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

Episode Date: September 27, 2026

Why would a grown man pay money to sit in the dark and be terrified, and what does that have to do with the reason the modern world feels like it is coming apart? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson argues that everything you think you know about how you see the world is backward: that you do not navigate by facts or reason but through a story, and that the direction you secretly aim decides what you are able to perceive at all. From the first date in a crowded restaurant to the three great stories fighting for control of the West, he builds toward an unsettling diagnosis of a civilization living unconsciously on inherited wealth, illustrated by nothing less than a children's cartoon and a myth older than the Bible. Then the writer Konstantin Kisin joins him on stage to push back, and their conversation turns to the hardest question of all, whether the ancient stories are merely useful or actually true, and what it would cost us to find out we cannot live without them. This lecture was filmed in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 5, 2024. Unlock the ad-free experience of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast and dive into exclusive bonus content on DailyWire+. Start watching now: http://dwpluspeterson.com/yt ALL LINKS: https://feedlink.io/jordanbpeterson // LINKS // Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com Books - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/books/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Animals. How far would you go when someone threatens everyone you love? Who can you trust? From Academy Award winner Ben Affleck. Animals stars Affleck, Carrie Washington, Jillian Anderson, and Stephen Young. When a Los Angeles mayoral candidate's son is kidnapped, he and his wife are pulled into a web of deception, forced to make choices that could tear their world apart. Watch Animals only on Netflix on October 9th.

rated R. What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the pray.com app. today. All these great bands and here you are tonight. Well, thank you very much for coming. Let me tell

you what's going to happen tonight. I'm going to share my thoughts with you for 70 minutes, thereabouts. Then I have a special guest here, Constantine Kizin, who runs a podcast. Good, well, you should know about him. Definitely. Crazy Russian from the UK. a real voice of reason for our fellow Westerners in the UK. Constantine is going to come out on stage and torture me about what I said, I hope. Well, what I'm hoping, Constantine is a very clear thinker, very witty man. He's got a very sharp mind. He's critically oriented in the best possible way.

A good critical mind separates the wheat from the chaff. right, because to be property critical isn't to hurt or destroy with criticism, it's to separate what's truly valuable from what isn't valuable so that you have solid ground to stand on. And, you know, one of the things that I've strived to do in my whole academic career is to move closer and closer to believing and stating and writing things that I can't move. and you do that yourself by subjecting your own presumptions to critical analysis you do that so that you think through what you're doing so that you don't act out your stupid ideas in the world and die

and that's the purpose of thinking right seriously the purpose of thinking is to have your stupid ideas die instead of you And that's part of the reason why your enemy can be your best friend, because if someone can take out something you think, because they can show you how it's erroneous and counterproductive, and then you don't have to go through all the trouble of learning that stupidly in the world, that's a fine gift. And so I'm hoping that Constantine can stand in for the audience, for the critical and skeptical audience. We're talking about very difficult issues. it's highly likely that I could formulate what I'm stating more clearly and precisely.

And so Constantine will come out and we'll discuss what was presented tonight and then we'll turn to the questions that you've kindly delivered and discuss those. And then we'll reintroduce the band and that should do for the evening. And so that's the plan. And so away we go. I'm very much looking forward to this. So the first thing we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about stories and set the stage. I think we're at a crucial inflection point in the world, culturally and philosophically. I think we're on the dawn of a new set of realizations.

A new set of realizations that will return us. two are fundamentals. I think the reason that we have a culture war raging in the West, why there's so much instability, is because something new is struggling to be born or reborn. And I want to explain the reason for that first. And the reason is that the Enlightenment view of the world, which has guided our technological and scientific endeavor,

our conceptual endeavor, our philosophical endeavor for a few hundred years is there's something about it that's wrong, like deeply wrong. And that error is making itself manifest in the scientific community, because I would say now that scientists themselves from a multitude of different disciplines understand that the idea that we see the world as a place of, facts or that we see the world as rational creatures or that you can even see the world that way is wrong wrong and i believe that it's it's been demonstrated to be wrong it's this isn't a matter of mere

philosophical opinion anymore although it's also that one example for example is that the newest artificial intelligence systems that we've designed the large language models that have burst onto the stage in the last year or thereabouts, chat GPT, the catastrophic Gemini that Google so foolishly launched. Elon Musk's GROC, these systems are trained like human beings are trained. They have an aim. They have a purpose. They were trained with reward and punishment, so to speak.

Their approximations to a target. They see the world through a structure of value. that they have absorbed from human beings. To make the world's smartest linguistic machines, we had to inculcate in them a structure of value. Okay, and so, and we produced machines now that can engage in discourse, that can use language in a way that's virtually indistinguishable from the human, and it's going to become radically indistinguishable from the human very, very rapidly.

and they're not programmed like lists of rules. They're not programmed like ordinary thinking machines. They're programmed the same way that human beings learn. They're programmed with aim. They have an ethos and an ethic. We can't orient ourselves in the world with the facts. We can't follow the science because science isn't a leader.

doesn't establish our aims. Our aims are established using mechanisms of perception and emotion and thought that aren't in themselves scientific. We're aiming at something. Why can't we orient ourselves in the world with the facts? Well, the simplest explanation for that is that there are too many facts. There's as many facts as there are as many facts as there are. phenomena. More, actually, there's as many facts as there are possible combinations of phenomena. You drown in the facts. When you're confused in your own life and things are chaotic and you're anxious, it's because a plethora of possibilities is making itself manifest in front of you and you don't know which way to turn. You don't have a clear direction. You don't have a clear aim. There's no way of simplifying the world so that you can act in it. We know, for example, that to perceive the world,

you have to obliterate from your consciousness almost everything that you could see because otherwise you're overwhelmed. We know even that the hallucinogens who are being studied with increasing intensity in recent years interfere with your normal perception such that they bring to consciousness a plethora of things that under normal circumstances you ignore. And the consequence of that is a influx of a sense of overwhelming significance and meaning,

but at the same time a kind of paralysis of action, because when everything becomes infinitely meaningful, there's no straightforward way of moving forward. When you're in a restaurant with someone on a first date and you're focusing on the conversation and actions of your date in a sea of competing conversations, you zero out everything that you could be attending to in every other table. All the competing thoughts in your imagination. All the things you could be bringing to mind to zero in with like laser pinpoint accuracy. on what it is that your partner in conversation is doing. And you do that in the world all the time.

You make one thing at a time of pinnacle importance, and you arrange everything else in the world at every moment that you perceive around that thing that you've made of pinnacle importance. That's how you see the world. And I don't mean think about the world. This is underthought. It's more profound. It's what you do when you actually see.

If I decide to do something straightforward, like walk from here to the stairs on the stage, and I set my aim, I don't perceive any of you in consequence because the fact of your existence is irrelevant to my purpose and you're gone. None of the facts of the stage that I could attend to are relevant and perceptible anymore except insofar as their pathways or facilitators or obstacles to my journey forward. If I'm looking to the stairs, I see the chairs, but not as places to sit. I see them as obstacles that I have to circumvent in order to attain my. aim. Everything that you see in the world makes itself manifest in accordance with your aim. And that's a radically, revolutionarily different way of conceptualizing the world than the notion that you take the facts and you sort them despite their infinite number

and calculate your way with the facts rationally forward. That's not what you do. Imagine your favorite lecture. Dial that on one max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture. I went to college because I had to. I go to Peterson Academy because I want to. I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago, and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college.

In traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry. They don't bring the same energy as the professors. at Peterson Academy. And it is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you. If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time. That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself. You have the opportunity to investigate that calling. Here's a proposition to contemplate.

It's another proposition that has revolutionary significance. It'll explain all sorts of things that you know to be true, but don't know why they're true. The description of the structure through which you see the world is a story. That's what a story is. Okay, so now this explains many things that are otherwise left as mysteries or side effects. I read a book by Stephen Pinker once. Pinker's an Enlightenment rationalist from Harvard. A good guy and very smart.

And much of what he says is extraordinarily useful. But he believes, for example, that our proclivity to enjoy and tell stories is like a side effect of something more fundamental cognitively. It's the story as entertainment theory. You go to a movie because it's fun. You read a book of fiction to your child because it's fun. It's not core to the... What would you say? It's not a core element of the way that you exist in the world.

