TRANSCRIPT: Cain and Abel – The Destruction of the Ideal: Jordan B Peterson

So I’m up here to thank you deeply and profoundly on behalf of the great mother herself, the goddess, the divine feminine principle, who has been eagerly awaiting the awakening of the masculine principle into divinity and service.

So, you don’t get a letter like that every day. Actually, I get a letter or two like that every day. So, you know, what went through my head when I read this, and this is of course a completely crazy parallel, but one of the things I learned to do as a psychotherapist was just to tell people who were talking to me what came into my head.

It isn’t what I’m thinking exactly, because it’s not exactly the same thing, you know. What comes into your head is more like a dream. It comes unbidden. It’s like your imagination. If you’re thinking, there seems to be like a voluntary element of that, right? I mean, God only knows how we think, but it seems partly voluntary at least.

Carl Jung thought about it like a dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. There’s a constant continual dialogue. But when things just pop into your mind, it’s not much different than walking into a room and having something there, which is an observation I also derived from Jung, by the way, because he pointed out quite rightly that people don’t really think that thoughts appear to them.

Now, you can think because you can take the thoughts that appear to you, and then you can subject them to criticism and elaboration and so on, instead of just assuming that they’re true right off the bat. But people often don’t do that. Something just pops into their head, and then they assume that it’s true.

Anyways, one of the things that I tend to do in psychotherapy is just to tell people what pops into my head, because, well, why? Because then the person that is talking to me gets one person’s untrammeled opinion. Not even that, reaction, not opinion. It’s not really an opinion, I don’t think. An opinion maybe is what I think later, and there’s this personal flavor to it.

The Delphic Oracle

What popped into my head was the story about Socrates. When he was being put on trial by the Athenians for corrupting the nation’s youth, something I’ve been accused of, by the way, although it’s not self-evident to me that it’s me doing the corrupting. He said that somebody had asked him once, had asked the Delphic Oracle once, and the Delphic Oracle was this retreat that you could go to if you were an ancient Greek citizen, and you’d be there, and you’d have a dream, and then you’d go ask the Delphic Oracle to interpret it.

And nobody really knows what was up with the Delphic Oracle today, how that worked exactly, but she would interpret your dream in any case. And somebody once asked her who the wisest man in Greece was, and the Delphic Oracle said it was Socrates because he knew he didn’t know anything. That’s essentially the story.

And that popped into my mind. It’s a crazy comparison, but I have a crazy mind, so I guess that’s how it works out.

Now, one of the things I’m going to do today, which I haven’t done before, is I’m going to read you a little bit of… I told you I finished my book last week, and I haven’t read it to anyone. I’ve given it to a couple of friends to review. One person in particular, a screenwriter named Gregg Hurwitz, has been unbelievably helpful. He’s so fast and so sharp at this sort of thing, and I can send him like a 20-page, dense 20-page manuscript, and he’ll rip it to shreds and send it back to me in like 90 minutes. It’s just unbelievable. He’s so good at that. He’s been very helpful, but I haven’t.

Abraham and Isaac

No one else has seen it apart from my editor, and I haven’t read it to anyone. Some of it seemed particularly appropriate for tonight’s lecture, so I thought I would start the lecture tonight by reading a little bit of it. It’s from a chapter. It’s on the issue of sacrifice as such. This is Abraham and Isaac. This is a very strange Old Testament story, right? This is one of the stories that’s contained in the Old Testament that makes modern people think that maybe we should just not have that much to do with the Old Testament per se at all, especially with regards.

Maybe we shouldn’t have anything to do with the God of the Old Testament either, because as far as Abraham is concerned, God tells him to sacrifice his own son. Now, it turns out that God was just kidding, so to speak. I’m obviously being flippant, but it does raise the question, what do you make of a divine being who would require such a thing?

Or conversely, what do you make of Abraham who would have such delusions? Either way, it’s a little hard on the modern believability and moral integrity of the Old Testament, but these are very, very strange stories, and they’re not what they seem to be, or they are, and they’re more. So, we’re going to talk a lot about sacrifice tonight, and here’s some of the things that I’ve been thinking about sacrifice. So, this is from –

This book is called Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, and it’s coming out in January, which I think I mentioned. And this is from Rule 7, which is, Do What Is Meaningful, Not What Is Expedient. And so, here’s some of the writing I’ve been doing over the last three years on the motif of sacrifice.

I’ll start with just a brief intro before I read this. It took me a long time to understand what was meant in the Old Testament by sacrifice, which is strange, because once I figured it out, it seemed bloody obvious. It seemed like, oh yeah, obviously, that’s what it means. But lots of times, if you figure something out correctly, it seems self-evident as soon as you’ve figured it out correctly. Well, we’ll see how that goes, but it seemed to work for me anyways.

I knew that, of course, at least implicitly, I knew of the modern usage of the idea of sacrifice. Everyone understands that motif, is that if you want to make things better in the future, then you start to make sacrifices in the present. And maybe you even do that multi-generationally. In fact, you most definitely do if you’re a good parent.

I would say that’s really particularly typical of immigrants, right, because immigrants often come from terrible places and have to undergo terrible things to come to a new community where they get a rough reception and have a hard time getting their life going. And a big part of the reason that they do it is to make their lives of their children better.

And luckily, when they come to Canada, usually given where they came from, that actually works because where they came from is worse and here is better, even though immigrants often have to struggle to get on their feet again. They have to learn a new language and become enculturated and face the fact that they’re not part of the mainstream culture.

And, well, you know, many of you know the whole story. So the idea that you make sacrifices for the future and you make sacrifices for your children, everyone understands that. And it’s part of being responsible and mature and shouldering the burden of being properly. And you do that for yourself, too, if you’re disciplined. In fact, that’s almost what discipline means. Discipline means that you’re capable of making sacrifices, because you’re not disciplined if you just do something you want more rather than something that you’re doing. That’s not discipline. Maybe that works, and great. If your life is working out that way, great, but that isn’t discipline.

Discipline is when you want to do something right now and instead you think, no, I’m going to forestall my gratification, maybe forever, but certainly for a very long period of time, medium to long period of time, and you concentrate on something that you think will bear fruit in the medium to long run.

And so you look into the future and you decide that by making today a little less impulsively pleasurable, shall we say, you’ll make tomorrow a little bit more secure and productive. And then you actually do it, too, and that’s difficult.

We discussed last week Adam and Eve’s discovery of the future and the revelation of the possibility of the future, including the possibility of tragedy and suffering in the future. It’s our knowledge of the possibility of tragedy and suffering in the future that motivates us to sacrifice in the present so that we can reduce the unnecessary anxiety and uncertainty and pain that awaits us. Now, that’s a negative way of putting it.

We’re also doing it so that we can have some joy and we can make life better and all of that, and that’s not trivial. But the fundamental issue, especially once you have small children, the fundamental issue is to stave the suffering, the hell off, right? That’s what you want to do. That’s your primary moral obligation if you’re a person who has any — if your eyes are open at all, that’s your primary obligation. And so you make the sacrifices that are necessary and you set up the future.

Well, the motif of sacrifice is there in the Old Testament, but it’s so concrete that it’s difficult to draw a parallel between the two, at least for me. They didn’t align self-evidently, and I don’t remember in my rather limited religious education as a child in the United Church, because I went to the United Church until I was about 13, I don’t ever remember anybody pointing out that the sacrifices that Cain and Abel were making or the sacrifice that Abraham was supposed to make or the sacrifices that people were making to God were the precursors, let’s say, the dramatic precursors to the psychological idea of sacrifice that we all hold as civilized people in the modern world.

The Marshmallow Test

So although it seems obvious, as I said, once you lay it out, I don’t remember that ever being explained to me. And then, well, let me read this, now that I’ve sort of introduced it.

Here’s what happened as humanity developed. First were the endless tens or hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of written history and drama. The twin practices of delay and exchange began to emerge slowly and painfully. So here’s a cool psychological study. It’s called the Marshmallow Test. And maybe it’s even a reliable study, even though it was done by social psychologists. It’s probably replicable. And it’s a nice study.

So you take small children and you bring them into a room and you put something that they would like in front of them, a marshmallow, and then you torture them, basically. You say, see that marshmallow? And the kid thinks, yeah, man, I see that marshmallow. It’s like, you can have that marshmallow right now. Or if you wait, I think the experiment is ten minutes, then you can have two marshmallows.

And so that puts the child in quite a conundrum, because they’re being asked to trade an actual, concrete, tangible marshmallow for two hypothetical future marshmallows. And it’s not that easy to conjure up a hypothetical future reality that has the same tangible significance as something real right in front of you. And so it’s an amazing thing that people can do that.

And so then the experiment leaves, and some children grab the marshmallow and just, you know, chomp that thing down right now. Other kids, they videotape kids while they’re waiting. And they do all sorts of things. They whistle. They look at the ceiling. They sit on their hands. You know, they try to distract themselves. Of course, they’re eyeing that marshmallow like a squirrel eyeing a nut and trying to restrain themselves.

And, you know, what I see in that is that the child’s prefrontal cortex, the higher cortical systems, are warring with the underlying motivational systems, more primordial motivational systems that govern such things as hunger. And the hunger system, hypothalamic system, says, there’s something sweet and fat right sitting there, right bloody now. Grab that thing and stuff it down now. And I’m sure many of you have a constant battle with your hypothalamus with regards to sweet and fat things and often lose so you can feel some sympathy for the child.

But the hypothalamus has these tremendously powerful tendrils upward into the brain, into the parts that we would associate more with voluntary control. And the voluntary control centers have these little weak ribbons going down to control the hypothalamus. It’s pretty obvious, if you know something about neuroanatomy, what part is actually in charge when the chips are down. And it’s not easy for children to learn to regulate those underlying primordial impulses, the ones that are wired in, the ones that we share with animals. But they do it.

And the cool thing is, this is what Walter Mischel found, he’s the guy who did the study, was that the long-term outcome for the children who can delay gratification in the marshmallow test is much more positive than it is for the children that are impulsive and eat the marshmallow instantly. It’s delay of gratification.

Now, it’s likely that that’s associated with trait conscientiousness, although that specific connection has not yet been established. But they seem conceptually very, very similar. So anyways, this emerges in children probably between the ages of two and four, something like that. They should have it in place by four, because it’s very difficult for them to really interact well with other children without having that delay of gratification in place.

Because you can’t delay gratification, other kids don’t like you, because you want everything your way, and you want it now, and you’re liable to temper tantrums and that sort of thing. You haven’t got the kind of self-control necessary to make you fun to play with.

So you can see that emerging in children, and it’s pretty interesting. And not only that, if it emerges, it predicts positive long-term outcomes, just like trait conscientiousness does, by the way, because trait conscientiousness is the second best predictor of long-term success over the lifespan. In Western cultures, it’s second after intelligence.

And so in our societies, the people who do best across time are the people who have high IQs and who work hard. And I would say that’s a pretty decent, what would you call it? It’s a validation in some sense that our cultures are working properly, because what you would want, I would say, if the system is working meritocratically like it should, and if you’re trying to extract resources from those who can contribute at a higher rate, then what you would want to have happen is that the hard-working, smart people do better.

Hopefully, if that’s the case, then everyone does better. Hopefully. Anyways, so you can see this developing in children. First, where the endless tens or hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of written history and drama, the twin practices of delay and exchange began to emerge slowly and painfully.

Then they became represented in metaphorical abstraction as rituals and tales of sacrifice. It’s as if there’s a powerful figure in the sky who’s judging you. You better keep him happy or look the hell out. We’ve been watching ourselves deal with him for a long time. He seems to like it when you give up something you value. So practice sharing and sacrificing until you get good at it.

No one actually said any of this so long ago, although they said something very similar, but it was implicit in the practice and then in the stories. Action comes first. Implicit comes first. People watched the successful succeed and the unsuccessful fail for thousands and thousands of years, and we thought it over and we drew a conclusion. The successful among us sacrifice. The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.

And then a great idea begins to emerge in ever more articulated form. That idea is the point of a long and profound story. It’s the moral of this story, and I’m going to engage in some foreshadowing here.

What’s the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice. And things get better as the successful practice their sacrifices. The question becomes increasingly precise and simultaneously broader.

What is the greatest possible sacrifice for the greatest possible good? If you push a question in a direction, perhaps there comes a time when you can’t formulate it any more precisely and broadly. And that’s the point at which the question in some sense, and perhaps even the answer, the question becomes archetypal. It becomes archetypal because it can’t be bested. And this is like an ultimate question in some sense. How are you going to ask a more broad-based question than that?

Given the initial presuppositions that you have to make sacrifices, then the logical endpoint to that is something like, okay, if you have to make a sacrifice, what’s the greatest possible sacrifice for the greatest possible good? That’s a good question. The answer becomes increasingly profound.

