Transcript of Jacob Howland’s Interview On The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

And so we delve deep into the philosophical relationship between Enlightenment rationality and the underlying narrative substructure. That’s a good way of thinking about it. And we discussed that in terms of the relationship between Athens and Plato and the ancient religious texts of the Western world. So join us for that.

So, Dr. Howland, I wanted to talk to you today. Primarily. There’s a bunch of reasons. I think the main reason was that we have overlapping interests in new approaches to higher education and maybe education in general. And you’re involved with the University of Austin, and I’ve been involved in Peterson Academy and also Ralston College. And so I thought we could talk about that more narrowly. But we share philosophical interests. And I’m also curious about your take on new developments in AI, especially with regards to the large language models. That’ll be an interesting discussion because I’ve used them quite a bit now, and I have a colleague who’s helped me program a number of them, custom LLMs. And they’re uncanny machines, and I have no idea where they’re headed. Well, that doesn’t make me special. No one knows where they’re headed. And so that’s the broad landscape that I hope to traverse with you today. But I think we should start with. Let’s start with a little background about you so that people can situate you. You’re a philosophy professor, you’re an acclaimed educator. So fill us in on who you are.

Jacob Howland’s Background and Education

JACOB HOWLAND: First, let me say I appreciate your having me on your podcast. This is a great opportunity. So. How far back do you want me to start?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Back away? You can start with undergraduate if you want.

JACOB HOWLAND: Great. Sure. So. Well, I’ll start with my parents. My father was a biology professor at Cornell University. My mother was a writer. First nine, ten years of my life. I live with my mother. I have an older brother. My parents were divorced before I have any recollection of them being together, so I was just maybe a year old during that period. My mother was a struggling writer and lived in poverty, and we lived in Chicago. And I had the unfortunate experience of being in Chicago public schools in 1968-69. And a lot of tension. Things became very difficult because my mother was quite poor and couldn’t sort of make ends meet.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: When were you born?

JACOB HOWLAND: I was born in 1959. End of 1959, yeah. So let’s see. My mother comes from a Jewish background. Her whole family was from Chicago, Blue Collar. My grandfather graduated from the 10th grade and worked with his hands making nuts and bolts in a big factory. And my father, who’s not Jewish. Actually, we’re descended from a John Howland who came over on the Mayflower. And his side of the family were all scientists. His father was an engineer at Purdue University who designed the sewer system of Lafayette, Indiana. His older brother was a genius who graduated from Purdue at the age of 17 and was an engineer, optical engineer. Just had 20 patents, and actually, both of those guys are still alive.

But in any case. So as a child, I had strong influences on my mother’s side, let’s say literary and cultural influences. One of my earliest memories was being in Iowa City when I was a kid. My mother was reading me a story by Tolstoy called “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” And my older brother got me up early in the morning. And I don’t know, I was probably 4 or 5. He was a couple years older, and he finished reading the story to me. So we always had. She always took us to, you know, see dance, you know, ballet and museums and things like this.

Anyway, fast forward. We moved in with my father. I graduated from Ithaca High School at the age of 16 because my dad said, well, I’m going to go on a Sabbatic leave, and I don’t want to take you with me. And so graduated early, which I did. Went to Swarthmore College, took a philosophy course. I initially thought I was going to be a physics major.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I see. So you really are split between the aesthetic and the more scientific engineering.

JACOB HOWLAND: Exactly, exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s useful to know.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah. And I was. And I’m not a mathematician, but I did very well in mathematics. But I found that the physics was, frankly, too challenging. And I took an English course and some other things. And I finally took a philosophy course with a very brilliant man named David Lacherman. And he’s one of these people that anyone who knew the guy said, this is the most brilliant person they’d ever met. I was very fortunate, too.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And that was that. Cornell.

Philosophy, Plato, and the Talmud

JACOB HOWLAND: No, that was that. Swarthmore College undergraduate. Yeah. And I decided. So I studied philosophy, history and English. Those are my sort of three big influences. I got to read a lot of great literature. Russian lit, Latin American literature. American literature. Studied history. In particular, African history, I think, which was quite interesting. But I fell in love with Plato, went to graduate school at Penn State University, and David Lackerman came to Penn State then. And that was great because he was on my dissertation committee, my main professor there. I suppose besides Lachman was a man named Stanley Rosen who was a student of Leo Strauss.

And I studied Greek and wrote a dissertation on Plato’s political philosophy. Got a job at the University of Tulsa, which was great for about three decades. I was the first chairman or the first chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. They put these two departments together and I had written a book on Plato’s Republic. And then I had published my dissertation and then decided I really wanted to get to know my religion colleagues. So I started studying Kierkegaard and wrote a book on Kierkegaard and Socrates.

Then I also, when we got to Tulsa—I had Jewish experiences as a child. For example, I remember Passover at my grandfather’s house where he’d grab my hand and take me to a shul when he was saying yahrtzeit for a relative, which is on the anniversary of their death, you say prayers. But other than that I didn’t really have any Jewish identity. Got to Tulsa, the first thing that happens, and this truly is the buckle of the Bible belt, lady comes from across the street and says, won’t you join our church?

So my wife, who’s not Jewish, said, well, and she was unemployed at the time and she started going to some classes and went to listen to a couple of rabbis and said, I think you like this rabbi. Join the synagogue. I’ve never been particularly observant but started attending and I got interested in the Talmud and so I started studying Talmud and we were lucky to have several very high ranking Jewish theologians come through Tulsa. And I told them, wow, you know, that Talmud is really interesting. It’s a lot like the Platonic dialogues.

And I don’t know how much you know about Talmud, but the thing is. So it’s this massive corpus. There are two Talmuds. The main one is the Babylonian Talmud, two and a half million words. The Jerusalem Talmud is about a million words, but the Babylonian one is the main one. And you have this fictional colloquy. That’s the only way to describe it. Rabbis who maybe lived centuries apart are brought into debate and discussion.

Talmud privileges questions. Privileges questions, questions. Most of the time there are no answers. Or at least, yeah, I think that’s probably correct, most of the stuff. So you have debates and you have discussions. And much like the Platonic dialogues, the Talmud will start with a practical question. For example, you have two plots of land. One is your vegetable plot, the other is your neighbor’s vegetable plot. His tomato plant leans over, over into your plot. Who gets the tomato?

Then just like Plato starts, you know, in a dialogue called the Laches, Socrates runs into a couple guys, they’re saying, should we have our kids study with this guy with a new fangled weapon? And in three pages they’re talking about, what is courage? In the Talmud, it can be three pages. And they’re talking about, why did God create the universe? So they privilege questions. They have multiple intellectual perspectives. The rabbis are never on the same. Like, they’re constantly debating. And sometimes, as in the academy, the American Academy, it gets a little heated and contentious. So you have these debates and then.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Except it’s not obvious that the American Academy privileges questions.

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, that is true now. Right, right. I was really referring to the old joke about, you know, why is there so much conflict? You know, why is it so heated? Because the stakes are so small.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right.

The Wisdom of Questions and Humility

JACOB HOWLAND: But in any case, and very often, at the end of a sort of section of debate, they’ve got a little acronym which basically means the answer will be revealed in the days of Elijah. Now, the reason I mention that is the belief is Elijah specifically. Right. So the idea is that there is an answer. Okay? We may not be able to understand it, or we haven’t achieved it yet.

And I say that because in the Socratic perspective, I think there’s also an answer that becomes very clear in the apology where Socrates has. His friend Chaerephon goes to the Delphic oracle, says, is there anyone wiser than Socrates? And the oracle says, no. And what’s great here is that Socrates, by the way, he makes no argument for this. He says, it is not permissible for the God to utter a falsehood. That’s his faith. Right. So I have to take this statement seriously, but I’m not aware that I’m wise.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Extreme same.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Dreams don’t utter falsehoods. They’re incomprehensible often, but they never lie.

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, I like that. That’s a lot. But what I want to say, the.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Voice of nature, you could say, yes, very much so.

JACOB HOWLAND: And of course, I mean, that’s a whole interesting subject, because also, even in Plato, this question of how do we explain dreams? Is it a communication from the divine or something? But in any case, Socrates says what you mean by the divine as yes, indeed. Socrates says that it’s impermissible for a God to utter a falsehood. So he now dedicates his entire life to answering two questions, what is wisdom? And who is Socrates? So his entire philosophical quest comes out of this moment, the shortest revelation in history, which is no, right? No. There’s no one wiser than Socrates.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. And isn’t that because he knows what he doesn’t know?

