The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Who Dares Say He Believes in God
Episode Date: June 30, 2019"I have been asked many times by many people if I believe in God. I don't like this question. I generally respond by stating that I act as if God exists, but that's not sufficiently true. Who could do... that? Who could conduct themselves with the moral exactitude and care necessary of someone who would dare to make that claim? Either claim? In any case, after being asked the question yet again, when I was in Australia, I decided to attempt to answer it in some detail." - Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
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Welcome to season 2 episode 15 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast.
I'm Makayla Peterson, Doctor Peterson's daughter, manager, favorite child, and heir to
the Peterson Empire.
Believe me, it's an empire.
Mostly filled with ideas, crazy ideas, interesting ideas, some that you'll even hear in this
episode.
I'm kidding, I'm not his favorite child.
He has another one who's way less trouble than I am.
But also not as cute.
Anyway, back to reality, healing's slow for my mom, we're still stressed beyond belief.
I never knew that you could be stressed into feelings that are similar to actual depression.
I had inflammatory depression, which is hell, and I've completely managed with diet, But I didn't know that you could actually get stressed into something similar to that.
Not as bad, but like different.
Well, I knew you could be stressed. What else is PTSD, right? But I didn't really know if you know what I mean.
So that's a fun conclusion I've come to recently.
Situational depression is very real. Not as bad as what my food depression was, but unpleasant and unless. Fortunately, working out seems to
help a lot. So here's to taking a bad situation and finally growing a booty,
right? This week's episode is the first of a series of two. I said three last
week, but we switched it to two. About Dad's belief in God and belief in God in
general. This week's episode is titled, Who Dare's Say He Believes in God?
It's taken from one of Dad's 12 Rules for Life tour talks,
which was delivered in Sydney on February 26, 2019
at the International Convention Center.
I hope you enjoy it.
When we return, Dad's lecture from Sydney
titled, Who Dare's Say He Believes in God.
titled, Who Dare Say He Believes in God.
Please welcome my father, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.
And for a long stop!
Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here in this massive hall. I can't believe that all of you decided that coming to talk about the topics we're going to talk about tonight
was the top priority in your life.
But let's see if we can justify that.
That might be a good aim.
See if we can make it worthwhile.
So to make your decision correct.
So you may know or not that I was on a television show last night, Q&A.
Apparently you know that. Some of you, anyways, I can't say I enjoyed it. Really, it's funny,
you know, like, I think as I've got farther along in doing whatever it is that I happen to be doing,
I find those events more and more stressful.
I don't know exactly what it is.
I think it's the proclivity of everything,
everything has to be mangled in some sense
into a preset format, you know,
and the fundamental format really is
that everything has to be political, you know,
and everything isn't
political. So that's not helpful when you're trying to discuss things that aren't
political. And I mean I'm not complaining about it, well I suppose I am. It's just, it's surprising to me how much it takes out of me, say, compared to doing
an event like this, which I really enjoy doing, like I spent a lot of time preparing, and
there's a lot of you, and I really want it to go well and all that, but this is much less
dreadful. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
I guess that's right.
And then there's the strange constraints on format.
People ask very complex questions.
And then you have a minute to answer.
And there's something downright sinful about answering a really complicated question in a minute.
Because it sort of suggests that complex questions have answers that take one minute.
And they don't. They have answers that take God. Sometimes they take decades.
And sometimes they take thousands of years, you know. But of course I can't expect a television show to allow for thousands of years, but
But the format itself works against
The kind of thought that's necessary to actually have the discussions that are necessary and so
Anyways having said all that
It went it went it went all right. I would say
There were no nasty surprises
and particularly and it was a civil discussion,
whether it was a productive discussion or not,
is a different matter, but it wasn't an
unproductive discussion and so that's something.
But there was one question that came up and I thought
I would actually start talking about that question tonight,
because I've never been happy. I've been asked this question a lot, and I've never been happy with the answer that I've given to it,
and I've never really been able to exactly get my, I've never been able to figure out exactly why I haven't been happy with the question. And so I'm going to try to answer it properly tonight.
And then I'm going to talk more generally about 12 rules about the book.
Now it's fine, this question is directly relevant to the book.
And so it should make for a good lady, but it'll enable us to talk about something that
I think is really very much worth talking about.
And I hope I can formulate the problem properly and then formulate the proper answer,
at least more coherently than I've managed.
It's, see, I have this, I followed this rule for a very long time,
which I actually thought was a socratic rule.
I didn't know this until, really quite recently, until I wrote 12 rules for life.
Socrates said that he had a daemon by which he meant an internal voice.
And he said that he always listened to it.
And then that was what made him different from other people, that he always listened to it, and then that was what made him different from other people,
that he always listened to this voice, and the voice didn't tell him what to do,
it told him what not to do. And when the Delphiocorical proclaimed that Socrates was the wisest man
in Greece, in Athens, and in Greece, one of the reasons
Socrates attributed her decision to deem him
the wisest man was because, well, she said,
he knew he knew nothing, but he knew in part
that he knew nothing, at least in part,
because he was always listening to the voice
of his Daemon, his internal conscience.
And then I just found out the other day
that the word democracy comes from the same root,
which is really interesting.
I had no idea that that was the case
because what it suggests, it's so fascinating
looking at how words are related to one another historically
because you find strange connections between ideas
that you would never imagine.
And sometimes they're unbelievably profound.
And so the basic, what happened historically
is that, well, so there was a concept of the Socratic Daemon.
Now, it was the Daemon that Socrates listened to
when he decided that he was not going to run
when the Athenians decided that they were going to put him
to death, the Athenian aristocrats, right?
Because they thought
that he was corrupting the youth by, you know,
talking to them and telling them the truth.
And I suppose that's certainly grounds for chasing
someone out of your town.
Anyways, they gave him plenty of notice
because they didn't really want to kill him.
They just wanted to get the old goat,
the hell out to some other city where he could cause trouble
there.
And his friends were, you know, making plans get the old goat, the hell out to some other city where he could cause trouble there.
And his friends were, you know, making plans to scurry him away from Athens.
And he went out and consulted his Damon, and it told him not to leave.
And that was a big shock to Socrates because, of course, he didn't want to die.
But yet he had decided that he was always going to follow the dictates of the Damon.
So he did something that only a philosopher would do was reverse his assumptions.
He thought, oh, well, I was afraid of dying.
And my Damon said, stick around.
And so I must be wrong.
It must be worse to be to risk not following that internal
voice than to risk this form of death.
You know, which is a question you have to really wrestle with.
And one his friends weren't very happy about.
But in any case, he didn't run.
And we have two good court-like documents attesting to that, one written
by someone named Xenophon and the other by Plato. They're very interesting documents, I
would highly recommend reading them, they're very short, and one of the reasons I would
recommend reading them, apart from the fact that they're fascinating, and short, is that you also get the sense from what Socrates wrote that because he had lived his life fully,
you know, no holds barred in some sense that he could let it go when the time came.
And that's an interesting thing, you know, because, well, it's question, I think that we all wrestle with, we should,
is like, well, is there a purpose to our life? And, well, that's a hard question. And then
if there is a purpose, well, how is it expressed? And then if there is a purpose, and our
lives are truncated as they are by death, then how can that purpose have significance? And
those are hard questions. But, Socrates' experience seemed to be that he had lived enough in his life so that
when push came to shove, which it certainly did, he was able to gracefully let it go.
And that's, and you know, he attested to that with his death, and that's
fairly convincing, you know,
that's a fairly convincing argument.
And it's one that I find, what's hard to tell
if I find it exactly credible,
but I don't find it incredible.
I mean, I certainly have noticed that as I've got older,
I've done things various,
I've, what would you say,
accomplished isn't exactly the right word. I've participated in many things that I'm pleased to have participated in them, but wouldn't
necessarily go back and participate in them again.
It's sort of, as if when you do something and you finish it, it's as if it's done.
You don't have to do it again and maybe it's
possible who knows that if you finish your life, whatever that might mean, if you
exhaust your life, then that's enough life, you know, that you've had enough.
And I mean, that doesn't mean that I try not to keep myself healthy and that I
want to die tomorrow. It doesn't mean any I try not to keep myself healthy and that I want to die tomorrow.
It doesn't mean any of that.
I'm trying to stick around as long as I can, but there's still that curiosity about the relationship
between life and mortality and the possibility that a life well-lived, exhausts itself in some fundamental sense,
so that you can be satisfied, let's say,
with what you were.
There is some psychological evidence that bears on this.
If you ask people what they regret,
especially as they get older, what they generally
port is things not done. So they don't regret so much mistakes they've made, although
of course people obviously regret mistakes they've made as well. So they don't
exactly regret sins of commission, right, errors that they've actively made, they miss, they torment themselves
for opportunities that had presented themselves that they did not, let's say, exploit or engage
in. And I think that's worth thinking about too, because one thing that I have become convinced about with regards to human consciousness,
which I think is equivalent to the spark of divinity in some sense that our fundamental
stories insist has been placed within us, is that human consciousness is that faculty
that confronts potential itself.
I think there's good neurological evidence for this,
by the way, for those of you who are scientifically minded,
because we build circuits within us for habitual action
that we've practiced many times that seem to run
in a very deterministic fashion.
And we are a strange combination of deterministic
and non-deterministic
as far as I can tell, but what our consciousness seems to be for is to encounter those things
that we have not yet encountered. And those things that we have not yet encountered seem
to me to be those things that have not yet been brought into being. And so you could say that what our consciousness is for is for
the encounter with potential, you know, that our consciousness is for the, it's not for
the past, it's not even for the present, it's to transform the future into the present.
And really that that's what our consciousness does. And when you wake up in the morning,
you have a new day ahead of you and the day could take you in very many directions.
And the weeks and the years, all of that can take you in very many directions.
And you have some apprehension about what those directions might be.
You have some apprehension about what role your choices might make in
transforming that potential into one form of
transforming that potential into one form of actuality or another, I mean you certainly know that there are dreadful mistakes that you might be very tempted
to make that would produce all manner of hell around you and still be tempted to
do it. It seems like it's sitting there right in front of you as a possibility.
You also know that you know you could haul yourself up out of bed and attend
to your duties and do the sorts of things
that you're supposed to and set a few things right that day
and that week and that likely things would at least not
be worse and they would probably be better.
And I believe that I do believe that I don't understand
how this can be the case.
I don't understand how it is that consciousness can function in that way because I think't understand how this can be the case. I don't understand how it is that consciousness can function
in that way, because I think to understand
that we would have to understand what it means
for the future to be only potential rather than actuality
and who the hell understands that.
I mean, no one.
And then we'd have to understand how it is
that our conscious choices and our conscious ethical choices transform that potentiality into actuality, into reality, into the present
and the past.
But we certainly act as if we believe that that's what we do.
We upgrade ourselves, for example, when we do a bad job of it, we're upset with our children
and those we love, if we don't believe that they're living up to their potential, we're
guilty and ashamed when we make choices that we feel are inappropriate. We understand to
some degree that the manner in which time lays itself out has something to do with the
ethics of our choice. And again, I would say that's a very deep idea. I think
it's the most true idea I know. It's very emphasized that idea, emphasized in ancient
religious stories, such as those that are outlighted in Genesis, when Genesis with its strange insistence that God is that which brings order out of chaos,
formless potential, generates the world out of formless potential, and that we're somehow
made in that image, which seems to me to be the case.
And at the proper way, by the way, to go about acting in that image is to act in relationship to the potential that confronts you with truth
and with courage, with careful articulation.
That's the logos and that if you do that, then what you bring forth is good.
So anyways, those are all background ideas that are associated with 12 rules for life
and they have a bearing on this question that I want to answer tonight and so I'm gonna sit
I have some notes which I don't usually use but I'm gonna use them tonight because I haven't got everything
about this particular
notion memorized in some sense yet because I'm still working it out but that should work out okay.
So we'll see what happens.
So yeah, yeah, well good. So Windows worked, that's always good.
I've seen it not work sometimes when Bill Gates demonstrates it and that's,
that's going to be very embarrassing, although I would
say all things considered he seems to have done quite well.
All right, so here's the question that came up last night, and this is a strange question
for what's essentially a political show.
Near the end, gentlemen on videotape came up and he discussed the topic of human dignity.
It's not a topic you hear a lot about. There's a lot of topics that are sort of related to
human beings that you don't hear a lot about anymore. You don't hear a lot about nobility.
You don't hear a lot about endurance, let's say,
stalwartness, courage, dignity.
Those aren't values that we discuss much.
Responsibility being another one,
which is one I'm quite thrilled about, all
things considered, because I think it's the pathway to meaning itself.
But so his was the topic of human dignity and he asked us question, do you believe in God?
And then he said as a Catholic, I don't see any other way that we can have a universe
with dignity.
And so I'm not so concerned about the second part of his commentary, although I might get
to that.
But the first part, do you believe in God, is a question that's been leveled at me many
times.
And I'm going to risk other people on the panel, and I'm going to just review what they
said briefly,
and then I'm going to talk about what I said,
and then I'm going to fix what I said, I hope,
so that it's better, at least that's the plan.
So Terry Butler, who was a laborer,
is a laborer, front bencher, said,
I'm agnostic, people are inherently valuable because they are people.
And no, that doesn't work out.
It's one of those one minute answers,
except it's actually only 10 seconds,
because you can make the opposite argument
and people do all the time, like the club of Rome, for example, which was an organization in Rome, logically enough,
formed in the 60s, it was very much concerned about that terribly detrimental
effect that human beings were having on the planet.
And I believe it was one of the Club of Rome members who coined the idea,
and if it wasn't, it was someone who was thinking
exactly the same way.
So it works out either way, that human beings were something
approximating a cancer on the planet,
because of all the terrible things we were doing
ecologically.
And so forth, that was back when people believed
we were going to overpopulate the planet to such a degree
by the year 2000 that there would be widespread
privation and starvation, which by the way, if you haven't noticed, there isn't.
And you know, if you look at the terrible things that people do, apart
from the dispoiling of the natural environment, let's say, there's all the,
you know, malevolence that's associated with human interactions and also human social
systems. And it isn't so obvious as a consequence of that, that you can make
a straightforward case that human beings are inherently valuable merely because
they're human beings, because you can eat me, can equally logical case from
first principles that they're inherently well destructive,
or that they should be perhaps limited in their ability
to procreate, or that they are a catastrophe for the planet
as a whole, or that our entire history is nothing,
but a sequence of un, what would you call, un-requited
malevolenceence and that people
generally can't be trusted.
