The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Why You Read Their Eyes First

00:00:00.220 What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day?

00:00:05.460 With Pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers,

00:00:12.340 inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith.

00:00:18.600 Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start,

00:00:22.360 Pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life.

00:00:26.940 Download the Pray.com app today.

00:00:30.000 all these great bands and here you are tonight

00:00:39.880 well thank you very much for coming let me tell you what's going to happen tonight i'm

00:00:45.520 i'm going to share my thoughts with you for 70 minutes thereabouts then i have a special guest

00:00:55.360 here, Konstantin Kizin, who runs a podcast. Good. Well, you should know about him, definitely.

00:01:04.000 Crazy Russian from the UK. A real voice of reason for our fellow Westerners in the UK. 1.00

00:01:18.000 Konstantin is going to come out on stage and torture me about what I said, I hope. Well,

00:01:24.560 what i'm hoping constantine is a very clear thinker very witty man he's got a very sharp mind

00:01:31.820 he's critically oriented in the best possible way a good critical mind separates the wheat from the

00:01:37.460 chaff right to because to be property critical isn't to hurt or destroy with criticism it's to

00:01:44.160 separate what's truly valuable from what isn't valuable so that you have solid ground to stand

00:01:49.560 on and you know one of the things that i've strived to do in my whole academic career is to

00:01:54.440 move closer and closer to

00:01:57.080 believing

00:01:58.800 and stating and writing

00:02:00.740 things that I can't

00:02:03.220 I can't

00:02:04.920 move

00:02:05.380 and

00:02:06.880 you do that yourself by

00:02:10.600 subjecting your own

00:02:12.700 presumptions to

00:02:14.120 critical analysis

00:02:15.980 you do that so that you think

00:02:18.740 through what you're doing so that 1.00

00:02:20.700 you don't act out your stupid 1.00

00:02:22.780 ideas in the world and die and and that's the purpose of thinking right seriously the purpose 1.00

00:02:28.640 of thinking is to have your stupid ideas die instead of you and that's part of the reason 1.00

00:02:36.080 why your enemy can be your best friend because if someone can take out something you think because 1.00

00:02:41.460 they can show you how it's erroneous and counterproductive and then you don't have to go

00:02:46.820 through all the trouble of learning that stupidly in the world that's a fine gift and so i'm hoping

00:02:53.560 that constantine can stand in for for the for the audience for the critical and skeptical audience

00:03:00.420 we're talking about very difficult issues it's highly likely that

00:03:04.380 i could formulate what i'm stating more clearly and precisely and so constantine will come out and

00:03:13.400 we'll discuss what was presented tonight and then we'll turn to the questions that

00:03:20.680 you've kindly delivered and discuss those and and then we'll reintroduce the band and

00:03:27.400 that should do for the evening and so that's the plan and so away we go i'm very much looking

00:03:36.860 forward to this so the first thing we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about stories

00:03:48.940 and and set the stage i think we're at a crucial inflection point in in the world

00:03:59.740 culturally and philosophically I think we're on the dawn of a new set of realizations

00:04:07.020 a new set of realizations that will return us to our fundamentals I think the reason that we have

00:04:15.140 a culture war raging in the west why there's so much instability is because something new is

00:04:21.960 struggling to be born or reborn and I want to explain the reason for that first and

00:04:29.400 the reason is that the enlightenment view of the world

00:04:36.600 which has guided our technological and scientific endeavor

00:04:41.180 our conceptual endeavor

00:04:42.440 our philosophical endeavor

00:04:44.180 for a few hundred years

00:04:47.580 is there's something about it that's wrong

00:04:50.880 like deeply wrong

00:04:52.040 and that error is making itself manifest

00:04:58.400 in the scientific community because i would say now that scientists themselves from a multitude

00:05:05.100 of different disciplines understand that the idea that we see the world as a place of facts

00:05:13.180 or that we see the world as rational creatures or that you can even see the world that way

00:05:19.880 is wrong wrong and i believe that it's it's been demonstrated to be wrong it's this isn't a matter

00:05:27.280 of mere philosophical opinion anymore although it's also that one example for example is that

00:05:34.500 the newest artificial intelligence systems that we've designed the large language models that

00:05:41.580 have burst onto the stage in the last year or thereabouts chat gpt the catastrophic gemini

00:05:48.400 that google so foolishly launched um elon musk's grok these systems are trained like human beings

00:05:58.620 are trained they have an aim they have a purpose they were trained with reward and punishment so

00:06:05.640 to speak their approximations to a target they see the world through a structure of value

00:06:11.900 that they have absorbed from human beings

00:06:14.920 to make the world's smartest

00:06:17.800 linguistic machines

00:06:20.340 we had to inculcate in them a structure of value

00:06:24.100 okay and so

00:06:26.320 and we produced machines now

00:06:28.540 that can engage in discourse

00:06:30.560 that can use language in a way that's virtually indistinguishable from the human

00:06:34.620 and it's going to become

00:06:35.660 radically indistinguishable from the human

00:06:38.860 very very rapidly

00:06:40.260 and they're not programmed like lists of rules they're not programmed like ordinary

00:06:48.320 thinking machines they're programmed the same way that human beings learn they're

00:06:53.500 programmed with aim they have an ethos and an ethic

00:06:56.520 we can't orient ourselves in the world with the facts

00:07:06.020 We can't follow the science

00:07:09.900 Because science isn't a leader

00:07:12.960 Science doesn't establish our aims

00:07:15.900 Our aims are established using mechanisms of perception and emotion

00:07:21.340 And thought that aren't in themselves scientific

00:07:24.800 We're aiming at something

00:07:26.800 Why can't we orient ourselves in the world with the facts?

00:07:34.220 while the simplest explanation for that is that there are too many facts

00:07:41.900 there's as many facts as there are phenomena more actually there's as many facts as there

00:07:50.840 are possible combinations of phenomena you drown in the facts when you're confused in your own life

00:07:59.120 and things are chaotic and you're anxious,

00:08:02.200 it's because a plethora of possibilities is making itself manifest in front of you

00:08:08.260 and you don't know which way to turn.

00:08:10.560 You don't have a clear direction.

00:08:11.980 You don't have a clear aim.

00:08:13.040 There's no way of simplifying the world so that you can act in it.

00:08:17.320 We know, for example, that to perceive the world,

00:08:20.100 you have to obliterate from your consciousness almost everything that you could see

00:08:26.100 because otherwise you you're overwhelmed we know even that the hallucinogens who

00:08:33.080 are being studied in in with increasing intensity in recent years interfere with your normal

00:08:40.860 perception such that they bring to consciousness a plethora of things that under normal circumstances

00:08:49.340 you ignore and the consequence of that is um influx of a sense of overwhelming significance

00:08:56.560 and meaning but at the same time a kind of paralysis of action because when everything

00:09:02.900 becomes infinitely meaningful there's no straightforward way of moving forward when

00:09:10.120 you're in a restaurant with someone on a first date and you're focusing on the conversation and

00:09:16.440 actions of your date in a sea of competing conversations you zero out everything that

00:09:26.400 you could be attending to in every other table all the competing thoughts in your imagination

00:09:32.040 all the things you could be bringing to mind to zero in with like laser pinpoint accuracy on

00:09:39.660 what it is that your partner in conversation is doing and you do that in the world all the time

00:09:45.200 you make one thing at a time of pinnacle importance and you arrange everything else

00:09:53.040 in the world at every moment that you perceive around that thing that you've made of pinnacle

00:09:59.100 importance that's how you see the world and i don't mean think about the world this is under

00:10:05.120 thought it's more profound it's what you do when you actually see if i decide to do something

00:10:15.180 straightforward like walk from here to the stairs on the stage and i set my aim i don't perceive

00:10:27.620 any of you in consequence because the fact of your existence is irrelevant to my purpose and you're

00:10:35.800 gone. None of the facts of the stage that I could attend to are relevant and perceptible

00:10:44.780 anymore, except insofar as they're pathways or facilitators or obstacles to my journey forward.

00:10:56.480 If I'm looking to the stairs, I see the chairs, but not as places to sit. I see them as

00:11:03.280 obstacles that i have to circumvent in order to attain my aim everything that you see in the world

00:11:10.620 makes itself manifest in accordance with your aim and that's a radically revolutionarily

00:11:18.800 different way of conceptualizing the world than the notion that you take the facts and you

00:11:27.120 sort them despite their infinite number and calculate your way with the facts rationally

00:11:35.180 forward that's not what you do imagine your favorite lecture dial that on one max put that

00:11:43.120 on steroids and then add some cinematic elements to it that's the best way i could describe a

00:11:48.340 peterson academy lecture i went to college because i had to i go to peterson academy because i want

00:11:55.520 I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago, and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college.

00:12:00.520 In traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry.

00:12:04.520 They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.

00:12:08.520 It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you.

00:12:12.520 If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time.

00:12:16.520 That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself.

00:12:20.520 You have the opportunity to investigate that calling.

00:12:25.520 Here's a proposition to contemplate. It's another proposition that has revolutionary

00:12:31.920 significance. It'll explain all sorts of things that you know to be true, but don't know why

00:12:36.160 they're true. The description of the structure through which you see the world is a story.

00:12:49.600 that's what a story is okay so now this explains many things that are otherwise left as

00:12:57.860 mysteries or or side effects i read a book by stephen pinker once pinker's an enlightenment

00:13:05.100 rationalist from harvard and a good guy and very smart and much of what he says is extraordinarily

00:13:11.120 useful but he believes for example that our proclivity to enjoy and tell stories is like a

00:13:17.340 side effect of something more fundamental cognitively it's it's the story as entertainment

00:13:23.420 theory you go to a movie because it's it's fun you you read a book of fiction to your child

00:13:29.260 because it's fun it's it's not core to the what would you say it's not a core element of the way

00:13:37.560 that you exist in the world. It's mere entertainment. It misses the point, that theory. Why is

00:13:48.780 it entertaining? Why can you teach children with stories? If you get the story right for

00:13:56.000 a child, you can capture the child's interest and you can integrate almost any form of learning

00:14:02.640 into the story. And the child will be captivated by that. When children play, pretend play, which

00:14:08.540 they do spontaneously, they spontaneously dramatize the world. They spontaneously make

00:14:15.760 stories out of their roles and their destinies. And that captures them. That forms the basis of

00:14:25.860 their friendships. That's why children want to play so frenetically, is that they're practicing

00:14:31.380 modeling the world when you go see a movie it's not that you want to be entertained although it

00:14:38.700 is entertained that's not why you're there it's not for fun either that's easy to understand and

00:14:44.740 to and to see what's fun about a horror movie i'm dead serious it's like

00:14:50.860 people will be so afraid in a horror movie that they'll cover their eyes

00:14:56.680 they'll hide behind the chair in front of them

00:14:59.840 they'll ask themselves afterwards

00:15:01.920 why they even put themselves through it

00:15:04.160 and yet they'll line up

00:15:05.760 and pay to do it

00:15:06.920 well why would you

00:15:09.680 line up and pay

00:15:11.760 to torture yourself 0.97

00:15:13.680 well

00:15:15.060 because you want to know how to deal

00:15:19.940 with what's horrifying

00:15:20.860 and you want to practice

00:15:24.000 that in a way if you can that

00:15:25.560 isn't in itself fatal. You want to expose yourself to the catastrophes of existence

00:15:31.160 so that you're prepared when those catastrophes come along. You want to expose yourself to the

00:15:37.380 predators that lurk everywhere. You want to inure yourself against what's disgusting and

00:15:43.880 contaminating because you're going to have to deal with it. You want to expose yourself to

00:15:48.560 what's frightening so that you can find the courage within you to deal with what's frightening.

00:15:53.760 and that's part of the instinct to develop and expand your competence

00:15:58.460 and it's in that expansion of competence and skill

00:16:03.200 that occurs as a consequence of that voluntary exposure

00:16:06.580 that the entertainment is situated

00:16:09.500 the reason that's entertaining is because

00:16:11.620 it's part of the manner in which you expand yourself

00:16:15.620 and you can do that in the direction of what's dark and terrible

00:16:19.280 just as you can in the direction of say what's heroic

00:16:22.800 Like, what do you do when you go to a movie?

