highest possible value.

00:33:23.000 That's what monotheists presume.

00:33:25.000 They don't really presume God's nameable.

00:33:27.000 And even the Israelites presume that God wasn't nameable.

00:33:30.000 It's ineffable.

00:33:31.000 But it's the ultimate value, whatever the ultimate value is.

00:33:34.000 You don't know what it is, but you kind of have some idea.

00:33:37.000 And the idea of offering yourself up as a sacrifice to God is the same thing as determining that your life will be guided by unshakable commitment to the highest good.

00:33:47.000 And what that means is that it's no longer your state that's in charge.

00:33:52.000 It's no longer your ego that's in charge.

00:33:54.000 It's not even you that's in charge.

00:33:56.000 It means that your conversations with people are no longer going to be about convincing them that your viewpoint is right.

00:34:02.000 It means that what your conversation is going to be about in your speech is about attempting to represent what you believe to be true in the most concise and clear possible manner, no matter what.

00:34:17.000 And that's not how people live.

00:34:19.000 People live in a sense by, it's like a conniving.

00:34:23.000 And the conniving is a totalitarian conniving.

00:34:27.000 The conniving is an idea that the world should be the way that I want it to be.

00:34:34.000 I have a theory about how I want it to be, and I'm going to enforce that theory.

00:34:37.000 And I'm going to be very angry when the world doesn't respond the way I want it to, and maybe I'll even be violent as a consequence of it.

00:34:43.000 And I have some sense of where I'm headed.

00:34:46.000 Maybe I'm headed for wealth, for example.

00:34:48.000 And I'm headed to an advertisement, so I'm with my wife when I'm 50 on a tropical beach.

00:34:53.000 And that's how I'm going to be redeemed.

00:34:55.000 And it's a narrow and totalitarian viewpoint.

00:34:57.000 And then I sacrifice everything to that.

00:34:59.000 And it turns out that that's a very bad idea.

00:35:02.000 Because things don't turn out the way I want them to turn out.

00:35:05.000 And the alternative to that, and this is part of what happens in the Sermon on the Mount,

00:35:10.000 which is a very, very strange document.

00:35:12.000 Because it represents a transformation from the idea that morality is constituted by adherence to a set of rules,

00:35:19.000 to morality being aimed at something that you might think about as more of a positive good.

00:35:24.000 It's not merely not doing what's wrong.

00:35:26.000 It's something else.

00:35:27.000 It's sacrificing yourself in the attempt to make things better.

00:35:31.000 And making things better, not by aiming at what's better, but by telling what's true.

00:35:38.000 And assuming that if you do that, then what's better will happen, whatever that is.

00:35:43.000 Because the thing is, you don't know what's better.

00:35:45.000 You don't have the capacity to fully realize what would constitute better.

00:35:50.000 I mean, we've seen that, as I said, over and over in the 20th century.

00:35:53.000 People aim at a circumscribed definition of what constitutes the utopian state.

00:35:58.000 And all we get out of that is endless hell.

00:36:01.000 We have to pursue what's good, but we don't know what's good is.

00:36:05.000 So how do we remove ourselves from that paradox?

00:36:10.000 Well, it isn't a matter of gathering more knowledge.

00:36:13.000 Gathering more knowledge, it's a matter of approaching reality in a different manner.

00:36:17.000 And it is an act of faith, as Kierkegaard pointed out.

00:36:20.000 Because if you decide, for example, that you're going to pursue the highest good, whatever that is.

00:36:26.000 The highest good, pursuing the highest good means being willing to transform what your conception of the highest good is.

00:36:32.000 You pursue the highest good.

00:36:36.000 That's your aim.

00:36:37.000 Your aim determines the world you live in.

00:36:39.000 We know that.

00:36:40.000 That's a fact.

00:36:41.000 That's a psychological fact.

00:36:42.000 What you aim at determines the nature of your world.

00:36:46.000 And to aim wrong, that's hamartia, by the way.

00:36:49.000 That's a Greek word, hamartia.

00:36:50.000 To aim wrong, that's sin.

00:36:52.000 Because hamartia, which is an archery term, which means to miss the target, is what sin means.

00:36:58.000 So if you're not in a state of grace, it means your aim's wrong.