It's mere entertainment. It misses the point that theory. Why is it entertaining? Why can you teach children with stories? If you get the story right for a child, you can capture the child's interest and you can integrate almost any form of learning into the story. And the child will be captivated by that. When children play, pretend play, which they do spontaneously, they spontaneously, they spontaneously dramatize. They spontaneously dramatize the world. They spontaneously make stories out of their roles and their destinies. And that captures them. That forms the basis of their friendships.

That's why children want to play so frenetically, is that they're practicing, modeling the world. When you go see a movie, it's not that you want to be entertained, although it is entertained. That's not why you're there. It's not for fun either. That's easy to understand and to see what's fun about a horror movie. I'm dead serious.

It's like people will be so afraid in a horror movie that they'll cover their eyes. They'll hide behind the chair in front of them. They'll ask themselves afterwards why they even put themselves through it. And yet they'll line up and pay to do it. Well, why would you line up and pay to torture yourself. Well, because you want to know how to deal with what's horrifying. And you want to practice that in a way, if you can, that isn't in itself fatal.

You want to expose yourself to the catastrophes of existence so that you're prepared when those catastrophes come along. You want to expose yourself to the predators that lurk everywhere. You want to inure yourself against what's disgusting and contaminating because you're going to have to deal with it. You want to expose yourself to what's frightening so that you can find the courage within you to deal with what's frightening.

And that's part of the instinct to develop and expand your competence. And it's in that expansion of competence and skill that occurs as a consequence of that voluntary exposure that the entertainment is situated. The reason that's entertaining is because it's part of the manner in which you explore, expand yourself.

And you can do that in the direction of what's dark and terrible, just as you can, in the direction of say, what's heroic? What do you do when you go to a movie? Well, you fasten onto a character, and you understand that character the same way that you understand people that you're in conversation with. Now, you might think that the way that you understand people is by, you listen to what they say, and you extract out the knowledge that they're delivering to you in terms of facts, and you interpret the facts and you derive your understanding of the person. Like, none of that's true. That has absolutely nothing to do with how you establish a relationship with someone. And, well, here's some proof. Is that what you do with a dog? Well, obviously not, but you can establish a relationship

with a dog. And so, and the relationship you have with a dog, it's not the same as the relationship with a person, but a dog's a pack animal. The dog can become a member of the family. You can you can understand a dog well enough so the dog likes you. Right. And so whatever you're doing with the dog, it isn't discourse about propositions. Because most of the dogs you own don't talk. So, and it's the same with very young children.

And it's the same with an infant. You establish a relationship using mechanisms that aren't propositional. They're not rules, they're not descriptions, they're not facts. That's not how you do it. How do you do it? Where do you look when you talk to someone? You look at their eyes. Why?

To see where they're pointing them. Why? So you can see what they're looking at. Why? So you can infer what's important to them because we point our eyes that that's that which is important to us. That's why our eyes look the way they look. black in the middle,

colored on the ring around that, against a white background. That's an evolved mechanism. I can see your eyes. All of our ancestors whose eyes weren't visible either got killed or didn't reproduce. The one thing you want to know about someone right away is where the hell their eyes are pointed.

And you can do that politely, which you do by attending to someone without two predatory a stare. You do that by attending politely to their face, but not too intensely, and not attending, let's say, inappropriately to other parts of their body. And they're going to be watching you to see what you do with your eyes. Because the one thing you want to know about someone, above all else, is what the hell are they up to? Right? What's their aim? And so, when you go to a movie, that's what you do,

when you watch a character in a role, you see him in a variety of things. You see him in a variety of different situations. And you watch how he structures his attention, what he pays attention to, his attention is a costly business, and so people pay attention to what they value, you watch what they attend to, and you watch how they prioritize their actions. And from that, you derive an understanding of what's important to them. As soon as you understand what's important to them, you've got their aim. You figured that character out. This is what you do when you learn to know someone. What's their aim? As soon as you know their aim, you can see the world through their eyes. You can see the same objects they see, and the objects take on the same emotional significance. And when you say, I come to understand someone, what you really mean is, oh, I understand their aim. And now I can aim at the same thing. at least in simulation, at least fictionly, and I can come to inhabit the same world of perception

and emotion that they inhabit. I can even guess at how they might act into what they might attend in situations I haven't seen, because now I know they're in. What's he up to? That's what you're thinking in a murder mystery or in a thriller. What's he up to? What's he up to? What's going to happen next? And so the plot of the fiction is

the aim of the character across time, the aim as the character unfolds, and that might involve the transformation of his aims as well, right? And that would be the transformation of a character in a movie. He aims at one thing, and he learns that that aim is off in some manner, or he comes to a bitter and dismal, partial end and has to switch course, and you want to see people transform their aims.

That's character development. We see the world through a story. The world's only, The world's objects reveal themselves in relationship to our aim. The landscape of emotion presents itself as markers on the pathway to our aim. The world reveals itself in accordance with our aim. That's how perception works. That's a hell of a thing to learn.

Because if the world, for example, appears to you only as thorn-bearing obstacles, right? If you feel that everything's arrayed against you and there's no pathway, forward, if you feel that you're surrounded by foes and obstacles instead of walking the golden pathway, accompanied by allies with the world on your side, you might ask yourself whether or not your aim is wrong. And so the world lays itself out in accordance with our aim. We go, we produce fiction, we generate fiction. We live in a fictional landscape because we want to get our aim right. We read stories, we watch movies, we go to plays, we talk to each other because we want to get our aim right.

We want to find the place we should go and we want to learn how to get there efficiently. And we're compelled by spirit and instinct to establish the aim and follow the path. And to transform ourselves so that our aim, becomes ever more precise and efficient and delivers us a world that's ever more abundant and beautiful. And that's all a function of aim. Okay, so we live in the story. Well, then, as soon as you know that, this is what the postmodernists figured out. By the way, this is why the literary critics have become a dominant force in the culture war.

The postmodernists were literary critics. You think, well, there's nothing more irrelevant than a literary critic. Like, who the hell cares what an intellectual thinks about a story? I mean, of all the preposterous things to be concerned about, that might top the list. Not if the story is the thing through which you see the world. If the story is the thing you see through which you see the world, there's nothing more powerful than a literary critic, except perhaps an author. And we wouldn't have a culture war right now if the literary critic wasn't far more powerful.

than anybody had possibly imagined. Because the French intellectual literary critics, known as the postmodernists, have criticized the central story of the West to death. And that's why we have a culture war. And it's no joke. This is foundational. There's no more serious conflict than that. And you all can feel that.

That's why you're here. You know that the world is shaking and uncertain in a way that's new. And the reason that's... for that is the story itself is under assault. All right, so let's wander through that a little bit. You see the world through a story. The rationalists are empiricists, even the biologists, they might have an answer to that. They say, okay, fair enough, you see the world through a story.

But the story is biologically determined or socioculturally determined. It's a story of sex, that would be Freud. Because for Freud and for Charles Darwin, for that matter, for Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist, to an equal degree. The story, the aim is sex, reproduction,

and the story is predicated on that aim. Freud, Darwin, Dawkins. The degenerate element of that is a descent into a kind of hedonism. Because if sex is the story, then

why don't worship sex? and some dispute that and say, no, the central story isn't sex. This would be the Marxists. The central story is power. That's the story that the universities tell when they're not telling the story about sex. It's all about power.

The essential human aim is domination, oppression, victimization, exploitation, the central theme of the family is a power dynamic. The central theme of the relationship between men and women is a power dynamic. Marriage itself is a heteronormative patriarchal establishment of oppression that goes back to the dawn of time. The nuclear family is the same thing. Economic arrangements are nothing but power.

Friendships are nothing but power. The landscape. of human interaction is a dynamic of power or sex or both or both fighting against one another look these are powerful ideas why well obvious it's obvious why i mean first of all without sex there's no reproduction and without reproduction there's no people and so the Darwinian, Freudian, Richard Dawkins' selfish gene claim is that, well, what could it possibly be other than sex? And the Marxists come running forward and say, how about power? And then the Marxists say, well, obviously it's power because there's radical inequality in the world.