The God of Western tradition like so many gods requires sacrifice. We’ve already examined why, but sometimes he goes even further and requires the sacrifice of what is loved best. This is why. And this is another one of mankind’s fundamental discoveries. Sometimes things do not go well. That’s self-evident.

But here’s the rub. Sometimes when things are not going well, it’s precisely that which is most valued that is the cause. Why? It’s because the world is revealed through the template of your values. If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment

There’s a famous experiment that I’ve alluded to a couple of times, I believe, in this lecture series. The invisible gorilla experiment. In the invisible gorilla experiment, there’s two teams of players, each with three members, one dressed in black and the other dressed in white. Each team is passing a basketball back and forth to the team members and milling about.

You see a video of them doing so. They basically fill the video screen and the white team is passing a basketball to the white team members and the black team is passing a basketball to the black team members. And your job, as far as the experimenter is concerned, is for you to count the number of times that the black team passes the basketball back and forth. So that’s what you do.

So now you have an ambition and an aim and a value. And the ambition and the aim and the value, they’re all the same thing. And that is to perform well at the task. Now the thing that’s so cool about this, and this is really so cool, it’s just unbelievable that this is the case. It’s like a complete validation of a certain element of the Buddhist worldview.

So they pass the ball for a couple of minutes and then the experimenter says to you, how many? And you say 15, and you’re happy with yourself because you’ve been paying attention. And the experimenter says, yeah, that’s right, or maybe not, maybe you missed one. And then the experimenter says, did you see the gorilla? And half of you say, what gorilla? Like really?

And the experimenter says, yes. And then he rewinds it and plays the video. And like a minute and a half into the three minute video, sure enough, in walks this guy in a gorilla suit, six foot three or so, stands in the middle of the game, right in the middle of the game, the same size as the players, perfectly obviously evident, beats his chest for like a second and a half, and then sort of saunters off.

And half the people who watch the video don’t see the gorilla, which is absolutely shocking. And what that means is that your ambitions blind you to the nature of reality. Now they illuminate some reality, but they blind you to most of it. And that’s fine, because there’s not a lot of you in some ways. You’re a very pinpoint thing, like a laser beam. And so you just can’t be attending to everything all the time.

But one of the things that you might ask yourself, once you know that, is that if you’re suffering dreadfully, then one possibility is that you’re so fixed on a point, the fact that you’re so fixed on the point that you’re fixed on might be integrally related to why things are going so catastrophically wrong.

Now perhaps not, because you know, there’s a lot of arbitrariness about life. And perhaps you suffer even when you don’t deserve to. That seems to happen in the book of Job, for example, because Job is a good guy, and God has a bet with Satan, which seems like another relatively nasty thing to do, to let Satan just torture him. And he does, quite nicely, to see if he’ll turn against God.

And it seems like a rather playground sort of thing for God to engage in. But the point is that even in a document like the Old Testament, there’s ample suggestion that sometimes people just get wiped out and hurt, even if they’re living good moral lives, aiming properly, and all that. There’s an arbitrariness in life that’s not eradicable.

But it’s possible that it’s what you’re clinging to that’s hurting you, and it’s even possible that it’s the thing that you’re clinging to the hardest that’s hurting you the most. That could easily be someone you love. Like lots of times, I see people in therapy, and they’re miserable for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s because they have a very close relationship with a family member, and that just isn’t working.

You know, the family member, for the sake of simplicity, will say, is not really oriented towards helping them have a good life. The family member is instead oriented towards making them as bloody miserable as you can possibly make anyone. And, what would you say, exploiting the bond between family members in order to enable that.

And then, sometimes, the sacrifice that’s necessary is either merely distancing yourself from that person, sometimes substantively, and sometimes, seriously distancing yourself from, like, we don’t talk anymore, ever. And so that’s pretty damn rough, and it hurts, and all of that. But it’s a good example of the fact that sometimes, in order to extract yourself from the miserable bit of chaos that you happen to be enmeshed in, you have to let go of what you love best.

If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. That’s really worth thinking about, because the alternative, too, is to curse fate. Because if it isn’t you, and there’s nothing you can do to change, there isn’t something you’re doing that’s wrong, then it’s fate itself, it’s the world itself, it’s other people, let’s say, because they’re a huge part of the world, or it’s the nature of the world itself, or it’s God himself, in whatever form you either believe in or don’t believe in, because it’s fundamentally all the same in the sort of situation that I’m describing.

And one of the things that’s really interesting, and I mentioned this before, about the Israelites in the Old Testament, is that they got this right. It’s really something, because what happens to the Israelites over and over in the Old Testament is that they get all puffed up about how wonderful they are, and then they make moral errors because they’re arrogant, and then God comes along and just cuts them into pieces for like generation after generation, and then they wobble back to their feet.

But they always maintain the same attitude, which is, we did something wrong, we did something wrong. It’s like an axiom, rather than an observation, is that if things are not laying themselves out for us as they should be, then we cannot curse God, we have to look to ourselves. And you think, well, why not curse God? Because maybe it’s his fault. That’s a really good question.

And one of the things that I’ve tried to figure out over the last 30 years is, well, why not just curse God? Because there is this arbitrary element to existence, and we are vulnerable, and there is plenty of suffering, and things are unfair. Like, there’s problems, right? There’s injustice, and unfairness, and all of these things, and endless suffering. So why not just lay it at the feet of God?

And whether God exists or not, in some sense, by the way, with regards to the metaphysics of this particular discussion, is not relevant. The point remains the same either way. And the answer is, as far as I can tell, that if you refuse to take on the responsibility yourself, and you attempt to lay it at the feet of either society or being itself, then you instantly start to act in a way that makes everything much worse, not only for you, but for everyone else, and maybe even for being itself. And so, it’s not helpful.

Now, if you decide that it’s you, you’ve got the problem. Maybe that’s not even true. Like, maybe you are someone who’s being tortured by the bet between God and Satan, and like, too bad for you, if that happens to be the case. But it still seems to be the appropriate thing for a human being who’s standing on his or her own two feet, in a proper manner, to take the responsibility on for themselves, regardless of the counter-arguments that might be made against it. That’s really something.

Deadwood issue

It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. I also think of that. It’s a Deadwood issue. You know, one of the things you see with motifs like the phoenix. Remember, when Harry Potter goes off to fight, he’s like Saint George. He goes off to fight the, what is that thing, the basilisk that turns you to stone when you look at it? It’s a dragon, for all intents and purposes. It’s guarding a virgin. What’s her name? It’s not Virginia. It’s close to that, though. Ginevra, right, which is a variant of Virgin, and a variant of Virginia.

Well, when he gets bitten by the dragon and poisoned, that’s the dragon of chaos, right? The thing that turns you to stone when you look at it. When he gets bitten by it, then he’s going to die. And yeah, well, if you get bitten by the thing that turns you to stone when you look at it, if it bites you, man, if you’re not dead, you’re going to wish you are. It’s one of the two.

And then the phoenix flies in and cries tears into the wound, and that heals him. And the phoenix is the thing that allows the deadwood to burn off occasionally, let’s say. Well, I think it’s once every 100 years with a phoenix. And, of course, it’s pretty dramatic. The whole damn bird has to go up in flames, and then there’s nothing left but an egg.

But there’s a very serious message there, too, which is that, you know, you can compare yourself in some sense to a forest fire, to a forest, you know, and a forest has to burn now and then for the deadwood to clear so that the forest can actually maintain its continued existence.

And if you stop the forest from burning for a prolonged period of time, which happened in the United States when they were trying to manage the forest fires too tightly, then all that happens is the deadwood accumulates and accumulates and accumulates and accumulates and accumulates until the whole damn forest is deadwood. And then lightning hits it, and it burns so hot that it burns the topsoil off. And then there’s nothing left. Nothing grows.

And so that’s a good moral lesson, which is don’t wait too long to let the damn deadwood burn off, you know. Maybe a little self-immolation on a daily basis might be preferable to burning yourself all the way down to the bedrock, you know, once every 20 years or so, because maybe there won’t be anything left of you when you do that.

And, you know, that happens to people all the time. I’ve seen that happen to people many, many times. The deadwood accumulates, the mess around them gathers, the chaos that they haven’t dealt with accumulates, and then one day the spark comes, and they burn so far and so fast that there’s not enough left of them to recover.

And then there are the people who’ve been eaten by the beast. There are the people who’ve been eaten by the dragon and now are inside its belly, another very common archetypal motif. And, well, maybe a hero will come along and rescue them, or maybe they’ll just stay in there forever. And that’s a precursor to the idea of hell, and it’s not something I would recommend.

So a little medicine on a regular basis is a lot better than total immolation on terms other than your own, sporadically. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions.

Pathological Authoritarianism

There’s another thing that — See, in the Soviet Union, when Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet Union and its pathologies, it sort of peaked in terms of its pathological authoritarianism when it became illegal to complain that your life wasn’t going well. And just think about how horrible that is, because lots of times your life isn’t going well. And I don’t mean this in some casual way.

I mean, maybe you have diabetes, and maybe you’re going to lose your feet or something. It’s nothing trivial that’s going on here. Something is not good. Or maybe it’s economic, or maybe you’re unemployed. But you see, the idea in the Soviet Union was, well, we already have all the answers. Everything’s perfect already. That’s what totalitarians think.

Well, if everything’s perfect, and you’re suffering, then, well, maybe there’s something wrong with you. Because everything is perfect, after all, and if you’re suffering, then. And what are you going to come out and say? Well, I’m suffering? It’s like, well, then you’re evidence that things aren’t perfect, right? You’re like a widow or an orphan in an Old Testament story.

When the kings got too high and mighty, then they wouldn’t pay enough attention to the widows and the orphans. And then the prophet would come along and say, you know, those widows and orphans are a lot more important than you think they are. And if you don’t pay attention to them properly, then things are going to fall apart around you in a way that you just can’t even imagine.

And so, well, then you’re sort of like your own widow and your own orphan, but you don’t get to say, hey, look, you know, things aren’t perfect yet, because I’m actually having still quite a rough time here. You don’t get to admit to your own suffering. If you can’t admit to your own suffering, then you certainly.

See, the suffering, especially the additional suffering, the excess suffering, should be treated as evidence that you’re not doing something quite right yet. It should be treated as evidence that you’re wrong. There’s something important that you’re doing that’s wrong. I understand how harsh that is, and I’m not saying that everyone who’s suffering is suffering because they’re doing something in some simple way that’s wrong.

I was in an elevator once in a hospital. It’s a very terrifying thing, and this person got on who was just in an absolute state of shock, you know. I mean, it was really not good. And I don’t remember how this happened, but I engaged the person in conversation, and they just said that they had just been diagnosed with what looked to be terminal cancer.

And what was horrifying about it was that what they were doing was going over their life in the elevator, trying to figure out what they had done in order to deserve such a fate. You know, they’d immediately taken it on themselves as a moral failing. And that’s not what I’m saying.

You can’t come up to someone who has cancer and say, well, if you weren’t such a bloody idiot throughout your whole life, you wouldn’t have cancer. And believe me, that happens a lot more than you think. And people who have diseases like that get blamed for it. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s not like that. It’s a more generalized attitude that is that if life isn’t yet what it should be, then you have a primary responsibility to do something about it. And the place to start looking is to your own errors and to fix them.

And that’s a safe bet, man, because you’re probably doing some things that you wouldn’t have to be doing, that if you fixed would make things better. So it’s time to let go and to sacrifice who you are for who you could become.

How To Catch A Monkey

There’s an old story about how to catch a monkey, in case any of you are interested in how to catch a monkey. Now you’re going to know how to do it.

First, you have to take a large narrow-necked jar, just large enough in diameter at the top for a monkey to put its hand inside. Then you have to fill it partway with rock, so it’s too heavy for the monkey to carry. Then you scatter some treats near the jar to attract them, and you put some inside the narrow-necked jar.

A monkey will come along, if you’re lucky, and grab the goodies, but he’ll want the ones inside the jar too, so then put his hand in there and grab what’s in there. And if you set up your monkey trap properly, then he won’t be able to get his hand out, because he’s got the goodies. Not without unclenching his hand, not without relinquishing what he already has.

The monkey catcher can just walk over and just pick up the monkey, because the monkey isn’t into the whole sacrifice thing, because he’s just a monkey. And so you can catch him as a consequence of his own unregulated hypothalamic desires. And to be, what would you say, charitable to the monkey, if you put out candy or something like that, it’s like, how often does a monkey get candy?

He’s probably a little more motivated than you are to not let go, but you get the point. The monkey catcher can just walk over to the jar and pick up the monkey. The animal will not sacrifice the part for the whole. That’s actually a pretty good phrase, hey? It’s the animal that will not sacrifice the part for the whole.

