The Problem That Won’t Let You Go – Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (Transcript)

It’s really something to remember with your wife or your husband, and I’m dead serious about that. The fact that you might be able to defeat your wife in an argument, or vice versa, does not mean that you were right. And if you’re wrong and you win, that’s a really bad thing. Because then you’re wrong and you think you’re right. And if you were unbearable before, you’re going to be a lot more unbearable after that.

And so one of the reasons you really want to listen to your partner, and maybe even help them make their point, is just so you could investigate the off probability that someone as wonderful as you still has something to learn. And the thing is, if you’re stupid and you learn why — even though it’s painful — the advantage is that you don’t have to be stupid again in the future. And that’s a big advantage. And it’s a really big advantage for your wife.

Ivan’s Argument Against God

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And so Ivan trounces Alyosha regularly when they have discussions about, for example, whether or not God exists. And I started with this discussion with the proclamation that absent or present, we wrestle with God.

Ivan does something famous in this book. He mounts what’s probably the most powerful argument ever offered in the literary domain for the atheist claim. And he does it essentially on moral grounds, interestingly enough. He tells this story that Dostoevsky actually took out of a Russian newspaper about this four-year-old girl who had tyrannical, terrible, brutal, psychopathic, tyrannical parents. And one night, to punish their daughter, they locked her in the outhouse. And this was Russia and it was like 40 below. And she froze to death during the night while she was screaming to be released.

And that became a scandal in Russia — a well-publicized, horrifying event, as the torturous death of a child is, self-evidently, we hope, a moral crime, though we seem to be committing an awful lot of those recently.

And Dostoevsky uses that event as an argument that Ivan puts forth about the — I would say about the iniquity of existence essentially. And he asks, Ivan asks his brother: “If this God you believe to be a moral being is willing to torture even one child to death, regardless even if that holds up the whole world, is that something you yourself would do?”

That’s what he asks his brother. And Alyosha has no idea what to say, because what do you say to a question like that? And Ivan says to his brother: “I know you wouldn’t do that, but the God that you claim exists and that is good and that you worship apparently does. And so, apart from the utter preposterousness from a materialistic perspective — say that the deity is a necessary supposition — I think your case for his existence is shaky on moral grounds.”

And Alyosha is silent in the onslaught of that argumentation. But it isn’t obvious that it shakes his faith. And it’s still the case that as the novel progresses, he shows himself to be the better man. Ivan, being a brilliant intellect, is characterized by the pride that the brilliant intellect has as its greatest sin.

The Cosmic Scales of Justice and the Temptation of Pride

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I’ve been thinking recently about how the cosmic scales of justice are balanced. There’s a gospel line that says: “From those to whom much has been given, much will be expected or demanded.” And that’s a very interesting line, because one of the things we wrestle with in the culture now is the issue of privilege.

Maybe you’re born wealthy, maybe you’re born tall, maybe you’re born Caucasian — apparently that’s an advantage. Maybe you’re born Asian, maybe you’re born good-looking. We are all awarded privileges that constitute a temperamental advantage or maybe a situational advantage. And there is something that seems unfair about that, arguably.

It’s certainly the case that people differ painfully in their intellectual capacity. It’s also equally obvious that that difference is a major determinant of success economically. Even the trait conscientiousness — which is associated with orderliness and industriousness and also predicts economic success — has quite a substantial genetic influence, which means that it’s really not attributable to the person. It’s not a trait that’s attributable to the person that bears it. It’s a gift, in some ways, that’s given to them at birth.

And you might say: “Well, if talents and abilities are distributed unequally, how can there be any justice?” And the answer to that might be: if you’re fortunate, you better pay for it somehow.

And one of the things you see with people who are very intelligent is that they fall prey to the temptation of pride. And that temptation for intelligent people is proportionate to the degree of their intelligence. And I would say the potential downside of their gift gone astray is sufficiently great to be the factor on the other side of the scale.

So if you’re intelligent and you’re proud of that and you get arrogant, that will take you places that you couldn’t go if you weren’t that bright — and those aren’t going to be places that you’re particularly going to enjoy being.

With Every Gift Comes an Equivalent Temptation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And so with every gift comes an equivalent temptation, and with every talent comes an equivalent responsibility. And I really do believe that’s the case. I think that if nothing else, if you are unfairly privileged and you don’t make much of that — if you don’t offer other people the benefit of your privilege — then you’ll take yourself apart in one way or another.

And so Ivan’s a very intelligent man and he’s very prideful as a consequence, and that doesn’t work out very well for him. And he points to the suffering of children as his evidence against the existence of God.

Stephen Fry and the Anger at God

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And when I was talking to Stephen Fry, he did something that was similar. And I found this extremely interesting because, first of all, he talked about his interest in mythology, and then he made a claim which I believe to be untrue — that the mythology upon which our culture is predicated, essentially the biblical stories, were of perhaps inferior quality to other collections of ancient stories that we have accumulated.

And that surprised me because that’s by no means evident to me. And I know a reasonable amount about mythology, and I’ve found great wisdom in Taoism and in ancient Egyptian theology and in ancient Mesopotamian theology and in many places that I’ve looked. But it’s certainly the case that I found a wealth of wisdom at least as rich in the biblical corpus, in the Judeo-Christian stories. And I would say deeper. And that’s partly because a lot of those stories were part of the cultural heritage of Judaism, and the Jews are remarkably naturally smart in some ways, and they were immensely remarkable storytellers, and the stories they told are unbelievably deep. They’re insanely deep. And we’ll wander through a couple tonight and I’ll show you some of that depth.

And then Fry did something interesting. He started talking about God, and I said: “Well, what’s your problem exactly with God as a concept?” And I was expecting something akin to the materialist atheist notion that God is a superfluous hypothesis. And that’s a perspective, but not a very deep perspective in my estimation, and a very dangerous one, as we’re finding out right now.

But Fry actually got angry. And what he got angry about — one of the things he pointed to — was the suffering of children, just like Ivan. He talked about watching children with bone cancer suffer, and how dreadful that was, and how preposterous it was to presume that in a world characterized by the suffering of innocence, anything that could be regarded as a transcendent good might be held to exist.

Fair enough — you can understand that argument. But what I found so remarkable was that he was actually angry about it. He was morally outraged about it. He was shaking his fist at the sky. Well, that’s what you do to someone that you’re angry at. You don’t shake your fist at the rocks on the ground. You shake your fist at the imaginary being in the sky, even if you’re an atheist.

And that’s an interesting thing, because what it indicates — at least to some degree — is that: A, even if you’re atheistic, you wrestle with God. And B, even if you’re atheistic, you’re at least unconsciously in a relationship.

The Moral Outrage of Atheism

Because why else bother with the anger? Why else? What else is the source of the moral outrage? And one of the things I’ve noticed is that, because I’ve read a lot of comments from atheists, maybe more than anybody else in the world — I’m dead serious about that — because I’ve done a lot of analysis of biblical stories online. And I read most of the comments that are put on my YouTube channel, and that’s often like a thousand, five thousand comments a week.

A lot of comments. And some of the arguments that the atheists mount against what I’m elucidating are rationalistic, materialistic atheist objections. But most of them are angry. And a lot of them are written by people who were hurt by people who purported to be religious at some point in their lives. They encountered the tyranny of dogmatic insistence in religious guise, and that damaged them and left them with a resentment towards anything with a religious flavor.

