Walking with God: Noah and the Flood: Jordan Peterson (Transcript)

And so, that would include, for example, our ability to utilize language, and the words that we use, and the phrases that we use, and the mutual understanding that we develop as a consequence of interacting with each other.

Archetypically speaking, that structure is always dead and corrupt. And the reason it’s dead is because it was made by people who are dead, and the reason it’s corrupt is because things fall apart of their own accord. And the fact that people don’t aim properly, let’s say, speeds along that process of degeneration. And so what that means, and I think this is something worth knowing, maybe I’ll try standing back here and see if that problem goes away.

What that means is that young people always have a reason to be upset and cynical about the current state of affairs, and it’s that way forever. And so it’s useful, I think, to consider such considerations or such conceptualizations as the patriarchy in that light, because it’s an archetypal truth that the social structure is corrupt and incomplete. And what that means is that it’s something that you have to contend with every moment, in some sense, of your life. It’s a permanent fact of existence. And to be upset that the structures, the social structures, or even the biological structures within which we live are incomplete and imperfect, is to take that personally.

That’s the worst part of it. To take that personally is a misreading of the existential condition of humankind. Because it’s always the case that what you have been given and what you live in is degenerate and corrupt and in need of repair. And it’s easier just to accept that, because there’s also a positive element, and the positive element is, well, you’ve been granted something rather than nothing. And maybe you haven’t been granted pure hell, because, especially in a culture like ours, where many things actually function quite well, there’s room for gratitude there, even if it’s a broken machine, it’s not one that’s completely devastated, and it’s not absolutely hell-bent at every second on your misery and destruction.

And it easily could be, because many societies are like that. And so the fact that we happen to live in one that isn’t corrupt beyond imagining is something to be eternally grateful for. Well, so, we live inside a damaged structure, and we also bear responsibility for that damage, because we don’t do everything we can to constantly repair it. And you might say, well, that’s actually one of the fundamental, you know, people say, ‘Well, what’s the meaning of life?’ What they really mean is, ‘What’s the positive meaning of life?’

Because, as we’ve already discussed, the negative meanings of life are more or less self-evident. Well, the positive meaning of life is to be found in noting the state of lack of repair of the walled city that you inhabit. And then sallying forth to do something about that, to repair the breaches and to fix up the walls and to make the structure that you inhabit as secure and as productive as it possibly can be.

And there’s no shortage of opportunities to do that. You can do that in your own mind. You can do that in your own room. You can do that in your own household, in your local community. And maybe if you get good at doing it at all those levels, then you can start to look beyond that.

And so there’s challenges. That’s the thing that’s kind of interesting about this insufficient structure is that it has a set of challenges built into it because of its insufficiency, and perhaps even because of its corrupt nature that calls forth the potential response from you of heroic adventure. And the heroic adventure is to man the barricades and repair the city. And you can always do that. It doesn’t matter what your personal circumstances are.

There’s always something that isn’t right near you, isn’t correct, isn’t laid out properly, that you could just fix if you wanted to. And one of the things that we’re going to talk about tonight is the idea that if you adopt an attitude that’s like that, that the role that you should play is to make things better wherever you are, however you can, that what would actually happen would be that things would get better wherever you are in all sorts of ways. And that we’ve really, as a species, you might say, or maybe even as singular individuals, we’ve explored that rarely.

It isn’t something that’s put forth as a proposition that often. And it’s quite surprising to me. You know, I had an interesting experience the other day. I went to the keg. I go there because I have food allergies and they’re very careful with people who have food allergies. And the waiter took me to the table and he said that he had been watching my lectures and that’s a very common experience. And he was happy about that. And he said that he’d had two promotions at the keg in the last four months because he’d been watching my lectures.

And I really found that an affecting experience because, you know, you might say, ‘Well, he’s working as a waiter at the keg and there’s nothing particularly heroic about that.’ And I disagree with that, actually, because I don’t care where you’re located. You can do a hell of a job. And I mean that literally. At whatever job you have, you can take whatever job you have and you can make it a real nice little piece of absolute misery. Or you can do, you can act like a civilized human being and notice that no matter where you are, there’s a richness and a complexity that’s completely inexhaustible right at hand.

And then you can take that seriously and you can say, “Well, I happen to be a waiter at the keg and perhaps that’s not what I expected.” And he’s a young guy and perhaps that isn’t where I want to end up, but it’s not nothing. It’s a rich environment and I can make it a lot better if I want to. I can get along properly with my co-workers and not gossip behind their back and I can treat my customers properly.

And if an opportunity comes my way, I can take it and I can see what happens. And so he said that’s what he’d started doing and that things were working out much better for him. He was in a much better job than he was three months ago and three months, that’s nothing, right? I mean, that’s a nice trajectory. It’s an uphill trajectory and that’s what you want really. An uphill trajectory is actually even better than being somewhere good as far as I’m concerned.

Because one of the things that really makes your life meaningful is the clear realization that you’re headed somewhere better than you are now. And then it’s even better if you also understand that there’s a direct causal relationship between the things that you’re doing and the steepness of that incline. And so I get a lot of letters from people like that and they’re most frequently young men, although not always. And they say, “Well, you know, I’ve been listening to these lectures and I decided that I’m going to try to take responsibility for my life.”

And so I’ve started to stop doing all the stupid things that I know are stupid that I know I shouldn’t be doing. And I’ve started doing some of the things that aren’t stupid that I know I should be doing, which seems pretty obvious, really, if you think about it. But obvious though it may be, that isn’t necessarily what people do. And then they write and say, “You can’t believe what difference that makes.” And they’re thrilled about it. And so I’m thrilled about it when I get letters like that because I really don’t experience anything as better than a letter like that or a message like that.

Because it’s so good to see things that aren’t so good replaced by something better. And I really do think it’s an open question. I truly believe it’s an open question to what degree we could make things better if that’s what we actually aimed at doing. You know, in some of the stories that we’ve covered already, the story of Cain and Abel in particular is really an analysis of that problem, which is so remarkable. It occurs so early in this document. It’s such a foundational story.

