The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - What The Story Of Jacob And Esau Teaches About Sibling Rivalry

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00:00:30.000 Pretty good crowd for the city of sin.

00:00:35.680 It's very amusing in a strange and unfathomable way

00:00:44.260 to walk down the strip and to see the big billboards

00:00:48.660 and to see all the entertainers in Vegas one after another

00:00:53.140 and then to see the We Who Wrestle With God tour pop up.

00:00:56.660 It's like unbelievably preposterous and impossible happening.

00:01:04.020 And so, and it was also funny.

00:01:06.320 See, I didn't, I hadn't remembered what Michaela said

00:01:09.200 when she came out here that I was too controversial for Vegas.

00:01:12.820 I mean, really, I mean, what are you supposed to make of that?

00:01:19.520 How can you be too controversial for Las Vegas?

00:01:23.220 not just organized crime that's no problem gambling no problem peterson no bloody way 0.88

00:01:34.760 that's so funny so ridiculous anyways i'm very pleased to be here it's very good of you all

00:01:43.880 to come and uh i'm looking forward to tonight so i want to start with a little story

00:01:49.460 I had a lot of fun with my kids

00:01:52.660 well, for their whole life

00:01:54.540 but I had a particular amount of fun

00:01:56.620 with them when they were little

00:01:58.080 and I used to teach them 0.82

00:02:00.260 like silly tricks

00:02:01.220 and when they were very, very little

00:02:03.260 one of the things I taught them was

00:02:06.340 I'd ask them which way was up

00:02:08.000 and they'd just point right away

00:02:10.440 and I thought, that's good, that's good

00:02:12.700 no one's ever going to

00:02:13.940 be able to accuse my children

00:02:15.920 of not knowing which way is up

00:02:18.300 And they knew that when they were like, early as they could point.

00:02:22.600 Which way's up?

00:02:23.940 That way.

00:02:24.540 It's like, great.

00:02:25.800 Good work, kid.

00:02:26.700 Pat him on the head for that.

00:02:28.340 Good work.

00:02:29.720 Okay, so that's what we're going to talk about tonight.

00:02:33.960 Which way's up?

00:02:35.860 And what does that mean?

00:02:37.780 Because it means something.

00:02:39.900 And so we're going to get to the bottom of that, as close as I can manage.

00:02:45.020 And we're going to see what the consequence of that is.

00:02:48.300 So I'm going to start with a story. So this tour is an explication and a further exploration of the themes in my newest book, which is called We Who Wrestle With God, and it will be published in November.

00:03:05.700 so this is like the world's earliest book tour.

00:03:08.820 And it's been very useful because I've been editing

00:03:13.900 and finishing the book while on tour,

00:03:16.180 and that meant that I could wrestle with the ideas that are in it

00:03:19.720 like in real time every night or three nights a week, let's say,

00:03:24.220 and I'm writing otherwise, and then also trying out the ideas

00:03:29.780 kind of like a stand-up comedian in a way,

00:03:32.800 seeing what lands and what doesn't,

00:03:34.800 seeing how I can communicate, what works with the communication.

00:03:38.700 That's extremely useful.

00:03:40.480 So if you listen to the audience, which is, again, what stand-up comedians do,

00:03:46.420 the audience tells you what works, right?

00:03:50.800 Mostly, well, with two ways, I would say, fundamentally, with their silence.

00:03:57.720 Because if what you're saying is landing, then everyone is gripped by it

00:04:03.340 And they don't even rustle, like there's no sound.

00:04:06.820 And so that's good.

00:04:07.620 Or the alternative would be an enthusiastic response, you know.

00:04:12.400 And it's very useful and informative and challenging and interesting and playful

00:04:20.640 to try to stay in the place where that's always happening, right?

00:04:25.080 And, you know, that's a collective thing, isn't it?

00:04:27.300 Because in order to make that happen, you need one audience full of people.

00:04:32.800 and they have to be gripped by the same thing obviously because it's happening to all of them

00:04:39.060 and that's a dynamic that exists between the person who's speaking and the audience so that's

00:04:45.380 a conversation and it's a dialogue a dialogos it's an exchange of information obviously I'm

00:04:55.640 speaking, but you're listening, and you're listening individually and collectively,

00:05:01.680 and that's part of the celebration that we're engaged in, in this event, the stage show,

00:05:11.480 the play, the performance, all of that, and there's a spirit that goes along with that,

00:05:20.760 And if you pay sufficient attention, then you can, what would you say?

00:05:26.300 You can embody that spirit more and more accurately, and then everything works.

00:05:33.720 And that's fun. It's ridiculously entertaining to try that.

00:05:38.580 And so that's always what I'm trying to do in these shows.

00:05:43.640 And tonight, as I said, we're going to talk about aiming up.

00:05:47.480 Now, what I, I have a, I wouldn't say it's a technique, because it's not a technique.

00:05:55.820 It's a, because it's not an, it's not something you do automatically and unthinkingly.

00:06:00.320 It's more, it's more like the essence of the lecture, let's say.

00:06:07.040 A lecture, a good lecture, great lecture, hopefully, isn't the attempt to convince an audience

00:06:15.360 or to force them to believe something

00:06:17.320 or even to entice them, let's say, into believing it

00:06:20.900 or to tell the audience what you know

00:06:25.240 or to deliver a talk or any of those things.

00:06:29.560 What you want to do, especially in a situation like this,

00:06:33.520 is you want to engage in an active dramatization of wrestling.

00:06:40.840 I always have a question that I want to address in mind

00:06:45.540 usually a single question

00:06:47.180 because that helps with the focus

00:06:48.820 and then the goal of the lecture

00:06:54.760 that emerges out of that question

00:06:57.400 is to try to answer the question

00:06:59.160 so the first thing that you have to do

00:07:02.220 for that to be real

00:07:03.500 is it has to be a real question

00:07:05.000 and it has to matter

00:07:06.920 and so it matters to me

00:07:10.100 what it means to aim up

00:07:11.880 and that's a very mysterious thing

00:07:14.260 and so you can inquire

00:07:17.220 into the meaning of that endlessly

00:07:19.280 and I have inquired into that a lot

00:07:23.380 but then I have another opportunity tonight

00:07:26.780 to push that further

00:07:28.140 and then I have the privilege

00:07:29.920 of being able to do that

00:07:31.100 while also seeing if I can bring

00:07:34.280 everybody along for the ride

00:07:35.580 and so that's a good deal

00:07:37.820 that's a fun challenge

00:07:39.000 And the grip of the lecture is, what would you say, the audience's curiosity about whether

00:07:48.780 or not that'll land, whether it'll happen, right?

00:07:53.160 And whether that'll be real, because that's, you want to see a real performance, kind of

00:07:58.860 a paradoxical thing, a real performance, but that's what you want to see, and you need

00:08:06.460 that.

00:08:06.780 And so, okay, so let's start with a story, because this is about stories.

00:08:16.520 The book, We Who Wrestle With God, is about stories.

00:08:20.960 And the biblical library that I'm assessing in this book is a collection of stories,

00:08:27.560 a collection of characterizations, in a sense, akin to what you would experience

00:08:34.440 if you went and saw a movie or if you read a work of fiction

00:08:38.220 and fell into the characters that were being presented to you.

00:08:45.300 And these are very deep stories, unfathomably deep, I would say.

00:08:50.380 And we'll string together a sequence of them tonight

00:08:53.960 to investigate this idea of aiming up.

00:08:58.900 So I'll start with this story of Jacob and Esau.

00:09:02.220 And it's a typical Old Testament story in some ways.

00:09:07.540 There's a hero, Jacob, and his foil,

00:09:12.020 who's actually the better man in some ways, Esau, his brother.

00:09:15.860 And Jacob, like many of the Old Testament patriarchs,

00:09:22.700 is not a very good person when he starts. 0.81

00:09:26.980 And that's a relief, actually,

00:09:29.480 if you think about it with some degree of humility

00:09:32.200 because if progress forward was limited to those who were good

00:09:39.480 none of us would have a chance

00:09:41.440 because we start everything

00:09:45.080 we start flawed and prone to error

00:09:50.100 some of that's merely a matter of ignorance

00:09:52.660 because what the hell do you know when you start something new

00:09:55.300 but a fair bit of it is a consequence of

00:09:58.120 willful blindness and refusal to learn and pride

00:10:02.880 and the classical sins, you might say.

00:10:06.140 And it's one thing to be ignorant, and that's not a great thing,

00:10:09.100 but it's another thing to be, what would you say, 0.63

00:10:13.580 consigning yourself to perdition out of bitterness.

00:10:16.900 How about that?

00:10:18.100 And there's no shortage of suffering that emerges as a consequence of that.

00:10:23.240 That's worth knowing too.

00:10:24.400 Now Jacob, at the beginning, he's battling with his brother.

00:10:29.360 Now this is a very ancient motif, the battle between two brothers.

00:10:34.720 It's constantly reportrayed in modern stories, modern films in particular.

00:10:41.900 I mean, the dynamic between Batman and the Joker, for example, there's been much mileage made out of that in recent years.

00:10:50.440 the war between Harry Potter and Voldemort, or Harry Potter and Malfoy,

00:10:58.040 who's like, he's the junior version of Satan, let's say,

00:11:05.600 or the battle between Superman and Lex Luthor,

00:11:12.840 the notion that there's an antithesis between two patterns of being,

00:11:18.120 one heroic and one villainous is an extremely old idea and it's also the basis for

00:11:25.460 a very large number of the stories that we find compelling. We want to see the good guy

00:11:33.020 against the bad guy and we want to investigate the nature of the bad guy. We might even watch

00:11:40.320 a movie just about a bad guy. Why? Well, for some people, because he's a role model,

00:11:46.960 but that's not the wise approach

00:11:50.120 the wise approach is to watch the bad guy

00:11:52.260 so that you know who the hell he is

00:11:53.820 to see how much you might be like him

00:11:56.800 to watch how that pattern deteriorates and degenerates

00:12:00.180 to see if you can understand why

00:12:01.840 so that you develop enough wisdom

00:12:04.560 so you don't do that

00:12:05.700 so a good bad guy is a salutary counter example

00:12:09.380 and so you could imagine too

00:12:11.160 that there are different depths of bad guy

00:12:14.260 with the kind of casual villain that you might meet every day

00:12:19.780 in a relatively believable and realistic drama

00:12:24.580 representing one level of analysis with regards to what's evil

00:12:28.820 and a figure more like the Joker who, in the Batman series in particular,

00:12:33.700 particularly as played by Heath Ledger, let's say,

00:12:37.040 is the bad guy who's so bad that he doesn't even want to win.

00:12:40.460 his victory is to lose everything including himself and everything around him and so

00:12:46.400 he's a he's a representation of of the downward path let's say that verges on the archetypal

00:12:56.040 it's there's a form of there's a form of the ultimate about it you see the same thing in the

00:13:01.120 figure of voldemort say and harry potter or the figure of sauron in the lord of the rings sauron

00:13:07.620 sort of with his all-seeing eye he's sort of the god of the totalitarian state you know and the 0.90

00:13:12.760 Chinese communists are building the all-seeing eye of Sauron I mean the literary imagination is very 0.99

00:13:18.300 what would you say very wise when it comes to representing such things you need the all-seeing 1.00

00:13:25.460 eye of the state to monitor people who don't attend to their own moral development and so

00:13:31.880 in the absence of, let's say, this is one way of looking at it,

00:13:36.700 in the absence of the establishment of a relationship between God and each individual,

00:13:45.000 in the absence of that relationship, which allows for a kind of hedonistic and immature licentiousness,

00:13:52.200 you need a replacement that's the tyrannical eye of the state.

00:13:55.720 right, and so that's very much worth knowing

00:13:58.580 is that the cost of not aiming up

00:14:01.960 is that you will 100% fall under the dominion

00:14:06.400 of an all-seeing totalitarian state

00:14:08.600 and part of the reason for that is that

00:14:11.000 well, you asked for it, right 0.99

00:14:13.800 I'm dead serious, like you asked for it with your own foolishness

00:14:16.860 if you don't, well, think about it, you can think about it very straightforwardly

00:14:20.200 if you don't take responsibility

00:14:22.920 for your own self-governance, for the governance of your community,

00:14:27.840 someone is going to vacuum up that opportunity

00:14:31.340 and also be invited to play that role. 0.99

00:14:34.840 And if it's not you because you have the foolish habits 0.99

00:14:38.240 of a hedonistic slave, let's say, 0.99

00:14:41.620 then it's going to be someone who's contemptuous of you 1.00

00:14:45.340 because of your constant proclivity for idiot misbehavior 1.00

00:14:49.340 and who's going to clamp down on you with all the power at their disposal. 1.00

00:14:57.040 And so that's a very bad idea.

00:14:59.160 That's one of the consequences, let's say, of failing to aim up.

00:15:05.080 The enemy of the hedonist, the enemy of the immature hedonist is the tyrant.

00:15:11.060 And that's a, what would you say?