And so I don't find that answer particularly satisfying.
I think it's a, it's just self-referential.
People are inherently valuable because they are people.
It's like, well, you don't really get anywhere with an answer like that.
So she's agnostic, but then she has this idea, despite her agnosticism, that you can make
the case a priori with nothing butressing it, that people are somehow inherently valuable
and it seems to me that that requires a little more depth and a little more explanation for it to actually be convincing. You know, it's like it's not
obvious to me that people themselves think that they're valuable all the time
often they don't think that at all and they don't certainly don't think that
often when they're depressed. They certainly don't think that when they're
suicidal. They don't really think that when they're ashamed or guilty or
frustrated or disappointed or angry or waking up
with three in the morning and tormenting themselves with their consciences, they don't necessarily think
that when they're fighting with their family or when they're upset at work or you know when things
go wrong in life. And so it's not so bloody obvious that people are inherently valuable. And
and then you might also notice that it's kind of easy to think that some people are inherently valuable. And then you might also notice that it's kind of easy
to think that some people are more valuable than others,
sort of like an animal farm, you know,
where the animals were all equal except that some animals
were more equal than others.
But it's very easy for human beings to think
about other human beings because no matter where you look
in human societies, there are rank orders of value, right?
And in any hierarchy that we produce that's associated with
some ability, we find that some people are so much better at
whatever it is that they're doing, that it's an absolute
miracle, and most people are absolutely dreadful at it.
And so, you know, if you were thinking about inherent value
as something associated with an approximation
of skill or competence, then it wouldn't be obvious from the structure of the world that
people were inherently valuable in that manner either, because there's such a rank order
difference in our ability to do things.
You know, and you might say, well, that kind of averages out across things, but I don't
think that's a very strong argument either.
So it's not, it's bloody well not obvious, I'll tell you.
It's not obvious where this idea that people are inherently valuable came from.
That's a tough one.
And in aristocratic states or tyrannical states, it's certainly not obvious at all
that there's any acceptance of the
notion that people are inherently valuable. It's like there's no necessary presumption
of innocence, for example, and you don't have any sovereign right to your own destiny,
like you're not granted the rights, not granted, because that's the wrong way of thinking
about it. Your rights as a sovereign individual who has the responsibility and the capability to
determine the destiny of the state itself don't exist, that doesn't exist as a concept
and so I don't see that there's anything there that speaks of inherent value either.
So it's by no means an obvious concept.
In fact, I think it's one of the least obvious
concepts that human beings have ever come up with that each of us in some strange manner
is to be attributed some divine spark, let's say, that makes us equal in some fundamental
way before God, you know, before the reality of the universe itself, even in relationship to our own laws.
I mean, if you want a miracle for an idea, that's, I can't think of one that's more unlikely than that.
So I've been puzzling over that for a very long time because I cannot understand why in the world that idea ever came to be or how in the world we ever agreed to act as if it was true.
It's really something and we should let that go. We let that idea, weird as it is and improbable as it is,
and you start to organize your social relationships in accordance with it,
well then they work.
So my rule too is treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping
and it's sort of predicated on the idea that regardless of your inadequacies and your malevolence,
which, you know, I'm sure you have many inadequacies and no shortage of malevolence just like everyone else,
regardless of that, you have a moral obligation, so that would be a responsibility,
to assume that despite all evidence that there's actually something of intrinsic worth about you and that as a consequence
your duty bound to treat yourself like that is true.
And then it turns out that if you do that,
well then your life gets better.
And I don't mean happier exactly,
although I would say it gets happier.
I mean it gets richer and more meaningful and deeper and more worthwhile and you become
more educated and you become wiser and you treat yourself with more respect and you're
a better model for other people and you're a better father or a better sister or better
mother, whatever it happens to be. It's and you're less ridden by that guilt that's,
that noise at you and shame that's there,
otherwise saying, you're not what you could be.
You're not what you could be.
And that's a hell of a voice to get rid of.
And it's certainly not one that's easy to ignore.
So that's a pretty good, that idea that there's something divine, let's say, that resides within you of ultimate worth,
even as a philosophical statement or a psychological statement rather than a metaphysical statement,
it seems to be a precondition for establishing
properly harmonious relationships with yourself. And that's man, that's worth thinking about a lot,
that you have, because you think,
you could think that in some sense,
you just own yourself, because people do kind of make
that claim, especially when they're trying to justify,
for example, they're right to suicide,
that it's your life, it's your body,
you're used to do what you will with.
And if that was true, well, then it would seem to me that life would be a lot more straightforward
because you would just tell yourself things that you would instantly obey and believe.
So first of all, you'd tell yourself all the things that you were going to do
and then you'd just run off and do them, which you don't, obviously,
because it's much more difficult than that.
And then you'd also say, well, enough of the guilt and the shame and the negative emotion
and the disillusionment and the vengefulness and all those things that make life hard,
the self-recrimination, it's like, what the hell do we need that for?
And if we're our masters of our own destiny and owners of our own fate,
then why can't we just command to ourselves that that be dispensed
with?
And like that doesn't work.
I've never seen anybody able to do that.
So I mean, you can fool yourself for very brief periods of time into thinking that that
might work, but it doesn't work.
And that's strange.
And this is one of the reasons I love the psychoanalysts, because they were really the people,
apart from the religious types, who figured out that,
whatever you are, you're not a unitary spirit
that's under your own dominion.
You know, you're something like a loose unity
of a multiplicity of spirits, many of which are doing
their own thing, which you're striving to bring
into some form of unity.
But even that unity isn't something that's under your control in any real sense.
It's a unity that has its own nature that you have to exist in relationship to.
And I would also say that that's one of the things that keeps people's feet firmly on the ground,
because otherwise it's easy to become ego-tistical and narcissistic.
If you think that you're the center of your own being,
in some fundamental sense, then you're only beholden
to yourself, you're sort of a self-created creature.
Perhaps you could think about it that way,
but it doesn't work like that.
It's like the ideal that constitutes the unity
that you might become then sort of manifests itself
as something that you could strive toward but aren't.
And it also serves as a judge.
It's the thing that keeps you up at night saying,
you know, there's some things you're just not attending to
and you should get at it because life is short and there's no shortage of trouble that you might end up
in and a wise person would attend to the dictates of his conscience and lay out his actions
in the world according to what he knows to be true and correct. And that is how people think.
And it isn't obvious that why we think that way.
That this is part of the reason that it seems to me
so obvious that we have a religious instinct
because I can't think of what else you would possibly call
that other than a religious instinct.
Nietzsche, when he proclaimed the death of God,
which by the way was no triumphant
proclamation, because he also mentioned that we would never find enough water to wash away the blood,
which was his, what would you call it, prognostication for the 20th century and a very accurate one at
that. He believed that we would, in some sense, have to become as gods in ourselves in order to
replace what we had lost.
He thought that the collapse of the Judeo-Christian structure would be absolutely catastrophic for
the West.
I believe that he was correct.
And that the way out of that would be that we'd have to create our own values. We'd have to take the place of what was once, let's say,
externalized and divine onto ourselves.
And you know, it's a hell of a theory.
And it's not, and Nietzsche is not an easy person
to criticize because you have to do a lot of reading
before you find someone who's one-tenth as smart as Nietzsche.
He has this funny line about
his books. It's really quite comical. He said, takes most writers a whole book to write what I
can write in a sentence. Then he said, then, no, they can't even manage it in a book. And that's
actually true. I mean, if you read Nietzsche and be on Good Neville, for example, you see that, that his thought is so powerful that it's
really a kind of miracle. What the psychoanalysts realized, though, this was
particularly Jung's contribution, I would say Carl Jung's contribution. He was a
great student of Nietzsche and real admirer of Nietzsche, and really
someone who was trying to solve the problem that Nietzsche had put forward,
which was, well, our underlying metaphysics, our religious structure, had collapsed.
And that was the story upon which our entire culture was based for better or worse.
And it collapsed. And we needed to do something about that.
And we were doing various things.
We were turning to fascism, let's say, or we were turning to communism, both ideological
replacements for more fundamental religious beliefs. But that need just suggestion that
we turn to ourselves to extract out our own values, to create our own values. Let me be more accurate about that.
Happened to be untrue because we weren't the sort of creatures who were actually capable
of doing that.
And that's, it's such, what's one of the reasons I love Jung and his biological take in some
sense towards human beings because Jung firmly believed, and I think all of the evidence
supports him, believed that human beings actually
had a nature that we weren't merely social constructions,
which we certainly aren't, despite what the social
constructionists insist upon forcing us to think
increasingly through legislative means,
and that we had to wrestle with what it was that we were.
Even though we're our own creatures in some sense,
we also have to wrestle with our intrinsic nature.
And we know about the nature part of that more and more.
I mean, we know more about our neural circuitry, for example.
We know that there's a circuit for rage and there's a circuit for fear and there's a biological
system for jealousy and there's a system for altruism and there's a circuit for play
and there's another one for pleasure and there's a complex circuit for negative emotion, pain
and anxiety and frustration and disappointment and guilt and shame, and we know that human beings
share that motivational structure not only with all other human beings, but certainly with
all mammals and almost all animals. And so that biological component of us is unbelievably deep,
right? It's tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and even billions of years old.
I read an interesting paper just the other day.
I tend to talk about lobsters more than the average person.
One of the points I made in 12 rules for life was that our neurochemistry, at least some
of it, is so similar.
It's been conserved so completely throughout the immense duration of evolution, hundreds
of millions of years, that lobsters, like human beings, appear to become the lobster equivalent
of depressed if they suffer a hierarchy defeat, and that if you give them chemicals that
are roughly analogous to human antidepressants, it perks
them right back up.
Their posture improves and they'll go off and fight.
And, you know, when I first discovered that, it just, well, it just blew me away.
I never recovered from it.
I thought, my God, really, that the continent is 350 million years of continuity in the
structure of those systems.
We know the serotonin system, which is the system I'm talking about,
does govern your observation of where you sit in a social hierarchy like it does for many, many animal species,
and as one consequence of that regulates your emotions so that if it sees that you're a relatively high status creature
in your local environment, then it tends to allow you to feel more positive emotion and
less negative emotion.
And if it sees you as a low status creature in your local comparative environment that it
does the opposite, it overwhelms you with negative emotion and suppresses positive emotion.
And that's really bad.
No one likes that.
It's it's it's fundamentally there's really nothing worse that can happen to you than that to have those emotions
re re
Adjusted in that manner so that the incentive reward and the motivation and the positive emotion
Vanishes from your life. So there's nothing to be enthusiastic or excited about.
And all of the negative emotions,
pain, disappointment, frustration, grief,
all of those terrible negative emotions
are tremendously magnified.
No one wants that.
It's the last thing you want.
Perhaps it's the last thing you want.
And that's partly why people are very, let's call it,
what would you say?
They're tightly, they're willing to fight for their position
in their status hierarchy and even for the existence
of the hierarchies themselves.
So anyways, it is the case that human beings have a nature
and we have to contend with that nature.
And so we can't
just create our own values.
And what Jung, especially Jung, Freud started it, but especially Jung, believed that, well,
in some sense, what had happened was that we had lost the externalized religious narrative
that had been projected by our imagination out onto the world.
You know, you think about the constellations
and the names of the constellations and the idea that the skies were populated by gods.
You know, that was an externalization of our imagination, right, projected out into the world.
We were seeing the world through our imagination,
and which is exactly how we do see the world.
And as we proceed, we're better able to distinguish,
let's say, what's imagination from what's objective world,
but that doesn't mean the imagination disappears
or that it's without value,
because the imagination is part of what helps us,
let's say, confront the future,
because we do that with our imagination
and to compose things in possibility
before we realize them in actuality.
So for Jung, the world of God's just collapsed within back into the imagination,
and it was into the imagination that we had to go again to discover what we had lost,
to discover these lost values.
And that's a kin in some sense, I suppose, to rescuing your father from the belly of the whale,
a very brilliant, brilliant, intellectual tour de force
to manage that supposition, especially back when he did it.
And I think I see no evidence whatsoever
that he was wrong, given, as I said,
our radical inability to command ourselves as if we are our own in some
fundamental way. We seem subject to, now we seem subject to intractable moral laws.
And I'm not trying to make a case for the accuracy of those laws necessarily or for their
metaphysical origin, but I am trying to make a case for their psychological
and phenomenological reality.
You definitely experience them insofar as you suffer,
let's say, from the pricks and arrows of your own conscience.
And I doubt if there's a single person in this room
who doesn't regularly suffer in that manner.
And some of you suffer like that virtually all the time,
which can also be a problem.
In any case, it's interesting to note
that we're not exactly masters in our own houses.
And that's such an interesting thing to note,
because you think, well, if we're not masters
in our own houses, what is it?
Is it just a chaotic internal structure?
Is it merely the voice of nature and nature's various instinctual subsystems?
That doesn't seem to be correct because we do integrate them into something approximating
a unity.
There's more than just the basics of nature.
We have language, we have communication, we have culture, we build
up above nature, something that's more than nature, but we're still beholden to it. The question
is, well, what are we beholden to? What is this that we're beholden to? And socially, politically,
and individually, that we cannot escape from? Well, so that's part of the question.
Do you believe in God?
Well, that's part of the answer, actually.
And, you know, it's no bleak answer.
But the first thing I'm trying to say is,
try controlling yourself.
Try acting as if you're the fundamental source
of your own values independent of any,
what would you call a transcendent
ethical structure?
To see if you can do that.
But try it for a week, try it for a month.
I've never met anybody that could do it, not even for a moment.
I mean, I don't know how many of you have read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, but I would
highly recommend that if you're interested in this sort of thing, because it is the definitive study of this idea, because in crime and punishment
the protagonist commits the perfect murder, and he has his reasons for it.
And many reasons, because Dostyewski didn't mess around when he wanted to give someone
reasons, he gave them reasons, and he rescullnikov, the main character, had reasons for murder,
and then he commits his murder and he gets away with it.
But things don't go well for Raskolnikov, because one of the things he finds out is that
the Raskolnikov that you were before you committed the murder is not the same as the
Raskolnikov as you are after you've committed the murder.
And there's a dividing line there that you don't, it's like the red pill, I guess, right?
It's like, that's the matrix, correct?
The red pill?
And once there's certain actions, once you take them, there's no going back.