00:16:26.160 Well, you fasten on to a character.

00:16:28.920 And you understand that character the same way that you understand people that you're in conversation with.

00:16:34.100 Now, you might think that the way that you understand people is by you listen to what they say.

00:16:39.020 And you extract out the knowledge that they're delivering to you in terms of facts.

00:16:44.440 And you interpret the facts and you derive your understanding of the person.

00:16:48.160 Like, none of that's true.

00:16:50.240 That has absolutely nothing to do with how you establish a relationship with someone and well here's some proof

00:16:56.240 Is that what you do with a dog?

00:16:59.420 Well, obviously not but you can establish a relationship with a dog and

00:17:04.560 So and the relationship you have with the dog it's not the same as the relationship with a person

00:17:09.960 But a dog's a pack animal the dog can become a member of the family you can you can

00:17:15.440 understand a dog well enough so the dog likes you right and so whatever you're

00:17:22.220 doing with the dog it isn't discourse about propositions because most of the

00:17:27.740 dogs you own don't talk so and it's the same with very young children and it's

00:17:37.460 the same with an infant you establish a relationship using mechanisms that

00:17:42.560 that aren't propositional. They're not rules, they're not descriptions, they're not facts.

00:17:48.320 That's not how you do it. How do you do it? Where do you look when you talk to someone?

00:17:53.840 You look at their eyes. Why? To see where they're pointing them. Why?

00:18:00.600 So you can see what they're looking at. Why? So you can infer what's important to them.

00:18:06.920 Because we point our eyes at that which is important to us.

00:18:10.780 That's why our eyes look the way they look.

00:18:14.420 Black in the middle, colored on the ring around that, against a white background.

00:18:19.580 That's an evolved mechanism. I can see your eyes.

00:18:23.120 All of our ancestors whose eyes weren't visible, either got killed or didn't reproduce.

00:18:30.400 The one thing you want to know about someone right away is where the hell their eyes are pointed.

00:18:34.960 And you can do that politely, which you do by attending to someone without too predatory a stare.

00:18:41.940 You do that by attending politely to their face, but not too intensely,

00:18:46.960 and not attending, let's say, inappropriately to other parts of their body.

00:18:51.420 And they're going to be watching you to see what you do with your eyes.

00:18:55.600 Because the one thing you want to know about someone, above all else, is what the hell are they up to?

00:19:01.120 Right? What's their aim?

00:19:02.380 and so when you go to a movie that's what you do when you watch a character

00:19:07.300 in a role you see him in a variety of different situations and you watch how he structures his

00:19:17.680 attention what he pays attention to his attention is a costly business and so people pay attention

00:19:24.560 to what they value you watch what they attend to and you watch how they prioritize their actions

00:19:32.580 and from that you derive an understanding of what's important to them as soon as you understand

00:19:39.300 what's important to them you've got their aim you figured that character out this is what you do when

00:19:44.360 you learn to know someone what's their aim as soon as you know their aim

00:19:52.000 you can see the world through their eyes you can see the same objects they see

00:19:59.280 and the objects take on the same emotional significance and when you say i come to

00:20:04.540 understand someone what you really mean is oh i understand their aim and now i can aim at the same

00:20:10.420 thing at least in simulation at least fictionally and i can come to inhabit the same world of

00:20:17.680 perception and emotion that they inhabit. I can even guess at how they might act and to what they

00:20:25.540 might attend in situations I haven't seen, because now I know their aim. What's he up to? That's what

00:20:30.380 you're thinking in a murder mystery or in a thriller. What's he up to? What's he up to? What's

00:20:34.340 going to happen next? And so the plot of the fiction is the aim of the character across time,

00:20:42.020 the aim as the character unfolds. And that might involve the transformation of his aims as well.

00:20:47.680 Right? And that would be the transformation of a character in a movie.

00:20:50.680 He aims at one thing and he learns that that aim is off in some manner.

00:20:54.680 Or he comes to a bitter and dismal partial end and has to switch course.

00:21:00.680 And you want to see people transform their aims.

00:21:03.680 That's character development.

00:21:08.680 We see the world through a story.

00:21:12.680 The world's objects reveal themselves in relationship to our aim.

00:21:18.340 The landscape of emotion presents itself as markers on the pathway to our aim.

00:21:27.000 The world reveals itself in accordance with our aim.

00:21:29.600 That's how perception works.

00:21:31.380 That's a hell of a thing to learn.

00:21:33.460 Because if the world, for example, appears to you only as thorn-bearing obstacles, right?

00:21:40.860 If you feel that everything's arrayed against you and there's no pathway forward.

00:21:44.340 If you feel that you're surrounded by foes and obstacles instead of walking the golden pathway.

00:21:51.720 Accompanied by allies with the world on your side.

00:21:55.720 You might ask yourself whether or not your aim is wrong.

00:22:01.820 And so the world lays itself out in accordance with our aim.

00:22:07.280 we go

00:22:08.840 we

00:22:10.240 produce fiction

00:22:12.380 we generate fiction

00:22:14.580 we live in a fictional landscape

00:22:17.280 because we want to get our aim right

00:22:20.580 we read stories

00:22:22.380 we watch movies

00:22:23.940 we go to plays

00:22:25.300 we talk to each other

00:22:26.600 because we want to get our aim right

00:22:28.180 we want to find the place we should go

00:22:31.100 and we want to learn how to get there efficiently

00:22:32.820 and we're compelled

00:22:35.360 by spirit and instinct to establish the aim and follow the path and to transform ourselves so

00:22:44.720 that our aim becomes ever more precise and efficient and delivers us a world that's ever

00:22:52.980 more abundant and beautiful and that's all a function of aim

00:22:58.280 okay so we live in the story well then as soon as you know that this is what the postmodernists

00:23:09.420 figured out by the way this is why the literary critics have become a dominant force in the

00:23:16.320 culture war the postmodernists were literary critics you think well there's nothing more

00:23:20.600 irrelevant than a literary critic like who the hell cares what an intellectual thinks about a

00:23:24.980 story. I mean, of all the preposterous things to be concerned about, that might top the list.

00:23:30.960 Not if the story is the thing through which you see the world. If the story is the thing you see

00:23:35.800 through which you see the world, there's nothing more powerful than a literary critic,

00:23:39.940 except perhaps an author. And we wouldn't have a culture war right now if the literary critic

00:23:48.340 wasn't far more powerful than anybody had possibly imagined. Because the French intellectual

00:23:53.400 literary critics known as the post-modernists have criticized the central story of the west

00:24:00.320 to death and that's why we have a culture war and it's no joke this is foundational there's no more

00:24:08.960 serious conflict than that and you all can feel that that's why you're here you know that the

00:24:13.860 world is shaking and uncertain in a way that's new and the reason for that is the story itself

00:24:20.900 is under assault all right so let's let's wander through that a little bit you see the world through

00:24:28.200 a story the rationalists or empiricists even the biologists they might have an answer to that they

00:24:34.500 say okay fair enough you see the world through a story but the story is biologically determined or

00:24:40.620 socioculturally determined it's a story of sex that would be freud because for freud and for

00:24:47.100 Charles Darwin, for that matter, for Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist, to an equal degree,

00:24:53.600 the story, the aim is sex, reproduction, and the story is predicated on that aim.

00:25:06.980 Freud, Darwin, Dawkins.

00:25:09.360 The degenerate element of that

00:25:15.720 Is a descent into a kind of hedonism

00:25:18.200 Because if sex is the story 0.98

00:25:21.100 Then why not worship sex 0.97

00:25:23.700 And some dispute that 0.97

00:25:28.700 And say no the central story isn't sex

00:25:31.900 This would be the Marxists

00:25:33.660 The central story is

00:25:35.680 Power

00:25:37.940 that's the story that the universities tell when they're not telling the story about sex

00:25:44.860 it's all about power the essential human aim is domination oppression victimization

00:25:57.040 exploitation the central theme of the family is a power dynamic the central theme of the

00:26:06.580 The relationship between men and women is a power dynamic.

00:26:10.620 Marriage itself is a heteronormative, patriarchal establishment of oppression that goes back

00:26:17.940 to the dawn of time.

00:26:19.660 The nuclear family is the same thing. 0.71

00:26:23.640 Economic arrangements are nothing but power.

00:26:25.960 Friendships are nothing but power.

00:26:27.220 The landscape of human interaction is a dynamic of power.

00:26:33.380 Or sex.

00:26:34.900 Or both.

00:26:36.540 both fighting against one another. Look, these are powerful ideas. Why? Well, obvious. It's

00:26:44.380 obvious. Why? I mean, first of all, without sex, there's no reproduction. And without

00:26:50.580 reproduction, there's no people. And so the Darwinian, Freudian, Richard Dawkins, selfish

00:26:58.440 gene claim is that, well, what could it possibly be other than sex? And the Marxists come running

00:27:07.300 forward and say, how about power? And then the Marxists say, well, obviously it's power

00:27:14.340 because there's radical inequality in the world. There's some who have and some who

00:27:20.820 have not. There's no reason to assume that property in the final analysis, let's say,

00:27:25.900 isn't a form of theft. And everyone who has established themselves in some manner has only

00:27:31.460 done that by stealing from those who are powerless and who have less everything they have and

00:27:37.920 accruing it to themselves. And that's a credible claim for a variety of reasons. The first most 0.90

00:27:43.680 fundamental reason is that a minority of people have all the success on any possible dimension

00:27:49.540 of comparison. It's a very small number of people who are radically attractive. It's a very small

00:27:54.880 number of people who are radically gifted in the visual arts, let's say. It's a radically

00:27:59.380 small percentage of people who are musicians. A tiny percentage of the people have most

00:28:04.560 of the money. A tiny percentage of the people gather most of the attention. It's a Pareto

00:28:11.280 distribution, and that's what Mark's pointed onto. The rich get richer, and the poor get

00:28:15.340 poorer. And there's real truth in that, and there's truth in the claim that people structure

00:28:24.460 their relationships with power. And that some people who obtain success do it as a consequence

00:28:30.540 of exploitation. And it's equally true that when any human relationship deteriorates, it tends to

00:28:38.620 deteriorate in the relationship of power. If your marriage starts to become shaky, then you begin to

00:28:45.040 exploit each other. Use force. You try to get your way. You try to dominate. It's the same within

00:28:51.600 any family that's deteriorating into a state of pathology. It's the same in any organization.

00:28:56.600 We've seen huge states deteriorate into the tyrannical use of power. If you had to identify

00:29:03.600 a cardinal attribute of mankind, power is a reasonable hypothesis.

00:29:15.600 But let's think about that for a minute. So imagine that

00:29:21.600 Well, imagine that it's sex that is and should be the complete story of mankind.

00:29:29.180 Well, what does that mean exactly?

00:29:30.680 What's a world organized on that basis?

00:29:34.200 What does a world organized on that basis look like?

00:29:37.700 Well, there's nothing more important than sex. 0.63

00:29:39.820 Well, how about immediate sexual gratification whenever you want it? 0.81

00:29:43.620 How about immediate sexual gratification as the archetype of hedonism?