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, he knows what he doesn’t know, but he.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I think I thought he made a statement to that end, like, absolutely. Okay, so the reason I asked that is very specific. Well, because you said that the Talmud, like Plato’s, or the Talmud specifically, which are like Plato’s dialogues, privilege questions. Now, the thing about questions is that questions require. They require the recognition of ignorance. And that’s a form of humility.

JACOB HOWLAND: Exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Of course, humility is the opposite of pride. One of the things I figured out recently we could talk about.

JACOB HOWLAND: Maybe this is what we’ll talk about.

The Quest of Questioning

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: In fact, mostly. It had never struck me before this year, weirdly enough, that the significance of the fact that the root word of question is quest, because quest is adventure. And so I’ve been trying to figure out what I do in my lectures because they are popular and it’s strange because I discuss the sorts of things we’re discussing right now, and yet many people come and watch. And so I’ve been very curious about why that happens. And so I’ve taken the process that I use apart.

What I do essentially is figure out what the question is. And it’s an actual question. Like, before I go on stage to talk for 90 minutes, I have a question which is part of a set of questions that I’m pursuing. So it’s a real question. I actually want the answer. I use the time on stage to further the quest. And the quest is the answer. And that’s the treasure at the end of the pathway. And then the lecture itself, which isn’t exactly a lecture because it’s a quest, is an attempt to answer.

Now, the reason I think it’s so relevant to privilege the question is because your thoughts are structured the same way your perceptual systems are structured. And what that means is that when you set the quest, you set the question, you set the aim. And here’s a thought, you tell me what you think about this. This is a terrifying thought. I think the spirit of your aim answers your prayers. So if you have a question, the answer to the question will make itself manifest in your consciousness.

People usually say, I thought up the answer, which I think is a terrible answer. That isn’t what happens. What happens is that when you set the aim, which is the question, I would like to know this, this is the direction I’m seeking, then the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you will be in keeping with that aim. And then you search for the words. And are you a vehicle for them? Likely you’re a vehicle for the spirit of your aim.

Well, and that’s what’s happening when I’m talking on stage. It’s like, I have a question. It’s a real question. There’s a little more to it because I use stories that I know as investigative tools. So they’re like tools of inquiry. But the fundamental thing is the inquiry, the question.

And it’s very interesting to me that one of the things I’ve thought about too, is that thought essentially has a question element. You set the aim, then it has a revelation element. The ideas come to you. Then it has a critical thought element, which is like a dialogue, essentially. It’s like, okay, well, here’s the question, here’s an answer, but here’s another answer. Or maybe here’s another answer. So how do we sort that out? Well, we have an internal dialogue, which is an analog of an actual dialogue you’d have socially. And the consequence of the dialogue is the separation of the wheat from the chaff, you might say.

I’ve started to think about thought itself as secularized prayer. And that makes sense historically. If you think about how thought might have developed, you have a question, which is your plea to the gods. Let’s say you await a revelation. Well, then you have to determine whence comes the revelation, and is it reliable, especially if there’s many of them or if you’re unclear about your aim. And then the critical process is something like internalized dialogue.

And so it seems to me that, and I’d like your opinion on it, is it Socrates who taught the Greeks to think, at least to think critically? Like, literally, is he the first man who determined how to internalize dialogue? So, that’s a bunch of questions.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, very possibly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s right, because we don’t know when thought itself emerged, especially critical thought. Critical thought’s hard.

The Problem of Infinity and Finitude

JACOB HOWLAND: You said a lot.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah.

JACOB HOWLAND: Let me reply to a couple of things here. It seems to me that you’re on a very fruitful path in talking about this. While you were speaking, I was thinking how this shows up in a lot of fields. So even for example, in great literature. And the example that came to my mind is Jorge Luis Borges. Have you read any of Jorge Luis Borges short stories?

It seems to me that this man’s writing is itself guided by a fundamental question. And maybe this is true of other great authors. In fact, I would be willing to give you some other examples. Borges’ question is this: What are the effects of infinity on human beings?

Because we have stories like “Funes, the Memorious.” The guy falls, hits his head and not only cannot forget anything and not just from that point, I mean, he actually remembers everything. But his experience is as vivid, his memories are as vivid as the moment of experience itself. And so he’s completely overwhelmed and he just lies in the bed. He lies in the dark.

And then we have for example, “The Immortal.” And it’s about a guy who is in North Africa fighting, this is his earliest memory anyway, and fighting in North Africa in a Roman legion and accidentally drinks the water of life, the water of immortality. And then after centuries and centuries, he seeks death. And he reasons that there must be an antidote, right? If there’s a place where you can drink water that makes you immortal, there’s got to be some other spring or something that you can drink and allow you to die. But the problem is that his life just blends together. He can’t separate anything out.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So is he looking… Is Borges looking for the advantages to finitude? Let’s say.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, exactly. Well, let me put it a different way. What he is suggesting is that we are creatures of finitude. We are creatures of finitude in terms of our lifespan. We are creatures of finitude in terms of our intelligence, our memory. We are creatures of finitude in terms of our capacity to understand.

So, for example, there’s another wonderful story. It’s about a Mayan priest during the time of the conquistadors. They destroy the civilization. They throw him in an underground prison, and there are some bars, and on the other side is a jaguar. And he begins to remember. He begins to recall that there’s an ancient myth that the gods have inscribed in the world, somehow a phrase that gives you complete omnipotence, if you could utter the phrase anyway.

And one day, he’s watching the jaguar, and he realizes that its spots spell out somehow this phrase which he then utters. And then he’s looking for a way to destroy the conquistadors and restore Mayan civilization. But now he sees everything. This great wheel, the entire universe. He understands everything. And he has no longer any interest in doing anything, because that knowledge simply… it’s complete, and it’s totally irrelevant what’s happening here on Earth or anything like that.

My favorite is “The Library of Babel,” which is about this. The universe is a library, and the library has hexagonal cells, and every cell has X number of shelves, and every shelf has X number of books of exactly the same lengths, written in 23 characters or 24, whatever it is, certain number of letters, comma, period, space. And it’s inhabited by librarians, and they’re looking through these books and they’re trying to find some meaning. But there’s an infinite library.

And by the way, the mathematicians have done the calculations on that. But so anyway, the most coherent phrase in any book that any librarian that this librarian who’s narrating it knows, and he’s gone as far as he can, is something like, “oh, time thy pyramids,” right?

So everyone starts looking for books because they realize, there’s, you know, I want to find something that will explain the meaning of my life or my purpose or something. And then the fundamental proposition of the library is formulated, which is that any book that is possible is actual in the library. In other words, any combination of characters exists. That means that there is a book in this library that describes exactly this event. We’re sitting here having this podcast. This is a possible book. It must exist in this library now.

But there are also weird mathematical problems, because if you think about it, it can’t be the case that any possible book is actual because you can have catalogs of catalogs of catalogs so that it, like, mathematically, it explodes.

But anyway, so my point is, what happens in a universe where finite beings, finite rational intellects, try to find some meaning and encounter or are afflicted by infinity in some way? So just to go back here, that’s Borges’ idea.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s a fundamental problem.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because obviously we have some relationship with the infinite.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It might be a relationship of negation, but there’s no escape from the conundrum that we’re finite and faced with the infinite.

The Productivity of Limitations

JACOB HOWLAND: Indeed. But the point I really wanted to emphasize in what you were saying is this question becomes a fertile soil for these literary growths. In other words, this is the question that animates his being as a writer. And it’s highly, highly productive. So we all know that questions are highly productive limitations.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You see that in the creativity literature.

JACOB HOWLAND: Exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: There’s a great, extremely comical example of that online. So haiku is a poetic form that has ridiculous limitations.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes. Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And you might say, well, why bother with it? And the answer is, well, you can’t play a game without rules. That’s the answer.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Now, but there’s a spam haiku archive online, so it’s only haiku that’s only devoted to the luncheon meat. The last time I looked at it… Yes, very funny. They’re very funny.

JACOB HOWLAND: That’s pretty…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And it’s ridiculous. The MIT engineers made the archive, of course. And so there’s 50,000 haikus there about spam. And it’s ridiculous and it’s supposed to be. It’s comical. But the point is that without that absolutely preposterous set of limitations, that whole universe of poetic beauty, you might say, and comic endeavor wouldn’t have come into being.

And so it’s a very strange thing that there is a genuine relationship between finitude and abundance. Like, so there’s a right balance between constraint and possibility that produces abundance. Too much possibility, there’s nothing.

JACOB HOWLAND: That’s Borges’ point.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And then too much limitation, there’s nothing. But there’s some optimal balance. And maybe, I mean you could, it seems reasonable to propose that the issue, fundamental issue in human life is how to get that balance exactly right. That’s really what the Jews, the ancient Jews were wrestling with when they were trying to figure out how you have a relationship with God. You know, modern people say, well, there’s no such thing as God. Well, you have a relationship with the infinite or not, you have some relationship. Maybe it could be a productive one if you could formulate it properly.