Perhaps this story is apocryphal, but as an eccentric psychology professor once told me, fiction lies to you in the most truthful possible manner. Something valuable given up ensures future prosperity. Something valuable sacrificed pleases the Lord. Those are equivalent statements. One’s more articulated, I would say that’s the first statement, and the second one is more dramatic and more embedded in a collective religious dream, you might say.

What’s most valuable and best sacrificed? Well, obviously that depends on the culture and the time. What is at least emblematic of that? A choice cut of meat. Well, if you’re a herdsman, for example, that’s a big deal. I mean, generally speaking, throughout human history, meat has been a very valuable commodity, as it is, by the way, among chimpanzees. Chimpanzees hunt. They like to hunt colobus monkeys.

And, you know, they’ll basically start eating the damn monkey alive. They weigh about 40 pounds, despite the fact that the thing is screaming away. And that’s pretty interesting, because one of the things that indicates is that male monkeys, male chimps, they’re the ones that do the hunting, aren’t really inhibited that much when they’re in hunter mode by what you might describe as empathy. And there’s certain elements of human behavior that are reminiscent of that.

You see that sort of thing emerge now and then in human battlefields, when groups of men seem to abandon all internal regulation whatsoever, to a degree that makes you wonder if internal regulation even exists.

A choice cut of meat. Well, meat’s valuable, you know. And there’s a good document by Richard Wrangham, I think, a while back, a book about the human invention of fire. I think I told you a little bit about this. Wrangham claimed that we invented fire, discovered fire, mastered it, maybe two or three million years ago. That’s a long time, longer than people had thought, and that that’s what actually transformed us physiologically from our chimp-like ancestors into the sort of svelte creatures we are now, because it’s a lot easier to digest cooked meat, and meat is a tremendous source of nutrition, energy, raw materials, all of that, especially if it’s cooked.

So meat’s a big deal. Cooked meat is a big deal. And maybe it’s a choice cut of meat. The kind you might offer to a guest, if you’re not a — I always say this wrong. Is it vegan? Vegan, or vagan. I always think vagan, but that’s wrong. That’s a star. Vagan’s a star, right? They’re not like star creatures.

Anyway, so you might offer that, especially if a guest came to your abode, and you were a herdsman. You might sacrifice a high-end animal and offer your guest a nice choice cut of meat, and that would actually matter. It would mean something from the best animal in a flock.

What’s above even that? Well, in terms of the thing you could sacrifice, well, your best animal, that’s good. Well, how about you? How about your child? How about you? Well, that would be next on the hierarchy. It’s kind of hard to get past that, and I think it’s a toss-up whether the sacrifice is greater if it’s you or if it’s your child.

I would say, being a parent, that it’s greater if it’s your child, because I think most people who have established a — I hesitate to say proper, but I’m going to anyway. It’s a proper relationship with their children. It’s if push came to shove, they’d take the bullet and let their kid go live.

The sacrifice of the mother is exemplified profoundly by Michelangelo’s great sculpture, the Pietà. Mary is contemplating her son crucified and ruined, so that’s his body after he’s been crucified. It’s her fault. It was through her he entered the great drama of being. So what’s the meaning of this sculpture? It’s a great sculpture. It’s just an absolutely unbelievable sculpture.

You just can’t believe that someone could exist who could make something, and of course, it wasn’t the only thing Michelangelo made, right? It wasn’t like, that’s it. It was something he just tossed off in a couple of months while he was doing other unbelievable things, but it’s an object of contemplation, which is why it’s in a great cathedral in a great city.

It’s an object of contemplation, and the idea is something like, well, what’s the role of a mother if she’s awake? I had a client come see me a while back, not very long ago, a woman who’s about 30 and trying to make decisions about her life. She was pretty career-oriented, and so I asked her about, although maybe having a bit of trouble with her career. I’ve seen this many, many times. So this is an amalgam.

This is a story that’s an amalgam, and I talked to her about the other elements of her life. It’s like, well, you know, there’s only five things you do in life, so you’ve got your career down. You know, what do you do outside of your career that’s meaningful and engaging? How are things going with your family? It could be your family of origin, your siblings, whatever. Do you have an intimate relationship? And like, what’s your plan for your own family?

And apart from those five things, there’s sort of something like, get some exercise now and then, don’t eat too badly, and try to stay away from the drugs, you know. And the crime, that kind of lays out life, and if you miss any of those five things, or if you do any of those other things wrong, then you’re in trouble, and you can get away with missing a couple of them, but not all of them.

You know, and she said something along the lines of, well, I’m not sure I should bring a child into this world. And I thought, oh God Christ, you’ve got to come up with something better than that. Such a bloody cliché, which is what I told her. I said, you know, you must have thought that up when you were 16. It’s like, really? That’s your, you can’t do any better? This is a very, very smart woman. It’s like, really? And you can’t do any better than that? It’s like, yes, obviously, this is a veil of tears, and you know, a well of suffering, and all of that.

You know, if you ask 30 people who are wondering about having children why they’re wondering, 20 of them will say that. And so that tells you how original it is. It’s not original at all. It’s not a thought. It’s like this little, it’s like a, it’s a meme. It’s something that lives in your mind. It’s not a thought. And it’s certainly not something, it’s certainly not something that you should just take at face value and say, oh, well, I’m not having a family then.

It’s like, no, no. You kind of look at that, and you criticize it a little bit. It’s like, well, the pop, it’s the other one. That’s the other one that’s very common. There’s too many people on the planet already. It’s like, I really don’t like that statement. It’s like, just who are you going to ask to leave? Just how are you going to get them to leave? You know, it’s a serious question.

And who says there’s too many people? What is wrong with people anyways? So we’re running around ruining the planet. Yeah. It’s like, I think it was the Club of Rome who prophesied, by the way, that there would be so many people on the planet by the year 2000 that there would be widespread starvation. And they were completely and utterly wrong about that. And I think it was the Club of Rome who either compared us to a virus or a cancer on the face of the planet.

It’s like, oh, really? That’s what you think about people, eh? Aren’t you something? Isn’t that something to think about human beings? Viruses and cancer. What do you do with viruses and cancer? Invite them in and make them at home. It’s like, no. You try to eradicate them. You’ve got to bloody well watch your metaphors, folks. Because it isn’t clear that you come up with them or that they run you. So you better watch them.

So anyways, Mary, you know, and Mary’s the great mother, right? She’s the mother. That’s what Mary is. Whether she existed or not is not the point. She exists at least as a hyper-reality. She exists as the mother. Well, what’s the sacrifice of the mother? Well, that’s easy. If you’re a mother who’s worth her salt, you offer your son to be destroyed by the world. That’s what you do. And that’s what’s going to happen, right? He’s going to be born. He’s going to suffer. He’s going to have his trouble in life. He’s going to have his illnesses. He’s going to face his failures and catastrophes. And he’s going to die. That’s what’s going to happen.

And if you’re awake, you know that. And then you say, well, perhaps he will live in a way that will justify that. And then you try to have that happen. And that’s what makes you worthy of a statue like that. But still the sacrifice of the mother.

Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world? Well, every woman asks herself that question. Some say no, and they have the reasons. Mary answers yes voluntarily. Mary is the archetype of the woman who answers yes to life voluntarily. That’s what that image means. And not because she’s blind. She knows what’s going to happen.

And so she’s the archetypal representation of the woman who says yes to life, knowing full well what life is. Not naive, not someone who got pregnant in the back seat of a 1957 Chevy in one night of half-drunk idiocy. Not that. But consciously, knowing what’s to come. And then also allows it to happen, because that’s another thing that’s a testament to the courage of mothers.

My mother was good at this. My mother’s a very agreeable person. Too agreeable for her own good. But that’s what happens if you’re agreeable, because you’re too agreeable for your own good. That’s the definition of agreeable. And so she’s a nice person, and still is. Luckily, she’s still alive, and we’ve had a very good relationship. And I have always been able to make her laugh, which is a good thing.

But she was a tough cookie, that woman, you know. Remember, once she came across — I was out playing in this baseball diamond, little diamond, and empty lot, really, in this little town I grew up in. And I was about 10, and she walked by. I was there with a bunch of my friends, and I was about to have a fistfight with this little tough kid that I hung around with. And there were half-girls on the team, and the fistfight had some relationship to status, maneuvering, you know, in relationship to that.

Anyways, we were going to have a fight. And my mom walked by. She took a look, and I could see from her demeanor that she knew exactly what was about to happen. And she looked for a second, and then she walked by. And I thought, whoa, good work, mom. No kidding, eh? It’s like, last bloody thing I needed at that moment was for her to come charging up and say, you boys aren’t planning to have a fight, are you? It’s like, well, yeah, mom, we’re actually planning to have a fight. And now that you came and intervened, I actually lost before the goddamn thing even started.

So two thumbs up for mom. She was also the person that said, because I had some trouble with my dad when I was, you know, an adolescent, he had some trouble with me. So, you know, it was 50-50. That’s for now. It’s probably 70-30 with me on the 70 end of being the trouble.

And anyways, I left home when I was about 17, and she said something really interesting when I left home. She said, if it was too good at home, you’d never leave. I thought, hey, mom, that’s pretty good, you know. For an agreeable person, you’ve got a real spine, man. So that was pretty good.

So, mother, this is this. The mother is the person who also says, get out there, take your goddamn lumps, because you’re tough enough so that you can handle it. She doesn’t say, you just stay down there in your bedroom, brooding away, because the world is unfair and treating you badly, and your suffering is too much. She says, yeah, there’s a lot of suffering out there, but you’re a lot tougher than you think you are.

In turn, Mary’s son, Christ, offers himself to God so completely that his faith and trust in the world is not broken by betrayal, torture, or death. That’s the model for the honorable man. So, you know, you have an interesting dynamic there. You have the woman who’s willing to make the sacrifice, lays the groundwork for the son who is willing to make the sacrifice. That works out pretty nicely, and it’s a good thing to know.

In Christ’s case, however, as he sacrifices himself, God, his Father, is simultaneously sacrificing his son, right? That’s one of the oddities of the Trinitarian model, is that God sacrifices himself to himself. Same thing happens in Norse mythology, right? Is it Norse? It’s Zeus. Germanic mythology. Zeus sacrifices himself to himself. He actually hangs on a tree. He’s actually wounded in his side. It’s a very interesting parallel.

But I think part of the idea is, well, the human race is trying to work out, well, what’s the ultimate sacrifice? It’s something like that, the ultimate sacrifice of value. Well, the passion story, and I told you I was foreshadowing. I’m bringing into consideration things we won’t talk about for a long time, maybe not at all in this lecture series, because I don’t know how far I’ll get, is that, well, there’s a supreme sacrifice demanded on the part of the mother, and there’s a supreme sacrifice demanded on the part of the son, and there’s a supreme sacrifice demanded on the part of the father, all at the same time.

And then that makes the supreme sacrifice possible, and hypothetically, that’s the one that renews. That’s the sacrifice that renews and redeems. It’s an idea, man. And the thing about it is that I don’t know if it’s true, but I know that its opposite is false. And generally, the opposite of something that’s false is true.

Its opposite is false because if the mother doesn’t make the sacrifice, then you get the horrible Oedipal situation or something like that in the household, which is just its own absolute catastrophic hell. And if you want a really good insight into that, I would say watch the documentary Crumb, C-R-U-M-B. That’s been rated by some critics as the best documentary ever made, and it is some piece of work, man. It is the only thing I’ve ever seen that actually lays out the Oedipal catastrophe in its full nightmare. So you could look at that.

So if the maternal sacrifice isn’t there, then that doesn’t work. If the paternal sacrifice isn’t there, if the father isn’t willing to put his son out into the world, let’s say, to be broken and betrayed and all of those things, then that’s a non-starter because the kid doesn’t grow up. And then if the son isn’t willing to do that, well, then who is going to shoulder the responsibility?

So if those three things don’t happen, then it’s cataclysmic, it’s chaotic, it’s hell. If they do happen, is it the opposite of that? Well, you could say, well, maybe it depends on the degree to which they happen, and it’s a continuum. How thoroughly can they happen? Well, we don’t know, you know, because you might say, how good a job do you do of encouraging your children to live in truth, let’s say?

Well, that’s part of the answer to this question, and the answer likely is, well, you don’t do as good a job of it as you could. So it works out quite well, but you don’t know how well it could work if you did it really well, or spectacularly well, or ultimately well, or something like that. You don’t know.

And, you know, people have an intimation of this because one of the things that’s really cool about having a young baby, this is something you don’t know until you have it. There’s two things you don’t know. There’s a lot more than two.

There’s three things you don’t know until you have a baby. The one is that you didn’t grow up yet, because you actually don’t grow up until someone else is more important than you. You can’t. So people think they grow up if they don’t have children, but they don’t. They just think they do.