00:15:15.080 that's another pattern of the eternal battle between the hostile brothers and so that's useful

00:15:22.020 to know that's an eternal pattern what's it called peterson academy peterson academy peterson academy

00:15:28.340 it's called peterson academy peterson academy if you want an actual education with hand-selected

00:15:34.000 professors from top universities around the world bringing the best professors together making sure

00:15:39.880 they're not censored in any way giving them the audience and the remuneration and appreciation

00:15:43.260 they deserve and you were true to your word you gave me absolute intellectual autonomy i have had

00:15:47.600 it through every course we figure we can offer people a high quality university level education

00:15:52.800 for under two thousand dollars well congratulations jordan it's honestly brilliant can't wait to

00:15:56.980 enroll myself i'll be doing that straight after this fun joe

00:16:01.440 Jacob and Esau fight in the womb.

00:16:15.740 So that's how deep their struggle reaches.

00:16:21.640 Now, why is this?

00:16:22.800 Well, there's a variety of reasons why this story rings true.

00:16:27.660 The first is that sibling rivalry is far from rare.

00:16:30.720 it's a common pattern in households

00:16:33.380 and it's more likely to emerge

00:16:35.580 between same-sex siblings

00:16:37.780 obviously because they're competing

00:16:40.260 for the same slice of resources

00:16:42.260 you might say

00:16:43.040 and it's even more likely to be the case

00:16:46.440 if they're born relatively close together

00:16:49.660 if you want to have children

00:16:51.400 and minimize the probability

00:16:53.940 of intense sibling rivalry

00:16:55.580 it's good to space them

00:16:57.380 for about three years

00:16:59.220 Now, I'm not saying you should do that because there's a cost to the spacing too.

00:17:04.220 It's possible, for example, that the siblings won't be as close.

00:17:07.380 I'm just saying that on that unitary dimension, the reason three works perhaps is because

00:17:13.620 a three-year-old is no longer an infant.

00:17:16.060 A three-year-old is social.

00:17:18.280 And so when a new baby comes into the house, the three-year-old can establish a relationship

00:17:23.260 with the baby, and that can be, what would you say, a payoff for no longer being the infant, right?

00:17:31.000 Because the problem, if you're the older child and a new infant shows up, is, well, you're not the infant

00:17:38.760 anymore, and so the lion's share of attention, at least for the first while, is not going to go to you,

00:17:44.420 And attention, that's like the ultimate valuable resource.

00:17:51.880 There's nothing that's more valuable than attention.

00:17:54.440 That's why advertisers pay for it, right?

00:17:57.860 And so there can be a fight, very intense fight for parental attention in families.

00:18:05.660 Now, parents who are awake can regulate that, but it takes a fair bit of careful negotiation.

00:18:18.380 Right, so the rivalry can get out of hand.

00:18:21.480 Well, this is what happens with Jacob and Esau.

00:18:24.160 But something deeper happens too, because Jacob's mother, Rachel, and Jacob's father, Isaac,

00:18:32.920 they don't agree on which kid is the right kid.

00:18:38.320 And so Jacob is his mother's favorite,

00:18:42.160 and Esau is his father's favorite.

00:18:45.380 And they have some interesting personality characteristics,

00:18:48.680 these two, that kind of go along with that as well. 0.80

00:18:50.700 So Esau is kind of a hairy brute. 0.70

00:18:53.060 He's very masculine. 0.96

00:18:55.280 He lives outside.

00:18:56.680 He doesn't like the tent.

00:18:58.200 He's out hunting constantly.

00:19:00.800 He's a man's man.

00:19:01.920 and his father particularly admires him.

00:19:05.440 And he admires him partly because Esau is a skilled hunter and provider

00:19:11.360 and, well, because Isaac is also male

00:19:14.700 and a certain amount of favoritism falls on Esau in relationship to the father.

00:19:20.880 Whereas Rachel likes Jacob better.

00:19:25.260 Jacob is more of a homeboy. 1.00

00:19:29.500 He's more of a mama's boy, truth be told.

00:19:32.840 And I'm not saying that necessarily because that shows a weakness in his character that Esau doesn't share.

00:19:39.940 Esau has the faults of someone who's more exploratory, mass exploratory in the masculine way.

00:19:47.760 He tends to be impulsive, for example, and he isn't as concerned about abstract, what would you say?

00:19:55.660 he's less concerned with abstract thought

00:19:58.640 and he doesn't think that much about the future

00:20:00.540 and that actually, that's a fault

00:20:02.880 and that also makes him susceptible

00:20:05.720 to the machinations of Jacob

00:20:08.400 who's more serpentine, more capable of planning

00:20:13.900 and who conspires with his own mother

00:20:17.540 to take what is rightfully Esau's

00:20:21.360 so Esau is the firstborn by seconds

00:20:25.300 Jacob and Esau are twins

00:20:27.540 and that's one of the things

00:20:30.700 that increases the probability

00:20:32.660 of sibling rivalry

00:20:33.720 because they both appear

00:20:35.120 at the same time

00:20:35.900 Jacob is literally holding on

00:20:38.140 to Esau's heel

00:20:39.580 when they're born

00:20:40.360 and his name means

00:20:42.200 something approximating

00:20:43.720 he who grips the heel

00:20:45.240 and that's an archaic

00:20:47.040 characterization of

00:20:51.100 jealousy and envy

00:20:53.840 And so Jacob is a usurper.

00:20:58.260 Esau is the firstborn.

00:20:59.540 That means that he is entitled, according to the archaic laws,

00:21:03.160 to a double portion of the inheritance.

00:21:05.620 Now, many archaic societies were set up so that the firstborn

00:21:09.320 got the lion's share of an inheritance.

00:21:11.580 And the reason for that was that if he kept dividing up property,

00:21:14.820 for example, or wealth, equally among siblings,

00:21:18.060 he did that for multiple generations.

00:21:19.840 Everybody ends up with like two square feet of land.

00:21:22.280 and, you know, a few pennies and everyone starves.

00:21:25.560 And so one solution to that is to give the bulk of the resources to one person

00:21:31.800 and let everyone else know they have to fend for themselves

00:21:34.960 and that that's not cruel.

00:21:37.140 It's just custom.

00:21:38.320 It's not, there's nothing personal in it.

00:21:40.620 Right.

00:21:40.820 And so anyways, Esau has this firstborn right

00:21:44.820 and Rachel and Jacob conspire constantly to steal it from him.

00:21:52.280 Right. And so there's a very ugly story there, right? Like seriously, if you think it through,

00:21:57.600 it's a seriously ugly story because you have a relationship between mother and son that's too

00:22:02.760 close. It's a relationship that excludes the other brother plus the father. So that's not a good

00:22:09.420 thing. Then there's a conspiratorial element to it. And then there's this twin flaw of character

00:22:16.440 on Jacob's part he's kind of timid

00:22:20.140 he sticks around the household 0.98

00:22:21.840 he's a mama's boy and he's a conspirer

00:22:24.320 and on Esau's part he's a wild kind of adventurer 1.00

00:22:27.260 and he's impulsive and foolish 0.97

00:22:30.780 one day Esau comes in from a hunt 0.99

00:22:34.800 and he's ravenous from the hunt

00:22:37.680 and Jacob has been sitting at home making porridge

00:22:41.460 and Esau is hungry

00:22:44.000 and impulsively demands some of what Jacob has been cooking.

00:22:51.040 And Jacob says, I'm not going to give you any of this

00:22:53.940 unless you turn over your birthright.

00:22:57.160 And Esau, who's a little on the impulsive side, as I said,

00:23:01.100 and not sufficiently concerned about the future,

00:23:03.500 not civilized in that way to be concerned about the future, he agrees.

00:23:09.360 And this is not a good trade.

00:23:12.720 It's not a wise trade.

00:23:14.020 And it's the way the story highlights the danger of a kind of,

00:23:19.580 well, an otherwise admirable exploratory nature.

00:23:23.920 Like, you know, Esau's a tough guy and he's out there in the wilderness

00:23:27.140 hunting and taking care of himself, provisioning the family.

00:23:31.460 But he lacks the civilized wisdom that would enable him to regulate

00:23:38.600 that exploratory proclivity,

00:23:41.380 courageous exploratory proclivity

00:23:43.080 in light, let's say, of the future.

00:23:45.280 Because what he does is

00:23:46.700 sacrifice his future,

00:23:49.440 his birthright, right, his inheritance,

00:23:51.240 this is a big deal,

00:23:52.380 to gratify what's essentially

00:23:54.880 an immediate whim.

00:23:55.960 It's like he was hungry,

00:23:56.860 but he wasn't starving.

00:23:57.760 It's like it was,

00:23:58.840 he didn't even trade it

00:23:59.660 for like cheesecake.

00:24:00.700 It was like, you know,

00:24:02.460 porridge made out of beans. 1.00

00:24:04.920 Stupid deal. 1.00

00:24:06.000 So he kind of wandered into it, 1.00

00:24:07.600 you know,

00:24:07.840 And I'm sure Jacob and Rachel contented themselves and their conscience with that realization.

00:24:14.420 It's a typical realization of psychopaths who are trying to justify their crime is, 1.00

00:24:19.440 well, if he's stupid enough to let us take advantage of him, then he deserves it. 1.00

00:24:23.600 Which is a pretty weak defense, but on the other side, Esau is careless. 0.99

00:24:30.260 Now, Isaac tries to reverse this theft, and on his deathbed, he's preparing to bless his sons,

00:24:39.940 which was a custom as well, to provide this final blessing of the father.

00:24:44.160 And he wants to return to Esau much of his birthright.

00:24:50.360 And Rachel and Jacob get wind of this and they conspire once again and even more deeply and more consciously.

00:25:01.720 It's really a nasty story.

00:25:04.540 And Isaac sends Esau off to hunt.

00:25:08.520 He says, I'm going to die, son, and I would like you to find some, get a deer and make me some of the venison that you're so good at providing.

00:25:19.180 and I'd appreciate that.

00:25:21.100 So Esau goes off to hunt

00:25:22.420 and then Jacob dresses up like him

00:25:26.880 because his dad's old and blind

00:25:28.920 and hypothetically easy fooled.

00:25:31.060 He puts on some skins 0.74

00:25:33.200 that make him hairy like his brother 0.97

00:25:34.980 and he mimics Esau's voice

00:25:37.480 and he tells his father

00:25:39.600 that he's returned from the hunt

00:25:41.000 and Isaac checks him out

00:25:43.720 and he's fooled by this treachery

00:25:48.600 and he delivers the blessing that's meant for Esau to Jacob,

00:25:53.560 which means that Jacob, for the second time, conspires with his mother to steal,

00:25:59.160 to steal from the firstborn what's rightfully his.

00:26:03.020 So this makes Jacob a usurper, right?

00:26:05.960 A usurper is someone who conspires to take a position of authority that they don't deserve.

00:26:12.480 In the Lion King, Scar is a usurper, right?

00:26:16.140 And the Luciferian spirit itself, classically speaking, is a usurper because, for example, in the Garden of Eden, when the serpent tempts Eve in the guise of the snake, he does that as Lucifer, so the story goes, to overturn the divine order.

00:26:41.180 And he tells human beings that they can become as gods

00:26:44.220 if they take the right to determine the moral order to themselves.

00:26:49.420 But at a deeper level, it's a reflection of what came to be recognized

00:26:54.720 as the rebellion of the Luciferian intellect

00:26:58.160 against the pre-established moral order.

00:27:02.260 It's something like that.

00:27:03.220 And that's echoed in the story of Jacob.

00:27:04.920 So as a usurper, he's, unbeknownst to himself,

00:27:09.940 you might say falling under the sway of this luciferian impulse to overthrow and it's in 0.77

00:27:17.800 keeping with his personality as tent dweller and scholar because that's a development of the

00:27:26.780 intellect and the intellect itself has the temptation constant temptation to be the usurper

00:27:33.020 That's the Luciferian intellect that flies in the dreadfully wrong direction.

00:27:38.940 And so, Jacob and Esau have a fractious relationship,

00:27:45.860 and it's characterized by a very intense pattern of betrayal.

00:27:51.020 Dante, who wrote Dante's Inferno, is one of the figures of the classic age,

00:27:58.540 the Renaissance, let's say, classic European age,

00:28:02.020 who really formulated much of the modern vision of hell.

00:28:07.700 There's not a lot of description of hell in the biblical stories.

00:28:11.280 Almost none. Virtually none.

00:28:14.080 Virtually no reference to Satan.

00:28:16.740 They're oblique references. They have to be pieced together.

00:28:19.940 Our vision of hell comes primarily from legend, 0.53

00:28:23.680 the legends that aggregated around the Bible 0.96

00:28:27.380 and the Judeo-Christian tradition

00:28:30.380 and also the accounts of Dante and of Milton.

00:28:35.860 That's where we got a lot of our images of Satan and hell

00:28:41.400 and Satan and Lucifer as rulers of hell.

00:28:45.300 Dante, this is something very interesting to know about Dante's Inferno.

00:28:49.740 It's very useful to know practically.