The Divine and Human Governance

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, well, look, so as you know, in the Hebrew scriptures, God creates human beings. He’s almost immediately disappointed with Adam and Eve. Now they’re on their own, you know, they get their wish right? I mean, the serpent says to them, “oh no, God knows you will become as gods.” The best interpretation here, I think is Maimonides who cites another rabbi. And he says, well, the word for gods is Elohim, but it can also mean rulers. So they actually get what they wish for because there’s no need for rule in the sense that we understand it. That is limitation, law and so forth to order chaos in the garden. Because you’re sort of, you’re in the presence of God now. Once you’re kicked out, now you’ve got a problem. And the problem of chaos that’s internal to the human soul immediately asserts itself because Cain kills Abel. And of course they screw up so badly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Problem of misaligned aim, like Adam and Eve turn away from the proper aim like the builders the tower of Babel. And because they no longer. This is exactly what happens with the Israelites when they demand a king. God basically says to them, well, if you conducted yourselves properly and maintained the covenant with the divine, you wouldn’t need a king. We want a king.

JACOB HOWLAND: And see, so after all these failures and yes, you know, the flood and the tower of Babel and everything. So finally we speed up in this part of Exodus where the ten Commandments and then the so called book of the Covenant and you know, the rest of the laws are laid out. This seems to me to fit exactly what you’re saying. God is limiting these human beings, right? Like here you are, these freed slaves, we’ve got to give you some sorts of channels in which to move your desires and stop signs and restrictions and so forth. And only within those 613 laws can you have a flourishing life.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and it’s even stranger than that in some sense because you have first, first of all, you have the idea in the Garden of Eden that if your aim is proper, then you don’t need. Well, to set your own course.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Which Eve decides she’s going to do regardless. Once you set your own course and you’re steeped in sin because your aim is misaligned, you need rules. Now remember in the Exodus story, God provides the rules first of all directly from God and then the Israelites go astray instantly, and then they get kind of a second rate. And you could argue in a way inferior and more tyrannical set of rules. And that’s because you could imagine tiers of proper aim. And God’s hoping that the Israelites will aim at the. At the highest conceivable, and they fail at that. He says, well, here’s something that’s still high and they fail at that. He says, well, it looks like you guys are going to have to settle for this with me hanging around the fringes and. Because that’s all you seem to be able to manage. So. Yes, and I’m very interested in this idea of misaligned aim. Yes, well, because I think the spirit of your aim answers your prayers. And so. Okay, now you talked about Borges and you talked about the question, and that was part of a conversation we were having about questions in general. Yeah, so let’s go back to the.

The Fundamental Question

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, so like the fruitfulness of the question.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, exactly.

JACOB HOWLAND: I mean, you know, I think this is absolutely crucial. And let me say that there is a question that I know to be absolutely fundamental. And I know it to be fundamental because it shows up both in the Hebrew Bible and in Plato. In Plato, it shows up in the very first sentence of Plato’s Phaedrus. And in the Hebrew Bible it shows up when Hagar runs away from Sarah for the first time and the angel comes to her in the wilderness. And the question is, “Where have you been? And where are you going?”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right. There’s a question.

JACOB HOWLAND: Now, for me, this is absolutely fundamental for individuals, for families, for tribes, for nations, for societies. And I view it as an urgent question today.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s probably the question. It’s at least one variant of the question of identity. Yes, we’re in an identity crisis. Obviously we’ve cascaded into identity politics.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And given your frame here, you could say, well, the reason for that is because we don’t know where we’ve been.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And certainly there’s no unified sense of that, which is a big problem. And we don’t know where we’re going. You could add maybe one other foundation stone to that, which would be where have you been? Where are you now? And where you’re going.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s a full narrative.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right, Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So, okay, so let’s focus on these.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So why did that capture your interest specifically?

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, I mean, first of all, it seems to me that each part of that. And let’s say, where are you now? Yeah. Okay. This is crucial. No part of it can be answered without the answers to the other two. Okay, Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yep.

JACOB HOWLAND: Because, look, the future is trackless. Where are we going? Well, our only resource, really is where are we now? And where have we been more fully. I would say that, and this is just my hypothesis, but I think there’s a lot to it, that there are no really fruitful growths in the future that don’t come out of the soil of the past. That is to say, a rich understanding of the past. And we could do this.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Spoken like a true conservative.

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, I mean, yeah, listen, that’s the.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Sort of thing that makes you think in a conservative direction once you realize that.

The Western Tradition and Conservatism

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, this is. And that’s a whole other interesting thing because the fact is that. And I’ve shared this with a lot of colleagues and friends, I actually think that part of the hostility to studying the Western tradition on the part of those who are antagonistic to the west comes from the fact that studying the great books actually makes you not only intellectually conservative, but in some ways politically conservative. Conservative enough, for example, to say that we need to study the Western tradition. They’re all related.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the other issue. Tell me what you think about this. I also think that if you think about the Maoists, for example, and the fact that, for example, the Red Guards destroyed all the Chinese statues as far up as you could reach with a hammer, we’re going to obliterate the past and we’re going to build the new man. In keeping with our. Well, there’s the question, right. In keeping with our. What? Revolutionary presuppositions. Okay, but then you might. You have to say, well, where did those revolutionary presuppositions come from? They just spring, like Athena out of the head of Zeus. There’s no. They have a history, too. Or worse. They have a spirit, they have a personality.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And this resistance to studying the Western canon, let’s say, which. Which is not even exactly Western.

JACOB HOWLAND: Get right down to it.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

JACOB HOWLAND: It’s much broader than that. Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I think it’s a. It’s a. It’s. It’s not only terror. Let’s Say that you’ll become more conservative. But also it’s a rebuke to your intellectual hubris because you can no longer presume that your selfish power mad whims, say, are of sufficient significance to be the determinants of the future. You have to subordinate yourself to the tradition.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, and right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I think Luciferian intellects dislike that. And you could be even more cynical than that. You could say that people who are underpaid in relationship to their IQ, that would be professors are angry enough with their lack of status to elevate their Luciferian presumption to the highest point. And that means they’re very interested in dissociating themselves from the canon and making themselves. Well, they do the same thing Adam and Eve do. It’s like we’re going to make our own values.

The Man-God vs. God’s Servant

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, look, I mean, here’s another thing that. I mean, you mentioned Mao. Now, as you know, under Mao, the little Shinto shrines and things that people had in their homes were replaced by pictures of Mao. They worshiped Mao.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

JACOB HOWLAND: And at the same time, Mao, Stalin, whoever, you know, these guys had this notion of a new man. We’re going to have a new man. But yeah, new, new. But here’s the thing, actually, it’s all very, very old. So we were talking about Exodus. And so let me just throw this out. I happen to have just taught a couple of classes on Exodus. I filled in for one of our professors. The way I look at that book, one main thing that’s happening there is that book of the Bible is presenting you with the following alternative. Either you enslave yourself to Pharaoh or you enslave yourself to God.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, you can also be lost in the desert. Well, okay, that’s an alternative.

JACOB HOWLAND: Okay, right, but that’s important.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Those are the three.

JACOB HOWLAND: No, no, I mean, you’re absolutely right. Let’s just imagine that Moses had never returned and you know, they got the calf, whatever. Now that’s not going to be a very long lasting alternative. But what I want to say here is then the question is, well, what is Pharaoh? What does Pharaoh mean? What’s Pharaoh? Pharaoh is a man God, by the way, aside from the Jews who are trying to start a Hebrew Republic and the Greeks, which are these little islands of liberty in a sea of despotism. Everyone else is man gods. I mean, the Persian, the emperor, the Egyptians, et cetera.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So that means that those societies apprehended a principle of sovereignty abstracted beyond the most powerful man.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s a very sophisticated view of it.

JACOB HOWLAND: And you know, I Mean in for example, Aeschylus, Persians, which is about the defeat of Xerxes army in the second Persian war. Xerxes can’t be held to account because he’s divine. Yeah, right. Okay, so the buck stops there. But what’s interesting about Pharaoh is that first of all, it is the most, and not only the most technically advanced, I would even call it a technological civilization. If you’ve been to Egypt, as I have, you see the pyramids, right? And nobody even knows how these things were made. There are blocks that are much larger than this fairly large room we’re sitting in. You know, they made the most amazing jewelry ever produced. And we have a bunch of it. Just because a bunch of it was shoved in a tiny little room, the burial site of King Tutankhamun. Who knows what the tomb of Ramses had in it. They had these massive granite obelisks and all this stuff.