00:37:03.000 You're not aiming at the right thing.

00:37:05.000 Or maybe the world is constituted badly, and it's hell-bent on torturing you.

00:37:09.000 That's the alternative viewpoint.

00:37:11.000 So you've got to get your aim right.

00:37:12.000 You aim at the best.

00:37:14.000 And how do you aim?

00:37:16.000 Well, the Sermon on the Mount says something very interesting.

00:37:19.000 It says, okay, once you get your aim right, and you decide to tell the truth,

00:37:23.000 then all you have to do is concentrate on the day.

00:37:27.000 Now, people read the Sermon on the Mount like it's a hippie document.

00:37:32.000 You know, be like a flower, be like a bird, don't pay any attention to the future.

00:37:36.000 You know, everything will be taken care of.

00:37:38.000 It's not that at all.

00:37:39.000 There's presumptions that are nested in there.

00:37:41.000 And the presumption is, first of all, that you're aiming at perfection.

00:37:45.000 You're aiming at whatever perfection is.

00:37:48.000 And you're not trying to get other people to do that.

00:37:50.000 You're aiming at it.

00:37:51.000 You're reconstituting your actions and your speech to aim at that.

00:37:55.000 And then you do that by noticing very carefully and attending to what constitutes the truth.

00:38:01.000 And then you let that take you wherever it will go.

00:38:05.000 And that's the sacrifice of self to God.

00:38:08.000 Because the truth is a representation of whatever constitutes reality.

00:38:12.000 Your best attempt at whatever constitutes reality.

00:38:15.000 And to follow that means to follow something that's transcendent.

00:38:19.000 Because whatever reality is, it's certainly not something that you're individually responsible for creating.

00:38:25.000 Even though you might participate in that process.

00:38:27.000 To speak the truth is to be guided by being.

00:38:31.000 It's a completely different mode of being.

00:38:33.000 Now I said, right after Adam and Eve's catastrophic emergence into self-consciousness.

00:38:43.000 The world split into two attitudes.

00:38:46.000 One associated with pain.

00:38:48.000 And the other associated with Abel.

00:38:50.000 And that those attitudes are associated with heaven and hell.

00:38:54.000 Well, we know that human beings can turn the world into hell.

00:39:00.000 If you're a student of history, you have no doubt about that.

00:39:04.000 And no matter how terrible you think the hell that people have created in the past is.

00:39:11.000 If you read a little more history, you'll find something even more terrible.

00:39:15.000 And people, of course, are afraid of the human capacity to turn things into hell.

00:39:21.000 That's one of the things that underlies our environmentalism.

00:39:23.000 We're afraid that our misbehavior will turn the world into hell.

00:39:27.000 Well, we believe we can do that.

00:39:30.000 Do we believe that human beings can turn the world into heaven?

00:39:36.000 Well, that's a harder thing to believe.

00:39:38.000 Because there's a lot more ways that things can go wrong than there are ways that things can go right.

00:39:42.000 So, heaven's a much narrower thing to aim at than hell, which is a chaotic mess.

00:39:47.000 Well, maybe it's improbable.

00:39:54.000 But life is improbable, that's for sure.

00:39:57.000 And our unredeemed state of being is improbable.

00:40:01.000 And the other thing that's improbable is the burden that we're required to carry existentially.

00:40:07.000 We're awake creatures of God.

00:40:11.000 What does that mean?

00:40:14.000 It means that we suffer.

00:40:16.000 And it's real, that suffering.

00:40:18.000 And it's not only that we suffer and that we feel pain, which is bad enough and frustration and disappointment

00:40:23.000 and all the catastrophic things that are associated with life.

00:40:25.000 But even worse, we can apprehend the possibility of that recurring in the future.

00:40:30.000 So, even when none of those terrible things happen to be happening right now, it's pretty easy for us to imagine that they're going to happen tomorrow.

00:40:37.000 And they will.

00:40:38.000 So, not only can we imagine that they're going to happen again tomorrow, they are going to happen again tomorrow.

00:40:43.000 So, we're in a state of constant unredeemed suffering.

00:40:46.000 It's a big problem.