There's some who have and some who have not. There's no reason to assume that property in the final analysis, let's say, isn't, a form of theft, and everyone who has established themselves in some manner has only done that by stealing from those who are powerless and who have less everything they have and accruing it to themselves. And that's a credible claim for a variety of reasons. The first most fundamental reason is that a minority of people have all the success on any possible dimension of comparison. It's a very small number of people who are radically attractive. It's a very small number of people who are radically gifted in the visual arts, let's say. It's a radically small percentage of people who are

musicians. A tiny percentage of the people have most of the money. A tiny percentage of the people gather most of the attention. It's a Pareto distribution, and that's what Marks pointed on to. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And there's real truth in that, and there's truth in the claim that people structure their relationships with power. And that some people who obtain success, do it as a consequence of exploitation. And it's equally true that when any human relationship deteriorates, it tends to deteriorate in the relationship of power. If your marriage starts to become shaky, then you begin to exploit each other. Use force. You try to get your way. You try to dominate. It's the same within any family that's deteriorating into a state of pathology. It's the same

in any organization. We've seen huge states. deteriorate into the tyrannical use of power. If you had to identify a cardinal attribute of mankind, powers a reasonable hypothesis. But let's think about that for a minute. So imagine that, well, imagine that it's sex that is and should be the complete story of mankind. Well, what does that mean exactly? What's a world organized on that basis? What does a world organized on that basis look? like? Well, there's nothing more important than sex. Well, how about immediate sexual gratification whenever you want it? How about immediate sexual gratification as the archetype of hedonism? How about immediate sexual gratification whenever you want it, regardless of what anyone else has to

say about it? Because if it's the story, and it's the fundamental story, then what stops me from gaining access to what I want right now, regardless of the cost to anyone else. If there's nothing beyond that, if only the naive believe that there's anything noble about humanity beyond the immediate demand of reproduction, then what have you got to say that's moral about sex? And why the hell shouldn't everybody just do exactly what they want,

with whoever they want, whenever they want, all the time? And with power, you can, make exactly the same argument. And classical societies, aristocratic societies, militaristic and martial societies are predicated on this idea. If I can push you around, all that indicates is that I should push you around, because if you're so weak that I can push you around, you have absolutely no ground whatsoever to stand on to oppose me. Because if you were moral by the traditions of power, I wouldn't be able to push you around. And so, it's very difficult to argue out of that from a rational perspective.

Why doesn't it might make right? And why isn't it only the weak who claim that that's wrong? And why isn't it only that the weak claim that that's wrong? Not because they're moral, but because they're weak. That would certainly be a spin-off on the Nietzschean notion that will-to-power constitutes the core of man. and I would say up until the dawn of

Judeo-Christian ethic let's say power ruled and then we could imagine what sort of world it's like when power rules well we know what that world's like it's like pay attention to the strongest

or suffer the consequences well is there something beyond that that's not mere naivety what's if it isn't power that's the story and if it isn't sex. That's the story. What's the story? For the West, the answer to that is the library of the Bible. That's the story. It's the story upon which the West is founded. It's the story that has arisen over thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, for that matter, attempting to address the core issue.

what's the fundamental story It's no mystery to make the claim that The claim of the biblical library of stories as it is a library Is that it's the fundamental story All right, so we live in a story We've identified the competitors power and sex What is it that's being expressed in the biblical story? Look, if you go to a movie you read a complex

book. You go to a sophisticated movie, a sophisticated play, a Shakespearean play, or you read a sophisticated work of fiction, you see a multi-dimensional characterization. Right. A comic book has a hero with one motive. A sophisticated work of fiction has a hero, and perhaps an anti-hero, with complex multi-dimensional motivations. Whatever characterizes those more realistic people isn't reducible to any single attribute. And in a complicated work of fiction, the author walks you through a multi-dimensional characterization. You see the same person, the hero, aiming upward, the anti-hero or villain aiming downward. You see that person portrayed in multiple different situations.

And pursuing partial partial refurb. reflections of their ultimate aim. And in consequence of that, you learn to understand and embody that complex of aims. When you see a movie and you watch the hero, you're watching the hero to learn how to act like a hero. When you're watching a movie and you watch the anti-hero or the villain, you're watching the movie to learn how not to fail catastrophically and land in hell, well taking everyone else along with you. Is it reducible to something as simple as power or sex? Not if it's not a comic book. You need a multidimensional characterization.

All right. The biblical corpus provides a multi-dimensional characterization of the fundamental aim of man and cosmos. That's the claim of the book. So I'm going to walk you through some of the stories and show you what's being revealed. What's being revealed is the proper object of worship. Okay, so what does that mean? The proper object of celebration.

The aim towards which all sacrifices and work are to be directed. That which should be held in the highest regard. That which should be imitated in ritual and admiration. Okay. So that's the idea. Admiration in the same way that a small child who hero worships the boy down the street who's the baseball star, because that boy portrays a pattern of skill and attention that is the next appropriate developmental step for the hero-worshipping child. that's a recreation of the religious impulse.

The impulse to look up, admire and imitate. The question being, to what should we address our attention, upward looking, admire and imitate? That highest possible object of apprehension and admiration is by definition God. It's a definition. It's the highest aim that lurks behind all proximal aims.

That's a good way of thinking about it. It's the upward aim as such. All right. How do you bring that down to earth? Well, let's start with Genesis 1. There's a characterization of God and man in Genesis 1. The story opens at the dawn of time, at the beginning of things. That's not exactly the beginning of time.

That's usually how it's read, but it's more. complex than that. It's not only the beginning of time in the linear sense, but it's the beginning of all things that begin. This is what happens every time something begins. This is what happens every time something new makes its entry into the world. It's the continual beginning that continually unfolds that happened and is happening now and will always happen. It's the pattern of the emergence of order. out of chaos that makes itself manifest in the form of your life. How is the stage set? The spirit of God hovers over the water, over the deep.

You hear that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God engenders the world ex-Nahilo out of nothing. That's not how the story sets itself up. It sets itself up with the spirit of God hovering. above the waters, but it's not water. That's not the word. Water is one of the symbolic images,

attempting to make what's being described clear using a sequence of complex metaphors. The word for the water over which the spirit of God hovers is Tohu Vabohu or Tejom.

And it means a lot of things. It means it means the the dragon that lives at the bottom of the deepest well it means the unplomable depths of the most abysmal ocean it means the water that brings forth life

it means the infinite well of possibility itself it means the confusion that rains when your world falls apart it means the unstructured day that makes itself manifest

when you wake up it means all of that it means the dragon that the archaic god sliced into pieces and made the world from it means it's the hydra that Hercules defeats to form the world

It's all of that So what does that mean? It means that The spirit of being and becoming Generates the world from possibility What does that mean? That's what your consciousness does That's what you do

See you think you're surrounded by a world of objects That you manipulate in a robotic fashion But you're not concerned with The objects that are static you're concerned with what you can dynamically transform. When you wake up in the morning, what presents itself to you is a field of indeterminate opportunity. That's why you're worried or perhaps excited

because you have something to grapple with that hasn't yet come into being. The possibilities of the day and you might think, oh my God, I have so many things to do. I'm overwhelmed. It's too much. That's the Tohu Babohu. That's the chaos and confusion. That's a plethora of possibility. You're thinking, oh my God, how many ways are there for things to go wrong? Well, that's the multi-headed serpent that the hero always confronts. And what do you have to do with that? It's like, well, are you going to establish the order that's good in the course of the day? Because that's what

you're called upon to do. And it's your recreation of what God himself does at the the beginning of time that constitutes the action of your conscious on the possibility that's in front of you. You have a microcosm of plenitude and possibility right in front of you at any moment that you can wrestle into order if your aim is right. the process that God relies on to extract the cosmos, the order that's good, from the well of unformed possibility, is the word. It's the logos. What does that mean?

How much hell can you bring into being by saying the wrong words to your wife? Right. Now, your wife is who she is, but she's also who she could become, as you've no doubt noticed many times. And you can extract out something good or something terrible from the possibility she represents with the cautious and loving application of your words or with the careful and prideful and dismissive application of your words.

And the world you live in will be radically different depending on which of those two approaches you apply. And that will be exactly the same with anyone else you talk to and how you treat yourself and how you interact with the world as such. Because there's a provision of possibility that you're offered as a participant in the process of creation that you formulate in accordance with your aim. What's the insistence in Genesis 1? Aim up with love.

So if you want to establish the paradise of your household in relationship to your wife and your children, you aim at what's best for the best in them. You offer them the security that you can imagine. That's the walls of the walled garden. And you present to them the challenge that allows them to unfold develop optimally.

And you do that appropriately if you're aiming at what's best, what's highest. And that's the spirit of God that makes itself manifest on the waters of possibility. That's the embodiment,

the source, the initial source, and the spirit of upward aiming ultimate love. You can understand this by understanding what sort of walled garden you produce in your own household with your aim. God wrestles with the possibility that's not yet manifest and creates the cosmic order as a consequence in sequence, creating the fundamental divisions to begin with.