The entire society was dedicated to the elevation and the monumentalization and the memories, you know, memorialization of the pharaoh. Okay, so it’s the exaltation of the man God. Well, and so what pharaoh means today is the elevation of man to a God. Now we do this, by the way. I mean, Freud has this phrase in Civilization and its Discontents about how modern man is a prophetic God, right? Like we equip ourselves with all these tools and things like this. So that’s a huge temptation. But the suggestion of the Bible is if you go in that direction, you’re going to have a kind of totalitarian society and to be a slave dynamic.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Between potentate and slave.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, exactly. But there can be lots of slaves, right? So for example, in Persia, the emperor, whether it was Xerxes or Darius or Cyrus, everyone else was known as the king’s slave, including the members of his family. So you had that. Now you can do that. But the alternative then is bowing down to God and being a slave, or if you want to put it a softer way, a servant to God.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s what Moses tells the Pharaoh, right? He says, let my people go so they may worship me in the wilderness.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s not anarchy.

JACOB HOWLAND: It’s not exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s not hedonistic freedom of the sort that the golden calf worshipers turn to.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. It is, it’s.

JACOB HOWLAND: It’s right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What would we call it? Ordered freedom? Right is the general phrase.

The Tyranny of Ideologies

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Balance of nature takes fresh produce, freeze.

JACOB HOWLAND: So if we fast forward again to middle of the 20th century ideological tyrannies, and this includes fascism, obviously, this is like there’s nothing new under the sun.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Retelling of the pharaonic tyranny.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right? Right. But so the notion that like, that might also be part of this resistance, like, you know, it is.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, but I think that’s.

JACOB HOWLAND: You want to sustain the illusion that you.

The Luciferian Spirit

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, I think that’s part of the spirit of Luciferian illusion. It’s like the radical types who were trying to produce the new man. They assume that if they had been stellar normal, the promised utopia would have come. And that is an elevation of the intellect because one of the. So I interviewed a guy recently, unfortunately, I can’t remember his name, who wrote a book about Marx and Satanism. And he looked at Marx’s early writings before he became political. And Marx was a seriously warped individual in virtually every way you could possibly imagine. And he was definitely a Luciferian intellect.

And see, one of the things I think we’ve done wrong in our analysis of, let’s say, communism and perhaps also Nazism, but we’ll stick with communism, is that we assume that the best way to understand it, to understand what happened, is to do an analysis of communism. But we don’t think what you’re proposing, which is, well, communism that emerged in like 1850, let’s say something like that. Was it actually something new? Well, your point is. No, it’s not something new at all. It’s really old. It’s the tyrant slave dichotomy and I do believe that communism is the most recent garb that something very ancient cloaks itself.

Ancient Communism

JACOB HOWLAND: Oh, yes. And in fact, as you were speaking, it occurred to me, I mean, so here are a couple of examples of communism. First of all, we have book five of Plato’s Republic, where the women and men are shared in common, et cetera. It turns out to be a highly stratified society where everyone is miserable, essentially, unless you’re sort of the top dog. But more important is Aristophanes play Assembly Women, in which the women take over and establish a communist society. Now, this is very interesting for reasons that you may already have gleaned. That is, the evidence shows that women, far more than men in the United States and in Europe, are left, especially if they’re young. Far left. Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. And it’s true in South Korea, it’s true in Japan.

JACOB HOWLAND: So I would suggest that anyone listening to our discussion who’s interested in this might go back and look at Aristophanes’ Assembly Women, where the men are essentially infantilized, the women run everything, the men are infantilized, and it’s a communist society. So you have all these, you know, these earlier things. But one thing I wanted to say here, and I want to mention before I forget it, is that.

Ancient Stories and Modern Politics

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So why? Why? Oh, sorry. Well, I’m curious, because you said, you know, you said some statements that elicit questions. So for example, you studied Plato and then you said sort of casually, you joined the synagogue and you got interested in the Talmud.

JACOB HOWLAND: It’s.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, well, that’s not necessarily expected. And then you showed your deepening understanding of the relationship between today’s political scene and these very, very old stories and are making a case that the political situation is better understood in terms of those old stories, what, arguably, than any other way. I mean, that’s kind of what it.

JACOB HOWLAND: Looks like to me.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: There is nothing new under the sun. And if we lose touch with those ancient stories, we lose our ability to actually understand what’s going on. Elijah. You mentioned Elijah.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Elijah’s foes are the nature worshipers.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s kind of relevant in today’s society, given the rise of nature worship is something will attain the pinnacle point we talked about the man God. Well, that doesn’t look like it works out very well unless you want to be a slave, and maybe you do. And it’s also. We’re also facing the consequences of the rise of Gaia worship, let’s say the rise of nature to the highest place. And that’s Elijah’s fundamental realization which makes him a star of the Old Testament. He’s one of the two prophets that appear when Christ is transfigured on the mount.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s Moses and Elijah. Well, why? Because Elijah realizes that God is not to be found in nature. But we have no idea how cataclysmic a discovery.

JACOB HOWLAND: That was huge.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So God isn’t a man God and God isn’t in nature.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. Well, now, one response to that is there’s no God, but we kind of end up with nature or man gods when we take that route or some nihilistic catastrophe.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And so then the question. Now you talked about Greece and the ancient Israelites as constructing up a principle of divinity or sovereignty that was separate from a specific embodiment like a pharaoh or an emperor, but also not to be found in nature. Right?

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, indeed.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

The Overestimation of Reason

JACOB HOWLAND: Okay. Okay, yeah. So let me make another suggestion here. So you mentioned Marx, and what we see in Marx is an overestimation, a serious overestimation of the power of reason. And now reason understood as a productive and political principle. And I mean, obviously there’s a religious background because it’s a secularization of the Christian story. But I think there are several elements here. And by the way, this goes back to Plato’s Republic as well. We can talk about that. But the idea is that, okay, we’re going to have a heaven on earth, we’re going to have a paradisical society where all men are brothers and so.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: On, and everyone’s needs are met.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Whatever the hell that means.

JACOB HOWLAND: But here’s the problem. It is going to be realized by human political productive action. And the difficulty there is. So, first of all, it’s not emerging organically, okay? It’s a political constructivism. So the best society will not emerge organically, but it’s to be brought into being by man. Now, it’s to be brought into being by man in a particular time and in a particular place.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: By particular men.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right, by particular men. And when you put those constraints on it, you drastically limit the possibilities within that society. Because it’s got to be producible, it’s got to be sustainable, it’s got to fit the particular parameters. All these kinds of things add onto that the delusion that human beings are not, in fact, say, radically local beings who form the most meaningful bonds in particular ways. Marriage, family, etc. Right. But they’re universal. Right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Right.

JACOB HOWLAND: And finally you have this kind of divinization of man because after all, you know. Well, if we. I mean, we’re going to realize heaven on earth. So.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and as you said, we can produce a centralized authority which falls out of the presumption described. That’s going to have the computational power necessary to pull off the task.

JACOB HOWLAND: Exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Which is. Well, that.

JACOB HOWLAND: Just huge.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Just. That claim is preposterous. Right, but I like the way you formulate that, because what you’re pointing out is that for the system that’s proposed to make itself manifest, it has to meet a series of increasingly likely constraints.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Sorry, increasingly unlikely constraints. It has to do this. That’s already hard. Well, you add four more impossibilities to that.

Modern Hubris and Reason

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, right. And where I want to go with this is that that kind of hubris about reason is, I think. Well, first of all, it’s a characteristic of the modern era because, you know, you have Descartes saying we’re going to be masters and possessors of nature. And if you read the Discourse on Methods.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, we’re going to.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right. We’re going to do this.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: We’re going to form our own values.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right, right. But that’s sort of the end of the whole kind of decay. But if we go back to the early moderns, he even suggests in the Discourse on Method that maybe medicine will make all the infirmities of old age sort of disappear, which means we’re not going to die. In which case, by the way, the religious question is gone, like from the. I mean, Descartes writing. He doesn’t want his books to be placed on the index, which they were nonetheless, you know, and so they’re read and they have to be. You know, the Roman Catholic Church has to look at them. But the fact is that Roman Catholicism is irrelevant if you’ve got. If we’re not going to die. Right. I mean, it’s not a fundamental sense, but. Okay.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, whatever a human being is, is something completely different than whatever it is now.

Athens and Jerusalem

JACOB HOWLAND: But now I want to go back to Leo Strauss, who talks about the permanent questions. And what I’ve come to understand is the following, that the permanence of the questions arises from the necessity that Athens, so to speak. And now let’s just take that to mean reason, like unaided reason. Okay. Can’t be separated from the biblical alternative, which is the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: How did you figure that out?