But even that is not a rational argument, by the way. Let’s point that out very clearly. That’s an emotional argument. And it’s the kind of emotional argument that you would mount against someone that you were in a relationship with. Now then you might ask yourself about that.

Are We in Relationship with Being?

Are we in a relationship with the spirit of being and becoming? That’s a good way of thinking. But I don’t mean with the material world. That’s not what I mean exactly, because the material world in some sense isn’t the whole world. And we all know that because, well, first of all, we exist within the material world and we’re conscious and we don’t know how to relate that to the material realm at all.

Not at all. We have no idea. We don’t understand the relationship between consciousness and matter at all. And you might say, well, it can be reducible to neurological function, and I would say most of the neurological function that characterizes you has no consciousness. And so how we distinguish between the neurological function that hypothetically underlies consciousness and the neurological function that seems equally complex but has no consciousness is not something that anyone knows.

And I would say the one undeniable truth that we have at hand is the fact of our consciousness. That was basically Descartes’ proposition. He said, “I think therefore I am.” But what he meant in more modern parlance is something like the brute fact of my own consciousness is the deepest of undeniable realities. And so what that appears to indicate is that, well, you can make a materialist case that matter is at the bottom of being itself, but you can make an equally powerful case philosophically that consciousness is at the bottom of things.

Not least because I can’t even imagine how you could come up with an account of being — materialist or otherwise — in the absence of consciousness. If there’s no experience of what is, there is nothing. And no materialist has ever come up with a satisfactory answer to that. That’s a complicated question.

And then there’s the fact of consciousness, and that’s a strange fact. And then there’s also the fact of the manner in which we’re organized, we’re constructed. So human beings are personalities and personalities exist in relationship. And insofar as we’re personalities, our personalities — speaking materialistically — are an evolved function. We’re personalities because being a personality is what allows us to orient ourselves in the world. And so, if at the highest level of our being we’re personalities, how is it that we’re not in relationship with the essence of reality? Otherwise it wouldn’t work.

Richard Dawkins and the Microcosm

So that’s a very interesting fact. Now here’s another twist for you. I’ve been in touch with Richard Dawkins, who’s probably the world’s most famous living atheist, and he’s like the avatar of the Enlightenment mind. He’s the last standing avatar of the Enlightenment mind. That’s a good way of thinking about it.

And formidable — a formidable intellect. And someone I actually like. I’ve met Richard a couple of times, and he’s an ornery bastard, and he’s tough as a boot, and you don’t mess with him lightly, and he’s disagreeable enough to cut you into pieces like Englishmen can at the drop of a hat. But I think fundamentally, he’s a genuine scientist, and that’s a difficult thing to be. And you have to be a dedicated pursuer of the truth to be a scientist. And there’s a certain moral element to that, a profound moral element to that.

And I tried to get Dawkins to talk to me a number of times and he put me off in various ways for a while. But then one day he wrote me and he said, “I don’t know what the hell — I can never understand what you’re talking about, Peterson, but I don’t know why you want to talk to me, and I don’t think I’d have the patience for it anyways, but I kind of think maybe you’re interested in this.” And so he sent me a paper and I thought, you son of a b, you know exactly why I want to talk to you.

It was a paper I actually knew about from about 30 years previously, and he made a very interesting claim in that paper. He said that every biological organism is a microcosm of its environment by necessity — like a model, like a low resolution representation of its environment. And here’s what he meant by that.

He said, imagine you were an alien. Scientists like to imagine such things. They don’t believe in angels or demons, but aliens — those things are there for sure. Anyways, he said imagine you gave an alien scientist a bird, a dead bird. What could this alien, who’d never seen the earth, conclude about the earth from analyzing the bird?

And the answer is, well, a tremendous amount. Because you could calculate the density of the atmosphere from its wings, and if you analyzed its blood properly, you would know the composition of the atmosphere, and you’d be able to calculate the gravitational pull of the Earth and its approximate mass. And by analyzing its DNA at a deep enough level, you could reconstruct a lot of the tree of life that characterizes Earth itself. A bird is a densely packed microcosm of its environment.

And I thought, well, I don’t know if you know this Dr. Dawkins, but there was a medieval conceit among Christians hundreds of years ago that the human soul was a microcosm — a reflection of the cosmic order. And your proposition as an evolutionary biologist is that you can’t adapt to an environment that you’re not a microcosmic replica of. That’s exactly the same claim that the Christians made in the medieval period. We’re a microcosm. Our soul reflects the cosmic order.

You might say, well, what the hell does that mean, Dr. Peterson? It means that if you’re not in tune with the structure of reality at all of the levels at which it manifests itself, then you die. That’s what it means.

A Covenant with Being

And so I found that extraordinarily interesting, especially because it has another implication, which is that if we are a microcosm of the cosmos itself and we’re a personality, then maybe the deepest way that we can conceptualize our relationship to being and becoming itself is as a covenant, as a relationship, as an understanding between beings — rather than as an alienated consciousness inhabiting a cold and dead material world.

And so I was interested in that partly because there’s an insistence in the Old Testament stories that we’re in relationship with being and becoming. And Tammy made reference to that in relationship to prayer. And it’s easy to be cynical about such things, especially if you’re a Luciferian intellect. But I would say that the thought that rationalists worship is secularized prayer, historically speaking.

And so why would I say that? Well, you follow along. You tell me if you think that this is incorrect. I can’t see a flaw in it.

The Problem That Won’t Let You Go

As a scientist, I might ask myself, well, what do I do when I’m generating a scientific hypothesis? Now, this is a very interesting question because scientists never discuss how they generate their hypotheses. They write down their experimental results and their methods and they just take the hypothesis part for granted. Or maybe they make up some story about how they were driven to their hypothesis by rational means, and that’s just not true. That’s not how it works at all.

I had a great student at Harvard, Shelley Carson. Shelley was creative and intuitive and she’d come up with a bright idea. And you can’t just write your bright idea down in a scientific paper. You have to tell people how you came to it logically. So then she’d have to invent a story about how she came to her intuitive idea logically, and that was the introduction to her scientific paper. And scientists do that all the time. Every single scientific paper is like that.

Where do your hypotheses come from? Your research question. What grips your interest? What compels you and calls you forward? And how does that make itself manifest? Zero instruction in that, in the scientific realm.

So let’s take that apart a bit. Well, the first thing that you need, if you’re a scientist, is a problem. It has to be a real problem. And how do you know if it’s a real problem? How do you know if you have a real problem?

It won’t let you go.

Well, that’s a funny way of thinking about it. What won’t let you go? You? Well, what do you mean, you won’t let you go? This is your conscience. It’s you that won’t let you go. Well, if you can’t let yourself go, if you can’t escape from a problem that besets you, what makes you think for a moment that it’s you that’s besetting you with the problem?

And you know this perfectly well. You know this perfectly well because many times in your life, if you had the chance of just saying to yourself, “You should let that problem go,” you would. But you can’t. You can’t, for example, when your conscience calls you out. Or if you do, you damage yourself by lying that deeply.

