Read the full transcript of renowned psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s speech titled “How To Weather The Coming Storm” at ARC 2025 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
Building the Modern Ark
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, how then do we build an ark? We admit our ignorance, we look to the heavens for guidance, and we take heed of the words of the best of our ancestors. We take a page from the story of Noah. And Noah is a wise man and a good man, given his time and place, as God himself attests to. Noah, in his wisdom, has a revelation that the storm is brewing and the waters are about to rise. He’s the ancestor of the legacy of Cain.
Cain makes poor sacrifices. He fails to bring his best to the table. His failure tempts him towards bitterness. He invites the spirit of resentment to possess his heart. He becomes murderous in his resentment and turns against himself, his ideal, and God. He slays his brother, who is in truth his idol, and his descendants become murderous and genocidal. And then the flood threatens.
Noah, as a wise man and good, walks with God. Oriented as he is upward, properly, towards what’s highest, he’s able to rely on the wisdom of his own intuition. And when everyone around doubts his vision of what’s to come, he sallies forth nonetheless and builds the ark. He gathers his family and his community and he constructs the vessel of psyche and state that protects the good and wise from the catastrophe of the flood.
The Lesson of Moses
How then do we conduct ourselves such that we create a state that is simultaneously the ark? This is the conundrum that faces Moses when he begins to lead the lost slaves of Israel from the grip of tyranny across the Red Sea of blood and chaos and into the desert of confusion and hopelessness. Possessed as they are by the spirit of their own craven slavishness, the Israelites are unable and unwilling to govern their own affairs. They fall to immature and heedless squabbling and they call upon Moses to sit as their judge.
For a decade, perhaps, he awakens at dawn, sleeps at midnight, and hears the fractious and faithless slavish citizens of the prematurely freed nation beset him with their petty concerns. And although he acquires wisdom in judgment in consequence of his positioning, he positions himself improperly in consequence of his own temptation as leader towards the attraction of power.
His father-in-law, Jethro, reappears on the scene, the foreigner who can see the corruption of the state when no one, no citizen has the courage to do so, and issues to Moses a warning – you’re setting yourself up as a new pharaoh in the desert, you’ve taken the responsibility of your people onto yourself alone and that will exhaust and embitter you. It’s not sustainable, and worse, by depriving your slavish compatriots of the necessity to govern their own affairs, you maintain their slavish habits and tempt them to make you into a new pharaoh.
It’s incumbent upon you to reorganize your state so that it can withstand the temptations of tyranny and the passions of hedonistic slavery, and to make of it the ark that withstands tyranny and chaos. Divide your people into groups of ten, have the ten elect an elder and have them bring their concerns to him. If those concerns cannot be addressed by the one, divide the leaders into groups of ten and have them elect a leader amongst themselves. And do that all the way up to groups of ten thousand.
And if a concern arises and it rises up the hierarchy of responsibility to you and remains unresolved, then you can render judgment. But let the concerns of the moment find responsible address in the hands of the sovereign citizens of your state, and that’s the formulation of a subsidiary structure of distributed responsibility that’s the eternal antidote to tyrannical power and hedonistic anarchic slavishness. And that requires for its establishment and maintenance the responsible citizenship that’s the proper pattern of attention and action that characterizes the true citizen made in the image of God.
The Story of Abraham
And how is it that we should conduct ourselves as responsible citizens? And we learn that from the story of Abraham. Abraham lives in the materialist paradise. He’s privileged and wealthy, but not through any efforts of his own. He lives in his father’s tent. He lives among people he’s familiar with. He has high and undeserved status. He has the privileges of the elite. And he luxuriates in dependent security until his eighth decade.
Then God comes to him, like he did to Noah, but this time not as the voice that warns the wise to prepare, but as the voice of adventure that calls people to leave their security, to live on the edge, to venture forth into the terrible world, and to have the redeeming adventure of their lives. God comes to Moses as the spirit of adventure that establishes with. God comes to Abraham as the spirit of adventure that calls him forward to what he could be and establishes an eternal covenant between the divine and man.
That covenant is a contract, an offering from God in compensation for the sacrificial offering of the faithful servant who sallies forth in spite of their own vulnerability. And God tells Abraham, if you attend with all diligence to the voice of adventure that calls you from your comfort to leave everything that grants you familiarity and security and you venture forth courageously into the terrible world, your life will become a blessing to you.
And furthermore, you will earn the respect and admiration and justified attention of your peers, so that your name is properly renowned. And not only that, you’ll become a blessing to yourself and your name will become known in a manner that will allow you to establish something of genuine permanence that will establish the pattern of the divinely patriarchal spirit that establishes the family whose descendants will be numberless in their success because of their faithful adherence to the pattern.
And not only that, not only will you, in consequence of hearkening to the call of adventure, establish a life that’s a blessing to you and that makes your name justly known among your peers and that establishes something of permanent value, you’ll do that in a manner that brings…
Lessons for Building Our Ark
So, what are we to derive from these stories about how we might build an ark?