The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - What to Do When Life Feels Empty

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00:00:30.000 Hello again, everybody. Today we're releasing the third lecture from my last tour.

00:00:35.300 Each of them stands alone, but together they provide a detailed analysis of the deepest,

00:00:41.600 most meaningful, and most influential stories ever told. Our attention turns today from Cain

00:00:48.100 and Abel and the discovery and significance of sacrifice to the conceptualization of life

00:00:54.420 as a romantic adventure.

00:00:57.320 This is captured in the great account of Abraham,

00:01:00.480 who was called, as we all are,

00:01:02.620 away from the security and familiarity

00:01:04.620 of our childhood surroundings

00:01:06.580 into the uncertainty and possibility

00:01:09.220 of our adult lives.

00:01:11.800 What could we possibly become?

00:01:13.760 What could we possibly offer

00:01:15.160 if we swore above all to aim up,

00:01:19.860 regardless of the catastrophe and tragedy of our lives?

00:01:23.780 Watch and see.

00:01:35.260 Thank you.

00:01:39.880 Thank you.

00:01:41.420 Thank you all for coming.

00:01:44.200 So I'm going to jump right into the story and then elaborate on it as we proceed.

00:01:52.780 I want to talk to you tonight about the story of Abraham.

00:01:58.660 Not all of it, just because it's a long story.

00:02:01.120 We'll see how much we can get through.

00:02:03.860 I guess I'll start by telling you what a story is,

00:02:08.060 because that'll lay open...

00:02:10.280 Thank you, thank you.

00:02:11.900 That'll lay open why I'm presenting the material that I'm presenting.

00:02:17.320 I didn't really expect when I first embarked on my career

00:02:23.820 that I would become interested in biblical stories.

00:02:34.040 It happened because I was fixated on the deepest problem that I could find,

00:02:46.540 which was the problem of evil

00:02:48.980 I became aware of what had happened

00:02:53.080 in Nazi Germany when I was about 13

00:02:56.360 and it was shocking to me

00:03:00.340 and I started to study

00:03:01.780 I started to study what had happened there

00:03:06.480 at that point

00:03:07.460 I didn't really know how to go about doing that

00:03:11.160 but I had a librarian there

00:03:13.600 who was quite literate

00:03:15.840 And she pointed me in some useful directions.

00:03:19.440 I read the first book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

00:03:22.940 I read when I was about 13.

00:03:24.380 It was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

00:03:26.500 And it was the first book that had come out of the Soviet Union, really,

00:03:29.260 during a period of thaw in the early 1960s that revealed what had happened under Stalin.

00:03:37.180 And then I read 1984 by George Orwell in Brave New World.

00:03:42.100 some Ayn Rand as well at that time starting to wrestle with the problem of good and evil

00:03:50.860 it's a variant of wrestling with God I suppose and that is a variant of wrestling with

00:03:59.060 decision making in general the landscape that you live in when you make decisions is the landscape

00:04:05.980 that has good and evil as its far-reaching borders.

00:04:12.400 It's good to understand that.

00:04:14.380 Why would I say that?

00:04:15.840 Well, you know that, really,

00:04:17.620 because you know that you can make a good decision or a bad decision.

00:04:24.160 And so the mere fact that you understand what that descriptive phrase means

00:04:31.220 indicates that you understand at some level

00:04:34.560 that when you're making a decision

00:04:36.480 you inhabit a moral landscape

00:04:38.020 and you know you can make decisions

00:04:39.840 for good reasons or for bad reasons

00:04:41.640 and you also know that

00:04:43.360 the consequences of your decisions

00:04:49.460 can be good or not.

00:04:53.800 And so if you take that conceptualization

00:04:56.320 and you just extend it

00:04:58.240 to its ultimate reaches

00:05:00.080 so that you're characterizing

00:05:02.480 the entire domain

00:05:03.440 you get the landscape of good and evil. And I was interested in the far reaches of the

00:05:10.560 dark side of that continuum. The problem with studying that, for me, eventually became

00:05:17.740 it was what knocked me out of my sort of rationalistic moral relativism. It wasn't easy

00:05:26.260 for me to, like I left the church when I was about 13. I went to church with my mother up

00:05:32.660 until that point. It was just a kind of middle-of-the-road Protestant, exactly the kind of Protestant church

00:05:38.440 you'd expect to characterize Canadians. It was the United Church, you know, which has got so woke,

00:05:45.640 you can't believe it. It's just done. I think the woman who runs it is an atheist. So, you know,

00:05:53.400 that's just not good yeah and they they they worship pride essentially so and and that that's

00:06:06.160 also it's also really not good it's hard to go more wrong than that you you have to really work

00:06:12.140 to go more wrong than that um anyways i studied totalitarianism for a long time and i even more

00:06:19.980 specifically because i didn't really think that the totalitarian problem was the problem so that

00:06:25.640 would be the problem of that's a political or economic or sociological problem in some sense

00:06:30.920 how do you characterize a authoritarian state or a totalitarian state maybe you're interested in

00:06:37.540 the economic conditions that might give rise to such a state what it's like politically

00:06:43.000 that's descriptive in some ways that isn't really what i was interested in i was interested in

00:06:48.540 the psychology of a totalitarian state and interested not only in that but in the dark

00:06:54.720 elements of the psychology of the totalitarian state because i was very curious about how people

00:07:01.820 could do terrible things to other people and i wasn't even curious about that i was curious about

00:07:07.980 how someone could do something terrible to someone else like truly terrible unimaginably terrible

00:07:15.480 and enjoy it and then more than that i was interested in how that was possible

00:07:23.320 see because to understand how that's possible you see this is the key thing you have to understand

00:07:30.060 how you could do it because until it's you it's irrelevant it's not it's not real it's you'll come

00:07:37.560 up with some explanation that divorces you from the phenomena you'll make the assumption for

00:07:43.000 example if you're watching schindler's list then you would have been oscar schindler it's like

00:07:47.780 that's just not how it would have worked out ladies and gentlemen you can tell that by watching

00:07:54.180 what happened during the so-called covid pandemic no wait people who stand up against the pathological

00:08:01.780 mob they're few and far between so how is it that you could participate in the ultimate atrocities

00:08:11.240 that the worst possible state could promote?

00:08:14.560 How is it that you would come to that?

00:08:16.780 Could you?

00:08:17.680 Could you come to that?

00:08:22.300 I didn't really understand.

00:08:24.240 I didn't understand exactly how you could come to that point

00:08:28.880 until I visited a maximum security prison.

00:08:35.020 I had this professor there at the University of Alberta.

00:08:38.840 He was an odd character.

00:08:40.300 he taught a he was an adjunct professor so not a full-time part-time professor he was the head

00:08:45.980 psychologist at this maximum security prison and it was a nasty place it was full of exactly the

00:08:52.920 sort of people you'd put in a maximum security prison you know repeat offenders you know one

00:08:57.860 percent of the criminals account for 65 percent of the crime say so everything has its specialization

00:09:04.360 and crime is like that and if you're there are criminals who are repeat offenders and then there

00:09:11.300 are criminals who are violent repeat offenders and they're the ones who generally end up in

00:09:16.460 maximum security prisons so they're tough places and i went to this prison a couple of times and

00:09:23.140 i met some people there that really made me think one time i was at i was i was in the gym in this

00:09:33.120 prison. Prison looked like a high school, which I thought was kind of indicative of what high

00:09:39.580 schools are like. And it had a gym and an exercise yard. And in the gym, mostly the gym was taken up

00:09:47.820 by weight benches. And there were a lot of monsters in there, guys who'd been pumping iron pretty hard

00:09:54.940 for a long time, and they were, you know, murderers and rapists and weightlifters, and

00:10:03.200 so pretty intimidating bunch, and I'd worn this preposterous get-up, I guess even then.