00:28:51.520 you know couples are often loath to engage in conflict now there's a reason for this

00:28:59.820 or maybe you're loath to engage in conflict with people that you love or even people that you don't

00:29:05.820 like no but it's more relevant i would say in the context of relationships that are intimate

00:29:13.040 imagine that you have a pattern of disagreement with your wife that results in sequential frustrations

00:29:21.180 of the same type now she could easily have precisely the same problem with you this is not

00:29:27.020 a sex type problem in any way it's a situation that characterizes any intimate relationship you

00:29:33.580 know that there's problems that arise in your marriage and some of them have a the characteristic

00:29:39.740 of repetition which means they're more serious problems and often couples either just bicker

00:29:46.100 stupidly about those problems or they ignore them and let them continue. And there's a reason for

00:29:51.620 that. The reason is, and everyone knows this, you know, if you start to investigate what appears to

00:29:59.480 be a trivial disagreement, generally what happens is tempers start to rise and more profound

00:30:08.280 accusations start to be thrown back and forth and people become defensive and then

00:30:14.460 then spirits that aren't helpful enter the dialogue and one spirit would be the spirit

00:30:24.200 of power that wishes to dominate so that one partner in the dispute or the other strives

00:30:30.560 for victory instead of clarity and peace. You want to win the argument so you're right

00:30:36.420 and that's a big problem because you're probably not right 0.88

00:30:40.480 because who the hell are you? 0.97

00:30:42.080 And second, well, what about your wife? 0.97

00:30:46.120 She's going to be there tomorrow and like next week if you're lucky

00:30:50.240 and next year and so if you're continually defeating her

00:30:55.100 because you're right, then she's going to be continually defeated

00:30:59.780 and that's going to be your partner 1.00

00:31:02.580 And that's, unless you want to be a tyrant with a slave, that's a pretty stupid strategy. 1.00

00:31:09.560 And so you want to, well, but you can see the temptation, right? 0.99

00:31:14.420 Because people like to be right.

00:31:17.180 And if you're right, then you don't have to change.

00:31:20.560 And that's a relief.

00:31:21.980 Plus you have the moral upper hand and it's the impetus is on her to make the adjustments.

00:31:27.080 That's a good deal for you, even though it's not.

00:31:29.620 it's a terrible deal for you

00:31:31.640 if you make the case that you're right

00:31:34.500 and you're not

00:31:35.520 that's a really bad deal

00:31:37.060 and it's a bad deal for her too

00:31:38.980 now what happens if you start to investigate a problem

00:31:42.340 you know and instead of trying to win

00:31:45.700 or being tempted to avoid

00:31:47.420 you actually start to listen to each other

00:31:50.080 and you dig into it

00:31:51.600 and this is hard

00:31:52.580 you're going to have to want peace

00:31:55.300 you have to want to solve the problem

00:31:57.200 what happens is you go deeper into it right and that's the same thing as a journey into Dante's

00:32:04.120 Inferno so see in the story of the Inferno there's levels of hell right and the outer levels are sort 1.00

00:32:11.260 of just common misery you know that's where you are if you're just your day-to-day idiot self you 0.95

00:32:17.140 know it's like you're not suffering too badly but it's not paradise by any stretch of the imagination 1.00

00:32:22.140 And then you imagine that there are layers of foolish hell that you could make manifest 0.89

00:32:29.280 more deeper and deeper, more and more profoundly, 0.93

00:32:33.800 that are associated with more and more suffering.

00:32:37.480 And, well, that's what Dante investigates, right?

00:32:40.660 This spiraling down to the bottom of things, right?

00:32:45.300 How do things go wrong most fundamentally?

00:32:48.540 Now, Dante put betrayers at the bottom level of hell.

00:32:55.920 And why?

00:32:57.160 Well, one of the practical reasons is that if you imagine that part of the reason you're having a fight with your wife or she with you 0.71

00:33:06.920 is that neither of you really trust the opposite sex, right? 0.98

00:33:13.600 And that's pretty much the norm.

00:33:15.600 and no wonder right because the relationships between human beings are very fractious and

00:33:20.680 difficult and you know maybe your wife didn't have great role model in her father or maybe in her

00:33:26.640 father and her grandfather and maybe her father and her grandfather and her brothers and all the

00:33:31.380 men she went out with before you and so she's kind of hurt because of that and maybe you know

00:33:37.460 you were under the thumb of your mother or your aunt or your previous girlfriend and you've got

00:33:43.640 a lot of built-up resentment about women and if you dig into all that as it makes its horrible

00:33:50.280 horned head manifest in your relationship, you often find that at the bottom is some form of

00:33:56.320 betrayal. And betrayal is the most profound sin in some ways because the community is based on

00:34:04.220 trust, right? Like really what you have in your marriage is trust. Fundamentally, that's the

00:34:10.880 bedrock of the relationship. I mean, the vow of fidelity, for example, you're going to forego all

00:34:16.400 others, is a covenant of trust, right? And the reason betrayal is such a terrible sin is because

00:34:24.960 betrayal violates trust. And that means it undermines the most fundamental element of any

00:34:32.180 relationship, intimate or otherwise, and thus threatens community itself. And so Dante was

00:34:39.560 very wise in placing the betrayers right next to Satan. And so then, if you dig into that, well,

00:34:46.460 first of all, your person that you're fighting with, they're not going to want to admit to these

00:34:50.420 betrayals, especially if they played a part in them like Esau did, let's say, with Jacob. Lots

00:34:55.680 of times when you're betrayed, you're willfully blind, you set yourself up, and so it's bloody

00:35:00.300 embarrassing to go over it again. And even if mostly you were, you know, tortured at the hands

00:35:06.320 of someone else, you probably did a few stupid things along the way to increase the probability. 0.98

00:35:11.400 And that's not exactly fun territory to go back over. And so you have to do this terrible 0.99

00:35:17.840 expedition and excavation if you want to get to the bottom of, I would say, any problem.

00:35:24.460 And a lot of what you do in psychotherapy is exactly that. You know, people come to you as

00:35:28.720 a therapist and they say, well, I'm miserable. And you say something like, well, what do you

00:35:34.320 mean miserable? And that's a long accounting because it's a mystery. Like if you're suffering,

00:35:40.220 well, what does that mean? Like, are you suffering all the time? Is it minute by minute? How profound

00:35:44.740 is it? Are you suicidal because of it? Is it because you're physically ill or is there something

00:35:49.700 psychologically wrong or did you make some idiot decisions or are you sick physically? Because that 1.00

00:35:56.020 can certainly be the case or is this something that's multi-generational and you're just playing

00:36:01.160 it out? Or is it situation? Who knows? That's a lot of trouble. And then that's just to sort of

00:36:08.320 specify the nature of the suffering. Is it better sometimes and worse at other times? If it's worse

00:36:13.640 sometimes, what makes it worse? If it's better sometimes, why is it better? I mean, that's

00:36:19.420 months worth of discussion, especially if you're talking to someone who no one has ever listened to.

00:36:24.860 and that's a lot of people

00:36:26.660 and especially about deeply private matters

00:36:30.180 and that's there in your marriage

00:36:31.920 you can be 100% sure of that

00:36:34.060 and it's of course most likely

00:36:36.180 that the things that are most troublesome

00:36:37.960 are the things that are most likely

00:36:40.020 to be buried the most, the deepest

00:36:42.480 and to take the most excavation

00:36:45.900 to unearth and the most pain

00:36:48.460 to straighten out

00:36:50.080 plus it's not an easy thing to straighten out

00:36:52.360 Like, if your person or you has been betrayed, which is highly probable,

00:36:56.940 what the hell are you supposed to do about that?

00:36:59.820 You know, because the betrayal could be real.

00:37:01.920 And then, well, if you're betrayed, should you trust?

00:37:04.840 Well, that's kind of naive, isn't it?

00:37:06.800 Once burnt, twice shy.

00:37:09.300 But then if you don't trust, what are you?

00:37:12.060 Bitter, resentful, and afraid?

00:37:13.940 No, you're not going to have any relationships anymore.

00:37:16.180 You're going to contaminate the relationships you do have with your distrust.

00:37:19.880 Because that seems like a bad idea.

00:37:22.360 But it's not like that's easy to solve.

00:37:24.540 It's really, here's one solution.

00:37:27.480 Wise people trust because they're courageous.

00:37:30.920 Right?

00:37:31.520 This is a good thing to know.

00:37:33.640 Well, because you get cynics, eh?

00:37:35.880 And a cynic is an improvement over a naive child.

00:37:39.480 Like a cynic is a naive child who's been burnt and noticed.

00:37:43.480 And the cynic says, well, all hell can break loose,

00:37:46.640 and so why should I trust?

00:37:48.000 And that is an improvement over naivety

00:37:50.420 because the naive person trusts because they don't know any better.

00:37:54.040 Whereas the cynic thinks, well, I've been burnt,

00:37:56.300 and the world is on fire in many ways, and so I should be careful.

00:38:00.140 But then if you're cynical, well, what's the problem?

00:38:03.320 Well, you're cynical. That's a problem.

00:38:06.680 Well, it's a weight, man, to be cynical.

00:38:08.840 That's a weight, this distrust that you have on your face.

00:38:11.700 You know, this attitude you bring to bear on everyone.

00:38:15.360 It's like, are you a snake?

00:38:16.620 Because I've met some people before that seem pretty good,

00:38:18.960 But when I got to know them, all hell broke loose.

00:38:21.640 And that's a hell of a barrier to put between you and someone that you're just meeting, right?

00:38:26.480 Why the hell should they struggle to overcome your distrust, warranted though it may be?

00:38:31.140 And so what do you do?

00:38:32.720 You trust because you're courageous.

00:38:35.300 This is what you have to do in your marriage, continually, right?

00:38:38.760 You have to say, look, you're probably no better than me, and we're going to hurt each other.

00:38:43.760 but we're not going to close off

00:38:47.300 and we're not going to stop extending our hand to each other

00:38:49.760 and we're going to hope that in consequence of that trust

00:38:53.740 which is now a form of courage

00:38:55.520 we're going to shed our pathological pasts

00:38:59.780 and build ourselves into the people who could be deserving of that trust

00:39:04.600 but the thing is for that to happen

00:39:06.440 you've got to extend the hand of trust to begin with

00:39:08.760 and so that's definitely a form of both wisdom and courage

00:39:13.100 and it's the right alternative to cynicism.

00:39:15.820 It's like, yeah, I've been burnt,

00:39:16.980 but that doesn't mean that I've allowed my faith to be destroyed. 1.00

00:39:22.380 And you might think, well, that's stupidity. 1.00

00:39:24.480 It's like, it's no, that's, 1.00

00:39:32.540 you have to make your way forward in the world

00:39:34.860 despite your ignorance and despite the pain of existence.

00:39:38.720 And being willing to do that in the best possible manner 1.00

00:39:41.700 can't be defined as naive or foolish 0.98

00:39:44.940 because the alternative is hell. 0.98

00:39:48.580 So that's not a good alternative.

00:39:51.040 And so it's definitely the case, you know,

00:39:52.720 if you can develop an attitude of wise trust,

00:39:55.560 you still want to have your eyes open.

00:39:57.120 You don't want to be a pushover. 1.00

00:39:58.420 You're not supposed to be a fool. 0.98

00:40:00.100 But you also open the door to an endless number of opportunities 0.99

00:40:03.860 if you put forward a hand of trust.

00:40:05.800 Part of the reason your society is so rich,

00:40:08.860 this is actually the definition of rich

00:40:12.080 genuinely

00:40:13.600 is because the default trade

00:40:16.780 in the United States is honest

00:40:18.920 it's staggering

00:40:20.540 like you guys take that for granted

00:40:22.120 it's like you go into a store

00:40:24.260 and you assume that

00:40:25.240 what you're getting is the genuine article

00:40:28.380 and that it'll actually work

00:40:29.820 and that it won't be poison

00:40:30.960 that it's not counterfeit

00:40:32.260 or otherwise fake

00:40:34.240 and the person that you give the money to

00:40:37.180 assumes that that's actually money and not a check that'll bounce or some sort of credit card

00:40:41.480 fraud. And you both walk away better because one of you has the money and the other has the thing

00:40:47.560 they want. And what a deal. And you think there's nothing to that. It's like, there's a lot to that,

00:40:52.880 man. That happens very few places. And all the places it doesn't happen are poor and they'll

00:40:58.740 never get out of it. Right? And so when the default trade is based on trust, man, you are so rich.

00:41:07.180 And that's so delicate and so unlikely.

00:41:12.120 You know, you should be always regarding that

00:41:14.360 as the complete bloody miracle that it is

00:41:16.480 because we're all full of snakes. 0.51

00:41:19.040 And the fact that your society is so well constituted

00:41:22.100 that the default interaction between trading strangers is trust,

00:41:26.440 that's like a complete and utter miracle.

00:41:30.600 And there's a reason for it.