And it basically says, well, there’s two modes of being in the world, right? There’s one where you adopt the responsibility for living properly, for being properly, and you make the sacrifices necessary for doing that. And then everything will flourish properly. And the other one is a pathway of resentment and bitterness and rejection and murder and genocide. And that just seems exactly right to me. And so if the positive path beckons, if you can actually see what it is, if you can lower yourself enough to see what it is.

Carl Jung said once that modern people didn’t see God because they didn’t look low enough. It’s a phrase I really, really like because people denigrate the opportunities that are right in front of them. And there’s no reason to do that because what’s right in front of you is the majesty of being. That’s what’s right in front of you. It’s inexhaustibly complex and full of potential. And there’s no reason to assume that wherever you happen to be isn’t as good a starting place as anywhere else.

Now, you know, I know some people have terrible, terrible lives. They’re in situations that are absolutely unbearable. But I also do know that even situations like that can be made a hell of a lot worse by the bad, by the worst kind of attitude. That’s for sure. So, so anyway, so that’s where you are. You’re in a damaged structure. You’re a damaged structure. You’re in a damaged structure. But, you know, at least it’s got some walls. You know, you’re not being fed to the lions on a regular basis.

So that’s a good thing. And you can emerge forward, you know, heroically, magically to confront the chaos that constantly threatens the structure within which you live. And you can free something as a consequence of that. You can learn something. You can strengthen yourself. That’s the other thing, because the way what you’re actually made of in many ways, what informs you, what you’re made of is what you encounter when you voluntarily encounter the unknown. And so the more you voluntarily encounter the unknown, the more you get made of.

And the more you get made of, the more there is to you. And then the more you’re good at encountering the unknown and restructuring order and calling forth proper order out of the potential of being. God, you’ve got to think, why wouldn’t you do that, since you can do that? And it’s an endless mystery. You know, I think part of it is that people, well, it’s also encapsulated to some degree in the story of Adam and Eve. Because what happens to Adam is when he becomes self-conscious, right, he becomes ashamed of himself and regards himself as a lowly sort of creature.

And there’s endless reasons why people would do that, because, of course, we’re rife with imperfection. And so he hides from God. And I think that’s actually the answer to the conundrum, which is that people don’t aspire to the highest good, because they’re deeply ashamed of themselves and their weaknesses and their insufficiencies.

And so that’s not the only reason. I mean, there’s the desire to avoid responsibility and there’s all the negative motivations as well, like resentment and hatred and the desire to make things worse. I don’t want to give us too much of a break, but it’s something like that. But it’s okay to not be in a very good place if what you’re trying to do with that not very good place is make it better.

And one of the things I really have learned as a clinical psychologist is that you just cannot believe how powerful incremental progress is. You can do the calculations like, it’s like compound interest, you know. If you make your life a tenth of a percent better a week, man, in two or three years, you’re in such a better place than you were that it isn’t even like the same domain. And if you keep that up for 10 years or 20 years, you know, especially if you’re young and you start early, you start to straighten yourself out and fix the things that you can fix, you can transform your lives in ways that are completely unimaginable.

And God only knows what the upper limit of that is in terms of human possibility, because we are amazing creatures, you know, when we really get our act together and stop running at 10% of our capacity. So that’s what you do. You’ve got, you know, the fact that things aren’t exactly the way they should be, at least gives you something to do. And maybe something great to do, because there’s no shortage of suffering and trouble that besets the world that you could conceivably ameliorate in some way. And the utility of that and the intrinsic meaning of that is self-evident.

So it also makes me curious about nihilism, for example, and despair, because, I mean, I understand those emotions. I understand them deeply and the intellectual mindset goes along with it. But they just seem beside the point to me in some sense, because there are so many things that need doing that all you really have to do is open your eyes and look at them and then decide that you’re actually going to do something about them. And you might think, well, what’s within my scope of influence is so trivial that it’s not worth doing.

It’s like it won’t stay trivial for long if you do it. Not at all. And I don’t think it’s trivial to begin with. I don’t think that any, I really don’t believe that anything done right is trivial. And my experience in my life has been that anything I actually did paid off. It didn’t pay off necessarily in the way that I expected it to pay off. That’s a whole different story. But if it was genuine commitment to do something, even if it went sideways and the outcome was really something other than what I expected, the net consequence over time was nothing but good.

So every new frontier that can be conquered is an advanced forward. And there’s no shortage of frontier because we’re surrounded by the unknown. We’re surrounded by our own ignorance. And we can continually move into that domain, into the domain of chaos, or we can restructure pathological order. And that’s the secret to proper being. And so then you encounter chaos that way. And then you can regard yourself as the sort of entity that, despite its insufficiency, has the capability to conquer chaos, despite the danger of that.

That’s the other thing, because the fact that you’re fragile is actually a precondition for your heroism. Because if you weren’t fragile, then there’d be nothing heroic about doing something difficult, right? Because if you could be hurt or damaged or defeated or end up in failure, then where’s the moral courage in the endeavor? It has to be that the fragility is built into the courage. And so it’s not a reason not to engage in it at all. In fact, quite the contrary.

And so then, you know, what do you do? Well, you put the city back together, and maybe the way you want it, so that it’s functional and efficient and beautiful, and so that people can flourish there and flourish in a manner that makes them feel that the unbearable catastrophe of being is worth it for the experience. That’s what you’re aiming at. And it’s not an impossibility. And then not only that, not only do you repair the city when you do that, but you make yourself the sort of thing that continually repairs the city.

And that’s even better. That’s the end goal, because it’s not the repair of the city that’s the goal. It’s the transformation of yourself into the thing that continually repairs the city. And so there’s just no reason for that not to happen. And the more it can happen, the better. Well, there’s an undercurrent to this story, and that is also the story of the flood. And that’s the fact that the city can become corrupt because people don’t engage in heroic endeavour, or perhaps because they engage in precisely the opposite of that, which is outright destructive behaviour.

And this is also something that’s worth considering, too, because if you consider your own manner of being, you know, you can say things to people like, tell the truth and be good. And those are cliches, obviously, and so they lack power because they’re cliches, but you can take them apart and utilize them in a manner that stops being a cliche. And you do that by being more humble about them, I would say, because maybe you can’t tell the truth because you don’t know what the truth is. But one thing you can do is you can stop saying things that you know to be untrue.