And so that's what crime and punishment is about.
And Ryskolnikov torches himself to death, well, not literally,
but metaphysically, psychologically,
because he cannot tolerate breaking the great moral code.
And so it's a great book.
It's truly a great book.
And it's also extraordinarily, it's a murder mystery thriller,
as well as being a deep philosophical book.
So if you're in the mood for a murder mystery thriller that's also a deep philosophical
book, then that's the one for you.
So now, one of the other speakers on the panel, Van Badham, who described was described not by me as a writer, activist, and Twitter queen,
which is I think like being the red queen in in Ellison Wonderland, something like that. I
went on her Twitter site today to find out how many followers she has, but apparently I'm not one of them because I'm
blocked.
And I kind of surprises me because I didn't know that I'd ever tried to follow her.
But anyways, she said, and this was interesting, she said, I'm a Christian animarxist, and I thought, no.
You can only be a Christian animarxist if you, well, there's a couple of ways.
One is that you just want to be all things that are good at once, regardless of their
internal contradictions.
And so that would be one reason.
And another reason would be that you don't know anything about Christianity or Marxism.
And then the next would be that you're just compartmentalized.
You know, like there's this idea that people can't hold to contradictory thoughts in their mind at the same time.
Well, that idea was formulated by someone
who's never met a human being.
Because you can hold like 50 contradictory thoughts
in your head at the same time.
As you know, whenever you argue with someone that you love
because you love them and maybe you even like them,
but you also hate them and you wish
that you could just crush them right there and then.
And so that's a lot of contradictory ideas.
And that's probably only like half the contradictory ideas
that are running through your mind at the moment.
So man, you're so full of contradictions,
that it's just beyond belief.
And the only time, I mean, I know this
because I read undergraduate essays. And what's interesting about undergraduate essays
is it's so interesting because the undergraduate
will make a claim in paragraph one,
and then in paragraph seven will make the opposite claim
and they won't notice that they're intellectually
and commensurate.
And that might happen 30 times in the essay.
And the reason that works is because what they haven't
been called on the paradoxes, but also because they haven't
had to live the paradoxes through.
Because you really only straighten out your thought when you
have impulse A and impulse B,
and they conflict at the same time, right?
And you can either do one or the other, but not both.
You know, if it's A today and B tomorrow, well, then you can be,
you can hold those ideas simultaneously.
But if it's A or B right now, then you have to decide,
is A more important or is B more important?
You have to put them in a hierarchy. And then you have to act them out, and you have to decide is A more important or is B more important. You have to put them
in a hierarchy, and then you have to act them out, and you have to see what happens. And
so then you find out if you're full of contradictions, and part of the way that you iron out your
contradictions, which is very, very hard to do, is that you go out and you do a whole bunch
of things in the world, like Socrates did, you have your adventure in the world, and you put your ideas to the test, and those that work out in a paradoxical or counterproductive manner,
you dispense with or put lower on the priority list or something like that, and that's how
you discover that you can't hold in commensurate views simultaneously.
Carl Jung said that something like paradoxical views that are not made conscious will be played out in the world as fate.
And that's really worth thinking about too.
So if you have your, let's call it your typical negative experience.
You know, this thing that just keeps, seems to just keep happening to you, bad luck, let's call it. It's highly probable that there's a set of ideas
that are occupying you, pre-occupying you,
possessing you, that are driving you
in this direction continually, and that you can't
or won't work out the contradiction,
and as a consequence, maybe you think
every woman is your mother, and you haven't noticed that you think that, and consequence, you know, maybe you think every woman is your mother
and you haven't noticed that you think that and that, you know, and then it is something
that people think because women are, or mothers are women and it's not about initial template
but you know, you've got to, you've got to modify it to some degree and you know, if that's
an unconscious idea that you have and you continue to play it out,
you may run into your continual, habitual, negative experience with women and you'll wonder
what the hell is wrong with women, but it isn't the women that has the problem, it's you.
And, you know, if you run into problems with women all the time, then it's highly probable
that the problem is you.
So, not always, but generally.
So, let's go into this Marxist and Christian idea here just for a minute.
So, we'll start with some of the ideas of Marx.
Well, Marx believed that people were basically socially constructed so that we were blank
slates and that whatever our nature was was given to us essentially by our surroundings,
but even more importantly by our social class, right, because Marx was a theorist of social
class and believed that the primary dispute, let's say, the primary motivator of human history, the primary driver of human history,
was something like the rich versus the poor, the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat,
and that was a consequence of your social upbringing, and that your group identity was paramount.
Okay, so there's nothing about that, it's vaguely Christian.
That's not how the Christian worldview works, not how the Judeo-Christian worldview works, because in that worldview, you're fundamentally an individual,
your nature is fundamentally attributable to you by God, you're fundamentally responsible to God,
and your, and history itself is something like the playing out of your relationship to the transcendent. So those things aren't even, those aren't the same.
They're not commensurate.
You can't believe both of them at the same time.
Marxism is a materialistic philosophy.
It's predicated on the idea that essentially, an idea that Dostoevsky criticized in great
depth was that if you just made people rich enough,
let's say, if you deprived them of their privation, if you equalize their economic status, let's say,
that the utopia would come to light upon earth. And you know, I have a certain amount of sympathy for a
viewpoint like that because, you know, who liked starvation and misery, there's nothing
positive to be said about that.
But I think Dostoevsky was right, too, and his criticism of Marxism, although he wasn't
directly aiming this at Marx, in notes from Underground, where he noted that if you gave
people what they wanted in terms of, let's say, bread and circuses, they had, as he said, nothing to do,
but eat cakes and busy themselves
with the continuation of the species,
which is kind of a nice phrase.
The first thing they would do was take a hammer
and smash things just so that something improbable
and strange would happen, just so that we could have our way.
And it's kind of a recapitulation of the idea of original sin
in Dostoevsky's subtle manner,
is that we're the sorts of creatures that, you know,
what did he say?
We're ungrateful.
That's the thing that primarily distinguishes us from animals,
is we're ungrateful and that we can curse.
That was what he thought made us different than animals.
And that if, even if we got what we wanted materially, that wouldn't satisfy us because we're
not the sorts of creatures that can be satisfied with material possessions, let's say material
comfort, because it isn't even obvious that we're after comfort.
I mean, what do you want?
You want to just lay in a feather bed and eat peal grapes all day?
I mean, maybe for an hour or so,
that might not be a bad idea, but you know, it's going to get dull pretty quick. You're going to go
out looking for trouble. And it's certainly possible that the more material resources and the easier
they were to get that you have at your disposal, the more creative ways you're going to find to
cause yourself trouble when you go out and look for trouble.
And so, and that's a testament to the human spirit.
And Dostoevsky knew this, is like,
well, whatever we're here for,
it isn't the utopia of equal material distribution.
That's not, we're not, we're not looking to be fed and asleep,
you know, and I don't know what it is that we're looking for.
God only knows.
Maybe what we're looking for is to continually keep looking,
something like that.
I mean, that's the sorts of creatures that we are.
But the materialist philosophy is that,
well, if you just provided for people economically,
problem over and no wrong.
I mean, most of you are as given that you're,
you're going to be ill in one way or another
and that you're still subject to mortality
and all of the terrible natural limitations
that human beings are characterized by.
Your mouth is well off as you're gonna get.
You know, the economic data already
show that once you have enough money, so that bill collectors aren't chasing you, which
basically puts you say at the, kind of in the upper reaches of the working class or maybe
the lower end of the middle class, something like that, that additional money has absolutely
no effect whatsoever on your self-reported well-being,
which is something like a combination of positive emotion
and absence of negative emotion.
So you might like to think that, you know,
if you were rich, your life would be better,
and maybe it would be somewhat better,
but it wouldn't be as much better as you might hope.
And that's because you'd still have most of the problems
that people have, you know, you'd still maybe
wouldn't get along with your sister and you'd still get divorced
and maybe you'd even be more likely to.
And there'd still be illnesses that would be set.
You'd be able to deal with them perhaps with some degree of more urgency.
But, and you'd still have the problem with what the hell your life is for and what you're
doing on the planet and how to conduct yourself in the proper way.
So we don't want to be too naive about materialism, even though we don't want to be ungrateful
for its advantages.
Mark's also believed, while I said this already, that history was basically characterized
by the war of socioeconomic groups.
That's been transformed more recently into the war of identity groups, which is
the same damn thing. And it's the same old wolf in new sheep's clothing as far as I'm concerned.
The best way to conceptualize human beings is whatever your damn identity is, maybe it's sex
for you and it's ethnicity for you and it's gender for you and God only knows what it is for you.
ethnicity for you and it's gender for you and God only knows what it is for you. And that's who you identify with.
And all there is in the world, and this is the postmodernist view, is hierarchies of
people in these identity groups struggling for dominion.
And that's a quasi-Marxist viewpoint.
It's just a variant of the bourgeoisie versus proletariat theory of history, which is a foolish theory,
as far as I'm concerned.
And certainly not one that we need to take forward
into the 21st century, although we seem destined to insist
that we do so.
He believed that the revolutionary overthrow
of the oppressor class was necessary and morally demanded and that
turns out to be a little bloodier than I would say the typical Christian
Judeo-Christian ethic might require because it doesn't require you to take up
arms against your evil overlords and well put them in gulags and kill them by
the millions for example and that to me seems to be an important difference.
There's no, in the Judeo-Christian tradition,
there's no guilt, there's no group guilt, right?
You're guilty and you're guilty of different things,
or presume, and that's your problem,
but maybe you're also innocent, who knows,
but whatever, it's on you.
It's not a consequence of your racial heritage, your ethnicity, or your gender,
or any of those things.
It's between you and God, let's say, or it's between you and the state,
even, but at least it's between you and the state or God.
It's not like, well, your father was a factory owner, let's say your
grandfather, and so it was perfectly reasonable during the Russian revolution and the red
terror to vacuum you up along with your whole family and do away with you because you'd
been irredeemably tainted by your bourgeoisie past. So that's another place where Marxism and Judeo Christianity are, they're not just different.
Like they're opposite.
You know, it's not just one and two.
These are like seriously different ideas.
And so there's another reason you can't be a Marxist and a Christian, as if you're in.
And then there's the idea that Marx had that religion
was the opiate of the masses, which
doesn't exactly sound like.
I've always thought religion was the opiate of the masses.
But communism, Marxism was the methamphetamine of the masses. let's say, yeah, the
myth of the masses, we had no idea with regards to
opi. So here's what Marx has to say about religion. The
abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the
people is the demand for their real happiness to call on
them to give up their illusions about their condition is
to call on them to give up their illusions about their condition,
is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. It's interesting to me,
because it's not like the Judeo-Christian story was really a happy one, as far as I can tell.
You know, I mean, there was heaven, but the chances you were going to get in, man, that was low.
it in, man, that was low. And mostly it was fair bit of original sin, you know, and a fair bit of you wrestling with all of your inadequacies and your proclivity towards malevolence, to
pick up your cross, to bear your suffering, to understand that, you know, there was a war
in your soul between the forces of good and evil. It's like how that's an opiate is beyond
me. I mean, if I was going that's an opiate is beyond me.
I mean, if I was going to design an opiate that made people
feel better, I'd certainly dispense with a fair bit of that.
It's like, whatever you do is OK.
We could start with that.
There's certainly no hell.
That's something we're going to get rid of right away.
Little less guilt and shame would be.
It can be like a hippie cult in the 1960s, you know,
with little more marijuana and some free sex,
something like that.
So I don't really understand the illusion idea.
There is Marx's criticism, I suppose,
of the belief of the great father in the sky,
who still doesn't seem to me to be that,
like, he's sort of still kind of a nightmarish creature
of things considered, since at least in principle, he's sort of still kind of a nightmarish creature of things considered
since at least in principle he's keeping track of everything you do, even more than you
are and that's not such a good thing, but whatever.
So it's a foolish criticism, as far as I can tell, but doesn't matter, he's still criticized
it.
The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo, the criticism of that veil of tears
of which religion is the halo.
Criticism, meaning his, has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain,
not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation,
but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. That's something that plenty
of Marxists did, I can tell you. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act, and fashion, his reality,
like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses,
so that he will move around himself as his own true son, SUN.
Yeah, well that's Marxism in a nutshell, all right. I mean, that's like that's the fundamental
definition of pathological narcissism, so that he will move around himself as his own true son,
right? Religion is only the illusory son which revolves around man as long as he does not
revolve around himself. And you know, generally, we don't use that as an insult. He only revolves
around himself. Isn't that an insult? And is there reason for that? Don't we assume that there's
something that you should be revolving around that isn't just yourself? You know, it could be many
things, you know, it could be, well, someone you love, that would be a start, could be a child, could be your partner in life, it could be your family in extension, could be your community,
it could be some noble ideal that you're trying to serve, to be something other than you
as the primary center of the universe around which, well, you and presumably everything
else revolves, so I don't really see that as a particularly wise,
what would you call it, philosophy,
and as it manifested itself in the world,
you know, I would say Stalin probably
revolved around himself quite nicely since,
and don't you think?
I mean, if you had to pick someone
who was revolving around himself,
it would be a pretty decent competition
between Mao and Stalin, and that didn't seem to be
that didn't seem to be for the best.
So that's something to consider as well.
The Marxists believe that religion hindered human development
and the Soviets and the Maoists instituted state atheism,
apart from the worship of their leaders, of course.
And then I'm going to read you a poem by Marx.
This is a good one.
I found this a while back.
God, it's a rough poem.
And you want to let your imagination sort of, I would say, let your imagination loose with
this poem, which is what you should do with a poem.
And imagine the sort of state of mind that you have to be into right a poem like this.
And then also imagine, as you should, that poetry, like dreams,
or the birth, it's a birthplace of thought, with my undergraduates often,
especially ones that are really obsessed with ideas,
they'll often put really bad poetry in their essays.
And I'm not saying that in a cynical way,
because bad poetry can have good ideas in it.
It's hard to write good poetry, you know?
But the thing is often an idea that's extraordinarily
emotional in content will manifest itself as a poem
before it is able to articulate itself
out into a fully expressed philosophy.
And so I see this with my undergraduates, they'll really be obsessed with something that's bothering them,
and they'll write some poem often about a personal experience.
And then as I help them shape the essay, they kind of unfold the poem into an articulated statement about the structure of reality.
And so you could say, well, you know, we're all embedded in the dream.
We know that.
