The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Psychology of Redemption

Episode Date: January 10, 2017

A TVO Big Ideas Lecture from 2012, presented at INPM's Conference on Personal Meaning. It discusses the idea of redemption in Christianity from a psychological perspective, comparing in part to ideas of transformation in psychotherapy. www.selfauthoring.com, Dr Peterson's Patreon

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. This is Episode 5, the psychology of redemption in Christianity. This episode is a TV Ontario big ideas lecture from 2012 that was presented at the INPM conference on personal meetings. You can support this podcast by donating to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's Patreon account by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, are available at self-authoring.com. So people are possessed by a question, and it's part of our nature to be possessed by this question.

And so you can think about this as an archetypal question, if you like. you can think about this as an archetypal question, if you like. And the question is, what are we doing here? And you can ask yourself that in relationship to this conference, you're here to search for meaning. And to understand what that might mean, you also might ask yourself, well, why is it that you have to be here for your search for meaning? Why is that something that drives human beings?

It isn't characteristic, for example, of animals. They don't seem to question their existence. And so there's something about the very nature of human being that makes us feel as if something needs to be set right. When not being discussed historically, it's been associated with the term redemption. People are in need of redemption. In the modern age, we talk about positive psychology

and we talk about happiness, which is a much weaker word. But our forefathers had a more profound sense of the problematic state of human existence and they used more profound words and the idea that we have a need for redemption is a more profound idea. Human beings, and I'm going to talk mostly about human beings in the West because that's the literature that I'm most familiar with. Human beings in the West have been meditating on the nature of human being for thousands of years.

Perhaps ever since we became self-conscious, which is another thing that distinguishes us from animals. And another thing that drives our search for meaning, the consequence of this meditation or one of the consequences of this meditation has been the production of a series of books that people know as the Bible. I realized years ago that people saw the world through lenses of belief. And more recently, it's been demonstrated that that's actually inevitable because you're a limited cognitive processor. You have to frame your perceptions with beliefs. What I learned is that the belief systems that people use to frame their perceptions have a structure and that structure is religious.

A religious presupposition is one that you might even not notice that you make. It's a predicate or an axiom or an assumption. And the study of those axiomatic assumptions is what religion is about. Now one of your axiomatic assumptions, for example, is that life involves a search for meaning and that's associated with the idea of redemption. And you'll notice that you ask that question because of course you're here, but you might not notice how strange it is

that all of you ask that question. And the fact that all of you ask that question, that human beings have asked that question for as far back as we can understand, is indicative of something profound about human nature. It's lack of completion. I'm going to walk you through the series of stories that make up this library of books known as the Bible, because it presents a theory of redemption that in a sense is emergent. It's a consequence of this insanely complicated cross-generational meditation on the nature of being. It's not designed by anyone person. It's designed by processes that we don't really understand because we don't know anything about how books

are written over thousands of years or what forces cause them to be compiled in a certain way or what narrative direction they tend to take. Now one of the things that's strange about the Bible given that it's a collection of books, is that it actually has a narrative structure. It has a story. And that story is being cobbled together. It's like it's emerged out of the depths. It's not a top-down story. It's a bottom-up story. And I suppose that's why many of the world's major religions regard the Bible as a book that was revealed rather than one that was written. It's a perfectly reasonable presupposition that it's revealed because it's not the consequence

of the work of anyone author. It's not written according to a plan or not a plan that we can understand, but nonetheless it has a structure. It also has a strange structure in that it's full of stories that no one can forget, but that also that no one can understand. And the combination of incomprehensible and unforgettable is a very strange combination. And of course, that combination is basically mythological.

So I'm going to start out by telling you what Genesis has to say about why it is that you need to search for meaning. Now, people are pretty familiar as a general rule with the basic stories. In Genesis, Genesis starts out with the word of God creating being from chaos. That's a very complicated idea. The idea is that whatever the word is, which is logos from a Christian perspective, from a Western perspective, that logos, which is something like consciousness and something like speech, has the power to pull order out of an underlying chaos. Now we do this

all the time. People do this all the time. Not, say, suppose in some sense why we're hypothetically made in the image of God. We use our consciousness to constantly construct being out of chaos. And according to the initial opening of Genesis, there's something about that that's akin to the construction of the world. And so that means that from the perspective of this book, consciousness itself plays a world-constructing role. It's got a central place. And human beings, in some sense, participate in that. In some minor sense, I suppose, but in a sense