Now, there are some people who make sacrifices of other sorts, but this is a whole different ball of wax as far as I’m concerned. It’s not a very elegant metaphor, but you learn that it’s kind of a relief not to be the center of attention. That’s cool that you can sit back, because of course your child in your family and in society is immediately the center of attention.

And so unless you’re narcissistic, then you allow that to happen. And then you learn all sorts of really good things about other people, because other people really like babies. It’s so cool. I lived in Montreal when we had our first child, and I lived in a pretty rough neighborhood by Montreal standards, right? It’s like, you know, Montreal is such a great city, like Toronto. It’s like even the rough neighborhoods, they’re more like charming with a little, you know, dark underbelly, something like that.

But there were some rough characters in our neighborhood, and it was pretty poor. And we’d push her around in her stroller, and these like grizzled, wrecked old guys would come by. They’d look at her, and they’d just light up, and they’d come over and like smile at her. And, you know, you just saw the positive element of their humanity just well forth. There has to be something seriously wrong with you if you don’t respond that way to a baby, you know.

I mean, that’s not good. That’s not good. But it was so cool to see these people. You kind of give them, generally, you’d sort of walk four feet around them on the street, you know. And yet they were, all of a sudden, all that, the layers that were on them would just fall off, and they’d be so.

And the babies are sort of like public property, weirdly enough, too. Sort of like pregnant women, you know, because people often treat pregnant women sort of like they’re public property, too. I mean, in a positive way. Oh, wow, look, you’re going to have a baby, eh? Well, they do all sorts of cute things.

So, you know, the reason I’m telling you that is because there’s a strong impulse in people to know that there’s something miraculous about the existence of a new human being. And the miraculous element is all the potential that’s there, right? That’s all there is there, is potential. And with every birth, there’s the potential for something remarkable to be introduced in the world.

And, you know, one of the things I’ve thought, too, is the other thing you don’t know is that babies are generic until you have one. And then your baby isn’t a generic baby at all. It’s like, instantly, it’s a person with whom you have a relationship that’s closer, perhaps, than any relationship that you’ve ever had, and that you can keep perfect, right? Because most of the relationships you’ve had already are with people who are screwed up in 50 different ways, and so are you.

But here you’ve got this baby, and, like, it’s being cared, but it’s not ruined yet. And so, you have this possibility of maintaining this relationship that starts out that baby really likes you, and generally that continues for quite a long time. They’re two years old, and you come home, they’re really happy to see you. It’s kind of like having a puppy, you know? It’s like they’re thrilled when you come home. It’s like, how many people are thrilled when you come home, you know?

So I’ll see you again. It’s like, no, not a little kid. A little kid is thrilled when you come home. And you can keep that going. And so there’s this pristine element to the potential relationship between parents and children that’s terribly devalued in our society, terribly. It’s almost as if we’re willfully blind to it. And I think it’s an absolute catastrophe, because there’s nothing, there’s very little in life that can compare to establishing a proper relationship with a child.

They make great company if you keep your relationship with them pristine. And so, you know, it’s worthwhile, you think. Well, and so the reason I’m telling you this is because people look at infants and they think, they think this could be the potential savior of mankind. That is what they think. That’s how they act. So that’s what they think.

And the thing is, it’s also true. Now, how true it is, I don’t know. But that’s, I think, probably because, I think it’s probably because people don’t dare to find out. That’s how it looks to me.

In Christ’s case, however, as he sacrifices himself, God, his Father, is simultaneously sacrificing his son. It is for this reason that the Christian sacrificial drama of son and self is archetypal. Nothing greater can be imagined. That’s why it’s an archetype. You can’t push past it. That’s the very definition of archetypal. That’s the core of what constitutes religious.

The greatest of all possible sacrifices is self and child. Of that, there can be no doubt. Pain and suffering define the world. Of that, equally, there can be no doubt. The person who wants to alleviate suffering, who wants to bring about the best of all possible futures, who wants to create heaven on earth, will therefore sacrifice everything he has to God. To life in the truth.

So, that’s a page and a half from the book I’m going to release in January. So, back to Genesis.

We’re already up to GENESIS 4. So, back to Genesis. We’re already up to Genesis 4. ‘And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain, and said, ‘I’ve gotten a man from the Lord.’

This is after Adam and Eve have been chased out of the Garden of Eden. So, what’s really cool about this, I really think that the Cain and Abel story is the most profound story I’ve ever read. Especially given that you can tell it in 15 seconds. I won’t, because I tend not to tell stories in 15 seconds, as you may have noticed.

But you can read the whole thing that quickly. And it’s so densely packed that I just can’t — It’s actually unbelievable to me that it can be that densely packed.

First Human Being: Cain

Okay, so the first thing is that Adam and Eve are not the first two human beings. Cain and Abel are the first two human beings. Because Adam and Eve were made by God, and they were born in Paradise. It’s like, what kind of human beings are those? You don’t know any human beings like that. Human beings aren’t born in Paradise and made by God. Human beings are born of other human beings.

And so, that’s the first thing. And it’s post-Fall. We’re out in history now. We’re not in some archetypal beyond, although we are still to some degree. Not to the degree that was the case with the story of Adam and Eve. We’ve already been thrown out of the garden. We’re already self-conscious. We’re already awake. We’re already covered. We’re already working. We’re full-fledged human beings.

And so, you have the first two human beings: Cain and Abel, prototypical human beings. So what’s cool is that humanity enters history at the end of the story of Adam and Eve, and then the archetypal patterns for human behavior are instantaneously presented. It’s absolutely mind-boggling. And it’s not a very nice story, right?

So they’re brothers. They’re hostile brothers. They’ve got their hands around each other’s throat, so to speak, or at least that’s the case in one direction. So it’s a story. The first two human beings engage in a fratricidal struggle that ends in the death of the best one of them. That’s the story of human beings in history. And that, man, that doesn’t give you nightmares, you didn’t understand the damn story.

Now, in these hostile brother stories, which are very, very common, often the older brother, Cain, is used—and this is very true in the Bible, but it’s true in all sorts of folktales and all sorts of stories of all sorts, for that matter.

See, the older brother has some advantages. He’s the older brother. And in an agricultural community, the older brother generally inherited the land, not the younger brothers. And the reason for that was that, well, let’s say you have like eight sons, and you have enough land to support a bit of a family, and you divide it among your eight sons. And they have eight sons, and they divide it among their eight sons.

It’s like soon everyone has a little postage stamp that they can stand on and starve to death on. And so that just doesn’t work. So you hand the land down in a piece to the eldest son, and that’s just how it is. It’s tough luck for the rest of them. But at least they know they’re going to have to go and make their own way. It’s not fair, but there’s no way of making it fair.

Well, so the oldest son has some—you might say he has an additional stake in the stability of the current hierarchy. He has more of a stake in the status quo. So that makes him more of an emblematic representative of the status quo, and perhaps more likely to be blind in its favor. It’s something like that. So that motif creeps up very frequently in the Hostile Brothers archetypal struggle.

So the story of Cain and Abel fits this pattern, because Cain is the one who won’t budge, who won’t move. He’s stubborn. Whereas the younger son, who’s Abel, is often the one who’s more—not so much of a revolutionary, but perhaps more of a balance between the revolutionary and the traditionalist. Something like that. Whereas the older son tends to be more traditionalist authoritarian, at least in these metaphorical representations.

And Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain and said, I’ve gotten a man from the Lord. So there’s the first human being, Cain. It’s like I told you that the Mesopotamians thought that mankind was made out of the blood of the worst demon that the great goddess of chaos could imagine.

Well, the first human being is a murderer, and not only a murderer, a murderer of his own brother. And so, you know, Old Testament, that’s a harsh book. And you might think, well, maybe that’s a little bit too much to bear. And then you might think, yeah, and maybe it’s true too. So that’s something to think about.

I mean, human beings, you know, like, they’re amazing creatures. And to think about us as a plague on the planet is its own kind of bloody catastrophe, malevolent, low, quasi-genocidal metaphor. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not without our problems. And the fact that this book that sits at the cornerstone of our culture would present the first man as a murderer of his brother is something that should really set you back on your heels.

And again, she bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. There you see a very old representation. There’s Abel there, and he’s got his sheep up on the altar, and Cain is bringing a sheaf of wheat. And I don’t know exactly what’s happening here with the blood, or it’s a ray, perhaps. It’s something like that.

But the overall impression of the image is that something transcendent is communicating with this sacrifice. And you see, you think, oh, how primitive. How primitive these people were sacrificing to their god. It’s like, you know, those people weren’t stupid. And this is not primitive. Whatever it is, it’s not primitive. It’s sophisticated beyond belief.

Because the idea, as I already pointed out, is that you could sacrifice something of value, and that that would have transcendent utility. And that is by no means an unsophisticated idea. In fact, it might be the greatest idea that human beings ever came up with. It’s an answer to the problem that’s put forward in the story of Adam and Eve, right? Because we became self-conscious, and then we discovered the future, and then we knew we were going to die, and then we knew we were vulnerable, and then we became ashamed, and then we developed the knowledge of good and evil, and then we got thrown out of paradise.

It’s like, that’s a big problem. So what are you going to do about it? Well, sacrifice. That’s the hypothesis. Well, that’s a hypothesis, man. That’s what we’re doing. You’ve made plenty of sacrifices, even to sit in this theater. And many people made plenty of sacrifices to have a theater like this exist. And many people made sacrifices so that we could actually freely engage in the dialogue that we’re engaging in, in a theater like this.

And so it’s like, all of this is built on sacrifice, and sacrifice bloody well better work, because we do not have a better idea. Sacrifice, what’s the counterposition? Murder and theft.

So let’s go with sacrifice, shall we? And perhaps we won’t consider it so damn primitive, you know, because it’s not so primitive. And again, she bare his brother Abel, and Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the ground.

Now, some people have read into this, the eternal battle between herdsmen and agriculturalists, which raged in the American West, for example, because the herdsmen like to have their herds, sheep, cattle, go wherever they were going to go. And of course, the agriculturalists, the farmers like to have things fenced off. And so, and the agriculturalists actually won in the final analysis.

But anyways, Abel is a keeper of sheep. And that’s interesting, because that makes him a shepherd. And I think that’s part of the critical issue here, because a shepherd, I talked a little bit about shepherds before. You know, if you look at Michelangelo’s statue of David, which is another staggering work. I mean, David, he’s no trivial figure. And of course, it’s David who slays Goliath, right? And Goliath is like the giant of the patriarchal enemy, it’s something like that.

And, you know, Middle Eastern shepherds, they had to take care of sheep, and they’re edible. And the lambs are very vulnerable. And there were lots of wild animals around. It wasn’t like England in the 16th century. It was like there were lions, you know, and you had a slingshot or a stick or some damn thing. And so your job was to keep the sheep organized, and not let them be eaten by the lions alone.

And so you had to have a clue, and be tough, and self-reliant, and all of those things. You had to be tough and self-reliant. You had to be able to take care of a lot of vulnerable things. You had to be able to do it on your own. And so that’s all built into the shepherd metaphor.

And it’s, you know, it’s a tough thing. It’s not a great metaphor for modern people, because we tend to think of the shepherd as someone like little Lord Fauntleroy, you know, like some little, certainly not a lion-killing, hyper-masculine, lion-killing, you know, monster. That’s not a shepherd. A shepherd sort of dances around. And, you know, that’s not the metaphor here.

So Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in the process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. Okay, so he’s participating in this sacrificial ritual.

And Abel, he brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering. Now, you don’t know why that is, and this is a built-in ambiguity, I think. Now, I think there’s textual hints, but I’m not sure. Abel brought the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof.

Okay, so what does that mean? Well, he brought high-quality sacrifice. You don’t know that Abel’s sacrifice is low-quality, because it doesn’t say, you know, Abel brought God some wilted lettuce and then burnt it. He doesn’t say that. But there isn’t a sentence there that talks about how high-quality Cain’s sacrifice is.

But in any case, the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering. So there’s a hint that Abel’s putting a little bit more into the whole sacrificial thing than Cain, but there’s also a hint that maybe God is just liking you a little better than he’s liking him. And that’s, I think, useful from a literary perspective, because there is that arbitrariness about life.

You know, with my own children, for example, one of them has had, I would say, things come easy to him. He’s lucky, fortunate, however you want to put it. He seems to be that sort of person. Whereas my other child, it’s just like one horrible Job-like catastrophe after another. And it’s so strange to see that, because as far as I can tell, the characterological differences are certainly not accounting for the difference in destiny.

You know, my one child who’s had so much trouble, I mean, as a child, was just a wonderful child. Amazingly happy, and easy to get along with, and fun. And had a terrible time of it. So who knows what God’s up to? But distributing fate equally certainly isn’t one of them.

