The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Lecture 01: Present or Absent We Wrestle with God

Episode Date: June 21, 2026

Hi, everybody. I’m pleased to let you know that we’re going to release a lecture a week from my extensive tour archive, beginning this Sunday and then repeating every Sunday after that. This allows me to do something interesting and useful while I’m otherwise incapacitated. My health is such at the moment that I can’t really return to podcasting or public lecturing. But we recorded these with the express intention of preparing them for release, and we’ve all determined that this is a very good time to do that. So that’s what’s going to happen. I hope you find them useful and compelling. They’ll be particularly attractive to those of you who liked my early YouTube work that was very lecture focused. It’s a return to my roots, I suppose, in some ways. And I’m as happy as I can be under the current circumstances, given my ill health, to be participating in this process and to have these lectures prepared for release. Thanks a lot for your continued attention and support. - Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Hi, everybody. I'm pleased to let you know that we're going to release a lecture a week from my extensive tour archive beginning this Sunday and then repeating every Sunday after that. This allows me to do something interesting and useful while I'm otherwise incapacitated. My health is such at the moment that I can't really return to podcasting or public lecturing. But we recorded these with the express intention of preparing them for release, and we've all determined that this is a very good time to do that. So that's what's going to happen.

I hope you find them useful and compelling. They'll be particularly attractive to those of you who liked my early YouTube work that was very lecture-focused. It's a return to my roots, I suppose, in some ways. And I'm as happy as I can be under the current circumstance. given my ill health to be participating in this process and to have these lectures prepared for release. Thank you very much for your continued interest and support. There's no adventure without trouble and the greatest adventure has the most trouble. And if you took on the full trouble of your

life, unstintingly, you'd have an adventure that would justify the misery. Why do you need a why? Have you tried making your way forward without meaning? What are you going to do? You're going to work with no purpose? You're going to sacrifice with no You're going to suffer with no purpose? Present or absent, we wrestle with God. And that's human destiny, all aimed at answering the same question. On what principle is the world founded? And on what principle should the world be founded? If you gaze upon all the things that terrify you simultaneously,

then you become who you could be. And that would be the spirit that could withstand death at hell and yet prevail. Thank you. So I was sitting backstage. trying to figure out how I would open this, 50 city tour, new tour. And a phrase came into my mind, and that was, present or absent, we wrestle with God. And that reminded me of an interview I did a while back with a very urban and sophisticated English actor, Stephen Fry. and I did a debate with Stephen.

He was on my side at a forum called the Monk Center in Toronto. I debated, we debated a New York Times journalist. And you can imagine what that was like. And a compatriot of hers. And Mr. Fry was a delight. He's educated the way that only educated English, are educated with their with the accent that makes them sound intelligent even if they're reading a telephone book and uh he was witty and charming and brilliant and everything you'd hope a man

might be and we got to know each other a bit you know um and i interviewed him from my youtube channel and he's a he's very interested in mythology he's he's very interested in mythology he's he's very interested in stories. He's an actor, so that makes sense. Stories compel him. And myths, myths are the deepest form of stories. That's a good way of thinking about it. And we'll talk about that a lot, trying to get to the bottom of just what a story is.

And Stephen said some things that were quite surprising to me. He said a lot. I listened to him a lot. He needed to talk. People really need to talk. They really need to be listened to. And that's partly because we actually organize our brains at the highest level, our psyches, our souls at the highest level of abstraction and unity with language.

And if we don't have someone to listen and to allow us to think on our feet, our brains get terribly disorganized and our aim goes astray. And we become chaotic and anxious and we wander off into the desert or off a cliff. It's not a good thing. And Stephen is a very intelligent man, and he had a lot to say. And he said something that I found extremely interesting. There's a scene in Dostoevsky's great book,

The Brothers Karamazov, which is a classic scene. The book features The Brothers, obviously, two of whom are Ivan and Elosia, and Eleosha. And Elyosha is a monastic novitiate, so he's a religious man. And his brother, Ivan, is a charming, materialistic atheist, who can really wrap his brother up in verbal arguments

with no problem. One of the things that makes this book so utterly remarkable is that Ivan really has everything going for him on the arrogant intellect side. But Dostoevsky shows in the dramatization and characterization in the novel, that Alyosha is the better man. And what he's trying to indicate there is that whatever constitutes the deepest form of ethic is not necessarily the same thing that makes you the most effective verbal adversary.

And also to make the point that just winning the argument doesn't mean you're right. And that's something to really remember with people. It's really something to remember with your wife or your husband. But I'm dead serious about that, you know. The fact that you might be able to defeat your wife in an argument or vice versa does not mean that you were right, right? And if you're wrong and you win, that's a really bad thing. Because then you're wrong and you think you're right.

And if you were unbearable before, you're going to be a lot more unbearable after that. And so one of the reasons you really want to listen to your partner and maybe even help them make their point is, you know, just so you could investigate the off probability that someone as wonderful as you still has something to learn. And, you know, the thing is if you're stupid and you learn why, even though it's painful, the advantage is that you don't have to be stupid again in the future. And that's a big advantage, you know, and it's a really big advantage for your wife. And so Ivan trounces Eliocia regularly when they have discussions about, for example, whether or not God exists. And I started with this discussion with the proclamation that absent or present we wrestle with God. Ivan does something famous in this book.

He mounts what's probably the most powerful argument ever. offered in the literary domain for the atheist claim. And he does it essentially on moral grounds, interestingly enough. He tells this story that Dostoevsky actually took out of a Russian newspaper about this four-year-old girl who had tyrannical, terrible, brutal, psychopathic, tyrannical parents. And one night to punish their daughter, they locked her in the outhouse. And this was Russia.

and it was like 40 below. And she froze to death during the night while she was screaming to be released. And that became a scandal in Russia. And it was a well publicized event, well publicized, horrifying event, as the torturous death of a child is self-evidently, we hope, a moral crime, though we seem to be committing an awful lot of those recently. And Dostoevsky uses that event as an argument that Ivan puts forth about the, I would say about the iniquity of existence, essentially.

And he asks, Ivan asks his brother, you know, if this God you believe, you believe to be a moral being, said, is willing to torture even one child to death, regardless even if that holds up the whole world, is that something you yourself would do? That's what he asks his brother, and Eliosha has no idea what to say, because what do you say to a question like that? And Ivan says to his brother,

I know you wouldn't do that, but the God that you claim exists and that is good and that you worship apparently does. And so, apart from the utter preposterousness from a materialistic perspective, say that the deity is, necessary supposition, I think your case for his existence is shaky on moral grounds. And Alyosha is silent in the onslaught of that argumentation.

But it isn't obvious that it shakes his faith, and it's still the case that as the novel progresses, he shows himself to be the better man. Ivan being brilliant intellect is characterized by the pride that the brilliant intellect has as its greatest sin. You know, I've been thinking recently about how the cosmic scales of justice are balanced. Let's say there's a gospel line that says that to those, from those to whom much has been given, much will be expected or demanded. And that's a very interesting line, you know, because one of the things we wrestle with in the culture now, let's say, is the issue of privilege. Maybe you're born wealthy. Maybe you're born tall.

Maybe you're born Caucasian. Apparently, that's an advantage. Maybe you're born Asian. Maybe you're born good-looking. You know, we are all awarded privileges that constitute a temperamental advantage or maybe a situational advantage. And there's something that seems unfair about that, arguably. It's certainly the case that people differ painfully in their intellectual capacity. For example, it's also equally obvious that that difference is a major determinant of success economically.