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, Strauss writes about this stuff. He writes about. This is not my ideas. He writes about Athens. But what I’m claiming is this in order for reason to function in a healthy way, it must conduct itself in the light of the alternative of religion, which is like, you can’t understand everything on your own. There are massive mysteries. Right. And there’s this entire alternative way of thinking about things. So if you simply separate reason from that, you’re going to get totalitarianism and kind of, you know, the lunacy that we see.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, Luciferian hubris.

JACOB HOWLAND: If you separate religion from the alternative that, well, man has reason and man is able to figure things out and there are things that we can understand about nature and the world and science that aren’t in the religious tradition, then you’re going to end up with, say, Islamic extremism or something. You see what I’m saying? In other words, a healthy human existence is to dwell in the space of the permanent questions which must be informed by these alternatives. And Strauss is very good on this. He says there’s no philosophical proof that the Bible is wrong. Right. Like there’s like, you know, you could, like you’re always making assumptions that they’re simply going to sort of, you know, prejudice the conclusions that you’re going to.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

The Tension Between Faith and Reason

JACOB HOWLAND: So. So we have to live in this space. And Strauss’s claim, which I really think is great, is that the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is the coiled spring of the greatness of the west, that we have to understand that. But now what I’ve come to understand, this is a kind of moderation, right? Like, don’t. Because if you say no reason, that reason’s that anything that’s not rational, you got some kind of positivism or whatever, you’re going to go straight to that man God thing, right? You’re going to go straight to that totalitarian. You know, the train’s going to stop at the, you know, at the death camp, basically.

But if you also say, well, there’s no reason, which is one more thing I just want to say about my book on Plato and the Talmud. I’ve already suggested that Socratic philosophizing begins with this revelation, Adelphi, which Socrates takes seriously. Who is Socrates? What is wisdom? But he’s convinced that there must be an answer because the God can’t speak falsely. The rabbis. There’s a great book called Rational Rabbis by a guy named Menachem Fish, and believe it or not, he talks about the rabbis of the talmud. The first 40 pages is about Karl Popper’s theory of falsification in science, which is great, humble theory. Right. It’s that we can’t prove laws like the law of gravity. We can only falsify them. We can conduct experiments that if they turn out a certain way, will falsify the formulation of the law of gravity.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: For new forms of our ignorance.

Rationality Within the Horizon of Revelation

JACOB HOWLAND: Right, so then this guy argues that the rabbis are rational. And they are, in a sense, they’re playing the Socratic game of rationality within the horizon of revelation. So they start with the Torah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, I believe, I think we know enough about both psychology and neuroscience now to move that from the domain of philosophical theory to the domain of established fact. Because one of the things that people who’ve studied perception and emotion have come to conclude is that—well, I asked Carl Friston, who’s the world’s most cited neuroscientist, by the way, I asked him, is every object perception a micro narrative?

JACOB HOWLAND: Oh, that’s very interesting.

Perception as Narrative

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: He said yes, for sure. He said necessarily. That’s quite the claim. Because what we’ve come to understand is that there’s no object perception independent of motivational frame. And the description of a motivational frame is a narrative.

Okay, now you made a comment earlier that, well, you need to know where you’ve come from and where you’re going. So let’s consider: What is a narrative? Well, there’s an aim, there’s a starting place, there’s a voyage. And then you might say, well, the world’s made out of objects and you overlay a value laden narrative on top of it. But then you might say, well, where’s the interface?

So you might say, let’s look at how perception works. What do we see as objects? We do not see what the Enlightenment mind conceptualized as the object. When we see an object, that’s not right. It’s very cool. So once you establish an aim, and this is in the most trivial of circumstances, the world reveals itself to your perception as a pathway to the aim. As a set of obstacles that produces negative emotion, a set of facilitators or tools that produces positive emotion. And that’s every glance you take. Because every glance specifies a name for action, right? Because otherwise why look? Okay, so aim, pathway, right? So that might be the straight narrow pathway uphill, for example, tools and obstacles.

JACOB HOWLAND: Gotcha.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Positive emotion, negative. On the social front, friends and foes, same thing. Almost everything defaults to the realm of the irrelevant. Right? Because if I specify an aim, most things are now irrelevant. So your aim makes most of the world irrelevant. Some things stand out as phenomena. The phenomena that stand out are tools and obstacles, or friends and foes.

There’s also, and I just figured this out this year, there’s also agents of magical transformation in narratives. They change your aim.

JACOB HOWLAND: So magical.

The End of the Enlightenment

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Every aim brings a set of constraints and rules. So that’s like the metaphysics of the aim, the rules. But if you switch the aim, the metaphysics change, and that’s a magical shift. And if someone comes along whose aim is four stages higher than yours, we’ll say, then they appear truly magical.

But the reason I’m making this case is like, there is, I think we’re at the end of the Enlightenment and I think it died like Nietzsche claimed. Christianity died at its own hand. Because it turns out that there is no level at which what we see are dead objects.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Not at any level of perception whatsoever. Every object is actually—you cannot dissociate value from object in perception.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s not possible.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: In fact, if anything, it’s tilted towards value and not object. And there’s another terrible plague for the Enlightenment types as well, who think the world is a place of objects. Is that, well, there’s an infinite number of objects because, well, so then which objects?

JACOB HOWLAND: Right, right, which objects?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s a terrible question because as soon as you say that, you have to prioritize. Well, there’s no difference between priority and value.

So another way of thinking about a narrative, when you go to a movie, you watch the protagonist, what you are embodying is your observation of the protagonist’s structure of value—you’re incorporating that. You match his emotions because you match his aims. And so when we’re storytelling, what we’re doing is we’re exchanging information about the substrata within which rationality has no choice but to operate.

So the metaphysics of the Enlightenment were wrong. Rationality is at the base because the world’s made out of objects and you can calculate your way forward with value free, objective knowledge. Like, none of that’s right.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So the story’s the thing. Now you said, well, we need a story, we need to know where we’ve seen. Now that has to have something to do with why you got interested in the Talmud.

JACOB HOWLAND: I would presume so.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You said you saw a similarity with the dialogues. So what else caught your attention? You’ve obviously developed extreme familiarity, for example, with the story of Exodus. Why do you think, as a philosopher, you started to presume or understand that these ancient stories shed light on the world in a way that philosophical theories abstracted away from narrative don’t?

Finding the Proper Aim

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, look, what you just said is very rich and I think very, very attractive and interesting. So let me start with a question, I guess. Doesn’t this all mean then that we have to find the proper aim? And if we find the proper aim, then our questions are going to be helpful and productive to us as human beings? So let’s go back to the very first commandment.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: This is why Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, which is a guidebook for revelation, says, okay, how do you pray? How do you orient yourself in the world? Same question. Aim at the highest thing you can conceptualize. Yes, that’s number one. Presume that other people are made in the image of that highest thing.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so now you’ve set the right.

JACOB HOWLAND: You’ve got it. Exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Now pay attention.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Having done that, pay attention to the moment, because what will happen is if you specify your aim properly, the path, the proper pathway will appear. The proper tools will make themselves manifest.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The proper revelations will come to you. Well, that is how perception and thought work. So the Tower of Babel is the story of misaligned aim, you know, and it’s the engineers who build the tower.

The Tower of Babel and Misaligned Aims

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, right. Well, that’s a great story too, because if you read it carefully, they say, let’s bake bricks. So they bake the bricks and that’s fascinating because they break it out of Adama, which is the soil that man is made out of, Adam, etc. And then they say, let’s make a tower.

This may be over interpreting, but first we’ll develop the bricks and then we’ll figure out what to do with them. Like the technological thing comes—or it actually reminds me of like the CIA discovers LSD. I mean, they don’t discover it, but they’re like, we got LSD. So now their question is, what can we do with it? There’s a book about this. And so they say, well, is it a truth serum? So they give LSD to this CIA guy. No, it’s not. Well, maybe it’s an anti-truth serum, we give it to our agents if they’re caught and stuff like that. No, it’s not. But this kind of reasoning, right, like this is potent stuff, this is super potent stuff. What can we do with it? Right? But anyway, you’re absolutely right about the misaligned aim.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You know, people end up unable to communicate because the aim gets so misaligned, words themselves lose their meaning. And that’s a reference to exactly what we’re describing is that if you mess up the underlying narrative substrate enough, rationality becomes impossible, partly because words don’t mean the same thing to different people.

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, that’s true.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, well, we can see that now.

The Highest Aim

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah. I mean, and so what you said about the Sermon on the Mount is anticipated by God in the very first commandment. I am the Lord thy God, Thou shalt have no other gods beside me.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, exactly.