00:40:47.000 And, you know, if you think about it, you can't even imagine a state that would address that.

00:40:51.000 It's just too big a problem.

00:40:53.000 Well, so then there's another inference in the New Testament.

00:40:58.000 And it's hypothesis of a meta-state.

00:41:01.000 And the inference is that a life that's predicated on constant death and renewal at every level of being.

00:41:09.000 A life that's predicated on a search for the truth and an attempt to act out the truth.

00:41:16.000 And a life that's associated with the sacrifice of self to God produces a state of being that's so deeply meaningful that it justifies suffering.

00:41:29.000 It doesn't eliminate suffering.

00:41:31.000 There's no elimination of suffering.

00:41:34.000 Nietzsche said, he who has a why can bear any how.

00:41:43.000 And what he meant by that was, if what you're aiming at is of sufficient profundity,

00:41:53.000 it's worth an awful lot of misery to participate in the process of bringing it about.

00:41:59.000 And life has an unbearable depth of misery.

00:42:05.000 And as a consequence, it needs an absurd positive aim.

00:42:12.000 And the absurd positive aim that's posited in the New Testament is participation in the process that transforms earth into heaven.

00:42:28.000 The generation of the kingdom of God on earth.

00:42:33.000 And that actually means something.

00:42:35.000 It means that the state of being that's described by the parameters that I already laid out.

00:42:46.000 The willingness to engage in eternal sacrificial death and renewal and sacrifice of the self to the highest value produces a state of being subjectively that's associated with habitation in the kingdom of God.

00:43:05.000 And the actions that are conducted in that state are what transform the interpersonal state into the political state that's a manifestation of that kingdom.

00:43:20.000 Now, you all know this.

00:43:24.000 You know this the same way that the people who wrote the Bible know it.

00:43:27.000 Because, of course, people just like you wrote the Bible.

00:43:30.000 And the Bible is about people.

00:43:33.000 When you have a deeply meaningful conversation with someone, you change them and you change yourself.

00:43:43.000 You know that.

00:43:44.000 And the process that you're engaged in while you have that deeply meaningful conversation, that's a mode of being.

00:43:50.000 And that mode of being, to the degree that that mode of being is predicated on the attempt to communicate as truthfully as possible and with the highest possible end in mind.

00:44:04.000 Then, right then and there, you're in that state.

00:44:09.000 Now, you can tell when you're in that state because, number one, you're not self-conscious.

00:44:14.000 Time disappears.

00:44:16.000 Number two, what you're engaged in is deeply meaningful.

00:44:21.000 You don't bear the tragic burden of your life at that moment because what's happening with you is so worthwhile that it consumes you completely.

00:44:34.000 And people are in that state to a widely varying degree.

00:44:42.000 But everyone is in it sometimes.

00:44:44.000 And when something like that happens to you, especially once you learn to notice it, you think, well, there's nothing better than that.

00:44:57.000 And if there's nothing better than that, then you might ask yourself, why do anything else?

00:45:06.000 Now, I've tried to figure that out.

00:45:09.000 I've tried to figure that out for years.

00:45:11.000 It's like, because, to me, these look like existential realities.

00:45:15.000 They're not hypothetical states.

00:45:17.000 They're not shoved off into some transcendent heaven.

00:45:22.000 They're not otherworldly.

00:45:24.000 They're part of being itself.

00:45:27.000 People can enter states of heaven and hell.

00:45:30.000 And they can learn to stay longer in one state or another.

00:45:36.000 So why don't they stay in the best possible state?

00:45:41.000 Well, one problem is the commitment of faith, I think.

00:45:46.000 It's very terrifying to let go of the direction of your life and say, well, I'm going to go wherever the attempt to speak the truth will take me.

00:45:55.000 Because God only knows where you're going to end up.

00:45:58.000 And it's certainly not where you think.

00:46:00.000 In fact, the willingness to abandon going to where you think is a prerequisite for doing this.

00:46:06.000 And so, in a sense, you're a ship that the wind takes wherever it wants to take.

00:46:15.000 And the second problem, I think, is that it's a real responsibility.

00:46:19.000 Because in order to undertake this process, you have to come to terms with the idea that what you do in your life, your wretched, miserable, tragic, prone life, actually matters.