00:41:32.140 so without that trust

00:41:36.520 it's that trust

00:41:37.960 and the ethos that justifies it

00:41:40.100 that's what makes the desert bloom

00:41:41.760 you know so

00:41:43.380 that's an ethical endeavor

00:41:46.420 it's the ethical endeavor upon which

00:41:48.300 true wealth is predicated

00:41:50.160 it has nothing to do with

00:41:52.140 in some fundamental sense

00:41:53.960 with the bountiful provision of

00:41:56.120 mother nature it's an ethos

00:41:58.360 it's just same within your

00:42:00.220 marriage if you

00:42:01.620 both trust each other and you give each other reason for trust, man, you've got a treasure,

00:42:08.800 right? And you can imagine even that it is the treasure that allows you to have a treasure.

00:42:12.820 Because one of the things, if you want to be poor, here's a good thing to do. Just fight with your

00:42:18.720 wife all the time instead of working. And then you'll be poor, plus miserable, you know, and 0.98

00:42:24.240 resentful. That's another kind of poverty. You know, if you can establish a harmonious relationship

00:42:30.100 that's genuine, then that frees you up to, well, do all the other things that you might do if you 1.00

00:42:36.120 weren't torturing yourself and her with endless, fractious, idiot disputes. And so you can see 1.00

00:42:43.800 right there that there's a direct relationship between a relationship predicated on honesty and

00:42:50.420 the provision of what you need to make your way through life. And that's also true

00:42:54.940 at the broader social level.

00:42:57.620 This is not what Jacob does. 1.00

00:43:00.260 He's a crook, and his mother is an enabler, 0.98

00:43:04.040 and they conspire, and so it's this underground evil 0.99

00:43:10.460 that deprives Esau of his rightful place

00:43:16.440 and confuses and manipulates Isaac on his deathbed.

00:43:24.540 Not a pretty story.

00:43:27.980 Esau learns what happens.

00:43:30.860 Now he's stuck with it because Isaac is a man of his word

00:43:33.640 and he's delivered the wrong blessing.

00:43:36.460 But c'est la vie.

00:43:39.100 The words, the fateful words have been uttered.

00:43:42.340 And you might think, well, that's preposterous 0.96

00:43:44.760 because why maintain a contract written with a liar

00:43:51.200 and the ethos of that time was 0.99

00:43:55.180 you stick to your bloody word. 0.70

00:43:59.600 And, you know, there's something to be said for that 0.98

00:44:01.360 and you can argue about the details

00:44:03.580 but the central idea is a good one.

00:44:06.860 If the father has his statement

00:44:10.560 then he's going to live up to it.

00:44:12.460 And so that's what Isaac does

00:44:13.720 and Esau is rooked out of his inheritance

00:44:17.880 and that does not make him happy

00:44:20.020 as you might expect.

00:44:22.040 And so he decides that he's going to, 0.99

00:44:24.480 once Isaac dies, he's going to kill his brother. 0.71

00:44:26.980 And so that's kind of like the ultimate extent

00:44:28.740 of sibling rivalry, right?

00:44:30.400 It's a story very similar to the story of Cain and Abel,

00:44:34.100 right, where the brothers engage in murderous conflict.

00:44:38.860 And of course, in the story of Cain and Abel,

00:44:41.900 Abel dies, he's killed.

00:44:45.220 And Cain suffers the consequence of that dreadful murder.

00:44:50.660 And that pattern, that pattern, that dynamic between Cain and Abel,

00:44:54.600 that dynamic of misery, Cain makes improper sacrifices.

00:44:58.820 He doesn't offer his best, so he fails.

00:45:03.460 And that's part of the pathway to his intense misery, which he nurses.

00:45:08.460 And then, as a consequence of that nursing, that conspiracy with evil itself,

00:45:15.420 he decides he's going to kill Abel, even though Abel is who he wants to be.

00:45:19.580 and who he most admires, and so he does that.

00:45:22.820 And that's a very deep story.

00:45:25.200 The victim-victimizer narrative that pervades our culture

00:45:28.340 is a variant of the Cain and Abel story.

00:45:31.020 Marxism is a variant, a pathological variant of the Cain and Abel story. 0.94

00:45:35.640 Everyone who succeeds is a thief.

00:45:38.500 It's like, really?

00:45:40.080 Just imagine what happens to a society that defines success as theft.

00:45:44.620 Right? How are you going to be successful

00:45:46.760 If you define success as theft, that's a communist insistence.

00:45:52.600 Property is theft.

00:45:54.660 Great.

00:45:56.100 Success is theft.

00:45:58.060 Well, you see all the accusations leveled at the Jewish community. 0.99

00:46:01.560 Now, that's the emergence of that pathological hatred for success. 1.00

00:46:07.060 The Jews are always canaries in the coal mine. 0.99

00:46:09.880 It's really not good. 1.00

00:46:11.840 Perennial successful minority. 1.00

00:46:14.380 You hate them in good conscience?

00:46:15.900 all the people who are successful are next so that's a that's something to watch out for it is

00:46:22.460 not a good sign and that's everywhere on your university campuses at the moment it's really

00:46:29.920 not good so why because envy is a deadly sin really and what does that mean it means if you

00:46:38.200 do enough of it you die and in some bloody miserable manner and so that's a good definition

00:46:45.480 of sin, right? Misaligned aim. Okay, so now Jacob gets wind of Esau's plot, and he thinks,

00:46:54.180 I better get the hell out of here. Now, it's worthwhile giving Jacob some credit at this time.

00:46:58.900 He's not very old, and so he's young and foolish, and so you want to have some sympathy for him, 0.99

00:47:05.020 because you were young and foolish, and maybe now you're old and foolish, and you probably have 0.99

00:47:10.600 your temperamental proclivities in the false and sinful direction. And it's useful to know that 1.00

00:47:18.320 that's how the story is set up. Know that Jacob starts his journey as a very flawed person. Okay,

00:47:26.620 why is that good? Because you're very flawed. And so if there's hope for Jacob, given his terrible

00:47:34.580 beginning and his conniving behavior, well, maybe there's hope for you. And so what does Jacob do

00:47:42.880 when he leaves? Okay, well, now you can imagine he leaves. Well, that means he leaves home.

00:47:48.400 So that's a maturation decision. Even though he has to run off, lots of times when people leave

00:47:54.420 home, you know, when they're teenagers, older teenagers, they kind of leave in a flurry of

00:47:59.640 trouble, maybe with a fight. It's like, it's time I get the hell out of here. Well, what's the fight

00:48:04.340 about. The too heavy, tyrannical hand of the father. The too much enabling on the part of the

00:48:09.680 mother. The idiot sins of the juvenile who's resentful. Whatever. Away he goes. That's what 1.00

00:48:16.080 happens to Jacob. And that's what happens to most of us. You know, the parting, the parting that

00:48:22.040 constitutes the first step into maturity doesn't have to be smooth. And often isn't. And so Jacob,

00:48:28.160 Anyways, Jacob at least leaves.

00:48:31.360 And obviously not under the best circumstances,

00:48:33.920 but we could imagine that maybe he's relieved

00:48:36.000 to get away from the machinations of his manipulative mother.

00:48:41.040 Because we don't even know from the story

00:48:42.580 how much of this decision was Jacob's

00:48:45.320 and how much of it was Rachel's.

00:48:47.260 And you never know that in a family, you know?

00:48:49.780 And so children can be enticed into sin by their parents

00:48:53.320 and they can go along with it or refuse it too.

00:48:57.420 And so it's very complex.

00:48:59.240 In any case, Jacob leaves.

00:49:01.800 And so that's a good thing.

00:49:03.180 He takes a step out into the world.

00:49:04.980 And then he makes a decision.

00:49:06.400 And this is, it's a key decision.

00:49:08.840 And it's really worth understanding.

00:49:10.780 He decides he's going to aim up.

00:49:13.940 Okay, so what does that mean?

00:49:15.540 Well, let's make it very concrete and practical.

00:49:20.140 And what would you say?

00:49:22.460 Immediately recognizable and believable.

00:49:24.500 we all know people who have led a rather profligate life

00:49:31.540 this is likely true of virtually everyone sitting in this audience

00:49:36.780 who have decided at different times in their life 1.00

00:49:40.440 that they're going to stop doing the stupid things that they're doing 0.99

00:49:44.680 and they're going to try to what? 1.00

00:49:46.880 to aim up

00:49:48.040 okay so that seems like something that you can do

00:49:51.820 right? You can not be doing things correctly, and you can be suffering the consequences of that

00:50:00.220 along with the people around you, but then you can decide that that's not, maybe that's not

00:50:07.520 optimal, something like that. Maybe there's something wrong with the way you're conducting

00:50:11.320 yourself. That's what happens when people try to escape from an addiction or a gambling habit or

00:50:15.400 something like that. It's like, maybe I'm doing something wrong here, okay? Two decisions. Maybe

00:50:21.580 i'm doing something wrong that's kind of like a confession and maybe i could try to be better

00:50:27.680 okay so what is it what happens when you decide to try to be better well you're you're what would

00:50:34.440 you say you're taping taking a step forward in faith well what's the faith well it's kind of

00:50:39.880 twofold the first bit of faith is there's something that's better and that's not so self-evident you

00:50:47.280 know lots of people who have a criminal bent let's say or manipulative bent they justify that by

00:50:52.180 saying well there's no real evil or good you know it's just a matter of power it's a matter of

00:50:57.920 opinion it's all morally relative and if you object to what i'm doing when i steal your car

00:51:03.300 for example it's like well property is theft buddy so get over it you know and you made your

00:51:10.320 money by exploiting and you got your car and I'm just returning the favor, let's say. So

00:51:16.980 when you decide that you're going to aim up, you've agreed provisionally

00:51:25.180 that there's a moral framework to the world and that you, at least in some way,

00:51:31.860 are not on the right side of the equation, right? That maybe that happens when you're addicted to

00:51:38.560 alcohol and you hit rock bottom and you think, oh my God, you know, enough of this. I got to do

00:51:44.360 something different. I got to change. And so there's the second part of the faith. It's like,

00:51:49.840 not only now do you understand that there's an up, something better than what you're doing,

00:51:55.520 something less hellish than what you're doing, but you've also decided to risk the proposition that

00:52:01.840 you are the sort of person that could, in principle, aim up, right? So it's a twofold faith.

00:52:09.880 And why faith? Well, you don't have much evidence that that's the sort of person you are,

00:52:14.580 because you wouldn't be in the predicament you're in if that was the case. And you didn't really

00:52:19.520 believe in up to begin with, because why the hell were you aiming down? And so it's quite a radical

00:52:25.240 transformation. Now the question that arises, what exactly is the nature of this transformation?

00:52:33.220 Well, I've tried to take this apart as a clinician. Let's imagine that you decided to aim up. You're

00:52:39.820 going to rescue yourself from the pit you dug insofar as you're capable of doing that. Well,

00:52:45.340 how might you do that? Because you're blind and you're corrupt. And so what the hell do you know 1.00

00:52:50.800 even about what up is, right?

00:52:53.420 So that's a big problem.

00:52:54.460 You're all morally confused.

00:52:55.920 How do you take the first step?

00:52:58.220 Well, generally, there's a prayer that I formulated

00:53:02.640 that sort of goes along with this.

00:53:04.100 This is a good prayer.

00:53:04.900 If you want a prayer that'll be answered,

00:53:06.320 this is a good one. 1.00

00:53:08.760 What stupid thing am I doing or did do 1.00

00:53:12.160 that increased the probability 1.00

00:53:14.900 that this hellish situation is upon me? 1.00

00:53:18.780 what stupid thing did I do 1.00

00:53:22.100 that I might be willing to try not to do again? 1.00

00:53:25.980 There's a very particular kind of prayer, right?

00:53:27.980 Because it's, first of all, the admission that

00:53:29.660 maybe you had something to do with it.

00:53:31.640 And second, the admission that

00:53:34.080 well, you might have had something to do with it

00:53:36.020 but maybe you're not going to be willing to change that.

00:53:39.540 But maybe there's some little bloody thing you could do

00:53:42.260 that you would do.

00:53:43.920 It's a useful technique, by the way.

00:53:45.960 if you're having an argument with your wife or your husband.

00:53:49.160 This actually works very well.

00:53:50.480 It's like maybe it's an intractable argument, you know,

00:53:53.080 and tempers are flaring.

00:53:55.660 You could return to your corners,

00:53:58.240 and you could sit on the edge of your bed, let's say,

00:54:00.740 and you could aim heavenward, and you could say to yourself,

00:54:04.360 I know she's wrong, like she always is.

00:54:08.180 I know I'm right, or at least 95% right.

00:54:11.920 But maybe, despite my perfection,

00:54:14.400 There's something I did that increased the probability of this miserable situation.

00:54:20.640 You know, some little thing, obviously.

00:54:23.860 And then if you allow the revelation to occur, 1.00

00:54:29.860 some little memory will come up about some bloody, stupid thing that you managed 0.99

00:54:34.760 maybe a long time ago that set the stage for this particular bit of trouble. 1.00

00:54:41.300 And then you can go tell your wife that.