And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering, but unto Cain and his offering He had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, angry. Wroth is a tough word. You know, and these are translated many times. It’s hard to get the full flavor of the words. But wroth and his countenance fell. Well, to have your countenance fell, this is sort of up. To fall is to have it be heavy. Depressed, for sure. Angry, for sure. Resentful, probably. Wroth, that’s anger.

So Cain is not a happy clam, that his hard work is being rejected by God. Now that’s worth thinking about, really. Because you think about how human that story is, you know. You’re out there. Well, we could say you might be a useless character, and you know, you’re whining about how catastrophic your life is.

And it’s pretty much obvious to everyone around you, and you, that it’s your fault. You just don’t try. You don’t wake up in the morning. You don’t get a job. You don’t engage in things. You’re cynical, and you’re bitter, and you’re angry, and you don’t try to help the people near you, and you don’t try to fix up your own life, and you don’t take care of yourself, and you know, and then things go wrong.

It’s like, well, really, what do you expect? But then, but that’s, I mean, that doesn’t mean someone in that situation will just say, well, that’s okay. I deserve it, and they’ll be happy about it. They won’t. They’ll be absolutely bitter about it and angry. But you know, put that aside for a moment. There are people who seem to struggle very forthrightly, let’s say, and still have one catastrophe after another happen to them.

And so, there’s no easy answer in this story. It’s like, you can fall a foul of God because your sacrifices are second-rate, or you can just fall a foul of God, and you don’t know why. Well, tough luck for you. And then, what happens in either case is exactly this. Almost inevitably, Cain was wroth and his countenance fell.

Well, you know, you meet, and I, people like this right to me all the time. I’ve seen many, many of them as clients. You know, they say they’re 20, not so often, 30 more commonly, sometimes 40. Their lives haven’t gone well. You know, they’re in a pit of despair of one form or another. And not only are they in a pit of despair, but they’re extraordinarily angry about it. And God only knows what they would do with that anger if they had the opportunity to give it full voice.

Right, you know, one of the things I’ve always thought about Hitler is that, you know, people, you have to admire Hitler. That’s the thing. Because he was an organizational genius. You know, the thing that doesn’t stop people from being Hitler, the thing people don’t, people don’t refuse the ambition to become Hitler because they don’t have the genocidal motivation. They don’t follow that pathway because they don’t have the organizational genius. They’ve got the damn motivation.

And, you know, if you take 100 people randomly, and you talk to them, and you really talk to them, you’ll find that 5% of them would take their vengeful thoughts pretty damn far if they were just given the opportunity. And, in fact, they do, because they make life miserable for themselves, and often for their family, and sometimes for anybody they can come near.

And then maybe another 20% of people have that bubble up in them on a pretty damn regular basis. So, you know, you can have some sympathy for Cain. If you don’t have any sympathy for Cain, then you’re not. See, Cain and Abel also, they don’t just represent two archetypal types of being. They represent — So it’s not like you’re Cain, and you’re Abel, and you’re Cain, and you’re Abel. It’s like you’re half and half, and you’re half and half, and you’re half and half. It’s something like this.

This is two different potential patterns of destiny. And you don’t manifest one purely and the other zero. It’s like you’re — It’s like the line between good and evil that runs down the human heart. It’s exactly the same idea. And maybe you’re more like Cain, or maybe you’re more like Abel, but there’s still a little Cain in you, no matter how Abel you are.

And maybe more than a little, and probably more than a little. And if you watch your fantasies, which I would very much recommend, you’ll find that they show you dark things about you that will shock you if you allow yourself to be conscious of what you’re thinking.

So it’s a good time when you’re having an argument with someone, especially someone that you love, to just watch the pictures that flash in the back of your mind. That’s part of, let’s say, coming into contact with what Carl Jung called the shadow. And the shadow is the manifestation of Cain. That’s a perfect way of thinking about it.

And one of the things that Jung said about the shadow, because Jung was not someone you mess around with lightly, he said, the human shadow has roots that reach all the way to hell. And Jung meant that. That’s no metaphor for him. Now, he might not have meant it in the same way that a fundamentalist Christian from the southern US might mean it. But I would say that Jung meant it in a way that’s far more terrifying, and also far more true. So, and Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

So there’s Abel, burning his offering away there. And he’s in this sort of relationship with, let’s call him the archetypal figure of culture, the archetypal father. And it’s something he respects. That’s the thing. The posture is an indication of respect.

And then there’s Cain in the background. You see, his face is in shadow, and he’s jealous of what’s happening here. And he’s going through the motions, perhaps, and maybe God just doesn’t like him, we don’t know. But he’s going through the motions, and he’s not very happy about it. And you know, that’s actually a phrase that you could carve into many people’s tombstones as an epitaph for their life, which would be, went through the motions, but wasn’t very happy about it.

This is really an interesting one, I think. I mean, so I don’t know what God’s doing here exactly, but he’s helping ignite the sacrificial flame. And that’s kind of an interesting idea, I think, because, you know, let’s say that you have an impulse to make a sacrifice. You think, well, I should change this about my life.

Well, it’s like, where does that come from, that impulse? It’s just, well, it just manifests itself out of nothing. Or you came up with it. Well, you might want to stop thinking about that, thinking so surely that you come up with your own thoughts. You don’t come up with your damn dreams, do you? They just happen. And God only knows where they come from. They come from your brain. Oh boy, that’s a sophisticated answer.

They come from your unconscious. Well, that’s not much better. At least it’s somewhat better. But there are those amazing dramas take place in the theater of your imagination at night. You don’t even understand what they are, and yet they occur night after night. And those things, dreams, they can contain wisdom. It’s just, well, it just staggers the person who has the dream once they get the key to the dream, once they remember it.

It’s like, oh, look, you just revealed a bunch of wisdom to yourself that you didn’t know. Well, where’d that come from? Well, you don’t know. How in the world can you dream up things that you don’t know? That’s a tough one. Maybe we’ll talk about that at some point in this lecture series, because there are some reasonable things that can be said about that.

But, you know, the idea that there’s something that’s not you. Jung would call it the self. Carl Jung would call it the self, which he thought of as the totality of your being across time and space. It’s something like that. And that, you know, each second that you exist is a slice of the self manifesting itself across time and space. And he thought of the self as partly the voice of conscience, whatever that is, that helps guide you when you have to make a difficult decision.

And a difficult decision might be, well, what do I need to sacrifice? How do I need to discipline myself, right? What do I need to forego? Well, how do you figure those things out? Well, this picture is trying to put forth the idea that perhaps if you had established the proper relationship with God the Father, and we’ve talked about what that might mean, then he would help figure out how to get the sacrificial fires burning, so that you could stay in a proper relationship with him across time.

Well, if that’s such an unreasonable proposition, what’s the alternative proposition? Well, this isn’t working out very well, that’s for sure. You know, Cain seems to be doing it. I don’t know what it is. It’s as if he thinks he can only do it himself, or maybe he wants only to take credit for it, or something like that. He’s not in this grateful, let’s say, and inquiring, grateful and inquiring posture, because that’s what a prayerful posture should be.

It should be grateful and inquiring. And grateful is, thank God things aren’t worse for me than they are. And you should be grateful about that, because they could be a lot worse than they are, man. They can be so bad. And inquiring would be, well, I don’t really know how I could make it better, but I’m open to suggestions, man. If I can figure out how to do it, I’ll try it. That’s the humility and the inquiry. That’s a humble inquiry.

How could I make things better? It’s something like that. And that’s like, what sacrifices do I need to make in order to make things better? That’s a good question to ask yourself. You could ask yourself that every morning. What sacrifice do I have to make to make things better? You can decide what constitutes better. How about that?

Then it’s not even as if it’s being imposed on you. Come up with your own notion of what constitutes better. You know, try to make it sophisticated. It shouldn’t just be better for you, because that isn’t going to work very well, right? You’re just going to fall downstairs if you do that, because you have to live with other people. And besides, it’s stupid anyways. What are you going to do? Nothing you can even say about that.

That’s the attitude of a very badly behaved, hyper-aggressive two-year-old. And I mean that technically. And so you could ask yourself, well, I have this day that lays itself out in front of me. What thing could I let go of that’s impeding my progress that if I let go of would make my life better, my family’s life better, my culture’s life better, my being better?

And then that would give you something to do for the day, wouldn’t it? And to justify your miserable life. Because you need that. That’s the whole point of the first story of Adam and Eve. What do you have? A miserable life. Okay. What am I going to do about that? Well, if you just have a miserable life, you’re just going to suffer stupidly and get bitter about it. That’s what happens to Cain.

It’s like, well, how about not doing that? Because that seems to just take a bad deal and make it worse. How about making a sacrifice and seeing if you can please God and put being on track? God, that’d be something to do. What could be better than that? What could possibly be better than that?

Well, that’s why it’s archetypal, man, because nothing’s better than that. That’s where it tops out. And you can do that. You can do that every day. You have to do it a little way, because what good are you? You’re not going to go and bring this socialist utopia into being in one fell swoop.

You might also think that one of the things Cain might figure out here, there’s a couple of things that just aren’t going right for him. Downwind of the fire, not the right place to blow from. And the fact that he’s enveloped in haze and smoke and breathing it in, and the fire isn’t burning, might be an indication that he’s doing something wrong. Or he could be wiping his eyes and saying, Jesus, what kind of stupid bloody universe would produce smoke like this?

It’s like, yes, well, that’s the more likely outcome. And the Lord said unto Cain, ‘Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?’ Now that’s an interesting line, because I’ve looked at a variety of different translations of this seventh verse here, like a bunch of them, because the translation for that, that’s a critical line, and the translation really matters.

And so I’ll tell you what I think the story is, what I’ve been able to figure out. And I’m sure I haven’t got it completely right, but it’s — So God says to him, if you do well, won’t you be accepted? But there’s a hint there, right? It’s something like, well, things aren’t going so well for you.

So the first thing you might think is, you’re not doing well. Well, does that mean you’re not doing good? Does that mean you’re not acting properly? It’s the hint, because God is suggesting that if you were doing properly, you would be successful. I had a friend at one point who was a very bitter person, and he had a bunch of problems, and some of them were self-inflicted, and some of them were fate, I suppose. And he had become very, very destructive, murderously destructive, genocidally destructive, I would say.

You could see it in his dreams. And he lived with me for a while. And I knew him very well. He was a friend of mine from the time I was 12 until the time he committed suicide, when he was about 40. And when he lived with me, I was trying to help him get on his feet, which was why he had come to live with me, because he thought maybe I could help him get on his feet.

And he could only take relatively low-level jobs. He had some mechanical ability. He didn’t get educated, although he’s a very, very smart person. He probably had an IQ of about 135 or something like that. He was very smart. And so he was bitter too, because he hadn’t educated himself to the level that his intellect would have demanded. So he had to take jobs that were beneath him intellectually.

And he had that real intellectual arrogance, because he was smart. And really smart people often come to believe that only smart matters. And if they’re smart, and all that matters is smart, and then the world is sort of laying itself at their feet, then they’ve been terribly betrayed. And then they cling to their intelligence, which is more like a talent or a gift, like it’s an idol, a false idol, which is exactly what it is, and a very dangerous one.

And get cynical about the stupidity of the world, and the fact that their talents weren’t properly recognized. And that’s just not that helpful, you know, because smart is a good thing. But I’ll tell you, if you don’t use it properly, it will devour you, just like all arbitrarily assigned talents, right?

So you might have a talent, but it’s your friend if you use it properly. And if you misuse it, it will be your enemy. And maybe that’s how God keeps the cosmic scales adjusted. But anyhow, my friend was a very smart person, although not as smart as he thought he was, unfortunately. But he hadn’t done what would have been necessary with that intelligence to make it manifest itself properly in the world. And that also embittered him, because he also knew that there was more that he could have done if he would have done it, and perhaps more that he could still do.

What I was suggesting to him while he was living with us, because he was, you know, two levels from homeless by that point, was that he should find a job that he could find, working in a garage, working in a shop, something like that, because he had some mechanical ability. And that he should separate himself from the arrogance that made him presume that such a job would be beneath him, because at that point, no job was beneath him.

But more importantly, it’s not so obvious that jobs are beneath people. You know, because imagine you have a job as a checkout person in a grocery store. You know, it’s a fairly unskilled job. You can be some miserable, resentful, horrid bastard doing that job, boy. You know, you can come in there just exuding resentment and bitterness, and making mistakes, and making sure that every customer that passes by you has a slightly worse day than they need to, right?

And, you know, pilfering time, and perhaps pilfering goods, and being resentful about the people who gave you the position because they’re above you in the dominance hierarchy, and talking bad things, gossiping behind the back of your co-workers. It’s like you can take your menial position, self-described, and turn that into a very nice little slice of hell, that’s for sure.