JACOB HOWLAND: Now what’s interesting is that it doesn’t mean that we don’t have subsidiary aims, but what it means is that’s the highest. For Socrates, what is the highest? Well, he calls these things ideas, you know, justice, for example. What Socrates is trying to do is a sort of shuttling movement. Okay, first of all, to come to the best possible understanding he can of, for example, the idea of justice, which plays a huge role in his life.

But you know, the cave image, there aren’t any signs that say “you are now leaving the cave and entering into the full light of truth.” Right? So there’s always a question, have I truly understood this thing? Then the other thing he has to do is to try to live up to the ideas, or if you want to put it the other way, to take the idea into his life as a matter of his existence, Jacob’s ladder image. Exactly, exactly.

So he’s trying to do these things, but for him, the highest is frankly—I mean, you can call it the beautiful, as per the symposium. You can call it the good, as per the Republic. But of course, the good is analogized to the sun, and the sun, in a way has no form. Like, if the soul, if the mind is compared to the eye, then the mind is destroyed by looking directly at the sun or at the good. Right. So that’s the connection between Plato and the Talmud, because it’s that upward aim. It’s this upward aim.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Would it be fair to say that Plato—would Plato consider the highest good as whatever the commonality is between the true, the good and the beautiful, let’s say.

Attention as Worship

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, he moves back and—yes. He gives different perspectives on that. Right. So we have the beautiful in the symposium. We have the good. Obviously, the truth is absolutely fundamental. But one thing I want to say is, you know, you mentioned earlier attention, and I am convinced, I’ve heard several people say this or read it, that attention, proper attention, is an act of worship. Yeah, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s the definition of worship, actually, because you pay attention, worship, the act of worship is—it’s indistinguishable from paying attention.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because what you’re doing when you attend is you’re prioritizing the objects of attention.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right, exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: To worship is to prioritize.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes. Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And so this is what’s so stunning about these sequence, let’s say, of discoveries in neuroscience. It’s like, oh, I see every glance, whether you know it or not, is an act of worship.

JACOB HOWLAND: Now the question comes up, that’s very interesting, where you’re going with that. That’s very like, oh, what are you worshiping? Well, nothing.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s like, well, then your eyes are closed and you’re asleep. It’s like, no, there’s no escape from this.

JACOB HOWLAND: There is no escape. Yeah. I just ran a class for some applicants to my university, and we were discussing David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” Kenyon graduation speech. I don’t know if you know this, but anyway, it’s great. And at some point there, he says that everybody worships something. Right. And that in fact—and he makes this case, he says, whether it’s Jesus Christ, whether it’s Yahweh, whether it’s some extreme, the good, something like this, if you don’t bow down to those highest things, then your life is going to be miserable.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you could be a pagan and a polytheist and you could be a worshiper of your own whims. This is another thing I’ve been trying to take apart, particularly in the last couple of years. It’s like, especially because I started to understand more deeply the Golden Calf story. It’s like, well, I don’t worship anything. Okay, well, let’s take that apart, okay. Because it’s about me.

The Quest for Meaning

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it could be about nothing because you could be nihilistic, but then you’re like suicidal and dead if you take that pathway. Okay? So let’s say there’s nothing superordinate to you.

JACOB HOWLAND: Okay.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: But then when an ugly question comes up, it’s like, well, what do you mean by you? Do you mean the higher you that’s in service to your wife and your family for the long run or do you mean the you that’s at the strip club with like a Jack Daniels.

JACOB HOWLAND: Wrap in your hand? Golden calf.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, exactly that. And then, and then. And it’s the you that you are prioritizing is what you want. What you’re actually saying is that the momentary whims that seize you are your God.

JACOB HOWLAND: Exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and then you might, you could easily ask and should. It’s like, what makes you think that those whims. Why is it self evident to you that you’re identical with your whims? That just means you’re possessed by something low.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So completely that you don’t even know that you’re possessed. Like.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes. Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Once you start to open up the question of what is the you that you’re serving? If you’re selfish, let’s say because it’s not self evident that you are.

JACOB HOWLAND: Your selfish aims, indeed.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Especially because they change. So there’s no escape from the problem of prioritization. Right, Right.

JACOB HOWLAND: So if you have the proper goal, and let’s just, I mean, let’s not try to define that, but let’s say it’s transcendent, whatever’s at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Right. That’s a great way to put it.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s a lovely way of putting it.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because you climb up and it keeps receding.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, that’s good.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: C’est la vie.

JACOB HOWLAND: So then your attention can be rightly focused. And the questions are the right ones. That’s the important thing. And we go back to your earlier statement about quest. The questions are the right ones. And that becomes very exciting because.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, why, why does it become. That’s a very trenchant observation because I mentioned earlier that there’s. People think that the purpose of their life is happiness, but it’s not. That’s shallow.

JACOB HOWLAND: It is indeed.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So then I think, well, maybe the purpose of your life is adventure. And that’s different than happiness by a lot. Well, where’s that to be found? Well, an adventure is a quest, and the quest is to be found in the questions. Now you just said you get the questions right, and that’s very exciting.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so, well, the first question would be, why is it exciting? Why is it exciting to get the questions right? And what does the fact that it’s exciting signify, even neurologically, let’s say? Because that excitement signifies the discovery of something of import.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so why is the right question exciting?

The Power of Questions

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, I can speak to that from the perspective of a scholar or reader or thinker. If you have a book in front of you and you’re trying to make sense of it, we all know this. A question, a good question, can reveal depths of meaning and understanding in everyday life. To come to understand what the question really is can reorient you and can again reveal, I’ll just use the same phrase, depths of meaning in your own existence that you simply weren’t attending to. Right. So the question.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Moses is on a quest when he encounters the burning bush.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And depths of meaning are revealed to him as a consequence of his pursuit.

JACOB HOWLAND: Exactly right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s what transforms him into a leader. Right. It’s a question that takes him off the beaten path. Might be what is beyond well adapted shepherd, let’s say. Right, right.

JACOB HOWLAND: Way out beyond the wilderness.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Yeah, exactly.

JACOB HOWLAND: And this, well, and so this relates to Socrates saying, you know, wonder is the beginning of philosophy. There’s a. So let’s go back. I agree. Happiness not only is not the proper aim. In Vasily Grossman’s wonderful book Life and Fate, there’s a little chapter where this guy has written a little letter in the Gulag and he says something like, happiness with a capital H has been the cause of the greatest evil in the world. And I think this is right. And you read it elsewhere. You read it in the Desha Mandelstam’s book Hope Against Hope. In the name of happiness, the greatest evil was committed.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and Solzhenitsyn points out, happiness disappears with the first blow of the jailer’s truncheon on your apartment door at 2 in the morning.

JACOB HOWLAND: Indeed.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s like if happiness is the purpose, as soon as you’re not happy. Which is going to happen. You’re lost.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right, Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

Meaning vs. Happiness

JACOB HOWLAND: So I imagine you would agree with this, but I propose that what is far more important is meaning. And meaning is the deepest and richest things are the most meaningful and the highest things.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s a definition again.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, that’s right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You can find what’s exhaustible. That’s like the well that never run dry.

JACOB HOWLAND: Inexhaustible. And so in human life, that’s why.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Christ is the miraculous provider of fish and water.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because there’s an orientation. There’s an orientation that makes. That has. That provides limitless abundance.

JACOB HOWLAND: That’s the reason. Yeah. And so. And the quest for meaning can take many forms. So, for example, we’re having our students read Marco Polo. Very interesting. So Marco Polo, his uncle and his father actually journeyed to see Kublai Khan before Marco Polo ever did. Incredibly arduous and dangerous journey from Italy to Mongolia. And they go all the way out there, and they get to the Khan, who’s not going anywhere, by the way. But the Khan turns out to be a brilliant guy, and he also wants to learn about the world. So this is the spirit of adventure you were talking about.

They go there, by the way, the Khan says to them, oh, this Catholicism you talk about, it’s very interesting. Go back, talk to the Pope, get some bishops, bring him back to see me, and if I like what they say, we’ll all convert to Catholicism. It’s very interesting. So we have these two people who are explorers, right? And they’re finding meaning. And in the story of Marco Polo, you know, he’s just utterly fascinated by this completely different world. It’s just this. It’s so fulfilling for him to see these things.