And you might say, well, how do I know that they’re untrue? And the answer to that is, well, you need a whole philosophy of truth, the elaboration of an entire philosophy of truth to answer that question. And so we’re not going to bother answering that question because in some sense, at the moment, it’s beside the point. That isn’t the issue. The issue is there are times in your life where you know that the thing that you’re saying is not true. It’s a deception. It’s a lie of some sort. And you’re using it to manipulate yourself or another person or the world.

And you’re also possessed, fully possessed of the idea that you can get away with it. And there’s a satanic arrogance about that. In fact, that is the archetypal arrogance that’s portrayed in the mythological character of Satan, because Satan is precisely the archetype of the element of the mind that believes that it can twist and bend the structure of reality without paying the price for that.

And you can’t imagine anything that’s more arrogant than that, because really, do you really think that you can twist the structure of reality and that that’s going to work out for you without it snapping back? It’s so obvious that that can’t work, that everyone knows it. But anyways, back to the initial point is that you know by the rules of the game that you yourself are playing that some of the times you’re violating the rules of the game that you’re playing. And the first issue with regards to, say, stating the truth or behaving in a responsible manner would be merely stop cheating at whatever game it is that you’ve chosen to play.

That’s a good start and that’ll straighten out your life. It’ll start to straighten out your life. And so, well, the flood, how does the flood tie into this? Well, you know, we live in a corrupt structure, we’re corrupt as individuals, we live in a corrupt structure, and part of that corruption is just happenstance, it’s the way things fall apart. But the other part of it is that not only are we not aiming up, we’re actually aiming down. And the flood story is a warning, and it’s a very clear warning.

And the warning is if you aim down enough, and then if enough of you aim down at the same time, everything will degenerate into something that’s indistinguishable from the chaos from which things emerged at the beginning of time. It’s something like that, because the cosmos that’s presented in mythological representations is chaos versus order, right? The order is on top, you might say, and the chaos is always underneath, and the chaos can break through, or the order can crumble, and you can fall into the chaos, and that chaos is intermingled potential.

And the way that you destroy the order and let the chaos rise back up, which is exactly how it’s portrayed in the flood story, is by inhabiting the corpse of your father, that’s one mythological motif. And feeding on the remains with no gratitude and no attempt to replenish what it is that you’re taking from. And the warning in the flood story is don’t do that for very long, because things will happen that are so awful you cannot possibly imagine it. And that’ll happen to you personally, and it’ll happen to your family, and it’ll happen to your community, and it’s happened to people over and over throughout history, and it’s quite interesting.

You know, it’s very soon after the story of Cain and Abel, when you see evil enter the world in the story of Adam and Eve, along with self-consciousness. And evil there is the ability, that’s the knowledge of good and evil, that’s the ability to hurt other people self-consciously, to know what you’re doing. And then, of course, instantly Cain takes that to the absolute extreme, and he uses that capacity to destroy really what he loves best. He gets as close as a human being can to destroying the divine ideal, because, of course, his brother is Abel, and Abel is favored by God, and Cain destroys him.

Which Cain tells God at the end of that episode that his punishment is more than he can bear. And I think the reason for that is where are you once you destroy your own ideal? What’s left for you? There’s nowhere to go. There’s no up. And when there’s no up, there’s a lot of down. And, you know, there’s an idea that was put forth very nicely in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, when he was describing, from a psychological perspective, essentially, what hell is. And hell is, you’re in hell to the degree that you’re distant from the good. That might be a good way of thinking about it.

And if you destroy your own ideal, which you do with jealousy and resentment, and the desire to pull down people who you would like to be, let’s say, then you end up in a situation that’s indistinguishable from hell. And the way the biblical story unfolds is, well, it’s Cain, and then it’s the flood.

And so Cain adopts this mode of being that’s antithetical to being itself, at least to positive being itself. He does it voluntarily. He does it knowing full well what he’s doing. And the net consequence of this, that as it ripples through the entire social structure, is that God stands back and says, this whole thing has got so bad, the only thing we can do is just wipe it to the ground. And that is no joke. That’s exactly how things work.

And one of the things that’s extraordinarily terrifying about that sequence of stories, and I believe this to be true, I think I realized this independently of any of the analysis that I was doing of mythological stories. Because I looked at what happened in places like the Soviet Union, and Maoist China, and Nazi Germany, and the most penetrating observers of those societies, the people who were most interested in how it was that those absolute catastrophes came about, all said the same thing. It was rooted in the degeneration of the individuals who made up the society.

You know, you hear, well, people were following orders. It’s like, no, that explanation doesn’t hold water, or that you’d be punished if you resisted. Well, there was some truth in that, but nowhere near as much as people might think, especially at the beginnings of the process. More it was that people decided, each and every one of them, to turn a blind eye to the catastrophes and to participate in the lies. And that warped the entire societies, and they veered their way downward to something as closely approximating hell as you could hope to manage, especially in places like Nazi Germany, and, well, in all three of those places, in Maoist China and in the Soviet Union.

And so, the thing that’s so frightening about, one of the things that’s so frightening about the stories in Genesis is, they say something very clear, which is that your moral degeneration contributes in no small way to the degeneration of the entire cosmos. You say, well, I would like my life to be meaningful. People say that. Really, would you? Really? You really would like your life to be meaningful. You think maybe people would trade a little nihilism to not have to face that particular realization, and I think people do that all the time.

It’s a terrible way to realize, but we are networked together. And that’s the price of, or let’s say, that’s the vulnerability that’s associated with our intense capacity to communicate. And it is certainly possible that the ripples of our individual actions have consequences that are far beyond the limits of our immediate consciousness. And I also think people know that too. They know that in the way that people know things when they don’t want to know them, which means they know them embodied, they can feel them, they can sense them, they have an emotional response to them, but there’s no damn way they’re going to let them become articulate because they don’t want to know.