that nonetheless makes the McKin to what the library of books called the Bible assumes is deity. And once God logos extracts order out of chaos, he builds a little world and he populates it. And then in the little world he puts a garden, a walled garden, that's paradise, because paradise means walled garden or Eden, and Eden means well-watered place. And you might think, well, why had garden? And the answer to that is, a garden is the

optimal combination of nature and culture, or chaos and order, because a garden is where nature flourishes, but it's also where nature flourishes in a safe and controlled environment. And so that's like an optimal environment for people. And so there's a garden and God puts the people in there, and that's optimal. Only warns them, he says, this is a strange thing, he says, well now you're in the garden, that's where you should live and there's something you shouldn't do. And what you should do is eat a particular fruit. Now I'm going to tell you something about vision. Human beings have excellent vision.

First of all, we see color, hardly any creatures see color, but we do. And not only do we see color, but our vision is tremendously acute. The only other animals that can see as well as us are birds of prey. For mammals, man, we can see like you wouldn't believe. And for primates as well, as we can see much better than our closest primate relatives. And why that is is a bit of mystery, but there's a woman in California who seems perhaps

to have solved that. Her name is Lynn Isbel, and she was very interested in how human beings develop vision. And she's interested in how human beings developed vision. She is interested in patterns of predation, predator-pray relationships. She knew that our tree dwelling ancestors, millions of years ago, were frequently preyed upon by snakes. In fact, there's some evidence that our tree dwelling ancestors and snakes co-evolved, and

that our visual system is particularly good at picking up the patterns of camouflage that snakes use to hide in trees or in the undergrowth. And what Isbell showed was that if you looked at primate populations around the world, where there were more predatory snakes, the primates could see better. It's a very high correlation. And so she concluded that the reason that human beings can see so well is because of snakes.

Now she thought the association between that and the snake story and genesis was interestingly coincidental. but it's much more than that. We don't know how the Adam and Eve story came about. We know it's very ancient, but there's something about it that sticks in our memory and in our culture. And the reason for that seems to be that in some strange way it's an extraordinarily accurate summation. Snakes gave us vision. What about fruit? Well, the reason we can see colors is because our visual system evolved to detect ripe fruit. What about women? Well, you have to be pretty wake-toed smart a woman. So there's this weird interconnection in Genesis between women, fruit, and snakes. And the idea is that the interplay between the three, you remember women or gatherers,

two, or were gatherers historically speaking, and they shared food with men. And that's a strange thing, because human beings share food, and hardly any other animals do. And so women did tempt men with fruit. And they did make themselves conscious along with this snake in the fruit. And that was a catastrophe. And what happens in Genesis is that when people become

self-conscious when they eat the fruit, their vision improves. The scales fall from their eyes. And all of a sudden, they can see in a way that no other animal has ever seen. And one of the things they can see is that they're naked, and that that's a big problem. And you might ask, well, what does being naked mean?

And that's quite straightforward. People often dream, for example, of being naked in front of a crowd. And to be naked in front of a crowd is to have all your frailties and vulnerabilities revealed to judgment. And that's a nightmare for people. And so to become self-aware is to wake up into a nightmare. And the nightmare involves a profound realization of individual vulnerability.

And the consequence of that in Genesis is that people are banished from paradise and are from then on in need of redemption and that they have to work. And that's how a man comes to be in a fallen state. And you don't have the need for redemption or need for meaning or a quest after meaning unless you're in a fallen state. And you don't have a need for redemption or need for meaning or a quest after meaning unless you're in a fallen state. And everyone, strangely enough, has this intuition

that they're in a fallen state that something is wrong with the world that needs to be put right. And more than that, or something is wrong with being and needs to be put, right? And more than that, that in some weird sense, weird way, they have a moral obligation to participate in that process. And that drives us, like it's beneath what drives us. It's an axiomatic presupposition.

The next thing that happens in Genesis is that able and can are born, and they're really the first two human beings, because Adam and Eve are made by God, whereas Canaan Abel are born, they're the first people that are born in history. And interestingly enough, what happens between Canaan Abel, which is jealous resentment against God, followed by murder, is the first pattern of behavior that human beings manifest once they become self-conscious. That's an awful story and it's a prototypical

story in a sense because what it says is that there are two patterns of reaction to tragic self-consciousness and one is associated with a murderous state of resentment, resentment towards life, the kind of murderous resentment that drove the killer Colorado, for example. Murderous resentment against life. And the other, typified by Abel, has something to do with the establishment of the antithesis of murderous resentment. So you can associate murderous resentment in a sense with hell, and you can associate Abel's path a sense with hell and you can associate Abel's path, his choices with heaven. And so what happens is that as soon as people become self-conscious

being divides into domain that has hell on one end and heaven on another. And that's only hinted at in the second story in Genesis. After that everything dissolves into a flood. That's Noah. Into a flood, nature comes in, tears everything down, and the tower of Babel is erected, and that's a meditation on pride. People build a structure that reaches up to where God is.