Okay, so we have that kind of example. That’s one version. Now, intellectually, you know, think of the Great books, think of the Bible, think of Shakespeare. Depths beyond depths. You ask the right question, you find these things, but then also just in everyday life. I mean, one of the good things about getting older is realizing the futility of so much that is esteemed and so many things that I myself chased. And then to begin to realize that, you know, the love of one’s spouse, of one’s children, the opportunity to help them, the, you know, let’s say, sure, people want esteem, sure, they. But to be esteemed by people that, in your estimation, are truly worthy, you.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Get the fans you deserve.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah. I mean, just like God offers Abraham.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So God offers Abraham an adventure as the Covenant, Right? And he says. He says that one of the Consequences. He says, if you accept this mission, this mission impossible, you’ll be a blessing to yourself. Well, that’s a good deal.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah. Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You’ll be esteemed for valid reasons. Right. So. So the esteem, like there’s almost nothing that people will chase more than attention from others. And there’s a very positive aspect of that.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, yes, but.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So that’s not going anywhere. And you might say, well, are you esteemed because you’re an actor, because you’re a phony? Or are you esteemed because the pattern of your life brings abundance to everyone, which is also another offering with Abraham. Right?

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You’ll be a blessing to yourself. If you have an adventurous life, you’ll be esteemed for valid reasons. You’ll establish something of incalculable permanence. And you’ll do this in a way that will bring abundance to everyone. That’s a hell of an offer.

Humility and Wonder

JACOB HOWLAND: Now, you know what’s so interesting about this? To pick up a couple of themes that we mentioned earlier. You talked about humility, somebody like Abraham, and this is the trick, and we see it in Socrates, we see it in Abraham, we see it in all the greats, is confidence. How do these two things go together? That is to say, what do I mean by Socrates? Confidence? Okay, I don’t have knowledge. I have some, to the best of my ability, justified beliefs that I take to heart. For example, the soul is more important than the body. Justice is more important than everything else. But at the same time, humility. Now the humility, that’s an easy thing.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: To have faith in if you’re honest. Because your ignorance is boundless. Your ignorance is boundless and that’s truly something. Self evident. I don’t know exactly. Yeah, Yep. You can, you can go to on that, right? Yeah. And that’s Socrates, that. And that drives the question.

JACOB HOWLAND: And the beautiful thing about humility to go, it’s connected with wonder. Because the unhumble don’t wonder. They already know.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: They know.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: They’re also afraid of wonder. Like, they’re afraid that. They’re afraid that wonder will be that sword that bars the path to paradise, that cuts every which way and burns.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because you. You have to substitute wonder for certainty. And if you’ve staked your soul on your certainty and wonder is your enemy.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And you will pursue it. Yeah, exactly.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah. And now. Oh, yeah, now we’re getting down to a deeper thing. Because wonder, you know, when you wonder, you enter into what Socrates calls aporia, and the Greek word literally means no way out. It’s like you’re stuck. Maybe that’s not the right way to put it. Let’s say this. You know that the more you think and the more you ponder possibilities and the more you know, you don’t know, you feel like you’re on this sea. I mean, it can do. It can really be overwhelming. Okay. There’s got to be a prior assumption that makes wonder worthwhile. That allows you to feel that you’re going to remain afloat.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s Job’s conclusion, I think, because Job ends up adrift in the barren in the most dismal way possible. And he makes.

JACOB HOWLAND: He.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: He proclaims two axioms that he won’t abandon. One is that despite the evidence, he’s fundamentally valuable despite the evidence. Okay, so he’s not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of being a man.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Especially if you’re one that’s trying to aim up. Yes.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So he’s not going to abandon that. And he’s going to make the presumption that the spirit that gave rise to all things is good, even if he can’t see how.

The Good in Reality and Scientific Pursuit

JACOB HOWLAND: So those are the two—you’ve anticipated me exactly. Let’s go with that. Good thing is special, right? That the world is good. That reality is good. And what do we—now we can even say, well, what do we mean by good? Well, there is some kind of sustaining structure, let’s say. And the reason I put it that way, like, in other words, intelligibility.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, but more than that.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, probably more than that. But let’s take intelligibility just for a second here. One of my favorite books, which I’m now listening to, I read it 30 years ago, is the Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. And what’s so great about this book is, I mean, it has many wonderful features. It’s a great work of history. It’s a great work of sort of explaining physics to educated amateurs. But what it focuses on is theoretical physics in the first half of the 20th century, which was almost an academic paradise. You had all these great physicists and they’re working together and they’re discovering things like—so they have the atomic theory at the beginning of the 20th century, an atom, this uncuttable thing from the Greek is can’t be cut. And they don’t even know. They don’t know anything about it. Right. And so now they’re discovering the nucleus and electrons and protons and neutrons and all this kind of thing, and they’re just going around. I mean, the reason I say it’s an academic paradise is you go to Cambridge and they say, oh, go to see Rutherford at, you know, this other place. And you go there, Niels Bohr has the—and so they’re all collaborating, but they’re convinced that there’s a there there. Right. And they’re convinced that—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And that their quest is worthwhile.

JACOB HOWLAND: That their quest is worthwhile. And then, of course, all of a sudden, it’s driven into overdrive because now we’re in the war and now there’s possible application. But you know that there’s—so there’s this kind of faith. There is—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I talked to Richard Dawkins about that.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I said, what? Because he’s an enlightenment mind, let’s say. I said, well, you bring to the scientific endeavor a set of axiomatic presumptions. One is the world could be understood. The second is that trying to understand it is good and will bring good. It’s like those aren’t scientific theories. Those are starting points for being a scientist. And so then the question is, well, what’s the validity? Like, how do you ground that metaphysics that gets science itself off to a start?

Scientific Humility and Reality

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, I mean, look, in the case of the harnessing of nuclear energy, you have, let us say, a proof of concept, right? That is to say, this is to me probably the most dramatic and persuasive indication that science has the capacity to know something fundamental about reality. Okay? So, yeah, I mean, their faith paid off in this instance. But I think this is really, really important because if you don’t start with the notion that there is a reality and the reality is good, that it has some kind of intelligibility, et cetera. Oh, but actually, now I’m interrupting myself. Let me just say this.

Niels Bohr, here’s the humility. Niels Bohr was like the man, incredible physicist. He never spoke of the laws of nature. Never spoke of them because he was humble and people use the word laws of nature, but the fact is there’s no proof that these are laws. I mean, first of all, our horizon is tiny. Are the same laws 10 billion light years away, you know, whatever. Okay. But second, he spoke about regularities of phenomena. So here we have someone who’s genuinely understanding, you know, nuclear physics, which, I mean, we’re talking about, you know, 10 to the minus 23rd or something. Just like stuff that you can’t see these things, you can see the effects of them and so forth. And so he’s making advances, but he has this humility. So, but anyway, that also that humility.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You know, because there’s another metaphysical aspect to this too, which is extraordinarily, I learned this from Carl Jung mostly, I think, at least initially, which was, well, what spirit seizes the scientists?

JACOB HOWLAND: Curiosity.

The Moral Dimension of Scientific Inquiry

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s like, so let’s say the world’s intelligible, the pursuit of that intelligibility is possible and good and could bring benefit. But then that begs the question, the question is, well, does that depend on the orientation of the scientist? So like, I read a book at one point that was written by an ex-KGB officer, and he made the claim that there were labs in the Soviet Union in the 80s, I think, in the 80s, where they were trying to hybridize Ebola and smallpox and aerosolize it.

JACOB HOWLAND: Oh, how lovely.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s a perfectly reasonable scientific question.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right, right, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Can that be done? If you live in a world of valueless objects, that’s just as good a question as any other. And you could even imagine spin off benefits from it. But you might say, well, isn’t there a better question you could ask? So then you might say that this is a weird thing too, that the goodness of the world is predicated on the aim of the investigator. The alchemist kind of knew that.

I got very interested in Hume’s analysis of alchemy because the alchemists, the pre-chemists insisted that the aim of the investigator had to be pure.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And so they were beginning to understand that the secrets that matter revealed were dependent on the investigative tools that were put to play in the investigation. And that was actually a moral endeavor, you know. So are you actually trying to aim up.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes. Right, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So we’re looking at the substrate of science, right, saying, well, there are values that have to be held for the scientific enterprise itself to emerge, to proceed and to be beneficial.

Finding What You Seek

JACOB HOWLAND: And now we’re getting down to some really fundamental questions. And so I’m going to take a little shift here. Douglas Murray’s book, The War on the West, he’s got this wonderful passage where he says, you can stand in front of a painting and you can look at it and you can say, hmm, this peculiar blue pigment, was that sourced from some country that was in poverty? Was the apprentice who stretched the canvas paid? Are the fibers—did they get—so you can, in other words, you can, to use this isn’t quite the right word, like deconstruct.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Close enough.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yeah, you can. And what I realized in reading that passage is there’s no end to it. I mean, I can look and say, no, you know, you’re wearing this suit, Dr. Peterson, you know, where it doesn’t—anything can be taken apart this way. Or Douglas Bryce, blood soaks everything. Yes, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So if you look enough, you’ll find a problem.