00:29:47.780 how about immediate sexual gratification whenever you want it regardless of what anyone else has to

00:29:53.880 say about it because if it's the story and it's the fundamental story then what stops me from

00:30:00.860 gaining access to what i want right now regardless of the cost to anyone else

00:30:08.120 if there's nothing beyond that if only the naive believe that there's anything noble about humanity

00:30:14.580 beyond the immediate demand of reproduction, then what have you got to say that's moral

00:30:19.060 about sex? And why the hell shouldn't everybody just do exactly what they want with whoever

00:30:24.080 they want, whenever they want, all the time? And with power, you can make exactly the same

00:30:33.920 argument. And classical societies, aristocratic societies, militaristic and martial societies

00:30:40.320 are predicated on this idea if i can push you around

00:30:44.240 all that indicates is that i should push you around because if you're so weak that i can push

00:30:51.640 you around you have absolutely no ground whatsoever to stand on to oppose me because

00:30:59.520 if you were moral by the traditions of power i wouldn't be able to push you around and so

00:31:05.980 it's very difficult to argue out of that from a rational perspective why doesn't might make right

00:31:11.240 and why isn't it only the weak who claim that that's wrong and why isn't it only that the weak

00:31:17.520 claim that that's wrong not because they're moral but because they're weak that would certainly be

00:31:22.740 a spin-off on the Nietzschean notion that will to power constitutes the core of man

00:31:28.760 And I would say, up until the dawn of Judeo-Christian ethic, let's say, power ruled.

00:31:38.200 And then we can imagine what sort of world it's like when power rules. 0.73

00:31:41.660 Well, we know what that world's like.

00:31:43.080 It's like, pay attention to the strongest or suffer the consequences.

00:31:50.080 Well, is there something beyond that?

00:31:54.020 That's not mere naivety?

00:31:58.760 What's, if it isn't power that's the story, and if it isn't sex that's the story, what's the story?

00:32:09.040 For the West, the answer to that is the library of the Bible.

00:32:16.700 That's the story.

00:32:18.480 It's the story upon which the West is founded.

00:32:23.120 It's the story that has arisen over thousands of years.

00:32:28.420 tens of thousands of years, for that matter,

00:32:34.420 attempting to address the core issue.

00:32:39.420 What's the fundamental story?

00:32:41.420 It's no mystery to make the claim that

00:32:45.420 the claim of the biblical library of stories,

00:32:48.420 as it is a library,

00:32:50.420 is that it's the fundamental story.

00:32:54.420 Alright, so...

00:32:56.420 We live in a story. We've identified the competitors, power and sex.

00:33:03.420 What is it that's being expressed in the biblical story?

00:33:07.420 Look, if you go to a movie, you read a complex book.

00:33:10.420 You go to a sophisticated movie, a sophisticated play, a Shakespearean play.

00:33:15.420 Or you read a sophisticated work of fiction.

00:33:18.420 You see a multi-dimensional characterization. Right?

00:33:23.420 A comic book has a hero with one motive.

00:33:28.000 A sophisticated work of fiction has a hero, and perhaps an anti-hero, with complex, multidimensional motivations.

00:33:37.220 Whatever characterizes those more realistic people isn't reducible to any single attribute.

00:33:45.100 And in a complicated work of fiction, the author walks you through a multidimensional characterization.

00:33:52.780 You see the same person, the hero, aiming upward, the anti-hero or villain aiming downward.

00:33:59.520 You see that person portrayed in multiple different situations.

00:34:04.540 And pursuing partial reflections of their ultimate aim.

00:34:12.040 And in consequence of that, you learn to understand and embody that complex of aims.

00:34:22.780 When you see a movie and you watch the hero, you're watching the hero to learn how to act like a hero.

00:34:30.140 When you're watching a movie and you watch the anti-hero or the villain,

00:34:34.300 you're watching the movie to learn how not to fail catastrophically and land in hell,

00:34:40.500 while taking everyone else along with you.

00:34:44.200 Is it reducible to something as simple as power or sex?

00:34:50.740 Not if it's not a comic book

00:34:53.920 You need a multidimensional characterization

00:34:56.780 Alright

00:34:57.740 The biblical corpus provides a multidimensional characterization

00:35:03.180 Of the fundamental aim of

00:35:05.920 Man and cosmos

00:35:08.360 That's the claim of the book

00:35:10.500 So I'm going to walk you through some of the stories

00:35:12.460 And show you what's being revealed

00:35:15.460 What's being revealed is the proper object of worship

00:35:20.660 Okay, so what does that mean?

00:35:22.420 The proper object of celebration.

00:35:24.560 The aim towards which all sacrifices and work are to be directed.

00:35:29.920 That which should be held in the highest regard.

00:35:33.200 That which should be imitated in ritual and admiration.

00:35:39.120 Okay, so that's the idea.

00:35:43.460 Admiration in the same way that a small child who hero worships.

00:35:50.660 the boy down the street who's the baseball star because that boy

00:35:57.860 portrays a pattern of skill and attention that is the next appropriate developmental step for

00:36:06.920 the hero-worshipping child that's a recreation of the religious impulse the impulse to look up

00:36:14.540 admire and imitate the question being what to what should we

00:36:18.620 address our attention upward looking admire and imitate

00:36:25.660 that highest possible object of apprehension and admiration

00:36:33.260 is by definition god it's a definition

00:36:39.900 It's the highest aim that lurks behind all proximal aims.

00:36:44.840 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:36:46.560 It's the upward aim as such.

00:36:49.160 Alright, how do you bring that down to earth?

00:36:51.800 Well, let's start with Genesis 1.

00:36:54.040 There's a characterization of God and man in Genesis 1.

00:37:00.220 The story opens at the dawn of time.

00:37:04.240 At the beginning of things.

00:37:05.900 That's not exactly the beginning of time.

00:37:08.500 That's usually how it's read, but it's more complex than that.

00:37:11.560 It's not only the beginning of time, in the linear sense,

00:37:15.960 but it's the beginning of all things that begin.

00:37:18.740 This is what happens every time something begins.

00:37:21.540 This is what happens every time something new makes its entry into the world.

00:37:26.380 It's the continual beginning that continually unfolds,

00:37:30.660 that happened and is happening now and will always happen.

00:37:35.780 It's the pattern of...

00:37:38.500 the emergence of order out of chaos that makes itself manifest

00:37:47.700 in the form of your life

00:37:51.620 how is the stage set the spirit of god

00:37:57.700 hovers over the water over the deep

00:38:02.180 you hear that in the judeo-christian tradition god

00:38:08.500 engenders the world, ex nihilo, out of nothing.

00:38:12.740 That's not how the story sets itself up.

00:38:15.200 It sets itself up with the Spirit of God hovering above the waters.

00:38:19.940 But it's not water.

00:38:21.740 That's not the word.

00:38:22.620 Water is one of the symbolic images attempting to make what's being described clear

00:38:31.160 using a sequence of complex metaphors.

00:38:35.420 The word for the water over which the Spirit of God hovers is Tohu Vabohu or Tehom.

00:38:42.980 And it means a lot of things.

00:38:45.640 It means the dragon that lives at the bottom of the deepest well.

00:38:53.020 It means the unplumbable depths of the most abysmal ocean.

00:38:59.580 It means the water that brings forth life.

00:39:02.360 It means the infinite well of possibility itself.

00:39:10.340 It means the confusion that reigns when your world falls apart.

00:39:16.680 It means the unstructured day that makes itself manifest when you wake up.

00:39:28.000 It means all of that.

00:39:29.500 It means the dragon that the archaic god sliced into pieces and made the world from.

00:39:37.060 It means it's the hydra that Hercules defeats to form the world.

00:39:44.340 It's all of that.

00:39:46.540 So what does that mean?

00:39:49.340 It means that the spirit of being and becoming generates the world from possibility.

00:39:56.880 What does that mean?

00:39:58.260 That's what your consciousness does.

00:40:00.260 That's what you do.

00:40:02.260 See, you think you're surrounded by a world of objects that you manipulate in a robotic fashion.

00:40:07.260 But you're not concerned with the objects that are static.

00:40:12.260 You're concerned with what you can dynamically transform.

00:40:16.260 When you wake up in the morning, what presents itself to you is a field of indeterminate opportunity.

00:40:24.260 That's why you're worried.

00:40:27.260 Or, perhaps, excited because you have something to grapple with that hasn't yet come into being.

00:40:33.760 The possibilities of the day. And you might think, oh my god, I have so many things to do. I'm overwhelmed. It's too much.

00:40:41.760 Well, that's the tohu vabohu. That's the chaos and confusion. That's a plethora of possibility.

00:40:47.760 You're thinking, oh my god, how many ways are there for things to go wrong?

00:40:52.760 Well, that's the multi-headed serpent that the hero always confronts.

00:40:57.900 And what do you have to do with that?

00:40:59.820 It's like, well, are you going to establish the order that's good in the course of the day?

00:41:07.160 Because that's what you're called upon to do.

00:41:09.100 And it's your recreation of what God himself does at the beginning of time

00:41:14.760 that constitutes the action of your conscious on the possibility that's in front of you.

00:41:21.280 You have a microcosm of plenitude and possibility right in front of you at any moment

00:41:30.460 that you can wrestle into order if your aim is right.

00:41:36.560 The process that God relies on to extract the cosmos, the order that's good,

00:41:46.280 from the well of unformed possibility

00:41:50.980 is the word.

00:41:53.420 It's the logos.

00:41:54.800 Well, what does that mean?

00:42:00.480 How much hell can you bring into being

00:42:02.340 by saying the wrong words to your wife?

00:42:07.220 Right, now your wife is who she is,

00:42:09.360 but she's also who she could become,

00:42:11.220 as you've no doubt noticed many times.

00:42:13.560 And you can extract out something good or something terrible from the possibility she represents with the cautious and loving application of your words or with the careful and prideful and dismissive application of your words.

00:42:32.520 And the world you live in will be radically different depending on which of those two approaches you apply.

00:42:41.100 And that will be exactly the same with anyone else you talk to and how you treat yourself and how you interact with the world as such.

00:42:49.300 Because there's a provision of possibility that you're offered as a participant in the process of creation.

00:43:01.760 that you formulate in accordance with your aim.

00:43:05.700 What's the insistence in Genesis 1?

00:43:10.120 Aim up with love.

00:43:13.360 So, if you want to establish the paradise of your household

00:43:18.300 in relationship to your wife and your children,

00:43:22.320 you aim at what's best for the best in them.

00:43:27.740 You offer them the security that you can imagine.

00:43:31.760 That's the walls of the walled garden and you

00:43:36.480 present to them the challenge that

00:43:40.940 Allows them to unfold and develop optimally and

00:43:45.620 You do that appropriately if you're aiming at what's best what's highest and

00:43:53.000 That's the spirit of God that makes itself manifest on the waters of possibility

00:43:59.320 that's the embodiment, the source, the initial source, and the spirit of upward-aiming ultimate love.

00:44:12.680 You can understand this by understanding what sort of walled garden you produce in your own household with your aim.

00:44:22.440 god

00:44:25.700 wrestles with the possibility that's not yet manifest and creates the cosmic order as a

00:44:37.160 consequence in sequence creating the fundamental divisions to begin with the separation of light

00:44:44.920 and darkness that's the phenomenology of day and night the separation of the land from the waters

00:44:50.140 the establishment of the dome of the sky

00:44:52.900 over the disk of the earth

00:44:54.880 populates the world with its created beings

00:45:01.060 and on the sixth day

00:45:04.340 produces man

00:45:07.680 and says in his own image

00:45:11.840 so now we have a characterization of God

00:45:16.360 who's the dynamic process that gives rise to order from possibility itself in keeping

00:45:26.320 with the highest possible aim.

00:45:28.700 And we have a characterization of the human being as a microcosm of that process.

00:45:35.060 The notion that each of us has a worth that's transcendental and not given by the state,

00:45:45.960 given by yourself not given by other individuals is predicated on that image i mean that historically

00:45:55.080 and i mean it conceptually the notion is that one of the notions is that the state itself

00:46:04.200 has to grant to you the worth of

00:46:07.320 someone created in the image of the creator himself in order even for the state to exist

00:46:18.080 maintain itself and transform that the state itself cannot function unless it

00:46:24.680 establishes a sacred boundary between its operations and the operation of the psyche

00:46:33.860 the human psyche, the human spirit, that's a manifestation of the God who generates the order

00:46:39.740 that's good from possibility. And you might ask, well, who believes that? And I would say,

00:46:47.520 try talking to one person once without believing that and see how it goes. We call to each other

00:46:57.320 all the time, especially in our intimate relationships, to be treated as if we are the

00:47:03.740 locus of value. And if you treat people that way, if you regard them that way, if you perceive

00:47:11.920 them that way, if you encourage them in that pathway of development, everything in your

00:47:22.400 interactions with human beings will open itself up to you and fill your life with abundance.