Let's say as you move forward, even the trait conscientiousness, which is associated with orderliness and industrious. industriousness and also predicts economic success has quite a substantial genetic influence, which means that it's really not attributable to the, it's not a trait that's attributable to the person that bears it. It's a gift in some ways that's given to them at birth. And you might say, well, if talents are hand abilities are distributed unequally, how can there be any justice? And the answer to that might be, if you're fortunate, you'd be, you'd be, you, better pay for it somehow.

And one of the things you see with people who are very intelligent is that they fall prey to the temptation of pride. And that temptation for intelligent people is proportionate to the degree of their intelligence. And I would say the potential downside of their gift gone astray is sufficiently great to be the factor on the other side of the scale. So if you're intelligent and you're proud of that and you get arrogant, that will take you places that you couldn't go if you weren't that bright. And those aren't going to be places that you're particularly going to enjoy being.

Imagine your favorite lecture. Dial that on one max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture. I went to college because I had to. I go to Peterson Academy because I want to. I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college. The traditional universities a lot of times it's just pretty dry. They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.

It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you. If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time. That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself. You have the opportunity to investigate that calling. And so with every gift comes an equivalent temptation, and with every talent comes an equivalent responsibility. And I really do believe that's the case. I think that if nothing else, if you are unfairly privileged and you don't make much of that, if you don't offer other people the benefit of your privilege, then you'll take yourself

apart in one way or another. And so Ivan's a very intelligent man, and he's very prideful as a consequence, and that doesn't work out very well for him. And he points to the suffering of children as his evidence against the existence of God. And when I was talking to Stephen Fry, he did something that was similar.

And I found this extremely interesting, because first of all, he talked about his interest in mythology, and then he made a claim which I believe to be untrue, that the mythology upon which are the stories, the deep stories, because that's what I mean when I say mythology, the deep stories upon which our culture are predicated, essentially the biblical stories, were of perhaps inferior quality to other collections of ancient stories

that we have accumulated. And that surprised me, because that's by no means evident to me. And I know a reasonable about mythology, and I've found great wisdom in Taoism and in ancient Egyptian theology and an ancient Mesopotamian theology and many places that I've looked,

but I've certainly the case that I've found a wealth of wisdom at least as rich in the biblical corpus in the Judeo-Christian stories. And I would say deeper, And that's partly because a lot of them were, a lot of those stories were, they're the culture, part of the culture heritage of Judaism. And the Jews are smart and preternaturally smart in some ways. And they were immensely remarkable storytellers. And the stories they told are unbelievably deep.

They're insanely deep. And we'll wander through a couple tonight. And I'll show you some of that depth. And I'll... And then Frye did something interesting. You know, he started talking about God, and I said, well, you know, what's your problem exactly with God as a concept? And I was expecting something akin to the materialist, atheist notion

that God is a superfluous hypothesis. And, you know, that's a perspective, but not a very deep perspective in my estimation, and a very dangerous one, as we're finding out, right now. But Frye actually got angry. And what he got angry about, one of the things he pointed to was the suffering of children, just like Ivan. He talked about watching children with bone cancer suffer, you know, and how dreadful that was and how preposterate it was to presume that in a world characterized by the suffering of innocence, that anything that could be regarded as a transcendent,

good might be held to exist. Now, but, and fair enough, you know, you can understand that argument, but what I found so remarkable was he was actually angry about it. He was angry about it. He was morally outraged about it. He was shaking his fist at the sky. Well, that's what you do

to someone that you're angry about. You don't shake your fist at the rocks on the ground. You shake your fist at the imaginary being in the sky. Even if you're an atheist. And that's an interesting thing because what it indicates, at least to some

degree, is that A, even if you're atheistic, you wrestle with God. And B, even if you're atheistic, you're at least unconsciously in a relationship. Because why else bother with the anger? Why else? What else is the source of the moral outrage? And, you know, one of the things I've noticed is that, because I've read a lot of comments from atheists, like, I don't know, maybe more than anybody else in the world. You know, I'm dead serious about that because I've done a lot of analysis of biblical stories, let's say, online. And I read most of the comments that are put on my YouTube channel,

and that's often like, you know, 1,000, 5,000 comments a week, a lot of comments. And some of the arguments that the atheists mount against what I'm... elucidating, let's say, are rationalistic, materialistic, atheist objections, but most of them are angry. And a lot of them are written by people who were hurt by people who purported to be religious at some point in their lives. You know, they had a tyrannical, they encountered the tyranny of dogmatic insistence in religious guise. And that damaged them and left them with a resuscary. resentment towards anything with a religious flavor, let's say.

But even that, that's not a rational argument, by the way. Let's point that out very clearly. That's an emotional argument. And it's the kind of emotional argument that you would mount against someone that you were in a relationship with. Now, then you might ask yourself about that. Are we in a relationship with the spirit of being and becoming? That's a good way of thinking. but I don't mean with the material world.

That's not what I mean exactly, because the material world in some sense isn't the whole world, you know. And we all know that because, well, first of all, we exist within the material world, and we're conscious, and we don't know how to relate that to the material realm at all. Not at all. We have no idea.

We don't understand the relationship between consciousness and matter at all. And you might say, well, it can be reducible to neurological, function, and I would say most of the neurological function that characterizes you has no consciousness. And so how we distinguish between the neurological function that hypothetically underlies consciousness and the neurological function that seems equally complex but has no consciousness is not something that anyone knows. And I would say the one undeniable truth that we have at hand is the fact of our consciousness. That was basically Descartes' proposition. He said, I think, therefore I am, but what he meant in more modern parlance is something like the brute fact of my own consciousness

is one is the most, is the deepest of undeniable realities. And so what that appears to indicate is that, well, you can make a materialist case that matter is at the bottom of being itself, but you can make an equally powerful case philosophically that consciousness is at the bottom of things, part not and not least, because I can't even imagine how you could come up with an account of being materialists or otherwise in the absence of consciousness.

If there's no experience of what is there, and no materialist has ever come up with a satisfactory answer to that, that's a complicated question. And then, So there's the fact of consciousness, and that's a strange fact. And then there's also the fact of the manner in which we're organized, we're constructed. So human beings are personalities, and personalities exist in relationship. And insofar as we're personalities, are personalities speaking materialistically, let's say,

are an evolved function. We're personalities because being a personality is what allows us to orient ourselves in the world. And so if at the highest level of our being were personalities, how is it that we're not in relationship with the essence of reality? Otherwise, it wouldn't work. So that's a very interesting. That's a very interesting fact. Now, here's another twist for you.

So I've been in touch with Richard Dawkins, who's probably the world's most famous living atheist, and he's like the avatar of the Enlightenment Mind. He's the last standing avatar of the Enlightenment Mind. That's a good way of thinking about it. And a formidable, a formidable intellect. And someone I actually like. I've met Richard a couple of times,

and he's an ornery bastard, you know, and he's tough as a boot, and you don't mess with him lightly, and he's disagreeable enough to cut you into pieces like Englishman can at the drop of a hat. But, you know, I think fundamentally he's a genuine scientist, and that's a difficult thing to be, and you have to be a dedicated pursuer of the truth

to be a scientist, and there's a certain moral element to that, a profound moral element to that. And I tried to get Dawkins to talk to me a number of times, and he put me off, you know, in various ways for a while. But then one day he wrote me and he said, I don't know what the hell. I can never understand what you're talking about, Peterson, but I don't know why you want to talk to me, and I don't think I'd have the patience for it anyways. But I kind of think maybe you're interested in this. And so he sent me a paper, and I thought, you son of a bitch, you know exactly why I want to talk to you. And so it was a paper I actually knew about from about 30 years.

previously, and he made a very interesting claim in that paper. He said that every biological organism is a microcosm of its environment by necessity, like a model, like a low-resolution representation of its environment. And here's what he meant by that. So he said, if imagine you were an alien, scientists like to imagine such things. They don't believe in angels or demons, but aliens, man. those things are there for sure. Anyways, anyways.