And when you’re feeling guilty and ashamed about the things you’ve done or not done, and I know that can get out of hand as well, it’s often because there is a crooked little part of you that’s aiming at the worst possible outcome. You know, one of the things Jung said about the shadow, you know, Jung’s famous idea that everyone has a dark side, and that that dark side needs to be incorporated and made conscious. Jung said that the shadow of the human being reaches all the way to hell. And he actually, that’s the thing that’s so interesting about reading Carl Jung, is he actually means what he says. It’s not a metaphor.

It’s like the part of you that’s twisted against being is aligned with the part of the cosmos, let’s say, the conscious cosmos that’s aiming at making everything as terrible as it can possibly be. And, you know, it’s a terrible shock to realize that. It’s partly why people don’t realize that it’s something that people keep at an arm’s length. It’s the same as recognizing yourself as a Nazi concentration camp guard, which is a very useful exercise, because there’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t have been or still could be one.

So, and if you think otherwise, then all the more reason for assuming that you would be unable to resist the temptation if it was in fact offered to you. And if you don’t think it’s a temptation, then there’s so much that you don’t know about human beings that you’re not even in the game. Because if it wasn’t a temptation, then people bloody well wouldn’t have done it. And plenty of people did it. And it’s no wonder.

So things get serious in Genesis very, very rapidly. And the depth of the seriousness is ultimate archetypal. It gets as serious as it can get. The story of Noah and the flood opens in a fragmentary manner, and I believe that these passages are part of a longer story that we only have bits and pieces of, and also one that’s fragmented in its… it’s parts of more than one story.

And it starts like this. “It came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose.” Now, there’s an idea there. There’s two ways of looking at the past. You can kind of see that in the political landscape that we inhabit now. On the more conservative end of the spectrum, people regard the past as the land of giants, right? They were the heroes of the past who established the current conditions that we exist in.

And then the people on the left are more concerned, perhaps, with the… what would you call it? With the lineage of corruption that’s come down through the centuries. Both of those perspectives are accurate. You can say, well, there were the great heroes of the past who established our modes of being. You can think of them as composite beings if you want. That’s fine. That’s a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it. And you can also think of the accumulation of corruption and evil that’s come along the centuries as well.

And so, you see, both of those reflected in these initial few lines, that the sons of gods, so those are the heroes, saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and they took them wives, all of which they chose. Then this statement comes in as somewhat of a non sequitur. I looked at a variety of interpretations of that line because it doesn’t seem to follow so clearly from the previous line. And exactly what it means isn’t obvious, but it seems to be… The first line talks about the heroes of the past. And the second line says, wait a second, there’s something corrupt about the human mode of being.

And one of the consequences of that, as far as God is concerned, is that there are conditions under which the divine spirit will not strive with man. What that means is there are conditions under which, let’s say, I don’t think there’s any other way of putting it. The divine impulse towards the good will abandon you because of things that you’ve done. And then the secondary consideration here is that perhaps because of the degeneration of people, it’s not so obvious here that our life spans are limited, that the spirit that inhabits us will only do so for a limited amount of time.

And that’s tangled in a strange way in with the idea of human moral culpability. And that’s posed against the notion of the giants of the past. And then it returns to the giant idea, the narrative returns to the giant idea and reads, “There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of men came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, and the same became mighty men which are of old, men of renown.” And that’s the end of that sequence of fragments. It’s very broken, but you can see a dual narrative underneath it.

And one of the narratives is that there’s the kind of corruption, despite the nature of the giants of the past, there’s the kind of corruption lurking that would cause God to withhold his grace and allow men to deteriorate. And that sets the stage for Noah and the flood. “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” You know, one of the things I really didn’t like about going to church when I was a kid, I went to a pretty moderate church, it was the United Church, which has hardly even become a church now, it’s so moderate, so to speak.

One of the things I didn’t like was the constant harping by the ministry on the sinful nature of human beings. It didn’t speak to me properly, partly because I really didn’t understand what it meant, and partly because it seemed, well, sort of, what would you say, was self-flagellating in an unattractive way. I don’t know if there is an attractive way to be self-flagellating, but there was something about it that was also rote and fake that I didn’t like.

But, you know, in later years I thought about that more, and I started to understand that there was some real utility in asking people to keep the evil that they’re doing clear and conscious in the forefront of their imagination. I think I mentioned to you guys last week this little episode from what we know of Mesopotamian culture surrounding the emperor, the New Year’s festival. They would take the emperor outside of the walled city and strip him of his garb so that he was reduced to just an ordinary man, and then humiliate him richly, and then ask him how it was over the last year that he wasn’t a spectacular embodiment of Marduk.

Marduk was the Mesopotamian deity who made order out of chaos, essentially, and the emperor was supposed to sit and think, okay, well, you know, I’m emperor and everything, I should be doing a good job, maybe I should even be doing a great job, and probably I’m coming up short in a bunch of ways, and that actually happens to be important since I’m running the entire show.

I should be very, very cognizant of how I’m failing to live up to the ideal. And that is what that call, that constant clarion call that’s degenerated, I would say, in institutional Christianity, that was actually the idea, was, look, there’s a bunch of ways that you’re not being everything you could be. And it is not supposed to be a whip to knock you down, although maybe it’s a whip to knock down your pride, the pride that stops you from being aware of your insufficiencies.

It’s more like a call to the opposite. It’s like, well, you should stop doing those things because you could be so much more than you are, and that would be so much better for you and everyone else that it’s just not good that you continue doing these things, continue breaking your own rules, let’s say, because we could certainly, as I said, we could start this game by assuming that you should at least play the game that you’re playing straight.

And so, and it is the case that if you watch yourself, it’s a terrifying thing to do, but if you watch yourself, you’ll see, you lie a lot. Like, when I learned this to begin with, I was in my 20s, and I was, I’m a smart person, and I was very proud of that.

I was also a small person, I was moved ahead one year in school, and I was a small person to begin with, and so I was a very small person in my classes, and also very mouthy, which might not come as much of a surprise, and somewhat provocative. And so, you know, and I got pushed around a fair bit, because everybody gets pushed around, and my weapon was to be mouthy, and it was a fairly effective weapon, although it tended to backfire, because, you know, if you’re really effectively mouthy with large, obnoxious people, then they tend to respond in a relatively negative physical way. And so that sort of thing was happening to me a fair bit.