00:47:29.260 Everyone wants to be treated that way. And the reason for that is, it's in keeping with our

00:47:35.880 essential nature. And that that hospitable, welcoming, encouraging, upward aiming, loving

00:47:46.140 treatment is the aim and attitude upon which the soul the the soul the community

00:47:59.940 and the natural order itself depends for its integrity your country is predicated on that

00:48:08.400 notion. The idea that each of you is endowed with inalienable rights and their requisite

00:48:16.580 responsibilities is a direct reflection of that conceptualization. And one of the things

00:48:23.020 you might frequently remind yourself of is the fact that your country wouldn't be what

00:48:30.340 it is, which is the closest approximation to a shining city on the hill that's been

00:48:36.820 established so far in the travail of mankind without that fundamental conception right

00:48:44.060 so then you might say well is it true and the answer is it's not hell i mean that because lots

00:48:57.840 of countries are hell and they're hell in a way that opens up into an abyss and has the possibility

00:49:05.660 of a deeper abyss waiting latent within it which will open up with the possibility of a deeper abyss

00:49:12.460 within that and that's what happens when that fundamental characterization is overthrown in a

00:49:20.540 revolutionary manner or carelessly abandoned and we saw that for all of us who are non-believers

00:49:27.500 and no longer conceptualize the metaphysical hell is real we saw the metaphysical hell realized in

00:49:36.620 the 20th century many times in case anyone having abandoned their metaphysical presuppositions

00:49:47.420 was so blind that only an object lesson would suffice right nazi germany

00:49:53.500 the soviet union under stalin the chinese communist party under mao 0.88

00:50:00.740 if that isn't close enough to hell for you then i would say you should pray that

00:50:08.660 you aren't introduced to something even worse for the purposes of convincing you about what's real

00:50:16.900 So, in the second, God announces two things, three things, four things once he creates man.

00:50:30.880 He says, man is to tend the garden.

00:50:34.600 That's his purpose.

00:50:36.500 Why a garden?

00:50:38.000 It's a walled garden, actually, because that's what paradise means, walled garden.

00:50:41.680 Why a walled garden?

00:50:42.700 Well, a garden is a place of nature, obviously.

00:50:45.800 and walls are a place of culture

00:50:48.120 and a walled garden is a place of nature

00:50:50.480 encapsulated in a manageable manner

00:50:54.420 by the walls of culture

00:50:56.280 that's what your backyard is

00:50:57.880 it's a yard, it's nature

00:51:00.300 it has walls 0.99

00:51:01.640 the walls are culture

00:51:02.880 the walls you could think of as physical

00:51:05.260 as physical entities, as objects

00:51:09.260 but your lawn has borders

00:51:11.940 if you don't have a fence

00:51:13.180 and your neighbors know where the borders are and where are the borders well they're in the

00:51:17.940 imagination of your neighbors i'm dead serious about that the walls it's so funny because you'll

00:51:24.700 see people in the border between canada and the united states they'll get out and they'll step

00:51:29.340 across the border it's like as if it's an object of it as if it's an entity that's there on the

00:51:37.420 And people know that that's magic in some sense, because the grass in Canada is only slightly less healthy than the grass in the United States, let's say.

00:51:53.420 It's easy to concretize that, but the idea of a walled-off space in a communal society is a social agreement.

00:52:02.420 You have your domain, your house, your garden, your backyard.

00:52:06.420 That's enough cosmos for you to set right and perhaps if you're competent enough to do more

00:52:12.180 You'll expand your garden so that you have more to tend

00:52:17.160 but you start with a

00:52:20.280 walled garden of some

00:52:23.040 Size and if you tend it properly, then the promise is that as your competence grows, so will your dominion

00:52:31.600 man sent to tend the garden and to name everything that's in it this is adam what is it what does

00:52:41.580 that mean well it's the logos again it's an re-representation of the creative spirit of god

00:52:48.660 that makes itself manifest when time begins and when new things come into being

00:52:54.340 our ability to name our ability to speak is that in in the microcosmic manner that's

00:53:02.500 what we're capable of doing that's what the patriarchal spirit does is name and order the

00:53:08.880 world and god brings everything to adam to see what he'll name them and that's a

00:53:14.380 reflection of the idea that we have a created order but man has a place in it and the place is to

00:53:23.760 organize it and to put

00:53:25.740 everything in its proper place

00:53:27.480 and to assign it its identity

00:53:30.040 and that's

00:53:31.880 no different than the prioritization

00:53:34.080 of attention that's part

00:53:35.940 of the story

00:53:36.660 name things in relationship to their

00:53:39.900 function put things in place

00:53:41.720 in relationship to

00:53:43.800 their significance

00:53:46.020 in the

00:53:49.840 hierarchy of being

00:53:51.100 orient them

00:53:52.980 orient all named things upward sequence constrain organize and order the manifestation of the

00:54:04.580 patriarchal spirit what does god decide that's not good enough man lacks a helper man needs a helper

00:54:13.260 woman's created as a consequence because the order that men produce

00:54:21.940 because of their limitations is insufficient and something has to be introduced to

00:54:30.980 speak for that which is not included that's the role of woman that's the biblical role of the

00:54:40.060 woman. It's the biological role of the mother. You know this in your own household. Women bring

00:54:48.120 the concerns of the marginalized to the center. You can think about that politically. It's useful 0.99

00:54:56.480 to think about it politically. All established human orders exclude. The exclusion causes pain.

00:55:05.320 the pain of exclusion requires a voice

00:55:09.140 that's the voice of the eternal mother

00:55:12.120 that's where Genesis 1 ends

00:55:16.800 Genesis 2 begins

00:55:19.820 contains the story of Adam and Eve

00:55:22.420 it's another creation story

00:55:24.520 it's commensurate with the first one

00:55:29.280 it's a variation on a theme

00:55:31.540 god creates adam out of matter earth and breath spirit why because that's what human beings are

00:55:44.880 we're material creatures that are animated anima means spirit we

00:55:52.920 what's the spirit the spirit is the living organizing principle of the material

00:56:03.680 and human beings are an amalgam of the living organizing principle and the material and that's

00:56:12.100 what's portrayed in the creation of adam the combination of matter and spirit the combination

00:56:18.560 of material and conscious. You could think about it that way, if you're more secular-minded.

00:56:25.140 We're conscious matter. What's up with that? No one understands that. No materialist understands

00:56:33.820 that. We understand nothing about consciousness. It's as mysterious now as it's been throughout

00:56:39.300 the entire course of our existence. It's never been reduced to material phenomenon. We have

00:56:45.680 No idea what that would even mean.

00:56:47.580 And if we did reduce it to the material, all that would mean was that we inadvertently elevated the material.

00:56:54.000 We treat each other like we're conscious.

00:56:56.660 We presume from first principles that we're conscious.

00:57:00.420 We can't even distinguish between being itself and being conscious.

00:57:04.400 And so, that's a perfectly reasonable representation of man. 0.93

00:57:13.680 Woman is taken from man. 0.80

00:57:15.680 from a rib from the side as an equal there's a critique of patriarchal judeo-christian

00:57:25.760 narrative from the resentful feminist side that makes the claim that the biblical narrative is

00:57:31.860 for example radically patriarchal in its orientation dooming women to subjugation

00:57:38.020 um that's a preposterous claim by the way it's it's not only false it's false in a very particular

00:57:46.480 way there are falsehoods that are approximations of the truth there are falsehoods so deep that

00:57:53.280 they're the exact opposite of the truth and the truth of the matter is that right from the first 0.60

00:58:00.040 words the biblical library is miraculous in its in its insistence that women like men are made in

00:58:08.560 the image of god that emerges in the first chapter and that eve is the equal of adam in every manner

00:58:16.800 although complementary and not identical and our society is riven by conflict so deep that

00:58:27.420 We now doubt both of those propositions

00:58:30.400 There's no form of confusion more profound than that

00:58:35.120 Sexually reproducing creatures without nervous systems 0.99

00:58:40.180 Can tell the difference between male and female 0.71

00:58:42.200 I'm dead serious about that 0.82

00:58:44.760 If you can get people to swallow the lie

00:58:52.760 That there's no difference between men and women

00:58:54.620 There is no lie they won't swallow 1.00

00:58:57.340 right 0.99

00:58:58.440 so God makes Adam and Eve

00:59:05.100 each with their own role 0.51

00:59:08.660 and he puts them in the garden

00:59:11.700 to play

00:59:13.500 forever under the watchful

00:59:15.600 eye of their heavenly father

00:59:17.420 and he tells them they have

00:59:19.480 free reign in the garden

00:59:20.700 with everything delightful that's being

00:59:23.400 created

00:59:23.920 except for one thing

00:59:27.600 They're not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

00:59:37.420 So what does that mean?

00:59:39.460 Man, that's a mystery.

00:59:42.580 I spent a long time trying to crack the micro-narratives in the story of Adam and Eve.

00:59:48.500 And it wasn't until three or four years ago that I think I started to understand that particular fragment of the story.

00:59:59.680 A friend of mine is here, Jonathan Pajot.

01:00:02.320 Some of you might have been following him.

01:00:05.960 Jonathan and his brother Matthew really helped me crack this.

01:00:09.920 And so we're here.

01:00:12.440 I'm here with Jonathan and a number of my other colleagues and friends right now with The Daily Wire

01:00:17.340 recording another seminar we released an exodus seminar we're recording a seminar on the gospels

01:00:23.220 right now we're about 60 of the way through that and so just so you know that's also forthcoming

01:00:30.780 god tells human beings he makes one fundamental rule

01:00:36.180 do not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil okay that's moral

01:00:42.060 knowledge that that should be self-evident knowledge of good and evil that's moral knowledge

01:00:47.120 moral knowledge is predicated on the idea that there's an upward path and a downward path that

01:00:53.640 there are desirable things and that there are undesirable things and that at the pinnacle of

01:00:57.380 what's desirable is what's heavenly or paradisal and in the abysmal depths of what's undesirable

01:01:03.140 is the diabolical and the hellish and that's the moral landscape that's the landscape of good and

01:01:08.380 evil that's the fictional landscape fictional in the sense of characterization and plot

01:01:15.500 fictional in the sense of distilled truth not falsehood fictional in the sense that the fiction

01:01:22.720 describes the structure through which you see the world fiction has the deepest form of truth

01:01:29.440 what does it mean to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil when nietzsche

01:01:38.160 announced the death of god in the late 1800s he said something that he believed would

01:01:45.600 constitute a pathway forward he said we have dispensed with god we are the greatest murderers

01:01:53.500 who ever lived we've engaged in a murder so profound that will never wash away the blood

01:02:03.100 How could we possibly conduct ourselves in the aftermath of that murder?

01:02:11.060 You read of Nietzsche as a triumphant anti-Christian.

01:02:15.660 He was a very complicated person.

01:02:19.080 And he knew perfectly well that the dissolution of the Christian metaphysic would produce a cataclysmic consequence.

01:02:26.620 He predicted in the late 1800s that Europe would turn to a radically resentful, egalitarian 0.82

01:02:34.060 communitarianism that would kill tens of millions of people, which is exactly what happened.

01:02:41.700 And he saw that coming just as clearly as his Russian counterpart, Theodor Dostoevsky,

01:02:47.040 saw it.

01:02:48.100 He knew what would rise in the aftermath of the death of God.

01:02:51.120 He knew that resentment and communitarianism would be one temptation.

01:02:58.180 And he tried to formulate an alternative path.

01:03:02.320 He said, we're going to have to create our own values.

01:03:05.800 We're going to have to take it upon ourselves to create the moral landscape.

01:03:12.080 I read that, and I understood why he said that.