JACOB HOWLAND: You’ll find a problem. Or Douglas Murray says you can rejoice in the picture that Raphael has painted of the Virgin ascending to heaven. And what I realized in thinking about that is here’s the really fundamental premise or the like, what distinguishes these two approaches. And I think it is the view that the world is good or not. In other words, if you start from that and say there’s goodness here, then you’re going to look for the goodness and there’s beauty and there’s truth. You’re going to look for that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And you may also find it.

JACOB HOWLAND: You may find it. And if you don’t, then everything follows from that. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Pretty weird if it turned out that the world was constituted so that you find what you’re looking for.

JACOB HOWLAND: Seriously.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And I kind of think there’s some truth in that.

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, yes, indeed. And if you’re not looking for it, you’re not going to find it. But to me, then this becomes maybe it’s a psychological question. Because if that’s the fundamental question, right, you’ve got these folks over here who want to burn down and destroy and wreck and repudiate, and these folks over here who want to build and want to solve and want to progress and want to repair. And if the difference between them is that fundamental premise, Marx’s favorite world is—

The Mephistophelean Spirit

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Best what it was from Goethe. And it’s a very specific quote. I knew this quote before I found this out, because I read Faust 1 and 2, and there’s a line in there. Mephistopheles.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Goethe is trying to characterize Mephistopheles.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Who’s the spirit of rationality or the spirit, the Luciferian spirit of Mephistopheles. Credo was repeated twice in Faust, once in Faust one and once in the second part. Everything that lives should be eradicated because of its insufficiency. Now, I’m paraphrasing, and I’m paraphrasing badly, but the basic idea is that the suffering that’s attendant on consciousness is indicative of a flaw in the world so profound that the best possible solution is the eradication of everything. Right. That’s Marx’s favorite quote.

JACOB HOWLAND: Wow.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right?

JACOB HOWLAND: That’s very interesting. I did not know that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, it’s extremely, extremely interesting because, like, that’s only one sentence in each of those plays. But it’s Mephistopheles’ revelation of his motivation. It’s like all the sufferers should die so that suffering itself will cease. And the antinatalist types, for example, they believe exactly that.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

Faith and the Choice of Goodness

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So. And so, yes, this is something. It’s very interesting here because we’re also verging on a definition of faith. So in Job, like, Job makes a decision, and the decision is the act of faith. It’s not belief in some idiot superstition. Job says, okay, I got two pathways here. I can act as if the world in its essence is good. I am, and so is the spirit of being. Or I can forego that and do what my wife suggests, which curse God. Curse God and die. Right. And all the evidence at hand suggests that cursing God and dying is the right—it’s a rational conclusion. And Job says, I refuse to forswear my faith. Right.

And so I see that partly as a prodroma to the passion story, which is an extension of what Job suffers and concludes. But the axiomatic presumption—well, maybe there’s three, right? The spirit that underlies being is to be regarded as good. The essence of man, despite his flaws, if he’s aiming up, is to be regarded as good. And the answer that you seek is dependent on the aim.

Right. Because that brings the morality of the investigator into the picture. And so this is part of the reason, for example, why scientists need a—and engineers maybe even more to solve the problem of alignment, let’s say. Yes, they need a classical education that’s grounded. Okay, so. Okay, so you, you’ve already come to that. Is that part of, I guess probably what we’re going to talk about on the daily wire side, because we’re unfortunately approaching the end of this is more practical consequences of this. I want to talk to you more about the University of Austin and what you’re aiming at. But now I’ve kind of fleshed out the metaphysical territory.

And so, yeah, we’re grounding people in their aim. And scientists and engineers might think, well, that’s unnecessary given the importance of our pursuit. But you can also see how absolutely susceptible they have been to the ideological mob in the universities.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The scientists have it, they’re just like babes in the woods when it comes to the political activists. And it shows that their metaphysics is so underdeveloped that they have no understanding or defense against the deconstructionist mob.

Technology Without Philosophy

JACOB HOWLAND: Well, and look, I mean, you know, now we’re in the age of AI and this is an incredibly powerful technological force. And imagine, you don’t have to imagine, unfortunately, what would it mean for experts and technicians with, you know, comprehensive capabilities to use AI and implement it and make it stronger, had no philosophical anthropology, had no understanding of the human being.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: We know what happens. We see it. We see what was.

JACOB HOWLAND: They invent. They invent devices that cause serious depression and mental illness in teenage girls.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And everyone loses the ability to communicate because time is wrong. And they devolve in their ignorance to their science fiction metaphysics that they adopted when they were 13 without even understanding that that constitutes original religion and are unwilling completely to look beyond that.

JACOB HOWLAND: Exactly. And you know my image for this, I started thinking about the Inferno as a kind of political text.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, yeah.

Dante’s Inferno as a Metaphor for Modern Society

JACOB HOWLAND: And the fact is that you get to the ninth circle and Dante’s beautiful creation invention is that it’s ice. Everyone’s frozen. Isn’t this like today? Or at least I mean, now the ice is melting and maybe we’ve gone through that center of the earth and come out the other side. But you have Lucifer who towers up like a thousand feet. And because he’s come from the other side of the world and jammed into the middle, and he’s compared to like this mechanical, like a windmill. And he’s chewing on Brutus and Cassius, these traitors. And all these people are frozen in the ice and they’re completely isolated.

No one can speak, not even Lucifer’s mouth is full. No speech, no connection with each other. An eternity of atomization. This is the effect of social media. And by the way, Lucifer has three faces, right? And he’s way up high. He can look down, he can spy, he can survey the kingdom. It’s just this incredible political image.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Like the all seeing eye of Sauron. Yeah, right. Well, you get the all seeing eye of Sauron as a substitute for the divine if the state has to intervene in everything.

JACOB HOWLAND: Exactly right. So he’s an image of this state that’s just chewing. Now, I feel like, and I’m talking about, frankly, after Trump’s election, there’s a lot of chaos, but it’s as if, well, before the election I just had a sense of dread because I saw the way things were going. And now I have a hope that we’ve sort of gone through and realized everything was upside down, because remember, when they go through now, they’re going up and above them is purgatory and above that is heaven. Now, they’re rightly oriented.

But the misorientation of Lucifer, whose head is pointed the wrong way but pointed to the world above. Right. So in hell, it’s a sort of sewer in which all the polluted streams of the earth flow. And you’ve got to remake and be being punished. But that reorientation is absolutely essential. We have to break the ice, we have to learn how to speak, we have to connect with each other and we’ve got to reorient ourselves and figure out what is above us and what is below. Figure out what is north and what is south. And that’s the most important task at this point.

Reorienting Ourselves Through Ancient Wisdom

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, well, that’s a really good place to end. And so we’ll continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side. Well, I think we could do two things. We can flesh out what it might mean to aim up, because part of what you see in the biblical corpus is an attempt to characterize up and of course, Socrates, Plato are doing exactly the same thing. Right. They’re doing it. It’s like Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, in a sense.

JACOB HOWLAND: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The ancient Hebrews used narrative as an investigative tool. And the philosophers use philosophy.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You can see that dynamic with Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky too, which is quite interesting. But both of them have their role and the narrative role is more fundamental. Yes, more fundamental. And I think that’s been established.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, all right, so we’ll talk about that. I think we’ll talk about attempts that are being made now to reorient the academy.

JACOB HOWLAND: Sure, go on.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That problem. And so if you want to continue with the discussion, join us on the Daily Wire side. And so while there were many more things that we could have talked about today, but I like that vein. That was good. And it’s interesting to see how you were drawn to the conclusion that there was something in these ancient narrative texts that was, well, of incalculable and necessary value.

JACOB HOWLAND: Yes, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And that it’s particularly relevant given the technological transformations of the age. That’s a very strange thing. Right. Because you’d expect that as technology advances, the more ancient the text, the less relevant it would be. It turns out to be exactly the opposite.

JACOB HOWLAND: And it’s already there with Babel. Yeah, and it’s already there.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Right.

JACOB HOWLAND: And Pharaoh.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly. Yes, definitely that. That’s right. There’s nothing new under the sun, that’s for sure. Even in this time when so strangely there is so much new, the old patterns are even more obvious. And people can see that at the bottom of the identity crisis, there is a spiritual crisis and a spiritual war, and the contours are becoming obvious. So as the technology mounts and the rate of transformation increases, the archetypal contours actually become more clear. Yeah, very weird.

All right, everybody, so join us on the Daily Wire side, and thank you for your attention today, and thank you very much for coming to talk to me. And we appreciate you people who are watching, and if you are inclined to toss and support the Daily Wire way, come and see the rest of the conversation there. Good to talk to you.

JACOB HOWLAND: Great to talk to you.

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