00:54:43.020 and maybe she can do the same

00:54:45.120 and then you're a lot happier with each other

00:54:47.000 because neither of you are right

00:54:48.720 and both of you contributed

00:54:50.360 and you both admitted it

00:54:52.360 and maybe there's something you could do about it

00:54:54.380 and so if you want to solve a hard problem

00:54:57.680 it's a good idea to start with yourself

00:55:00.720 and even if you still think you're 95% right

00:55:03.700 well at least you've opened the door

00:55:06.460 that she could be 5% right

00:55:08.320 and that's better than you were

00:55:09.680 it's better positioning than you had

00:55:12.140 before you tried the exercise.

00:55:13.980 And, you know, there's something to know about that, too.

00:55:17.380 Painful as it is to admit that you're wrong,

00:55:19.840 and so you might say, well, why should I even bother?

00:55:21.720 It's like, well, maybe you wouldn't have to be wrong again.

00:55:25.260 That's a good deal.

00:55:26.680 So this is one of the advantages to the notion of soul-searching,

00:55:32.700 abiding by conscience, and, let's say, confession.

00:55:35.740 It's like, why look at your own sins?

00:55:38.400 well if they're producing misery

00:55:40.720 unnecessary misery

00:55:42.540 it's a good definition of sin

00:55:44.200 and you could figure out

00:55:46.040 how you're contributing to that

00:55:48.040 painful as that realization

00:55:49.720 is likely to be

00:55:52.120 then maybe you could stop

00:55:54.080 and you wouldn't have to replicate

00:55:56.240 the errors in the future

00:55:57.800 and that particular slice of hell

00:56:00.760 wouldn't make its appearance anymore

00:56:02.660 and that is what happens

00:56:04.260 if you go down Dante's Inferno

00:56:06.860 to the bottom

00:56:07.520 when you're having a conflict with your wife

00:56:10.480 or someone that you love

00:56:11.600 and you get to the bottom of things

00:56:14.140 and you sort it out, right?

00:56:16.160 You change and they change

00:56:17.740 and hopefully you both change in a manner

00:56:20.720 that makes that pathway not necessary anymore.

00:56:24.660 And that's a form of up and that's a good deal.

00:56:27.500 And so if you extend your contemplation of that,

00:56:30.340 you might come to understand that

00:56:31.580 the more soul searching you do

00:56:34.080 and the more you can attend to your own sins, let's say,

00:56:37.200 The more you admit that's humility to where you might have gone wrong,

00:56:42.160 the higher the probability that you could set things right.

00:56:46.040 And maybe that payoff would be worth the trouble of having to do that painful investigation, right?

00:56:54.460 And so that's worth knowing.

00:56:56.620 It's like, well, why should I admit that I'm wrong?

00:56:59.240 It isn't exactly the admission, although that's necessary.

00:57:02.220 It's more like, God, if I could discover where I was wrong,

00:57:07.480 oh, then maybe I could get back on the right road.

00:57:10.000 This is exactly the opposite, by the way, of what the Pharaoh does

00:57:13.100 when Moses comes to tell them, tyrant,

00:57:17.840 that he's to let the enslaved people of Israel go, 0.56

00:57:21.880 to worship him in the desert, right? 0.63

00:57:23.760 That's the words God uses for Moses.

00:57:25.920 The tyrant, instead of noting his error, 0.95

00:57:31.300 which in this case would be the vicious enslavement of the Jews 0.82

00:57:35.860 a particularly ungrateful thing to do

00:57:38.660 because they were great benefactors of Egypt

00:57:40.980 in times not so much previous

00:57:44.480 he just doubles down

00:57:46.300 and that is the alternative in an argument 1.00

00:57:49.800 the alternative to trying to figure out why you're the idiot 1.00

00:57:52.460 is doubling down and insisting that you're right 1.00

00:57:55.920 well so what happens to the Pharaoh when he insists that he's right?

00:57:59.800 well he gets a plague

00:58:00.900 It's like, well, do you understand that?

00:58:02.760 It's like, what happens to you if you're wrong and you insist that you're right?

00:58:06.880 Well, if being wrong made you suffer,

00:58:09.840 and now you're even insisting more directly that you were right,

00:58:14.580 a plague is going to visit you. 0.51

00:58:16.920 And theoretically, you could learn from that, but you won't if you're a tyrant.

00:58:21.280 And then you'll double down even harder

00:58:23.520 and use whatever magic tricks are at your disposal to show how you're right,

00:58:28.900 which is what the Pharaoh does.

00:58:30.000 and another plague will come.

00:58:31.940 And if that doesn't teach you,

00:58:33.300 then a worse plague will come.

00:58:35.620 And there's no end to that. 1.00

00:58:37.100 Well, there's an end in the Egyptian case. 1.00

00:58:39.640 The destruction of the future. 1.00

00:58:42.220 That's the firstborn.

00:58:43.540 That's the last plague.

00:58:44.720 The destruction not only of the present,

00:58:46.980 but the future.

00:58:48.720 So that's not very much fun.

00:58:51.240 And then the utter destructive chaos

00:58:54.020 of the Red Sea,

00:58:55.620 which is a flood of destructive blood.

00:58:58.360 And that's the final destination for the tyranny that won't admit to its own error.

00:59:05.680 So, unless you want to end up there, which seems like a bad plan,

00:59:10.920 then maybe what you want to do is figure out what you're contributing to the situation.

00:59:17.400 On the off chance that you could stop being a delusional tyrant,

00:59:21.540 and in the hopes that you could learn to negotiate in this dialogical manner

00:59:29.020 and move yourself upward.

00:59:32.900 Okay, so now we have Jacob.

00:59:34.880 He leaves home and he decides that it dawns on him, you might say,

00:59:40.160 that he wasn't that good a guy and that Esau kind of has a point in his murderous rage.

00:59:47.120 And maybe he's away from his mother.

00:59:49.060 And so he wakes up a little bit and he thinks, like you think when you make a change, you

00:59:54.460 think, maybe something new could be born in me.

00:59:58.240 Maybe I could be a different person.

01:00:00.320 And so how is that signified in the text?

01:00:02.900 He builds an altar to God.

01:00:05.860 Now, I don't want to explain that completely yet, but I can make some hints in that direction.

01:00:12.320 He makes a sacrifice.

01:00:14.940 Okay, so imagine that you're trying to improve.

01:00:18.340 What do you sacrifice? 0.99

01:00:20.400 Some stupid thing you value that's impeding your progress. 1.00

01:00:25.180 So every bit of progress is going to be marked by a sacrifice, right? 1.00

01:00:29.720 When you become an adult, you put away childish things.

01:00:32.900 You grow up.

01:00:33.780 What does it mean to grow up?

01:00:34.740 It means to sacrifice your immaturity, to sacrifice your self-centeredness in this attempt to aim upward.

01:00:42.360 And Jacob, at least, he marks the decision with this building of an altar. 1.00

01:00:48.860 Well, that was a good thing for those archaic people to do 0.75

01:00:51.420 because they had a ritual to signify the willingness to sacrifice properly and transform.

01:00:58.080 We don't really have that, and that's a really bad thing. 0.99

01:01:00.520 You know, I don't know, the Catholics have it a bit 1.00

01:01:04.620 because you can go to church and confess, 0.98

01:01:06.700 and then at least you've told someone what you've done wrong

01:01:10.500 and informed them of your intent to improve.

01:01:13.380 And you kind of made it real that way.

01:01:15.380 But if you don't have anyone to tell

01:01:17.300 and you can barely tell yourself,

01:01:18.800 it's not that easy to formulate a conviction

01:01:21.560 that's going to transform you.

01:01:23.540 We're very bad at that in our society.

01:01:25.960 But, you know, people do decide to aim upward.

01:01:29.580 Okay, so what do you do when you aim upward?

01:01:32.160 Blind as you might be.

01:01:33.880 Well, practically speaking, we might say,

01:01:36.140 I don't think that anyone is so lost ever

01:01:39.840 that they're unable to see that some of the things they're doing are wrong, right?

01:01:47.280 You can imagine someone's moral compass being dreadfully askew.

01:01:51.420 But the probability that they're aware of their most egregious current errors is still quite high.

01:01:58.200 And then you might also hope, and I think this is true unless you're totally lost,

01:02:03.980 and the Judeo-Christian promise is that you're never that lost.

01:02:09.120 right? There's hope for everyone

01:02:11.000 no matter what dire straits

01:02:13.160 they might be in, even if they're in

01:02:15.160 hell itself, so to speak

01:02:17.140 like Jonah was when

01:02:19.200 he refused the commandment of God

01:02:21.100 to say what he knew to be true

01:02:22.640 you start perhaps by

01:02:27.060 deciding not to do

01:02:29.020 some of the things that you are doing that you know

01:02:31.140 to be wrong. So that first

01:02:33.020 bit of upward aim is something like a

01:02:35.060 prohibition, right? It's

01:02:37.100 a thou shalt not, like a commandment, all the commandments, virtually all the commandments

01:02:41.660 are things you should not do. That's sort of the first step in moral striving. You know,

01:02:47.620 maybe you realize that, I don't know, all that methamphetamine is just not doing you any good.

01:02:53.200 And so what's the rule? Well, you're going to try to stop, or maybe you lie, or maybe you cheat,

01:02:58.160 or God only knows. Whatever your temptation is, there's lots of them. It's like you can see that

01:03:05.620 some of them are, are what? They're stopping your progress forward. They're hurting the people

01:03:12.920 around you. Now, maybe you're willing to put up with that because you were in the past, but

01:03:16.640 like I said, now and then people come to a realization. It's like, maybe I could change.

01:03:23.240 And they, they make that decision. And that's a step towards up. And that's an interesting thing

01:03:30.820 because it implies that there is an up.

01:03:32.980 Okay, so now what happens to Jacob?

01:03:35.020 Well, he has this dream.

01:03:36.880 And everyone knows about this dream.

01:03:39.400 He dreams of Jacob's ladder.

01:03:41.480 And he sees this staircase.

01:03:44.200 I imagine it as a spiral.

01:03:46.960 A staircase that spirals up

01:03:49.280 and disappears into the highest conceivable place.

01:03:53.860 And that the angels of the Lord descend on that

01:03:56.600 to deliver messages to earth

01:03:58.280 and to bring messages back up the hierarchy to God.

01:04:03.680 And so what kind of vision is that?

01:04:05.740 Well, it's an entrancing vision,

01:04:07.240 which is why we remember it thousands of years later.

01:04:09.660 But it's also an ancient vision.

01:04:11.560 It's the same vision as Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb.

01:04:14.580 It's the same vision as the pyramid.

01:04:18.220 It's the same vision as the tree,

01:04:22.520 the tree, Yggdrasil,

01:04:25.620 the tree of the ancient Scandinavians

01:04:27.580 that the Scandinavian shaman climbed

01:04:31.460 to commune with the spirits of their ancestors

01:04:35.820 when they entered the divine realm.

01:04:38.360 It's the same as the stalk

01:04:40.280 in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk,

01:04:43.320 where Jack can rise out of the earthly realm

01:04:46.360 along the axis that unites heaven and earth

01:04:50.580 to find the treasure that lurks

01:04:54.140 at the highest possible place.

01:04:56.300 This is a very old idea.

01:04:59.400 It's tens of thousands of years old

01:05:01.360 that there's a structure that unites

01:05:03.840 the profane realm and the divine realm.

01:05:07.200 And that there's the possibility of communication

01:05:10.180 between those realms if the doorway is open.

01:05:14.100 And the thing is, Jacob opened the door

01:05:15.760 because he decided that he was going to aim up.

01:05:18.780 Okay, so now we've got to think about that.

01:05:20.580 Aim up.

01:05:21.740 Okay.

01:05:22.000 like i said that implies that there's an up all right so imagine now imagine someone on a moral 0.97

01:05:30.960 journey upward and the first thing they do is they stop doing some of the stupid things that

01:05:37.160 they're doing right they discipline themselves to some degree and what's the consequence of that 0.94

01:05:42.060 well there are the the scales fall a bit from their eyes right so once you stop blinding yourself

01:05:51.680 you can see better and so what does that mean well it means that your moral compass is set

01:05:58.140 more accurately and maybe you can see more subtle examples of the foolish things that you're doing

01:06:04.980 that were that you were blind to to begin with and so your ability to see up improves and so

01:06:13.200 maybe you're smart and you make the sacrifices that are attendant on that new realization and

01:06:19.260 what happens is you can see even a little better. Now, the story of Jacob and the story

01:06:26.140 of Abraham are both stories of that sort. So what happens to Abraham once he leaves

01:06:32.200 the safety of his father's tent and goes out into the world for his adventure is that

01:06:37.820 he faces an ever-expanding field of opportunities, right? And each of which is marked by a sacrifice

01:06:46.620 that is more costly.

01:06:49.640 Okay, so what does that mean?

01:06:51.200 Well, that's your life.

01:06:53.220 If you're aiming up,

01:06:55.740 is that as you mature and improve

01:06:58.940 and your vision clears,

01:07:00.580 the opportunities that avail themselves to you

01:07:03.420 will grow.

01:07:04.720 But as they grow, more will be required from you

01:07:07.800 because as you have more at hand,

01:07:12.120 any foolishness that you bring on for the trip

01:07:16.300 is going to trip you up.

01:07:19.060 You know, if you have hardly any responsibility,

01:07:21.180 you can be fairly irresponsible.