And it’s the same if something calls to you — not so much besets you, but grips your interest — which is something that happens to scientists all the time. They’re insanely called forward by some phenomena. Phenomena means to shine forth. They’re called forward by what shines forth to them. And so you need that calling and conscience to specify your problem. And so you do that in relationship to what besets you and interests you. And there’s an autonomy in that.

You can’t decide what you’re interested in. This is so weird. This is part of what got me interested in psychoanalytic thought so many years ago, because Freud and Jung both said that there are autonomous forces, there’s an autonomy of spirit operating within you. They put it in the unconscious — you’re motivated by things that aren’t under your voluntary control. They have an autonomy. They call to you. They plague you. You can’t control it. What the hell is that?

So you need to have a problem, and maybe it’s a problem because you’re fascinated by something, you’re locked onto it by a force that’s beyond your control. Or you’re plagued by it — your conscience screams that you have to do something about the cancer of children, for example, because someone needs to, because the suffering is wrong. That’s a moral claim, by the way, not a scientific claim. From the purely scientific perspective, the cancer cell has just as much right to live as you do.

You start your investigation with an a priori set of moral claims, all sorts of moral claims. The claim that the truth is at hand if you approach the problem properly. The claim that the truth is comprehensible. You have to believe that to be a scientist. The claim that your pursuit of the comprehensible truth will make the world a better place? That’s an axiom of faith. Are we so sure that our technology has made the world a better place? Well, maybe we are now, but if we wiped ourselves out with hydrogen bombs, we might rethink that hypothesis. So it’s not self-evident.

The Problem as Opportunity

You have to have a problem. And that’s an interesting thing to know, because you’re going to have a lot of problems in your life. And a problem approached comprehensively is an opportunity. And that’s something very, very useful to know. And the deeper the problem is, the more it’s going to hurt you. But the more opportunity lurks in that problem, because the fact that it besets you means you could be the person to pursue the solution, and that’s something very interesting to know.

It’s akin to the claim that the dragon hoards the gold. And implicit in that is the notion that the larger the dragon, the more valuable the gold. And Tammy referred to that to some degree tonight. She’s been in a situation over the last few years where she’s had to face very serious illness and death on a multitude of fronts in many, many ways, and that’s about as bitter as it gets. And it’s not too much to say that because she approached the problem on her knees, the net consequence of that suffering has been positive.

And I suppose that’s the secret to a life well lived, isn’t it? Because there’s going to be no shortage of serious problems that are coming your way. And if you can’t transform them into stellar opportunities, then you’re going to be left in the dust. And you do that, not least by faith, but also as a consequence of a certain form of humility.

So we could get to that next. You have a problem. You’re a scientist. The next thing you have to admit is you don’t know the answer. And that’s not much different, semantically speaking, than approaching the problem on your knees. It’s like you have a problem.

The Problem of Insufficiency and the Nature of Prayer

It’s a real problem. It’s an insufficiency. You have an insufficiency. You have to admit to the insufficiency. Deeply, you have to understand that it’s an insufficiency that you would like to have rectified.

You have to ask, you have to knock, you have to seek. And the consequence of that, intensely pursued, will be something like a revelation. We say, us moderns, that we say things like, “I thought this up.” And I would say that’s not really very accurate psychologically or spiritually. If it was you that thought it up, why didn’t you know it to begin with?

Well, that’s a good question, right? Where did that come from? How did you call it forth, or under what conditions did it make itself manifest to you? Those are the same questions. You’re not going to get much of an answer unless you ask the question.

And that’s really what a prayer is in the final analysis. It’s an admission of insufficiency, and it’s a reaching into the beyond for a revelation. Now, thought itself doesn’t end there because your prayers might be warped, and what that means to some degree is that the revelation — you might be aiming at the wrong thing. And what that might mean is the revelation you receive might not precisely be from God, which is why you have to test the spirit, so to speak, to see if they’re of God.

And there’s actually no difference between that critical thinking. You’ll ask yourself a question, hopefully a well-aimed one, hopefully one that’s aiming up — not something like, “How can I take advantage of this situation for myself in this moment, maximally, and to hell with everyone else?” — which isn’t exactly a prayer to God, let’s put it that way. And so you have to check yourself, and you do that with critical thinking of various sorts, which is another manifestation of the creative process.

And I don’t see any difference between that on the scientific front and prayer, not on the hypothesis generating side. And I think also it’s a completely reasonable claim anthropologically and historically to generate the hypothesis that the thought that moderns are capable of — literate, semantically sophisticated moderns — is a variant of the prayer which clearly preceded that historically.

So there’s a gospel statement that says, “If you ask you’ll receive, if you knock the door will open, and if you seek you’ll find.” But it’s nested in another set of propositions, which is something like, “Careful what you ask for.” And seriously — if you ask for what is highest, you’ll receive what is highest in return. And if you ask for what is lowest, you’ll receive what is lowest in return. And I wouldn’t recommend that.

The Structure of Reality: Facts vs. Stories

Well, that’s a bit of preamble musing, let’s say, to set the stage. I have one other thing I want to discuss with you before we get to the stories themselves. I want to discuss with you what constitutes a story.

Now, we’re engaged in a culture war, and part of the reason for that culture war is the clash of two claims about the structure of reality itself. The rationalists and the empiricists make the claim that the world is composed of a set of objective facts, and that you can be guided by those facts. You can follow the science, for example, right off the tyrannical cliff, as you may have noticed.

The world is composed of a set of empirical facts, and that was opposed starting in the 1970s by the postmodernists who claim that, no, you see the world through a story. And it turns out the facts support the postmodernists and not the scientists. And that isn’t an opinion anymore, because the same realization occurred simultaneously in multiple fields of inquiry.

The greatest neuroscientists in the world now regard each word as a micro-narrative, or as a tool. The AI engineers learned that they could only produce supercomputing intelligences by training them within the framework of something approximating a hierarchy of values. The computational scientists learned that it was impossible to generate a robotic machine that could function merely as a consequence of modeling the facts. All of those things basically happened at the same time.

David Hume and the Problem of Value

And here’s why. About 200 years ago, a Scottish philosopher named David Hume put forward a very famous proposition which was that you couldn’t derive an ought from an is, which meant something like, no matter how many facts you aggregated around you, you couldn’t use those facts as an unerring guide as to where you should go.

Imagine that you’re dropped in the ocean and you’re trying to determine which way to swim. There’s no set of facts at your disposal that is going to map that territory for you. The same is true if you’re lost in an expansive desert. The geography itself will not signify to you your destination.

Now, why is that? What is the problem? It seems like it’s one of something approximating volume. The facts can’t guide you because there’s an infinite number of them. And if you rank order and prioritize them, you’re not in the domain of facts, you’re in the domain of value.

The perceptual scientists figured this out too. You do this every time you take a glance. The empiricists say, “Well, you just look at the world and there are the facts.” But the perceptual scientists say, “No, you can’t even look at the world without looking at the world through a lens of value.”

Perception and the Hierarchy of Value

What do I mean by that? Well, imagine you’re out on a date. You’re in a restaurant. There are a lot of things you could pay attention to. You could pay attention to the waitress who happens to be more attractive than your date, let’s say. Now that’s not a strategy of value that’s going to endear you to your date.