But I was quite, I was quite proud of the fact that I was, that I was, I had some intellectual power, and that, it was then, in my 20s, when I learned about some of the danger of that, because I started to read, partly Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and I started to understand the danger of the intellect. And the danger of the intellect, as far as I can tell, is that it tends towards pride and arrogance, and it also tends to fall in love with its own productions. And so that’s actually Lucifer in “Paradise Lost,” that’s Lucifer. Lucifer is the intellect that falls in love with its own productions, and then assumes that there’s nothing outside of what it thinks.

That’s the totalitarian mentality, right? It’s like, we have a total system, and we know how everything works, and we’re going to implement it, and that’ll bring about heaven on earth, right? That’s the totalitarian mindset, and that’s associated with intellectual arrogance, and another, at the same time, another thing was happening to me, so I was noticing that.

I started to understand what that meant, and I also started to understand that there was more to life than the intellect, much more, because I smoked too much, and I drank too much, and I weighed like 130 pounds, I wasn’t in good physical shape. And like, I had a lot of things to do when I went to graduate school to put myself together. At the same time, I was trying to understand why things had gone so crazily wrong with the world, its encapsulation in the Cold War, and what role I might be playing in that, if any, or what role any of us were playing in that.

At the same time, I was working at a prison, only a little bit, I worked with this crazy psychologist. He used to put jokes on his multiple-choice tests. He was a really eccentric guy, but I really liked his courses, and he taught a course on creativity, and he was also a prison psychologist. And he was an eccentric guy, and he, for some reason, liked me, and maybe because I was eccentric too, and he invited me to go out to the Edmonton maximum security prison with him a couple of times, which I did.

And that was a very interesting experience, because I was trying to figure out what role each individual’s behaviour bore to the pathology of the group, it was something like that. And I went out there, and I met a little guy, smaller than me, I was a little bigger by then, and he was a pretty innocuous guy. And what had happened was, I was out in this gymnasium, it looks like a high school prison, which is really quite telling in my estimation, and there were all these monsters in there, weightlifting, and they were monsters.

I remember one guy, he was tattooed everywhere, and he had a huge scar running down the middle of his chest, it looked like someone had to hit him with an axe, and I was in there. And I had this weird cape that I used to wear that I bought in Portugal, and some boots that went along with it, yeah, it was like an 1890s Sherlock Holmes cape. And it was really like, it was from the 1890s, because this little village was up on a hill, it was a walled city on a hill. And they sold these things, and I don’t think they’d changed the style since 1890.

And so I thought they were really cool, and so I was wearing that, which wasn’t perhaps the most conservative garb to dawn if you’re going to go to a maximum security prison. And so anyways, I was in the gymnasium, and the psychologist left, and God only knows, I mean, that’s what he was like, and all these guys came around me. And they were offering to trade their prison clothes for my cape, and it was like, I was being made an offer I couldn’t refuse, you know, and so I didn’t really know what to do.

And this little guy said something like, “The psychologist sent me to come and take you away,” or something like that. And so I thought, well, better this little guy than all these monsters, so we went outside the gym, through some doors, like school doors. We went outside the gym into the exercise yard, I guess, and we were wandering along, and he was talking to me. And he seemed like kind of an innocuous guy, and then the psychologist showed up at the door and motioned us back, and so, which was kind of a relief, and so I went into his office.

And he said, “You know that guy that you walked out in the yard with?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “He took two cops one night, and he had them kneel down, and while they were begging for their lives, he shot them both in the back of the head.” And I thought, hmm, that’s, see, the thing that was so interesting was that he was so innocuous, right, because what you’d hope is that someone like that would be very much unlike you, let’s say. And certainly wouldn’t be like someone innocuous that you’d met.

What you’d want is that the guy would be like, you know, half werewolf and half vampire, so you could just tell right away that he was a cold-blooded killer, but no, he was this sort of ineffectual little guy, who was certainly not ineffectual if you gave him a revolver in the upper hand.

And so that made me think, that made me think a lot about the relationship between being innocuous and being dangerous. And then another thing happened, I met another guy out there, and then a week or two later, I heard that he and a friend of his had held another guy down, and pulverized his left leg with a lead pipe, like just pulverized it. And the reason for that was that they thought that he was a snitch, and maybe he was. And that time I did something different, instead of being shocked and horrified by that, although I certainly was, I thought, how in the world could you do that, because I didn’t think I could do that.

I didn’t think that, I thought that there was a qualitative distinction between me and those people. And so I spent about two weeks trying to see if I could figure out under what conditions I could do that, like what kind of psychological transformation I would have to undergo to be able to do that. And so that was a meditative exercise, let’s say, and it only took about ten days for me to realize that, not only could I do that, that it would be a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be. And that’s sort of where that wall between me and what Jung described as the shadow started to fall apart, and that also was very useful, because I started to treat myself as a somewhat different entity, because I hadn’t been aware up to that point, you know, because I thought I was a good guy.

And there’s no reason for me to think that, because you’re not a good guy, unless you really made a bloody effort to be a good guy, you’re just not, it’s not easy. And so you’re probably a moderately bad guy, and that’s a long ways from being an absolutely horrible guy, but it’s also a long ways from being a good guy. And so, but I had a little more respect for myself after that, because I also understood that there was a monstrous element to the human psyche that you needed to respect. And that was part of you, that you should regard yourself in some sense as a loaded weapon.

It’s very useful around children to regard yourself as a loaded weapon, because around children you are a loaded weapon. And the terrible experiences that many children have with their parents are testament to that. Anyways, about the same time, and I don’t exactly know how these things were causally related, I guess it was because I was trying to figure out who I was and how that could be fixed, something like that. I started to pay very careful attention to what I was saying.

I don’t know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily, but I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche, and I’ve actually had students tell me the same thing that has happened to them, after they’ve listened to some of the material that I’ve been describing to all of you.

But I split into two, let’s say, and one part was, let’s say, the old me that was talking a lot, and that liked to argue, and that liked ideas, and there was another part that was watching that part, just with its eyes open, and neutrally judging. And the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and going, “That isn’t your idea, you don’t really believe that, you don’t really know what you’re talking about, that isn’t true.” And I thought, hmm, that’s really interesting. And that was happening to like 95% of what I was saying.