00:10:12.400 I'd gone to Portugal, and I bought this cape, and we went to this town that was basically

00:10:16.880 a castle on top of a mountain, and the place hadn't changed much since 1890, and this was

00:10:23.240 back in the 1980s and they sold these like dracula capes that were made out of wolves like sherlock

00:10:28.960 holmes and from the victorian era so i bought one of those capes i used to wear it around the

00:10:33.360 university in edmonton and i wore it out to this prison which might not have been the wisest choice

00:10:39.340 anyways i was in in the gym with these monsters and a bloody psychologist left because he was an

00:10:48.260 odd guy which you have to be an odd guy to be like a psychologist for a prison full of

00:10:54.420 murderers and rapists it's like you're not going to be your run-of-the-mill person to

00:11:00.680 to end up there and he definitely wasn't he's a great professor he's very eccentric and interesting

00:11:06.260 anyways he left so i was in there with all these prisoners and they surrounded me and

00:11:13.480 then they started to offer to trade their clothes for mine and I didn't like their clothes and but

00:11:20.280 I wasn't exactly sure how to say no as you might imagine and then this little guy came up he's

00:11:28.100 I don't know five foot six or something and he said that the psychologist had sent him to get me

00:11:35.720 which was unfortunate phrasing as far as I was concerned but um I thought I must go with him

00:11:43.060 because it's like one of him and 20 of these guys and so we wandered out into the exercise yard and

00:11:49.220 he was your normal sort of nondescript looking character you wouldn't have given him a second

00:11:54.060 glance on the street and we got about 50 yards out into the yard and then the prison the

00:12:00.680 psychologist showed back up at the doors to the exercise yard and motioned us back and I was just

00:12:07.380 relieved about that and then we went to his office and he told he said you know that guy that took

00:12:12.400 you out in the yard i said yeah he said he took two cops out uh they stopped him on on a road when

00:12:20.740 he was driving the he they stopped him and he had he was armed and he uh pulled pulled a crystal on

00:12:28.000 the guards on the policeman and uh he shot them both in the back of the head and one of them well

00:12:34.880 he was describing the fact that he had two little kids and so that was rather shocking

00:12:43.920 the shock I suppose was not just the brutality of what he had done although that was plenty brutal

00:12:51.600 it was the juxtaposition of that brutality with his apparent nondescript normality like this wasn't

00:12:59.460 a guy that there was nothing intimate apart from the fact that he was in a maximum security prison

00:13:04.800 that there was nothing about him that marked him out of the ordinary.

00:13:08.680 So that made me think a lot about the relationship between good and evil

00:13:13.260 as it pertained to a single individual.

00:13:20.200 And then I met this other guy.

00:13:22.820 He came into the prison psychologist's office one day when we were sitting there, 0.95

00:13:27.220 and he was a real psychopath, real narcissist, 0.79

00:13:30.760 interesting person to watch as psychopathic narcissists are.

00:13:34.800 And you can tell because there's so many movies about them.

00:13:37.340 He knew everything as far as he was concerned.

00:13:39.580 It was so interesting to watch him because he'd been in prison for like 20 years, a long time.

00:13:44.500 He didn't really even know how the outside world worked anymore.

00:13:48.080 But there was nothing you could tell him that he didn't know.

00:13:51.440 And he was just 100% self-centered.

00:13:55.460 And so it was interesting to watch him.

00:13:58.280 And the psychologist was playing with a deck of cards.

00:14:02.320 and the prisoner said why don't you give me those cards I'll show you a trick and

00:14:07.860 so the psychologist handed his name was Patrick Thauberger the psychologist handed him the deck

00:14:14.340 of cards and he shuffled them and then he put the cards in front of me face down and then he

00:14:21.480 named the first card and flipped it and he was right and then he named the second card and

00:14:26.100 flipped it and he was right and he went through like a third of the deck and got every single

00:14:30.380 card. And I thought, how the hell did you do that? He said, I memorized them when I was flipping them.

00:14:36.880 He said, don't ever play cards with someone who's been in prison.

00:14:41.440 I found out later that this same man and one of his compatriots had

00:14:46.080 identified someone in the prison they thought was a snitch, rightly or wrongly. I mean, could have

00:14:54.200 been the case. And they took him out with a lead pipe. And what they did to him was lay him down

00:15:02.680 and batter one of his legs into a pulp with a lead pipe. And I thought about that. You know,

00:15:11.220 it's a funny thing to think about. I thought about that for, it really occupied my imagination

00:15:17.820 for two weeks, I would say.

00:15:20.380 This was while I was reading Solzhenitsyn's book

00:15:24.380 on the Gulag Archipelago

00:15:25.580 and various accounts of totalitarian brutality

00:15:28.880 in Nazi Germany and so forth,

00:15:31.360 and some psychoanalytic work,

00:15:33.840 and that's where the story part emerges.

00:15:37.100 Imagine your favorite lecture.

00:15:39.940 Dial that up on Macs, put that on steroids,

00:15:42.760 and then add some cinematic elements to it.

00:15:45.120 That's the best way I could describe

00:15:46.560 a Peterson Academy lecture.

00:15:50.520 I went to college because I had to.

00:15:52.500 I go to Peterson Academy because I want to.

00:15:54.420 I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago,

00:15:56.560 and I'm also still questioning the value

00:15:58.660 that I got out of college.

00:15:59.840 Traditional universities, a lot of times,

00:16:01.880 it's just pretty dry.

00:16:03.240 They don't bring the same energy as the professors

00:16:05.660 at Peterson Academy.

00:16:07.360 It is a completely different experience

00:16:09.040 to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you.

00:16:11.580 If you've been on the fence about this,

00:16:14.160 this is the time.

00:16:15.100 That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself.

00:16:19.820 You have the opportunity to investigate that calling.

00:16:29.000 You know, at the same time, this is a hard thing to relate, actually.

00:16:34.060 At the same time, I had found myself possessed by some dark impulses that I didn't understand.

00:16:42.080 For example, when I was sitting in class, I would sometimes get the impulse to stick the person in front of me with a pen.

00:16:52.860 I'd never done anything violent in my life.

00:16:56.260 You know, it was kind of an obsessive thought, and I had no idea what to make of that thought at all.

00:17:03.240 And it was unsettling. It didn't happen very often. It wasn't very powerful.

00:17:06.580 But the mere fact that a thought like that could even enter my mind was upsetting.

00:17:12.080 And that was happening at about the same time, and it was related to what I was assessing, because I was trying to, I was actually trying to come to terms with the human proclivity for evil. And that means to come to terms with your own proclivity for evil. That's what it means. If you really want the understanding, it's personal, it's not political, it's not economic, it's not sociological.

00:17:31.300 My first degree was political science, and I was interested in economic determinants of behavior to begin with and political determinants.

00:17:38.280 But I soon realized that that wasn't where the action was.

00:17:41.000 The action was in the soul.

00:17:42.780 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:17:44.160 The real answer to the deepest problems were psychological, and the deepest psychological problems are spiritual.

00:17:52.220 That's like a definition of deep.

00:17:55.380 And so all these things were tangled together.

00:17:57.200 And I thought about what had happened at that prison, and I imagined myself doing it, which is a, you have to break a barrier to do that, right?

00:18:09.040 You have to break the barrier that's the assumption that you aren't the sort of person that could do that.

00:18:15.660 But I wasn't so sure of that, because it looked to me, from what I had read, that if you put people in the appropriate circumstance, there's very little they won't do.

00:18:25.360 it's a rare person who won't go down that road when the opportunity makes itself known especially

00:18:33.700 one little move at a time which is how totalitarian states develop right it isn't that you go from

00:18:40.420 normal to nazi in one leap it's like it's 10 000 little steps and each step is a little

00:18:47.700 farther into the abyss than the previous one and nowhere along the way do you ever wake up and say

00:18:53.720 well that's just too much now if you examine the whole pathway from beginning to end you'd think

00:19:00.800 well that was too much but each little nudge you can rationalize with your silence or with

00:19:08.680 your acquiescence with the fact that you'll put up with it with the fact that you don't want to

00:19:14.400 take the trouble with the fact that you want to hide with the fact that you want to maintain your

00:19:20.600 own pristine view of yourself. Anyways, I thought about it for about two weeks, quite

00:19:29.020 obsessively. If I think about something, I tend to think about it like for 16 hours a

00:19:35.560 day. You know, it's just nonstop trying to crack the problem. And that's how you crack

00:19:45.340 problems, I suppose. And I had the realization one day that I could do that. And the impulses

00:19:54.460 I had, the impulse that I mentioned, that went away. And so that impulse was part of

00:20:01.340 something within me that was trying to make its presence known, right? My capability for

00:20:08.380 for participating in abysmal acts

00:20:15.880 people have dark fantasies you know and like you can watch them in yourself

00:20:22.480 if you're willing to if you get angry especially if it's resentful

00:20:27.440 you can watch the background fantasies that are associated with that and

00:20:33.180 the temptations that are associated with that.