So what do you do if you’re polite and you have a clue? What you do with the person of the opposite sex that you’re with is you attend to the facts that accompany them. You prioritize your perception so that in the restaurant, for example, you don’t listen to the conversations two tables away, although you could — you listen to what your date is saying. And the way you do that is you focus on what it is that she’s uttering and you suppress into invisibility everything else. What that means is that you put her utterances at the pinnacle of a structure of value and you subsume everything else beneath that.

And you do that with every single glance you take. You couldn’t even focus your eyes if you didn’t do that. Perception — visual perception, auditory perception — cannot be dissociated from action. You don’t see and then act, because you can’t see without acting. And it’s the same with all of your senses.

So you have to make a decision about what’s important, literally with every glance. Even with the unconscious movements that keep your eyes actually functioning — because they’re vibrating constantly even though you don’t know that, because your brain corrects for it — you have to live within a hierarchy of value. There’s no way out of that.

And once you know that — and we know that, and we know that factually, we know that incontrovertibly — once you know that you live within a structure of value, two questions might arise: How is that structure of value to be characterized? And what should be valued?

Stories as Descriptions of Value

To answer the first question: a description of a hierarchy of value is a story. That’s why we’re so interested in stories. We want to see how other people see the world. We want to have them help us solve the problem of what to attend to.

Here’s a scientific justification for that claim. Your eyes evolved so that other people can easily see where you’re pointing them. That’s why you have whites. When you look at someone, when you talk to them, you look at their eyes. You look at their face, but mostly their eyes, and the reason you look at their eyes is so that you can see where they’re pointing their eyes. Because if you can see where they’re pointing their eyes, you can figure out what they’re aiming at. And if you can figure out what they’re aiming at, you can figure out what they’re up to. And if you can figure out what they’re up to, you can use your body to mimic their responses emotionally, and that’s how you understand them.

You say, “Well, how do you know that’s true?” Think — what do you do when you go to a movie? You pay to go see a movie. It’s a story. You’ll even go pay to see a story that horrifies and terrifies you. That’s how important it is for you to understand the broad landscape of evaluation.

You’ll go watch someone confront a horrifying death and you’ll walk through those emotions just so you can orient yourself in that landscape, and you’ll pay for it. And the reason you’ll pay for it is because you’ll pay for not doing it, and you’ll pay more.

Why We Watch Movies and Engage with Fiction

So you go to a movie and what do you do? You watch the hero, you watch the protagonist, and you try to infer: What’s he up to? What’s he doing? Why is he doing it? What are his aims? What’s his moral structure? And you lock onto him. And as soon as you start to understand his motivations — assuming the movie is well written and well portrayed — you start to feel the emotions. And that’s because you’re using your body as a computational landscape to mimic the state of being that characterizes the protagonist.

And then you split yourself into all sorts of people while watching the movie, one person per actor. And you experience all those emotions. And you absorb all those stories. And why do you do that?

Well, maybe the protagonist is an anti-hero, like the Joker in Batman — like Heath Ledger’s Joker. Why would you watch the Joker? To learn how not to let the world burn pointlessly. How about that? And why would you watch a superhero movie? Well, maybe to ally yourself with the central tenets of heroism per se.

If you have a better explanation — “It’s entertaining. I enjoy it. Don’t make too much of it.” — it’s like, no, sorry, you’re gripped by an instinct. That’s how a biologist looks at it, or a psychologist. What else is dragging you to the movie theater? You can’t just brush it off as entertaining. You’re missing the point. Why is it entertaining? Why will you pay for that?

Fiction, Simulation, and What Truly Matters

Here’s an even deeper question. Part of our attempt to build faster and faster computers is so that we can have more and more realistic fictional simulations. You don’t need the newest supercomputer in your laptop. You were pretty much taken care of on that front in 1995. So what’s driving our desire to build these insanely complex machines? Well, how about the ability to play more realistic games? Story-based games? How about the ability to construct more and more realistic fictional worlds? Why? Because it matters. It matters.

So then we might ask ourselves, what are we to make of fiction itself? And a thoughtless rationalist would say, “Well, fiction is the opposite of fact.” That’s a stupid answer. And here’s one of the reasons — because there’s a lot of reasons, but here’s one. We seem to recognize different levels of quality in fiction.

You’ll go home when you’re tired and watch a movie you know to be trivial, light, shallow, and foolish. Just entertaining, right? It doesn’t move you, doesn’t require any effort on your part. You’re probably even embarrassed to watch it. But maybe you worked hard that day and that’s pretty much what’s left of you. You can lay on the couch and watch Barbie — and I could only make it halfway through Barbie, by the way.

But then you’ll see a movie that moves you to your depths, that’ll evoke tears, that’ll sometimes even change your life. You’ll read a book like that — a book of fiction. And so we have this instinct and this unerring sense and this knowledge that there are levels of depth in fiction, levels of quality in fiction. And what that seems to indicate is that, at least even if fiction is the opposite of fact, some fiction is much more real than others.

Dostoevsky and the Depth of Human Character

I’m a great admirer of Dostoevsky, for example, and I loved clinical psychology. I loved being a clinical psychologist because I found that if I listened intently to my clients, they all turned into characters from a Dostoevsky novel. Because people are so interesting. If you get people to tell you the truth, they’re so interesting that you want to run away screaming.

And so that’s why husbands and wives don’t listen to each other, by the way. They tell each other platitudinous half-truths so that none of them are terrified enough to leave the house in a fit of horror. And they miss the best of the other person as a consequence of that cowardice. If you’re bored of your spouse, all that means is they’re not letting you know who they are. Because if they did, you’d be interested enough to stay awake at night worrying.

So here’s a theory about fiction. We have to see the world through a hierarchy of valuation. And a description of a hierarchy of valuation is the story. You’re looking at the world through the eyes of someone else, trying to adopt their frame of reference, trying to understand their position, their aim, their conclusions, their emotions, their motivations.

The Nature of Mythology and Deep Fiction

Now imagine there’s sets of stories, right, and some are more compelling than others. And then imagine you aggregate all the compelling stories and you make super compelling stories out of that aggregation. And those are the deepest possible stories and the most real possible representations. That’s what mythology is. It’s a form of truth that surpasses the merely literal.

Now you might say, well, that’s a preposterous claim. Nothing’s more real than concrete reality. Really? How about numbers?

What’s more real? The world of brute material facts or the world of numbers? How powerful are you if you are a master of the world of numbers? Well, our computational devices are a consequence of our mastery of the world of numbers.

Our technological prowess is a consequence of our mastery of the world of numbers. Are numbers more or less real than what they represent? Well, I think the proper answer to that question is, it depends on your definition of real. It depends on the purposes toward which you’re putting the levels of abstraction. But you’re a bloody fool if you think the answer to that question is simple.

And you’re certainly a fool if you think that making the claim that the realm of numbers is real is a preposterous claim. That just means that you have a definition of reality that you really know nothing about. Abstractions can be plenty real and deep fiction is the ultimate abstraction of value and that’s crucial because we see the world through a structure of value.

The Postmodernist Critique and Its Failures

Now the postmodernists figured this out in the 1970s. Why? Well, how about because they were literary critics? Now you’d think literary critics, no wonder they’re in the university, nothing more useless than a literary critic. What if you live by stories? Then there’s nothing more powerful than a literary critic. Especially one that takes the stories your culture’s predicated upon apart. Which is exactly where we are now.