01:07:23.040 But if you have weighty and deep responsibilities,

01:07:27.020 you better bloody well get your act together

01:07:28.880 because the price you pay for the expanded opportunity

01:07:31.800 is the necessity for improved,

01:07:35.540 for more wisdom, right?

01:07:37.680 Improved vision on the moral dimension.

01:07:41.560 And so Abraham, that's Abraham,

01:07:43.600 decides to follow that pathway.

01:07:45.100 And while God offers him a remarkable deal, God offers him, he says, if you take that path, the path of expanding opportunity and expanding sacrifice at each opportune moment, then you'll be a blessing to yourself, that's a good deal.

01:08:03.900 and your reputation will grow

01:08:07.060 and validly

01:08:07.980 and so that's a good deal

01:08:09.420 and you'll do that in a way

01:08:10.740 that will enable you

01:08:11.600 to establish something permanent

01:08:13.080 a dynasty

01:08:14.020 in Abraham's case

01:08:15.740 he becomes the father of nations

01:08:17.960 which is quite the accomplishment

01:08:20.280 and you'll do it in a way

01:08:22.980 that makes you a benefit

01:08:23.920 to everyone else

01:08:24.840 so that's a pretty good deal

01:08:27.160 that's four great things

01:08:28.560 stacked on each other

01:08:29.680 associated with the call to adventure

01:08:32.700 And that's what Jacob follows as well.

01:08:34.780 He goes off to have his life.

01:08:40.320 He goes off and he lives with his uncle,

01:08:42.760 who's kind of a schemer,

01:08:44.240 which is pretty much exactly what Jacob deserves.

01:08:46.640 And he apprentices himself to his uncle for seven years

01:08:49.760 to gain the hand of his eventual wife.

01:08:56.360 And then his uncle substitutes the other daughter

01:09:01.840 on the bridal night and Jacob has to work for another seven years to get the woman that he

01:09:07.640 loves. And what does that mean? Well, it means that when you move from a crooked juvenile existence

01:09:14.500 into adulthood, you probably have to apprentice yourself. And maybe it's just the fate you set up

01:09:21.460 for yourself to encounter the kind of schemer who's going to pull the same stunts on you that

01:09:25.760 you pulled. And maybe if that happens to you, you'll learn. And maybe not. But Jacob learns.

01:09:32.760 And then he decides to go back to his homeland and reestablish peace with his brother.

01:09:41.480 And on the banks of the river, before he makes the crossing into his brother's land,

01:09:48.200 he wrestles with an angel. He wrestles with God. He's making another moral decision. He's

01:09:55.620 going to go confront the catastrophe of his past. Should he do that? Should he not do that? Should

01:10:01.220 he turn back? Is it dangerous? What should he do? That's the wrestling. Well, what does it mean to

01:10:06.440 wrestle with God in that way? It's like, well, that's what you do when you have a difficult

01:10:10.620 moral decision to make. It's like, is it this pathway or is it this pathway? That's why you

01:10:15.120 meet the devil at the crossroads. It's like, up or not? And even more, what's even more difficult?

01:10:22.700 which way is up? That's hard when the moral decision is complex. And so you hope your vision

01:10:29.580 is clear. One of the reasons that you want to practice your upward aim is because there will

01:10:34.620 come a time in your life, many times, where if you've corrupted your vision, you will make the

01:10:41.100 wrong decision. And that will bring hell down on you and everyone around you. And often at the

01:10:49.460 worst possible time. And so one of the reasons that you're enjoined, let's say, to practice

01:10:57.340 virtue with every glance and every utterance is so that when the time comes, which it will,

01:11:04.700 you'll be able to rely on yourself as you would rely on someone trustworthy, knowing them to be

01:11:10.740 trustworthy, to make an impossible decision in the midst of utter chaos. And if you don't have

01:11:16.740 that ability? Well, it's the Red Sea for you. And that's not something you would hope for if you

01:11:24.260 had any sense. Okay, so now, Jacob aims upward. Now, the question is, what do we make of the

01:11:34.480 notion of upward aim? And so, here's a way of thinking about what Jacob's ladder means. This

01:11:44.480 is a very cool thing to understand so imagine that as you make the sequential transformations

01:11:51.060 in your life that make you a better person what beckons to you as an upward opportunity changes

01:11:59.840 right so what you might regard as up when you're a teenager will move you ahead if you pursue it

01:12:07.740 But if you make that movement, something new will make itself manifest to you as up.

01:12:14.120 And then if you realize that and make the sacrifices and make the changes necessary,

01:12:20.240 your vision will change and your circumstance will change

01:12:23.040 and something new will manifest itself as the next upward aim.

01:12:27.520 Okay, so now you can see that as part of that ladder.

01:12:30.320 And so then the question is, well, what's at the top of that?

01:12:35.100 or what's behind that?

01:12:38.780 Because here's a way of thinking about it.

01:12:40.420 You can imagine that the upward calling

01:12:44.300 makes itself manifest to you

01:12:47.920 in different ways at different stages of your life.

01:12:50.840 But it's still the same thing that's calling you upward.

01:12:54.760 That upward calling also makes itself manifest

01:12:57.820 in different ways to different people.

01:13:00.920 Like up for you and up for you now

01:13:03.580 may look even opposite sometimes.

01:13:05.900 Like maybe you would have to get your temper under control

01:13:09.120 and maybe you would have to have a temper now and then, right?

01:13:13.100 Because you're too much of a pushover.

01:13:15.680 And so you could, an outside observer might think,

01:13:18.100 well, the up for both of you is opposite

01:13:21.160 and therefore can't be a reflection of the same thing, right?

01:13:24.640 That looks paradoxical, but that has more to do

01:13:28.800 with the particulars of your circumstance

01:13:30.600 than anything paradoxical about up.

01:13:33.140 How is God defined in the story of Jacob and Esau?

01:13:36.960 God is defined as the spirit that lurks behind all upward aim.

01:13:42.060 And that is such a cool thing to understand.

01:13:44.940 Like, this is a definition, you see.

01:13:47.560 It's a definition.

01:13:49.040 And it's useful for modern...

01:13:50.260 It's not the only definition of God by any stretch in the biblical stories.

01:13:54.980 There's many definitions.

01:13:56.240 They're, in principle, they all unite because it's a monotheistic document.

01:14:00.540 And so God makes himself manifest in many ways.

01:14:03.640 In the story of Noah, for example,

01:14:05.680 God is defined as the spirit that calls to the wise to prepare when trouble is brewing.

01:14:11.300 Right?

01:14:11.880 And you might say, well, do you believe in God?

01:14:13.960 It's like, well, if you're a wise person and you have an intuition that trouble is brewing,

01:14:19.300 and you're inclined as a consequence of that intuition to prepare,

01:14:23.880 then you believe.

01:14:25.820 The preparation is the belief.

01:14:28.080 And if you don't, well, then you just believe in what?

01:14:31.580 The insignificance of your own moral intuition.

01:14:34.560 That's a form of belief, too.

01:14:36.040 Or maybe belief in the pathway of irresponsibility.

01:14:39.100 That's not my problem.

01:14:41.020 It's like, well, that's a form of belief, too.

01:14:44.660 Jacob construes God in this vision.

01:14:47.140 And as I said, this is a vision that partakes of a very ancient pattern

01:14:50.400 as the spirit that lurks at the apex, the invisible apex,

01:14:55.580 the transcendent apex of all upward aims.

01:14:59.640 And so that's a very cool thing to understand,

01:15:02.020 because it means that you can establish a relationship with that

01:15:05.200 very rapidly and very realistically.

01:15:08.300 And the way you do that is you think,

01:15:09.920 okay, my life isn't everything it could be,

01:15:14.300 because I'm not in paradise, let's say,

01:15:16.640 and some of that's on me, okay?

01:15:19.460 I would like to understand which parts of that are on me,

01:15:23.160 and I would like to rectify that.

01:15:26.820 Now that's a decision, right?

01:15:28.140 And as I said already,

01:15:29.280 that's a decision that's based on faith

01:15:31.180 in your ability to transform,

01:15:33.140 but more profoundly in the idea

01:15:35.660 that there is an up in comparison

01:15:37.700 to your pathway.

01:15:40.820 And so,

01:15:42.580 in all likelihood,

01:15:48.340 if you ask that question

01:15:50.040 in the proper spirit,

01:15:51.620 and that's the spirit of all due humility

01:15:53.940 in the absence of pride

01:15:55.920 and the desire for power

01:15:57.760 some step

01:15:59.800 forward will make itself manifest

01:16:01.940 to you and

01:16:03.920 then your belief in that

01:16:05.780 your manifestation

01:16:07.960 of faith is to take that step

01:16:10.220 and then the consequence

01:16:12.060 is perhaps

01:16:13.820 the next step will make itself

01:16:15.740 manifest to you next now there's

01:16:17.820 a pattern to that too so Christ

01:16:19.840 says something brilliant, surprise, surprise, and it's called the Matthew principle. Economists

01:16:27.940 know about this. To those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing,

01:16:35.440 everything will be taken. So what does that mean? Well, it means that progress and failure aren't 1.00

01:16:41.060 linear. It means they have a pattern like this. Progress, failure, right? And that falling off

01:16:48.020 the cliff, that's the endless descent into hell. What does that pattern indicate? Once you start

01:16:53.640 improving, the process accelerates. And once you start failing, the process accelerates, right?

01:17:01.640 And so the upside of that, the downside of that's pretty clear, right? Each mistake you make takes

01:17:07.860 you closer to the brink. Everyone knows that. The upside is, it doesn't really matter where you

01:17:14.760 start. You can start as damaged as Jacob, let's say. The first step you take forward increases

01:17:21.480 the probability not only that the next step will make itself manifest, but that it will be a bigger

01:17:26.040 step and you'll be able to take it. And then the thing that calls you up will recede as you progress

01:17:34.440 towards it and manifest itself in different ways. But that's a beckoning forward. And Jacob's ladder

01:17:41.100 is a vision of that beckoning forward up to the highest possible,

01:17:45.120 what would you say?

01:17:46.600 It's calling upon you to be an avatar of the highest possible spirit.

01:17:52.000 That upward aim is the voice of the image of God in which you're made,

01:17:59.460 attempting to make itself manifest within you.

01:18:02.220 That's what it is.

01:18:03.480 And that's there for you.

01:18:05.300 That's there for you.

01:18:07.240 And so what does it mean to aim up?

01:18:11.540 Well, it's a great relief for you to begin with.

01:18:15.020 And everyone around you that loves you is going to be pretty damn happy

01:18:19.220 if that's what you decide to do.

01:18:21.260 Even if you've failed in the past,

01:18:23.480 anyone who loves you is going to be thrilled that you've made that decision.

01:18:26.320 And if you stick to it religiously, then your reputation will grow.

01:18:32.820 And if you do that properly, then maybe you could establish something permanent.

01:18:37.360 And if you do that well, maybe you do that in a way that's a benefit to everyone else.

01:18:42.220 And that would be a good deal.

01:18:44.380 And there's no difference between that and wrestling with God.

01:18:47.680 And there's no difference between that and establishing a covenant with the Lord.

01:18:52.400 And these are matters of definition.

01:18:54.140 I'm not trying to call on you to believe some superstitious, archaic claptrop.

01:19:00.240 these are descriptions of the pathway that opens and it's the nature of the

01:19:06.960 pathways that open up in front of us they're always the same and one leads up

01:19:11.700 and the other leads down and we all know that and the upward path is a it has a

01:19:16.980 pattern and the pattern is part of what's explicated in these ancient texts

01:19:22.200 and of course it is because wouldn't you expect the wisdom of ages to specify the

01:19:28.860 nature of the true pathway forward it's like what do you think your ancestors were doing

01:19:33.040 like nothing they built all the they built everything you have around you so

01:19:39.280 so this is a very optimistic story you know it it requires you to be on your knees

01:19:47.160 which is the appropriate place for you to be unless you're in the kingdom of heaven to begin

01:19:52.020 with so that you can develop the courage to face your own sins, right? Your own inadequacies and

01:20:00.740 the mistakes that you've made to determine, to attempt to rectify them in the hope that

01:20:08.960 you could rectify them and that you would improve and that you would establish harmony within your

01:20:15.380 soul and within your marriage and within your family and within your community, within your

01:20:20.920 state and within your nation and all of that under God. And that's all part of that upward

01:20:25.820 spiraling process that's Jacob's ladder. And that's all part of what I was telling my kids

01:20:32.140 when I asked them, which direction is up? It's like, is there up or not? Is there down? Do you

01:20:38.960 suffer stupidly? Well, if the answer to that is yes, then the evidence that there's down is 1.00

01:20:44.840 right at hand in the form of your own misery.

01:20:49.680 And you can deny that if you want,

01:20:52.280 but the cost of that denial

01:20:58.480 is the multiplication of the misery

01:21:00.160 and it's transmission to everyone around you. 0.99

01:21:02.780 And so it's a fool's journey. 0.98

01:21:04.640 And the alternative is to take the great risk of up. 0.99

01:21:09.800 And it's not a risk because

01:21:11.540 the biggest risk is to not do it

01:21:14.600 by an immense margin.