00:46:36.000 Really, it matters.

00:46:38.000 You know, when people complain about meaninglessness in their life all the time.

00:46:42.000 But I think that's a kind of face-saving illusion.

00:46:48.000 I think people are more afraid of meaning than they are of meaninglessness.

00:46:52.000 Because meaninglessness means, well, I can do whatever I want.

00:46:55.000 I mean, it might be kind of, you know, second-rate.

00:46:58.000 And it might be dull.

00:47:00.000 It might be dangerous.

00:47:01.000 It might be destructive.

00:47:02.000 But it doesn't matter.

00:47:03.000 And so I can do whatever I want.

00:47:05.000 I have no responsibility because I don't mean anything.

00:47:08.000 So I'm not responsible to anything or anyone.

00:47:11.000 But if your life actually has meaning, and it doesn't always have meaning.

00:47:15.000 It has meaning when you're doing something that's meaningful.

00:47:18.000 Well, then all of a sudden you are responsible to a higher power, so to speak.

00:47:24.000 You're responsible to your own soul.

00:47:27.000 And you're responsible to the state of being that characterizes the world itself.

00:47:31.000 And that's a massive, massive responsibility.

00:47:36.000 It's to take responsibility, in a sense, it's to take responsibility for the sins of the world.

00:47:43.000 Which is another prerequisite of the mode of being that's described in the New Testament.

00:47:47.000 It's a very strange idea.

00:47:48.000 The Redeemer takes on the sins of the world.

00:47:51.000 What does that mean?

00:47:52.000 Well, it means all human beings are Nazis.

00:47:59.000 And human beings are the Maoist Red Guard.

00:48:03.000 And human beings are the slaughterers in Rwanda.

00:48:07.000 And you're all human beings.

00:48:09.000 And so to take on the sins of the world means to realize that all those things that characterize the human capacity to turn Earth into hell characterize you.

00:48:19.000 And that in order to live properly, you have to live in a manner that addresses those elements of your nature.

00:48:26.000 And again, that's a terrible responsibility.

00:48:31.000 Well, first of all, who wants to admit that?

00:48:34.000 Second of all, who can stand looking at it?

00:48:36.000 And third, who's going to take on the burden of solving it?

00:48:42.000 Well, it better be all of us.

00:48:44.000 Or we're just going to keep doing it.

00:48:47.000 So, redemption.

00:48:48.000 Well, what does it mean?

00:48:51.000 It means we're not in a state of grace.

00:48:54.000 Why?

00:48:59.000 We're self-conscious.

00:49:00.000 We're aware of the tragedy of our being.

00:49:03.000 We're unwilling to take full responsibility for it.

00:49:06.000 Or we're ignorant about how to do that.

00:49:08.000 And that leaves us bereft.

00:49:11.000 How do we solve that?

00:49:14.000 Well, we can solve it with a state.

00:49:17.000 But the problem is the state is not reliable.

00:49:21.000 It degenerates into tyranny.

00:49:23.000 Then it transforms into chaos.

00:49:25.000 Then it reconstitutes itself and does the same thing again.

00:49:30.000 It's not a good answer.

00:49:32.000 Is there another answer?

00:49:35.000 Well, maybe.

00:49:39.000 I believe that what is outlined in narrative form in the New Testament is psychologically correct.

00:49:50.000 I believe that the idea that endless micro-death and renewal produces a state of proper adaptation to being.

00:50:01.000 And that the prerequisites for that that are laid out in the narrative structure that underlies the New Testament are fundamentally correct.

00:50:07.000 So to be redeemed is to aim at the highest value, to sacrifice what's no longer useful and valid in yourself, and to tell the truth.

00:50:22.000 And the consequence of that is existence in a deep state of meaning that justifies the tragedy of being, and the possibility of transforming your own life in the most beneficial, positive direction, while simultaneously doing that for the people around you.

00:50:39.000 And that's redemption.

00:50:44.000 Thank you for listening to episode five of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, Psychology of Redemption in Christianity.

00:50:52.000 If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate or review on iTunes.

00:50:57.000 You can support this podcast once again by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon.

00:51:07.000 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 10, 2017

The Psychology of Redemption

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