And, you know, you go into places like that. I always think of the archetypal diner in that way. You know, you guys have been in this diner. There’s a really good opposite diner, and there’s a great video on YouTube. It’s Tom Waits reading a poem by Bukowski, and I think it’s called Nirvana. And it’s about a good diner that he happened to visit, Bukowski happened to visit, when he was on a bus, when he was a kid. A diner where everything was going well.

You could listen to that. It’s great. I think it’s great. But this is the opposite diner I’m thinking about. So, you’ll go into a diner, right? It’s seven o’clock in the morning, and you order some bacon and eggs, and some toast, and then you look around in the diner, and you think, it was like 1975 when the windows were last washed, and there’s this kind of thick coating of who gives a damn grease on the walls, you know. And the floor too has got that sort of stickiness that you really have to work at to develop over years.

You know, and the waitress is, she’s not happy to be there, and the guy behind the counter isn’t happy that that happens to be the waitress that he’s working with. And then, you know, you walk down the stairs maybe to the washroom, and that’s its own little trip. And so, you come back, and you order your damn eggs, and you order your toast, and you order your bacon, and then it comes, and like the eggs are too cooked on the bottom, so they’re kind of brown, and then they’re kind of raw on top, and they’re cold in the middle, which is, you really have to work to cook an egg like that, man.

But you can master that with like 10 years of bitterness. You teach you how to cook an egg like that. And then the toast, here’s what you do with the toast, right? You take the white bread, you know, the pre-sliced stuff that no one should ever eat, and then you put that in the toaster, and you overcook it, and then you wait, and then you pop it out of the toaster, and then because it’s overcooked, you scrape it off, and you knock off the crumbs so it doesn’t look too burnt, and then you wait till it’s cold, and then you put cold margarine on it, because if you put cold margarine, first of all, not butter, but if you put cold margarine on it, you can also kind of tear holes in it, so that then it has lumps of margarine in it, and it’s really dry except where it’s too greasy. So that’s like its own little work of art, man.

And then you put that on the side with the eggs, and then you have the potatoes, and this is how you cook the potatoes properly. You know, so they’re leftover potatoes, and you keep dumping new leftover potatoes into the old leftover potatoes over weeks, and so some of the potatoes, they’re no longer potatoes, right? They’ve half returned to Mother Earth.

Then you flap them on the grill, and you sort of, I don’t know, you burn them a bit, I guess, and then you slap them on the plate, and Jesus, you don’t want to eat those, man. That’s for sure, and that’s the point.

And then you have the bacon, and you want to make sure you buy the lowest possible quality bacon. That’s how you start. And then you throw it on the grill, and your grill has to be overheated to do this. You have to cook the bacon so that it’s raw in places and burnt in other places, and it has that delightful pit-like odor that only really cheap badly cooked bacon can provide.

Or maybe you use those little breakfast sausages that no one in their right mind would let within 15 feet of anything living, you know. And then you serve that, right? And you serve it with the kind of orange juice that is only orange in color, and with coffee that’s, what would you say? It was started too early in the morning. That’s the first thing.

Bad quality coffee started too early in the morning, got cold once or twice, and has been reheated. And then you serve that with Whitener. It’s like, here is your breakfast. It’s like, no man, that’s not breakfast. That’s hell.

You know, and you created it. And then what you do, if you have a diner like that, is because you have a miserable life, if you have a diner like that, and you’ve really worked on achieving that, is every night you go home and you curse your wife, and you curse your kids, and you curse God too, for producing a universe where a diner like yours is allowed to exist. And that’s your bloody life.

So, well, so that’s what God’s trying to point out here. If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted. And if thou doest not well, then sin lies at your door. Well, so I looked at lots of translations for this, and actually, the next line is, and unto thee shall be his desire. Yes.

What God actually says is something like this. It’s like, you know, things aren’t going so well for you, but if you were behaving properly, they would. But instead, this is what you’ve done. Sin came to your door. And sin means to, you know, pull your arrow back and to miss the target. Sin came to your door. But he uses a metaphor, and the metaphor is something like, sin came to your door like this sexually aroused cat, predator thing, and you invited it in first, and then you let it have its way with you.

It’s like you entered into a creative, he uses a sexual metaphor, you entered into a creative exchange with it, and gave birth to something as a consequence. And that, what you gave birth to, that’s your life. And you knew it. You’re self-conscious, after all. You knew you were doing this, and you conspired with this thing to produce the situation that you’re in.

Jung said something about this, similar, about the Oedipal mother situation, which was very politically incorrect, what he said. Of course, every single thing he wrote was politically incorrect. So, which is how you could tell he was a thinker, by the way. He talked about the unholy alliance between hyperdependent children and their mothers. And he said, well, it’s actually, because Freud thought about it as a maternal thing, I’m not putting Freud down, because Freud mapped out the Oedipal situation brilliantly.

I’m not putting Freud down. But, you know, Jung was taking the ideas and expanding them outward. And, you know, he said that there was actually an unholy alliance between a hyperdependent child and a need-to-pull-over dependent mother. And the alliance was, the mother would always offer, so maybe the kid is supposed to go off and do something that would require a little bit of courage and effort.

And the mother says, well, are you sure you’re feeling well enough to do it? And then the child could say, yes. Or the child could say, no, and then, you know, be put in bed and babied and all of that. But the thing is, the child made the damn decision, too. And you might think, well, that’s pretty harsh.

But just because children are little doesn’t mean they’re stupid. And you don’t know children if you don’t know how children know how to manipulate, because they are staggeringly good at that. Because they’re studying you nonstop, trying to figure out, A, what you’re up to, and, B, how they can get what they want in the way that they want it. And so they can play a manipulative game, no problem, especially if they’re well schooled in it. And so it’s sort of like that.

It’s like maybe the mother is a little timid and a little inclined to overprotect, and maybe the child is a little manipulative and a little willing to not take that courageous step out in the world and to regress into infantile dependency instead. And then you get a terrible dynamic building across time that is like a vicious circle, or like a positive feedback loop. It just expands and expands and expands.

Because sometimes in families, you see a hyperdependent child and a perfectly independent child, and same mother. So obviously, same mother. I mean, mothers are very complex. And mother for child A and mother for child B are not the same mother, even if they happen to be the same human being. The literature is quite clear on that. But you get my point.

But God’s idea was, not only are you not doing well because you’re not doing well, but you’re not doing well because you’ve actually really spent a lot of work figuring out how to not do well. This is like creative effort on your part. And if you read about truly malevolent people, you could start with the Columbine killers, because they left some very interesting diaries behind. So I would recommend them. There’s plenty of serial killers you could read about, and the people who’ve really gone out and done dark things.

And I’ve read more than my fair share of that sort of thing, and understand it quite well. If you really want to have your countenance fall and be wroth, 10 years of brooding on your own catastrophe, sort of alone, and letting your fantasies take shape, and egging them on, and allowing them to flourish and flourish and flourish and flourish, and allowing them to flourish and, let’s say, take possession of you, because that’s exactly the right way to think about it, that’ll get you somewhere like this.

And there are more people who are like that than you think, and you’re more like that than you think. Well, so Cain, he’s obviously not very happy about this whole answer, obviously, because the last thing you want to hear if your life is turned into a catastrophe, and you take God to task for creating a universe where that sort of thing was allowed, is that it’s your own damn fault, and you should straighten up and fly right, so to speak, and you shouldn’t be complaining about the nature of being.

But that is the answer he gets. And so then what happens? Well, we have to infer that if Cain was angry before, that he’s a lot more angry now. And, of course, that’s exactly what the story reveals.

And Cain talked with Abel, his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him. I’m going to read you something else now. This is foreshadowing again.

This is from the same chapter, by the way. Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Jesus was led into the wilderness, according to the story, to be tempted by the devil, Matthew 4:1 prior to his crucifixion. This is the story of Cain, restated abstractly. Cain is far from happy, as we have seen. He’s working hard, or so he thinks, but God is not pleased. Meanwhile, Abel is dancing away in the daisies. His crops flourish. Women love him. Worst of all, he’s a pretty good guy. Everyone knows it. He deserves his good fortune. All the more reason to hate him.

I used to joke when I used to teach at Harvard, and now and then my wife would have some of the undergraduates over. We used to joke afterwards, because some of them, many of them, were very remarkable kids. They were super smart. They were athletic, or they had some dramatic ability, or they were musicians, or they’d done some spectacular charitable work.

Because basically, to get accepted into Harvard, you had to be top of your damn school, and then you had to have at least two other outstanding things going for you. What was so annoying about most of these kids, this was our joke, was you really both liked them and respected them.

It’s like, my joke was, you’d think they would have had the good graces to be like dislikable sons of bitches, at least. With all those other great things going for them, they had to add like respectability and likability to it as well. So you thought, well, you know, it really couldn’t happen to a better person. It’s like, good God. Well, that’s Abel’s situation.

And the funny thing too is that that’s an ideal. That’s the ideal, right? Because an ideal person, let’s say, would be someone who you would want to be like, and someone who is operating in the world like you would want to operate, and someone whom fortune was smiling on, and someone who is making the right sacrifices. It’s really what you would want to be.

And so Cain kills that. Right? So it’s a psychological story too. And you see this in the cynicism that people have about people who have done well in the world. They’re always looking for some reason why they’ve done well. They must be crooked, or they must be conniving, or they must be arrogant, or they must be psychopathic, and of course all of those things exist.

But it’s a very bad trick to play on yourself to make the proposition that the person in the world who represents your own ideal is that ideal because of despicable reasons. Because what you do is train yourself that the ideal that you should pursue can only exist if it’s motivated by despicable reasons.

And then what? Not only is Abel, your brother, dead as your brother in the field, in reality, but you’ve also slaughtered your own ideal.

Well, then what are you going to work for? How are you going to live then? Well, bitterly and miserably, that’s for sure. Bitterly, miserably, and hopelessly. That’s how you’re going to live. You know, and it’s so rare that I see, especially publicly, that people honestly admit with sports figures they’ll do it. That’s one place where that seems to happen. But it’s so uncommon for expressions of admiration and gratitude to manifest themselves in any public communication of any sort.

Newspapers, TV, YouTube, Twitter, it’s almost always undermining and backbiting and criticism, and very often directed to people who have often done little else but bring good things into the world for other people. And that’s part of why this is such a profound story.

He’s a pretty good guy. Everyone knows it. He deserves his good fortune. All the more reason to hate him, that’s for sure. Cain broods on his misfortune like a vulture on an egg. He enters the desert wilderness of his own mind. He obsesses over his ill fortune and betrayal. He nourishes his resentment. He indulges in ever more elaborate fantasies of revenge. His arrogance grows to Luciferian proportions. I’m ill-used and oppressed, he thinks. This is a stupid bloody planet. It can go to hell.

And with that, he encounters Satan in the wilderness and falls prey to his temptations. And he does what he can in John Milton’s unforgettable words: to confound the race of mankind in the first root and mingle and involve earth with hell, done all to spite the great Creator. He turns to evil to obtain what good forbade him, and he does it voluntarily, self-consciously, and with malice. Let him who has ears hear.

So that’s the first two human beings. The resentful, bitter failure, taking an axe to the admirable success.

Then the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper? And He said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. Now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand.

You know, if you want to understand that, which I would recommend, you could read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. That’s a great novel. I think it might be the greatest novel ever written, because I haven’t read every novel. But in my experience, it’s the greatest novel ever written.

But in my experience, it’s the greatest novel, and it is exactly this. It says what happens psychologically if you commit the ultimate crime. It’s amazing. It’s absolutely amazing. There’s no psychologist like Dostoevsky.

When thou tellest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength. A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear.

Now, one of the things that’s interesting about this is that, you know, I think the punishment that God lays on Cain, it’s like the inevitable consequences of Cain’s action. It’s something like that. It’s like, well, he killed his brother. There’s no going back from that, man. Good luck forgiving yourself for that, especially if he was an ideal, especially if he was your ideal, because you haven’t just killed your brother and, of course, tortured your parents and the rest of your family.

You’ve deprived the community of someone who is upstanding, and you did it for the worst possible motivations. It’s like there’s no up from there, right? That’s as close to hell as you can manage on earth, I would say.

And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid.

That too. It’s like there’s also no turning back to God, let’s say, after an error like that, because, well, you’ve done everything you possibly could to spite God, assuming he exists, and the probability that you’re going to be able to mend that relationship in your now broken state, when you couldn’t mend it to begin with before you did something so terrible, starts to move towards zero.

And it shall come to pass that everyone that findeth me shall slay me. And the Lord said unto him, Therefore, whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

That’s an interesting thing. I wondered about that for a long time, because you might think, well, why would God take Cain under his wing, so to speak, given what’s already happened? And I think it has something to do with the emergence of the idea that it was necessary to prevent tit-for-tat revenge slayings, and something like that.