01:03:17.160 I could see its influence on clinical psychology, for example.

01:03:21.500 The notion of the self-actualized person.

01:03:24.000 The notion that our soul should unfold in the direction that's commensurate with

01:03:28.060 the deepest understanding of our subjective selves, right?

01:03:32.220 The radical unveiling of subjectivity.

01:03:35.640 Self-definition.

01:03:37.600 I am what I say I am.

01:03:40.100 Which is a radical claim in our society now.

01:03:43.540 A claim of omniscience.

01:03:44.740 Not only am I who I say I am, you better act like I'm who I say I am.

01:03:50.820 That's the claim of the radical subjective.

01:03:54.200 Well, what's wrong with that claim?

01:03:56.540 Well, the psychoanalysts criticized Nietzsche very effectively.

01:04:00.020 They said, look, how are you going to create your own values when you're not mastering your own house?

01:04:04.760 Have you tried telling yourself what to do?

01:04:07.460 How does that work for you?

01:04:09.380 I know, you're just your own obedient servant, right?

01:04:11.820 You're so morally pure.

01:04:13.040 You just tell yourself at New Year's that you're going to go to the gym.

01:04:17.400 And you're going to diet.

01:04:18.560 And you're going to be some stellar, physiqued, lean, mean fighting machine by March.

01:04:24.640 And you go once.

01:04:26.220 And then you tell yourself lies about why you don't have to go again.

01:04:30.040 And that's the end of that.

01:04:31.300 And if you were capable of creating your own values,

01:04:35.060 you wouldn't be

01:04:36.620 the

01:04:39.520 the banner, the tattered banner

01:04:43.160 that blows in the wind of its own whims

01:04:45.280 the psychoanalysts figured this out very quickly

01:04:48.900 you're a war of competing whims

01:04:51.280 and a creature like that's going to have a very difficult time

01:04:55.400 navigating the complex landscape of the ultimate

01:04:58.360 moral

01:05:00.180 pronouncement

01:05:02.140 who are you to make a decision about what constitutes good and evil

01:05:06.420 and that's what God tells men and women

01:05:09.120 it's like you don't get to create the moral order

01:05:11.540 you get to dwell within it

01:05:12.660 you get to align yourself with the pre-existent moral order

01:05:16.400 you do not take to yourself the right

01:05:19.540 the presumption to define good and evil themselves

01:05:24.420 you bow your head to good

01:05:30.280 and you pray for deliverance from evil and if you violate that look the hell out

01:05:39.420 and that's the pronouncement and so what happens

01:05:43.240 the serpent offers eve the fruit why the serpent well the serpent is camouflaged

01:05:54.460 the serpent is crafty subtle the serpent is marginalized the serpent is the voice of pride

01:06:08.100 the serpent is lucifer that's the metaphysical surrounding of the story that develops over

01:06:15.720 centuries the notion that the serpent in the garden of paradise is lucifer himself the spirit

01:06:20.660 of pride what does that mean it's prideful presumption that makes you assume that you

01:06:26.020 can define the moral order what's the provide what's the prideful presumption of eve at the

01:06:32.560 beginning of time and forever i can even clasp the serpent to my breast it's the

01:06:39.360 careless welcoming in of the monstrous and prideful

01:06:44.780 under the guise of the pretension of maternal compassion

01:06:50.540 and if you can't see that happening in our society you're blind

01:06:56.380 and what's the sin of a of adam

01:06:59.420 well what do men care about women care about

01:07:04.580 properly about

01:07:06.780 the helpless infant 1.00

01:07:09.920 It's a powerful feminine virtue 1.00

01:07:15.460 And it can be 1.00

01:07:16.120 Inverted and made prideful

01:07:18.300 And trumpeted

01:07:19.000 And presumptuous

01:07:20.280 To infantilize the world

01:07:22.580 And to advertise that compassion

01:07:25.000 As a badge of

01:07:27.280 Worth and honor

01:07:30.960 As a mode of attaining status

01:07:33.320 What's Adam's sin?

01:07:36.580 What do men care about? 1.00

01:07:37.880 Impressing women 0.95

01:07:38.820 men are ambitious fundamentally to impress women 0.99

01:07:44.660 for better or for worse what's the prideful pathway and false pathway to 0.98

01:07:55.160 establishing a relationship with the two demanding feminine 1.00

01:08:00.060 i've got it anything you want dear right and that's adam's sin he eve hearkens to the voice 0.71

01:08:11.960 of the serpent and clutches it to her breast in despite the clear injunction from the divine

01:08:21.220 never to do that

01:08:23.320 and Adam

01:08:24.460 weakly does exactly

01:08:27.540 what the worst part of his 1.00

01:08:29.000 wife wants

01:08:30.160 and so here we are folks

01:08:33.200 so what's the consequence of that

01:08:38.720 well the scales

01:08:41.320 fall from their eyes and they notice they're naked

01:08:43.320 and they're deeply ashamed and they cover up

01:08:47.600 they become

01:08:49.360 self-conscious

01:08:51.160 Okay, so when do people become self-conscious?

01:08:54.600 When they make prideful errors.

01:08:57.600 When you overreach and you reveal your inadequacy as a consequence of the mismatch between your pride and your ability.

01:09:06.440 You'll be ashamed.

01:09:08.440 You'll recognize your insufficiency.

01:09:12.080 You'll be aware of yourself as an isolated entity.

01:09:17.200 That's all to become self-conscious.

01:09:20.160 Psychologists have learned over the last 40 years that there's no difference between being conscious of yourself and being miserable.

01:09:26.560 Those are literally the same thing.

01:09:29.360 If you're living a life of other-centered, communally-oriented, hospitable calling,

01:09:37.760 you're not attending to the miseries of your isolated self.

01:09:42.660 If you stay in your bailiwick and you don't put forward your hand presumptuously,

01:09:49.360 you can live in the absence of painful self-consciousness.

01:09:53.660 Pride goes before a fall.

01:09:57.440 We have a month devoted to pride in our culture.

01:10:01.060 Right.

01:10:02.720 Pride goes before a fall.

01:10:04.260 You know this in your own life. 1.00

01:10:06.240 You can ask yourself, and this has been a Christian conundrum since the beginning of time. 1.00

01:10:12.440 Is your life miserable because misery is baked into the structure of the world? 1.00

01:10:16.560 Or is your life miserable because you do stupid things and refuse to learn and bring endless misery on yourself in your presumption? 0.99

01:10:24.640 And you know, you might say a little of column A and a little of column B, and fair enough. 0.99

01:10:28.480 But you certainly know that the most painful episodes of your life come when you claim falsely to be more than you are.

01:10:38.240 And the core narrative in the Judeo-Christian ethos is that the fall of man into the profane world is a consequence of pride.

01:10:53.240 And that is really something worth thinking about. 0.97

01:10:56.440 You know, Adam and Eve are called upon to work in misery as a consequence of their pride.

01:11:01.140 Well, could you work joyfully?

01:11:03.080 If you didn't overreach yourself, if you were aiming upward properly, if you were telling the truth, if you were acting communally, if you're acting in relationship to what was highest, would it be possible that your work would be joyful and bring abundance?

01:11:18.100 Isn't there times in your life when that's happened?

01:11:20.740 Is it the case that you move forward in misery in precise proportion to the pretension of your aim?

01:11:30.240 It's worth considering.

01:11:33.080 It's the suspicion that arises at the end of the story that begins history,

01:11:39.780 because it's with the prideful fall of Adam and Eve that history begins.

01:11:49.660 Adam and Eve discover they're naked, and they hide.

01:11:53.420 And God comes along and says, Adam, where are you?

01:11:57.520 And Adam says, I'm over here. I'm hiding.

01:12:01.960 And God says, well, why are you hiding? 0.78

01:12:03.860 It's a foolish thing to do, right?

01:12:05.500 Because Adam is perfectly aware that God can see through bushes. 0.86

01:12:09.460 Adam is hiding from God. 0.99

01:12:11.220 Is it your pathetic self-consciousness that makes you hide from God? 1.00

01:12:16.760 That's a good question. 1.00

01:12:18.200 Are you not everything you could be because you're ashamed of who you are?

01:12:23.820 That's what that story indicates.

01:12:26.120 And so God calls Adam on.

01:12:27.420 He says, who told you?

01:12:29.300 Why are you hiding?

01:12:30.340 And Adam says, well, I'm naked.

01:12:31.820 And God says, well, how do you find out that you were naked?

01:12:36.660 How did you find out that you were inadequate?

01:12:40.000 How did you find out that you are shameful?

01:12:43.780 And Adam says, you know that woman you made me? 0.97

01:12:47.520 It's her fault.

01:12:49.280 And that's the second sin of Adam.

01:12:51.200 And that's another indication of the non-patriarchal nature of the text.

01:12:55.580 You know, Eve is the first human being to take a bite of the apple.

01:12:59.360 But Adam follows along, and it isn't obvious to me that the follower of sin is in a worse, better moral position than the initiator.

01:13:07.760 And then he compounds his sin, like men do, by blaming the woman.

01:13:12.580 Why is your life so...

01:13:13.540 Well, if you had my wife, man, you'd know. 1.00

01:13:16.140 It's like those damn women. 1.00

01:13:17.520 It's like, it's a handy excuse for men all the time to say that... 1.00

01:13:21.760 And it's not least because men can't tolerate being rejected by women. 0.77

01:13:25.680 And women reject them all the time. 1.00

01:13:27.860 And the reason women reject them is because they're not all they should be. 0.99

01:13:31.860 And so, of course, that makes men painfully self-conscious. 0.97

01:13:35.200 And makes them shake their fist at God.

01:13:37.100 And makes them hide.

01:13:38.880 And so, what God says. 0.97

01:13:41.000 And so, Adam reveals himself in this pathetic manner. 0.96

01:13:44.400 It's like he can't even take responsibility for his own misstep. 0.98

01:13:48.260 He has to blame the thing that's been granted to him as the highest form of gift.

01:13:54.220 And not only her, but God.

01:13:57.360 Whose fault is it? Well, it's not mine. It's probably women's fault.

01:14:01.800 And if it's not women, it's clearly God. It can't be me. 0.98

01:14:07.540 So what happens? Well, both Adam and Eve are condemned to suffer in their work.

01:14:12.940 And that's how history begins.

01:14:15.900 And that's the situation of the fallen world.

01:14:20.860 And that's the description of the landscape of profound fiction that we inhabit.

01:14:34.240 And that's only a tiny fraction of the characterization of God and man in the biblical corpus.

01:14:45.140 Thank you very much.

01:14:50.860 All right, so we'll welcome Constantine onto the stage.

01:15:05.600 He's going to.

01:15:11.420 Thank you.

01:15:12.300 Thank you.

01:15:14.260 Thank you.

01:15:14.940 That was great, Jordan.

01:15:19.160 Shall we sit?

01:15:21.480 Absolutely.

01:15:23.780 Well, so much to agree on, first of all,

01:15:26.380 not least just when you were talking about the Foundation of America

01:15:31.280 and how great it is.

01:15:32.220 How could anyone disagree with that?

01:15:33.520 Everyone here has guns.

01:15:39.880 No, but I mean it, actually.

01:15:42.360 And one of the things I was thinking that I really agreed on,

01:15:46.160 I don't want to spend too much time on the stuff that I agree on,

01:15:48.180 But I've had this phrase in my head for a long time now, which is the cultures, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

01:15:56.560 And I thought that was very interesting that you mentioned it.

01:15:59.320 But you brought me here to be a contrarian.

01:16:02.800 So it's his fault, not mine, if I offend you, when I offend you.

01:16:10.480 You said we're here partly because the Enlightenment doesn't work, is wrong.

01:16:16.820 If the Enlightenment is wrong, why are we sitting in an arena of 6,500 people with bright lights

01:16:22.860 and all of this created through the scientific method and research

01:16:27.660 and all of the stuff that comes out of the Enlightenment?

01:16:31.080 How are we here?

01:16:34.560 I don't think the scientific method is wrong.