00:20:38.240 And if you are honest, you can see that they'll take you to some very dark places.

00:20:45.180 And I think that's true of everyone.

00:20:47.180 It's particularly true of the people who think that it's not true of them.

00:20:52.440 So I realized that I could do that.

00:20:56.800 And that helped make the problem that I was wrestling with real.

00:21:09.700 So I became convinced of two things.

00:21:12.360 I became convinced that the fundamental issue of malevolence was an individual issue.

00:21:20.800 So the fundamental problem with Nazi Germany is the Auschwitz camp guard who's a normal person who enjoys his work. 0.60

00:21:33.000 That's the problem.

00:21:34.520 If you boil it down and make it focal, that's the problem.

00:21:39.060 Now then the question is, is that you or is that someone else?

00:21:42.880 If it's someone else, if it's a psychopathic deviant who's barely human, you don't have a problem.

00:21:49.060 If that's you, and you think such things are a problem, you have a problem.

00:21:56.780 And I thought I had a problem.

00:21:59.120 It's like, okay, I see.

00:22:02.120 So this is a psychological or a spiritual problem.

00:22:06.400 So I became convinced of the reality of evil because I think it's very difficult to read

00:22:13.760 accounts of the ultimately barbaric acts that people perpetrated in the 20th century

00:22:21.040 totalitarian states without believing in the reality of evil. I think if you read through

00:22:28.540 those accounts, the summary of those accounts is something like an account of evil. I don't

00:22:35.920 care what you call it. That's what it ends up being. Is it real? Well, it's real enough

00:22:42.020 to kill millions of people and to torture millions more it's plenty real is it relevant to you it's

00:22:48.020 relevant to you if you're capable of engaging in it so then I became convinced that evil was real

00:22:54.220 and I became convinced that we had a personal responsibility for that I became convinced at

00:23:03.300 the same time that the pathway to the totalitarian state that motivates atrocity is associated with

00:23:14.780 deception with lie with the lie that a totalitarian state isn't a top-down oppression

00:23:23.220 of freedom-loving individuals by a small coterie of pathological elites but the grip of every

00:23:31.580 single person in this society by falsity and untruth. So here's a definition of a totalitarian

00:23:41.360 state. A totalitarian state isn't run by psychopathic thugs. A totalitarian state is

00:23:48.700 the state that exists when every single person in this society lies to themselves and everyone else,

00:23:57.400 including those they love, about absolutely everything they think, say, and do.

00:24:04.740 And the more comprehensive that grip, the more thorough the totalitarian state.

00:24:12.520 And when the grip of the lie is complete, there's nothing that's beyond you.

00:24:19.060 okay so then i thought well how do you understand that proclivity for evil

00:24:27.520 does it indicate that there's an opposite proclivity right so you know nietzsche announced

00:24:36.820 so famously in the mid 1800s that god was dead that didn't get rid of the problem of evil

00:24:43.740 quite the contrary and he knew it wouldn't and one of his prophecies was that we would see the

00:24:50.420 deaths of a hundred million people in the 20th century as a consequence of the ideological

00:24:55.420 possession that would flood in to supplant what the concept of god had protected us from and that

00:25:02.920 absolutely 100 percent happened exactly the way he predicted it would same with dostoevsky same

00:25:08.720 prediction. We're left with the reality of evil, and we're left with the question of

00:25:15.700 ultimate good. Like the dissolution of God, the disappearance of God, the collapse of

00:25:20.220 religious belief is something like the disappearance of the transcendent good. But if you're stuck

00:25:25.240 with evil, the abysmal evil that was on display in the 20th century, the problem of good doesn't

00:25:36.500 go away it's even brought into more stark relief that's partly why you like to go to movies that

00:25:41.940 feature anti-heroes like really bad people the reason you want to go watch that unless there's

00:25:48.440 something off about you is to flesh out what the most terrible pattern of action represents so that

00:25:59.060 you can go the other way the thing about coming to the realization of the existence of evil is

00:26:05.640 that you've instantly, even if you don't know it,

00:26:08.520 come to the realization of a transcendent good,

00:26:11.160 because the transcendent good is whatever gets you the farthest possible away from that.

00:26:17.940 Okay.

00:26:19.920 Then I started to understand that that landscape,

00:26:24.860 which is the landscape of good and evil,

00:26:26.920 was the landscape of stories.

00:26:31.080 Right?

00:26:31.680 And then I started to understand that stories varied in their depth.

00:26:36.160 Now, we kind of know that, right?

00:26:37.680 You know that you can watch a shallow story,

00:26:39.700 you can watch a movie that's just light entertainment,

00:26:42.980 or you can read a book,

00:26:44.760 or you can watch a movie that moves you profoundly to the depths.

00:26:49.120 And so you know there's a hierarchy of depth

00:26:54.100 that characterizes the literary world.

00:26:58.460 As you're more sophisticated, you read deeper books,

00:27:01.480 they move you more profoundly,

00:27:03.160 they shift the structure of your perception more comprehensively.

00:27:08.540 It's effortful, like difficult things are effortful.

00:27:15.140 The deepest stories are religious.

00:27:18.960 Okay, that's a definition, right?

00:27:21.920 Because you could ask, even as an observant scientist,

00:27:25.440 what's the domain of the religious?

00:27:29.200 And it's characterized by many features.

00:27:31.780 So the domain of the religious includes the experience of awe.

00:27:39.720 That's a good marker.

00:27:41.740 The awe you experience when you look at the night sky or perhaps the Grand Canyon or when you're in love.

00:27:47.520 That's another indication of your ability to see what's beyond.

00:27:51.840 That's not a proposition.

00:27:54.820 It's not a set of beliefs.

00:27:56.740 It's an experience.

00:27:58.840 So that's part of the domain of the religious.

00:28:02.780 Our stories are often about what inspires awe.

00:28:07.440 People can inspire awe.

00:28:09.340 If you admire someone deeply, that's a form of awe,

00:28:15.300 and it's a compulsion to imitate,

00:28:18.780 and that's no different than the instinct to worship.

00:28:22.180 Those are the same thing.

00:28:23.180 That's all the same thing.

00:28:24.280 the domain of literature is the landscape of good and evil 0.88

00:28:31.940 and the deepest literary stories are religious

00:28:36.220 so i started to analyze stories and i started to find out who was good at that and

00:28:44.760 the people i found that were the best at that were the the psychoanalysts freud

00:28:52.160 initially and then his compatriot Carl Jung in the school that he established and so then I started

00:29:00.140 reading everything I could get my hands on from that school and as much mythology

00:29:05.960 religious story as I could from all sorts of different cultures and I started as well

00:29:13.680 walking through the biblical stories and starting to piece together what they mean and what they

00:29:20.340 signify. And so, and I started to understand that along the way, a few other things.

00:29:32.880 You know, when you look at the world, you can't see all the world. You understand that. There's,

00:29:38.940 the world's insanely complex. This is why we can't be guided by facts alone. People say follow the

00:29:46.120 sciences, because they don't understand this. You can't follow the science, because science is not

00:29:52.300 a navigation tool. Science is a descriptive enterprise, and describing the landscape and

00:30:01.140 figuring out how to navigate through it are not the same problem. The facts alone can't tell you

00:30:08.080 what to do, no more than if someone drops you in a desert, the landscape around you can tell you

00:30:13.960 what direction you should walk in.

00:30:16.740 When you are interacting with what's real,

00:30:22.200 you have to choose what to attend to

00:30:24.380 and you have to choose what to ignore.

00:30:25.920 You have to prioritize your attention.

00:30:32.400 There's no difference between

00:30:34.280 the universe of value

00:30:38.660 and your prioritization of your attention.