The separation of light and darkness. That's the phenomenology of day and night. The separation of the land from the waters. the establishment of the dome of the sky over the disk of the earth populates the world with its created beings and on the sixth day produces man and says in his own image. So now we have a characterization of God

who's the dynamic process that gives rise to order from possibility itself in keeping with the highest possible aim and we have a characterization of the human being as a microcosm of that process. The notion that each of us has a worth that's transcendental and not given by the state,

not given by yourself, not given by other individuals is predicated on that image. I mean that historically and I mean it conceptually. The notion is that one of the notions is that the state itself

has to grant to you the worth of someone created in the image of the creator himself in order even for the state to exist, maintain itself and transform.

That the state itself cannot function unless it establishes a sacred boundary between its operations and the operation of the psyche, the human psyche, the human spirit that's a manifestation of the God who generates the order that's good from possibility. And you might ask, well, who believes that? And I would say, try talking to one person once without believing that and see how it goes. We call to each other all the time, especially in our intimate relationships, to be treated as if we are the locus of value. And if you treat people that way, if you regard them that way,

if you perceive them that way, if you encourage them in that pathway of development, everything in your interactions with human beings will open itself up to you and fill your life with abundance. Everyone wants to be treated that way. And the reason for that is it's in keeping with our essential nature. And that that hospitable, welcoming, encouraging, upward aiming, loving treatment is the, aim an attitude upon which the soul, the community and the natural order itself depends for its integrity. Your country is predicated on that notion. The idea that each of you is endowed with inalienable rights and their requisite responsibilities. Is it a direct reflection of that conceptualization?

And one of the things you might frequently remind yourself of is the fact that your country wouldn't be what it is, which is the closest approximation to a shining city on the hill that's been established so far in the travail of mankind without that fundamental conception. Right. So then, you might... might say, well, is it true? And the answer is, it's not hell. I mean that, because lots of countries are hell. And they're hell in a way that opens up into an abyss and has the possibility of a deeper abyss rating latent within it, which will open up with the possibility of a deeper abyss within that. And that's what happens when that fundamental characterization is overthrown in a revolutionary manner or carelessly abandoned.

And we saw that for all of us who are non-believers and no longer conceptualize the metaphysical hell is real. We saw the metaphysical hell realized in the 20th century many times in case anyone having abandoned their metaphysical hell. physical presuppositions, was so blind that only an object lesson would suffice. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Chinese Communist Party under Mao, if that isn't close enough to hell for you, then I would say you should pray that you aren't introduced to something even worse. for the purposes of convincing you about what's real. In the second, God announces two things, three things, four things, once he creates man. He says, man is to tend the garden.

That's his purpose. Why a garden? It's a walled garden, actually, because that's what paradise means. Walled garden. Why a walled garden? Well, a garden is a place of nature, obviously. And walls are a place of culture. And a walled garden is a place of nature

encapsulated in a manageable manner by the walls of culture. That's what your backyard is. It's a yard, it's nature, has walls. The walls are culture. The walls, you could think of as physical entities, as objects, but your lawn has borders if you don't have a fence.

And your neighbors know where the borders are. And where are the borders? Well, they're in the imagination of your neighbors. I'm dead serious about that. The walls, it's so funny because you'll see people in the border between Canada and the United States. They'll get out and they'll step across the border. It's like, as if it's an object, as if it's an entity that's there on the ground. And people know that that's magic in some sense,

because the grass in Canada is only slightly less healthy than the grass in the grass in the. United States, let's say. It's easy to concretize that, but the idea of a walled-off space in a communal society is a social agreement. You have your domain, your house, your garden, your backyard. That's enough cosmos for you to set right. And perhaps if you're competent enough to do more, you'll expand your garden so that you have more to tend. But you start with a walled garden of some size. And if you tend it properly, then the promise is that

as your competence grows, so will your dominion. Man sent to tend the garden. And to name everything that's in it. This is Adam. What does that mean? Well, it's the logos again. It's an re-representation

of the creative spirit of God that makes itself manifest when time begins and when new things come into being. Our ability to name, our ability to speak, is that in the microcosmic manner. That's what we're capable of doing. That's what the patriarchal spirit does, is name and order the world.

And God brings everything to Adam to see what he'll name them. And that's a reflection of the idea that we have a created order, man has a place in it and the place is to organize it and to put everything in its proper place and to assign it its identity and that's no different than the prioritization of attention that's part of the story name things in relationship to their function put things in place in relationship to their significance in the hierarchy of being orient them orient all named things upward sequence constrain organize an order the manifestation of the patriarchal spirit what does god decide that's not good enough man lacks a helper man needs a helper

woman's created as a consequence because the order that men produce because of their limitations is insufficient and something has to be introduced to speak for that which is not included that's the role of woman that's the biblical role of the woman it's the biological role of the mother you know this in your own household women bring the concerns of the marginalized to the center you can think about that politically and it's useful to think about it politically. All established human orders exclude. The exclusion causes pain.

The pain of exclusion requires a voice. That's the voice of the Eternal Mother. That's where Genesis 1 ends. Genesis 2 contains the story of Adam and Eve. It's another creation story. It's commensurate with the first one. It's a variation on a theme. God creates Adam out of matter, earth, and breath.

Spirit. Why? Because that's what human beings are. We're material creatures that are animated. Anima means spirit. What's the spirit? The spirit is the spirit. the living, organizing principle of the material.

And human beings are an amalgam of the living, organizing principle and the material. And that's what's portrayed in the creation of Adam. The combination of matter and spirit, the combination of material and conscious. You can think about it that way, if you're more secular-minded. We're conscious matter.

What's up with that? No one understands that. No materialist understands that. We understand nothing about consciousness. It's as mysterious now as it's been throughout the entire course of our existence. It's never been reduced to material phenomena. Phenomenon, we have no idea what that would even mean. And if we did reduce it to the material, all that would mean was that we inadvertently elevated the material.

We treat each other like we're conscious. We presume from first principles that we're conscious. We can't even distinguish between being itself and being conscious. And so that's a perfectly reasonable representation of man. Woman is taken from man, from a rib, from the side as an equal. There's a critique of patriarchal Judeo-Christian narrative from the resentful feminist side that makes the claim that the biblical narrative is, for example, radically patriarchal in its orientation,

dooming women to subjugation. That's a preposterous claim, by the way. It's not only false. It's false in a very particular way. There are falsehoods that are approximations of the truth. There are falsehoods so deep that they're the exact opposite of the truth. And the truth of the matter is that right from the first words, that biblical library is miraculous in its insistence

that women like men are made in the image of God that emerges in the first chapter and that Eve is the equal of Adam in every manner although complementary and not identical and our society is driven by conflict so deep that we now doubt both of those propositions there's no form of confusion more profound than that

sexually reproducing creatures without nervous systems can tell the difference between male and female I'm dead serious about that if you can get people to swallow the lie that there's no difference between men and women there is no lie they won't swallow right so God makes Adam and Eve each with their own role

and he puts them in the garden to play forever under the watchful eye of their heavenly father. And he tells them they have free reign in the garden with everything delightful that's being created, that's being created, except for one thing. They're not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So what does that mean? Man, that's a mystery.

I spent a long time trying to crack the micro-narratives in the story of Adam and Heath. And it wasn't until three or four years ago that I think I started to understand that particular fragment of the story. A friend of mine, he is here, Jonathan Pajos, some of you might have been following him. Jonathan and his brother, Matthew,

really helped me crack this. And so we're here. I'm here with Jonathan and a number of my other colleagues and friends right now with the Daily One. are recording another seminar. We released an Exodus seminar. We're recording a seminar on the Gospels right now.

We're about 60% of the way through that. And so, just so you know, that's also forthcoming. God tells human beings, he makes one fundamental rule. Do not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Okay, that's moral knowledge. That should be self-evident, knowledge of good and evil. That's moral knowledge. moral knowledge is predicated on the idea that there's an upward path and a downward path,

that there are desirable things and that there are undesirable things, and that the pinnacle of what's desirable is what's heavenly or paradisal, and in the abysmal depths of what's undesirable is the diabolical and the hellish. And that's the moral landscape. That's the landscape of good and evil. That's the fictional landscape. Fictional in the sense of characterization and plot, fictional in the sense of distilled truth, not falsehood, fictional in the sense that the fiction describes the structure

through which you see the world. Fiction has the deepest form of truth. What does it mean to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil? When Nietzsche announced the death of God in the late 1800s, he said something that he believed would. constitute a pathway forward. He said, we have dispensed with God. We are the greatest murderers who ever lived.