He said, imagine you gave an alien scientist, a bird, a dead bird. And he said, what could this scientist conclude about, what could the alien who'd never seen the earth, let's say, conclude about the earth from analyzing the bird? And the answer is, well, a tremendous amount, because you could calculate the density of the atmosphere from its wings. And if you analyzed its blood properly, you would know the composition of the atmosphere. and you'd be able to calculate the gravitational pole of the Earth and its approximate mass. And by analyzing its DNA, at a deep enough level, you could reconstruct a lot of the tree of life that characterizes Earth itself. I mean, a bird is a densely packed microcosm of its environment.

And I thought, well, I don't know if you know this, Dr. Dawkins, but there was a medieval conceit among Christians hundreds of years ago that the human soul was a microcosm. right, which was a reflection of the cosmic order. And your proposition as an evolutionary biologist is that you can't adapt to an environment that you're not a microcosmic replica of. That's exactly the same claim that the Christians made, like in the medieval period. We're a microcosm.

Our soul reflects the cosmic order. You might say, well, what the hell does that mean, Dr. Peterson? It means that if you're not in tune with the structure of reality at all of the levels at which it manifests itself, then you die. That's what it means. And so I found that extraordinarily interesting, especially because it has another implication, which is that if we are a microcosm of the cosmos itself

and were a personality, then maybe the deepest way that we can conceptualize our relationship to being and becoming itself, is as a covenant, as a relationship, as an understanding between beings, rather than as an alienated consciousness inhabiting a cold and dead material world. And so I was interested in that partly

because there's an insistence in the Old Testament stories that we're in relationship with being and becoming. And, you know, and Tammy, made reference to that in relationship, let's say, to prayer. And it's easy to be cynical about such things, especially if you're a Luciferian intellect. But I would say that the thought that rationalists worship is secularized prayer, historically speaking.

And so why would I say that? Well, you fall along. You tell me if you think that this is incorrect. I can't see a flaw in it. As a scientist, I might ask myself, well, what do I do when I'm generating a scientific hypothesis? Now, this is a very interesting question because scientists never discuss how they generate their hypotheses. They write down their experimental results and their methods, and they just take the hypothesis part for granted. Or maybe they make up some story about how they were driven to their hypothesis by rational means, and that's just not true.

That's not how it works at all. I had a great student at Harvard, Shelly Carson. Shelly was creative and intuitive, and she'd come up with a bright idea, and you can't just write your damn bright idea down in a scientific paper. You have to tell people how you came to it logically. So then she'd have to invent a story about how she came to her intuitive idea logically, and that was the introduction to her scientific paper. And scientists do that all the...

time. Every single scientific paper is like that. Where do your hypotheses come from? Your research question. What grips your interest? What compels you and calls you forward? And how does that make itself manifest? Zero instruction in that in the scientific realm. Okay, so let's take that apart a bit. Well, the first thing that you need, if you're a scientist, is a problem. It has to be a real problem. It has to be something. And how do you know if it's a real problem? How do you know if you have a real problem? It won't let you go. Well, that's a funny way of thinking about it. It's like, what won't let you go? You? Well, what do you mean? It you won't let you go. This is your conscience, let's say. It's you that won't let you go. Well, if you can't let yourself go, if you can't escape from a problem that

besets you. What makes it, what makes you think for a moment that it's you that's besetting you with the problem? And you know this perfectly well. You know this perfectly well because many times in your life if you had the chance of just saying to yourself, you should let that problem go. You would. But you can't. You can't, for example, when your conscience calls you out, or if you do, you damage yourself by lying that deeply. And It's the same if something calls to you, not so much besets you, but greeps your interest, which is something that happens to scientists all the time. They're insanely called forward by some phenomena and phenomena, some set of phenomena.

Phenomena means to shine forth. They're called forward by what shines forth to them. And so you need that calling and conscience to specify your problem. And so you do that in relationship to what besiefts. sets you and interests you. And there's an autonomy in that. You know this too. You can't decide what you're interested in. This is so weird. This is part of what got me interested in psychoanalytics. Thoughts so many years ago, because Freud and Jung both said that there are autonomous. There's an autonomy of spirit operating within you. They put it in the unconscious. You're motivated by

things that aren't under your voluntary control. They have an autonomy. They call to you. They plague you. You can't control it. What the hell is that? So you need to have a problem. And maybe it's a problem because you're fascinated by something. You're locked onto it by a force that's beyond your control. Or you're plagued by it. Your conscience screams at you have to do something about the cancer of children, for example. because someone needs to because the suffering is wrong.

That's a moral claim, by the way, not a scientific claim. From the purely scientific perspective, the cancer cell has just as much right to live as you do. You start your investigation with an a prior set of moral claims, all sorts of moral claims.

The claim that the truth is at hand if you approach the problem properly, the claim that the truth is comprehensible, you have to believe that to be a scientist. The claim that your pursuit of the comprehensible truth will make the world a better place? That's an axiom of faith. Are we so sure that our technology has made the world a better place? Well, maybe we are now, but if we wiped ourselves out with hydrogen bombs,

we might rethink that hypothesis. So it's not self-evident. You have to have a problem. You know, that's an interesting thing to know, too, you know, because you're going to have a lot of problems in your life. And a problem approached comprehensively is an opportunity. And that's something very, very useful to know. And the deeper the problem is, the more it's going to hurt you. But the more opportunity lurks in that problem. Because the fact that it besets you means you could be the person to pursue the solution. And that's something very interesting to know. It's akin to the claim that the dragon hoards the gold. And implicit in that is the notion that the larger dragons have the more valuable gold.

You know, and Tammy referred to that to some degree tonight. You know, she's been in a situation over the last few years where she's had to face very serious illness and death on a multitude of fronts in many, many ways. And that's about as bitter as it gets. although as bitter as it gets is a very deep form of bitterness. And it's not too much to say that because she approached the problem on her knees, let's say that the net consequence of that suffering has been positive. And I suppose that's the secret to a life well lived, isn't it?

Because there's going to be no shortage of serious problems that are coming your way. And if you can't transform them into stellar opportunities, then you're going to be left in the dust. And you do that at least, not least by faith, but also as a consequence of a certain form of humility. So we could get to that next. You have a problem. You're a scientist.

The next thing you have to admit is you don't know the answer. And that's not much different, semantically speaking, than approaching the problem on your knees. It's like you have a problem, it's a real problem. It's an insufficiency. You have an insufficiency. You have to admit to the insufficiency.