It’s worse than that. Even though the postmodernists got their central claim correct, that we see the world through a web of stories, let’s say, they got their answer wrong. And that was because they were possessed by this spirit of Luciferian pride. They put the cart before the horse.

They thought, well, we have to see the world through a story. Now remember, these same people, they’re all Marxists. And I’m not making this up. Go look it up for yourself. We’re talking about France in the 1970s. Okay, so that in itself should be a clue.

And we know perfectly well that the universities have been left-leaning since the 1960s, and that that was particularly true of France during the 1970s and probably no more true among the humanities oriented French intellectuals of the 1970s than anywhere else. And if they weren’t outright Marxists, they were implicit Marxists, and they said that themselves. And when Solzhenitsyn came out and demolished the moral pretensions of the communist universe, they kind of scuttled underground, but not really. They just invented a kind of meta-Marxism that would have made old Karl, had he lived to understand its spin, hopefully at a very rapid and uncomfortable rate for all of eternity.

Power as the Postmodernist Lens

What did the postmodernists claim? The central story that possesses us is one of power and nothing else? Well, fair enough in some ways. I mean, certainly there isn’t anyone here, there’s no one alive who hasn’t been tempted by… There’s people who are unable to utilize power, and they’re just useless. And then they might mask their lack of uselessness with a moral veneer.

“I’d never use power.” And my objection would be, well, it doesn’t really matter to me one way or another because you’re so incompetent you don’t have the opportunity. And so that’s not a moral claim. That was something Nietzsche pointed out in the late 1800s when in his critique of morality as cowardice. If you’re weak and useless, the best justification you have for it is that you don’t do terrible things because you’re good. It’s like, no, you don’t do terrible things just because you’re useless.

Now that doesn’t mean that’s necessarily the only reason that people don’t do terrible things. That is not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that the accusation thrown by the postmodernists at the human race, that our fundamental motivation is one of self-serving power — this power properly defined has to be self-serving. Otherwise, it’s not power. It’s cooperation.

So I need to exercise power if I’m trying to compel you to do something you don’t want to do. Maybe that’s all we do. You’re out for your power, I’m out for my power. It’s a bloody nightmare of power competition and whatever stability we manage to attain is merely a consequence of the balance of our fundamentally competing interests. And that ethos is core to the unholy alliance between the postmodernists and the Marxists.

There’s no genuine reality. There’s no genuine morality. There’s nothing but a set of competing claims to power. And then there’s the oppressed and the victimized, and then there’s the victimizer, and that’s a power dynamic, and you can understand marriage that way, and you can understand the family that way and you can understand history that way and it’s nothing but power.

And as I said, fair enough. Human beings are pretty damn brutal and you look at a regime like the National Socialist regime or Maoist China or Stalinist Soviet Union, you think, or the degeneration of great institutions in the West, and you think power’s on the march and maybe there’s nothing else.

The Limits of Power: Psychopathy as a Case Study

There are a group of people who use nothing but strategies of power. Psychopaths. They’re about 3% of the population cross-culturally. And that fact in itself is pretty damn interesting because if there was nothing but power, why wouldn’t the people who use nothing but power be the majority and be dominant? And they’re not.

Psychopathy turns out to be a very counterproductive strategy. Many psychopaths land up in prison. Psychopaths can’t cooperate. If I interact with you and I get what I want from you on our first interaction and then to hell with you, you’re not going to interact with me again. So psychopaths are itinerant. Even psychopathic chimps don’t do very well.

The idea that the fundamental human motivation is one of power is about the most cynical and self-serving story that you could possibly tell. Now it’s a bit compelling, it’s compelling because when a human social organization goes wrong, it degenerates in the direction of power. If you and your wife are not getting along, you can’t cooperate, you can’t communicate, that’s all off the table. You’re left with the relationship of tyrant to slave, and maybe you swap those roles, but it’s in the degeneration of the institution that the manifestation of power takes place.

I suppose it can degenerate into a kind of puerile and infertile hedonism too. Now if you can’t organize yourself at some relatively high level of sophistication, you can degenerate into the situation where you do nothing but allow yourself to be possessed by your basest whims. There’s not much difference between that and being psychopathic by the way. It’s an unbelievably corrosive doctrine.

What Is the World Founded On, If Not Power?

But then you might object. That’s naive because everything runs on power. I don’t think it’s naive at all by the way, but a more fundamental objection would be, well, if it’s not power that the world is founded on, if it’s not the war of all against all, then on what principle is the world founded? And on what principle should the world be founded? And that’s what the biblical corpus investigates.

I say biblical corpus because it’s a body, like a body of laws. It’s a body of stories. It’s a body of animating stories. That’s another way of thinking about it. And all stories contain within them an animating spirit. That’s the moral of the story, by the way. The seed around which the entire story organizes itself or the seed from which it grows. The seed that is planted in you when you hear a story or tell a story.

Over millennia, our ancestors aggregated stories that burned themselves into their memory, all aimed at answering the same question: toward what should sacrifice be devoted? Now that archaic terminology grates on our modern ears. We think of burnt altars and smoking carcasses and primitive gods that enjoy the smell of high quality roasted fat and we fail to investigate.

Sacrifice, Work, and the Human Bargain with the Future

To what end should sacrifice be devoted? What does that mean? You will wrestle with that question your entire life. There is no difference conceptually between sacrifice and work. They’re the same thing.

Work, the sacrifice of the present to the future. If you’re doing something for fun, if you’re engaged in the present, if you’re captivated by the moment, you’re not working. You’re enjoying yourself, you’re being entertained, you’re playing. What are you doing when you’re working? You’re striking a bargain with the future. Or you’re striking a bargain with the spirit of the future, and the bargain is, I’ll give up something I want and value now on the understanding that it will be returned to me manifold in the future. That’s why you work.

And so then that’s in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve are tossed out of paradise because of their sin of pride. God informs them that in this fallen world they will have to work, they will have to toil in the fields, they’ll have to toil to bring forth children, they’ll have to work. It’s the human destiny to work.

Why? How about because we’re aware of the future? How would that be? Above all other animals, we understand that we stretch across time, that you have to save for your retirement, because the you now will be the you that’s 65 and damn soon. And you have this perspective on the world that spans the ages, so to speak.

And you have to make a bargain between what’s neat and correct and enjoyable and fills you with enthusiasm at the moment and how you have to organize yourself into the future to make a bargain with your future self, to strike the same bargain with everyone else and all their future selves and balance all that in the moment with work.

Cain and Abel: The Two Pathways of Adaptation

What kind of work? That’s the story of Cain and Abel. What sacrifice best pleases God? Abel’s sacrifices are accepted, his life goes well. Cain’s sacrifices are rejected. He becomes resentful, arrogant, bitter, murderous, and then genocidal. Sound familiar?

Those two things are laid out. Those two pathways of adaptation, those two pathways of narrative valuation are laid out at the outset of the biblical corpus, in about 20 of the most tightly written sentences ever penned. The story of Cain and Abel is inexhaustible. It sets the pattern of the battle between the Hostile Brothers, between Batman and the Joker, between Superman and Lex Luthor, between the Hobbit and Sauron, between Harry Potter and Voldemort.