We've engaged in a murder so profound that we'll never wash away the blood. How could we possibly conduct ourselves in the aftermath of that murder? You read of Nietzsche as a triumphant anti-Christian. He was a very complicated person, and he knew perfectly well that the dissolution of the Christian metaphysic would produce a cataclysmic consequence. He predicted in the late 1800s that Europe would turn to a radically resentful egalitarian communitarianism that would kill tens of millions of people, which is exactly what happened. And he saw that coming just as clearly as his Russian counterpart. Fyodor Dostoevsky saw it. He knew what would rise in the aftermath of the death of God.

He knew that resentment and communitarianism would be one temptation. And he tried to formulate a alternative path. He said, we're going to have to create our own values. We're going to have to take it upon ourselves to create the moral landscape. I read that and I understood why he said that. I could see its influence on clinical psychology, for example, the notion of the self-actualized person, the notion that our soul should unfold in the direction that's commensurate with the deepest understanding of our subjective selves, right? The radical unveiling of subjectivity.

Self-definition. I am what I say I am, which is a radical claim in our society now. A claim of omniscience. Not only am I who I say I am, you better act like I'm who I say I am. That's the claim of the radical subjective. Well, what's wrong with that claim? Well, the psychoanalysts criticized Nietzsche very effectively. They said, look, how are you going to create your own values when you're not master in your own house?

Have you tried telling yourself what to do? How does that work for you? I know, you're just your own obedient servant, right? You're so morally pure. You just tell yourself at New Year's that you're going to go to the gym and you're going to diet and you're going to be some stellar physique, lean, mean fighting machine by March and you go once and then you tell yourself lies about why you don't have to go again. And that's the end of that. And if you were capable of creating your own values, you wouldn't be the banner, the tattered banner that blows in the wind of its overall. whims. The psychoanalyst figured this out very quickly. You're a war of competing whims.

And a creature like that's going to have a very difficult time navigating the complex landscape of the ultimate moral pronouncement. Who are you to make a decision about what constitutes good and evil? And that's what God tells men and women. It's like you don't get to create the moral order. You get to dwell within it. You get to align yourself with the pre-existent moral order. You do not take to yourself the right, the presumption to define good and evil themselves. You bow your head to good,

and you pray for deliverance from evil. And if you violate that, look the hell out. And that's the pronouncement. And so what happens? The serpent, offers Eve the fruit. Why the serpent? Well, the serpent is camouflaged. The serpent is crafty, subtle. The serpent is marginalized. The serpent is the voice of pride. The serpent is

Lucifer. That's the metaphysical surrounding of the story that develops over centuries the notion that the serpent in the Garden of Paradise is Lucifer himself, the spirit of pride. What does that mean? It's prideful presumption that makes you assume that you can define the moral order. What's the prideful presumption of Eve at the beginning of time and forever? I can even clasp the serpent to my breast. It's the careless welcoming in of the monstrous and prideful under the guise of the pretension of maternal compassion.

And if you can't see that happening in our society, you're blind. And what's the sin of Adam? Well, what do men care about? Women care about properly about the helpless infant. It's a powerful feminine virtue

and it can be inverted and made prideful and trumpeted and presumptuous to infantilize the world and to advertise that compassion as a badge of worth and honor, as a mode of attaining status. What's Adam's sin? What a men care about?

Impressing women. Men are ambitious fundamentally to impress women. For better or for worse. What's the prideful pathway and false pathway to establishing a relationship with the two demanding feminine. I've got it. Anything you want, dear. Right.

And that's Adam's sin. Eve harkens to the voice of the serpent and clutches it to her breast. Despite the clear injunction from the divine, never to do that. And Adam Weakley does exactly what the worst part of his wife wants And so here we are, folks

So what's the consequence of that? Well, the scales fall from their eyes And they notice they're naked And they're deeply ashamed and they cover up They become self-conscious Okay, so when do people become self-conscious? When they make prideful errors when you overreach

and you reveal your inadequacy as a consequence of the mismatch between your pride and your ability you'll be ashamed you'll recognize your insufficiency you'll be aware of yourself as an isolated entity

that's all to become self-conscious psychologists have learned over the last 40 years that there's no difference between being conscious of yourself and being miserable Those are literally the same thing. If you're living a life of other-centered, communally oriented, hospitable calling, you're not attending to the miseries of your isolated self.

If you stay in your bailiwick and you don't put forward your hand presumptuously, you can live in the absence of painful self-consciousness. Pride goes before a fall. We have a month devoted to pride in our culture. Right. Pride goes before a fall. You know this in your own life.

You can ask yourself, and this has been a Christian conundrum since the beginning of time, is your life miserable because misery is baked into the structure of the world? Or is your life miserable because you do stupid things and refuse to learn and bring endless misery on yourself? in your presumption. And you know, you might say a little a column A and a little a column B, and fair enough. But you certainly know that the most painful episodes of your life come when you claim falsely to be more than you are.

And the core narrative in the Judeo-Christian ethos is that the fall of man into the profane world is a consequence of pride. And that is really something worth thinking about. You know, Adam and Eve are called upon to work in misery as a consequence of their pride. Well, could you work joyfully? If you didn't overreach yourself, if you were aiming upward properly, if you were telling the truth, if you were acting communally, if you're acting in relationship to what was highest, would it be possible that your work would be joyful and bring abundance? Isn't there times in your life when that's happened? Is it the case that you move forward in misery

in precise proportion to the pretension of your aim? It's worth considering. It's the suspicion that arises at the end of the story that begins history because it's with the prideful fall of Adam and Eve that history begins. Adam and Eve discover they're naked and they hide. And God comes along and says, Adam, where are you? And Adam says,

I'm over here. I'm hiding. And God says, well, why are you hiding? It's a foolish thing to do, right? Because Adam is perfectly aware that God can see through bushes. Adam is hiding from God. Is it your pathetic self-consciousness that makes you hide from God?

That's a good question. Are you not everything you could be because you're ashamed of who you are? that's what that story indicates and so God calls Adam one he says who told you why are you hiding and Adam says well I'm naked

and God says well how do you find out that you were naked how did you find out that you were inadequate how did you find out that you are shameful and Adam says you know that woman you made me it's her fault and that's the second sin of Adam

and that's another indication of the non patriarchal nature of the text. You know, Eve is the first human being to take a bite of the apple, but Adam follows along, and it isn't obvious to me that the follower of sin is in a worse, better moral position than the initiator, and then he compounds his sin, like men do, by blaming the woman. Why is your life so... Well, if you had my wife, man, you'd know. It's like those damn women. It's like, it's a handy excuse for men all the time to say that, and it's not least, because men can't tolerate being rejected by women, and women reject them all the time. And the reason women reject them is because they're not all they should be. And so, of course, that makes men

painfully self-conscious, and makes them shake their fist at God, and makes them hide. And so, what God says. And so Adam reveals himself in this pathetic manner. It's like he can't even take responsibility for his own misstep. He has to blame the thing that's been granted to him as the highest form of gift and not only her but God. Whose fault is it? Well, it's not mine. It's probably women's fault and if it's not women, it's clearly God. It can't be me. So what happens? Well, both Adam and Eve are condemned to suffer in their work. And that's how history begins. And that's the situation of the fallen world. And that's the description of the landscape of profound fiction that we that we inhabit.

And that's only a tiny fraction of the characterization of God and man in the biblical corpus. Thank you very much. All right. So we'll welcome Constantine on to the stage. He's going to... Thank you. Hey, sir. Thank you. That was great, Jordan. Should we sit?

Absolutely. Well, so much to agree on, first of all, not least just when you were talking about the foundation of American, how great it is. How could anyone disagree with that? Everyone here has guns. No, but I mean it, actually. And one of the things I was thinking that I really agreed on, I don't want to spend too much time on the stuff that I agree on. but I've had this phrase in my head for a long time now, which is the cultures, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And I thought that was very interesting that you mentioned it.