Deeply, you have to understand that it's an insufficiency that you would like to have rectified. You have to ask, you have to knock, you have to seek. And the consequence of that, intensely pursued, will be something like a revelation. You know, we say, us moderns, that we say things like, I thought this up. And I would say that's not really very accurate psychologically or spiritually. If it was you that thought it up, why didn't you know it to begin with? well that's a good question right

where did that come from how did you call it forth or under what conditions did it make itself manifest to you those are the same questions you're not going to get much of an answer unless you ask the question you know and that's really what a prayer is

in the final analysis it's an admission of insufficiency and it's a reaching into the beyond for a revelation now thought itself doesn't end there because your prayers might be warped. And what that means to some degree is that you might be aiming at the wrong thing. And what that might mean is the revelation you receive might not precisely be from God,

which is why you have to test the spirits, so to speak, to see if they're of God. And there's actually no difference between that critical thinking. You know, you'll ask yourself a question, hopefully a well-aimed one, hopefully one that's aiming up, not something like, how can I take advantage of this situation for myself in this moment maximally and to hell with everyone else, for example, which isn't exactly a prayer to God, let's put it that way. And so you have to check yourself and you do that with critical thinking

of various sorts, which is another manifestation of the creative process. and I don't see any difference between that on the scientific front and prayer, not on the hypothesis generating side. And so, and I think also it's completely reasonable claim anthropologically and historically to generate the hypothesis that the thought that moderns are capable of, literate, semantically sophisticated moderns is a variant of the prayer which clearly preceded that historically. So, you know, there's a gospel statement that says,

if you ask, you'll receive, if you knock the door will open, and if you seek, you'll find. But it's nested in another set of propositions, which is something like, careful what you ask for. And seriously. And so if you ask for what is highest,

you'll receive what is highest in return. and if you ask for what is lowest, you'll receive what is lowest in return. And I wouldn't recommend that. All right. Well, that's a bit of preamble musing, let's say, to set the stage. I've one other thing I want to discuss with you before we get to the stories themselves. I want to discuss with you what constitutes a story. Now, you know, we're engaged in a culture world.

And part of the reason for that culture war is the clash of two claims about the structure of reality itself. Now, the rationalists and the empiricists, they make the claim that the world is composed of a set of objective facts, and that you can be guided by those facts. You can follow the science, for example, right off the tyrannical cliff, as you may have noticed. the world is composed of a set of empirical facts and that was opposed, starting in the 1970s, by the postmodernists who claimed that,

no, you see the world through a story and turns out the facts support the postmodernists and not the scientists. And that isn't an opinion anymore because the same realization occurred simultaneously in multiple fields of inquiry. So the greatest neuroscientists in the world

now regard each word as a micro-narrative, let's say, or as a tool, the AI engineers learned that they could only produce supercomputing intelligences by training them within the framework of something approximating a hierarchy of values. The computational scientists learned that it was impossible to generate a robotic machine that could function merely as a consequence of modeling the facts. All of those things basically happened at the same time. And here's why.

Here's why. 200 years ago, something like that, a Scottish philosopher named David Hume put forward a very famous proposition, which was a very famous proposition, which was. was that you couldn't derive an ought from an is, which meant something like, no matter how many facts you aggregated around you, you couldn't use those facts as an unerring guide as to where you should go. So imagine this, imagine that you're dropped in the ocean

and you're trying to determine which way to swim. There's no set of facts at your disposal that it's going to map that territory for you. The same is true if you're lost in an extent, expansive desert, the geography itself will not signify to you your destination. Now, why is that? What is the problem? It seems like it's one of something approximating volume. The facts can't guide you because there's an infinite number of them. And if you rank order and prioritize them, you're not in the domain of facts. You're in the domain of value. So, and you do this. The

perceptual scientists figured this out too. You do this every time you take a glance. So, and this is so interesting, eh, because the empiricists say, well, you just look at the world and there are the facts. But the perceptual scientists say, no, you can't even look at the world without looking at the world through a lens of value. Now, and so what do I mean by that? Well, imagine you're out on a date. Okay, you're in a restaurant. There is a lot of things you could pay attention to. You could pay attention to. You could pay attention. to the waitress who happens to be more attractive than your date, let's say. Now, that's not a strategy of value that's going to endear you to your date. Right. So what do you do if you're polite and you have a clue?

And this is what you do with the person of the opposite sex, say that you're with all the time, is you attend to the facts that accompany them. You prioritize your perception so that in the restaurant, for example, you don't listen to the conversations two tables away, although you could. You listen to what your date is saying. And the way you do that is you focus on what it is that she's uttering and you suppress into invisibility everything else. And what that means is that you put her utterances at the pinnacle of a structure of value

and you subsume everything else beneath that. And you do that with every single glance you take. You couldn't even focus your eyes if you didn't do that. As perception, visual perception, auditory perception, they cannot be dissociated from action. You don't see and then act because you can't see without acting. And it's the same with all of your senses. And so you have to make a decision about what's important.

Literally with every glance, even with the unconscious movements that keep your eyes actually functioning because they're vibrating constantly even though you don't know that because your brain corrects for it. You have to live within a hierarchy of value. You have to live within a hierarchy value.

There's no way out of that. And once you know that, and we know that, and we know that factually. We know that incontrovertibly Once you know that you live within a structure of value, two questions might arise. How is that structure of value to be characterized? And what should be valued?

So to answer the first question, a description of a hierarchy of value is a story. That's why we're so interested in stories. We want to see how other people see the world. We want to have them help us solve the problem of what to attend to. Here's a scientific justification for that claim. Your eyes evolved so that other people can easily see where you're pointing them. That's why you have whites.

When you look at someone, when you talk to them, you look at their eyes. You look at their face, but mostly their eyes. And the reason you look at their eyes is so that you can see where they're pointing their eyes. because if you can see where they're pointing their eyes, you can figure out what they're aiming at. And if you can figure out what they're aiming at, you can figure out what they're up to. And if you can figure out what they're up to,

you can use your body to mimic their responses emotionally, and that's how you understand them. You say, well, how do you know that's true? What do you do when you go to a movie? You pay to go see a movie. It's a story. You'll even go pay to see a story that horrifies and terrifies you. That's how important it is for you to understand the broad landscape of evaluation.

You'll go watch someone confront a horrifying death, and you'll walk through those emotions just so you can orient yourself in that landscape. And you'll pay for it. And the reason you'll pay for it is because you'll pay for not doing it, and you'll pay more. So you go to a movie, and what do you do? you watch the hero, you watch the protagonist, and you try to infer,

what's he up to, what's he doing? Why is he doing it? What are his aims? What's his moral structure? And you lock onto him. And as soon as you start to understand his motivations, assuming the movie is well written and well portrayed, you start to feel the emotions.

And that's because your body is, you're using your body as a computational landscape to mimic the state of being that characterizes the protagonist. And then you split yourself into all sorts of, of people, well watching the movie, one person per actor. And you experience all those emotions. And you absorb all those stories. And why do you do that?

Well, maybe the protagonist is an anti-hero like the Joker in Batman, like Heath Ledger's Joker. And why would you watch The Joker? To learn how not to let the world burn pointlessly. How about that? And why would you watch a superhero movie? Or maybe to ally yourself with the central tenets of heroism per se. I mean, if you have a better explanation, what's the general explanation? It's entertaining.

I enjoy it. Don't make too much of it. It's like, no, sorry, you're gripped by an instinct. That's how a biologist looks at it or a psychologist. What else is dragging you to the movie theater? You can't just brush it off as entertaining. You're missing the point. Why is it entertaining?

Why will you pay for that? Here's an even deeper question. You know that part of our attempt to build faster and faster computers is so that we can have more and more realistic fictional simulations. You don't need the newest supercomputer in your laptop. You were pretty much taken care of on that front in 19, And so what's driving our desire to build these insanely complex machines? Well, how about the ability to play more realistic games?