And so then I didn’t really know what to do. I thought, okay, this is strange, so maybe I’ve fragmented, and that’s just not a good thing at all. I mean, it wasn’t like I was hearing voices or anything like that. I mean, it wasn’t like that. It was, well, people have multiple parts. So then I had this weird conundrum. It’s like, well, which of these two things are me? Is it the part that’s listening and saying, “No, that’s rubbish, that’s a lie, you’re doing that to impress people, you’re just trying to win the argument, you know.” Was that me or was the part that was going about my normal verbal business me?

And I didn’t know, but I decided I would go with the critic. And then what I tried to do, what I learned to do, I think, was to stop saying things that made me weak. And now that, I mean, I’m still trying to do that because I’m always feeling when I talk, whether or not the words that I’m saying are either making me align or making me come apart. And I think the alignment, I really do think the alignment, I think alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it, because I think if you say things that are as true as you can say them, let’s say, then they come up, they come out of the depths inside of you.

Because we don’t know where thoughts come from. We don’t know how far down into your substructure the thoughts emerge. We don’t know what processes of physiological alignment are necessary for you to speak from the core of your being. We don’t understand any of that. We don’t even conceptualize that, but I believe that you can feel that. And I learned some of that from reading Carl Rogers, by the way, who’s a great clinician, because he talked about mental health in part as the coherence between the spiritual or the abstract and the physical, that the two things were aligned. And there’s a lot of idea of alignment in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking.

But anyways, I decided that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak. And what happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying. I would say 95% of it. It’s a hell of a shock to wake up and, I mean, this is over a few months, but it’s a hell of a shock to wake up and realize that you’re mostly dead wood. It’s a shock, you know, and you might think, well, do you really want all of that to burn off? It’s like, well, there’s nothing left but a little husk, 5% of you. It’s like, well, if that 5% is solid, then maybe that’s exactly what you want to have happen.

Also, I told you that story is an elaboration of this line. “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” It’s a question worth asking. Just exactly what are your motives? Well, you know, maybe they’re purer than mine were, and it’s certainly possible. I don’t think that I’m naturally a particularly good person. I think I have to work at it very, very hard. And I don’t necessarily think that everyone is like that. But some people are worse than that, and everyone’s like that to some degree.

So it’s worth thinking about. Just how much trouble are you trying to cause? You know, and the other thing you might think about is that if you’re not doing something important with your life, by your own definition, because that’s the game that we’re playing, you get to define the terms, at least initially. Maybe you’re prone to cause trouble just because you don’t have anything better to do. Because at least it’s trouble is more interesting than boring.

You know, that’s something you learn if you read Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky knew that extraordinarily well. And so if you’re not doing something, if you’re not pushing yourself to the limits of your capacity, then you have plenty of leftover, what would you say? Willpower, energy and resources to devote to causing interesting trouble.

And so, also I would say this is also an archetypal scenario. “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” That’s something to meditate on. And it’s not self-destructive, because what it is, is an attempt to… It’s like the diagnosis of an illness. It’s like if that does happen to be the case for you, or to some degree, maybe it’s only 10% of you or something, or maybe it’s 90%. Well then, coming to terms with that is excellent, because then maybe you can stop doing it.

And what would be the downside to that? You’d have to give up your resentment, obviously, and your hatred and all of that. And that’s really annoying, because those emotions are very… They’re easy to engage in, and they’re engaging. And they have this feeling of self-righteousness with them, that goes along with them. But, you’re not doing this in order to put yourself down. You’re doing this in order to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to leave everything that you don’t have to be, behind. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

“And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.” What’s the idea? Well, the idea is that the cosmos that God created had become corrupt. And that’s a funny thing, because, you know, this is the other thing about Genesis that always hits me, is that that’s also true.

I told you that the Mesopotamians believed that human beings were made out of the blood of Kingu, who was the worst monster that the dragon of chaos could imagine. That’s a pretty harsh diagnosis. But the reason the Mesopotamians believed that is because they knew, as did the authors of Genesis, that human beings are the only creatures in the cosmos, let’s say, the cosmos of being, who are actually capable of deceit, conscious deceit and malevolence. And the question is, to what degree does the expression of that conscious deceit and malevolence corrupt things so badly that it would be better that they didn’t exist at all?

Well, you see stories, there’s a story associated with this in the Epic of Gilgamesh, associated with the flood that has exactly the same underlying narrative structure. In fact, some people think the story of Noah was derived from it, where the gods who created repented of their creation and determined that erasing it would be better than allowing it to propagate.

And you see the same thing in the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, because the early gods, so they’re representatives of the giants of humanity, I would say, make so much noise and are so careless that the original creator god Tiamat and her consort Tiamat decide to wipe them from the face of the earth.

And so, when you read something like this, if you read it from an informed historical perspective, it starts to have a depth that makes it transcend the sort of archaic and fairytale-like element of the story. It’s like, I’ve read some very terrible things about what happened in Nazi Germany and what happened when the Japanese invaded China and just what happened generally in the history of mankind. Things can get so bad that it takes the imagination of a very bad person to conceptualize them. And when they get that bad, this is the only kind of language that works to describe them.

You know, that’s another thing that I’ve discovered working with my clinical clients is that when their lives are really not going well, you know, when they’re close to suicide or when they’re close to homicide or when there are things going on in the family that are so corrupt and terrible that they reach back generations and they’re aimed at nothing but misery and destruction. The only language that suffices has a religious tone. This is nothing else that’s available to describe what’s happening with the proper level of seriousness.

And it might be that you’ve never encountered a situation that required that level of seriousness, but that doesn’t mean that those situations don’t exist. They exist. You generally do everything you can to avoid being ensconced in them, but they certainly do exist. And the probability that you’ll encounter a situation like that or two at some point in your life is extraordinarily high. You’ll tangle with someone who’s malevolent right to the core. And maybe it’ll be you, that is. And that’ll be a big shock.