But you brought me here to be a contrarian, so it's his fault, not mine if I offend you, when I offend you. You said we're here partly because the Enlightenment doesn't work, is wrong. If the enlightenment is wrong, why are we sitting in an arena of 6,500 people with bright lights and all of this created through the scientific method and research and all of the stuff that comes out of the Enlightenment? How are we here? I don't think the scientific method is wrong. I think the Enlightenment is wrong. So I don't know how many of you noticed this, but yesterday, the day before or something like that,

Richard Dawkins announced that he was a cultural Christian. Most upvoted question for the Q&A. Okay, okay, well there we go. Well, because Richard Dawkins, who is a genuine scientist, and I think actually a good man, is feeling in his bones that something is up. And what he said essentially was that even though, and it's paradoxical, right? He said, even though I'm happy that formal blooms, belief in Christianity in the West is on the decline.

I would rather live in a Christian culture than in a religion, than in a culture dominated by any other religion. And so that's kind of a backhanded compliment. And then he said also he doesn't want the cathedrals to go, he doesn't want the churches to go, he doesn't want Christmas to go, there's a lot of beauty in the culture that he wants to maintain. And so that puts Dr. Dawkins in a difficult position. I don't say this with any delight.

If Christianity works in the manner that even makes science possible, which is something that Dr. Dawkins is beginning to understand, what is it about Christianity that works? And how is what works different from what doesn't work? Now, Dr. Dawkins doesn't like to mention this, but one of the things he is doing is contrasting what he believes is the Christian UK

with perhaps what the UK might be if it was fundamentalist Islam, for example. And I'm not criticizing Islam when I say that. I'm criticizing more pointedly fundamentalism. And Dr. Dawkins knows that there's something

regardless of what might be wrong with Christianity, let's say, there's something like seriously wrong with that kind of fundamentalism. And that means he's making a hierarchy of order and he's placing what's Christian above what's fundamentalist. So that's part of that reflection of a moral order. And then he's stuck with the problem. It's like, well, then what is it about Christianity that makes it right? Well, we have to get rid of all the, what? The miracles,

the magic, the superstition. Well, how do you separate out that from what's hypothetically good? And why do you even think that's possible? There's no evidence that it's possible. There's no evidence that it's possible. Like perhaps it's possible. We haven't done it since the Enlightenment arose, so I don't think we can. The so so there's that problem. The Enlightenment has run to its end because it's fun there are fundamental propositions that it was predicated on that aren't true. Like what? We don't orient ourselves empirically. We don't orient ourselves rationally. We orient ourselves in the narrative world. And we don't yet

really understand what that means. Let me give you an example of that, okay? So, Sigmund Freud believed that the reason your dreams were mysterious was because your dreams were delivering to you messages about your desires

that you didn't want to become conscious of and that the dream was symbolizing them to to hide what was repressed but well offering it you might argue in small doses

and that accounted for the mystery of dreams why are dreams so mysterious well Freud's answer was well because the dream disguises unpleasant truths from the dreamer so that he can maintain his slumber Carl Jung came along and said no

the dream is the universe within which philosophy situates itself you dream about what you do not yet understand. The dream is the mediator between what is still mysterious, so mysterious you might not even know that it exists, and what you concretely can contend with. Jung's correct. We know not enough now about how the hemispheres of the brain function. We know enough about how the dream functions. We know enough about the relationship between the imagination

and our ability to speak to say that what we understand is necessary. in a dream. The dream is mysterious. The dream isn't the same world as the graspable, describable world. Christianity is the dream within which the West is embedded. And there are elements of it that we can't understand partly because we have to situate ourselves in relationship to what's ultimately mysterious. And that means that the dream shades into the miraculous and mysterious. And there's no way around that. Because we need that buffer, at least because we need that buffer.

It's also because things that are true that we cannot understand from our current frame of reference appear as miraculous within that frame of reference. Now, that doesn't mean I know how to contend we're doing this gospel seminar. Now, I don't know how to contend with the plethora of miraculous healing stories. I don't know how to contend with the story of the quelling of the waves on the sea of Galilee, but I know that we live in a story, and I know that the story mediates between the finite and the infinite, and I know that we can't dispense with the story,

not without opening ourselves up to invasion by any number of catastrophic competing stories. And that is what's happening in the West, as far as I'm concerned, not least the story of power, or the story of hedonism, or the story of paganism, the story of nature worship. We moved very quickly from worship of the transcendent spirit beyond nature to worship of nature itself. That's what the environmentalist movement is. And you know this. The Irish want to sacrifice 200,000 cows to change the weather.

Right. Right. And that's a reemergence. truly a re-emergence of that pagan spirituality and a whole different aim. We put nature above all else. Well, where do we put man? What's our birth rate? Way below replacement.

We know where we put man. There's too many of us. In relationship to what? Nature. So, how is the Enlightenment wrong? Well, man does not live by bread alone. You know, the technological enterprise offers material abundance and more power to it. But as an end in itself, as a moral ethos in itself, it's unsustainable.

It produces nothing but towers of Babel. And it produces people who can't master their own tools. And we're in that situation. Do you think it's possible that it's the material abundance that's the problem? I wouldn't say it's the problem. The cause of the problem. No, I don't think so. I think it's a fundamental symptom.

Let me tell you a story. This is very cool. This took me 40 years to figure out. And I can tell you in three minutes, so that's a good deal for you. You remember, I like the movie Pinocchio a lot. I've talked about it a lot. I would do a whole series on Pinocchio if Disney hadn't crookedly reestablished copyright control over it by bribing public officials. You remember something, there's a variety of very strange things happen in Pinocchio. But one of the strangest is that Geppetto ends up in a whale.

And that's never explained. It's like, Geppetto makes Pinocchio. He's the benevolent father, and Pinocchio leaves, and Geppetto goes and looks for him, and fair enough. And then he ends up in a whale at the bottom of the ocean. And no one just walks out of the theater thinking, you know, what the hell? What's going on here? They think, oh, yeah, well, of course he's in a whale. And then, of course, Pinocchio goes to the bottom of the abyss, like Jonah, to find his father.

Who's living in a gigantic carcass. Right. There's an ancient story, the Mesopotamians told, called the Anuma Illish. And in the Anuma Illish, the world is consterned. by Tiamat, who's a feminine dragon. From her name, Tiamat, comes Tohu Babohu and Tehom, that possibility that God makes order out of, at the beginning of time. She's the feminine dragon that represents nature and possibility.

And she has a husband, Apsu, who's the patriarchy, matriarchy and patriarchy, yin and yang's. It's the age-old story. They unite and they give rise to the first. world. The deities of the first world start pursuing their own aims and they get noisy and prideful. They kill Apsu and they live on his corpse. That's what we're doing. Juppetto is in the corpse of a carcass. Why? Wealth is a carcass. Wealth is a storehouse of value. Wealth can be traded for food. The past is the carcass. The of a whale. Harvard is a whale carcass. Harvard is a whale carcass inhabited by unconscious people who are living on the storehouse of past value. Right. Right. Absolutely. Without replenishing it. Right. It's the parasite problem fundamentally. And it is a problem with wealth because the problem with wealth is like it. This is the problem Abraham has. Abraham has wealthy father.

He doesn't launch his life till he's 70 and the reason for that is because he doesn't have to He can exist unconsciously in the carcass of his ancestors Right, that's what we're doing in the West and we've been building these storehouses of value since World War II We're so rich and now we have the pathologies of the wealthy And one of the pathologies of the wealthy is prideful In gratitude and that's what the university is specialized in that's what they train their students to have, you know, prideful presumption. And the universities opened the door

to the non-productive scavengers starting in the 1960s. And they took over, over a 40-year period. I watched it happen. And much of what's happening downstream is a consequence of that. And this is an age-old story, like the Mesopotamian story. That's the oldest. story we have. It's like 3,500 years old, something like that, and in sorrow form, way older. People knew a long time ago that if you are stupid enough to kill the spirit of your fathers, you die. What happens in the Mesopotamian story is the Taimat, whose chaos itself comes back, just like God in the story of Noah, it's exactly the same idea. She comes back and says, I'm going to take you all out. Well, you brought me here to disagree with you,

struggling here because I agree with everything you're saying. I'm tricky that way. Well, it's just, it's much easier to see as an outsider like me having come from the Soviet Union to see a civilization essentially forgetting how it got there. I feel like we're kind of a cargo cult in a way. Right. But the obvious question then is, how do you put the toothpaste back in the tube, which I think is where we are?

Now, you're here talking about Christianity being the dream in which we're all embedded, but there is what I call the children of Dawkins is what I call my generation. And that conversation became fundamentally about one thing, I think, which is, are the metaphors that you laid out so beautifully? True. That's what that discussion is about. And it's very difficult to convince people like me. you know, if you have to believe that my suit is red

in order for everything to turn out correct, you still weren't because it's not red, right? Does that make sense? Of course, of course, of course. Okay, so what's your prescription? You had two questions, so I'll address them in order. Okay, so I'm going to tell you the rest of the Mesopotamian myth. Okay.