And there’s hints of that later in the text, because, you know, it’s like, well, I kill your brother, and then you kill two of my brothers, and then I kill your whole family, and then you kill my whole town, and then I kill your whole country, and then we blow up the world. It’s like that’s probably not a very intelligent solution to the initial problem, even though the initial problem, which might be a murder, is not an easy thing to solve.

But I think it’s something like that. And then the last part of the story is, that’s William Blake. So Adam and Eve have discovered their dead son, and Cain has become cognizant, I would say, of what he did and what he is. So it’s another entrance into a form of self-consciousness. It’s, you know, the self-consciousness that Adam and Eve developed was painful enough. They become aware of their own vulnerability and their nakedness, and perhaps even their capacity for evil.

But Cain becomes aware of his voluntary engagement with evil itself, and sees that as a crucial human capability. And that’s something modern people, you know, it’s no wonder we don’t take it seriously. Like I know in the academy, and among intellectual circles for decades, the idea of evil has been, it’s like, what are you, medieval or something? You know, the whole idea of evil, you don’t, that’s a non-starter as an intellectual starting place, as a topic. And that’s something that I’ve just been unable to understand, because I cannot understand how you could possibly have more than a cursory knowledge of the history of the 20th century, much less a deep knowledge of the history of the 20th century, and to walk away with any other conclusion than, well, good might not exist, but evil, hey, the evidence for that is so overwhelming, that only willful blindness could possibly explain denying in its existence.

And that was actually a useful discovery for me, because I also concluded, perhaps, that if it was true evil existed, then it was true by inference that its opposite existed. Because the opposite of evil, let’s say the evil of the concentration camp, let’s say, or we could get more specific about it, we could say, there’s this one thing that used to happen in Auschwitz, where they would take people off the incoming trains, those who lived, that weren’t stacked around the outside of the train cars, and froze to death because it was too cold, you know, those who only had to be stuck in the middle where it was warm enough, so that maybe the old people died because they suffocated, but at least some of them were alive when they made it to Auschwitz, and then they took those poor people out.

One of the tricks that the guards used to play on them was to have the newly arrived prisoners hoist, like, hundred pound sacks of wet salt and carry them from one side of the compound, and these compounds were big, this was a city, it wasn’t like a gymnasium, it was like a city, there were tens of thousands of people there. They’d have them carry the sack of wet salt from one side of the compound to the other and then back, right, and that was to make a mockery out of the notion that work would set you free.

It’s like, no, no, you work here, but there’s nothing productive about it. The whole point, it’s exactly the opposite of sacrifice in some sense. It’s, we’re going to make you act out working, but all it will do is speed your demise, and maybe we can decorate it up a little bit, because not only will it speed up your demise, it will do it in a very painful way, while simultaneously increasing the probability that other people’s demises will be painful and sped up.

It’s a work of art, that’s for sure, and to know about that sort of thing and to not regard it as evil means, well, you can figure out what it means for yourself.

And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden, and Cain knew his wife, and she conceived.

And one of the critics, the criticisms, a fairly common criticism of these biblical stories is, well, if Cain and Abel were the only two people from Adam and Eve, it’s like, where did all these other people come from, and doesn’t that make the story, like, simple-minded? It’s like, no, that makes the reader simple-minded, you know.

I mean, really, that’s the best criticism of this you’re going to come up with? I mean, you might say, you missed the point, that would be the right response, you missed the point. And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bare Enoch, and he builded the city, and so it’s Cain that builds the cities and starts the civilization, and called, that’s pretty rough, too, right? So it’s the first fratricidal murderer who builds the cities.

After the name of his son Enoch, and unto Enoch was born Irad, et cetera, et cetera, going through the generations, and Lamech took unto him two wives, the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other, Zillah. So this is an attempt to flesh out the genealogy and to describe how culture started, in some sense, in these tribal communities, and Adah bare Jabal, and he was the father of such as dwell in tents, of such as have cattle, and his brother’s name was Jubal, and he was the father of all as such handled the harp and organ, and Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron.

And Tubal-Cain, traditionally, is the first person who makes weapons of war. And Lamech, back to Lamech, a descendant of Cain, said unto his wives Adah and Zillah, hear my voice, ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech, for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt, if Cain be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.

Well, what I see in that is this proclivity of this murderous capacity of Cain as it manifests itself as society develops to a murderous intent that transcends the mere killing of a brother. You hurt me, I hurt you back. No, you hurt me, I kill you and six other people. And the thing that happens after that is to not make it seven people, but to make it 70 people.

And so there’s this idea that once that first murderous seed is sown, it has this proclivity to manifest itself exponentially. And that’s a warning. And that’s also why I think Tubal-Cain, who’s one of Cain’s descendants, was the first person who made weapons of war. And that’s pretty much the story of Cain and Abel. And it’s a hell of a story, as far as I can tell. And I think it’s worth thinking about pretty much forever, because there’s so many, it has so many facets, you know.

And I think the most usefully revealing of those facets is the potential for the story, once understood, to shed light on not your own failure, not even on your rejection by being, let’s say, but on the proclivity to murder the best and the best in you for revenge upon that violation.

Because what that means, and we know that knowledge of good and evil entered the world, so to speak, with Adam and Eve’s transgression, is that now not only does humanity have to contend with tragedy and suffering, and even the unharvested fruits of proper sacrifice, but with the introduction of real malevolence into the world.

So there’s the fall into history, and then there’s the discovery of sacrifice as a medication for the fall. And then there’s a counterposition, which is the emergence of malevolence as the enemy of proper sacrifice. And that’s where we’re left at the end of Cain and Abel. And that’s the end of that lecture.

Thank you.

All right.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

MALE AUDIENCE: Okay. So you said that one of your moral axioms is that pain is bad, and so we should work to eliminate unnecessary suffering. Isn’t this the basis for a secular morality like utilitarianism? And can we therefore be moral without religion?

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, I don’t think that it’s, first of all, probably, to the first question, but that’s also that derivation is predicated on the idea that that’s the only idea that I’m putting forward as an ethical idea, and it’s not. If that was the only idea, well, then you could derive from that a fairly straightforward brand of utilitarianism.

But also, I think, to push the argument in that direction also necessitates the reduction of what might constitute pain to something too unidimensional, because I think suffering is a better term than pain, although pain, in some sense, is at the core of suffering. Suffering is a multidimensional phenomena, and I don’t think that you can draw a simple utilitarian argument from that, that either the existence of suffering or the observation that it’s the reduction of unnecessary suffering might be a good thing.

So, I’m also leery of those. See, it’s not reasonable, in some sense, to reduce a complex set of ideas to a single proposition and then say the ideas that I’ve been putting forward, and then to reduce another complex philosophical set of ideas to a single proposition and then say, aren’t those two things the same? And they are once you reduce them to the two simple axioms, or you could argue that they’re the same, but I would say there’s a tremendous amount left out in the telling and that what’s left out is relevant.

It kind of reminds me of those philosophical games that psychologists often play. It’s like, well, if there was, I don’t know if I can recall this properly, it’s the trolley cart problem. Something like, you know, if there was a train that was out of control and it was going towards six people on one track, would you flip a switch so it switched tracks and only killed one person? Would you do that? And I read a question like that and I think, that’s a stupid question.

And the reason I think that is because you can’t take a situation like that and render it properly by reducing it to that question. And then you also can’t assume that the person who answers that question would, in fact, act in the way they answered. You can’t presume any of that.

It’s like, because in a situation like that, in a high stress situation like that, the devil is in the details. And I’ve dealt with situations like that a number of times and know perfectly well that the devil’s in the details. So I think that there’s an intellectual reduction to make a philosophical point that doesn’t give the complexity of the topic justice.

And then there’s a second part to that, which was, and therefore can’t we be moral without religion? Well, I would say that question also suffers in some sense from the same problem of formulation. I’m very hesitant ever to answer a question of the form, is A merely a manifestation of B, when A and B are very complex things?

Because the answer to that is, it depends on what you mean by moral and what you mean by religious. Because, see, there’s an underlying intellectual maneuver in a question like that. And the underlying maneuver is the a priori assumption that something as complex as religion or as complex as morality can be reduced to an object with a name. And that then two objects reduced to the name can be assessed simultaneously. And I don’t think that that’s the case.

I think you can say something like, is a triangle a square? I think you can say that. But I don’t think you can say, is it possible to have morality without religion? I don’t think you can have that question because it has to be expanded out. So it’s like, what do you mean by morality exactly? And what do you mean by religion? Because maybe and maybe not. And so the answer to that question is to decompose the question.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: I don’t want my young children indoctrinated with dangerous ideas. And as time marches on, I trust public education less and less. I know that you have strong thoughts on the danger of the devouring Oedipal mother who harms her child by protecting them. And that’s certainly not what I aspire to. I wonder if in spite of your idea that kids need to become tough and learn to slay dragons, if you have anything good to say about the idea of homeschooling?

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. I do know that the Quebec government has recently taken moves to make it much more difficult for people to homeschool their children. And it’s not like five years ago. I mean, 15 years ago, I would have presumed that the vast majority of people who were homeschooling their children were to be viewed with skepticism initially. I’m not so sure about that anymore.

You know, for example, I was sent a poster today. Someone sent me this link that they found in the local junior high school. And one of the media pieces that were recommended on this poster was a movie called Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Now, I thought that was a terrible movie, even though I’m perfectly capable of enjoying bizarre movies. So it’s a bizarre movie, that’s for sure. But I also thought it was a terrible, bitter movie.

Terrible and bitter. Those are separate. A movie can be bitter and be quite great. But it was a terrible movie, and it was a bitter movie. But I can tell you one bloody thing about that movie. It’s not required viewing for 12-year-old kids. That’s for sure. So I think you have increasing reason to be skeptical of the public education system. I also looked at the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario’s guidelines for education from kindergarten to grade eight. And what that is, in essence, and I think I will do a video about it in the relatively near future, is a blueprint for transforming children into social justice warriors.

It basically says that. It’s like, you don’t have to be a conspiracy theory to read that. We have social justice tribunals in Ontario. And so the idea is, well, if you’re going to get your children, if you’re going to get people to, what would you say, favour equity properly, well, then you better start teaching them while they’re young. It’s like, maybe not. So now, you ask that question properly, because you say, well, the terrible education system, the wonderful mother homeschooling, that’s the danger. It’s like, no, because it might not be the wonderful mother homeschooling. It might be the pathological mother using the pathology of the education system as an excuse to get her talons into her children, because that’s certainly equally possible, or perhaps even more possible, because at least in the public education system, there’s some necessity for consensus.

So that’s something that you have to be very aware of and work to prevent. And so I would say, if you’re going to do that, probably best not to do it on your own. It’s like you need a board of advisors or something like that. And so maybe it can’t just be you. And you have to figure out, well, what is the aim? And how are you going to manage that? And what makes you think you can do it? Even if it’s being done badly publicly, what makes you think you could do it better?

I mean, my general advice is, and people have asked me this. In fact, I had a conversation with the guy who was tiling my backyard this morning about something his son had said to him that he was taught at school recently, which really made the tiler, who had come from a rather authoritarian country, step back on his heels and think, I’m not so sure I should be sending my kid to public school anymore. And maybe I shouldn’t be living in Toronto even.

But my general advice is, keep an eye on your kids and discuss with them what they’re learning and help equip them with the tools to not only to articulate their own viewpoint in response to what they’re being taught. Now, the problem is you might not have the time nor the ability to do that. That’s no simple thing.

And increasingly, if you’re unwilling to have your children participate in what is increasingly indoctrination and not education, thanks to, in no small part, to the Ontario Institute of Studies on Education, which is an institution that I particularly despise, because I think that almost all it does now is produce indoctrinators of children. It’s not an easy problem to solve.

So, more power to you wanting to put your children in a situation where they’re not being indoctrinated. But the alternative is very, very complicated and difficult. So, yeah.

MALE AUDIENCE: I was wondering, is there a shamanic basis to calling it abomination?

JORDAN B PETERSON: Likely. I would say, generally speaking, there’s a shamanic basis to almost all the religious traditions, because that’s the milieu out of which the religious traditions emerge. Now, I can’t say much more than that, because I don’t know, and no one does, the particularities.

I mean, you might say, well, is there an illusion to the ingestion of psychoactive chemicals in the Adam and Eve story? And people have made that case. And there’s been powerful cases made. So, there’s a book, for example, I think it’s called Soma by a guy named Gordon Wasson, who was the first person, an amateur mycologist, who was the first person to propose that the Soma of the Hindus were Amanita muscaria mushrooms, which is actually, those are the red mushrooms with the white dots that you always see on fairy tales, you know, the cute ones, toadstools. Flies like to eat them. They’re called fly agaric, also.