00:30:43.060 think think about this for example you go on a date for with someone for the first time and

00:30:47.660 you're in a noisy restaurant and there's 50 conversations and you could listen to any of

00:30:52.820 them or you could look at your phone because there's a million conversations on there

00:30:59.660 but if you have any sense that's not what you do what do you do you prioritize the conversation

00:31:07.340 that you're having with the person that you're having dinner with that's what you do with your

00:31:10.900 guess what that means is that you of all the things you could attend to you focus on

00:31:17.460 the interactions between you and the person that you're attempting to shower with hospitality

00:31:25.140 you eliminate from your perception a multitude of potential phenomena and you highlight a tiny

00:31:35.500 proportion of what you're offered. You do that all the time. Every time you focus your

00:31:42.420 eyes, you do that. Every time you take a step forward, every glance you take, you

00:31:52.500 sift the world through a structure of value. The way you do that habitually, that's your

00:32:00.100 character that's your personality a representation of that a statable representation of that

00:32:07.160 that's a story the reason you like stories the reason you need to hear them is because

00:32:15.080 you want to know how people prioritize their attention and their perceptions

00:32:19.100 their attention and their actions and the reason you want to know that is because there's nothing

00:32:24.500 more valuable to know than that. That's why when you talk to someone, you look at their

00:32:30.400 eyes. You look at their eyes so you can see where they're pointing their eyes. You look

00:32:37.100 at their eyes so you can see what they're attending to. You look at what they're attending

00:32:41.620 to so that you can understand what they're prioritizing. You do that so that you can

00:32:46.020 gain insight into their character and understand them. That's how we do it. When you go see

00:32:51.840 a movie, you watch someone act out the priorities of their attention and action. And that's the

00:32:59.560 characterization in the movie. And you do that so that you can benefit from observing the

00:33:05.480 consequences of that characterization. The deeper the movie, the more general significance

00:33:14.560 the characterization has.

00:33:17.680 So, I could say that every decision you make

00:33:21.200 reflects the decision between good and evil

00:33:23.640 in an attenuated way,

00:33:28.860 such that your description of the micro decisions you make

00:33:34.520 might not be that interesting.

00:33:35.800 But if I took a set of decisions that people made,

00:33:39.560 that a set of people made,

00:33:41.040 and I distilled those decisions to their essence,

00:33:44.560 And I extracted out a characterization, in consequence, that distilled characterization

00:33:50.280 would be of general utility and general interest, and that's what a good storyteller does.

00:33:54.460 And you know this, because a good storyteller maybe writes a villain, and a complex and

00:34:01.180 compelling villain, and so that villain is, first of all, the distillation of everything

00:34:07.920 that could be villainous about one person, because the filmmaker will just show you the

00:34:13.040 essence of that. But then even more than that is that a very well-developed fictional villain

00:34:18.200 will be villainous in the way that 10 villains in the world might be, right? It's a distillation

00:34:26.140 of the essence of villainy. It's a purification. That's what stories do. They distill and purify

00:34:35.160 the moral landscape. And you want to watch them because

00:34:39.440 the representation of the distilled moral landscape is a powerful, generalizable tool.

00:34:48.120 It's an abstraction. And then we go again. Once again, the deepest distillations are

00:34:55.380 religious characterizations.

00:34:59.540 So,

00:35:01.420 the ultimate fictional character becomes a god.

00:35:06.800 Now, you have to understand what I'm not saying.

00:35:09.240 I'm not trying to reduce the domain of the religious

00:35:12.100 to the fiction that people juxtapose against fact.

00:35:16.200 I'm trying to make a claim for what we do when we fictionalize.

00:35:20.520 What we do when we fictionalize is we abstract.

00:35:23.060 fact. That's not the replacement of fact with falsehood. That's the sifting and winnowing

00:35:31.640 of fact until nothing remains but the purified essence. It's the most real, not the least.

00:35:39.500 Now, you know this already because you know if that wasn't the case, then there'd be no

00:35:43.860 such thing as deeply profound literature, right? Because if fiction was the falsification

00:35:55.640 that bore no relationship to reality, then there'd be no such thing as deep literature.

00:36:04.420 It wouldn't have any bearing on the world. But we know that that's opposite of the truth.

00:36:11.920 The deepest literature has the most bearing on the world.

00:36:15.960 And again, even as a matter of definition, the deepest literature is religious.

00:36:20.500 What happens in the biblical corpus?

00:36:22.900 It's a series of characterizations.

00:36:25.220 What are their characterizations?

00:36:26.980 Well, they're twofold, essentially.

00:36:29.400 There's a characterization of what should be put in the highest place.

00:36:35.240 It's an investigative inquiry into the nature of that which should be put in the highest place.

00:36:40.780 So that's a series of characterizations, and then it's a characterization of man's character in relationship to that.

00:36:53.960 That's what the biblical corpus is, and it's a distillation of such characterization that has made itself manifest over some tens of thousands of years, at least.

00:37:06.900 longer, at least that, at least that in story form, way longer in behavioral form, way longer

00:37:15.260 than that. So let's talk about this characterization. Well, I can, I'll start with this story.

00:37:27.880 And the Lord said unto Abraham, get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from 0.96

00:37:34.420 my father's house unto a land that I will show thee. Okay, so now that's, it's one line. Okay, 0.94

00:37:42.280 so what happens in this line? Well, we know some things about Abraham. He's old. He's like 75.

00:37:50.040 And where does he live? Well, he lives in his father's house, among his family, in his country.

00:37:58.280 and he's 75 so what are we to make of that what's a little old to be in your father's house

00:38:04.620 right there's a serious problem of failure to launch here right okay so now we could delve

00:38:12.040 into that and see what that signifies okay so now we know that abraham's father is a wealthy man

00:38:20.300 and what that means is that abraham is provided with everything he needs okay now imagine that

00:38:28.100 you're offered a political utopia. This is the standard political utopia offering. What did

00:38:33.760 Dostoevsky say about the political utopians? So imagine we can arrange your life, and this is

00:38:41.040 Dostoevsky's words, so that you had nothing like a description of California. You had nothing

00:38:46.100 to do except to sit in hot tubs of bubbling water, to eat cakes, and busy yourself with

00:38:53.540 the continuation of the species. Right. So that's Dostoevsky's characterization of the utopia.

00:38:59.940 And he analyzes this. I said, OK, well, imagine we could bring that about. What would human

00:39:04.680 beings do in response? And Dostoevsky's answer was, this is in Notes from Underground, a

00:39:11.540 study of resentment. He said human beings would immediately do something destructive

00:39:17.880 of an insane just to break that utopia that hedonistic utopia just so something interesting

00:39:28.300 would happen and he said and isn't that for the best that's a very interesting critique it's a

00:39:35.920 very sophisticated critique you know often you hear critiques of utopian socialism

00:39:40.980 critique will be well what is on offer is impossible and of course that's true but

00:39:46.800 that's perhaps not the deepest critique the deepest critique is that's not what you want

00:39:51.380 or maybe even one level below that that's not what you should want and you might say well why

00:39:57.280 wouldn't i want to have everything i need delivered to me with no effort and the answer is because

00:40:05.560 you're not an infant in a crib, right? And if you're 75 years old and you're living like

00:40:11.820 that, it's like something's gone wrong and seriously wrong. Well, then you think, well,

00:40:19.000 is that in accordance with your experience? It's like, well, think about what we do when

00:40:23.160 we go watch movies. We don't watch people shop. We don't watch people eat. We don't

00:40:29.280 watch people sleep, even in security and comfort, right? We're not that interested in watching

00:40:36.040 satiated people in their unconsciousness, which is an infantile existence. What we want to see

00:40:45.060 on the screen is romantic adventure. And so then you might think, well, that's what we're built

00:40:51.040 for, actually, that the ideal life isn't the utopia of infantile satiation, but something

00:40:59.700 like the life of romantic adventure. So let's assume for a moment that that's the case,

00:41:08.040 just for the sake of nurturing the hypothesis, and then we'll add an additional observation.

00:41:16.460 So now there's a characterization of man that we already described. 0.74

00:41:21.780 Abraham is living this life of infantile satiation.

00:41:25.200 And at some point, it's insufficient for him.

00:41:28.440 A little late, but better late than never.

00:41:31.680 And there's actually an optimism in that, because in this, the story puts forward the claim that it is better late than never.

00:41:40.000 And then maybe it's never too late.