01:16:38.440 I think the Enlightenment is wrong.

01:16:40.580 So, I don't know how many of you noticed this, but yesterday, the day before, something like that, Richard Dawkins announced that he was a cultural Christian.

01:16:53.840 Most upvoted question for the Q&A.

01:16:56.040 Okay, okay, well there we go.

01:16:57.740 Well, because Richard Dawkins, who is a genuine scientist, and I think actually a good man,

01:17:05.320 is feeling in his bones that something is up.

01:17:11.720 And what he said essentially was that, even though, and it's paradoxical, right?

01:17:16.260 He said, even though I'm happy that formal belief in Christianity in the West is on the decline,

01:17:23.000 I would rather live in a Christian culture 0.98

01:17:26.580 Than in a culture dominated by any other religion 1.00

01:17:29.860 And so that's kind of a backhanded compliment

01:17:33.540 And then he said also

01:17:34.440 He doesn't want the cathedrals to go

01:17:36.260 He doesn't want the churches to go

01:17:37.980 He doesn't want Christmas to go

01:17:39.740 There's a lot of beauty in the culture

01:17:41.960 That he wants to maintain

01:17:43.480 And so that puts Dr. Dawkins in a difficult position

01:17:49.020 I don't say this with any delight 1.00

01:17:53.280 If Christianity works in the manner that even makes science possible 1.00

01:18:01.000 Which is something that Dr. Dawkins is beginning to understand

01:18:04.260 What is it about Christianity that works?

01:18:08.580 And how is what works different from what doesn't work?

01:18:11.820 Now, Dr. Dawkins doesn't like to mention this

01:18:14.740 but one of the things he is doing is contrasting what he believes is the Christian UK

01:18:22.280 with perhaps what the UK might be if it was fundamentalist Islam, for example.

01:18:28.720 And I'm not criticizing Islam when I say that. 0.91

01:18:32.160 I'm criticizing, more pointedly, fundamentalism.

01:18:36.880 And Dr. Dawkins knows that there's something, regardless of what might be wrong with Christianity,

01:18:41.620 let's say there's something like seriously wrong with that kind of fundamentalism and that means

01:18:47.460 he's making a hierarchy of moral order and he's placing what's christian above what's fundamentalist

01:18:53.980 so that's part of that reflection of a moral order and then he's stuck with the problem is

01:18:58.580 like well what then what is it about christianity that makes it right well we have to get rid of all

01:19:02.800 the, what? The miracles, the magic, the superstition? Well, how do you separate out that from what's

01:19:14.880 hypothetically good? And why do you even think that's possible? There's no evidence that

01:19:20.180 it's possible. Like, perhaps it's possible. We haven't done it since the Enlightenment

01:19:24.380 arose, so I don't think we can. So there's that problem. The Enlightenment has run to its end

01:19:35.740 because there are fundamental propositions that it was predicated on that aren't true.

01:19:42.340 Like what?

01:19:43.380 We don't orient ourselves empirically. We don't orient ourselves rationally. We orient ourselves

01:19:48.300 in the narrative world and we don't yet really understand what that means like let me give you

01:19:55.060 an example of that okay so carl sigmund freud believed that the reason your dreams were

01:20:03.220 mysterious was because your dreams were delivering to you messages about your desires that you didn't

01:20:11.160 want to become conscious of, and that the dream was symbolizing them to hide what was

01:20:21.600 repressed, but, well, offering it, you might argue, in small doses. And that accounted

01:20:27.360 for the mystery of dreams. Why are dreams so mysterious? Well, Freud's answer was, well,

01:20:32.380 because the dream disguises unpleasant truths from the dreamer so that he can maintain his

01:20:37.240 slumber. Carl Jung came along and said, no. The dream is the universe within which philosophy

01:20:50.320 situates itself. You dream about what you do not yet understand. The dream is the mediator

01:20:58.280 between what is still mysterious, so mysterious you might not even know that it exists, and

01:21:04.300 what you concretely can contend with. Jung's correct. We know enough now about how the

01:21:12.000 hemispheres of the brain function. We know enough about how the dream functions. We know

01:21:16.420 enough about the relationship between the imagination and our ability to speak to say

01:21:21.760 that what we understand is nested in a dream. The dream is mysterious. The dream isn't the

01:21:29.820 same world as the graspable describable world christianity is the dream within which the west

01:21:38.100 is embedded and there are elements of it that we we can't understand partly because we have to

01:21:46.100 situate ourselves in relationship to what's ultimately mysterious and that means that the

01:21:50.780 dream shades into the miraculous and mysterious and there's no way around that because we need

01:21:57.820 that buffer at least because we need that buffer it's also because things that are true that we

01:22:05.120 cannot understand from our current frame of reference appear as miraculous within that frame

01:22:10.560 of reference now that doesn't mean i know how to contend we're doing this gospel seminar now i don't

01:22:17.020 know how to contend with the plethora of miraculous healing stories i don't know how to contend with

01:22:22.560 the story of the quelling of the waves on the sea of galilee but

01:22:27.440 but i know that we live in a story and i know that the story mediates between the finite and

01:22:37.680 the infinite and i know that we can't dispense with the story not without opening ourself

01:22:42.300 up to invasion by any number of catastrophic competing stories and that is what's happening

01:22:50.080 in the west as far as i'm concerned not least the story of power or the story of hedonism

01:22:55.600 or the story of paganism the story of nature worship we moved very quickly from worship of the

01:23:04.400 transcendent spirit beyond nature to worship of nature itself that's what the environmentalist

01:23:11.120 movement is and you know you know this the irish want to sacrifice 200 000 cows to change the weather

01:23:20.080 Right. Right. And that's a re-emergence. That is truly a re-emergence of that pagan spirituality and a whole different aim.

01:23:28.960 We put nature above all else. Well, where do we put man? What's our birth rate? 0.73

01:23:35.740 Way below replacement. We know where we put man. There's too many of us. 0.99

01:23:42.260 In relationship to what? Nature.

01:23:45.100 So

01:23:47.020 How is the enlightenment wrong?

01:23:52.480 Well, man does not live by bread alone

01:23:54.780 You know

01:23:55.660 The technological enterprise

01:23:58.340 Offers

01:24:00.480 Material abundance and

01:24:02.300 More power to it, but

01:24:04.140 As an end in itself

01:24:06.660 As a moral ethos in itself

01:24:08.960 It's unsustainable 0.86

01:24:10.460 It produces nothing but towers of Babel 0.69

01:24:12.560 And 0.99

01:24:13.600 And it produces people who can't master their own tools.

01:24:19.000 And we're in that situation.

01:24:27.980 Do you think it's possible that it's the material abundance that's the problem?

01:24:33.740 I wouldn't say it's the problem.

01:24:36.880 The cause of the problem.

01:24:38.580 No, I don't think so.

01:24:40.920 I think it's a it's a fundamental symptom. Let me tell you a story. This is very cool

01:24:47.640 This took me 40 years to figure out and I can tell you in three minutes. So that's a good deal for you

01:24:54.520 You remember I like the movie pinocchio a lot. I've talked about it a lot

01:24:58.440 I would do a whole series on pinocchio if disney hadn't crookedly

01:25:02.520 Re-established copyright control over it by bribing public officials

01:25:07.000 you remember something there's a variety of very strange things happen in Pinocchio but one of the

01:25:15.000 strangest is that Geppetto ends up in a whale and that's never explained it's like Geppetto makes

01:25:22.280 Pinocchio he's the benevolent father and Pinocchio leaves and Geppetto goes and looks for him and

01:25:26.760 fair enough and then he ends up in a whale at the bottom of the ocean and no one just walks out of

01:25:33.220 the theater thinking you know what the hell what's going on here they think oh yeah well of course

01:25:38.540 he's in a whale and then of course pinocchio goes to the bottom of the abyss like jonah to find his

01:25:46.100 father who's living in a gigantic carcass right there's an ancient story the mesopotamians told

01:25:58.220 Called the Enuma Elish

01:25:59.460 And in the Enuma Elish 0.73

01:26:01.020 The world is constituted by 0.98

01:26:03.460 Tiamat 1.00

01:26:05.040 Who's a feminine dragon 0.98

01:26:06.440 From her name, Tiamat, comes 0.98

01:26:08.880 Tohu Vabohu and Tehum

01:26:10.460 That possibility that

01:26:12.140 God makes order out of

01:26:14.240 At the beginning of time 1.00

01:26:15.580 She's the feminine dragon that represents 0.99

01:26:19.260 Nature and possibility 0.72

01:26:22.980 And she has a husband, Apsu

01:26:24.980 Who's the patriarchy 0.53

01:26:26.080 Matriarchy and patriarchy

01:26:27.680 yin and yang it's the age-old story they unite and they give rise to the first world

01:26:36.240 the deities of the first world start pursuing their own aims and they get noisy and prideful 0.78

01:26:45.680 they kill apsu and they live on his corpse

01:26:48.800 that's what we're doing geppetto is in the corpse of a carcass why wealth is a carcass

01:26:58.400 wealth is a storehouse of value wealth can be traded for food the past is the carcass of a

01:27:06.320 whale harvard is a whale carcass harvard is a whale carcass inhabited by unconscious people

01:27:13.480 who are living on the storehouse of past value right right absolutely without replenishing it

01:27:22.180 right it's the it's the parasite problem fundamentally and it is a problem with wealth

01:27:27.580 because the problem with wealth is like this is the problem abraham has abraham has wealthy

01:27:34.380 father and he doesn't launch his life till he's 70 and the reason for that is because he doesn't

01:27:39.700 have to. He can exist unconsciously in the carcass of his ancestors, right? That's what we're doing

01:27:47.520 in the West. And we've been building these storehouses of value since World War II. We're

01:27:52.740 so rich. And now we have the pathologies of the wealthy. And one of the pathologies of the wealthy

01:27:59.380 is prideful ingratitude. And that's what the universities specialize in. That's what they

01:28:05.740 train their students to have you know prideful presumption and the universities opened the door

01:28:13.300 to the non-productive scavengers starting in the 1960s and they took over over a 40-year period

01:28:25.340 i watched it happen and much of what's happening downstream is a consequence of that and this is

01:28:33.220 an age-old story, like the Mesopotamian story.

01:28:35.240 That's the oldest story we have. It's like 3,500

01:28:37.260 years old, something like that. And

01:28:39.140 in its oral form, way older. People knew

01:28:41.160 a long time ago that if you are 1.00

01:28:43.100 stupid enough to kill 1.00

01:28:44.620 the spirit of your fathers, 1.00

01:28:47.960 you 0.99

01:28:49.280 die. What happens in the Mesopotamian

01:28:51.480 story is the Tiamat, whose chaos 0.95

01:28:53.260 itself comes back, just

01:28:55.300 like God in the story of Noah.

01:28:57.220 It's exactly the same idea.

01:28:59.400 She comes back and says, I'm going to take you all

01:29:01.360 out.

01:29:03.220 Well, you brought me here to disagree with you, and I'm struggling here because I agree with everything you're saying.

01:29:08.920 I'm tricky that way. 0.51

01:29:10.720 Well, it's much easier to see as an outsider like me, having come from the Soviet Union, to see a civilization essentially forgetting how it got there.

01:29:20.120 I feel like we're kind of a cargo cult in a way. 0.53

01:29:23.900 Right.

01:29:24.180 but the obvious question then is how do you put the toothpaste back in the tube which i think is

01:29:33.240 where we are now you're here talking about christianity being the dream in which we're

01:29:38.900 all embedded but there is what i call the generation of door the children of dawkins

01:29:44.620 is what i call my generation and that conversation became fundamentally about one thing i think which

01:29:51.760 is are the metaphors that you laid out so beautifully true that's what that discussion

01:29:59.740 is about and it's very difficult to convince people like me you know if you if you have to

01:30:06.380 believe that my suit is red in order for everything to turn out correct you still won't because it's

01:30:12.640 not red right does that make sense of course of course of course okay so what's your prescription

01:30:19.160 You had two questions, so I'll address them in order.