Story-based games? How about the ability to construct more and more realistic fictional worlds? Why? Because it matters. It matters. So then we might ask yourself, what are we to make of fiction itself? and a thoughtless rationalist would say,

well, fiction is the opposite of fact. That's a stupid answer. And here's one of the reasons is because... There's a lot of reasons. But here's one. We seem to recognize different levels of quality in fiction. You know, you'll go home when you're tired and watch a movie you know to be trivial, light, shallow, and foolish.

just entertaining, right? It doesn't move you, doesn't require any effort on your part. You're probably even embarrassed to watch it. But, you know, maybe you worked hard that day, and that's pretty much what's left of you. You know, you can lay on the couch and watch Barbie. And I could only make it halfway through Barbie, by the way. But then, you know, you'll see a movie, for example, that moves you to your depths, that'll evoke tears, that'll sometimes even change your life. You'll read a book like that, a work of fiction. And so we have this instinct and this unerring sense

and this knowledge that there are levels of depth in fiction, right? There's levels of quality and fiction, and what that seems to indicate is at least, even if fiction is the opposite of fact, some fiction is much more real than others. And so I'm a great admirer of Dostoevsky, for example, And I loved clinical psychology. I loved being a clinical psychologist because I found that if I listened intently to my clients,

they all turned into characters from a Dostoevsky novel. You know, because people are so interesting. If you get people to tell you the truth, they're so interesting that you want to runaway screaming. And so that's why husbands and wives don't listen to each other. By the way, they tell each other platitudinous half-truth so that None of them are terrified enough to leave the house in a fit of horror. And they miss the best of the other person as a consequence of that cowardice. I mean, if you're bored of your spouse, all that means is they're not letting you know who they are.

Because if they did, you'd be interested enough to stay awake at night worrying. So here's the theory. about fiction, we have to see the world through a hierarchy of valuation. And a description of a hierarchy of valuation is this story. You're looking at the world through the eyes of someone else trying to adopt their frame of reference, trying to understand their position, their aim, their conclusions, their emotions, their motivations. Now imagine there's sets of stories, right? And some are more compelling than others. And then imagine you, aggregate all the compelling stories, and you make super compelling stories out of that aggregation.

And those are the deepest possible stories and the most real possible representations. That's what mythology is. It's a form of truth that surpasses the merely literal. Now, you might say, well, that's a preposter's claim. Nothing's more real than concrete reality. Really? How about numbers? How about numbers? What's more real? The world of brute material facts or the world of numbers? How powerful are you if you are a master of the world of numbers? Well, our computational devices are a consequence of our mastery of the world of numbers. Our technological prowess is a consequence of our mastery of the world of numbers. Are numbers more or less real than what they represent? Well, I think the proper answer to that question is

it depends on your definition of real. It depends on the purposes toward which you're putting the levels of abstraction. But you're a bloody fool if you think the answer to that question is simple. And you're certainly a fool if you think that making the claim that the realm of numbers is real is a preposterous claim. That just means that you have a definition of reality that you really know nothing about. Abstractions can be plenty real,

and deep fiction is the ultimate abstraction of value. And that's crucial because we see the world through a structure of value. Now, the postmodernists figured this out in the 1970s. Why? Well, how about because they were literary critics? Now you'd think literary critics, no wonder they're in the university,

nothing more useless than a literary critic. What if you live by stories? Then there's nothing more powerful than a literary critic, especially one that takes the stories your cultures predicated upon apart, which is exactly where we are now. And it's worse than that, even though the postmodernists got their central claim correct that we see the world through a web of stories, let's say,

they got their answer wrong. and that was because they were possessed by the spirit of Luciferian pride. They put the cart before the horse. They thought, well, we have to see the world through a story. Now, remember, these same people, they're all Marxists. And I'm not making this up. Go look it up for yourself. We're talking about France in the 1970s.

Okay, so that in itself should be a clue. Right. And we know perfectly well that the universities have been left leaning since the 1960s, and that that was particularly true of France during the 1970s, and probably no more true, true more among the humanities-oriented French intellectuals of the 1970s than anywhere else. And if they weren't outright Marxists, they were implicit Marxists, and they said that themselves. And when Solzhenitsyn came out and demolished the moral pretensions of the communist universe, they kind of scuttled underground, but not really. They just invented a kind of meta-Marxism that would have made old Carl had he lived to understand its spin and hopefully at a very rapid and uncomfortable rate

for all of eternity. What did the postmodernist claim? The central story that possesses us is one of power and nothing else. Well, fair enough, in some ways, you know, I mean, certainly there isn't anyone here. There's in no one alive who hasn't been tempted by there's people who are unable to utilize power.

and they're just useless. And then they might mask their lack of uselessness with a moral veneer. I'd never use power. And my objection would be, well, it doesn't really matter to me one way or another because you're so incompetent you don't have the opportunity. And so that's not a moral claim. That was something Nietzsche pointed out in the late 1800s. In his critique of morality as cowardice, you don't, if you're weak and useless,

the best justification you have for it is that you don't do terrible things because you're good. It's like, no, you don't do terrible things just because you're useless. Now, that doesn't mean that's necessarily the only reason that people don't do terrible things. That is not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that the accusation thrown by the postmodernness at the human race, that our fundamental motivation is one of, self-serving power. This power properly defined has to be self-serving. Otherwise, it's not power. It's cooperation. So I need to exercise power if I'm trying to compel you to do something you don't

want to do. Maybe that's all we do. You're out for your power. I'm out for my power. It's a bloody nightmare of power competition. And whatever stability we manage to attain is merely a consequence of the balance of our fundamentally competing interests. And that ethos is core to the unholy alliance between the postmodernness and the Marxists. There's no genuine reality. There's no genuine morality. There are a variety.

There's no genuine reality. There's nothing but a set of competing claims to power. And then there's the oppressed and the victimized, and then there's the victimizer. And that's a power dynamic. And you can understand marriage. way and you can understand the family that way and you can understand history that way and it's nothing but power. And as I said, fair enough, you know, human beings are pretty damn

brutal and you look at a regime like the National Socialist regime or Maoist China or Stalinist Soviet Union, you think, or the degeneration of great institutions in the West and you think powers on the march and maybe there's nothing else. There are a group of people. There are a group of people who use nothing but strategies of power. Psychopaths. There are about 3% of the population cross-culturally. And that fact in itself is pretty damn interesting

because if there was nothing but power, why wouldn't the people who use nothing but power be the majority and be dominant? And they're not. Psychopathy turns out. to be a very counterproductive strategy. Many psychopaths land up in prison. Psychopaths can't cooperate.

If I interact with you and I get what I want from you on our first interaction and then to hell with you, you're not going to interact with me again. So psychopaths are itinerant. Even psychopathic chimps don't do very well. The idea that the fundamental human motivation is one of power is about the most cynical and self-serving story that you could possibly tell. Now, it's a bit compelling, eh? It's compelling because when a human social organization goes wrong,

it degenerates in the direction of power. You know, if you and your wife are not getting along, you can't cooperate, you can't communicate. That's all off the table. You're left with the relationship of tyrant to slave. And maybe you swap those rules. But it's in the degeneration of the institution that the manifestation of power takes place. I suppose it can degenerate into a kind of puerile and infatile hedonism, too.

Now, if you can't organize yourself at some relatively high level of sophistication, you can degenerate into the situation where you do nothing but allow yourself to be possessed by your basest whims. There's not much difference between that and being psychopathic, by the way. It's an unbelievably corrosive doctrine, but then you might object. That's naive because everything runs on power. I don't think it's naive at all, by the way. But a more fundamental objection would be, well, if it's not power that the world is founded on,

if it's not the war of all against all, then on what principle is the world founded? And on what principle should the world be founded? And that's what the biblical corpus investigates. I say biblical corpus because it's a body, like a body of laws. It's a body of stories. It's a body of animating stories. That's another way of thinking about it.

And all stories contain within them an animating spirit. That's the moral of the story, by the way. The seed around which the entire story organizes itself or the seed from which it grows. the seed that is planted in you when you hear a story or tell a story. Over millennia, our ancestors aggregated stories that burned themselves into their memory, all aimed at answering the same question, toward what should sacrifice be devoted.