00:41:41.420 and so even if you lived a life of infantile dependency you could still wake up and

00:41:50.280 go have your life go have your adventure now you know you think about what you do for your kids

00:41:56.800 you know you know if you have any sense what did my mother say when i left home i left home about

00:42:03.720 16 my mother's a very nice person and she said something on i my life went better when i left

00:42:11.220 home I was having some friction with my father for a variety of reasons many of which had to do

00:42:17.740 with me many of which had to do with being 16 some of which had to do with it was time for me to go

00:42:23.660 and when I went it was much better and I got along with my parents much better and my mother who's a

00:42:28.940 very nice person said if things were too good at home you'd never leave and now and then my mother

00:42:35.500 you know she could strike with her tongue like a snake even though she's a very nice person 0.99

00:42:40.380 And that was one of the times that I saw her, the stronger character in her underneath her maternal solicitude, because she was the kind of mother who wanted her kids to go have your life. Right. That's the maternal sacrifice that that a true mother is called upon to offer her children to the world. Right. And my mother was good at that.

00:43:08.720 And so, if you're treating your children properly, you don't entice them into a prolonged state of dependency and infantile satiation.

00:43:24.040 That isn't good for them. You know it. That isn't what you want for them.

00:43:28.500 And that's an interesting thing, too, because you could imagine that you want nothing more than to shelter your child from all possible harm and damage.

00:43:35.420 but

00:43:36.680 you don't want that

00:43:42.540 you don't want them

00:43:44.540 you don't want to protect them from serpents

00:43:46.600 that's a way of thinking about it symbolically

00:43:48.620 you want to make them into snake handlers

00:43:50.640 that's a

00:43:52.600 more profound form of security

00:43:54.660 so if you make your child

00:43:56.060 if you encourage your child to become

00:43:57.700 adventurous and alert and awake

00:44:00.600 and undaunted

00:44:02.320 and faithful and courageous

00:44:04.620 then that actually provides them with the best form of security possible

00:44:09.920 because it means they're going to be able and ready for whatever comes their way.

00:44:16.220 And that's way more secure in the final analysis than anything you could produce

00:44:21.640 by maintaining them in a state of suspended infantile satiation.

00:44:26.880 Freud was very good at analyzing this.

00:44:29.280 You know, he characterized the mother who enticed her child into a relationship that was too close, let's put it that way, as eatable and devouring.

00:44:42.380 Okay, so what do we know from these first lines?

00:44:44.960 We have a characterization of man and God.

00:44:47.020 man as represented by Abraham might fall prey to the temptation of infantile security but will

00:44:58.440 eventually become dissatisfied with that what's God in this characterization God is the voice

00:45:06.500 of adventure that calls even to the unwilling okay now what you have to understand you have

00:45:12.780 to understand this. This is a definition. Okay? This is what modern people don't understand

00:45:20.060 about these stories. There are multiple characterizations of what God is in the opening stories of

00:45:27.920 Genesis. In the initial Genesis story, God is the spirit that brings order to chaos,

00:45:34.060 which is what you do in your household. He's the spirit that...

00:45:37.780 that Adam walks with unselfconsciously in the garden,

00:45:46.880 which is what you do when you're attempting some recreation in your backyard.

00:45:55.220 He's the spirit that calls the unworthy out for the poor quality of their sacrifices.

00:46:06.740 that's the god that makes himself manifest in the story of cain and abel so these are definitions so

00:46:13.800 what the writers of the biblical stories are trying to wrestle with is

00:46:18.800 what character should be placed in the highest place and how do you conceptualize that and then

00:46:26.000 how do you exist in relationship to that and so there's a hypothesis that underlies it and the

00:46:30.320 hypothesis is monotheistic it's that all these different characterizations are united

00:46:36.240 in one thing that's properly put in the highest place.

00:46:40.420 And so the hypothesis would be

00:46:42.380 that the spirit that makes order out of chaos,

00:46:45.460 the spirit that punishes the prideful,

00:46:48.240 the spirit that calls out

00:46:49.900 those who make second-rate sacrifices,

00:46:52.800 the spirit that warns of the impending flood,

00:46:55.940 that's the story of Noah,

00:46:57.260 the spirit that punishes the tyrant,

00:46:59.580 that's the story of the Tower of Babel, 0.56

00:47:01.320 those are all the same thing.

00:47:04.480 And that if you have any sense,

00:47:06.240 you exist in relationship to that thing, and devoted to it. Devoted to its manifestation

00:47:11.600 within your own life. Devoted to allowing that to possess you in the course of your decisions.

00:47:18.080 And then that story is elaborated further in the story of Abraham. And so Abraham is living

00:47:23.380 a semi-life. And a voice comes to him, or an impulse, or a feeling, doesn't really matter,

00:47:30.100 and says get out there now what makes abraham faithful he listens okay so now you got to ask

00:47:42.020 yourself this about your belief that voice makes itself manifest to you all the time

00:47:51.500 whenever you're in a relatively comfortable situation and you could stay there you could

00:47:59.180 dwell there, you could rot there, you could cease moving forward, or you could hearken

00:48:12.660 to the call of further adventure, and then enact that. Okay, so what are you doing in

00:48:18.280 those two circumstances? Well, you're placing faith in one spirit or another. One is a spirit

00:48:26.160 of stasis and comfort, and the other is the spirit of adventure. So you might say, well,

00:48:30.580 do you believe in that? It's like the belief is represented in your decision. That's the

00:48:36.580 belief. The belief isn't your statement about whether or not you think that that voice exists.

00:48:43.480 That's a secondary concern. The primary concern is when something deep within you issues the

00:48:51.820 command to move forward do you attend and if the answer is yes then the next thing that happened

00:49:01.380 the next thing happens so god says essentially if you hearken to the voice of adventure

00:49:09.500 i will make of you a great nation and i will bless you and i will make thy name great

00:49:16.280 and thou shalt be a blessing now that's quite an offer so let's see if we can take that apart well

00:49:23.320 nothing ventured nothing gained people certainly know that it's like how is it that you

00:49:31.140 begin the journey let's say to greatness to whatever greatness you might

00:49:35.740 conceive of or manage what would greatness be well in this story it's conceptualized as

00:49:43.280 the founding of not only a nation, but perhaps a multitude of nations, right, so that the actions

00:49:49.380 that you undertake are the foundation of a great enterprise. How does that make itself manifest

00:49:57.640 as the call to adventure? So we might ask, well, how does that make itself manifest? Because it's

00:50:05.220 good to nail these things down so you really understand them. Well, there are other

00:50:11.020 characterizations in the biblical corpus of the nature of god's voice so i'll give you an example

00:50:17.200 this is a very good example so before moses becomes a leader like abraham let's say he

00:50:24.760 encounters the burning bush okay so what does that mean exactly well he's just going along his

00:50:29.280 business he's a shepherd at this point and and a shepherd is a is the beginnings of a leader right

00:50:35.300 because a shepherd is a caretaker and a shepherd in biblical times was also someone who was

00:50:39.520 keeping the lions and the wolves at bay, right? It wasn't a job for this faint of heart, and you had

00:50:45.500 to live off the land at the same time. It was a tough job. He's a shepherd, and that's going

00:50:51.020 pretty well, and he's wandering around by Mount Sinai one day, which is the place of holy encounter,

00:50:56.400 by the way, and something catches his attention out of the corner of his eye, and he decides to

00:51:02.760 leave the beaten track, and go investigate. Okay, so how does that work in your life?

00:51:09.720 Well, are you interested in some things? Well, yes. Did you choose them, or did they choose you?

00:51:21.700 Now, that's a weird question, right? Because my sense is that, well, try to make yourself

00:51:27.940 interested in something you're not interested in. Right, right. That's weird, right? Because

00:51:33.480 if you were yours, you could just do that. You just say, look, I need to do this. So now I'm

00:51:38.580 interested in it. And then away you'd go. And there'd be no resistance. You'd just tell yourself

00:51:44.120 what to do. And away, that is not how it works. Not in the least. You can't tell yourself what

00:51:51.240 to do any more effectively than you can tell anyone else. Maybe even less effectively. And

00:51:56.280 And that's strange because, well, it certainly indicates that you're not under your own control.

00:52:01.560 And that's a, then what, who controls you then?

00:52:05.420 There's a question for the ages.