01:21:16.180 They're not even similar in principle.

01:21:18.820 There's no risk in aiming up

01:21:20.380 unless you think it's risky 1.00

01:21:21.800 to dispense with your idiocy. 1.00

01:21:23.940 And maybe it is in the shortest possible term 1.00

01:21:26.340 depending on how much you are in love with it

01:21:29.300 which might be a lot.

01:21:31.440 But why would you not do that?

01:21:34.180 Right?

01:21:35.420 Well, to shake your fist at God

01:21:37.000 and spite the world.

01:21:38.020 It's, well, that's the Luciferian attitude, man. 0.55

01:21:42.280 And you play that game, maybe you end up the biggest devil in hell,

01:21:48.240 but that makes you the worst possible failure.

01:21:50.420 And that's not a great pattern for your life.

01:21:53.180 Not unless that's what you're aiming for, man.

01:21:56.320 And if you are, you're going to regret it when you get there.

01:22:00.160 That's for sure.

01:22:01.940 And so my kids, they knew which way up was,

01:22:06.320 and we all know which way up is, you know,

01:22:08.280 and there's a promise in the biblical corpus

01:22:12.640 is that if you commit yourself to the upward aim,

01:22:16.600 you participate in the process that transforms possibility

01:22:19.700 into the kingdom of God.

01:22:21.560 That is a good deal.

01:22:23.500 That is a good deal.

01:22:25.220 And so that's right there in front of you, right,

01:22:30.560 in the form of your own willingness to admit to your inadequacy

01:22:33.740 and determine to improve. 0.96

01:22:35.500 And it doesn't matter how manipulative and crooked you are to begin with.

01:22:41.360 You can aim up.

01:22:44.280 And then the spirit of the highest upward aim will glimmer to you and invite you forward.

01:22:51.080 And you can take that responsibility.

01:22:54.740 And that's a good deal.

01:22:55.660 Because that's a meaningful adventure.

01:22:58.340 And that's a good deal.

01:22:59.640 And if you do that, well, then maybe you can set yourself straight.

01:23:02.640 And that'd be great because God only knows who you could be

01:23:06.340 if you were everything you could be.

01:23:08.480 And God only knows how much less the world is if you're not that.

01:23:12.780 It's a lot less, maybe fatally less, right?

01:23:18.220 And that's, why is that true?

01:23:20.860 Well, are you made in the image of God?

01:23:22.600 Are you sovereign citizens?

01:23:24.080 Are you the creatures whose essential nature is of such value

01:23:29.420 that even the state itself has to maintain a respectful distance from that

01:23:35.820 so that it can maintain even itself?

01:23:38.280 Well, that's what your country, that's the vision your whole country is predicated on.

01:23:44.360 Was it true?

01:23:46.240 Well, how do you know?

01:23:49.440 Find out.

01:23:51.040 How do you find?

01:23:52.940 You knock, and the door opens, right?

01:23:56.840 You ask and you receive and you seek and you'll find.

01:24:03.220 And you do that on your knees,

01:24:06.600 hoping for the revelation of the appropriate upward aim.

01:24:13.880 Thank you very much.

01:24:26.840 and apparently

01:24:38.280 apparently that's even possible in las vegas 1.00

01:24:41.980 all right i'm going to invite michaela out here

01:24:47.360 to ask some of the questions that you've kindly provided

01:24:56.840 You nailed it, Dad.

01:24:59.280 Thank you, Whittier.

01:25:04.680 You need some water?

01:25:06.260 Yes.

01:25:18.700 Okay.

01:25:20.720 We have 22 minutes, so we should get through one and a half questions.

01:25:26.840 Are you ready?

01:25:32.700 Coming from a soon-to-be dad,

01:25:34.920 how do you raise a mindful child amid extreme wokeism

01:25:39.440 and toxic gender ideologies that surround all the major academic institutions?

01:25:47.800 What was the first part? 0.99

01:25:49.400 Coming from a...

01:25:50.340 Soon-to-be dad.

01:25:51.480 Soon-to-be dad.

01:25:54.220 Congratulations.

01:25:54.820 Okay, well, I'll start that with some observations

01:26:04.080 that would be useful for a soon-to-be dad.

01:26:07.600 So, your child comes into the world with an offer for you.

01:26:17.680 And you need to know what this offer is

01:26:19.960 because a child is a lot of responsibility.

01:26:24.820 And that's a great thing if you're wise, but it can seem a burden, and that's unwise.

01:26:32.160 You need to see the opportunity in that instead of the burden.

01:26:37.460 There's something you need to understand, and this is a lovely thing to understand.

01:26:42.740 All of the relationships that we have in our life are corrupted.

01:26:48.420 Our marriages, our love affairs, our friendships,

01:26:51.640 they're corrupted by the fact

01:26:54.900 that the people that we're interacting with

01:26:56.660 have their burden of sins

01:26:58.580 and their blindness

01:26:59.360 you're going to contend with that

01:27:03.600 in every relationship

01:27:04.640 the impurity of the preconditions

01:27:07.960 for the relationship

01:27:08.780 the doubt even that your partner

01:27:11.540 your wife or your husband might have

01:27:13.520 that they can be loved

01:27:15.260 that they're deserving of love

01:27:17.020 that you're deserving of love

01:27:18.280 they'll put up barriers to that

01:27:19.720 and so will you

01:27:20.540 None of that's true with a newborn child

01:27:23.900 That child wants one thing

01:27:25.980 This is a great thing to understand

01:27:27.760 If you have the wisdom to see it and accept it

01:27:31.280 That child wants nothing more

01:27:33.720 Than to have the best possible relationship with you

01:27:36.260 That you've ever had with anyone in your entire life

01:27:39.200 Right, and so 0.91

01:27:40.800 Unless you want to be alone and miserable

01:27:45.360 That's the best offer anyone can make to you

01:27:50.120 And Christ points out in the Gospels that there's a particularly vicious form of hellfire

01:27:58.160 that's reserved for people who pervert the souls of children. 1.00

01:28:02.800 And that's a very wise observation. 0.65

01:28:05.140 And your obligation and responsibility and privilege as a parent

01:28:10.960 is to have that divine offering at hand and then to maintain it.

01:28:19.280 and you can do that and the benefits of that are so overwhelming that any of the trouble that goes

01:28:27.760 along with children is nothing in comparison to that benefit and so when i was a junior professor

01:28:37.440 at harvard in the 90s i had my little kids michaela and julian and i had a i really liked my job it was

01:28:45.360 a great job it was a great privilege to be there i really liked my students i liked my research

01:28:49.740 it was a good deal you know but it was still my experience that there was nothing better than

01:28:58.700 spending time with my kids they they were the best possible company now there were some

01:29:05.540 preconditions for that you had to take care of them and you couldn't let them run around like

01:29:10.240 tiny screeching demons but it's not that hard to do that and their company was ridiculously

01:29:19.360 rewarding because they were so engaged in everything which children are and that's what

01:29:26.780 they offer you is that re-engagement that spontaneous re-engagement with life you can

01:29:31.880 see that through their eyes and so if you're an adult and you're blinded and cynical like you will

01:29:38.120 be you can see the world through fresh eyes when you have children and that's a fine deal man if

01:29:43.720 if you're wise enough to see that and then they're also ridiculously fun you know because kids love

01:29:50.780 to play and play is the highest form of human endeavor that's what you want to do with your

01:29:56.040 wife you want to play house with your wife play dress up with your wife that's what you were

01:30:02.540 practicing when you were smarter when you were four right and you could do that again

01:30:09.120 and so that's a good thing to know the opposite of tyranny is play that's a good thing to know

01:30:16.180 so i would say to this would-be father it's like understand what you're being given you have the

01:30:22.660 opportunity to have the best relationship you've ever had with anyone in your whole life and that's

01:30:29.700 such a good deal and so and if you do that well then you won't have to worry so much about the 0.89

01:30:36.180 woke mob because you'll have established the kind of walled garden in your household that 0.73

01:30:41.540 helps your children learn to handle the serpents of the world right and that's a good thing to know

01:30:49.740 too, is that, you see, you don't want to protect them. You want to encourage them in their

01:30:59.640 faith and their skill such that they're able to deal with what's difficult and challenging

01:31:08.820 and even potentially corrupting and maintain themselves. And you do that at least in part

01:31:14.120 by establishing that deep relationship with them

01:31:17.140 so that there's trust there.

01:31:18.980 And then, well, then the propagandists will bounce off them

01:31:23.760 because they look for, just like cult leaders everywhere,

01:31:28.320 they look for the confused and the lost

01:31:31.620 and they offer them the false bread of the criminal,

01:31:38.740 the enticement and

01:31:41.240 the attention that the lost are craving.

01:31:46.840 And if you attend to your children

01:31:49.240 gratefully and fully,

01:31:53.020 your home will be a fortress

01:31:56.300 and built on a rock.

01:31:59.100 And then the woke mob will do nothing

01:32:01.860 but educate them, right,

01:32:03.440 in the ways not to behave in the world.

01:32:07.100 Right.

01:32:08.740 look there was woke nonsense to some degree in some of the schools that we sent you

01:32:23.900 definitely yeah so so what do you think it was that made you resistant to that

01:32:31.160 when I was in grade two uh dad this was like maybe even earlier I think it was grade two though 0.81

01:32:39.160 dad told both my brother and I don't listen to stupid rules that was the rule he left out of 0.99

01:32:46.460 12 rules for life don't listen to stupid rules and so I think I just learned that from a young 0.99

01:32:54.440 age and I was just skeptical about everything like too many things but everything so anybody 0.95

01:33:02.260 any anytime anybody said anything to me I was like is that true yeah well we did the rule that

01:33:07.420 Michaela is alluding to had another component which I don't know if you remember this explicitly but 0.97

01:33:14.580 I told both kids this is probably when you were older if you think a rule is stupid then you don't 0.79

01:33:21.520 have to follow it but there's problems with that right it's like well who are you to say that a 0.99

01:33:26.220 world a rule is stupid how do you tell the stupid rules from the necessary rules how do you know 0.99

01:33:32.520 you're not just being a foolish troublemaker these are hard questions so a side rule with that was 1.00

01:33:38.880 if you break a rule at school and there's a consequence you have to accept the consequence 0.99

01:33:45.220 right even if it's a stupid rule like you have to part of the that and this is also one of the 0.98

01:33:53.080 things that stops you from just casually breaking rules is like if it's a stupid rule you're not to 0.98

01:33:59.000 follow it but that doesn't mean you get away scot-free you know and and that's a good thing 0.97

01:34:05.500 to know too because you know maybe there's stupid rules at your work like DEI rules let's say and 0.94

01:34:11.980 you're afraid to break them and because there'll be a consequence it's like well if you can accept 0.96

01:34:18.820 the consequence then you can break the rule and you know if the rule if breaking the rule guards 0.99

01:34:24.880 your soul which is exactly what happens if you break a stupid rule then that's a good trait and 0.96

01:34:32.020 so so it was that is there anything else you remember that was relevant to to that because 0.97

01:34:38.680 you went to university and it was a very woke university that you went to and you that didn't

01:34:44.480 really have that didn't take with you at all oh no that didn't take at all uh i went to concordia

01:34:53.080 it was an art school in quebec and in canada and it was extremely woke there was a parade at one

01:34:59.700 point and i looked outside like my dorm window and everybody was naked it was just a naked parade

01:35:04.680 i don't know there are people riding bikes naked i was like this was 2012 so it was a while ago

01:35:12.020 uh why did that not take i was super disagreeable like what i did was i read all the books i could

01:35:18.540 that were pro-feminism and all the books i could that were anti-feminism and then decided which

01:35:24.020 one was more logical at that point right right right well so you know that's the other thing

01:35:30.040 with regards to your kids is that you want to you want to educate them as broadly as you can

01:35:35.940 manage it's really good thing to start familiarizing them with books early so that they start carrying

01:35:42.340 them around when they're like 18 months old get that proto-literacy going and then you want to

01:35:47.240 read to them at the edge of their ability to comprehend and also things that are challenging

01:35:52.880 and get them to think the ideas through you know and we had lots of opportunity for discussion

01:36:00.540 around our dinner table and breakfast table and that's a good thing to know too if you know lots

01:36:07.800 of people don't have set meal times anymore and that's a big mistake because a lot of socialization 0.97

01:36:14.860 the socialization that might make children resistant to idiot propaganda that emerges

01:36:21.560 is in the give and take around stable and regular mealtimes. And so that was a pleasure too in our 0.95

01:36:28.520 household. So, all right, next question. Okay, this is a sad one, but I think it's a good

01:36:37.420 follow-up to the first question. I'm childless in my 50s and I grieve daily for the abortions

01:36:43.620 I had in my youth. How do I move forward? My deep regret consumes me.

01:36:51.560 That's a rough one, all right.