And flies seem to like getting stoned. I know that’s weird. I know that’s weird thing to say, but I have a good book on animal use of psychedelics, and more animals use them than you might think. But anyways, there is some evidence that, you know, of use of the ingestion of fruits, let’s say, metaphorically speaking, as an aid to the transformation of consciousness that goes back so far that, well, forever, as far as human beings are concerned.

But to specifically tie that to the Adam and Eve story, I haven’t been able to see any evidence that would definitely link them, you know. There’s been a lot of interesting books written about that. There’s one that was quite a kind of a weird hit in, I think, in the early late 60s, might have been early 70s. Sort of got brushed off as a hippie book, but it really wasn’t. It’s called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. That’s really, that’s the sort of book you read and you think, huh, I don’t know what to do about that.

I have no idea what to do about that book. So that’s all I can say about that. Yeah.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: My question’s about martyrdom. So what do you think martyrdom, or the willingness to suffer and die for what you believe, if anything, says of the convictions? And what do you think is the benefit for the martyr, which is at least traditionally an immaterial and transcendent good, compared to the regular sacrifice or practical sacrifice, which is ordered to the future material, psychological, or economic good?

JORDAN B PETERSON: Man, you guys really come up with some wicked questions. I think it depends to some degree on how you define martyrdom. Because you could define it as the tendency to pathologically self-aggrandize yourself on public display. Or you could say it’s the decision to be immovable about a set of principles. So let’s go with that one. Forget about the first one.

Well, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. In some sense, it’s — That’s a really tough one. People asked me, I’ll make it personal, I suppose. People asked me when I first got involved with all this political controversy back in September, October. Well, they asked me a couple of things. They asked me if this was the hill that I really would choose to die on. It’s like pronouns and the transgender issue. Yeah, well, it’s not one I would have picked.

But I mean, it was about language, you know, and that makes it non-trivial. And Bill C-16 was passed this week, as you know. And one of the things that was quite interesting about that, and I will answer your question, was that Brenda Cossman, who was the woman that I debated, I think it’s one of the persons that I debated, didn’t like to be referred to as a woman, but I didn’t think it was Brenda.

Anyways, she wrote an op-ed, and I believe it was in the Globe and Mail, but it might have been the National Post, saying, as I knew she would say, that Bill C-16 was just the beginning, that we have plenty of work left to do. And yes, you can bloody well be sure that we have plenty of work left to do. Anyways, I was asked during that period of time whether or not I was being a martyr, you know. And I thought, well, it’s not really one of my ambitions, you know.

It’s like that sort of torn to the lions thing doesn’t sound like exactly something you might aim for. But I think, well, sometimes you find out in your life, maybe, that there’s something you won’t do. And then maybe you just don’t do it, no matter what the consequence is. Maybe. I don’t know, because, you know, I haven’t been pushed to that point. But there have been people who have been pushed to that point in history, and they’ve basically said, I don’t care what you do to me, I’m not doing that.

And, you know, maybe some of them were suicidal, and some of them were psychotic, and some of them had whatever other problems that people might have. But yeah, I do have this suspicion now, and then some of them were just kind of serious about saying no. And there’s some utility in being serious about saying no. And that sort of revealed itself to me, I suppose, to some degree, back in September, when I read a piece of legislation that said I would have to use some words that were legislated by the government.

And I thought, there’s no goddamn way I’m going to do that under any conditions that I can imagine. Now, there are conditions, and I have a pretty good imagination for unimaginable conditions. I couldn’t see it, because I thought that if I did that, I would break. Whatever would be left of me after having done that would no longer be me, and I’m not interested in that. I know what that would be like. I actually do know what that would be like, and I’m not interested in that.

I would rather have whatever else happens, happen. And people have said to me, well, you’re so courageous for taking this stand. It’s like, yeah, well, I’m not going to claim any sort of other world courage, I can tell you that. But one thing I do know the difference between is different forms of hell. Let’s put it that way. And there’s the hell that maybe I might be dragged through if I don’t agree, don’t act in accordance with this law. And there’s the hell that I would be dragged through if I did act in accordance with the law. And I would vastly prefer the first hell to the second, and it isn’t clear to me that that actually constitutes courage.

Is it useful? Because that’s also the question about martyrdom. I think it’s very useful for people to see that someone will say, there’s no way, there’s no conceivable way that you can get me to do that. And I’ve thought long and hard about such things too, because I’ve taught very many people to negotiate. And one of the things I always teach them is, you don’t negotiate from a position of weakness, because you lose.

And so if I say no to something, and I mean no, I mean no, I bloody well won’t do it. And I think that if there are people who also agree that such things aren’t appropriate, to have the example of someone who says no and means it actually turns out to be useful. And so then I would say, well, that’s an inclination in the potential direction of martyrdom. But I don’t see how to distinguish that from actually just having the courage of your convictions.

And so sometimes you might say, well, a person who has sufficient courage in their convictions will sometimes be put to death. Well, if that’s the definition of a martyr, then sometimes, but not always, that’s a really good thing. And one of the things I really liked about Solzhenitsyn’s book, The Gulag Archipelago, which I refer to it often, is an absolutely staggering book, is that he put in many, many stories of people who were in the Gulag, and they were often religious believers, which was a shock to him, because he was an atheistic communist when he first entered the camps. They were often religious believers, and they were people who said no.

There were things they would not do. They would not participate in what the regime was asking them to do. And you have to read it, because the devil’s in the stories, right? The details in the stories. But Solzhenitsyn in the camps grew to have tremendous admiration for such people, and actually viewed them as exemplars of the mode of being that was necessary for him to escape both the communist propaganda that had shaped him as an individual, and also the terrible bitterness and sorrow and anger that he experienced as a consequence of being flung into the terrible concentration camp conditions of the Gulag Archipelago.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hey doc, thanks for staying alive and potentially saving humanity. Yeah, that’s good stuff. I’m wondering about a couple things. Firstly, who won that childhood fight? You kind of let that just slide, so I’m thinking it was a big L.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, I can tell you, because he was a tough little kid. See, I don’t remember what happened, but my remembrance of him was that he could pound me out pretty effectively. So yeah, yeah. His name was [Vernon Swichenuk]. Yeah, he was a good friend of mine, and I think Vernon still lives in Fairview, so if he hears of this, then maybe he’ll remember that too. So probably he would have won. I didn’t win that many physical fights when I was a kid.

MALE AUDIENCE: Okay, that’s not the only question. Anyway, cool. I’m not sure if you’ve actually been asked this before. I’ve missed the last two lectures, but I’m wondering what your thoughts are on Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien and his work, not just Lord of the Rings, but The Silmarillion, which is basically, I’m seeing all this, and I’m thinking it’s like the modern Bible in a way.

It’s got the weird names, like Tubal-cain and all that stuff, and specifically when we were talking about Cain just now, and how he was, this thing’s just moving, when he was talking about how he felt like betrayed by God, and he spent his whole life working to spite him essentially, and he kind of set the path forward for the darkness in humanity. That’s almost exactly Melkor, which was in The Silmarillion, basically what spawned everything evil in Middle-earth and Mordor and whatnot. And I don’t even know as much as some people could go on.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, Tolkien was a student of mythology, and the story of The Hobbit is a retelling of Beowulf in large part, and that’s a dragon-slaying myth, and so the reason that Tolkien and Rowling for that matter are so popular is because they’ve done a very good job of making the old myths new.

And well, look what’s happened with the Marvel series. It’s the same thing with Star Wars and all of that, is that you can’t not respond to these stories. Now, you’re going to find them in one form or another, and sometimes, well, with the biblical stories for example, the mythological, the meaning of the mythological content has become invisible. That’s partly the death of God that Nietzsche was referring to, but that doesn’t mean that the stories themselves vanish because people have an eternal hunger for them.

Now, the problem with them emerging in, let’s say, more literary or less sophisticated form, let’s take the Marvel movies as an example, is that they’re not surrounded by an articulated culture the same way the biblical stories are. So for example, they’re not surrounded by something like Paradise Lost by John Milton or Dante’s Inferno, which are works of unlimited depth. And so you throw away something of great value and reacquire it in a different place with less value, perhaps, but more comprehensibility. It’s not a great trade.

That is not a critique of Tolkien. It’s not a critique of anybody who’s drawing on mythological stories for their narratives. You have to do that to be a good storyteller, but it’s nice to go as close to the source as you can as well. And the overlaps that you describe, well, yeah, it’s exactly what you’d expect, because if you deal with great mythological themes, you start to get — The archetypes are at the bottom of stories, and so if the story goes down far enough, it runs into the archetypes. Well, that was Jung’s claim, and I think he got that exactly right.

Last one.

MALE AUDIENCE: There’s a passage in Paradise Lost where the demons are building pandemonium under mammon’s guidance, and they crack open what’s not really earth but hell, and they take out the gold and they build pandemonium, which is the most sophisticated architectural wonder of all time in Milton’s language. And this conception of taking material and turning it into a temple to oneself was interpreted by Humphrey Jennings, who was the founder of the Mass Observation movement.

If anyone saw the opening to Britain’s 2012 games, the history of the industrial revolution, he said, was encapsulated by this passage in Milton, where you have demons building a temple for themselves out of matter, and that mankind, in Milton’s language, was taught to do this, or they learned it first by this example. And he says, let not envy the devils have riches in hell.

And I see things in this. One, the Gnostic idea that somehow the world itself that we inhabit is hell, and that matter is not our true place of existence, but somewhere sort of platonic. And also the Faustian sort of bargain that people made around 1666 to get a world of stuff and things and possession by losing a soul, or what existed before that. And I wonder if that, I play with that a lot in my own thought, and I wonder if that’s something that you found in Milton, and what you think of that passage in particular.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, Milton was definitely a prophetic voice, right? And I think that that’s a perfectly reasonable retelling of that section. It’s also very much akin to the story of the Tower of Babel, which we’ll talk about next week.

See, the problem with — God, it’s so complicated. See, one of the things that Jung said about the transformation of the first millennium of Christianity into, let’s say, the second millennium of Christianity, was that Christianity had promised something like redemption, universal redemption from suffering, maybe in the afterlife. But that was kind of a cop-out, let’s say, because it didn’t really solve the problem of suffering here and now.

And Jung believed that as people had — Although it did many positive things. Let’s not forget that. It civilized people in a way that they hadn’t been before, or you could make that case. But then there’s this underground — At the same time, there’s this denial of the utility of material reality that went along with the spiritualization of mankind in the Christian millennium. There was value left in material because it had been ignored.

And so then Jung believed that the collective unconscious, broadly speaking, began to be attracted to what had been rejected by the hyper-spiritualization, and started to question whether or not additional value could be extracted from the material, maybe as an adjunct to the spiritual. Because maybe true redemption was something like a proper meeting of the spiritual and the material, which wasn’t something that seemed to be part and parcel of Christian doctrine up to that point.

Now, maybe what Milton was warning against was a swing too far, right? And I think Milton’s point is well taken, because one of the things that’s worth noting is that you can be perfectly miserable in a house of gold, right? I mean, I’ve known very many wealthy people, very, very wealthy people, and the problem –

See, the thing is that money just doesn’t solve that many problems that people have. People wish it would. People who want to be rich think it will, and the people who want to redistribute money think it will. And I know that there’s nothing to be said for abject poverty, but the problem is that there are many serious problems that human beings have that matter — material comfort alone does nothing to address, or almost nothing.

You can be perfectly — You can have a perfectly miserable family life and 20 million dollars, and the buffer that the 20 million dollars puts between you and the misery is — Sometimes it’s not even a buffer, it’s a magnifier. So Milton would warn against the creation of even the idea of a material utopia, even in principle, something Dostoyevsky also recognized as an error. You cannot solve the problem in that manner, and maybe the demonic idea is propaganda that you could.

Now, maybe there is a balance of some sort, because I don’t understand if we were going to build the City of God, let’s say. Well, a huge part of the endeavor would have to be spiritual, and to me, a huge part of that would be — It would have to be something predicated, if not on truth, at least on the willingness of people not to lie to one another. Without that, all the material well-being in the world is — It’s a facade. It’s like gilding a corpse, right? And I think that’s partly what Milton was warning against.

I mean, Milton was doing many more things than he knew, of course, because he was a poetic genius of incalculable genius. Right, right, right, right. So, well, you’ve obviously thought about such things very much, so that was a very good question.

So, all right, everyone, good night.

For Further Reading:

Jordan Peterson Lecture: Reality and the Sacred (Transcript)

Jordan Peterson: Life, Death, Power, Fame, and Meaning (Transcript)

Jordan Peterson on 12 Rules for Life (Transcript)

Jocko Podcast: Facing your Inner Darkness. Breaking Your Wretched Loop (Transcript)

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