It's a presumptuous act, and there's reason for that, too. One of the consistent warnings that emerges in the biblical writings is warnings against the sin of pride. And the sin of pride is an intellectual sin. And it's associated with the presupposition that you know enough to do without the transcendent. And the biblical stories state very, very clearly, continually, that that is catastrophically dangerous, that you always have to be aware that there's something transcendent that supersedes the domain of your knowledge. And what might you think of people who don't believe that, and well, they're totalitarians, because they believe that their belief is total.

And we know what happens when people become totalitarian. What happens is you get the instant creation of something on Earth that very closely resembles hell. And that was hammered home in the 20th century. And if you want to derive one lesson from the 20th century, it's that totalitarian states and totalitarian ideologies are not a good way to entrap or search after meaning. That's a mistake. After the flood, the flood is, before the flood, that's prehistory.

That's so far back in time we can't even imagine it. After the flood, there's a new beginning in a sense, and that's when history really starts from a biblical perspective. And the way the Old Testament lays itself out then is that it's kind of a classic hero myth, a hero myth that's associated with the establishment of states.

And generally speaking, when societies mythologized the beginning of their state, they imagine a set of heroes. It's sort of happening with people like George Washington in the United States. It happens automatically that the founders of the state are mythologized as the great heroes of the past. It's the great heroes of the past are forefathers who established the state.

And of course, that's true, and there were millions of them, but you can't tell a story about millions of people. So all the actions of those millions of people are collapsed and condensed and compressed and turned into a kind of fiction that's more real than truth that describes the patterns that characterize how the state was founded. And the Old Testament runs us through that. The heroes like Abraham, for example, and Jacob, who are crucially involved in the establishment of the polity of the actual state. But something always happens as this state is established. And what happens is the state is established.

And then people get off course. And the leadership gets off course. And then the state collapses into a state of chaos. And then there's a prophetic revelation warning of that danger. And then there's a terrible period of chaotic disruption. And then there's the regeneration of the state. That story is foreshadowed in the Old Testament by Exodus. Moses' story, Egypt's a tyranny, a leader rises to pull everyone out of tyranny.

There's a terrible chaotic interlude, the wandering in the desert, and then there's the reestablishment of the state. That's an archetypal pattern. That happens to all of you. It happens to every country. And the pattern is, here in your system of belief, which is yours and a collective belief, and something arises like a snake, analogous to a snake, to disrupt it, because the state is insufficiently adapted to the environment. It doesn't have all the answers. It ages and becomes corrupt.

And then it's prone to collapse. And that collapses a catastrophe, a chaotic catastrophe. That happens to you every time, for example, that your dreams are shattered or that you encounter a great tragedy. It happens to people when their spouse dies or when they're diagnosed with a very dangerous illness or when their children are damaged. That event, and Alagas, as I said, to a snake, and that's partly because the circuits in your brain that detect snakes, that other animals use to detect snakes are the same circuits that we use to detect things that go wrong.

that go wrong. And things are always going wrong for us. And we're always collapsing into a state where we're wandering through a desert. And a desert is a state that's bereft of meaning and bereft of ideas. And in that state, then, we're desperately seeking for, well, for the establishment of another state, and a state that we hope will be a better state.

It'll be like the last state, except there'll be more to it, and everyone will finally be happy. And that's part of our utopian dream. And it's impossible not to be in that story. You're either in a state of order or you're in a state of chaos. And that's where the Dauas, for example, believe that the world is made out of order in chaos is because you're always in one of those two places. What happens in the Old Testament is that the limitations of the state itself

start to become apparent. And they become apparent in that the state is established, but it always collapses, and then it's reestablished. But it always collapses. It's never permanent. And there's repetitions of this, continual repetitions of this. An upshot of the Old Testament, at least the way that it's been constructed in Christianity, is that the state itself is flawed.