01:30:22.140 Okay, so I'm going to tell you the rest of the Mesopotamian myth.

01:30:25.860 Okay.

01:30:27.100 So you know what happens in the Pinocchio story, right?

01:30:29.880 Pinocchio, by the time Pinocchio gets to rescue his father, 0.95

01:30:32.920 he's a braying jackass who is enticed into slavery by hedonists. 0.95

01:30:39.360 And also by neurotic hedonists, because if you remember the story, 0.99

01:30:43.760 the reason he ends up on Pleasure Island is because the criminals convince him that he's too sick

01:30:50.580 and neurotic and victimized to become real so then he goes to Pleasure Island with all the

01:30:57.060 delinquents and they throw rocks through the masterpieces of western civilization 0.71

01:31:02.360 and they turn into braying drunken donkeys while the slavers prepare to sell them to the coal mines

01:31:08.920 and pinocchio escapes with some of his voice intact and he goes to the bottom of the ocean

01:31:15.560 to rescue geppetto okay so that's the first part of the

01:31:18.920 cure you go into the depths to find your lost father into the depths now what's in the depths

01:31:29.220 for pinocchio a fire-breathing dragon right you remember the whale has fire in it and when it

01:31:35.100 comes up to the surface, it breathes fire. It's a dragon. It's the dragon that has the treasure.

01:31:38.800 The treasure is not only the father who's rescued, but the discovery of the true pathway that

01:31:46.320 restores Pinocchio, restores his voice, restores the true voice to Pinocchio and transforms him

01:31:55.140 into what he could be. And that's the courage to confront the unconscious abyss. And that's

01:32:02.860 the psychoanalysts were calling for, especially Jung, is the courage to confront the unconscious

01:32:08.860 abyss. Auschwitz, the darkness itself, and that's the pathway to the light. There's no difference

01:32:15.660 between that and the idea of the crucifixion. The ultimate confrontation with death and mortality

01:32:22.860 and malevolence and the revelation of eternal life in consequence. The Mesopotamians,

01:32:29.580 tiamat re-emerges the dragon of chaos to destroy everything because the ungrateful inhabitants of 1.00

01:32:37.540 her husband's corpse have enraged the structure of being so profoundly that devastation is the 0.97

01:32:45.580 most likely outcome the inhabitants of apsu panic and marshal the forces to confront chaos

01:32:54.140 they send out one hero after another and they all fail well that's happening new

01:33:03.700 beings are born and one of them is qualitatively different this is the birth of the hero

01:33:12.640 this is the god of mesopotamia whose name was marduk marduk has eyes all the way around his head

01:33:19.200 and he speaks magic words that's the logos in nascent form magic words words of truth

01:33:26.560 words of truth and the eyes are the same as the eye of horus the the egyptian eye that sees

01:33:33.740 everything what's the antidote to unconsciousness pay attention what do you pay attention to

01:33:39.540 everything you don't want to pay attention to so marduk goes out marduk tells all the other

01:33:45.620 inhabitants of the dead corpse.

01:33:47.680 He says, look, I'll go out and I'll

01:33:49.600 attend to

01:33:51.300 and deal with

01:33:52.840 chaos.

01:33:54.880 The chaos you brought upon

01:33:57.740 yourself with your unconscious presumption.

01:33:59.960 But here's the deal.

01:34:01.940 I'm

01:34:02.400 at the pinnacle.

01:34:05.580 This is the emergence of a kind of monotheism.

01:34:08.060 What's at the pinnacle?

01:34:09.920 Magic, truth, and vision.

01:34:12.280 And the Mesopotamians figured that out.

01:34:13.640 so is how is that concretized the magic words of truth and the vision that enables you to

01:34:22.360 forthrightly confront chaos and malevolence itself the darkest elements of possibility

01:34:31.280 and to make the orderly world as a consequence and that's exactly what

01:34:36.200 marduk does he goes out with a net he encloses chaos in the net that's understanding as a

01:34:45.920 consequence of confrontation he cuts her into pieces and he makes the world and that's the

01:34:52.300 eternal medication for the death of god it's happened murcia elia had mapped this out in his

01:35:00.280 magisterial works on the history of religion we think the death of god has happened in 1850 it's

01:35:06.460 happened many times repeatedly it's the same pattern all the time which is why the mesopotamians

01:35:12.340 had it nailed like thousands of years ago and the medicine is always the same here's another example

01:35:18.840 in numbers moses is leading the lost israelites through the desert they're a long ways on their

01:35:29.760 journey by this time they're almost at the promised land they've been wandering around 0.85

01:35:33.720 lost for a long time and they're still pining for the tyranny and whining and irresponsible 1.00

01:35:39.760 they're still slavish they still wish they had a king they are whiny and terrible and 1.00

01:35:45.480 they run out of water and they're not really listening to moses but they're starting to die 1.00

01:35:51.360 of thirst and and worse and they're complaining about this bitterly and god has had enough of

01:35:59.280 them by this time and he sends poisonous snakes in to bite them and the meaning of that story is

01:36:04.940 that you might be lost and things are miserable and you're irresponsible and you think it's pretty 1.00

01:36:09.820 dismal and that you get to shake your fist at god but if you keep being stupid worse things will 1.00

01:36:16.280 happen to you without end and so god sends some poisonous snakes and so the israelites 1.00

01:36:21.840 that's enough for them the the thirst and the lostness is enough the snakes are too much they 0.59

01:36:27.780 go to Moses with some degree of humility and they say do you want to ask we hear you've got a

01:36:32.440 pipeline to God do you want to ask him to call off the snakes and Moses says I'm not very happy with

01:36:38.940 you people and I just as soon leave you like die and be poisoned in the desert but I'll see what

01:36:45.520 I can do so he goes and has a chat with God and God says yeah I don't think I'll call off the 0.98

01:36:51.600 snakes but what i'll do instead is i'm going to ask you to do something i want you to cast a

01:36:58.240 bronze serpent take all the bronze that you have and make a serpent out of it and put it on a stake

01:37:04.580 and like make a statue out of it and put it somewhere where the israelites can all see it 0.65

01:37:11.520 and if they go and actually look at it then they'll be immune from the poison okay it's that

01:37:19.560 symbol, that stake with a snake around it, that's the same symbol that Asclepius, who's the Greek

01:37:26.620 god of healing, that's the same symbol that represents Asclepius. It's the same symbol

01:37:31.700 that your physicians use to signify their operation. And there's a principle there, which is that

01:37:38.500 a little poison voluntarily incorporated will increase your resilience.

01:37:49.560 That's what a vaccine does when liars haven't made them. 0.58

01:37:54.580 So the Israelites go look at the snake on the bronze staff,

01:38:10.380 which is also Moses' staff, by the way,

01:38:12.480 which is also the staff that transforms itself into serpents

01:38:15.880 and that transforms itself into the serpent that eats all the serpents of the pharaoh's magicians

01:38:22.320 all of that's symbolically locked together and what's the idea confront what you're terrified by

01:38:29.100 that poisons you and prevail in the gospels christ says to his followers that unless he's lifted up

01:38:38.280 like the serpent in the desert that men will be redeemed if he is lifted up like the serpent in

01:38:45.020 desert that's what christianity was and so so this is a way of thinking about it

01:38:52.220 the serpent on the stake is a symbol of what's dangerous and poisonous and

01:39:01.260 what's dangerous and poisonous is an example of the danger and poison of life the danger of life

01:39:07.820 is the brute reality of mortality our vulnerability our naked vulnerability

01:39:14.300 and the poison is malevolence so a serpent is threat and poison

01:39:21.260 you're to confront threat and poison the crucifix is a meta

01:39:29.580 serpent it's everything about life that's catastrophic and everything about life that's

01:39:37.020 poisonous in one symbol and the west realized in this dreamlike fashion that we're to look upon

01:39:47.360 that we're to imitate the pattern of that confrontation which is a sacrificial pattern

01:39:54.380 and we're to regard that as the center of the community which is why the cross is at the center

01:39:59.760 of the church and the church is at the center of the town and the town is at the center of the state

01:40:06.020 It's all predicated on the idea of the ultimate sacrificial offering, a voluntary acceptance of the mortal and poisonous preconditions of life, right?

01:40:21.660 And that's the cure. That's the cure. And that's always been the case, right?

01:40:27.380 so i want to bring a couple of audience questions in while we have time and actually on this very

01:40:33.400 point about richard dawkins and whether cultural christianity quote unquote can be the solution

01:40:42.900 can it can you have practice without belief we were at constantine and i were in a conference

01:40:52.960 in London, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, ARC, which we put together as a distributed

01:41:02.420 responsibility alternative to the global internationalists, the doomsaying prophets

01:41:08.340 of the future, who offer tyranny as an offering to the gods of nature and as false security.

01:41:16.080 and ian herzi ali came to the conference and she spoke very eloquently about her recent

01:41:24.700 conversion to christianity from islam which has made her a marked woman yet again is a very brave

01:41:33.200 woman ian herzi ali and she said a flower can live for a time when you cut it off from its roots

01:41:39.940 but only for a time we're living on borrowed time it's the same idea with regard to the corpse let's

01:41:46.500 say of apsu or the whale carcass there's a spirit that gives rise to that plenitude right and it is

01:41:52.920 something like the spirit of communal self-sacrifice it's something like that now

01:41:57.520 okay so that's one story now douglas murray said something interesting to me too that was very

01:42:03.860 surprising because murray has come to the cultural christian conclusion despite also being a follower

01:42:09.920 of Dawkins, like Ian was, he said, I realized something. If you take the magic and the miracles

01:42:18.160 away, Christianity degenerates into wokeism. And so now, it's not like I understand that. I'm not 0.97

01:42:25.920 claiming that. But it has something to do with this issue of the dream. It's like the narrative

01:42:33.700 of our culture has to mediate between us and the infinite. And that means it has to shade into the

01:42:39.740 miraculous. Now, you might say, well, what does that mean in reality? Is that just a metaphor?

01:42:46.200 Which is kind of the question you asked earlier. Your suit isn't red, it's green, and how can we

01:42:50.840 predicate our culture on a lie? Well, I hashed this out with Jonathan Paggio, and he said

01:42:56.940 something which I thought was brilliant. He said, look, if the pattern that you're identifying is

01:43:04.940 that deep. And it's crucial to the maintenance of the integration of the psyche and of culture

01:43:14.160 itself. How can it not actually be reflective of the structure of reality itself? And, you

01:43:23.160 know, I've had a proclivity to view the mythological stories, let's say, as symbolic. And that's

01:43:34.840 a valid reading but the question that pageau posed is a very trenchant question it's like

01:43:40.000 at what point is something so highly functional and universally applicable that you have to

01:43:48.220 allow that even though you don't understand it it's reflective of the deepest

01:43:53.000 structure of reality itself and i'll put a twist on that

01:43:58.340 I tried to get Richard Dawkins to talk to me for a couple of years

01:44:04.240 Now he eventually did, and we're going to talk again publicly

01:44:06.900 I hope we're arranging that at the moment

01:44:08.820 The first thing he said, he's a very disagreeable guy

01:44:13.340 Like, very educated Englishman

01:44:15.640 Those are dangerous people, man

01:44:17.160 They'll cut you into ribbons politely

01:44:19.640 And be quite gleeful about it

01:44:21.860 And they're very good at it

01:44:23.400 Better than anyone else in the world, I would say

01:44:26.000 And he first of all he said I don't think I'd have enough patience to talk to you

01:44:29.840 You've said a lot of preposterous things and I don't know why the hell you want to talk to me anyways

01:44:35.160 But maybe it has something to do with this and he sent me a paper that he wrote like 30 years ago

01:44:39.620 And I thought you know exactly why I want to talk to you

01:44:43.440 So he sent me this paper

01:44:46.240 Where he made the claim that and it was a paper I had read and it had actually had some influence on me that

01:44:51.900 um

01:44:52.900 A living organism has to be a microcosm of its environment.