You go to sleep every night and you dream.
You're embedded in your imagination.
If you're forbidden to dream, if you're deprived of your dreams, you will lose your mind.
That's been experimentally demonstrated quite nicely on animals, but also on human beings.
You have to dream.
You have to enter that realm of incoherent imagination and possibility in order to maintain
your sanity, which is extraordinarily interesting and very strange.
And I would say poetry exists on the border between the dream and the fully articulate
wakefulness.
It's the place where the image of the dream meets the
articulated speech of full consciousness.
And so you can think about that with regards to this poem.
Invocation of one in despair.
So, a God has snatched from me all my all in the curse and rack of destiny.
All his worlds are gone beyond recall.
Nothing but revenge is left to me.
On myself revenge all proudly wreak.
On that being that enthroned Lord make my strength a patchwork of what's weak, leave my better self without reward.
I shall build my throne high overhead, cold, tremendous shall it summit be, for its bullwork, superstitious dread,
for its martial,
blackest agony,
who looked upon it with a healthy eye,
shall turn back, struck deathly pale and dumb,
clutched by blind and chill mortality,
may his happiness prepare its tomb.
And the Almighty's lightning shall rebound from that massive iron giant. If he brings my walls and towers down,
eternity shall raise them up, defiant.
Well, I would say that's the sort of poem that would be written by someone who revolved
around himself as his own true son.
And I would also say that given what we know about what happened as a consequence of the
instantiation of Marxist doctrine that this is a truly
horrifying piece of literature to contemplate written by the way when Marx was
rather young. So then the question came to me, do I believe in God? And I don't
like that question. And people have complained at me a lot, and I'm sure they have the reasons
because they don't like my answers.
And I have two answers.
They've kind of become stock, which is not a good thing.
But they're the best approach.
I can't figure out why I don't like the question exactly.
I've got three sort of burgeoning hypotheses.
One was, it's none of your damn business,
that's the first one.
So it's like a privacy issue.
Like it seemed to me to be a question
that was too private to be answered properly.
And so, and you know, you could consider that a cop out,
maybe it is.
And then another one was, well, what do you mean by believe?
Like do you mean the words? Do you mean to say the words? I believe in God. Does that indicate
that you believe in God? Like, I don't know what you mean by believe exactly. Because,
and that's got me in trouble too, because, you know, people think that attempting to
clarify the meaning of words is an attempt
to escape from the question when it's actually an attempt to specify the question.
I mean, is what you believe what you say or what you act out?
Now, I would say to some degree it's both, but if push comes to shove, as far as I'm concerned,
what you believe is what you act out, not what you say.
And if you're an integrated person, then what you act out and what you say are the same thing. And then you're a person
whose word can be trusted, right? Because what you say and what you do are isomorphic. They're
the same thing. But belief is instantiated in action. So I have also suggested that I act as if I believe in God or to the best of my ability.
And people aren't very happy with that either.
But, and then the third is that I'm afraid that he might exist, which I think is the most
comical of the three answers and perhaps the most accurate one.
But then, but then I was thinking about this today when I was thinking about what I might
talk to you guys about, and I thought, well, let's go into this a little bit more. Let's say you say
you do believe in God. Say, I believe in God. It's like, okay, well that's hypothetically pretty
impressive, I would say. It's like you believe that there's a divine power that oversees everything that is fundamentally
ethical, that's watching everything you do.
Welcome to season 2, episode 15 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
I'm Michaela Peterson, Dr. Peterson's daughter, manager,
favorite child, and heir to the Peterson Empire.
Believe me, it's an empire.
Mostly filled with ideas, crazy ideas,
interesting ideas, some that you'll even hear in this episode.
I'm kidding, I'm not his favorite child.
He has another one whose way less trouble than I am.
But also not as cute.
Anyway, back to reality,
healing's slow for my mom,
we're still stressed beyond belief. I never knew that you could be stressed into feelings that are
similar to actual depression. I had inflammatory depression, which is hell, and I've completely
managed with diet. But I didn't know that you could actually get stressed into something similar
to that. Not as bad, but like different. Well, I knew you could be stressed. What else is PTSD, right? But I didn't really know if you know what I mean. So that's a fun conclusion
I've come to recently. Situational depression is very real. Not as bad as what my food depression
was, but unpleasant and unless. Fortunately, working out seems to help a lot. So here's to taking a
bad situation and finally growing a booty, right? This week's episode is the first of a series of two.
I said three last week, but we switched it to two.
About Dad's belief in God and belief in God in general.
This week's episode is titled Who Dare's Say He Believes in God?
It's taken from one of Dad's 12 Rules for Life tour talks, which was delivered in Sydney
on February 26, 2019,
at the International Convention Center.
I hope you enjoy it.
When we return, Dad's lecture from Sydney, titled, Who Dare Say He Believes in God.
Please welcome my father, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. That coming to talk about the topics we're going to talk about tonight was the top priority in your life
But but let's see if we can
justify that
You know that might be a good that might be a good aim
See if we can make it worthwhile
so
To make your decision correct. So
You may know or not that I was on a television show last
night Q&A. Apparently you know that some of you anyways. I can't say I enjoyed it
really. Really it's funny you know like I think as I've got farther along in doing whatever it is
that I happen to be doing, I find those events more
and more stressful.
I don't know exactly what it is.
I think it's the proclivity of everything.
Everything has to be mangled in some sense into a pre-set format, you know,
and the fundamental format really is that everything has to be political, you know,
and everything isn't political, so that's not helpful when you're trying to
discuss things that aren't political.
And I mean, I'm not complaining about it, well, I suppose I am.
It's just, it's surprising to me how much it takes out of me, say, compared to doing an event like this,
which I really enjoy doing, like I spent a lot of time preparing, and there's a out of me, say, compared to doing an event like this, which I really enjoy
doing, like I spent a lot of time preparing, and there's a lot of you, and I really want
it to go well and all that, but this is much less dreadful. I guess that's right. And
you know, and then there's the strange constraints on format, you know, people ask very complex questions.
And then you have a minute to answer.
And, you know, there's something, there's something downright sinful about answering a really complicated question in a minute.
Because it sort of suggests that complex questions have answers that take one minute and they don't.
They have answers that take God.
Sometimes they take decades.
Sometimes they take thousands of years.
But of course, I can't expect a television show
to allow for thousands of years.
But the format itself works against the kind of thought
that's necessary to actually have the discussions that are necessary.
And so, anyways, having said all that, it went all right, I would say.
There were no nasty surprises, and particularly, and it was a civil discussion,
whether it was a productive discussion or not, is a different
matter.
But it wasn't an unproductive discussion, and so that's something.
But there was one question that came up, and I thought I would actually start talking
about that question tonight, because I've never been happy, I've been asked this question
a lot, and I've never been happy with the answer that I've given to it, and I've never been happy, I've been asked this question a lot, and I've never been happy with the answer that I've given to it,
and I've never really been able to exactly,
I've never been able to figure out exactly why I haven't been happy
with the question, and so I'm going to try to answer it properly tonight,
and then I'm going to talk more generally about 12 rules about the book.
Now, it's fine, this question is directly relevant to the book, and so it should make for a good
lead-in, but it'll enable us to talk about something that I think is really very much worth
talking about, and I hope I can formulate the problem properly and then formulate the proper answer, at least more coherently than
I've managed.
See, I have this, I followed this rule for a very long time, which I actually found was
a socratic rule.
I didn't know this until, really quite recently, until I wrote 12 rules for life, Socrates said that he had a daemon by which he
meant an internal voice.
And he said that he always listened to it, and then that was what made him different
from other people, that he always listened to this voice.
And the voice didn't tell him what to do, he told him what not to do. And when the Delphiocorical proclaimed that
Socrates was the wisest man in Greece, in Athens, and in Greece, one of the
reasons Socrates attributed her decision to deem him the wisest man was because
well she said he knew he knew nothing, but he knew in
part that he knew nothing, at least in part because he was always listening to the voice
of his Daemon, his internal conscience.
And then I just found out the other day that the word democracy comes from the same root,
which is really interesting.
Like, I had no idea that that was the case, because what it suggests, it's so fascinating
looking at how words are related to one another historically,
because you find strange connections between ideas
that you would never imagine,
and sometimes they're unbelievably profound.
And so the basic, what happened historically
is that, well, so there was a concept
of the Socratic Daemon.
Now, it was the Daemon that Socratic's
listened to when he decided that he was not going to run
when the Athenians decided that they were going to put
him to death, the Athenian aristocrats,
because they thought that he was corrupting the youth
by talking to them and telling them the truth.
And I suppose that's certainly grounds for chasing
someone out of your town.
Anyways, they gave him plenty of notice
because they didn't really want to kill him.
They just wanted to get the old goat,
the hell out to some other city
where he could cause trouble there.
And his friends were making plans
to scurry him away from Athens.
And he went out and consulted his Damon,
and it told him not to leave.
And that was a big shock to Socrates,
because of course he didn't want to die.
And but yet he had decided that he was always going
to follow the dictates of the Damon.
And so he did something that only a philosopher would do was reverse his
assumptions. He thought, oh, well, I was afraid of dying. And my Damon said,
stick around. And so I must be wrong. It must be worse to be to risk not following
that internal voice than to risk this form of death. You know, it's just question you have to really wrestle with.
And one is one his friends weren't very happy about.
But in any case, he didn't run.
And we have two good court-like documents attesting to that,
one written by someone named Xenophon and the other by Plato.
They're very interesting documents.
I would highly recommend reading them.
They're very short.
And one of the reasons I would recommend reading them,
apart from the fact that they're fascinating,
and short, is that you also get the sense
from what Socrates wrote that because he had lived
his life fully, no know, No-holes barred in some sense that he could let it go when the time came and
And that's an interesting thing, you know because well, it's a question. I think that we all
wrestle with we should is like well, is there a purpose to our life and well, that's a hard question and then if there is a purpose
life and well that's a hard question. And then if there is a purpose, well how is it expressed? And then if there is a purpose and our lives are truncated as they are by death,
then how can that purpose have significance? And those are hard questions. But Socrates'
experience seemed to be that he had lived enough in his life so that when push came to shove, which it certainly did, he was able
to gracefully let it go. And that's, and you know, he attested to that with his death.
And that's fairly convincing, you know, I mean, that's a fairly convincing argument. And
it's one that I find, what's hard to tell if I find it exactly credible, but I don't find it incredible.
I mean, I certainly have noticed that as I've got older, I've done things various,
I've, what would you say, accomplished isn't exactly the right word.
I've participated in many things that I'm pleased to have participated in them, but wouldn't
necessarily go back and participated in them, but wouldn't necessarily go back
and participate in them again.
It's sort of as if when you do something and you finish it, it's as if it's done.
You don't have to do it again.
And maybe it's possible who knows that if you finish your life, whatever that might mean if you exhaust your life, then that's enough
life, you know, that you've had enough.
And I mean, that doesn't mean that I try not to keep myself healthy and that I want to
die tomorrow.
It doesn't mean any of that.
I'm trying to stick around as long as I can, but there's still that curiosity about the relationship between life
and mortality and the possibility that a life well-lived, exhausts itself in some fundamental
sense so that you can be satisfied, let's say, with what you were.
There is some psychological evidence that bears on this.
If you ask people what they regret, especially as they get older,
what they generally port is things not done.
So they don't regret so much mistakes they've made,
although, of course, people obviously regret mistakes they've made as well. So they don't exactly regret sins of commission, right, errors that they've actively made. They miss, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they did not, let's say, exploit or
engage in. And I think that's worth thinking about too, because one thing that I have become convinced
about with regards to human consciousness, which I think is equivalent to the spark of divinity in some sense that our fundamental stories insist has been placed within us,
is that human consciousness is that faculty that confronts potential itself.
I think there's good neurological evidence for this, by the way, for those of you who are scientifically minded, mind it because we build circuits within us for habitual action that we've practiced
many times that seem to run in a very deterministic fashion. And we are a strange
combination of deterministic and non-deterministic as far as I can tell. But what
our consciousness seems to be for is to encounter those things that we have not yet encountered.
And those things that we have not yet encountered seem to me to be those things that have not yet
been brought into being.
And so you could say that what our consciousness is for is for the encounter with
potential, you know, that our consciousness is for the, it's not for the past,
it's not even for the present,
it's to transform the future into the present,
and really that that's what our consciousness does,
and you wake up in the morning,
you have a new day ahead of you,
and the day could take you in very many directions,
and the weeks and the years, all of that,
can take you in very many directions,
and you have some apprehension about what those directions
might be, you have some apprehension about what those directions might be, you have some apprehension about what role your choices might make in transforming
that potential into one form of actuality or another.
I mean, you certainly know that there are dreadful mistakes that you might be very tempted
to make that would produce all manner of hell around you,
and still be tempted to do it.
It seems like it's sitting there right in front of you as a possibility.
You also know that you could haul yourself up out of bed and attend to your duties and
do the sorts of things that you're supposed to, and set a few things right that day and
that week and that likely things would at least not be worse and they would
probably be better. And I believe that I do believe that I don't understand how
this can be the case. I don't understand how it is that consciousness can function
in that way because I think to understand that we would have to understand what it
means for the future to be only potential
rather than actuality and who the hell understands that.
I mean, no one.
And then we'd have to understand how it is that our conscious choices and our conscious
ethical choices transform that potentiality into actuality, into reality, into the present
and the past.
And we certainly, what we certainly act is if we believe that that's what we do.
We upgrade ourselves, for example, when we do a bad job of it, we're upset with our children.
And those we love, if we don't believe that they're living up to their potential,
we're guilty and ashamed when we make choices that we feel are inappropriate.
We understand to some degree that the manner in which time lays itself out has something
to do with the ethics of our choice.
And again, I would say that's a very deep idea.
I think it's the most true idea I know. It's very emphasized, that idea emphasized in ancient religious stories,
such as those that are outlighted in Genesis,
or in Genesis with its strange insistence that God is that,
which brings order out of chaos,
formless potential,
generates the world out of formless potential,
and that we're somehow made in that image, which seems to me to be the case. which is the most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, common, most common, most common, common, most common, common, most common, most common, most common, most common, most common, common, most common, common, most common, common, most common, most common, most common, most common, common, most common, common, most common, most common, common, most common, most common, common, common, most common, common, most common, most common, common, common, most common, common, common, common, most common, common, common, common, common, most common, common, common, common, common, common, common, most common, common, common, common, common, common, common, most common, common, common, common, common, common, common, most common, common, common, common, common, common, common, common, common, articulation, that's the logos, and that
if you do that, then what you bring forth is good.