Now, that archaic terminology grates on our modern ears. We think of burnt altars and suns, smoking carcasses and primitive gods that enjoy the smell of high-quality roasted fat, and we fail to investigate. To what end should sacrifice be devoted? What does that mean? You will wrestle with that question your entire life. There is no difference conceptually between sacrifice and work.

They're the same thing. Work. The sacrifice of the present to the future. Right? If you're doing something for fun, if you're engaged in the present, if you're captivated by the moment, you're not working.

You're enjoying yourself. You're being entertained. You're playing. What are you doing when you're working? You're striking a bargain with the future. Or you're striking a bargain with the spirit of the future. and the bargain is, I'll give up something I want and value now on the understanding that it will be returned to be manifold in the future.

That's why you work. And so then that's in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve are tossed out of paradise because of their sin of pride, God informs them that in this fallen world, they will have to work, they will have to toil. In the fields, they'll have to toil to bring forth children. They'll have to work.

It's the human destiny to work. Why? How about because we're aware of the future? How would that be? Above all other animals. We understand that we stretch across time, that you have to save for your retirement, because the you now will be the you that's 65 and damn soon.

And you have this perspective on the world that spans the ages, so to speak, And you have to make a bargain between what's meat and correct and enjoyable and fills you with enthusiasm at the moment and how you have to organize yourself into the future, to make a bargain with your future self, to strike the same bargain with everyone else and all their future selves. And balance all that in the moment with work. What kind of work? That's the story of Canaan Abel. what sacrifice best pleases God. Abel's sacrifices are accepted. His life goes well.

Hane's sacrifices are rejected. He becomes resentful, arrogant, bitter, murderous, and then genocidal. Sound familiar? Those two things are laid out. Those two pathways of adaptation. Those two pathways of narrative valuation are laid out At the outset of the biblical corpus in about 20 of the most tightly written sentences ever penned, the story of Canaan Abel is inexhaustible.

It sets the pattern of the battle between the hostile brothers, between Batman and the Joker, between Superman and Lex Luthor, between the Hobbit and Soron, between Harry Potter and Voldemort, It's the eternal battle of good against evil, and that's the most fundamental narrative trope. And it's the meta-story that burns us, that's burned itself into our imagination and our memory. And why? Because that's your story, whether you know it or not. And no matter where you are in that story, you're in that story.

And no matter which side you're on or what stance you take, you're in that story wrestling with God. And that's human destiny. There's probably no one who thinks of God more than a committed atheist. Right, and that's not accidental. All right, so I'm going to walk you through a bit of the first story in the biblical corpus. Just to give you a flavor of exactly how this works. in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth

and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters a few sentences a relatively radical claim so let me delve into this a little bit without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep it's a juxtaposition of a sequence of metaphors

the original Hebrew word was Tohu Vabohu. And Tohu Vabohu means something like formless potential. The Spirit of God is that which wrestles with which confronts and battles and differentiates formless chaos into the manifest structures of the world. Okay. Now, and you're made in that image.

What does that mean? Well, it's a claim about the fundamental structure of reality itself. And it's not a materialist claim, not in the least. First of all, it claims the existence of something that in some sense is non-material. And I would say the closest straightforward word we have of understanding what that is is consciousness. That's the brute fact of your awareness. But more than that, the brute fact of the fact that, your awareness is integrally involved with the fact of being itself.

And more, and more, that the being of your consciousness gives rise to the world. Okay, so let's just take that apart for a minute. You follow along with me, and you tell me what you think about this. What is it that faces you when you wake up in the morning? That's the dawn of the new day, right? God creates the world in seven days, units of time. You wake up in the morning when the sun rises and the light reappears. What confronts you in the morning?

And because you're a materialist, you think, well, my bed, the furniture in my room, my rug, my, the artifacts around me. And I would say, really, when you get up in the morning, the first thing that you perceive and conceive is the furniture that you're 100% familiar with. or how about this? How about this? This is what confronts you. How about if you think about the last time you were depressed or anxious? That's a good way in.

What confronts you when you wake up in the morning? How about the malformed potential of your life? How about the wasted potential of your life? How about the increasingly chaotic and demented chaos of your life? How about all those opportunities you could have made something of had you chosen to. How about all the wasted opportunities that saturate your house?

All the closets that haven't been organized. All the fights you haven't had with your wife. All the issues you haven't settled with your children. All of that formless, chaotic, anxiety-provoking, terrifying potential. Well, that's on the negative side. You might say that's the dragon that is there in the morning when you awaken. You can paint a positive picture that's, equally compelling. Maybe you're at a peak in your life and you wake up in the morning

filled with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm. That means to be filled with the spirit of God. Enthus. Thus is Thaeos. Deos. God. To be filled with the spirit of God. To be joyfully abounding in faith and hope. And why? Because you see a new business opportunity make itself manifest, or maybe you're in love with someone and the first thing you think about is the potential of that future relationship, even if that's the date that night. Or maybe you have a new child and you're deeply in love with that child and you think about the joys that the new day might bring if you only conducted yourself properly. And so what do you confront when you wake up in the morning?

Well, how about a field of potential? Maybe that's what your consciousness is for. Your consciousness is the mechanism that confronts a field of potential and casts it into reality that makes it tangible. Now, do you believe that? Well, do you make decisions? Do things happen as a consequence of your choices? Is that not part of assembling and forming the world?

And don't we all know that the world that we aggregate around us is in some why is a consequence of what we've aimed at? Of our own free choice? And you might say, well, I don't believe in free choice. It's like, do you believe in your wife's free choice? try treating her like an automaton for a week and see how well your relationship goes. Well, dear, I know that you really can't help how you are. And you're just moving robotically through the motions.

And no matter how disarrayed our relationship happens to be, I can't attribute any responsibility to you because I know at your core, you're nothing but a mindless, deterministic robot. It's like, you can't even have a relationship with yourself with that attitude, much less someone else. And so you might claim to be a determinist, which, by the way, is not a useful scientific stance because the universe is not a deterministic place and it can't be conquered by algorithmic calculation. And we know that, and that's actually a fact, not an opinion,

because at the quantum level, the world is fundamentally indeterministic, and that indeterminism makes it self-manifest all the levels of reality. It doesn't work technically. and it doesn't work practically. It's a preposterous scheme, and you mostly want to believe it so that you don't have to take responsibility for your life. But the catastrophe of that is that

that potential that you encounter when you awaken is in that potential is everything that could ever possibly be offered to you if you only knew how to seize it. And you know that because you're beckoned forward into the future by the fact that something new and redeeming could still make itself manifest. And if you don't have that,

you can't get out of bed. You say, I'm hopeless. I have no hope. I have no enthusiasm. The joy has gone out of my life. The neurological systems that signal movement forward to a desired end have shut down

and left you suffering, left you with nothing but the bitterness of the potential that's going to make itself manifest in the most negative possible way if you can't organize yourself and confront the world. And that's the same spirit. That's the same spirit that's claimed

in the great book of Genesis to make itself manifest at the beginning of time. The spirit that confronts potential itself and casts itself and casts that potential into tangible order. And not only order, this is repeatedly insisted upon in the text, the order that is good.

So imagine that you're conducting yourself as a proper conscious moral agent in your family. What are you doing? You're taking the raw potential of your children and your family, and you're transforming them into the order that is good. And how do you do that? Well, do you love your children?