It cannot provide the final answer to the question, what constitutes genuine redemption? Well, this is an important issue. It's an important issue psychologically. It's an important issue politically. Is the state the final answer? Well, it's a totalitarian claim. I know that it was claimed by people like Stalin.

It was certainly claimed by the communists. It was claimed by people like Hitler. That the state was the final answer. It still claimed in many ways in places like China today. The individual subsumed underneath the state organization, and the state, well, under Stalin, the state was already in a state of perfection. If you complained about its imperfection, then you were going to be killed. So the idea that the state is perfect, although it's a tremendously flawed idea, can be pursued so hard by people who are gripping their narrow viewpoints that the state itself becomes murderous. The Old Testament sort of sums itself up in the book of Job, and

it's a problematic summing up, because Job is tormented in all sorts of ways, everything that could possibly be terrible that happens to any person happens to Job. They can't understand why. So Job is in like a final state of unredeemed being. The state's not the answer. Well, so then, if being is order and being is chaos, and chaos is intolerable, and the state order is not the answer, what do you have left? That's the question the New Testament attempts to solve.

One of the problems with the Soviet Union, for example, was their inability to correct errors. See, when you start out with an aid primary hypothesis about what constitutes the truth, and that structures your life, it's very difficult to make the kind of micro corrections that a state has to make on a continual basis in order to remain dynamic and fluid. So in order to stay adapted to reality,

not only do you have to have a viewpoint, but you have to engage in a process of modifying that viewpoint and the way that you engage in the process of modifying that viewpoint. There's two ways, really. One is continual minor adjustments as a consequence of paying attention. So for example, if you're having a conversation

with your wife or a friend, or maybe it's a difficult conversation, there's a couple of ways that conversation can go. One is, you can take your viewpoint and you can impose it on that person. And often when people are talking, that's what they're trying to do. They're not having a conversation. What they're doing is attempting to impose a viewpoint that they already hold their own person that's listening. And if they're a tyrant or a bully, they'll do that and pay no attention whatsoever to

the person's response. And in fact, they'll get irritated and even violent if the person that's listening. And if they're a tyrant or a bully, they'll do that and pay no attention whatsoever to the person's response. And in fact, they'll get irritated and even violent if the person doesn't accept their a prior reframing. Is there an alternative? Well, there is an alternative. The alternative is to pay attention and to listen on the off chance that the person that you're talking to

might tell you something you don't know But in order to listen you have to be already convinced that the little theory that you're using to orient yourself in the world Isn't good enough because if it was good enough then why would you bother listening? So you have to be deeply aware of your own ignorance and that's what humility means humility means to be deeply aware of your own Ignorance it doesn't mean to slank around in an ashamed manner. It means to make a presupposition that you may still have something left to learn and that this annoying person in front of you might have something to teach you if you would just listen.

And so, you're discussing a problem and a problem is a time when the things you think aren't working. That's what constitutes a problem. So you have a little problem and you're discussing it, let's say, with your wife. And she offers you her opinion. And you can brush it off, and in which case your little state stays intact, it doesn't move.

It's still made out of stone, it's pillars, and you're still a tyrant. Or you can listen, and you can think, oh I see, there's a micro correction that I need to make in one of the peripheral elements of my belief. And that's a little painful because it means you have to let something go, your presumption, and then you have to be a little chaotic as you adjust to the new information, and then you have to reconstitute yourself. And what that means interestingly enough is that you have to reconstitute yourself. And what that means interestingly enough

is that you have to make a sacrifice. And God likes sacrifices, especially if they're of the proper kind. And the proper kind of sacrifice is the one that you make of your micro-belief when you're faced with evidence of error. And if you make those sorts of micro-sacrifices, then God stays pleased with you.

And the reason for that is that your models of the world stay up to date. Now, one of the things that happens in the Old Testament all the time is that people are making sacrifices to God and modern people, they just have no idea what that like why does God want burnt lamb smoke. It's not obvious to modern people, but you know your ancestors were stupid.

They were dramatizing something. They were dramatizing this tremendous realization that no other creature has ever managed, which is that there are things you can do to your being that change the nature of reality. And if you do them properly, you can make reality better. It's mind-boggling, and they acted that out, because they didn't really understand it. They noticed that if things weren't going right, you had to sacrifice something valuable and that seemed to make God happy. Well, it might have been a first-born calf or a first-born son for that matter.