So anyways, those are all background ideas that are associated with 12 rules for life,
and they have a bearing on this question that I want to answer tonight.
And so I'm going to sit.
I have some notes which I don't usually use
But I'm gonna use them tonight because I haven't got everything about this particular
Notion memorized in some sense yet because I'm still working it out
But that should work out okay, so we'll see we'll see what happens
So yeah, yeah, well good.
So Windows work, that's always good.
I've seen it not work sometimes when Bill Gates demonstrates it,
and that's got to be very embarrassing.
Although I would say, you know, all things considered,
he seems to have done quite well.
All right, so here's the question that came up last night.
And this is a strange question for what's essentially
a political show.
Near the end, gentlemen on videotape came up,
and he discussed the topic of human dignity.
It's not a topic you hear a lot about.
There's a lot of topics that are sort of related to human beings
that you don't hear a lot about anymore.
You don't hear a lot about nobility.
You don't hear a lot about endurance, let's say,
stall, worthness, courage, dignity.
Those aren't values that we discuss much.
Responsibility being another one,
which is one I'm quite thrilled about,
all things considered, because I think it's the pathway
to meaning itself.
But so his was the topic of human dignity and
he asked us a question. Do you believe in God? And then he said, as a Catholic, I don't see any other
way that we can have a universe with dignity. And so I'm not so concerned about the second part
of his commentary, although I might get to that, but the first part, do you believe in God, is a question that's been leveled
at me many times.
And I'm going to risk other people on the panel,
and I'm going to just review what they said briefly,
and then I'm going to talk about what I said,
and then I'm going to fix what I said, I hope,
so that it's better, at least that's the plan.
So Terry Butler, who was a laborer,
is a laborer, front bencher, said,
I'm agnostic, people are inherently valuable
because they are people.
And no, that doesn't work out,
it's one of those one-minute answers,
except it's actually only 10 seconds,
because you can make the opposite argument
and people do all the time,
like the Club of Rome, for example,
which was an organization in Rome, logically enough,
formed in the 60s, was very much concerned about the terribly detrimental effect that human
beings were having on the planet.
And I believe it was one of the club of role members who coined the idea, and if it wasn't,
it was someone who was thinking exactly the same way.
So it works out either way, that human beings were something approximating a cancer on the
planet, you know, because of all the terrible things we were doing ecologically.
And so forth, that was back when people believed we were going to overpopulate
the planet to such a degree by the year 2000 that there would be widespread
privation and starvation, which by the way, if you haven't noticed, there isn't.
And, you know, if you look at the terrible things
that people do apart from the dispoiling
of the natural environment, let's say,
there's all the, you know, malevolence
that's associated with human interactions
and also human social systems.
And it isn't so obvious as a consequence of that, that you can make a straightforward case
that human beings are inherently valuable merely because they're human beings, because you
can eat me, can equally logical case from first principles that they're inherently well destructive
or that they should be perhaps limited in their ability to procreate
or that they are a catastrophe for the planet as a whole
or that our entire history is nothing
but a sequence of what would you call unrequited malevolence
and that people generally can't be trusted.
So I don't find that answer particularly satisfying.
I think it's a, it's just self-referential.
People are inherently valuable because they are people.
It's like, well, you don't really get anywhere
with an answer like that.
So she's agnostic, but then she has this idea,
despite her agnosticism, that you can make the case a priori
with nothing butressing it, that people are somehow
inherently valuable.
And it seems to me that that requires a little more depth
and a little more explanation for it to actually be convincing.
You know, it's not obvious to me that people themselves
think that they're valuable all the time.
Often they don't think that at all. They don't certainly don't think that often when they're depressed.
They certainly don't think that when they're suicidal.
They don't really think that when they're ashamed or guilty or frustrated or disappointed
or angry or waking up at three in the morning and tormenting themselves with their consciences.
They don't necessarily think that when they're fighting with their family or when they're
upset at work or, you know or when things go wrong in life.
And so it's not so bloody obvious that people are inherently valuable.
And then you might also notice that it's kind of easy to think that some people are more
valuable than others, sort of like an animal farm, you know, where the animals were all
equal except that some animals were more equal than others.
But it's very easy for human beings to think that
about other human beings, because no matter where you look
in human societies, there are rank orders of value, right?
And in any hierarchy that we produce that's associated
with some ability, we find that some people are so much better
at whatever it is that they're doing,
that it's an absolute miracle, and most people are absolutely dreadful at it.
And so, you know, if you were thinking about inherent value as something associated with
an approximation of skill or competence, then it wouldn't be obvious from the structure
of the world that people were inherently valuable in that manner either, because there's such a rank order difference in our ability to do things.
You know, and you might say, well, that kind of averages out across things, but I don't think
that's a very strong argument either. So it's not, it's bloody well not obvious. I'll tell you,
it's not obvious where this idea that people are inherently valuable came from. That's a tough one. And in aristocratic states or or tyrannical states, it's certainly not
obvious at all that there's any acceptance of the notion that people are
inherently valuable. It's like there's no necessary presumption of
innocence, for example, and you don't have any sovereign right to your own destiny, like you're not granted the rights,
not granted, because that's the wrong way of thinking about it.
Your rights as a sovereign individual who has the responsibility and the capability to
determine the destiny of the state itself don't exist, that doesn't
exist as a concept. And so I don't see that there's anything there that speaks of inherent
value either. So it's by no means an obvious concept. In fact, I think it's one of the least
obvious concepts that human beings have ever come up with that each of us in some strange manner is to be attributed some divine spark, let's
say, that makes us equal in some fundamental way before God, you know, before the reality
of the universe itself, even in relationship to our own laws.
I mean, if you want a miracle for an idea, that's, I can't think of one that's more unlikely
than that.
So, I've been puzzling over that for a very long time because I cannot understand why
in the world that idea ever came to be or how in the world we ever agreed to act as if
it was true.
It's really something.
And we should let that go.
We let that idea go to our great peril.
It's a fundamental, remarkable, fundamental idea.
And what's so interesting about it too
is that once you have that idea, weird as it is,
and improbable as it is, and you start
to organize your social relationships in accordance with it,
well then they work.
So my rule too is treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping.
And it's sort of predicated on the idea that regardless of your inadequacies and your
malevolence, which I'm sure you have many inadequacies and no shortage of
malevolence, just like everyone else. Regardless of that, you have a moral obligation,
so that would be a responsibility,
to assume that despite all evidence
that there's actually something of intrinsic worth about you
and that as a consequence,
your duty bound to treat yourself like that is true.
And then it turns out that if you do that, to treat yourself like that is true.
And then it turns out that if you do that, well then your life gets better.
And I don't mean happier exactly,
although I would say it gets happier.
I mean it gets richer and more meaningful and deeper
and more worthwhile and you become more educated
and you become wiser and you treat yourself with more
respect and you're a better model for other people and you're a better father or better
sister or better mother, whatever it happens to be.
It's and you're less ridden by that guilt that's that noise at you and shame that's there
otherwise saying you're not what you could be, you're not what you could be.
And that's a hell of a voice to get rid of.
And it's certainly not one that's easy to ignore.
So that's a pretty good, that idea that there's something divine,
let's say, that resides within you of ultimate worth,
even as a philosophical statement or a psychological statement rather than a metaphysical statement,
it seems to be a precondition for establishing properly harmonious relationships with yourself.
And that's man, that's worth thinking about a lot, you know, that you have to,
because you think, you could think that in some sense you just own yourself, you know,
because people do kind of make that claim, especially
when they're trying to justify, for example, they're right to suicide, that, you know, it's
your life, it's your body, your years to do what you will with.
And if that was true, well, then it would seem to me that life would be a lot more straightforward
because you would just tell yourself things that you would instantly obey and believe. So first of all,
you'd tell yourself all the things that you were going to do and then you just run off and do them,
which you don't obviously, because it's much more difficult than that. And then you'd also say,
well, enough of the guilt and the shame and the negative emotion and the disillusionment and
the vengefulness and all those things that make life hard, the self-recrimination, it's like, what the hell do we need that for?
And if we're our masters of our own destiny and owners of our own fate,
then why can't we just command to ourselves that that be dispensed with?
And like, that doesn't work. I've never seen anybody able to do that.
So, I mean, you can fool yourself for very brief periods
of time into thinking that that might work, but it doesn't work.
And that's strange.
And this is one of the reasons I love the psychoanalysts
say, because they were really the people,
apart from the religious types, who figured out
that whatever you are, you're not a unitary spirit that's under your own dominion.
You're something like a loose unity of a multiplicity of spirits, many of which are doing their own thing,
which you're striving to bring into some form of unity.
But even that unity isn't something that's under your control in any real sense.
It's a unity that has its own nature,
that you have to exist in relationship to.
And I would also say that that's one of the things
that keeps people's feet firmly on the ground,
because otherwise it's easy to become ego-tistical
and narcissistic, you know, if you think
that you're the center of your own being,
you know, in some fundamental sense,
then you're only, what,
you're only beholden to yourself, you're sort of a self-created creature, perhaps you
could think about it that way, but it doesn't work like that.
It's like the ideal that constitutes the unity that you might become, then sort of manifests
itself as something that you could strive toward but
aren't and it also serves as a judge. It's the thing that keeps you up at night
saying, you know, there's some things you're just not attending to and you should
get at it because life is short and there's no shortage of trouble that you might
end up in and a wise person would attend to the dictates of his conscience
and lay out his actions in the world according to what he knows to be true and correct.
And that is how people think. And it isn't obvious that we, why we think that way. This is part
of the reason that it seems to me so obvious that we have a religious instinct
because I can't think of what else you would possibly
call that other than a religious instinct.
Nietzsche, when he proclaimed the death of God,
which by the way was no triumphant proclamation
because he also mentioned that we would never find enough
water to wash away the blood,
which was his, what would you call it, prognostication for the 20th century and a very accurate one
of that.
He believed that we would, in some sense, have to become as gods in ourselves in order
to replace what we had lost.
He thought that the collapse of the Judeo-Christian structure would be absolutely
catastrophic for the West. And I believe that he was correct. And that the way out of that
would be that we'd have to create our own values. We'd have to take the place of what was once,
let's say, externalized and divine onto ourselves. And you know, it's a hell of a theory. And it's not, and Nietzsche is not an easy
person to criticize because you have to do a lot of reading before you find someone who's
one-tenth as smart as Nietzsche. He has this funny line about his books. It's really
quite comical. He said, takes most writers a whole book to write what I can write in a sentence.
Then he said, no, they can't even manage it in a book.
And that's actually true. I mean, if you read in each and be on Good Nebel, for example,
you see that, that his thought is so powerful that it's really a kind of miracle.
What the psychoanalysts realized though,
this was particularly Jung's contribution,
I would say Carl Jung's contribution,
he was a great student of Nietzsche,
a real admirer of Nietzsche,
and really someone who was trying to solve the problem
that Nietzsche had put forward,
which was, well, our underlying metaphysics,
our religious structure had collapsed,
and that was the story upon which our entire culture
was based for better or worse, and it collapsed.
And we needed to do something about that,
and we were doing various things.
We were turning to fascism, let's say,
or we were turning to communism, both ideological
replacements for more fundamental religious beliefs.
But that need just suggestion that we turn to ourselves to extract out our own values,
to create our own values.
Let me be more accurate about that.
Happened to be untrue because we weren't the sort of creatures who were actually capable
of doing that.
And that's a, it's such what's one of the reasons I love Jung and his biological take in some
sense towards human beings because Jung firmly believed, and I think all of the evidence
supports him, believed that human beings actually had a nature, you know, that we weren't merely social constructions,
which we certainly aren't, despite what the social constructionists insist upon forcing
us to think increasingly through legislative means, and that we had to wrestle with what
it was that we were, you know, even though we're our own creatures in some sense.
We also have to wrestle with our intrinsic nature.
And we know about the nature part of that more and more.
I mean, we know more about our neural circuitry, for example.
We know that there's a circuit for rage and there's a circuit for fear
and there's a biological system for jealousy and there's a system for altruism
and there's a circuit for play
and there's another one for pleasure
and there's a complex circuit for negative emotion,
pain and anxiety and frustration and disappointment
and guilt and shame.
And we know that human beings share that
motivational structure not only with all other human beings
but with certainly with all mammals
and almost
all animals. And so that biological component of us is unbelievably deep, right? It's
it's tens of millions, hundreds of millions and even and even billions of years old. I read
an interesting paper just the other day, you know, I tend to talk about lobsters more than the average person. And one of the points I made in
12 rules for life was that our neurochemistry, at least some of it, is so
similar. It's been conserved so completely throughout the immense duration of
evolution, hundreds of millions of years, thatbsters like human beings appear to become the lobster
equivalent of depressed if they suffer a hierarchy defeat, and that if you give them chemicals
that are roughly analogous to human antidepressants, it perks them right back up.
Their posture improves and they'll go off and fight.
And you know, when I first discovered that, it just, well, it just, it just blew me away. I never recovered from it. I thought, my God, really, that the, the
continent is 350 million years of continuity in, in, in the structure of those systems.
And, you know, we know the serotonin system, which is the system I'm talking about, does
govern your observation of where you sit in a social hierarchy like it does for many, many animal species,
and as one consequence of that regulates your emotions, so that if it sees that you're a relatively high status creature in your local environment,
then it tends to allow you to feel more positive emotion and less negative emotion, and if it sees you as a low status creature in your local comparative environment,
that it does the opposite.
It overwhelms you with negative emotion and suppresses positive emotion.
And so, you know, and that's really bad.
No one likes that.
It's fundamentally, there's really nothing worse that can happen to you than that,
to have those emotions re-adjusted in that manner,
so that the incentive reward and the motivation
and the positive emotion vanishes from your life.
So there's nothing to be enthusiastic or excited about,
and all of the negative emotions,
pain, disappointment, frustration, grief,
all of those terrible negative emotions
are tremendously
magnified. No one wants that. It's the last thing you want. Perhaps it's the last thing
you want. And you know, that's partly why people are very, let's call it, what would
you say? They're tightly, they're willing to fight for their position in their status hierarchy and even
for the existence of the hierarchies themselves.
So anyways, it is the case that human beings have a nature and we have to contend with
that nature and so we can't just create our own values.