00:52:08.740 And more strangely even, if you can't control what you're interested in, what controls it?

00:52:17.840 It's not random. 0.96

00:52:19.240 It's not random unless you're insane.

00:52:22.500 And even then, it's not random.

00:52:24.060 It's more random.

00:52:24.980 That's for sure.

00:52:26.280 But what calls you is not random.

00:52:30.600 So what is it?

00:52:31.620 Well, the biblical answer to that is what calls you is God.

00:52:36.120 Definition.

00:52:38.640 Okay, now you've got to think about that in the context of your own life.

00:52:41.240 Like, ask yourself, if, consider the success that you have insofar as you have success.

00:52:54.180 And then ask yourself, what was the pathway to that success?

00:52:58.800 How much of that was a consequence of following your calling?

00:53:02.680 Now, if you have a job that pays you well and you hate it, you're not interested in it,

00:53:07.240 that's not exactly success.

00:53:10.020 And the security that the money hypothetically provides, which would be part of that provision of infantile gratification,

00:53:23.580 It's insufficient.

00:53:25.580 If you hate what you have to do to provide that,

00:53:29.280 if you're not engrossed by what you're sacrificing,

00:53:35.640 you know that you're much more likely to commit to something if it grips you.

00:53:41.660 Okay, so then you've got to ask yourself, what does that imply?

00:53:44.000 I can tell you what it implies in the biblical context,

00:53:46.280 because the voice of God is characterized as the interplay between two forces frequently.

00:53:51.880 one is what pulls you forward right it's an invitation it's a calling it's what makes itself

00:53:58.020 manifest behind everything that interests you you can think of everything that interests you

00:54:03.400 as a portal through which the divine light shines that's a very good way of thinking about it and

00:54:08.460 you know that the thing you're interested isn't the thing itself because you can pursue something

00:54:13.360 you're interested in and then your interest will shift which shows you that whatever it was that

00:54:18.700 was pulling you forward was not that specific thing, but that that thing was a pointer to

00:54:23.540 something else. Right. Interest is not enough. Right. Because your interest can lead you

00:54:29.800 astray, especially if you're not disciplined. So you need conscience as well. And there's

00:54:34.720 ample characterization of God in the biblical corpus as the voice of conscience. And so

00:54:39.900 then you could imagine that what calls you forward is the interplay between calling and

00:54:45.940 conscience, right? Conscience keeps you on the, your calling attracts you forward and defines the

00:54:53.760 path, and your conscience keeps you on the straight and narrow. And the interplay, it's a definition

00:54:59.160 again, the interplay between those two things, which aren't exactly you, you're subject to them,

00:55:04.780 that's why they're not you. They have an autonomy, which is why they're not you. You can't tell your

00:55:12.280 conscience what to do. It tells you when you make a mistake. That's not the same thing at all. And

00:55:19.020 it's akin very much to the phenomenon of interest. It's like you can't, you can respond to what

00:55:25.940 you're interested in. You can even pervert what you're interested in. But it's very difficult to

00:55:30.900 make it out of whole cloth. It's something that you abide by or not. The insistence in the first

00:55:40.980 few sentences of this story is that if you follow the voice of adventure, the voice that

00:55:49.280 calls you forward, if you commit yourself to that fully, fully, then you will become

00:55:59.380 a great nation, blessed with a great name, and someone that does nothing but good. That's

00:56:07.780 a pretty good deal. That's a good deal. And that's the deal that's on offer. And that's a very

00:56:13.000 strange thing to think that that's the deal that's on offer. Because maybe that is the deal that's

00:56:18.440 on offer. Because you could imagine, you can ask yourself, this is a good question. You ask

00:56:23.100 yourself, if you attended to everything that interested you, who could you become? If you

00:56:29.860 took it seriously, if you noticed that that was what was calling you forward, if you didn't shrug

00:56:34.840 off that opportunity and responsibility, which are exactly the same thing, if you were full

00:56:41.540 heartedly committed to that, if you were willing to make the sacrifices necessary to walk that

00:56:46.720 path, no matter what, who could you become? There's been studies of what people regret

00:56:56.540 when they're old. They don't regret so much the mistakes they've made. They regret more

00:57:01.960 the mistakes they didn't allow themselves to make, right? They regret banal normality.

00:57:12.300 And I think part of the reason they regret that is because life is too crucial to be

00:57:21.120 satisfied with banal normality. It's too difficult. There's too much suffering intrinsic to it.

00:57:27.560 the burden is too heavy what justifies the weight of life security

00:57:34.740 there are always times when people long for security but security doesn't secure you

00:57:41.340 you're still faced with the problem of mortality you're still faced with the problem of malevolence

00:57:46.320 what can justify that well how about a great adventure you act like that's the case because

00:57:53.220 you'll go watch people have a great adventure on a screen so then you might ask where do you find

00:57:59.300 your great adventure well that's part of what the biblical stories are trying to represent

00:58:05.900 calling so what happens to Moses is he goes off the beaten track so you can imagine this in your

00:58:14.140 own lives you know maybe you have a job that's providing for you and it's providing a certain

00:58:17.920 degree of stability but you feel that something is missing you're in Abraham's position

00:58:22.960 And you have these interests that have always lurked in the back of your psyche, you know,

00:58:27.140 and that maybe you've been afraid to pursue, you don't think enough of yourself, maybe

00:58:30.620 you think they're a bit crazy, maybe they're too daring, maybe you think people laugh.

00:58:35.220 God only knows what you think.

00:58:37.160 You think whatever you think that stops you.

00:58:39.980 That's plenty of things.

00:58:41.260 It's usually fear of failure, fear of success, fear of opinion, fear of the effort, who knows?

00:58:48.260 but let's say in the depths of your despair at your

00:58:56.280 too constrained life you

00:59:01.220 allow yourself to be gripped by something that compels you but that's what Moses does he goes

00:59:09.140 off the beaten track and he looks at this he looks at what calls to him and what is it it's

00:59:15.060 a burning bush okay what does that mean well the tree it's a tree it's a tree of life a tree is a

00:59:20.960 symbol of life and it's burning because things that are alive burn right that's metabolism

00:59:26.680 everything that's alive is on fire and things can living things can make them self-manifest

00:59:33.060 with hallucinogenic intensity that's what happens when you fall in love that's what happens when

00:59:38.960 you have a child. You see the life burning in a manner that's compelling. So Moses, he goes to

00:59:46.720 investigate this thing that calls to him, and he gets closer and closer to it, which means he

00:59:51.240 interacts with it more. He approaches it, and then he realizes that he's starting to tread on sacred

00:59:56.520 ground. Okay, so what does that mean? It means if you follow your interest, it will take you down

01:00:02.320 into the depths. No matter what the interest is, it will discipline you and broaden you and deepen

01:00:08.760 you until you get to the bottom of things. He takes off his shoes and he approaches closer,

01:00:15.020 and he takes off his shoes. That's a shedding of his old identity. Shoes are emblematic of

01:00:20.560 identity. You can walk a mile in someone's shoes and then you can understand them. He takes off

01:00:25.240 his shoes. He doesn't know where he's going. It's a symbol of humility. It's a symbol of willingness

01:00:30.280 to learn more. He takes off his shoes and continues his intense meditation, and the

01:00:38.180 voice of God itself speaks to him from the midst of the bush. And it reveals itself as

01:00:43.100 the spirit of being and becoming. I am that I am. I will be what I will be. It's both

01:00:48.880 of those. All the Hebrew in that announcement of God's identity is without tense. I am what

01:00:56.480 I was, I am what I am, I am what will be. That's the spirit of being and becoming. What does that

01:01:02.160 mean? It means if you pursue whatever calls to you with enough intensity, you'll get to the bottom

01:01:07.740 of things, and the voice of God itself, the spirit of being itself, will make itself manifest to you.