01:37:16.280 Well, I guess the first thing I would say is that

01:37:18.760 your unnecessary misery isn't improving the world and so you're not obliged to

01:37:29.940 heap any more burning coals of fire on your head that are sufficient for you to learn

01:37:37.760 i would say what would i say

01:37:40.400 I would say that you should go yeah I have a website self-authoring.com you should go there

01:37:51.500 and you should do all three exercises there's one that helps you write an autobiography that's the

01:37:57.020 past authoring you should do that specifically if you only did one of the three that's the one

01:38:04.980 you should do and you should write down absolutely everything you remember about those events and

01:38:12.380 what surrounds them so that you know exactly what you did and that will be unpleasant but

01:38:21.160 you're already stuck with unpleasant because you need to know the whole story you're obviously

01:38:28.720 guilty about this, and perhaps guilty in part because you're alone, but you won't be able

01:38:37.300 to forgive yourself or even understand what you did until you investigate what you did

01:38:46.000 thoroughly. Now, you did what you did when you were young. You've got decades since then,

01:38:53.500 hypothetically, that have allowed you to derive some wisdom. So you should be able to go back

01:38:58.700 into your past with the wisdom you have now and to lay out the story in detail

01:39:05.360 and to grapple with the mistakes that your younger self made. With some, what

01:39:15.520 would you say, some forgiving wisdom of maturity, right? I mean, when I think of

01:39:21.620 things I did when I was 14, they're regrettable things, some of the things I

01:39:27.060 think about but then i remember too while i was 14 you know and there's a certain mercy in judgment

01:39:36.040 that's appropriate when you look back at yourself you need to detail out what situational factors

01:39:45.180 influenced your decision what ideological factors

01:39:49.360 influenced your decision you need to make a case against yourself and you need to make a case

01:39:56.660 for yourself, like a profound case.

01:40:00.400 And then, and you need to do that exhaustively.

01:40:06.580 And that will help you get past it.

01:40:12.420 There's very reliable clinical evidence suggesting that such exploration,

01:40:19.460 it's exploration into the heart of darkness, right?

01:40:23.000 What's the theme?

01:40:25.020 confront what terrifies you

01:40:27.780 voluntarily and that includes

01:40:30.040 your past and so

01:40:32.100 if it's

01:40:33.940 plaguing you and won't

01:40:36.140 let you go

01:40:36.920 it means that you ate

01:40:40.020 something then that you have

01:40:41.980 not digested

01:40:43.280 and you have to

01:40:45.440 reconsider it until

01:40:48.060 you've

01:40:50.100 scoured

01:40:51.480 every corner and

01:40:53.960 And you could do that in the belief that if you do it, you might find your pathway to

01:41:06.200 being free.

01:41:08.640 That's the promise, right, of a full confession.

01:41:13.560 You will learn, too, what you need to do in the present and in the future to atone.

01:41:19.340 And I believe it's true that if you embark on that mission with faith,

01:41:28.620 that you can reconcile yourself to the misdeeds of your life.

01:41:38.340 And we hope that's true.

01:41:40.180 Everyone hopes that's true for everyone, because everyone makes mistakes.

01:41:43.800 You know, and if the cost of a mistake was eternal damnation for every mistake,

01:41:49.340 It would be a pretty brutal world.

01:41:51.880 And so, can you recover from even sins you regard as egregious?

01:41:58.180 I suppose it depends on the depth of your confession.

01:42:01.580 And that is the case.

01:42:03.100 So try that.

01:42:04.360 Try that.

01:42:05.200 It may take you a year.

01:42:06.840 Write every day.

01:42:08.380 And write badly.

01:42:11.280 You know, just get it down.

01:42:12.440 Everything you remember.

01:42:14.080 You can sort it out later.

01:42:16.320 Just get it down.

01:42:18.020 And try giving yourself the benefit of the doubt.

01:42:21.380 You know, one of the wonderful things about the West

01:42:24.920 is that when you're accused of a crime,

01:42:28.400 you're entitled to the presumption of innocence.

01:42:31.720 And that's a good presumption to bring to bear on yourself

01:42:34.840 when you're accusing yourself of, you know, unforgivable crimes.

01:42:40.140 You want to make a case for yourself.

01:42:42.220 And that doesn't mean to let yourself off the hook,

01:42:45.420 because that doesn't help.

01:42:46.460 but this is good advice for anybody

01:42:49.900 who's got a burden on their conscience

01:42:52.280 it's like there's a monster chasing you

01:42:56.280 as you turn around and face it

01:42:57.580 and you look at every bit of it

01:42:58.920 every bit of it

01:43:00.140 you detail it all out

01:43:02.700 and that courage makes you grow

01:43:07.400 and might transform that hideous beast

01:43:13.700 that's pursuing you into an ally right so good luck to you

01:43:22.260 that that past authoring has been very good for trauma too for letting the trauma go

01:43:36.300 processing it properly yeah it's been yeah it's useful yeah well anything that's useful

01:43:41.560 Any old memory that still plagues you, it's not being understood.

01:43:48.420 You haven't done enough exploration.

01:43:51.500 That's why it keeps knocking.

01:43:54.840 That's true neurologically, is that that memory signifies a danger to you,

01:44:01.320 a clear and present danger, because you did something that hurt you,

01:44:04.980 and you don't know why, and so it won't let you go.

01:44:09.040 It's your conscience in some ways.

01:44:10.940 It won't let you go until you understand what you did wrong.

01:44:15.020 Well, why?

01:44:16.640 So you don't do it again.

01:44:19.440 The purpose of your memory is to remember where you've been.

01:44:26.540 You remember where you fell off the path

01:44:29.020 so that you don't fall off the path in the future.

01:44:32.320 That's the purpose of memory.

01:44:34.580 And so if something's plaguing you,

01:44:36.260 it's because there's a part of you

01:44:39.420 a deep part that is telling you

01:44:41.460 you don't understand

01:44:43.480 you could make the same mistake again

01:44:45.240 and no one will let themselves go

01:44:48.680 if they understand that they're still at risk

01:44:52.620 so any emotion

01:44:54.660 any memory you have

01:44:55.920 that's older than about 18 months

01:44:57.400 if it's still hot

01:44:59.060 then you are avoiding

01:45:02.440 something you cannot avoid

01:45:05.180 so that's a useful thing to know

01:45:07.920 and it's horrible to

01:45:09.620 delve into that but it's worse

01:45:11.980 not to so

01:45:13.120 if you do it voluntarily

01:45:16.040 it will

01:45:17.560 that's your best bet

01:45:19.740 by far your best bet

01:45:21.280 are you going to

01:45:32.280 EDC rave

01:45:34.120 later after this show no no it's it's i actually like going to concerts like that outdoor concerts

01:45:47.300 but that's become quite difficult because people know me and um that's usually very good um whether

01:45:55.900 that would be very good at an electronic music festival is a different question but but it might

01:46:01.540 be so i i can't go to radically public events like that but i'm also going up to see my father

01:46:08.720 tomorrow morning in northern alberta so that's that's the priority for the next 10 days

01:46:14.700 how burton says yeah loud

01:46:29.640 how can someone who wants to believe in god but is deeply cynical about religion

01:46:36.060 overcome their skepticism by listening to this lecture maybe maybe that's been answered

01:46:43.480 What do you think?

01:46:45.480 Well, here's one way of looking at it.

01:46:51.520 You know, I left the church when I was 13.

01:46:55.360 Why?

01:46:57.160 Well, I thought that...

01:46:59.480 I think I probably thought that I knew more than the church.

01:47:04.820 Probably.

01:47:05.960 I mean, there was a bunch of honest reasons and some dishonest reasons.

01:47:11.240 The dishonest reason was likely that

01:47:13.760 I just didn't want to go

01:47:15.440 Like I'd sat in school a lot

01:47:17.900 Church was a lot like school

01:47:20.320 I didn't want to go to school again on Sunday

01:47:22.780 And so I had these moral reasons

01:47:25.540 Why I didn't want to go

01:47:26.540 But mostly it was that I didn't want to go

01:47:28.180 And I knew there was something wrong about that

01:47:29.820 Because my mother really wanted me to go with her

01:47:31.700 And I really should have gone with her

01:47:33.580 What were the honest reasons?

01:47:38.760 Honest

01:47:39.200 well i had taken confirmation classes and the priest preacher i was a protestant church

01:47:45.820 he didn't know how to reconcile the theory of evolution with the biblical accounts and

01:47:52.720 i guess i thought he should have been able to it's kind of a presumptuous desire because that's

01:47:57.560 quite difficult and because he couldn't do that i thought that

01:48:01.080 it was acceptable for me to be skeptical and and leave

01:48:08.840 And then, you know, there's

01:48:10.360 Oh, there is the other arguments about 0.99

01:48:12.640 Well, religious hypocrites 1.00

01:48:14.300 It's like all those Christians, they go to church 1.00

01:48:16.520 One hour a week, and the rest of the time 1.00

01:48:18.300 They're just as bad as everyone else

01:48:20.040 It's like, later I realized

01:48:22.180 That at least they were trying to aim up

01:48:24.240 An hour a week

01:48:26.440 Which is, like

01:48:28.120 Way more than never

01:48:30.060 Like, way more

01:48:32.120 And so

01:48:33.380 I would say

01:48:36.440 Like

01:48:36.760 if you're skeptical 0.95

01:48:39.260 well the first question is like well who the hell are you 0.98

01:48:43.740 you know and the next question is well maybe the church is corrupt 0.98

01:48:47.840 it's like well you know compared to you

01:48:51.220 okay and then even if it is corrupt

01:48:54.900 more than you which is very unlikely by the way

01:48:58.720 maybe you could go do something about it

01:49:02.160 right so if you went to the church and you were a better person

01:49:06.140 in the church, you could be the sort of shining example that would improve the church, and

01:49:10.900 that'd be a great deal for the church. So you could think about that. And if that doesn't happen,

01:49:16.720 it's maybe you're not shining quite as bright as you thought you were, you know? And then you might

01:49:23.320 also ask yourself, well, are you the sort of person that nothing is above? And if you're that

01:49:31.940 sort of person. God help you. Because the last person you ever want to meet or be is the person

01:49:41.920 who has nothing above them. That's like the definition of the ultimate tyrant. Because if

01:49:48.020 there's nothing above you, buddy, you think you're at the top. And that is a very, very dangerous

01:49:58.060 thing to think so you know

01:50:01.840 the other thing i guess i would add to that i've been going to church a lot more often since

01:50:11.260 i recovered from being so ill i was pretty antsy in religious ceremonies before that

01:50:19.880 it's probably a hangover from these childhood experiences but when i recovered i was in a lot

01:50:27.240 of pain for a long time, like a lot. And when I recovered, then I would have these times without

01:50:33.280 pain. And that was such a bloody miracle. I remember being in a pharmacy, one of the first

01:50:40.800 times this happened after about three years of unremitting pain. I was standing in this pharmacy

01:50:48.760 waiting for the pharmacist to fill a prescription. They were making a bunch of mistakes. And that

01:50:52.940 would have just annoyed me three years previously, but I thought I could just stand in this pharmacy

01:51:00.040 without pain for like a year and that'd be just fine. And then one of the things I found in the

01:51:09.120 religious ceremonies after that was that just the fact that it was peaceful was like such a relief,

01:51:15.480 you know, and so I wasn't in a hurry. I wasn't impatient and a time just to take a break and just

01:51:21.540 to feel at home I suppose and to aim up it's like that was that was good that's a good thing and

01:51:30.740 then I also understood you know that you can't pursue virtue by yourself you have to do it

01:51:36.660 communally and to do it communally you have to make a sacrifice and some of that sacrifice is

01:51:42.080 time and that's the time you go to church and some of that sacrifice is well maybe you don't

01:51:47.620 agree with everything it's like well no one agrees with everything but we still have to live together

01:51:54.460 so you know you got to make your gesture towards communal being and you make your gesture towards

01:52:01.840 communal being in a church that's always been the case and so well those that's some reasons to

01:52:10.420 not let your cynicism triumph and you got a better idea you know that's the other thing

01:52:18.360 it's like what there's no upward aim that's that's not a good theory it's a very destructive idea

01:52:26.780 very very destructive idea and so better to try to understand to assume that if you have a beef

01:52:35.960 with the traditions of the past,

01:52:38.060 it's a pretty reasonable possibility

01:52:39.840 that you just don't understand

01:52:41.760 what the hell you're doing, right?

01:52:44.060 Or was everyone who lived before you wrong

01:52:46.620 and you were right?

01:52:48.220 Yeah.

01:52:49.640 And I don't think so.

01:52:52.340 You'd last about three seconds

01:52:53.840 as a shepherd in the Middle East

01:52:55.340 2,000 years ago.

01:52:59.800 Yeah.

01:53:00.320 We are way over time. 0.99

01:53:15.060 We've got to play by the rules when they're not stupid. 0.54

01:53:19.720 Thank you very much, everybody, for coming tonight.

01:53:22.580 It was a pleasure talking to you all.

01:53:24.780 Thank you, Mick.

01:53:26.400 Well.

01:53:30.320 thank you everyone it was a pleasure was a pleasure being here yeah good night

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 07, 2026

What The Story Of Jacob And Esau Teaches About Sibling Rivalry

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