And what Jung, especially Jung, Freud started it, but especially Jung believed that,
well, in some sense, what had happened was that we had lost
the externalized religious narrative
that had been projected by our imagination out onto the world.
You know, you think about the constellations
and the names of the constellations
and the idea that the skies were populated by gods, you know.
That was an externalization of our imagination, right, projected out into the world. We were
seeing the world through our imagination, and which is exactly how we do see the world.
And as we proceed, we're better able to distinguish, let's say, what's imagination from
what's objective world, but that doesn't mean the imagination disappears or that it's
without value, because the imagination is part of what helps us, let's say, confront the
future because we do that with our imagination and to compose things in possibility before
we realize them in actuality.
So for Jung, the world of God just collapsed within back into the imagination and it was
into the imagination that we had to go again to discover what we had lost,
to discover these lost values.
And that's a kin in some sense, I suppose, to rescuing your father from the belly of
the whale, a very brilliant, brilliant, intellectual tour de force to manage that supposition, especially back when he did it.
And I think I see no evidence whatsoever that he was wrong given, as I said, our radical
inability to command ourselves as if we are our own in some fundamental way.
We seem subject to, now we seem subject to intractable moral laws.
And I'm not trying to make a case for the accuracy of those laws necessarily,
or for their metaphysical origin.
But I am trying to make a case for their psychological and phenomenological reality.
You definitely experience them in so far as you suffer, let's say,
from the pricks and arrows of your own conscience.
And I doubt if there's a single person in this room who doesn't regularly suffer in that manner.
And some of you suffer like that virtually all the time, which can also be a problem.
In any case, it's interesting to note that we're not exactly masters in our own houses.
And that's such an interesting thing to note
because you think, well, if we're not masters
in our own houses, what is it?
Is it just a chaotic internal structure?
Is it merely the voice of nature
and nature's various instinctual subsystems?
That doesn't seem to be correct because we do integrate them into something approximating a unity.
There's more than just the basics of nature.
We have language, we have communication, we have culture.
We build up above nature something that's more than nature, but we're still beholden to it.
The question is, well, what are we beholden to?
What is this that we're beholden to?
And socially, politically, and individually,
that we cannot escape from?
Well, so that's part of the question.
Do you believe in God?
Well, that's part of the answer, actually.
And you know, it's no bleak answer.
But the first thing I'm trying to say is,
try controlling yourself. Try acting as if you're the fundamental source of your own
values independent of any, what would you call a transcendent ethical structure,
to see if you can do that. But try it for a week, try it for a month.
I've never met anybody that could do it, not even for a moment.
I mean, I don't know how many of you have read Dostoevsky's crime and punishment, but
I would highly recommend that if you're interested in this sort of thing, because it's the definitive
study of this idea, because in crime and punishment, the protagonist commits the perfect murder, and he has his reasons for it.
And many reasons, because Dosty Eski didn't mess around when he wanted to give someone
reasons, he gave them reasons, and Raskolnikov, the main character, had reasons for murder,
and then he commits his murder, and he gets away with it.
But things don't go well for Raskolnikov, because one of the things he finds out is that
the Skolnikov that you were before you committed the murder is not the same as the Skolnikov
as you are after you've committed the murder. And there's a dividing line there that you
don't, it's like the red pill, I guess, right? It's like, that's the matrix, correct? The red pill. And once there's
certain actions, once you take them, there's no going back. And so that's what crime
and punishment is about. And Ryszkolnikov tortures himself to death, well, not literally, but
metaphysically, psychologically, because he cannot tolerate breaking the great moral code.
And so it's a great book, it's truly a great book.
And it's also extraordinarily,
like it's a murder mystery thriller,
as well as being a deep philosophical book.
So if you're in the mood for a murder mystery thriller,
that's also a deep philosophical book,
then that's the one for you.
So, now, one of the other speakers on the panel, Van Badham, who described was described,
not by me, as a writer, activist, and Twitter queen, which is, I think, like being the red queen in Ellison, Wonderland,
something like that. I went on her Twitter site today to find out how many followers she has,
but apparently I'm not one of them because I'm blocked. And that kind of surprises me because I didn't know that I'd ever tried to follow her.
But anyways, she said, and this was interesting, she said,
I'm a Christian animarxist.
And I thought, no.
You can only be a Christian and a Marxist if you, well, there's a couple of ways.
One is that you just want to be all things that are good at once, regardless of their internal
contradictions.
And so that would be one reason.
And another reason would be that you don't know anything
about Christianity or Marxism.
And then the next would be that you're just compartmentalized.
You know, like there's this idea that people can't hold
two contradictory thoughts in their mind at the same time.
Well, that idea was formulated by someone
who's never met a human being because you can hold like
50 contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time as you know whenever you argue with someone that you love because you love them
And maybe you even like them
But you also hate them and you wish that you could just crush them right there and then and so like that's a lot of
Contradictory ideas and that's probably only like half the contradictory ideas
that are running through your mind at the moment.
So, man, you're so full of contradictions
that it's just beyond belief.
And the only time, I mean, I know this
because I read undergraduate essays.
And what's interesting about undergraduate essays
is it's so interesting because the undergraduate
will make a claim in paragraph one and then
in paragraph seven will make the opposite claim and they won't notice that they're intellectually
and commensurate and you know that might happen 30 times in the essay and the reason that
works is because what they haven't been called on the paradoxes,
but also because they haven't had to live the paradoxes through,
because you really only straighten out your thought when you have like impulse A and impulse B,
and they conflict at the same time, right?
And you can either do one or the other, but not both. You know, if it's a
today and b tomorrow, well then you can be, you can hold those ideas simultaneously,
but if it's a or b right now, then you have to decide, is a more important or is
b more important, you have to put them in a hierarchy, and then you have to act
them out, and you have to see what happens. And so then you find out if you're
full of contradictions, and part of the way that you iron out your contradictions, which is very, very hard to do, is that
you go out and you do a whole bunch of things in the world. Like Socrates did, you have your
adventure in the world and you put your ideas to the test and those that work out in a paradoxical
or counterproductive manner, you dispense with or put lower on the priority list or something
like that, and that's how you discover that you can't hold
incommensurate views simultaneously.
Carl Jung said that something like paradoxical views that
are not made conscious will be played out in the world as
fate.
And that's really worth thinking about too.
So if you have your, let's call it
your typical negative experience, you know, this thing that just keeps, seems to just keep
happening to you, bad luck, let's call it, it's highly probable that there's a set of
ideas that are occupying you, pre-occupying you, possessing you, that are driving you in this direction continually,
and that you can't or won't work out the contradiction
and as a consequence, maybe you think every woman is your mother,
and you haven't noticed that you think that,
and then it is something that people think,
because women are, or mothers are women,
and it's not a bad initial template, but, you know, you've got to modify it to some degree.
And, you know, if that's an unconscious idea that you have, and you continue to play it out,
you may run into your continual, habitual, negative experience with women, and you'll wonder what
the hell is wrong with women, but it isn't the women that has the problem. It's you and
and you know if you run into problems with women all the time
Then it's highly probable that the problem is you so
not always but
Generally, so let's go into this Marxist and Christian idea here
just for a minute.
So we'll start with some of the ideas of Marx.
Well, Marx believed that people were basically
socially constructed so that we were blank slates
and that whatever our nature was was given to us,
essentially, by our surroundings, but even more importantly
by our social class, right, because Marx was a theorist of social class and believed
that the primary dispute, let's say, the primary motivator of human history, the primary driver
of human history was something like the rich versus the poor, the bourgeoisie versus
the proletariat, and that was a consequence of your social upbringing, and that your group
identity was paramount.
Okay, so there's nothing about that, it's vaguely Christian.
That's not how the Christian worldview works, not how the Judeo-Christian worldview works,
because in that worldview, you're fundamentally an individual, your nature is fundamentally attributable to you by God,
you're fundamentally responsible to God, and your and history itself is something like
the playing out of your relationship to the transcendent.
So those things aren't even, those aren't the same.
They're not commensurate, you can't believe both of them at the same time.
Marxism is a materialistic philosophy.
It's predicated on the idea that essentially,
an idea that Dostoevsky criticized in great depth
was that if you just made people rich enough, let's say,
if you deprived them of their privation,
if you equalized their economic status, let's say say that the utopia would come to light upon earth.
And I have a certain amount of sympathy
for a viewpoint like that because who likes starvation
and misery, there's nothing positive to be said about that.
But I think Dostoevsky was right too,
and his criticism of Marxism,
although he wasn't directly aiming this at Marx, in notes from Underground, where he noted
that, you know, if you gave people what they wanted in terms of, let's say, bread and
circuses, they had, as he said, nothing to do but eat cakes and busy themselves with
the continuation of the species, which is kind of a nice phrase.
The first thing they would do was take a hammer and smash things just so that something
improbable and strange would happen just so that we could have our way.
And it's kind of a recapitulation of the idea of original sin in Dostoevsky's subtle manner,
is that we're the sorts of creatures that, you know, what did he say?
We're ungrateful.
That's the thing that primarily distinguishes us from animals is we're ungrateful and
that we can curse.
That was what he thought made us different than animals.
And that if even if we got what we wanted materially, that wouldn't satisfy us because
we're not the sorts of creatures that can be satisfied with material possessions,
let's say material comfort, because it isn't even obvious that we're after comfort.
I mean, what do you want?
You want me to just lay in a feather bed and eat peal grapes all day?
I mean, maybe for an hour or so, that might not be a bad idea, but you know,
it's going to get dull pretty quick.
You're going to go out looking for trouble.
And it's certainly possible that the more material resources and the easier they were to get
that you have at your disposal, the more creative ways you're going to find to cause yourself
trouble when you go out and look for trouble.
And so, and that's a testament to the human spirit.
And Dostoevsky knew this, is like, well, whatever we're here for, it isn't the utopia of equal
material distribution.
That's not, we're not looking to be fed and asleep, you know?
And I don't know what it is that we're looking for.
God only knows.
Maybe what we're looking for is to continually keep looking, something like that.
I mean, that's the sorts of creatures that we are.
But the materialist philosophy is that, well, if you just provided for people economically,
problem over and no wrong, I mean, most of you are as given that you're going to be ill
in one way or another, and that you're still subject to mortality
and all of the terrible natural limitations
that human beings are characterized by,
your amount is well off as you're going to get.
You know, the economic data already show
that once you have enough money
so that Bill collectors aren't chasing you,
which basically puts you say at the
kind of in the upper reaches of the working class or maybe the lower end of the middle class,
something like that, that additional money has absolutely no effect whatsoever on your
self-reported well-being, which is something like a combination of positive emotion and absence
of negative emotion. So you might like to think that, you know, if you were rich, your life would be better. And maybe it would be somewhat better, but it wouldn't be as much
better as you might hope. And that's because you'd still have most of the problems that people have.
You know, you still maybe wouldn't get along with your sister and you'd still get divorced. And
maybe you'd even be more likely to. And there'd still be illnesses that would be set. You'd be able to deal with them perhaps with some degree,
a more urgency.
But, and you still have the problem with what the hell your life is for,
and what you're doing on the planet, and how to conduct yourself in the proper way.
And so, we don't want to be too naive about materialism,
even though we don't want to be ungrateful for its advantages.
Mark's also believed, while I said this already, that history was basically characterized by
the war of socioeconomic groups, that's been transformed more recently into the war
of identity groups, which is the same damn thing.
And it's the same old wolf in new sheep's clothing, as far as I'm concerned, that the best
way to conceptualize
human beings is whatever your damn identity is, maybe it's sex for you and its ethnicity
for you and its gender for you and God only knows what it is for you.
And that's who you identify with.
And all there is in the world, and this is the postmodernist view, is hierarchies of people in these
identity groups struggling for dominion. And that's a quasi-Marxist viewpoint. It's just a variant
of the bourgeoisie versus proletariat theory of history, which is a foolish theory as far as I'm
concerned. And certainly not one that we need to take forward into the 21st century, although we see
concerned and certainly not one that we need to take forward into the 21st century, although we seem destined to insist that we do.
So he believed that the revolutionary overthrow of the oppressor class was necessary and morally
demanded and that turns out to be a little bloodier than I would say the typical Christian,
Judeo-Christian ethic might require,
because it doesn't require you to take up arms against your evil overlords
and, well, put them in gulags and kill them by the millions, for example.
And that, to me, seems to be an important difference.
There's no, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, there's no gilt,
there's no group guilt,
right, your guilty and your guilty and of different things,
I presume, and that's your problem,
but maybe you're also innocent, who knows, you know,
but whatever, it's on you, it's not a consequence
of your racial heritage, your ethnicity,
or your gender, any of those things,
it's between you and God, let's say, it's your racial heritage, your ethnicity, or your gender, or any of those things.
It's between you and God, let's say, or it's between you and the state, even, but at least
it's between you and the state or God.
It's not like, well, you know, your father was a factory owner, let's say your grandfather.
And so it was perfectly reasonable during the Russian revolution and the red terror to vacuum you up along with your whole family
and do away with you because you'd
been irredeemably tainted by your bourgeoisie past.
So that's another place where Marxism and Judeo-Christianity
are, they're not just different.
Like they're opposite. It's not just variant. They're opposite.
It's not just one and two.
These are like seriously different ideas.
And so there's another reason you can't be a Marxist in a Christian zippuen.
And then there's the idea that Marx had that religion was the opiate of the masses,
which doesn't exactly sound like I've always thought religion was the opiate of the masses, which doesn't exactly sound like.
I've always thought religion was the opiate of the masses,
but communism, Marxism was the methamphetamine
of the masses, let's say, yeah,
the myth of the masses.
We had no idea with regards to opiate.
So here's what Marx has to say about religion.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness
of the people is the demand for their real happiness,
to call on them to give up their illusions about their condition
is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.
It's interesting to me, because it's not
like the Judeo-Christian story was really a happy one.
As far as I can tell, you know, I mean there was heaven, but the chances you were going to get in, man, that was low.
And mostly it was fair bit of original sin, you know, and a fair bit of you wrestling with all of your inadequacies and your proclivity towards
malevolence, to pick up your cross, to bear your suffering, to understand that there
was a war in your soul between the forces of good and evil.
It's like how that's an opiate is beyond me.
I mean, if I was going to design an opiate that made people feel better, I'd certainly
dispense with a fair bit of that.
It's like, whatever you do is okay.
We could start with that.
There's certainly no hell.