And then these sorts of things, these sorts of poetic descriptors start to become much more real. “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.” That’s an interesting line, because if you remember back in the story of Adam and Eve, what happens to Adam once he eats the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and wakes up, the scales fall from his eyes, becomes self-conscious, develops the knowledge of good and evil. He won’t walk with God when God calls him in the garden.

And so Noah is Adam without the fall, essentially. And there’s something that Noah’s doing right that motivates God to spare him, or maybe to show him a pathway through the emergent chaos, something like that. That’s worth thinking about a lot, because there will be situations in your life where what you face is the emergent chaos. And maybe that’ll be some terrible catastrophe inside your family, or maybe it’ll be something that’s occurring on a much broader social level. But the chaos is coming.

And what you’re going to want to know, unless you want to be a denizen of the chaos or even a contributor to it, and perhaps that is what you want, because many people under those circumstances choose that. What you want is to know how you build an ark and get through it. If you’re interested in life, if you’re interested in proper being, and you’re disinclined to produce any more suffering than necessary, then you want to know how to conduct yourself when the catastrophe comes, so that you have a reasonable possibility of moving through it and starting anew.

So when this old story says, well, God’s not happy and he’s going to wipe everything out, it’s like, well, you might want to take that seriously. And then when it says, but there’s one person who had a mode of being that protected him from that, that’s also something you might want to take seriously, because you might want to know what that mode of being is, because you might need to use it. And so these sorts of things are practical in the deepest possible sense. They’re real in the deepest possible sense and practical in the deepest possible sense. So Noah walked with God.

Now I’m going to switch way ahead here, because, you know, I said at the beginning of the lecture series that the Bible is a hyperlinked text and everything refers to everything else. And so there’s utility in reading it in linear order, but it’s not a linear document. It’s a document that you can move through in an infinite number of, there’s an infinite number of pathways that you can use to walk through it. And all of the document expands upon and refers to all of the rest of the document.

And so I’m going to switch to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is probably the key document in the New Testament. And I’m going to switch to it because I think it’s the closest thing we have to a fully articulated description of what it would mean to walk with God so that you’re in the ark when the flood comes. It’s the most fully articulated realization of that idea that leaps out of the metaphorical, because if I say, well, you should conduct yourself like Noah and walk with God and build an ark, obviously those are poetic and metaphorical suggestions. And it’s not that easy to bring them into practice, right? It’s the distance.

There’s a big distance between you and the archetype. It isn’t obvious how to manifest it in your own life. And what has to happen is the archetype has to be differentiated and articulated so that it becomes sufficiently practical and personal so that you can actually implement it.

And so I’m going to depart some of the Sermon on the Mount. It starts in Matthew 5, and I’m not going to talk about Matthew 5. I’m going to talk about the end of Matthew 6 and most of Matthew 7. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”

Therefore take no thought, saying, “What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed?” Those are famous lines and that’s sort of Christ the hippie, right? It’s like, hey, let it all hang out. That’s an old phrase. Do your thing and everything will come to you. And these lines have been interpreted in that manner many times. But that’s seriously not the proper interpretation because there’s a kicker with this injunction. And the kicker is this. “For your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

That’s a lot different than the hippie thing, right? Because there’s a very, very, very interesting idea here. It’s certainly one of the most profound ideas that I have ever encountered. And the idea is this, is that if you configure your life so that what you are genuinely doing is aiming at the highest possible good, then the things that you need to survive and to thrive on a day-to-day basis will deliver themselves to you. That’s a hypothesis. And it’s not some simple hypothesis, right? Because what it basically says is, if you dare to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize, your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else.

Well, how are you going to find out if that’s true? Well, it’s a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. There’s no way you’re going to find out whether or not that’s true unless you do it. So no one can tell you either, just because it works for someone else. I mean, that’s interesting and all that, but it’s no proof that it’ll work for you. You have to be all in in this game. And so the idea is, seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. It’s like, that’s actually a fairly important caution when you’re talking about not having to pay attention to what you’re going to eat or what you’re going to wear. It’s like, what it’s essentially saying is that those problems are trivial in comparison.

And the probability is that if you manifest yourself properly in the world, that those things will come your way is extraordinarily high. And I believe that that’s exactly right. I mean, I’ve watched people operate in the world and I would say that there is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and then strive to attain it. There’s no more practical pathway to the kind of success that you could have if you actually knew what success was. And so that’s what this sermon is attempting to posit.

It’s like in the story of Pinocchio, you know, what happens at the beginning of the story of Pinocchio is that Geppetto wishes on a star. We talked about that a little bit. And so what Geppetto does is align himself with the metaphorical manifestation of the highest good he can conceptualize. And say, he makes a commitment, let’s say, he aims at the star. And for him, the star is the possibility that he can take his creation, a puppet, whose strings are being pulled by unseen forces, and have it transform into something that’s autonomous and real. Well, that’s a hell of an ambition. You know, and we’re wise enough to put that in a children’s movie, but too foolish to understand what it means.

It’s such an interesting juxtaposition that we can both know that and not know it at the same time. You can go to the movie, you can watch it, and it makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that you can go home and think, well, I know what that meant. Well, people are complicated, right? We exist at different levels, and all the levels don’t communicate with one another. But the movie is a hypothesis, and the hypothesis is, there’s no better pathway to self-realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it.

And then you might also ask yourself, and this is definitely worth asking, do you really have anything better to do? And if you don’t, well, why would you do anything else? “Therefore take no thought for the moral, for the moral shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” I spent a long time trying to figure out what that meant, too, because it’s another one of those lines that can easily be read as pro-grasshopper and anti-ant.

You know, you remember the old fable of the grasshopper and the ant? Maybe not. I’m not going to tell it. But the ant works, and the grasshopper fiddles, and the ant has a pretty good time in the winter, and the grasshopper dies. And so, this is like a pro-grasshopper line, but it’s not, because it says something else. It says that if you orient yourself properly, and then pay attention to what you do every day, that works. And I actually think that that’s in accordance with what we have come to understand about human perception, because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim.