For modern people, it's more like an idea. You have to sacrifice an idea that you hold dear in order to progress, because the ideas that you hold dear are exactly what are making you suffer if you're suffering. So you have to sacrifice them, and then you have to let them go. And the consequence of that is that you enter into this little period of chaos, and then maybe you pop out of that, and that's a good thing. And so here's an interesting observation.

That process of being in a state and identifying an error and correcting it, that's a little death and rebirth. That's like the Phoenix. The Phoenix dissolves itself into ashes and then pops back up as a new bird. In the New Testament, there's this weird idea for that you have to identify with a person who continually dies and is reborn.

Well, what does that mean? It means that the idea that redemption itself is not the consequence of being in a state. It's the consequence of being in a state. It's the consequence of participating in a process. And the process is the willingness to continually have yourself sacrificed, chaotic, and then reborn. And that's what keeps things alive. Now, in the passion story, there are other elements,

and the elements are important. So for example, the story of Christ is predicated on the assumption that the person who is making the ultimate sacrifices performs another number of acts or undergoes a number of processes, and one is a discipline to apprenticeship. So for example, in order to have some ideas

that you can let go and then reconstitute, you have to have some ideas. You can't just be all chaotic and unformed, and so in the New Testament, Christ is a master of tradition. He's a master of the law. And you have to be disciplined. You have to be a master of something before you're formed at all. You have to be imbued with the spirit of your ancestors, we'll say.

You have to take on that burden. You see this reflected in popular culture, for example, in the movie Pinocchio. At the end of the movie when Pinocchio is about to become a real boy, his last challenge is to rescue his father. And he does that. And to rescue the father means to make peace with your culture and to embody it, but then not to assume that that's absolute. It's a necessary process of discipline. The next idea that underlies the passion ideas in the New Testament

is that the ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of yourself to God. Now, that's a very strange idea. It's a very, very sophisticated idea because what happens in the Old Testament is there's the constant sacrificing of something else. This requires a different order of being. Who does it mean to offer yourself up as a sacrifice to God? Well, you can think of God as an ineffable representation of the highest possible value. That's what

monotheists presume. They don't represume God's nameable, and even the Israelites presume that God wasn't nameable. It's ineffable, but it's the ultimate value. Whatever the ultimate value is. You don't know what it is, but you kind of have some idea. And the idea of offering yourself up as a sacrifice to God is the same thing as determining that your life will be guided by unshakable commitment to the highest good.

And what that means is that it's no longer your state that's in charge or it's no longer your ego that's in charge. It's not even you that's in charge. It means that your conversations with people are no longer going to be about convincing them that your viewpoint is right. It means that what your conversation is going to be about in your speech is about attempting to represent what you believe to be true in the most concise and clear possible manner, no matter what. And that's not how people live. People live in a sense by, it's like a conniving. And the conniving is a totalitarian conniving.

The conniving is an idea that the world should be the way that I want it to be. I have a theory about how I want it to be, and I'm going to enforce that theory, and I'm going to be very angry when the world doesn't respond the way I want it to, and maybe I'll be violent as a consequence of it. And I have some sense of where I'm headed. Maybe I'm headed for wealth, for example. And I'm headed to an advertisement. So I'm with my wife when I'm 50 on a tropical beach. And that's how I'm going to be redeemed. And it's a narrow and totalitarian viewpoint. And then I sacrifice everything to that. And it turns out that that's a very bad idea.

Because things don't turn out the way I want them to turn out. And the alternative to that, and this is part of what happens in the Sermon on the Mount, which is a very, very strange document, because it represents a transformation from the idea that morality is constituted by adherence to a set of rules, to morality being aimed at something that you might think about as more of a positive good. It's not merely not doing what's wrong, it's something else. It's sacrificing yourself in the attempt to make things better. And making things better, not by aiming at what's better, but by telling what's true and assuming that if you do that, then what's better will happen, whatever that is,

because the thing is you don't know what's better. You don't have the capacity to fully realize what would constitute better. When we've seen that, as I said, over and over in the 20th century, people aim at a circumscribed definition of what constitutes the utopian state. And all we get out of that is endless hell. We have to pursue what's good, but we don't know what's what's good is. So how do we? How do we remove ourselves from that paradox? Well, these are the matter of gathering more knowledge. It's a matter of approaching reality in a different manner

And it is an act of faith as Kirchgaard pointed out because if you decide for example that you're going to pursue the highest good Whatever that is and the highest good pursuing the highest good, whatever that is. And the highest good, pursuing the highest good, means being willing to transform what your conception of the highest good is. You pursue the highest good. That's your aim. Your aim determines the world you live in. We know that.