That's something we're gonna get rid of right away.
Little less guilt and shame would be, it can be like a hippie cult in the 1960s.
You know, with little more marijuana and some free sex, something, something like that.
So I don't really understand the illusion idea.
There is Marx's criticism, I suppose, of the belief of the great father in the sky,
who still doesn't seem to me to be that,
like, he's sort of still kind of a nightmarish creature
all things considered, since at least in principle,
he's keeping track of everything you do,
even more than you are, and that's not such a good thing,
but whatever.
So it's a foolish criticism, as far as I can tell, but doesn't matter, he's still criticized it.
The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo, the criticism of that veil of tears
of which religion is the halo.
Criticism, meaning his, has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain, not in order that
man shall continue to bear that chain
without fantasy or consolation,
but so that he shall throw off the chain
and pluck the living flower.
That's something that plenty of Marxists did,
I can tell you.
The criticism of religion disillusions man
so that he will think, act, and fashion, his reality,
like a man who has discarded his illusions
and regained his senses, like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained
his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true son, S-U-N. Yeah, well,
that's Marxism in a nutshell, all right. I mean, that's like that's the fundamental
definition of pathological narcissism, so that he will move around himself as his own true son.
Religion is only the illusory son which revolves around man as long as he does
not revolve around himself. And you know generally we don't use that as an
insult. He only revolves around himself, isn't that an insult? And is there
reason for that? Don't we assume that there's something that you should be revolving around that isn't just yourself?
You know, it could be many things.
You know, it could be, well, someone you love,
that would be a start, could be a child,
could be your partner in life,
it could be your family in extension,
could be your community,
it could be some noble ideal that you're trying to serve,
to be something other than you as the primary center of the universe around which, well,
you and presumably everything else revolves. So I don't really see that as a particularly
wise, what would you call it, philosophy, and as it manifested itself in the world, you
know, I would say Stalin probably revolved around himself quite nicely since, and as it manifested itself in the world, I would say Stalin probably
revolved around himself quite nicely,
since, and don't you think, I mean,
if you had to pick someone who was revolving around himself,
it would be a pretty decent competition
between Mao and Stalin, and that didn't seem to be,
that didn't seem to be for the best.
So that's something to consider as well.
The Marxists believe that religion hindered human development
and the Soviets and the Maoists instituted state atheism
apart from the worship of their leaders, of course.
And then I'm gonna read you a poem by Marx.
This is a good one.
I found this a while back.
God, it's a rough poem. And you know, you want to
let your imagination sort of, I would say, let your imagination loose with this poem, which
is what you should do with a poem. And imagine the sort of state of mind that you have to
be into right a poem like this. And then also imagine, as you should, that poetry, like
dreams, or the birth, it's a birthplace of thought,
with my undergraduates often, especially ones
that are really obsessed with ideas,
they'll often put really bad poetry in their essays.
And I'm not saying that in a cynical way,
because bad poetry can have good ideas in it.
It's hard to write good poetry, you know?
But the thing is often an idea that's extraordinarily emotional in content will manifest itself as a poem
before it is able to articulate itself out into a fully expressed philosophy.
And so I see this with my undergraduates, they'll really be obsessed with something that's bothering them,
and the rights of some poem often about a personal experience.
And then as I help them shape the essay, they kind of unfold the poem into an articulated
statement about the structure of reality. And so you could say, well, you know, we're
all embedded in the dream. We know that you go to sleep every night and you dream, you're
embedded in your imagination. If you're forbidden to dream, if you're deprived of your dreams,
you will lose your mind. That's been experimentally demonstrated quite nicely on animals,
but also on human beings. You have to dream. You have to enter that realm of incoherent
imagination and possibility in order to maintain your sanity, which is extraordinarily interesting
and very strange. And I would say poetry exists on the border between the dream and the fully articulate wakefulness.
It's the place where the image of the dream meets the
articulated speech of full consciousness.
And so you can think about that with regards to this poem.
Invocation of one in despair. So a God has snatched from me all my all in the
curse and rack of destiny. All his worlds are gone beyond recall. Nothing but revenge is left to me. On myself revenge all proudly reek.
On that being that enthroned Lord, make my strength a patchwork of what's weak, leave
my better self without reward. I shall build my throne high overhead, cold, tremendous shall it
summit be for its bullwork, superstitious dread, for its marshal, blackest agony,
who looks upon it with a healthy eye shall turn back struck deathly pale and dumb clutched by blind and chilled mortality,
may his happiness prepare its tomb.
And the Almighty's lightning shall rebound from that massive iron giant.
If he brings my walls and towers down, eternity shall raise them up defiant.
Well, I would say that's the sort of poem
that would be written by someone
who revolved around himself as his own true son. And I would also say that given
what we know about what happened as a consequence of the instantiation of Marxist doctrine that
this is a truly horrifying piece of literature to contemplate. Written by the way when Marx was rather young. So then the question
came to me, do I believe in God? And I don't like that question. And people have
complained at me a lot and I'm sure they have the reasons because they don't
like my answers, you know, and I have two answers. They've kind of become stock, which is not a good thing, but
But they're the best approach. I can't figure out why I don't like the question exactly. I've got three
I had three sort of
burgeoning hypotheses. One was it's none of your damn business. That's the first one
So it's like a privacy issue like it seemed seemed to me to be a question that was too private
to be answered properly.
And so, and you know, you could consider that a cop out,
and maybe it is.
And then another one was, well, what do you mean by believe?
Like do you mean the words?
Do you mean to say the words I believe in God. Does that indicate that you believe in God?
Like, I don't know what you mean by believe exactly,
because, and that's got me in trouble too,
because people think that attempting to clarify
the meaning of words is an attempt to escape from the question
when it's actually an attempt to specify the question.
I mean, is what you believe what you say or what you act out? Now, you know,
I would say to some degree it's both, but it push comes to shove as far as I'm concerned,
what you believe is what you act out, not what you say. And then, you know, and if you're
an integrated person, then what you act out and what you say are the same thing, and then
you're a person whose word can be trusted, right? Because what you say and what you do are isomorphic.
They're the same thing.
But belief is instantiated in action.
So I have also suggested that I act as if I believe in God
or to the best of my ability.
And people aren't very happy with that either.
But and then the third is that I'm afraid that he might exist,
which I think is the most comical of the three answers
and perhaps the most accurate one.
But then I was thinking about this today
when I was thinking about what I might talk to you guys about
and I thought, well, let's go into this a little bit more.
Let's say you say you do believe in God.
Say, I believe in God.
It's like, okay, well that's hypothetically pretty impressive, I would say.
It's like you believe that there's a divine power that oversees everything that is fundamentally
ethical, that's watching everything you do.
And you believe that.
And so what effect does that have on your behavior,
if you believe it?
Does that mean that you're, well, are you all in on your beliefs?
Are you sacrificing everything to this transcendent entity
that you proclaim belief in?
Have you cleansed yourself of all your sin, let's say?
Are you making all the sacrifices that you need to make?
Like have you taken the moat out of your eye?
No.
Or are you in the same situation?
Let's say that the Catholic Church seems to be in right now.
Just out of curiosity.
It's a good time to bring that up since the Pope seems to be concerned with what's been happening with the Catholic Church, given
the endless pedophilic scandals, let's say, which seem rather serious in my estimation, and might
have been something that was cleaned up perhaps 100 or 1000 years ago and it's being taken seriously perhaps now and
perhaps not because it's not so easy to determine exactly what it would mean to
take that seriously and you might say well are all the people who are committing
these high-ness actions and then covering them up or if you ask them well do you
believe in God what are are they gonna say?
You'd think the answer would be yes,
given that they're like priests and yet,
and yet, what's the evidence?
Well, evidence isn't exactly so clear
that the mere statement, let's say, or the mere acting
out of the ritual, let's say, and I'm not trying to denigrate the statement or the ritual,
but I'm pointing out that that's no indication of your right to say that you believe, because
you got it.
And I think this is why it's bothered me to answer this question.
It's like, well, what right do I have to say that to make that claim?
I believe in God.
Well, what's the claim?
Is that the claim that I'm a good person somehow?
Because you'd think that if you believed in God, actually, like seriously,
that you'd be a good person like right now, because for obvious reasons, I would think.
And so if that hasn't happened in some sort of miraculous sense, so that you're the best
person you could possibly imagine being on an ongoing basis and then terrified of deviating
from that path in a serious manner, then I don't see why you have the right to say that
you believe in God.
You know, one of the things Nietzsche said about Christianity, it was a great critic of Christianity,
although also a great friend in a very peculiar way, in that sometimes your best friend is the one who points out your weakest properties,
let's say, he said as far as he was concerned, there was only one Christian and he died on the cross.
And that's perhaps an extreme statement, but one worth giving some consideration to.
It's like, well, then you look at, what do you called upon?
Let's say if you're going to proclaim yourself as a believer, you know?
And I thought about this a lot as I've gone through the Old Testament.
I did a bunch of lectures last year.
And so what do you called upon?
Well, you're called upon initially to act out
the spark of divinity that's within you
by confronting potential with the logos that's within you,
which means to take the opportunities that are in front of you,
the potential future, and to transform it into the present
in the best possible way using truth and courage
and careful articulation as your guide.
So that's the first thing you're called on to do.
That's a major deal there, that's a tough one.
And then the second is to make the proper sacrifices.
That's the Canaanable story.
It's like you want something.
You genuinely want it.
You want to set the world straight.
Then you let go of what's necessary and you pursue.
You let go of what isn't necessary, no matter what it is.
No matter what it is.
And then you pursue what's necessary.
And then maybe you sacrifice
your children to God. That was the story. That's one of the next stories that comes up, of course,
and you think, well, that's pretty damn barbaric, and the way the stories laid out, of course, it is,
but that isn't exactly what it means. It means that what you try to do when you raise children
is that you try to do everything you can to impress upon them
by imitation and by instruction and by love and by encouragement that they are crucial beings in the world
whose ethical decisions play an important role in shaping the structure of reality itself
and that they have the moral responsibility to do that. And you get your arc in order, that's your family, let's say, so that when the storms
come, you can stay above water for the 40 days of flooding and you're capable of leading
your people through the desert.
When the desert makes itself manifest and you can escape from tyranny properly because
you're wise enough to see it.
And you take the full burden of being on yourself,
all the suffering that's part and parcel of that.
You accept that voluntarily, let's say.
And you do everything you can to confront the malevolence
that's part of you and that's part of the state
and that's part of the world.
And you make a garden around you.
That's the paradise of walled garden.
It's a well-watered place.
So the forces of nature and society exist together
in harmony and you place your family in that
so that they can live properly
and you treat your enemy as if he's yourself
and the same with your brother.
And well, then you can say,
then maybe you can say, then maybe you can say,
maybe then you have the right to say
that you believe in God.
Otherwise, maybe you should think twice about it
because there's a line in the New Testament
that Christ Himself says, two of them,
I should read them too,
because they're very relevant to this.
I guess I could paraphrase them.
A rich man comes up to Christ and says, and says, good, good leader, good Lord.
And he asked him a question about how it is that he should be a good person, and Christ
says, don't call me good, there's no one that's good but God.
And you know, that's worth thinking about.
I mean, the one person that in principle,
in our ancient stories, had the right
to make some direct connection between himself
and the divine was unwilling to do it when challenged.
And so it might be reasonable to assume
that each of us could be much more cautious
about making that sort of statement bluntly
when we're asked.
And then the other line is not all those who say
Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven.
Got that about right, which means something approximating
just because you make a claim to moral virtue, let's say,
your belief in God, which I can't see how you can make
a higher claim to moral virtue than that.
You know, I mean, agnostic, atheistic, I don't really care. The purpose, the point is
something like this. Imagine something of ultimate transcendent value. I don't
care whether you believe in it or not, but imagine that something like that
exists and then you swear allegiance to it, which is to say, I believe in this.
I mean, there's a heavy moral burden
that comes along with that, just to allow yourself
to utter the words without feeling
that you should be immediately struck down appropriately
by lightning.
And so, well, and so I think that's
why that question makes me uncomfortable.
It's that I don't think I have a right to make that proclamation.
There's another thing, too, that I learned when I was going through these biblical lectures.
It was a fascinating thing to do.
It was a story of Jacob, who became Israel, and Jacob was a real trickster.
He was a morally ambiguous figure to put it mildly.
And he tricked his older brother out of his birthright.
And he was full of tricks.
And he had a lot of tricks played on him, too,
and maybe learned something as a consequence.
Anyways, after running away from his brother
who had murderous thoughts and for good reasons,
I'd like about 20 years, maybe it was only 14.
But it doesn't matter, it was
a long time. He decided that he would go back and try to make peace. And he came to this
river, he sent his family across the river along with his belongings and partly as an offering
to his brother, a peace offering. And he had a dream, dream, visionary experience, hallucination, God, who knows what it was. And he dreamt that he
wrestled with an angel all night and that the angel was God. And God, he won, which is very
strange because, well, first of all, he was a trickster figure. You know, like, he wasn't your most
upstanding moral creature.
He wasn't Noah, for example.
And second, well, it was God, you know?
It's like, if you're gonna wrestle with someone and lose,
there's an opponent that's likely to take you out.
And he did damage his hip.
I mean, so, which is not that impressive an accomplishment on God's part in my estimation, but it is
a very interesting story because what it does indicate, what's so cool about it, you see
Jacob's name is changed at that point to Israel.
And Israel means those who wrestle with God.
And that's so, that blue meal, that's
one of the things I love about studying old stories is now and then you come across a piece
of one and you see in and into it, you know, you see down into the depths that characterizes
it. It's very difficult, but it happens sometimes. And it just flattens you to think that if Israel is the chosen people of God, that's the hypothesis,
and what Israel means is those who wrestle with God, then think that that gives, that seems
to me to be such a hopeful idea, because while everyone does that, to some degree, I mean,
you do that in your life, because because well, you don't know what's
a fundamental transcendent worth,
because who the hell are you?
And what do you know?
You're struggling all the time with,
well, I would say with good and evil,
when you're struggling with yourself,
you're struggling with the world to portray that
as wrestling with God.
That's perfectly reasonable from a metaphoric perspective.
And the idea that that's what characterizes
the true people of God is that willingness to wrestle.
That's really something because it kind of indicates
that you're here as a contender, you know?
You're not here to be happy, you're not here to be complacent,
you're not here to be materially satisfied,
not that that would be possible.