It’s the eternal battle of good against evil and that’s the most fundamental narrative trope and it’s the meta story that burns us, that’s burned itself into our imagination and our memory. And why? Because that’s your story, whether you know it or not. And no matter where you are in that story, you’re in that story. And no matter which side you’re on or what stance you take, you’re in that story wrestling with God. And that’s human destiny.

There’s probably no one who thinks of God more than a committed atheist. And that’s not accidental.

Walking Through the First Story in the Biblical Corpus

Alright, so I’m going to walk you through a bit of the first story in the biblical corpus, just to give you a flavour of exactly how this works.

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

A few sentences. A relatively radical claim. So let me delve into this a little bit. “Without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep,” it’s a juxtaposition of a sequence of metaphors. The original Hebrew word was tohu vabohu and tohu vabohu means something like formless potential. The Spirit of God is that which wrestles with, which confronts and battles and differentiates formless chaos into the manifest structures of the world.

Okay, now when you’re made in that image, what does that mean? Well, it’s a claim about the fundamental structure of reality itself. And it’s not a materialist claim, and not in the least. First of all, it claims the existence of something that in some sense is non-material. And I would say the closest straightforward word we have of understanding what that is is consciousness. That’s the brute fact of your awareness. But more than that, the brute fact of the fact that your awareness is integrally involved with the fact of being itself. And more and more that the being of your consciousness gives rise to the world.

What Confronts You When You Wake Up?

Okay, so let’s just take that apart for a minute. You follow along with me and you tell me what you think about this. What is it that faces you when you wake up in the morning? That’s the dawn of the new day, right? God creates the world in seven days, units of time. You wake up in the morning when the sun rises and the light reappears. What confronts you in the morning?

And because you’re a materialist, you think, well, my bed, my furniture in my room, my rug, the artifacts around me. And I would say really, when you get up in the morning, the first thing that you perceive and conceive is the furniture that you’re a hundred percent familiar with. Or how about this?

How about if you think about the last time you were depressed or anxious? That’s a good way in. What confronts you when you wake up in the morning? How about the malformed potential of your life? How about the wasted potential of your life? How about the increasingly chaotic and demented chaos of your life? How about all those opportunities you could have made something of had you chosen to. How about all the wasted opportunities that saturate your house?

The Dragon You Face Each Morning

All the closets that haven’t been organized? All the fights you haven’t had with your wife? All the issues you haven’t settled with your children, all of that formless chaotic anxiety provoking terrifying potential. Well that’s on the negative side. You might say that’s the dragon that is there in the morning when you awaken.

You can paint a positive picture that’s equally compelling. Maybe you’re at a peak in your life and you wake up in the morning filled with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, that means to be filled with the Spirit of God. Enthus, theus is theos, deos, God. To be filled with the Spirit of God, to be joyfully abounding in faith and hope.

And why? Because you see a new business opportunity make itself manifest. Or maybe you’re in love with someone and the first thing you think about is the potential of that future relationship, or even if that’s the date that night. Or maybe you have a new child and you’re deeply in love with that child and you think about the joys that the new day might bring if you only conducted yourself properly.

And so what do you confront when you wake up in the morning? Well, how about a field of potential? Maybe that’s what your consciousness is for. Your consciousness is the mechanism that confronts a field of potential and casts it into reality, that makes it tangible.

Free Will and the Field of Potential

Now, do you believe that? Well, do you make decisions? Do things happen as a consequence of your choices? Is that not part of assembling and forming the world? And don’t we all know that the world that we aggregate around us is in some wise consequence of what we’ve aimed at?

Of our own free choice? And you might say, well, I don’t believe in free choice. It’s like, do you believe in your wife’s free choice? Try treating her like an automaton for a week and see how well your relationship goes. “Well dear, I know that you really can’t help how you are, and you’re just moving robotically through the motions, and no matter how disarrayed our relationship happens to be, I can’t attribute any responsibility to you, because I know at your core you’re nothing but a mindless deterministic robot.”

It’s like you can’t even have a relationship with yourself with that attitude, much less someone else. And so you might claim to be a determinist, which by the way is not a useful scientific stance, because the universe is not a deterministic place and it can’t be conquered by algorithmic calculation. And we know that, and that’s actually a fact, not an opinion, because at the quantum level the world is fundamentally indeterministic and that indeterminism makes it self-manifest to all the levels of reality.

It doesn’t work technically, and it doesn’t work practically. It’s a preposterous scheme, and you mostly want to believe it so that you don’t have to take responsibility for your life. But the catastrophe of that is that that potential that you encounter when you awaken — in that potential is everything that could ever possibly be offered to you if you only knew how to seize it.

And you know that because you’re beckoned forward into the future by the fact that something new and redeeming could still make itself manifest. And if you don’t have that, you can’t get out of bed. You say, I’m hopeless. I have no hope. I have no enthusiasm.

The joy has gone out of my life. The neurological systems that signal movement forward to a desired end have shut down and left you suffering, left you with nothing but the bitterness of the potential that’s going to make itself manifest in the most negative possible way if you can’t organize yourself and confront the world.

The Spirit That Confronts Chaos

And that’s the same spirit, that’s the same spirit that’s claimed in the great book of Genesis to make itself manifest at the beginning of time, the spirit that confronts potential itself and casts that potential into tangible order. And not only order — this is repeatedly insisted upon in the text — the order that is good.

So imagine that you’re conducting yourself as a proper conscious moral agent in your family. What are you doing? You’re taking the raw potential of your children and your family and you’re transforming them into the order that is good. And how do you do that?

Well, do you love your children? I didn’t ask if you liked them. Do you love your children? And you say, well, at least I’d like to. You know, and I’m not being cynical about that. We’re all imperfect and none of us love our children with the depth that we should. But you see the best of people, I would say, in the love that they manifest for children.

And what does it mean to love a child? I mean, even if you don’t have much hope for yourself, even if you’ve given up on yourself, even if you’re bitter about the fact that you’ve wasted your potential, you have a child and you think, if only, God willing, things could be better for him. The potential that I see inside him that constitutes the core of my love, that vision of potential. That could make itself manifest in a manner I was never able to manage. And you pray that that occurs and it hurts you when you see your child deviate from that path.

Love as the Ordering Principle

And so what does that mean? It means when you orient yourself by love you strive to bring about within the confines of your family the order that is good or even very good. And what that implies too is that the ultimate aim of the spirit that would best make use of potential is the spirit that acts in love.

And that’s why there’s an insistence in the Judeo-Christian tradition that the ordering spirit at the base of reality itself is precisely the spirit that acts in accordance with the highest dictates of love. And you ask yourself, well if you wanted to bring about a world that was good or very good, what else could you possibly be oriented by?

And that love would not only be love for your children and for your wife, but even for yourself, but for yourself in the deepest possible sense, right, as the love for yourself as someone who carries within them the same flame that your son carries and that you need to manifest when you’re caring for your son so that he can manifest what’s within him.

And then you could ask yourself too, if you were oriented, God willing, by nothing but that love, what could you make of your life? Now there is a prayer. If I was oriented by nothing but the highest love, what could I make of my life? It’s a terrifying question to ask because if you ask and you want to know, everything that interferes with that will burn away from you. And that might mean that there’s precious little left standing.