That's a fact. That's a psychological fact. What you aim at determines the nature of your world. And to aim wrong, that's Hamar-Kia, by the way, that's Greek word, Hamar-Kia, to aim wrong, that sin, because Hamar-Kia, which is an archery term, which means to miss the target, is what sin means. So if you're not in a state of grace,

it means your aim's wrong. You're not aiming at the right thing, or maybe the world is constituted badly and it's hell bent on torturing you. That's the alternative viewpoint. You've got to get your aim right. You aim at the best. And how do you aim? Well, the Sermon on the Mount says something very interesting. It says, okay, what's you get your aim right? And you decide to tell the truth, then all you have to do is concentrate on the day. Now, people read the sermon on the mount, like it's a hippie document.

You know, be like a flower, be like a bird, don't pay any attention to the future, you know, everything will be taken care of. It's not that at all. There's presumptions that are nested in there, and the presumption is, first of all, that you're aiming at perfection. You're aiming at whatever perfection is.

And you're not trying to get other people to do that. You're aiming at it. You're reconstituting your actions and your speech to aim at that. And then you do that by noticing very carefully and attending to what constitutes the truth. And then you let that take you wherever it will go. And that's the sacrifice of self to God. Because the truth is a representation of whatever constitutes reality.

Your best attempt at whatever constitutes reality. And to follow that means to follow something that's transcendent, because whatever reality is, it's certainly not something that you're individually responsible for creating, even though you might participate in that process. To speak the truth is to be guided by being. It's a completely different mode of being. Now, I said, right after Adam and Eve's catastrophic emergence into self-consciousness, the world split into two attitudes, one associated with pain

and the other associated with able, to end up those attitudes are associated with heaven and hell. Well, we know that human beings can turn the world into hell. If you're a student of history, you have no doubt about that. And no matter how terrible you think the hell that people have created in the past is, if you read a little more history, you'll find something even more terrible. And people, of course, are afraid of the human capacity to turn things into hell. That's one of the things that underlies our environmentalism, we're afraid that our

misbehaved will turn the world into hell. We believe we can do that. Do we believe that human beings can turn the world into heaven? Well, that's a harder thing to believe, because there's a lot more ways that things can go wrong than there are ways that things can go right. So heaven's a much narrower thing to aim at than hell,

which is a chaotic mess. Well, maybe it's improbable, but life is improbable, that's for sure, and our unredeemed state of being is improbable, and the other thing that's improbable is the burden that we're required to carry The other thing that's improbable is the burden that we're required to carry existentially. We're awake creatures of God. What does that mean? It means that we suffer and it's real that suffering and it's not only that we suffer in that we feel pain which is bad enough in frustration and disappointment and all the catastrophic things that are associated with life but

even worse we can apprehend the possibility of that recurring in the future. So even when none of those terrible things happen to be happening right now, it's pretty easy for us to imagine that they're going to happen tomorrow, and they will. So not only can we imagine that they're going to happen again tomorrow, they are going to happen again tomorrow. So we're in a state of constant unredeemed suffering. It's a big problem. And if you think about it, you can't even imagine

a state that would address that. It's just too big a problem. Well, so then there's another inference in the New Testament. And it's hypothesis of a meta-state. And the inference is that a life that's predicated on constant death and renewal at every level of being, a life that's predicated on a search for the truth and an attempt to act out the truth, and a life that's associated with the sacrifice of self to God produces a state of being that so deeply meaningful that it justifies suffering.

It doesn't eliminate suffering. There's no elimination of suffering. Nietzsche said he who has a why can bear any how. And what he meant by that was if what you're aiming at is of sufficient profundity, it's worth an awful lot of misery to participate in the process of bringing it about. And life has an unbearable depth of misery, and as a consequence, it needs an absurd positive aim. The absurd positive aim that's posited in the New Testament is participation in the process that transforms Earth into heaven, the generation of the Kingdom of God on Earth. And that actually means something. It means that the state of being that's described by the parameters that I already laid out, the willingness to engage

an eternal sacrificial death and renewal, and sacrifice of the self to the highest value, produces a state of being, subjectively, that's associated with habitation in the Kingdom of God. And the actions that are conducted in that state are what transform the interpersonal state into the political state that's a manifestation of that kingdom. Now, you all know this. You know this the same way that the people who wrote the Bible know it because of course people just like you wrote the Bible and the Bible is about people.