Anyways, but that you're here to contend with the structure of reality,
and that's what will satisfy you,
because there's something to you, you know?
You're not weak in nothing.
There's something to you.
There's something malevolent and terrible.
I mean, you know that, you look at how people behave, you look at the blood and catastrophe of our history.
You can certainly see the absolute, the absolute hellish depths of the human soul.
But there's something that takes root in that and grows up out of that.
It's absolutely magnificent beyond belief and that's looking for to contend.
You know, and I've often thought
that I've been fortunate in my marriage
because you think, well, you get married
and you live happily ever after.
It's like,
that's not it.
You don't want that even.
What do you want your partner to do?
All she's going to do is sprinkle rose petals in front of you.
Pat you on the back of the head and tell you how wonderful you are constantly day after day.
Man, you'd be so sick of that after two.
Well, maybe take a month.
But let's say two weeks. It'd be you'd be, because you know she should be more on the side of who you could be
than on the side of who you are.
And if she's deluded enough or terrified enough to worship you in your current form, then
well that doesn't say much for her.
And it certainly isn't very helpful for
you. You want someone that's going to get in the way now and then, you know, and to contend
with. And I've been fortunate in my marriage because I have someone to contend with, you
know, we have our discussions, and they're not easy, partly because we have hard problems
to solve, because life is full of hard problems.
I want someone who stand up, you know, and have her say,
even if it's not what I would say.
And maybe I'm even willing at times because she's quite intuitive
and a good dreamer, and I'm more facile verbally.
And so we have to be careful in our relationship,
because if I'm in a particularly
ornary mood and she has something to say, I can usually slice up her arguments verbally.
And that's fine as far as I'm concerned because I get to win. But it's stupid. Well, it's
stupid. It's first of all, that doesn't mean I'm right. It just means I can formulate
verbal arguments slightly faster than she can, but her intuitions
and her dreams are often extraordinarily accurate.
And so we've learned to some degree to buttress each other's arguments, just on the off-salt,
off-chance that the person that you were foolish enough to marry might know something you
don't know and then about something important, you know. And so what do you want? Well, you want someone to contend with. And then it's an adventure.
You know, and then you have someone that you love and that you respect. And that's not
a bad combination for longevity of relationship. And then maybe if you have someone that you
love and respect and that you can communicate with then your children
also love and respect her or him and then that's pretty good for them because they've got some parents that they could love and respect
that's a good combination you know it solidifies their life and so you want to contend with them and you want to job that's
challenging I would say that pushes you beyond what you already are.
And God only knows how much, how hard you need to be pushed in order to go beyond where you are.
But, you know, to some degree, if you have a choice, you know, it's not that uncommon that what we'll do
is choose to be pushed to the limit, especially when we're at our best, we think, well, where's the limit?
It's here.
Maybe I can manage that.
I'm going to push myself right to the damn limit.
Then I'm going to push myself a little bit over just
to see if it's possible.
And if that happens, then you know,
you emerge with a sense of triumph.
I'm now more than I was, right?
And maybe that's what you're here to be,
is to be more than you were, right?
To push those limits and to do that, you contend with the world, you wrestle with God.
You don't casually say, I believe, because who knows? No one, no one knows, right? We're
separated from the infinite by death and ignorance. We don't know, we contend, we wrestle, you know, and in that maybe we
find our destiny, at least we find our purpose, we find something that justifies us to some
degree. If I'm awake at night, wondering, and I think, God, you know, like I pushed myself,
as far as I could in this effort,
whatever the effort that I'm considering happens to be.
I pushed myself, I don't have a weight on my conscience
because I let something go or I failed to accomplish something.
I mean, I do often have those sorts of weights.
I'm talking about the rare times when I don't.
It's like, well, there's something that,
that's where there's some atonement and some peace
as far as I'm concerned, where that contending and that wrestling has been successful.
And I would say that insofar as you're deeply involved in that, like completely involved
in that, thoroughly involved in that, then you have the right to say that you believe
in God. And since I'm not like that, 100% of the time,
or even approximating the percent of the time
that I would like to be like that,
despite my best efforts, then when people ask me,
I'm not going to say something virtuous, like,
I'm a believer because there's plenty wrong with me that needs to be
fixed before I would dare utter words like that. Thank you.
Well, so that's better answer to that question. So thank you very much for walking through that with me, let's say. Now, you have all, not all, many of you have asked some questions tonight using this nifty
little device called Slido, which I really like.
And so now what I'm going to do is spend 20 minutes or so looking through the questions
that you asked and seeing if I have anything that isn't
completely incomprehensible and embarrassing to say about them.
So let's try that.
Hmm, well this is a strange one.
I don't know about you people from Sydney.
So it's from Kathy Newman, which strikes me as somewhat unlikely, and it's got 164
upvotes, which is quite a few upvotes.
It hurt when you destroyed me on ABC. Now, I don't know if that's referring
to last night or so many months ago, but I have enrolled in university to get my facts
right. Yeah, well, that probably won't work. Thank you for enlightening my soul.
The burns are still healing.
Yeah, well, that's not exactly a question.
It's four sentences that are quite the strange combination.
I would say something about the burns are still healing.
I mean, Nietzsche said that you could tell much about a man's character
by how much truth he could tolerate, which is very interesting.
There's an idea in the great Western tradition
that the truth is the way and the path of life, and that
no one comes to the farther except through the truth. And I believe that to be the case,
because I don't think that you can manifest who you are without the truth. And so I
think it's literally and metaphorically true, that the pathway to who you could be
if you were completely who you were
is through the truth.
And I would say, and so the truth does set you free,
but the problem is is that it destroys everything
that isn't worthy in you as it sets you free.
And that's a process of burning. And it's painful because you
cling to what you shouldn't be partly out of pride and partly out of ignorance and partly
out of laziness. And so then you encounter something true and you all know this. You all
know this perfectly well because when was the last time that you learned something
important that wasn't a blow of some sort?
You know, and it's often you look back at your life and you think, oh God, I really learned
something there, I wouldn't want to do that again, but it really changed my life.
I mean, sometimes it can really destroy you, you know, and encounter with the truth, and
you never really recover.
But now and then something comes along and straightens you out and a lot of you has to go, a lot of you has to burn away. You know, and I
suppose in some sense the idea is that everything about you that isn't worthy is to be put into the
flames. And that's another reason to be not so casual about claiming what you believe,
because it isn't something that you undertake without due caution.
You know, I learned when I was a kid, about 25 or so, a little older than a kid,
that almost everything that I said was one form of lie or another.
And I wasn't any worse, I would say,
than the people that I was associating with or any better.
And the lies were manifold.
They were attempts to win arguments for the sake of winning
the argument.
That might be one, attempts
to indicate my intellectual prowess when there were competitions of that sort, maybe just
the sheer pleasure of engaging in an intellectual argument and winning.
My inability to distinguish between ideas that I had read and incorporated because I had
read but hadn't realized that I hadn't yet earned the right to use all of that.
And I had this experience that lasted a long time, while I would say it's really never
gone away, that, and I think this was the awakening of my conscience, essentially.
And I didn't realize this until much later, when I was reading
Socrates' apology, this voice for lack of a better word
made itself manifest inside me, and it
said every time I said something that wasn't true. And that's usually what it said.
That's not true.
You don't believe that.
Or there was a sensation that was associated with it.
I don't think this is that uncommon.
I asked my psychology classes for many years in a row
if they had an experience, this experience,
that they had a voice in their head, let's say,
it's a metaphor, or a feeling that communicated to them when they were about to do
something wrong. And it was universally the case that people agreed with one
of those statements or another. And the other thing I would ask is, well, do you
always listen to it? And of course, the answer to that was definitely no.
But that's also very interesting, you know, that you can have this faculty, this conscience,
this seems to me to be very tightly associated with the idea of free will, is that you can
have this internal voice, this Damon, the root word for democracy.
Oh, yes, I didn't finish that story.
So, yes, well, it's important.
Well, so Socrates Damon told him it was his moral guide. And democracy appears to be predicated
on the idea that the polity will function if people attend to their consciences. that's the overlap of those conceptualizations. And that's it. Well, first
of all, I think that's the case. It makes a certain amount of logical sense. I mean,
if we assume that the political state is something like the emergent consequence of the
decision of all its citizens, we would assume that the wiser the decisions of the citizens, the more upright
and functional the state, I can't see it could be any other way, and perhaps those who are
the most upright, who listen to their consciences more carefully, even play a disproportionately
powerful role, it's certainly possible.
So anyways, back to truth.
Well, I learned that so much of what I was doing was false.
And I think I learned this.
There was a reason that this came to me.
So clearly, I was trying to understand why people did terrible things.
And I was really concentrating on the terrible,
terrible things that people do.
And I was interested in Auschwitz, for example.
And not as a political phenomenon,
but as a psychological phenomenon.
I was curious about how you could be an Auschwitz guard.
And I wasn't really curious about how you could be one,
because you could be one, of course.
I was more curious about how I could be one being such a good person,
as I thought I was.
And but I also knew that people, many people,
did many terrible things during the 20th century.
And the idea that I was somehow better than them,
or that I should assume a priority
that I was better than them,
and that I wouldn't have made the same choices or worse
had I been in the same situation,
was a very, very, very dangerous supposition.
And in fact, a sufficiently dangerous supposition to bring about the very danger that I assumed
was worth avoiding.
I had this idea that what had happened, especially in Nazi Germany, but also in the Soviet Union,
shouldn't happen again, that what we needed to do, because of what happened in the 20th
century,
especially because we also managed to create hydrogen bombs,
and that we had become so technologically powerful,
that there wasn't time for that anymore, that time for that was over,
and that we really needed to understand why it happened,
and that perhaps we could go deep enough in that understanding, which
is I think what happens when you go deep and understanding, so that you could stop it.
Because if you understand a problem, maybe you can solve it.
And at least in part, I came to believe that the problem was, as Solzhenitsyn said, that the problem
is that the line between Guneval runs down every human heart.
And I was reading Jung at the same time, you know, and he believed that the human soul
was a tree whose roots grew all the way to hell.
And believed also that in the full investigation of the shadow, which was the dark side of the human psyche,
was that it was bottomless, essentially,
that it was like an experience of hell,
and that also struck me as true.
And that the way to stop those sorts of things from happening
was to stop yourself from being the sort of person who would do it
Who would even start to do it because the other thing you learn when you learn about atrocities of that sort
You could read ordinary men by the way, which is an unbelievably great study of exactly this sort of phenomenon
It's on my book list on my website. It's about a group of German policemen who were turned into brutal murderers
over a period of months when they went behind, when they went into Poland after the Germans had marched through,
and they were just ordinary middle-class men, and they weren't forced into this by their leadership, by the way,
either, which was one of the things that makes the book so interesting. So,
for me, it was a matter of understanding that if we want this sort of thing to not happen
anymore then we have to start to become the sort of people who wouldn't do it. Which seems
rather self-evident, all things considered, unless you believe that we're the pawns of social forces,
for example, like the Marxists do. And I don't believe that because we're also the creator of social forces.
And we're also capable of standing up to social forces because I would say the individual
is more powerful than the social force.
All things considered interestingly enough.
That the way to stop such things from happening, the way to remember properly is to understand that you could do it,
that you could do those terrible things because the people who did them were like you,
and that the way out of that is to stop being like that.
And the way you stop being like that is,
well, at least in part, by stop,
by ceasing to tell yourself lies that you don't believe in,
and that you know you shouldn't act out.
And, you know, and that's made a huge difference in my life for better or for worse.
I mean, it was very uncanny experience, I would say,
because it's very discombobulating
to experience yourself as fragmented enough
so that much of what you do and say is actually false.
It's a lot of work to clean that up, a lot, but the consequences are, in principle, worthwhile.
And so that was part of what understanding that was part of what
Understanding that was part of what drove me towards clinical psychology say in a way from
Political science and law and from politics in general because I started to believe that and I think this is the great Western idea
Which people were quite irritated about by the way on Q&A last night as well that the proper route forward for the redemption of the individual and for mankind as a whole is
as a consequence of the redemption of each individual and I truly believe that and I believe that that occurs as a consequence of
adherence to the truth and courage in the face of being.
That's rule one, right?
Stand up straight with your shoulders back
is to take on the onslaught and to enter the contentious ring
and to do more than your best,
because your best isn't enough,
because your best isn't as good as you could be.
You have to push yourself past that.
And that's as far as you could be. You have to push yourself past that and
And that's as far as I can tell where you find what you need in life
You find the meaning that sustains you in life and you find the
Patterns of action that redeem the world both at the same time
I mean life is a very difficult business. You know, it's it's fatal and
It's full of suffering and it's and it's full of betrayal and malevolence. There's nothing about it, it's trivial, it's all profound.
And in order to find your way through all of that, that capacity for hellish experience, let's say you need to
Develop a relationship with something that's profound and you can
You have that capacity and what could be more profound than the truth and what would you rather have on your side?
And you might say well, that's obvious and of course everyone do that. And then you need to know why you don't.
And the answer is, well, it's sort of encapsulated
in this first amusing question.
Thank you for enlightening my soul.
The burns are still healing.
It's like, well, you know, there's no shortage of deadwood
to burn off.
And there's no shortage of pain when the deadwood burns off.
And that's what makes people afraid of the truth.
You know, maybe that's why Moses encountered God
in a burning bush, who the hell knows.
But there's something about that idea that seems to me
to be the case. And so what's the decision that idea that seems to me to be the case.
And so, what's the decision that you make?
You know, you decide to believe, you know, it's a risk, an existential risk.
It's an active faith.
You believe that the truth can set you free.
You believe that people have an intrinsic divinity about their soul.
You decide that you're going to live in that
manner and that you're going to let everything about yourself that isn't worthy of that goal
die, and that might be almost everything that you are. And that's a terrible thing to contemplate.
And that's a terrible thing to contemplate. The only thing that's worse, I would say, is the alternative,
because the alternative is the sorts of hells that we manage to produce around us
and that we produced with particular expertise during the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
And it would be a good thing if we decided collectively
and individually not to go back there again.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
If you found this conversation meaningful,
you might think about picking up dad's books,
maps of meaning the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 rules for life, and antidote to chaos.
Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson podcast.
See JordanBeePeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.
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Next week's podcast is going to be a continuation of this theme, a commentary on Dad's Believe in
God and a discussion with Dennis Pregor of Frederick You, also on God.
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