01:01:13.660 And what's the consequence of that? For Moses, that's when he becomes a leader. So here's a

01:01:18.440 question that pertains to our question at the beginning of the lecture. What's the opposite

01:01:23.580 path to the hellish abyss of totalitarian atrocity. You become the leader who can lead

01:01:32.260 people out of tyranny and slavery across the desert to the promised land. And you become

01:01:38.600 that by following the calling that takes you to the depths that enables the structure of

01:01:45.820 existence itself to reveal itself to you. That motivates you to become a leader despite

01:01:52.340 your inadequacies. Moses was a man who couldn't speak. He had a speech impediment. There's

01:01:56.620 something wrong with his ability to communicate. And God basically says to him, that's your

01:02:01.440 problem. Sort it out. And that's a fair statement because like, if you're called upon to be

01:02:09.460 a leader, there's going to be things about you that are inadequate. That's your problem.

01:02:14.200 Find someone to help you. Build a team. You don't have an excuse. And this is what Moses

01:02:20.260 done is he allies himself with his brother, Aaron, who's a public speaker, essentially,

01:02:24.880 a politician. Moses is a prophet and Aaron is a politician. And that's a nice dynamic

01:02:30.120 because the prophet keeps the politician in line, right? But the politician gives voice

01:02:35.740 to the prophet. It's a good partnership and it works out quite well for them and for the

01:02:40.140 Israelites. Moses asked, why will the Israelites listen to me? And God says, tell them God

01:02:49.560 sent you. And you might say, well, why would someone believe that? And the answer is, it

01:02:55.640 would depend on how you said it. And I'm dead serious about that, right? And so if what

01:03:02.500 you said wasn't a lie, maybe people would listen. And you might say, well, how is it

01:03:09.680 that God would speak to me? I know the answer to that. Listen. To what?

01:03:19.560 to the voice of your own soul.

01:03:22.580 How's that?

01:03:24.420 And what's so terrible about that, in a sense,

01:03:27.020 is that there's nothing you want to do more than that.

01:03:31.100 And what's the consequence?

01:03:32.420 Well, the consequence for Abraham is that

01:03:34.300 I will make of thee a great nation.

01:03:38.480 I will bless thee and make thy name great,

01:03:40.220 and thou shalt be a blessing.

01:03:41.300 And I will bless them that bless thee,

01:03:42.980 and I will curse them that curse thee.

01:03:45.160 And in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. 0.96

01:03:50.220 Wow, that's quite the bloody offer.

01:03:52.460 So imagine this.

01:03:53.180 So here's the deal.

01:03:54.240 If you attended to what called you forward, hemmed inappropriately by your conscience,

01:03:59.100 you would become the sort of person whose pattern of action would be so beneficial

01:04:03.200 that every single person would benefit from it.

01:04:07.380 It would be the best thing that could possibly happen to you,

01:04:10.220 but simultaneously would be the best thing that could possibly happen to everyone else.

01:04:13.920 that's a good deal you might think that's worth taking some risks for well the funny thing about

01:04:21.120 risks is like you're taking risks you walk across the street right you have children you're gonna

01:04:30.980 die you're in this so the question of risk isn't the issue the risk is already there

01:04:39.600 the question is what do you do with the risk and you have an adventure with it and maybe that's

01:04:48.180 in some perverse sense why the risk is there because there's no adventure without risk

01:04:54.060 and maybe you could have an adventure that was so glorious that it would justify the risk

01:04:59.980 the secret to life is that the secret to life to have an adventure so

01:05:05.180 superlative that you say to yourself, that was difficult, but I'd do it again. It was

01:05:11.720 worth it. It's what you want for your children, right? You see your children struggling forward,

01:05:16.180 and that's painful. And what you want for them is to have a life that's so full and

01:05:20.940 abundant and rich and varied and remarkable and miraculous that the price they have to

01:05:26.840 pay for it, which is their mortality, let's say, is, you could celebrate that.

01:05:35.180 and in the all shall all families of the earth be blessed it's a lovely statement of

01:05:41.020 the harmony that could obtain between the psyche and this and society it's a representation of

01:05:47.240 the kingdom of heaven the kingdom of heaven is a place where you're doing exactly what you should

01:05:52.160 do and so things are good but they're getting better and at the same time what you're doing

01:05:56.920 is doing exactly that to everyone who's around you right so that's a harmonious balance it's

01:06:02.400 not a competition between you and everyone else, because it's not a zero-sum game. It's a game that

01:06:08.960 returns the more you give. That's a sacrificial motif. Life is a game whose returns are dependent

01:06:19.700 on your offering. Exactly that. That's what God tells Cain and Abel. Your return is dependent

01:06:26.580 on the quality of your sacrifice. What's the ultimate sacrifice? Then that's the question

01:06:31.280 in there. What's the ultimate sacrifice? Actually, the biblical corpus as a whole proceeds to that

01:06:36.880 revelation. What's the ultimate sacrifice? Child and self. Right? So that happens in the story of

01:06:47.300 Abraham. Abraham's called upon to sacrifice his son. Why? Because you have to give up everything

01:06:53.180 to what's highest. What happens when he decides to do that? He gets his son back, and it's part

01:06:59.320 of the process by which he establishes the great nation that's blessed, that makes his name a

01:07:05.340 blessing, the willingness to offer up everything, even what you love most dearly, to what's properly

01:07:11.160 highest, is the most abundant pathway forward. It's a terrifying idea. God approves of the proper

01:07:22.360 sacrifice. I was thinking about this. Maybe I'll close with this. God punishes Cain because Cain

01:07:30.880 makes second-rate sacrifices. Okay, so that means that God is the agent who punishes the second-rate

01:07:37.060 sacrifice. It's a definition. Do you believe in that? Well, you can ask yourself these questions

01:07:44.180 instead of assuming you know the answer. Do you believe that you can get away with second-rate

01:07:49.660 offerings? Has that ever worked for you? Or we could make the question more pointed. Have you

01:07:56.760 ever got away with a second-rate offering in a manner that makes you proud of what you did when

01:08:01.840 you look back when you're desperate? Because I know what you look to when you're desperate. You

01:08:08.760 look back through the detritus of your life to see if there's some evidence that at some point

01:08:14.300 in your life. You made a worthy offering that was accepted properly, that produced, at least for

01:08:22.380 some moment, the stability of your own psyche and the spread of what was good among the people

01:08:30.980 around you. And that can get you through a dark night. And so you can ask yourself, well, what

01:08:36.060 would happen if you did that all the time? Full, with full commitment. You're fully committed

01:08:41.560 anyways. That's your destiny. Your destiny is to be fully committed in actuality, but

01:08:50.220 perhaps not by choice. You might as well align the choice with the inevitability.

01:08:59.020 Abraham has to offer his son. That's what God himself does in the Christian venture,

01:09:04.200 right? It's an echo of that idea that the proper relationship between human beings and

01:09:10.160 what's highest is a sacrificial relationship, and Christ is the icon of the offering of

01:09:16.400 the self to God. And what does that mean? It means, it means exactly that. It means

01:09:24.320 that the offering that's most pleasing to God is yourself. Obviously, like it's obvious

01:09:31.760 that that's the case. It's like you have to reveal everything that's in you. You have

01:09:40.160 to offer everything that's in you. And you have to do that in a sacrificial manner. And so what

01:09:44.800 do I mean by that? That's a deeper level of sacrificial realization. You might think that

01:09:51.440 when you learn, you're ignorant and you learned. So you're ignorant and something is added to you. 1.00

01:09:56.080 But that isn't how it works. The way it works is that you're wrong. You run smack headfirst into 0.99

01:10:04.060 that error, a new realization reveals itself, and to accept that, you have to allow what

01:10:13.860 you were wrong about to die. You wonder why people cling to their old habits, even when

01:10:21.480 they know that they're destructive, and the answer is, they don't want to let, they don't

01:10:27.400 want to let go of what they're pathologically clinging to, they don't want to let go of

01:10:31.920 what they've pathologically raised to the highest place.

01:10:34.900 They're not willing to offer the sacrifice of what's unworthy to progress.

01:10:41.040 There's an insistence at the end of the story of Adam and Eve.

01:10:46.440 Adam and Eve are thrown out of paradise because of their pride.

01:10:50.360 And God bars the gates of paradise.

01:10:54.880 He puts an angel on each side, a cherub, and the cherubs hold a sword.