I didn't ask if you liked them. Do you love your children? And you say, well, at least I'd like to. You know, and I'm not being cynical about that. We're all imperfect, and none of us love our children with the depth that we should. But you see the best of people, I would say, in the love that they manifest for children. And what does it mean to love a child? I mean, even if you don't have much hope for yourself, even if you've given up on yourself,

even if you're bitter about the fact that you've wasted your potential, you have a child and you think, if only, God willing, things could be better for him, the potential that I see inside him that constitutes the core of my love, that vision of potential, that could make itself manifest in a manner I was never able to manage. And you pray that that occurs, and it hurts. you when you see your child deviate from that path. And so what does that mean? It means when you orient yourself by love, you strive to bring about within the confines of your family, the order that is good, or even very good.

And what that implies, too, is that the ultimate aim of the spirit that would best make use of potential is the spirit that acts in love. And that's why there's an insistence in the Judeo-Christian tradition that the ordering spirit at the base of reality itself is precisely the spirit that acts in accordance with the highest dictates of love. And you ask yourself,

well, if you wanted to bring about a world that was good or very good, what else could you possibly be oriented by? And that love would not only be love for your children and for your wife, but even for yourself, but for yourself in the deepest possible sense, right? As the love for yourself as someone who carries within them the same,

flame that your son carries and that you need to manifest when you're caring for your son so that he can manifest what's within him. And then you could ask yourself too, if you were oriented, God willing, by nothing but that love, what could you make of your life? Now there's a prayer. If I was oriented by nothing but the highest love, what could I make? of my life. It's a terrifying question to ask because if you ask and you want to know, everything that interferes with that will burn away from you. And that might mean that there's precious little left standing, this idea of the Spirit of God descending upon the chaotic waters. People ask, well, there was no water at the beginning. None of this makes sense. It's like, you just don't know what you're talking about. You have no idea. You have no

what constitutes a metaphor. What exists, this potential that exists at the beginning of everything isn't water. It's just that water's a useful metaphor. Well, why? You can draw things up from the water. The water is unknown. The water is dark and it's deep and it's mysterious and it's bountiful. You can drown in the water. You can sail on the water. The water is the... the water is a necessity of life. Use some imagination, like the poets do. When Christ is baptized by John the Baptist, the spirit of... The spirit descends upon him. What does that mean? Next slide, please.

Oh, I'll tell you about this first. This is the same story told from a different perspective. So what do you confront your life? Well, a monstrous, eternal... infinite mess of multi-headed snakes. You tell me that's never happened in your life. You wake up at the morning and think, oh my God, I wish I was asleep. Snakes everywhere.

Right. So what does the hero do? Confronts the snake. Right. More than that, this is even implicit still in the biblical corpus. There are echoes of the representation of God has the primordial deity who slayed the serpent that existed at the beginning of time

and made the world out of its pieces. Leviathan. What does that mean? Well, it means that we're hunters. It means that we make our clothes out of animal skins. It means that we establish the order that is habitable by confronting the predators and making use of the animals.

them, taming them, or destroying them, we establish order as a consequence of a conflict with potential. It's echoed in the story of the dragon and the gold. You confront what's terrifying and possible, and you gain what's valuable and necessary. And that's the eternal story of the heroic element of the human spirit. And when we hear a story like that, It echoes deep inside us. That's why the stories are so compelling. It's like the baptismal scene in the Lion King. When Simba is adolescent and deluded and power mad and confused,

and his father appears in the sky and says, remember who you are. Well, that's what the ancient stories do. They remind you who you are, right? Your children of God made in the image of the creative being, that sits at the center of reality itself, reflected in your soul, and you've forgotten in your

mis-aimed presumptions, your pretension, your pride, and your ignorance. And the stories, the ancient stories, call to you to wake up and understand who you are, to adopt that responsibility and to put that foremost above everything, to confront the terrible, catastrophic

dragon of chaos dressed in your suit of lion's skin and your armor so that you can render the void and the desert habitable for your family, yourself, and your community. That's the adventure

of your life, you might say. Life is suffering and it's bitter and I should turn against it. And the rejoinder to that is there's no adventure without trouble. And the greatest adventure has the most trouble.

And if you took on the full trouble of your life, unstintingly, you'd have an adventure that would justify the misery. That's the offer. It's not comfort. You want comfort? Dostoevsky figured this out in 1880. When he was criticizing

utopian delusional utopianism, he said, look, if you took the typical person and you just gave them everything they wanted. So they could do nothing with their life, but sit around and eat sweet cakes

and sit in pools of bubbling water. He obviously had a vision of California. And do nothing but busy yourself with the continuation of the species. What then? He said, well, we know what would happen then. Human beings, ungrateful to the core, unable to tolerate it.

anything like a brief respite from their troubles, would in no time whatsoever smash everything to smithereens just so they had something interesting to do? Well, have you never had the false adventure of trouble you caused just because you had nothing better to do? I mean, that's really, that's like the definition of 80% of life. Well, what would happen if you had a real adventure? What would happen, for example, if you took a real adventure?

For example, if you told the truth, because that's a real adventure. You have to let everything go if you're going to tell the truth. You don't get to predetermine the outcome if you're going to tell the truth. You get to say what you need to say and cast yourself on the briny deep and let the waves take you where they're going to. And that's a bit on the destabilizing side, you might say, but it's no shortage of exciting. And maybe that's what you're built for, right? Viking adventure over the high seas and not the idiot comfort that were promised by our tyrant wannabes.

That's what it means to be made in the image of God. To make that creative, contending, adventurous spirit suffused with love, manifest within you in everything that you say and do. that's the dawn of the kingdom of heaven that's laid upon the earth that men are too blind to see next slide please good thing we didn't miss that one Christ

is baptized by John the Baptist and the symbolic representations are that a dove descends from on high the Holy Spirit and comes to reside within him that's when he goes to the desert by the way

you ever had that time in your life where you woke up a little bit you realized that you were living a false life and something revealed itself to you to let you know that you were on the wrong path and what was the price you paid for that

how about an interregnum of confusion how about a period of not knowing which way was up. That's the price you pay for letting go of your tyrannical, of the tyrannical propositions that you use to imprison yourself. Out of the tyranny, as it says in Exodus, into the wasteland and desert. Why do people cling to their foolish presuppositions? Because knowing something stupid is more comforting than knowing nothing at all. And the price you pay for the realization of your own ignorance is a brief exposure to the fact that you're entirely lost. But you can wake up as a consequence, right? You can reestablish your relationship with the creative spirit that makes what's

good out of potential. That's a rediscovery, that revelation of your own ignorance, your own bitter ignorance. That's a re-contact with the ground of being itself. That's why it strikes you so hard. That's why it can be life-changing when you recognize your own insufficiency. This is part of what prayer calls you to do all the time, to pray, to pray on what's, what do you pray if you're sensible? What am I doing that's stupid? Well, there's a source of inexhaustible wisdom, precisely proportionate to your stupidity. And you might say, why bother? Well, we covered that already, so you don't fall into a pit. If you could do nothing but aim high and look, look within yourself for everything that stopped you from moving forward.

And you did that full heartedly, unreservedly. And you made that the light motif of your life. What would you be like in a year, in five years, in ten years, in twenty years? Would you be headed for sainthood itself? Is that not something that is a possibility that resides within you? You know perfectly well that there are times in your life. where you took a turn for the better. What if that was the pattern of your existence?

Nothing but the constant turn for the better. And then you might also ask yourself, would there be any difference between living a life that was composed of nothing but constant turns for the better and existence in the kingdom of heaven itself? A place where everything is good and still getting better? That's the identification with the spirit of revelation that descends, that replicings,

that replicates the conditions that obtain at the beginning of time and space itself. That's the central core message of the first four sentences of the biblical corpus. Thank you very much. So, you know, when you came out on stage, you said that you were going to talk about 12 rules, hey? But you talked about this, even if you didn't know, because that whole story that you told was wrestling with God. Yep.