The Metaphor of Water and the Heroic Spirit

This idea of the Spirit of God descending upon the chaotic waters. People ask, well there was no water at the beginning. None of this makes sense. It’s like you just don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no idea what constitutes a metaphor.

What exists, this potential that exists at the beginning of everything isn’t water. It’s just that water’s a useful metaphor. Well, why? You can draw things up from the water. The water is unknown. The water is dark and it’s deep and it’s mysterious and it’s bountiful. You can drown in the water. You can sail on the water. The water is the necessity of life. Use some imagination like the poets do.

When Christ is baptized by John the Baptist, the spirit descends upon him. What does that mean? Next slide, please. Oh, I’ll tell you about this first. This is the same story told from a different perspective.

So what do you confront in your life? Well, a monstrous, eternal, infinite mess of multi-headed snakes. Tell me that’s never happened in your life. You wake up in the morning and think, oh my god, I wish I was asleep. Snakes everywhere.

So what does the hero do? Confronts the snake. More than that. This is even implicit still in the biblical corpus. There are echoes of the representation of God as the primordial deity who slayed the serpent that existed at the beginning of time and made the world out of its pieces. Leviathan.

What does that mean? Well, it means that we’re hunters. It means that we make our clothes out of animal skins. It means that we establish the order that is habitable by confronting the predators and making use of them, taming them or destroying them. We establish order as a consequence of a conflict with potential.

It’s echoed in the story of the dragon and the gold. You confront what’s terrifying and possible, and you gain what’s valuable and necessary. And that’s the eternal story of the heroic element of the human spirit. And when we hear a story like that, it echoes deep inside us. That’s why the stories are so compelling.

Remember Who You Are

It’s like the baptismal scene in The Lion King when Simba is adolescent and deluded and power mad and confused and his father appears in the sky and says, “Remember who you are.” Well, that’s what the ancient stories do. They remind you who you are, right? Your children of God made in the image of the creative being that sits at the center of reality itself, reflected in your soul and you’ve forgotten in your mis-aimed presumptions, your pretension, your pride, and your ignorance, and the stories, the ancient stories, call to you to wake up and understand who you are, to adopt that responsibility and to put that foremost above everything.

To confront the terrible, catastrophic dragon of chaos dressed in your suit of lion skin and your armor so that you can render the void and the desert habitable for your family, yourself, and your community. That’s the adventure of your life, you might say.

The Adventure of Trouble

Life is suffering and it’s bitter and I should turn against it. And the rejoinder to that is, there’s no adventure without trouble. And the greatest adventure has the most trouble and if you took on the full trouble of your life unstintingly you’d have an adventure that would justify the misery. That’s the offer.

It’s not comfort you want. Dostoevsky figured this out in 1880 when he was criticizing utopian delusional utopianism. He said, look, if you took the typical person and you just gave them everything they wanted, so they could do nothing with their life but sit around and eat sweet cakes and sit in pools of bubbling water. He obviously had a vision of California. And do nothing but busy yourself with the continuation of the species. What then?

He said, well we know what would happen then. Human beings, ungrateful to the core, unable to tolerate anything like a brief respite from their troubles, would in no time whatsoever smash everything to smithereens just so they had something interesting to do.

Well, have you never had the false adventure of trouble you caused just because you had nothing better to do? I mean that’s really that’s like the definition of 80 percent of life. Well what would happen if you had a real adventure?

What would happen for example if you told the truth? Because that’s a real adventure. You have to let everything go if you’re going to tell the truth. You don’t get to predetermine the outcome if you’re going to tell the truth. You get to say what you need to say and cast yourself on the briny deep and let the waves take you where they’re going to. And that’s a bit on the destabilizing side, you might say, but it’s no shortage of exciting.

And maybe that’s what you’re built for, right? Viking adventure over the high seas and not the idiot comfort that were promised by our tyrant wannabes. That’s what it means to be made in the image of God. To make that creative, contending, adventurous spirit, suffused with love, manifest within you in everything that you say and do. “That’s the dawn of the kingdom of heaven that’s laid upon the earth that men are too blind to see.”

Baptism, Awakening, and the Desert

Next slide please. Good thing we didn’t miss that one. Christ is baptized by John the Baptist and the symbolic representations are that a dove descends from on high, the Holy Spirit, and comes to reside within him. That’s when he goes to the desert.

By the way, you ever had that time in your life where you woke up a little bit? You realize that you were living a false life and something revealed itself to you to let you know that you were on the wrong path. And what was the price you paid for that? How about an interregnum of confusion? How about a period of not knowing which way was up?

That’s the price you pay for letting go of the tyrannical propositions that you use to imprison yourself. Out of the tyranny, as it says in Exodus, into the wasteland and desert. Why do people cling to their foolish presuppositions? Because knowing something stupid is more comforting than knowing nothing at all.

And the price you pay for the realization of your own ignorance is a brief exposure to the fact that you’re entirely lost. But you can wake up as a consequence, right? You can reestablish your relationship with the creative spirit that makes what’s good out of potential. That’s a rediscovery, that revelation of your own ignorance, your own bitter ignorance. That’s a re-contact with the ground of being itself. That’s why it strikes you so hard. That’s why it can be life-changing when you recognize your own insufficiency.

The Prayer of Self-Examination

This is part of what prayer calls you to do all the time, to pray on what’s — what do you pray if you’re sensible? What am I doing that’s stupid? Well there’s a source of inexhaustible wisdom precisely proportionate to your stupidity.

And you might say, why bother? Well, we covered that already. So you don’t fall into a pit. If you could do nothing but aim high and look within yourself for everything that stopped you from moving forward, and you did that full-heartedly, unreservedly, and you made that the leitmotif of your life, what would you be like in a year, in five years, in ten years, in twenty years? Would you be headed for sainthood itself?

Wrestling With God and the Turn for the Better

Is that not something that is a possibility that resides within you? You know perfectly well that there are times in your life where you took a turn for the better. What if that was the pattern of your existence? Nothing but the constant turn for the better. And then you might also ask yourself, would there be any difference between living a life that was composed of nothing but constant turns for the better and existence in the kingdom of heaven itself?

A place where everything is good and still getting better. That’s the identification with this spirit of revelation that descends, that replicates the conditions that obtain at the beginning of time and space itself. That’s the central core message of the first four sentences of the biblical corpus. Thank you very much.

So you know when you came out on stage, you said that you were going to talk about 12 rules, but you talked about this, even if you didn’t notice it, because that whole story that you told was wrestling with God.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yep. Right? So you got that exactly right, just so you know it. No problem. Yeah.

The Anti-Semitic Surge: A Theological and Moral Explanation

AUDIENCE: What or who is behind the anti-Semitic surge in the U.S. — it’s not just in the U.S. — and in particular amongst Ivy League academia?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Obviously. And I actually mean that, and I can explain why to some degree.

Cain abides by the narrative of victim and victimizer. And Cain is resentful and bitter and arrogant and murderous and deicidal and genocidal. And the reason for that is that he construes himself as an eternal victim of innocence and everyone else, God included, as a victimizer. And that story leads to hell. So that’s the theological level of explanation.