01:10:59.560 the cherubs are accompanied by a sword that's on fire that turns every which way so what is that

01:11:06.900 what is a sword that turns every which way that's on fire well fire burns fire burns away dead wood

01:11:12.760 a sword cuts a flaming sword cuts and burns a flaming sword that turns every which way is the

01:11:20.520 sword that cuts and burns from which there's no escape well that's obviously guards the bars the

01:11:27.260 pathway to paradise because in paradise nothing that's insufficient is allowed to exist

01:11:33.320 and so if you're taking your steps towards paradise you're going to encounter the sword

01:11:39.660 that burns and cuts and you have to allow all of that that's unworthy to be sacrificed

01:11:45.820 and that's pleasing to god

01:11:48.080 you can see why people resist enlightenment

01:11:53.620 I mean, you've got to ask yourself, like, if it was a simple matter of incremental forward progression towards an ever more enlightened state, everyone would just do it.

01:12:07.720 If there's no cost, well, what's the cost?

01:12:10.340 Well, maybe you're 95% dead wood, right?

01:12:15.500 And so that's a lot to shed to move forward, especially when every cut is going to be painful.

01:12:21.600 You know that that's the case.

01:12:23.080 if you're arguing with your wife, you're arguing with your husband, and you come to the realization

01:12:26.780 that you were wrong, you'll dissolve in tears. And the reason for that is because

01:12:31.400 you have to let that part of you, the tears are grief for the part of you that has to die. 1.00

01:12:39.800 The stupid part of you that has to die. And you can easily get into a situation where that's so 1.00

01:12:45.800 much of you that you're unwilling to undergo the winnowing process. And then you live in purgatory.

01:12:51.940 so abraham departed as the lord had spoken unto him which is what you did when you left home

01:13:02.580 however imperfectly and lot went with him his nephew and abraham was 75 when he departed out

01:13:11.680 of haran and he took his wife and lot his brother's son and all their substance they had gathered and

01:13:17.020 all the souls that they had gotten in Heron, and they went forth to go into the land of

01:13:21.440 Canaan, and into the land of Canaan they came.

01:13:28.760 What's the land of Canaan?

01:13:30.440 It eventually becomes the promised land, by the way, in the story of Exodus.

01:13:35.800 Canaan is the land of the future.

01:13:37.780 That's a good way of thinking.

01:13:38.540 That's where you're headed.

01:13:40.240 And Canaan is the land of the future that's inhabited by...

01:13:44.020 the Canaanites in the biblical tradition are descendants of Cain and 0.96

01:13:51.300 they're citizens of the hedonistic and tyrannical society. 1.00

01:14:00.240 That's what you're headed towards when you move into the future.

01:14:03.300 You know that because what you contend with when you're moving forward to try

01:14:06.640 to establish yourself is the,

01:14:09.180 the occupancy of the place that you wish to establish by the forces that already rule there

01:14:18.060 it's a universal story of mankind the impetus in the biblical corpus is that you're

01:14:27.320 to assume that if you abide by the dictates of the voice that calls you to adventure and you're

01:14:34.840 willing to make the proper sacrifices that the inhabitants of Canaan will scatter as you approach. 0.90

01:14:46.280 Let's simplify that for a moment. Imagine you have a high school sports team. It's the theme of 0.99

01:14:55.020 every one in every 10 American movies. High school sports team, and maybe there's two characters on

01:15:02.380 the sports team there's like this two skilled young men um one of whom is a great team player

01:15:09.420 and the other who is maybe slightly more skilled but sort of narcissistic and arrogant right and

01:15:14.720 the story lays out the triumph and the trials of the boy who is not only skilled at the requirements

01:15:23.800 of the game but skilled at lifting up the spirits of his teammates playing the game fairly and

01:15:31.760 placing his athletic success in the proper context so he's playing a multitude of games

01:15:39.080 none of which are subsumed by the athletic contest the plot if it's a comedy a redemptive story is

01:15:47.640 that the good sport prevails do you believe that imagine you have a son who's playing on a sports

01:15:59.480 team and he's highly skilled maybe he's talented spectacularly talented but he's kind of a prick

01:16:04.860 you know and so when he's running down the soccer pitch with his scoring opportunity and

01:16:12.120 one of his teammates has a stellar opportunity himself he doesn't pass he takes the shot for

01:16:18.620 himself and if he does score even in some spectacular manner he has a celebration by

01:16:24.200 himself, and after the game, he complains about his teammates. And you see this making itself

01:16:29.360 manifest on the playing field, and he's celebrated, and rightly so, for his skill, but

01:16:38.100 you're deeply ashamed of his conduct. Why? Because you believe that your son should act like,

01:16:47.700 you believe that if your son acted properly, that the inhabitants of the land of Canaan would

01:16:53.280 scatter as he approached and when you fail to see that make itself manifest it makes your soul ache

01:16:59.920 because you don't want him merely to be skilled unless you're a narcissist who's collecting his

01:17:04.960 trophies you want him to be skilled in a way that makes him into a man and that's what you want and

01:17:10.740 that's the call to adventure that abraham undertakes and abraham passed through the land

01:17:18.960 unto the place of seek him unto the plain of mora and the canaanite was then in the land and the

01:17:23.640 lord appeared unto abraham and he said unto thy seed will i give this land and there builded he

01:17:28.500 an altar unto the lord who appeared unto him i'll close with this

01:17:32.600 abraham advances in good faith with each advancement there's a sacrifice okay

01:17:41.980 you know that makes sense have you ever advanced in your life without a sacrifice

01:17:48.960 is it the case that if the sacrifices are of the highest possible quality,

01:17:54.140 the advance is more rapid and aimed in a better direction?

01:18:01.700 If you're called upon to do more than your discipline now allows you to do,

01:18:06.540 and you're willing to sacrifice the bad habits that are holding you back,

01:18:10.440 the painful sacrifice of your pride and your hedonism that that might entail,

01:18:14.100 does that not make your pathway forward smoother?

01:18:16.400 and isn't it the case that you're more in tune with your soul when you do that and isn't it the

01:18:23.700 case that everyone around you is thrilled to death if they're not bitter and resentful at the fact

01:18:29.420 that you had enough character to drop the foolishness that was impeding your progress

01:18:34.580 when the opportunity to be better presented itself and isn't that exactly what you want for

01:18:39.600 your children and for those you love? And that's exactly what Abraham dramatizes. Each

01:18:46.000 adventure he undertakes is slightly more difficult. The sacrifice he's called upon to make slightly

01:18:51.320 more profound. Well, it culminates in the necessity to sacrifice his only son, despite

01:18:57.320 the fact that he's been promised the destiny of being the father of nations. He's called

01:19:02.920 upon to make the ultimate sacrifice, as we all are, right? By inevitability, voluntarily or

01:19:11.840 involuntarily, in celebration or kicking and screaming. And the notion, a fundamental notion

01:19:18.960 is that if it's in celebration, then it doesn't have to be kicking and screaming.

01:19:27.780 Okay, so let's recap.

01:19:32.920 stories represent characters in motion a character is the pattern of attentional

01:19:43.620 prioritization action and attentional prioritization it's a representation of what's

01:19:50.440 important to that person when you go watch a movie you watch what it is that the lead character is

01:19:55.060 aiming at and you infer their character from your analysis of their aim and you embody them

01:20:02.280 to understand them when you understand their aim.

01:20:09.640 The deepest stories represent the most profound characterization.

01:20:17.880 The character of what is to be put in the highest place

01:20:21.060 and to be imitated is represented in the biblical corpus

01:20:25.280 in a multitude of fashions that converge on a single characterization,

01:20:29.900 One aspect of which is laid out in the story of Abraham, which presents man as the spirit that, no matter how sheltered, can still respond to the call of adventure, and God as precisely that call.

01:20:49.140 with the insistence underlying the narrative that

01:20:58.240 the proper sacrificial heeding of that call

01:21:02.460 makes of each man the master of an infinite destiny.

01:21:11.120 So that's worth thinking about.

01:21:12.660 there's a christian injunction that you're to pick up your cross and carry it voluntarily

01:21:22.080 that's the adventure of your life that's the possibility of your life it's the catastrophe

01:21:29.820 of your life they're the same thing and in that catastrophe is the seeds of adventure

01:21:35.860 If the adventure is undertaken with sufficient faith, the catastrophe is forestalled.

01:21:50.940 That's a good place to end.

01:22:05.860 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 06, 2026

What to Do When Life Feels Empty

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