Right? So you got that exactly right, just so you know it. No problem. Yeah. All right. Here's a question. What or who is behind the anti-Semitic surge in the U.S.? It's not just in the U.S.

And in particular, amongst Ivy League academia. Well, Satan, obviously. and I actually mean that and I can explain why to some degree Kane abides by the narrative of victim and victimizer right and Kane is resentful

and bitter and arrogant and murderous and deicidal and genocidal and the reason for that is that he construes himself as an eternal victim of innocence and everyone else, God included, as a victimizer. And that story leads to hell. So that's the theological level of explanation.

More prosaically, it's a consequence of idiocy and moral degeneration. So the idiocy part is the willingness of ignorant people to, swallow hyper-simplified idolatrous rationalizations. And here's one. The world is founded on power. There's nothing but victims and victimizers. How do you identify the victimizers? Well, what's most convenient if you're a failure?

How about the successful? The successful are victimizers. What does that imply? The hyper-success are hyper-victimizers. They're the worst. Whose most hyper-successful, statistically? Jews. Right.

End of argument. Why Ivy League people? Well, because all they do is perpetrate the victim-victimizer narrative. And so here we are. How do I know when I'm wrestling with God versus wrestling with myself? If it's about what you want, then you're wrestling with yourself. You know, here I'll tell you something cool. So psychologists have spent a long time with early large language models, statistical modeling, that's a good way of thinking about it,

looking at the relationship between concepts, the meaning of concepts, of clusters of concepts. And we identified 30 years ago a pattern of clusters of concepts of personalities, and laid out a somewhat inadequate but useful five-dimensional picture of human personality. There's an important dimension missing, but we won't go into that at the moment. One of the dimensions is negative emotion, and so negative emotion, you can think of your emotional systems as a tree with two trunks, one trunk, branching into two, branching into many. One half of the trunk, or one of the separate trunks, is positive emotion and the other is negative emotion. And they're independent neurological systems, each with their own biochemistry, and they cross-talk, because it's hard to be miserable when you're happy. Although you can laugh and cry at the same time, right?

The relationship can be quite closely juxtaposed and paradoxical. you can weep with joy. The negative emotions all cluster together, coming as they do from the same trunk, let's say, sorrow, grief, pain, frustration, disappointment, shame, anxiety, horror, disgust, contempt, etc. And if you're more likely than most to feel any of those, you're more likely than most to feel all of them. There's a normal distribution of sensitivity to negative emotion with some people being relatively immune,

and so very resistant to depression and anxiety, but also somewhat opaque to signals of distress and threat, others extraordinarily sensitive to danger, but suffering because of a surfight of negative emotion with most people in the middle. That's the normal distribution. That's neuroticism, one of the big five traits. Tell me the question again. I knew that you can ask you. How do I know when I'm wrestling with God? Oh, yes.

So one of the, okay, so I outlined a sequence of negative emotions that were associated with the trait proclivity for negative emotion. Here is another self-consciousness. There is no technical. difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable. Right. So if you're thinking about yourself, you're wrestling with yourself in misery. When Tammy was talking about dealing with her grief, what did she say? She said she was feeling bitter and resentful because people weren't delivering to her what she felt was due her in her suffering.

Now, you can understand that, you know, because her father had just died, and you could think what kind of a son of a bitch husband would leave his wife under such circumstances. Look, it was a question we wrestled with because there was conflicting moral obligations at that moment. But what she realized was that she realized what only she could realize, which was that insofar as her suffering was a consequence of her, fault, the reason for that suffering is that her aim was inappropriate. She wasn't looking up enough. So she looked up and she said, well, I need to reestablish my relationship with what's highest.

I need to realign my aim away from bitterness and resentment towards only that which is optimally good. that's a good definition of God. A definition of God, note, and what was the consequence? She got more than she expected. Right. In the Gospels on the sermon on the Mount, Christ says something strange. He says, God takes care of the sparrows and close the lilies of the field. And you faithless ones do not presume that you are of sufficient worse so that that could happen to you.

you too. And it's, he sounds like Jesus the hippie. You know, if you were just a flower or a bird, you know, the sky daddy would take care of you under his wing. That's not what that means. It's not what it means. It means that if your aim is true, there's nothing that won't be revealed to you. even in the agonies of your misery, there's enough, there's more than enough at hand to provide everything that you need. And why would we assume anything other than the world we understand so poorly

as anything but a well of inexhaustible plenitude? I mean, certainly you'd see the miracles that have occurred over the last hundred years, the feeding of billions of people, the technological revolution that seems to have no end, the intensification of our computational ability, able to do more and more with less and less, until what? Until what? Until we can do everything with nothing at all? That's what God did at the beginning of time. If it's about what something in you that you've allowed to possess you

once right now, you're wrestling with the lowest parts of yourself. If you reorient yourself and aim at only what is best, then you're attempting communion with God. And you might ask yourself, well, how do you do that? And I would say, well, try to do it. Just try to do it. decide that before you look, before every word you speak, you place yourself in relationship to what makes itself to you as the highest possible aim at that moment.

And practice that, and ask yourself, why in the world would you not do that? why in the world would you not want to make the most out of every possible moment? And there's no difference between making the most out of every possible moment and aiming up with as much vision and love and hope and faith as you can possibly muster. And you might say, well, faith, that's for people who are too weak to rely on the facts. It's like, what facts did you rely on when you got married? You know, your knowledge of who a woman was or a man?

What the hell did you know about the facts? You gamble in life. You stake your soul on your bet. You make your way forward with faith. You don't know how your new job is going to turn out. You don't know how your new friendships are going to unfold. You assume that if you navigate properly over even the stormiest of seas, you can eventually get to your destination.

And that's an action of faith. And you have to make your life. You have to make faith manifest in your life unless you want to manifest the opposite, partly because you're steeped in ignorance. It's like, what the hell do you know? And so you're always facing the plenitude of the unknown in relationship to your own ignorance. that's like the definition of being mortal. And how do you step forward when you don't know where to step?

You're like the fool in the tarot cards. You look up and you walk off the cliff. And you do that while you're looking up. And you do that with every step you take. And if you look up towards the highest possible heights, then every step you take will have the firmest of all possible foundations underneath it. and you can do that with every glance and every word. And if you did that, you would set the world right.

Last question. You often talk about the ideal masculine. But what about ideal feminine? How can the divine feminine be integrated into society to make it greater if it can? Hamie and I were in Rome six months ago and in St. Peter's Basilica, which is perhaps the most remarkable building ever built. There's a remarkable sculpture by Michelangelo who's carved this particular sculpture when he was a very young man, and it's the paella, it's the Virgin Mary, the divine mother, the archetype of the feminine perfection, if you'll have it that way. And what does she have in her arms?

She has the broken body of her perfect son. That's the female crucifixion. what's the highest possible offering? What's the highest possible offering to God? Child and self. And what does that mean? For motherhood, well, the good mother offers your child to the world to be broken

and to be redeemed. The good mother cannot protect her child from the adventure of his life. she has to facilitate that, no matter what the cost. And the courage that's intrinsic to that is the core of female heroic being. It's not the only aspect, but it's the most feminine aspect.

The woman who doesn't do that, the woman who does nothing but protects her child, destroys her child. the woman who offers her child to God receives her child back and that story is the core of the divinity and femininity

and every mother worth her salt knows that and that's that thank you all thank you very much everyone it's very good to see you thank you for your time and attention Thank you.