When you have a deeply meaningful conversation with someone, you change them and you change yourself. You know that and the process that you're engaged in, well you have that deeply meaningful conversation, that's a mode of being. And that mode of being to the degree that that of mode of being is predicated on the attempt to communicate as truthfully as possible and with the highest possible end in mind, then right then and there. You're in that state. Now you can tell when you're in that state because number one, you're not self-conscious.

Time disappears. Number two, what you're engaged in is deeply meaningful. You don't bear the tragic burden of your life at that moment because what's happening with you is so worthwhile that it consumes you completely. And people are in that state to a widely varying degree. But everyone is in it sometimes.

And when something like that happens to you, especially once you learn to notice it, you think, well, there's nothing better than that. And if there's nothing better than that, then you might ask yourself, why do anything else? Now, I've tried to figure that out. I've tried to figure that out. I've tried to figure that out for years.

Because to me these look like existential realities. They're not hypothetical states. They're not shoved off into some transcendent heaven. They're not otherworldly. They're part of being itself. People can enter states of heaven and hell, and they can learn to stay longer in one state or another, so why don't they stay in the best possible state? Well, one problem is the commitment of faith, I think.

It's very terrifying to let go of the direction of your life and say, well, I'm going to go wherever the attempt to speak the truth will take me because God only knows where you're going to end up. And it's certainly not where you think. In fact, the willingness to abandon going to where you think is a prerequisite for doing this. And so in a sense, you're a ship that the wind takes wherever it wants to take.

And the second problem I think is that it's a real responsibility because in order to undertake this process, you have to come to terms with the idea that what you do in your life, your wretched miserable, tragic, prone life actually matters, really it matters. You know, when people complain about meaninglessness in their life all the time, but I think that's a kind of face-saving illusion. I think people are more afraid of meaning than they are of meaninglessness. Because meaningless means, meaninglessness means, well, I can do whatever I want. I mean, it might be kind of, you know, second rate and

might be dull, it might be dangerous, it might be destructive, but it doesn't matter. And so I can do whatever I want. I have no responsibility because I don't mean anything. So I'm not responsible to anything or anyone. But if your life actually has meaning, and it doesn't always have meaning, it has meaning when you're doing something that's meaningful, well then all of a sudden you are responsible to a higher power, so to speak, your own your own soul and irresponsible to the

state of being that characterizes the world itself. And that's a massive, massive responsibility. It's to take responsibility in a sense. It's to take responsibility for the sins of the world, which is another prerequisite of the mode of being that's described in the New Testament. It's a very strange idea. The redeemer takes on the sins of the world. What does that mean? Well, it means all human beings are Nazis and human beings are the Maoist red guard and human beings are the slaughterers in Rwanda and you're all human beings.

And so to take on the sins of the world means to realize that all those things that characterize the human capacity to turn earth into hell characterize you. And then in order to live properly, you have to live in a manner that addresses those elements of your nature. And again, that's a terrible responsibility. Well, first of all, who wants to admit that? Second of all, who can stand looking at it? And third, who's going to take on the burden of solving it? Well, it better be all of us, or we're just going to keep doing it. So redemption,

what does it mean? It means we're not in a state of grace. Why? We're self-conscious. We're aware of the tragedy of our being. We're unwilling to take full responsibility for it, or we're ignorant about how to do that, and that leaves us bereft. How do we solve that? Well we can solve it with a state, but the problem is the state is not reliable. It degenerates into tyranny, then it transforms into chaos, then it reconstitutes itself and does the same thing again. It's not a good answer. Is there another answer?

Well, maybe. I believe that what is outlined in narrative form in the New Testament is psychologically correct. I believe that the idea that endless micro death and renewal produces a state of proper adaptation to being and that the prerequisites for that that are laid out in the narrative structure that underlies the New Testament are fundamentally correct. So to be redeemed is to aim at the highest value,

to sacrifice what's no longer useful and valid in yourself and to tell the truth. And the consequence of that is existence in a deep state of meaning that justifies the tragedy of being and the possibility of transforming your own life in the most beneficial positive direction will simultaneously doing that for the people around you. And that's redemption. Thank you for listening to episode 5 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Psychology of Redemption

and Christianity. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate a review on iTunes. You can support this podcast once again by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon accounts by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon. Thank you. I donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon accounts by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon. Thank you.