So you know what happens in the Pinocchio story, right? Pinocchio, by the time Pinocchio gives to rescue his father, He's a braying jackass who is enticed into slavery by hedonists. And also by neurotic hedonists, because if you remember the story, the reason he ends up on Pleasure Island is because the criminals convince him that he's too sick and neurotic and victimized to become real. So then he goes to Pleasure Island with all the delinquents, and they throw rocks through the masterpieces of Western civilization,

and they turn into braying drunken donkeys, while the slavers prepare to sell them to the coal mines. And Pinocchio escapes with some of his voice intact, and he goes to the bottom of the ocean to rescue Geppetto. Okay, so that's the first part of the cure. You go into the depths to find your lost father, into the depths. Now, what's in the depths for Pinocchio? A fire-breathing dragon, right?

You remember the whale has fire in it, And when it comes up to the surface, it breathes fire. It's a dragon. It's the dragon that has the treasure. The treasure is not only the father who's rescued, but the discovery of the true pathway that restores Pinocchio, restores his voice, restores the true voice to Pinocchio,

and transforms him into what he could be. And that's the courage to confront the unconscious abyss. And that's what the psychoanalysts we're calling for, especially Jung, is the courage to confront the unconscious abyss. Auschwitz, the darkness itself, and that's the pathway to the light. There's no difference between that and the idea of the crucifixion. The ultimate confrontation with death and mortality and malevolence and the revelation of eternal life in consequence.

The Mesopotamians, Tiamat reemerges the dragon of chaos to destroy everything. because the ungrateful inhabitants of her husband's corpse have enraged the structure of being so profoundly that devastation is the most likely outcome. The inhabitants of Apsu panic and marshaled the forces to confront chaos. They send out one hero after another and they all fail. Well that's happening, new, New beings are born. And one of them is qualitatively different.

This is the birth of the hero. This is the god of Mesopotamia whose name was Marduk. Marduk has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words. That's the logos in nascent form. Magic words. Words of truth. And the eyes are the same as the eye of Horus, the Egyptian eye that sees everything. What's the antidote to unconsciousness?

Pay attention. What do you pay attention to? Everything you don't want to pay attention to. So Marduk goes out, Marduk tells all the other inhabitants of the dead corpse. He says, look, I'll go out and I'll attend to and deal with chaos. Tiamat. The chaos you brought upon yourself with your unconscious presumption. But here's the deal. I'm at the pinnacle. This is the emergence of a kind of monotheism. What's at the pinnacle? Magic truth and vision.

The Mesopotamians figured that out. So is how is that concretized? The magic words of truth and the vision that enables you to forthrightly confront chaos and malevolence itself, the darkest elements of possibility, and to make the orderly world as a consequence. And that's exactly what Marduk does. He goes out with a net. He encloses chaos in the net.

That's understanding as a consequence of confrontation. He cuts her into pieces and he makes the world. And that's the eternal medication for the death of God. It's happened. Murcher Eiliad mapped this out in his magisterial works on the history of religion. We think the death of God has happened in 1850. It's happened many times, repeatedly.

It's the same pattern all the time, which is why the Mesopotamians had it nailed like thousands of years ago, and the medicine is always the same. Here's another example. In numbers, Moses is leading the lost Israelites through the desert. They're a long ways on their journey by this time. They're almost at the promised land. They've been wandering around lost for a long time,

and they're still pining for the tyranny and whining and irresponsible. They're still slavish. They still wish they had a king. They are whiny and terrible, and they run out of water, and they're not really listening to Moses, but they're starting to die of thirst and worse. And they're complaining about this bitterly, and God has had enough of them by this time,

and he sends poisonous snakes in to bite them. And the meaning of that story is that you might be, lost and things are miserable and you're irresponsible and you think it's pretty dismal and that you get to shake your fist at God. But if you keep being stupid, worse things will happen to you without end. And so God sends some poisonous snakes. And so the Israelites, that's enough for them. The thirst and the lostness is enough. The snakes are too much. They go to Moses with some degree of humility and they say, do you want to ask, we hear you've got a pipeline to God, do you want to ask him to call off the snakes? And Moses says, I'm not very happy with you people.

And I just as soon leave you, like, die and be poisoned in the desert. But I'll see what I can do. So he goes and has a chat with God. And God says, yeah, I don't think I'll call off the snakes. But what I'll do instead is I'm going to ask you to do something. I want you to cast a bronze serpent. Take all the bronze that you have and make a serpent out of it. And put it on a steak.

and make a statue out of it and put it somewhere where the Israelites can all see it and if they go and actually look at it then they'll be immune from the poison okay that symbol that stake with a snake around it that's the same symbol that is Sclepius who's the Greek god of healing

that's the same symbol that represents Sclepius it's the same symbol that your physicians use to signify their operation. And there's a principle there, which is that a little poison voluntarily incorporated will increase your resilience. That's what a vaccine does when liars haven't made them.

So the Israelites go look at the snake on the bronze staff, which is also Moses' staff, by the way, which is also the staff that transforms itself into serpents, and that transforms itself into the serpent that eats all the serpents of the Pharaoh's magicians. All of that's symbolically locked together. And what's the idea?

Confront what you're terrified by that poisons you and prevail. In the gospels, Christ says to his followers that unless he's lifted up like the serpent in the desert, that men will be redeemed if he is lifted up like the serpent in the desert. That's what Christianity was. And so this is a way of thinking about it. The serpent on the stake is a symbol of what's dangerous and poisonous. And what's dangerous and poisonous is an example of the danger and poison of life.

The danger of life is the brute reality of mortality, our vulnerability, our naked vulnerability, and the poison is malevolence. So a serpent is threat and poison. You're to confront threat and poison. The crucifix is a meta serpent. It's everything about life that's catastrophic and everything about life that's poisonous in one symbol. And the West realized in this dreamlike fashion

that we're to look upon that we're to imitate the pattern of that confrontation which is a sacrificial pattern and we're to regard that as the center of the community which is why the cross is at the center of the church and the church is at the center of the town and the town is at the center of the state it's all predicated on the idea of

the ultimate sacrificial offering a voluntary acceptance of the mortal and poisonous preconditions of life and that's the cure. That's the cure. And that's always been the case.

Right. So I want to bring a couple of audience questions in while we have time. And actually on this very point about Richard Dawkins and whether cultural Christianity, quote, can be the solution.

Can it? Can you have practice without belief? We were at Constantine and I were in a conference in London, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, ARC, which we put together as a distributed responsibility alternative to the global internationalists, the doomsaying profits of the future, who offer tyranny as offering to the government. of nature and as false security. And Ayan Hershey Ali came to the conference and she spoke very eloquently about her recent

conversion to Christianity from Islam, which has made her a marked woman yet again. It's a very brave woman, Iian Herssey Ali. And she said, a flower can live for a time when you cut it off from its roots, but only for a time. We're living on borrowed time. It's the same idea with regard to the corpse, let's say, of Apzu or the whale carcass.

There's a spirit that gives rise to that plenitude, right? And it is something like the spirit of communal self-sacrifice. It's something like that. Now, okay, so that's one story. Now, Douglas Murray said something interesting to me, too, that was very surprising, because Murray has come to the cultural Christian conclusion, despite also being a follower of Dawkins, like IAN was, he said, I realized something.

If you take the magic and the miracles away, Christianity degenerates into wokeism. And so now, it's not like I understand that. I'm not claiming that. But it has something to do with this issue of the dream. It's like the narrative of our culture has to mediate between us and the infinite. And that means it has to shade into the miraculous.

Now, you might say, well, what does that mean in reality? Is that just a metaphor? Which is kind of the question you asked earlier. Your suit isn't red. It's green. And how can we predicate our culture on a lie? Well, I hashed this out with Jonathan Pazio. And he said something which I thought was brilliant. He said, look, if the pattern that you're identifying is that deep. and it's crucial to the maintenance of the integration of the psyche and of culture itself, how can it not actually be reflective of the structure of reality itself? And, you know, I've had a proclivity to view the mythological stories, let's say, as symbolic. And that's a valid reading, but the question that Pajot posed is a very trenchant question, It's like, at what point is something so highly functional and universally applicable

that you have to allow that even though you don't understand it, it's reflective of the deepest structure of reality itself? And I'll put a twist on that. I tried to get Richard Dawkins to talk to me for a couple of years. Now, he eventually did, and we're going to talk again publicly. I hope we're arranging that at the moment. The first thing he said, he's a very disagreeable guy. like very educated Englishmen, those are dangerous people, man.

