TRANSCRIPT: The Sins of Adam and the True Nature of Eve – Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

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, 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 under thought. 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.

The Power of Stories

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 Steven 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 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, 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 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 entertainment. 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, dude, 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 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.

How We Understand Others

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 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 understand the 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 at that which is important to us. That’s why our eyes look the way they look. Black in the middle, colored on that ring around that against the 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 too 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 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.

The Nature of Understanding and Aim

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. 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 fictionally. And I can come to inhabit the same world of perception and emotion that they inhabit.

I can even guess how they might act and to what they might attend in situations I haven’t seen because now I know their aim. 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.

How We See the World Through Story

We see the world through a story. 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—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 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 Aiden.

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The Power of Literary Critics

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 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 for that is the story itself is under assault.

Competing Stories: Sex and Power

So let’s wander through that a little bit. You see the world through a story. The rationalists or empiricists, even the biologists, they might have an answer to that to 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 not 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 the dynamic of power or sex or both or both fighting against one another. Look. These are powerful ideas. Why? Well, it’s obvious.

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.

The Truth in Power Dynamics

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 Marx pointed onto. 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 with 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, power is a reasonable hypothesis. But let’s think about that for a minute.

The Limits of Sex and Power as Stories

So 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 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 if it isn’t power that’s the story? And if it isn’t sex that’s the story, what’s the story?

The Biblical 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, because it is a library, is that it’s the fundamental story.

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, 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 multidimensional characterization. Right? A comic book has a hero with one motive.

A sophisticated work of fiction has a hero and perhaps an antihero with complex multidimensional 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 multidimensional 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 as a 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 while 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. The biblical corpus provides a multidimensional characterization of the fundamental aim of man and cosmos. That’s the claim of the book.

The Proper Object of Worship

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.

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 worshiping child. That’s a recreation of the religious impulse. The impulse to look up, admire, and imitate. The question being, what should we address our attention upward looking, admire, and imitate? That highest possible object of apprehension and admiration is by definition God.

The Highest Aim and Genesis

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.

How do you bring that down to earth? Well, let’s start with Genesis one. There’s a characterization of God and man in Genesis one. 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 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 tehom.

The Meaning of Chaos and Possibility

And it means a lot of things. It means the dragon that lives at the bottom of the deepest well. It means the unfathomable 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 reigns 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. So 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.”

Well, that’s the tohu vabohu. 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 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. Well, what does that mean? How much hell can you bring into being by saying the wrong words to your wife?

The Power of Words

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 one? 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 and 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 Transcendental Worth of Humans

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 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.

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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 and 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 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.

The Reality of Hell

So then you 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 waiting 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 nonbelievers and no longer conceptualize the metaphysical hell as real, we saw the metaphysical hell realized in the twentieth century many times. In case anyone having abandoned their metaphysical presuppositions, was so blind that only an object lesson would suffice. Right? 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 into something even worse for the purposes of convincing you about what’s real.

The Garden and Man’s Purpose

In the second, God announces two 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. It has walls. The walls are culture. The walls, 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. Right?

They’ll get out, and they’ll step across the border. It’s like as if it’s an object, as if 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 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 confidence grows, so will your dominion. Man sent to tend the garden and to name everything that’s in it.

The Role of Adam and Eve

This is Adam. What does that mean? Well, it’s the logos again. It’s a 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, but 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, order. The manifestation of the patriarchal spirit. And 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. 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 one ends. Genesis two begins 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 living organizing principle of the material.

The Dual Nature of Human Beings

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 could 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. 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.

The Biblical View of Women

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 this 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, the 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 riven 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.

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 except for one thing. They’re not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Tree of 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 Eve, 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 Pajo. 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 Wire recording another seminar.

We released an Exodus seminar. We’re recording a seminar on the gospels right now. We’re about sixty percent 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. 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. That at 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.

Nietzsche and the Death of God

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 an 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.

The Problem with Creating Your Own Values

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 mastering 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 tattered banner that blows in the wind of its own 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 preexisting 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.

The Serpent and Eve

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.

The Sins of Adam and Eve

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 do 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 too 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 weakly does exactly what the worst part of his wife wants. And so here we are, folks.

The Consequence of Pride

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.

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 forty 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 column A and a little 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 Christian Judeo-Christian ethos is that the fall of man into the profane world is the 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.

Hiding from God

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, “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 on. 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 terrible?” “Well, if you had my wife, man, you’d know.” It’s like “those damn women.” It’s a handy excuse for men all the time, and not least because men can’t tolerate being rejected by women—and women reject them all the time. 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 God says… And Adam reveals himself in this pathetic manner. 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.”

The Consequences of the Fall

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. That’s the description of the landscape of profound fiction 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.

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