More prosaically, it’s a consequence of idiocy and moral degeneration. So the idiocy part is the willingness of ignorant people to swallow hyper simplified idolatrous rationalizations. And here’s one. The world is founded on power. There’s nothing but victims and victimizers.

How do you identify the victimizers? Well, what’s most convenient if you’re a failure? How about the successful? The successful are victimizers. What does that imply?

The hyper successful are hyper victimizers. They’re the worst. Who’s most hyper successful statistically? Jews. Right. End of argument.

Why Ivy League people? Well, because all they do is perpetrate the victim-victimizer narrative. And so here we are.

How Do I Know When I’m Wrestling With God?

AUDIENCE: How do I know when I’m wrestling with God versus wrestling with myself?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: If it’s about what you want, then you’re wrestling with yourself. You know, here I’ll tell you something cool. So psychologists have spent a long time with early large language models — statistical modeling, that’s a good way of thinking about it — looking at the relationship between concepts, the meaning of concepts, of clusters of concepts. And we identified 30 years ago a pattern of clusters of concepts of personality and laid out a somewhat inadequate but useful five-dimensional picture of human personality. There’s an important dimension missing but we won’t go into that at the moment.

One of the dimensions is negative emotion. And so negative emotion — you can think of your emotional systems as a tree with two trunks. One trunk branching into two, branching into many. One half of the trunk, or one of the separate trunks, is positive emotion and the other is negative emotion. And they’re independent neurological systems, each with their own biochemistry, and they crosstalk because it’s hard to be miserable when you’re happy — although you can laugh and cry at the same time. The relationship can be quite closely juxtaposed and paradoxical. You can weep with joy.

The negative emotions all cluster together, coming as they do from the same trunk, let’s say — sorrow, grief, pain, frustration, disappointment, shame, anxiety, horror, disgust, contempt, etc. And if you’re more likely than most to feel any of those, you’re more likely than most to feel all of them.

There’s a normal distribution of sensitivity to negative emotion, with some people being relatively immune and so very resistant to depression and anxiety, but also somewhat opaque to signals of distress and threat. Others are extraordinarily sensitive to danger, but suffering because of a surfeit of negative emotion, with most people in the middle. That’s the normal distribution. That’s neuroticism, one of the big five traits.

Tell me the question again. I knew that you were going to ask me that. How do I know when I’m wrestling with God? Oh yes, so one of the — okay, so I outlined a sequence of negative emotions that were associated with the trait proclivity for negative emotion. Here is another. Self-consciousness.

There is no technical difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable. Right? So if you’re thinking about yourself, you’re wrestling with yourself in misery.

Aiming Up: The Story of Tammy

When Tammy was talking about dealing with her grief, what did she say? She said she was feeling bitter and resentful because people weren’t delivering to her what she felt was due her in her suffering. Now you can kind of understand that, because her father had just died and you could think, what kind of a son-of-a-b husband would leave his wife under such circumstances. Look, it was a question we wrestled with because there was conflicting moral obligations at that moment.

But what she realized was that she realized what only she could realize, which was that insofar as her suffering was a consequence of her fault, the reason for that suffering is that her aim was inappropriate. She wasn’t looking up enough. So she looked up and she said, “Well, I need to reestablish my relationship with what’s highest. I need to realign my aim away from bitterness and resentment towards only that which is optimally good.” That’s a good definition of God. A definition of God, note. What was the consequence? She got more than she expected.

Right. In the Gospels, on the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says something strange. He says, “God takes care of the sparrows and clothed the lilies of the field, and you faithless ones do not presume that you are of sufficient worth so that that could happen to you too.” And it sounds like Jesus the hippie — if you were just a flower or a bird, the sky daddy would take care of you under his wing. That’s not what that means. It’s not what it means.

It means that if your aim is true, there’s nothing that won’t be revealed to you. Even in the agonies of your misery, there’s enough — there’s more than enough at hand to provide everything that you need. And why would we assume anything other than the world we understand so poorly is anything but a well of inexhaustible plenitude? I mean, certainly you’d see the miracles that have occurred over the last hundred years — the feeding of billions of people, the technological revolution that seems to have no end, the intensification of our computational ability, able to do more and more with less and less — until what? Until what? Until we can do everything with nothing at all? That’s what God did at the beginning of time.

If it’s about what something in you that you’ve allowed to possess you wants right now, you’re wrestling with the lowest parts of yourself. If you reorient yourself and aim at only what is best, then you’re attempting communion with God.

The Practice of Aiming Up

And you might ask yourself, well, how do you do that? And I would say, well, try to do it. Just try to do it. Decide that before you look, before every word you speak, you place yourself in relationship to what makes itself manifest to you as the highest possible aim at that moment. And practice that and ask yourself, why in the world would you not do that?

Why in the world would you not do that? Why in the world would you not want to make the most out of every possible moment? And there’s no difference between making the most out of every possible moment and aiming up with as much vision and love and hope and faith as you can possibly muster.

And you might say, “Well, faith, that’s for people who are too weak to rely on the facts.” It’s like, what facts did you rely on when you got married? Your knowledge of who a woman was or a man — what the hell did you know about the facts? You gamble in life. You stake your soul on your bet. You make your way forward with faith. You don’t know how your new job is going to turn out. You don’t know how your new friendships are going to unfold. You assume that if you navigate properly over even the stormiest of seas, you can eventually get to your destination. And that’s an action of faith.

And you have to make your life — you have to make faith manifest in your life, unless you want to manifest the opposite, partly because you’re steeped in ignorance. It’s like, what the hell do you know? And so you’re always facing the plenitude of the unknown in relationship to your own ignorance. That’s like the definition of being mortal. And how do you step forward when you don’t know where to step?

You’re like the fool in the tarot cards. You look up and you walk off the cliff. And you do that while you’re looking up. And you do that with every step you take. And if you look up towards the highest possible heights, then every step you take will have the firmest of all possible foundations underneath it. And you can do that with every glance and every word. And if you did that, you would set the world right.

The Divine Feminine

AUDIENCE: You often talk about the ideal masculine, but what about the ideal feminine? How can the divine feminine be integrated into society to make it greater, if it can?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Hamme and I were in Rome six months ago, and in St. Peter’s Basilica — which is perhaps the most remarkable building ever built — there’s a remarkable sculpture by Michelangelo, who carved this particular sculpture when he was a very young man. And it’s the Pietà. It’s the Virgin Mary, the Divine Mother, the archetype of the feminine perfection, if you’ll have it that way. And what does she have in her arms? She has the broken body of her perfect son. That’s the female crucifixion.

What’s the highest possible offering? What’s the highest possible offering to God? Child and self. And what does that mean for motherhood? Well, the good mother offers her child to the world to be broken and to be redeemed. The good mother cannot protect her child from the adventure of his life. She has to facilitate that, no matter what the cost. And the courage that’s intrinsic to that is the core of female heroic being. It’s not the only aspect, but it’s the most feminine aspect.

The woman who doesn’t do that just — the woman who does nothing but protect her child destroys her child. The woman who offers her child to God receives her child back. And that story is the core of the divinity and femininity. And every mother worth her salt knows that.

And that’s that! And that’s that. Thank you all. Thank you very much everyone. It’s very good to see you. Thank you for your time and attention.

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