01:44:58.100 So what that means, for example, imagine an alien scientist came to Earth

01:45:01.660 and took a bird up to its lab and took the bird apart.

01:45:07.660 Well, what could it learn about the Earth?

01:45:09.300 Well, it could learn the chemical makeup of the atmosphere by studying the bird's blood.

01:45:16.160 It could derive a tremendous amount of knowledge about the whole history of life on Earth

01:45:20.140 by analyzing the DNA.

01:45:21.420 It could infer the density of the atmosphere by the ratio of the area of the bird's wings to the mass of the bird

01:45:31.400 It would know something about the temperature that the earth

01:45:35.860 That characterizes the earth and could infer something about the sun

01:45:40.000 It would be able to derive

01:45:41.660 Knowledge of the gravitational field

01:45:45.400 The bird is a model of its environment and Dawkins went further

01:45:48.620 He said, no animal that isn't a model of its environment can survive.

01:45:53.540 We're a microcosm.

01:45:54.620 A creature is a microcosm of its environment.

01:45:56.960 That's a medieval conception of the relationship between man and God.

01:46:00.640 It's like we're a microcosm of the cosmic structure.

01:46:04.120 And at the highest level of organization, the highest level of human organization, we're a personality.

01:46:11.080 Do we live in relationship to the spirit of the cosmos?

01:46:15.280 That's the biblical claim.

01:46:16.520 I think it's correct.

01:46:18.620 I think reality itself is founded on sacrifice.

01:46:22.860 Do I know what that means?

01:46:24.480 Not completely.

01:46:25.240 I do understand what it means that the integrated psyche and the community are founded on sacrifice.

01:46:31.420 I think I can make that argument completely coherently.

01:46:34.900 When you mature, you give up your hedonistic short-term whim for the future.

01:46:39.860 That's the sacrifice.

01:46:41.120 When you become communal, you give up your self-centeredness for others.

01:46:45.280 and so the community and the site and this integrity of the spirit are predicated on complex

01:46:51.880 sacrifice that what does that mean about reality the answer to that is it depends on what you mean

01:46:58.960 by reality right see most people who say is the religious worldview true assume axiomatically

01:47:09.180 That the rationalist, empiricist, materialist worldview is true

01:47:12.760 See, I don't think it's true

01:47:14.720 I think you can't help but bring the nature of reality itself into question

01:47:20.400 When you ask that question

01:47:21.600 This is why I don't like people asking me if I believe in God

01:47:23.980 It's like, not on your terms

01:47:25.940 We don't mean the same thing

01:47:28.620 I mean something in my belief, such as it is

01:47:32.440 That's radically different

01:47:34.400 so there's no difference between asking the question is the religious real and asking the

01:47:43.900 question well what do you mean by a reality that's not religious

01:47:48.100 so they're equally mysterious and i would say a reality that's not religious can't maintain itself

01:47:55.240 it can't it's missing something crucial it's missing meaning that's a problem it's like

01:48:01.940 not only is it a problem

01:48:04.560 it's possible that it's

01:48:06.640 the problem. This is why Christ

01:48:08.620 says you can't live by bread alone and that's part

01:48:10.700 of the problem with the technological enlightenment

01:48:12.640 it's like, here's all the bread you

01:48:14.700 need. Yeah?

01:48:17.560 For what?

01:48:20.020 What?

01:48:20.620 For what? To pursue my hedonistic whim?

01:48:22.960 Like, for what?

01:48:24.440 This is a crucial question.

01:48:26.800 People in abundance will commit suicide

01:48:28.660 without an answer to that question.

01:48:30.040 right so the technological enterprise is insufficient that doesn't mean it's unnecessary

01:48:34.600 or unworthy it just means that it has to be put in its proper place in its proper position in

01:48:40.360 the hierarchy that's how it looks to me i have so many questions but we'll have to save them for

01:48:49.180 next time because we're together for a few shows uh i want to ask you we're in wrestling some very

01:48:54.560 difficult questions tonight i want to finish maybe with the most difficult one this is from jonas

01:48:59.100 who says, my wife and I took your personality test.

01:49:02.720 I'm 0.1% neuroticism.

01:49:05.320 She's 99%.

01:49:06.780 Any advice on navigating this difference in personality?

01:49:14.520 Well, the first thing I would say as a clinician is that

01:49:17.780 I would find out if your wife is suffering

01:49:27.280 from an anxiety disorder depression like i would first of all find out if there's something physical

01:49:32.280 that's troubling her because that's a high enough level so neuroticism is sensitivity to negative

01:49:38.140 emotion right there's five cardinal personality dimensions sensitivity to positive emotion

01:49:43.320 that's extroversion sensitivity to negative emotion that's neuroticism agreeableness which

01:49:49.880 is really a maternal care dimension it's people orientation rather than thing orientation as well

01:49:56.980 um agreeable people are empathetic and compassionate and disagreeable people are

01:50:02.680 blunt and competitive and there's quite a sex difference there by the way conscientiousness

01:50:08.620 is dutifulness and orderliness and industriousness and openness is breadth of idea and aesthetic

01:50:17.020 interest it's creativity that's a good way of thinking about it if you're at the 99th percentile

01:50:23.100 for neuroticism you're more sensitive to negative emotion than 99 people out of 100 that's sensitive

01:50:30.520 enough to raise the question are you depressed or do you have an anxiety disorder and that raises

01:50:39.220 the question first is are you ill in some way because people suffer from depression and anxiety

01:50:49.340 For all sorts of reasons.

01:50:51.560 And some of them are linked to behavior and attitude.

01:50:54.860 But a lot of them are linked to physical health.

01:50:57.480 And so, especially if your wife has a proclivity for depression.

01:51:03.960 Which means she becomes hopeless.

01:51:07.160 That's the absence of positive emotion.

01:51:09.240 She suffers a surfeit of pain and anxiety.

01:51:13.080 You might want to see if something can be done about that.

01:51:16.120 if it's merely a matter of variability and temperament i would say

01:51:22.480 the way that you help people who are very sensitive to negative emotion

01:51:29.160 become more resilient is to help them establish an aim because that stabilizes them so she could

01:51:37.460 do my future authoring program at selfauthoring.com that helps people establish an aim and then

01:51:43.860 Once she decides her aim

01:51:46.260 There will be things that get in her way

01:51:48.940 That she's afraid of

01:51:51.160 That'll be the negative emotion

01:51:52.780 And you want to work out 0.60

01:51:54.420 Routines to have her

01:51:56.820 Practice

01:51:57.620 Exposing herself to the things she's afraid of

01:52:01.080 That's what you do too if you have a timid

01:52:03.020 Child

01:52:03.440 You know, so maybe you take a timid child

01:52:06.880 To the playground

01:52:08.000 And they want to hover around your feet

01:52:10.660 Because they're afraid to go make friends

01:52:12.620 You say

01:52:13.480 well look kid today we'll just go to the playground and you can watch the other kids

01:52:18.360 tomorrow we'll go to the playground and you can sit on that bench over there and i'll sit

01:52:25.220 over here 20 feet away and you can you can just watch from there and the day after that you can

01:52:31.040 do this progressively you go and stand near the kids and the day after that you go say hello to

01:52:36.360 one kid you know when you with someone who's very sensitive to negative emotion you can find

01:52:42.280 The border of their fear

01:52:44.720 And then you want them to put

01:52:47.380 You want them to put themselves

01:52:48.760 Voluntarily on the border of their fear

01:52:51.220 Until they're

01:52:53.040 Habituated

01:52:56.740 Until they understand that nothing terrible

01:52:59.620 Is going to happen

01:53:00.460 And then you want them to take a step forward

01:53:02.180 And if you do that carefully

01:53:03.600 You can take anyone who's very afraid

01:53:07.000 Of virtually anything

01:53:07.940 And you can make them more robust

01:53:10.580 And it's the clinical application of the Marduk principle, fundamentally,

01:53:14.740 is find out what the person's afraid of,

01:53:17.500 break it into manageable challenges,

01:53:20.840 expose them to the manageable challenge one,

01:53:23.700 so you could ask your wife,

01:53:25.340 is there something that you'd really want to do

01:53:27.540 that you're afraid of doing and haven't done because of the fear?

01:53:32.620 You know, list ten things like that.

01:53:35.640 Okay?

01:53:36.640 Now, list them in order of fear.

01:53:38.540 with number one being the thing i'm most afraid of and number 10 being the thing i'm least afraid

01:53:43.640 of okay now take number 10 and break that into steps and then have her take the steps and just

01:53:51.660 do that as a routine as a practice this is what you can do too like in your own life if you're

01:53:57.840 afraid of things it's like well cut the thing you're afraid of down to size how much do you

01:54:02.960 cut it down until you're willing to advance that's the rule you just break it down until you'll do 0.62

01:54:09.780 it wherever that is no matter how pathetic that is let's say you have to accept that and if you do

01:54:16.600 that you'll face it you'll master it and then you can take on the next task and people get it's

01:54:23.880 exactly what god tells the israelites to do in the deserts like you look at what frightens you and

01:54:30.160 throws you into chaos you look at it voluntarily every school of clinical therapeutic endeavor

01:54:37.140 since the dawn of the 20th century has converged on the understanding that voluntary exposure to

01:54:44.980 what stops you as you move forward is curative so you can use that as a treatment for negative

01:54:52.340 emotion it's well documented among timid children this is why it's so dangerous to have an

01:54:57.060 overprotective parent because the overprotective parent stops the child from transforming you have

01:55:03.520 to say out to the edge there kid you know and i can only get within five feet it's okay five feet

01:55:11.960 good get four and a half feet away then get three feet away right dance on the edge of the abyss

01:55:19.440 and that's a terrible thing for a mother to tell her child to do but all the good mothers do that

01:55:25.860 even with their terrified children.

01:55:28.680 It's even more important for them.

01:55:31.160 You know, and there's a kind of harshness about that,

01:55:33.260 but it's a harshness that prepares them

01:55:35.940 to not die when they leave.

01:55:39.160 So that's the answer to that question.

01:55:44.320 One more.

01:55:46.740 There you go.

01:55:47.500 I thought that was going to be a lighthearted question.

01:55:51.080 Jordan, what a pleasure it's been tonight.

01:55:53.560 I just thought I would maybe emphasize one thing that you said before we go, before we bring Kelly's Heroes back on to send us off with a bang, which is we've had this conversation about religion and God and so on.

01:56:04.980 But actually, I think irrespective of where people are on those issues, two of the most powerful things that I thought you said tonight was a reminder that, A, perception is projection.

01:56:15.760 What we see is a function of what we project into the world, what we expect to see.

01:56:20.040 and the second one is we wake up every day

01:56:22.320 with the opportunity to reorder the world

01:56:24.160 and I thought that's a very powerful

01:56:26.340 couple of things to take away

01:56:28.100 Thank you sir, good to have you

01:56:30.540 aboard man

01:56:31.160 Alright everyone

01:56:32.840 Thank you very much

01:56:35.500 It's a pleasure talking to you all

01:56:38.780 Much appreciated

01:56:40.600 I love your city

01:56:46.500 by the way, good work

01:56:48.180 yep

01:56:49.260 alright so we'll bring the band back on

01:56:53.100 and they'll take you out rocking

01:56:55.060 goodnight everybody

01:56:56.800 what if a few minutes

01:56:59.060 with God could change the direction of your

01:57:01.100 entire day

01:57:01.860 with pray.com

01:57:04.340 you can begin each morning

01:57:06.840 with powerful daily prayers

01:57:09.080 inspiring bible stories

01:57:11.420 and messages created

01:57:13.280 to strengthen your faith

01:57:14.960 whether you need peace

01:57:17.100 encouragement or a fresh start

01:57:19.140 Pray.com helps you make prayer

01:57:21.520 part of your everyday life

01:57:23.200 download the Pray.com

01:57:25.880 app today

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 27, 2026

Why You Read Their Eyes First

Episode Stats

Transcript