They'll cut you into ribbons politely and be quite gleeful about it, and they're very good at it, better than anyone else in the world, I would say. And he, first of all, he said, I don't think I'd have enough patience to talk to you. You've said a lot of preposterous things, and I don't know why the hell you want to talk to me anyways. But maybe it has something to do with this, and he sent me a paper that he wrote like 30 years ago, and I thought, you know exactly why I want to talk to you.

So he sent me this paper where he made the claim that, and it was a paper I had read, and that it actually had some influence on me, that a living organism has to be a microcosm of its environment. So what that means, for example, imagine an alien scientist came to Earth and took a bird up to its lab and took the bird apart. Well, what could it learn about the Earth? Well, it could learn the chemical makeup of the atmosphere by studying the bird's blood. It could derive a tremendous amount of knowledge about the whole history of life on Earth by analyzing the DNA. It could infer the density of the atmosphere by the ratio of the area of the bird's wings to the mass of the bird. It would know something about the temperature that the earth, that characterizes the earth,

and could infer something about the sun. It would be able to derive knowledge of the gravitational field. The bird is a model of its environment, and Dawkins went further. He said, no animal that isn't a model of its environment can survive. We're a microcosm.

A creature is a microcosm of its environment. That's a medieval conception of the relationship between man and God. It's like, we're a microcosm of the cosmic structure. And at the highest level of organization, the highest level of human organization were a personality. Do we live in relationship to the spirit of the cosmos? That's the biblical claim.

I think it's correct. I think reality itself is founded on sacrifice. Do I know what that means? Not completely. I do understand what it means that the integrated psyche and the community are founded on sacrifice. I think I can make that argument completely coherently. When you mature, you give up your...

hedonistic short-term whim for the future. That's the sacrifice. When you become communal, you give up your self-centeredness for others. And so the community and this integrity of the spirit are predicated on complex sacrifice. What does that mean about reality? The answer to that is it depends on what you mean by reality. Right? See, most people who say, is the religious worldview,

assume axiomatically that the rationalist, empiricist, materialist worldview is true. See, I don't think it's true. I think you can't help but bring the nature of reality itself into question when you ask that question. This is why I don't like people asking me if I believe in God. It's like not on your terms. We don't mean the same thing. I mean something in my belief, such as it is, that's radically different. So there's no difference between asking the question, is the religious real, and asking the question, well, what do you mean by a reality that's not religious?

So they're equally mysterious. And I would say a reality that's not religious can't maintain itself. It can't. It's missing something crucial. It's missing meaning. That's a problem. It's like it. Not only is it a problem.

it's possible that it's the problem this is why Christ says you can't live by bread alone and that's part of the problem with the technological enlightenment it's like here's all the bread you need yeah for what what for what to pursue my hedonistic whim like for what

this is a crucial question people in abundance will commit suicide without an answer to that question right so the technological enterprise is insufficient that doesn't mean it's unnecessary or unworthy. It just means that it has to be put in its proper place and its proper position in the hierarchy. That's how it looks to me. I have so many questions, but we'll have to save them for next time because we're together for a few shows. I want to ask you, we're in wrestling some very difficult questions tonight. I want to finish maybe with the most difficult one.

This is from Jonas, who says, my wife and I took your personality test. I'm 0.1% neuroticism. She's 99%. any advice on navigating this difference in personality? Well, the first thing I would say as a clinician is that I would find out if your wife is suffering from an anxiety disorder or depression. Like I would first of all find out if there's something physical that's troubling her because that's a high enough level. So neuroticism is sensitivity to negative emotion, right? There's five cardinal personality dimensions.

Sensitivity to positive emotion. That's extroversion. sensitivity to negative emotion that's neuroticism agreeableness which is really a maternal care dimension it's people orientation

rather than thing orientation as well agreeable people are empathetic and compassionate and disagreeable people are blunt and competitive and there's quite a sex difference there by the way conscientiousness is dutifulness and orderliness and industriousness

and openness is breadth of idea and aesthetic interest. It's creativity. That's a good way of thinking about it. If you're at the 99th percentile for neuroticism, you're more sensitive to negative emotion than 99 people out of 100. That's sensitive enough to raise the question, are you depressed or do you have an anxiety disorder? And that raises the question. First is, are you ill in some way? because people suffer from depression and anxiety for all sorts of reasons and some of them are linked to behavior and attitude but a lot of them are linked to physical health and so especially if your wife has a proclivity for depression which means she becomes hopeless that's the absence of positive emotion she suffers a surfeit of pain and anxiety you might want to see if you might want to see if you something can be done about that. If it's merely a matter of variability and temperament, I would say

the way that you help people who are very sensitive to negative emotion become more resilient is to help them establish an aim because that stabilizes them so she could do my future authoring program at self-authoring.com. That helps people establish an aim. and then once she decides her aim, there will be things that get in her way that she's afraid of. That'll be the negative emotion. And you want to work out routines to have her practice exposing herself to the things she's afraid of. That's what you do too if you have a timid child.

You know, so maybe you take a timid child to the playground and they want to hover around your feet because they're afraid to go make friends. You say, well, look, kid, today we'll just go to the playground and you can watch the other kids. Tomorrow, we'll go to the playground and you can sit on that bench over there and I'll sit over here 20 feet away

and you can just watch from there. And the day after that, you can do this progressively, you go and stand nearer the kids. And the day after that, you go say hello to one kid. You know, with someone who's very sensitive to negative emotion. You can find the border of their fear.

And then you want them to put, you want them to put themselves voluntarily on the border of their fear until they're habituated until they understand that nothing terrible is going to happen, and then you want them to take a step forward.

And if you do that carefully, you can take anyone who's very afraid of virtually anything, and you can make them more robust. And it's the clinical application of the Marduk principle fundamentally is find out what the person's afraid of, break it into manageable challenges, expose them to the manageable challenge one. So you could ask your wife, is there something that you'd really want to do that you're afraid of doing and haven't done

because of the fear? You know, list 10 things like that. Okay. Now list them in order of fear with number one being the thing I'm most afraid of and number 10 being the thing I'm least afraid of. Okay, now take number 10 and break that into steps and then have her take the steps and just do that as a routine, as a practice. This is what you can do too. Like in your own life, if you're afraid of things, it's like, well, cut the thing you're afraid of down to size. How much do you cut it down until you're willing to advance?

That's the rule. You just break it down until you'll do it. wherever that is, no matter how pathetic that is, let's say. You have to accept that. And if you do that, you'll face it, you'll master it, and then you can take on the next task. And people get, it's exactly what God tells the Israelites to do in the deserts. Like you look at what frightens you and throws you into chaos.

You look at it voluntarily. Every school of clinical therapeutic endeavor since the dawn of the 20th century has converged on the understanding that voluntary exposure to what stops you as you move forward is curative. So you can use that as a treatment for negative emotion. It's well documented among timid children. This is why it's so dangerous to have an overprotective parent. Because the overprotective parent stops the child from transforming. You have to say, out to the edge there, kid.

You know, and I can only get within five feet. It's okay, five feet's good. Get four and a half feet away then. Get three feet away, right? Dance on the edge of the abyss. And that's a terrible thing for a mother to tell her child to do. But all the good mothers do that, even with their terrified children. It's even more important for them.

You know, and there's a kind of harshness about that, but it's a harshness that prepares them to not die when they leave. so that's the answer to that question there you go I thought that was going to be a lighthearted question Jordan what a pleasure has been tonight I just thought I would maybe emphasize one thing that you said before we go before we bring Kelly's heroes back on to send us off with a bang which is we've had this conversation

about religion and God and so on but actually I think irrespective of where people are on those issues two of the most powerful things that I thought you said tonight was a reminder that, A, perception is projection. What we see is a function of what we project into the world, what we expect to see. And the second one is we wake up every day with the opportunity to reorder the world. And I thought that's a very powerful couple of things to take away. Thank you, sir.

Good to have you aboard, man. Thank you. All right, everyone. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure talking to you all. Much appreciated. I love your city, by the way. Good work.

Yep. All right, so we'll bring the band back on, and they'll take you out rocking. Good night, everybody. What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, you can begin each morning

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