You’re a creature that has an aim. You have to have an aim in order to do something. You’re an aiming creature. You look at a point, and you move towards it. It’s built right into you. And so, you have an aim. Well, let’s say your aim is the highest possible aim. Well then, so that sets up the world around you. It organizes all of your perceptions. It organizes what you see and you don’t see. It organizes your emotions and your motivations.

So you organize yourself around that aim, and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems, and if you solve them properly, then you stay on the pathway towards that aim. And you can concentrate on the day, and so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too, because you can point into the distance, the far distance, and you can live in the day. And it seems to me that that makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning, because if everything that you’re doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize, well, that’s the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life.

Well, and then the issue is, well, back to Noah. Well, all hell is about to break loose and chaos is coming. It’s like when that’s happening in your life, you might want to be doing something that you regard as truly worthwhile, because that’s what will keep you afloat when everything is flooded. And you don’t want to wait until the flood comes to start doing that, because if your ark’s half-built and you don’t know how to captain it, the probability is very high that you’ll drown. “Take therefore no thought for the moral, but for the moral shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” That’s not a particularly optimistic formulation.

“Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged, and with what measure you meet, it shall be measured to you again.” It’s a sensible piece of… it’s a sensible description. I wouldn’t call it a piece of advice, because I don’t think that any of this is advice. It’s a description of the structure of reality. That’s not the same as advice. And it basically says that you’ll be held accountable by the rules of the game that you choose to play.

And that, I also think, is perfectly in keeping with what we understand about human psychology, because you have to play a game that other people will allow you to play, and that will cooperate with you while you’re playing, and that will compete with you while you’re playing it. But you have a fair bit of flexibility in setting up the parameters of the game, but you don’t have any choice about whether or not you’re going to be in a game. You’re in a game, and you’re going to be held accountable by the rules of the game, because that’s how the game works.

And so, you might want to pick a game by whose rules you would be willing to be held accountable. “And why, beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but consider’st not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or, how wilt thou say to thy brother, let me pull out the mote out of thine eye, and behold, a beam is in thine own eye!” You might be wondering what a beam is, and a mote is a dust speck, and a beam is a very large piece of lumber.

And so the issue is, not so much the blindness of others, even though there’s as much blindness among others as there is for you. But the issue here, the description here is, you should be concerned about what’s interfering with your own vision first. And you should leave other people the hell alone in relationship to that.

And so, if your mote of being in the world is, if you would just act better things would improve for me, or if you identify the evil and the catastrophe as something that’s outside, that someone else needs to fix, or that someone else is responsible for, then you’re not going to fix that, and you’re going to remain blind to the things that you’re doing and not doing that make things not go well.

And so it’s just better to think, “Alright, I’m probably blind in many, many ways. And maybe there are some ways that I could rectify that, because it’s highly probable that you’re blind in all sorts of ways.” I mean, in fact, it’s virtually certain. And so, it’s just more useful to think, how is it that I’m wrong in this situation?

I’ll tell you something that I learned to do when I was arguing with my wife, which happened quite frequently, because when you actually communicate with people, you find out that there’s many things that you don’t agree on. And that’s because you’re actually different creatures. And so, if you’re actually going to have a truthful conversation, then you’re going to find out that you don’t see things the same way, and then you can either pretend that that’s not the case and gloss over it and then end up in a 30-year silent war, or you can have the damn fight when you need to have it and see if you can straighten it out.

So, now and then, we’d get in a situation where we were at loggerheads, we couldn’t move. And, you know, it would spiral up into hate speech, let’s say. Yeah, everyone laughs because they know they manifest plenty of hate speech towards those they love.

So, one of the things we learned to do was, when we hit an impasse, was to separate and to go our own ways and to go sit and think, “Okay, look, we’re at this unpleasant situation, we can’t figure out how to move forward.” I’d always think, of course it’s her fault, obviously it’s her fault, at least 95%, but maybe there was something I did that contributed like 5% to it. And so, I would sit and think and ask myself a question, which was, is there anything I did in the last six months that increased the probability that this impasse would manifest itself?

And I’ll tell you, you have no idea how fast your mind will generate an answer to a question like that, because there’s undoubtedly some idiotic thing that you did that you know, that you remember, that increased the probability that you’re going to have your hands around the throat of the person that you love. And then you can go tell them that, and then you can have a conversation, especially if they do the same thing. Say, “Look, you know, here’s how I’m an idiot in this situation.”

Another person says, “Well, yeah, here’s how I’m an idiot.” And then you’re two idiots, and then maybe you can have a conversation.

“So thou hypocrite first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” That’s, hey, hard to argue with that. “Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you; for every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” That sounds pretty optimistic again.

But again, I think it’s a description of the structure of existential reality. And by which I mean, when I’m in my clinical practice and I observe, and this is also the case with my students, is let’s say, people’s lives aren’t what they would like them to be. And so then you ask, why?

Well, forget about tragedy and catastrophe, because that’s self-evident. And we’re not going to discuss that. Although the degree to which you bring about your own tragedy is always indeterminate. But I would never say that every terrible thing that is visited on a person is something they deserved. I think that that’s a very dangerous presupposition, especially because everyone gets sick and everyone dies. But one of the main reasons that people don’t get what they want is because they don’t actually figure out what it is.

And the probability that you’re going to get what would be good for you, let’s say, which would even be better than what you want, right? Because you might be wrong about what you want, easily. But maybe you could get what would really be good for you. Well, why don’t you? Well, because you don’t try. You don’t think, “Okay, here’s what I would like if I could have it.” And I don’t mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods for status or something like that. That isn’t what I mean. I mean something like, imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for.

And then you thought, “Okay, I’m caring for this person. I would like things to go as well for them as possible. What would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case?” Well, people don’t do that. They don’t sit down and think, “Alright, let’s figure it out. You’ve got a life that’s hard, obviously. It’s like three years from now you can have what you need. You’ve got to be careful about it. You can’t have everything. You can have what would be good for you. But you have to figure out what it is. And then you have to aim at it.”

Well, my experience with people has been is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it, then they get it. And it’s strange because they don’t, it’s a strange thing. It’s not quite that simple because, you know, you may formulate an idea about what would be good for you. And then you take 10 steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off. And so you have to reformulate your goal. You know, so you’re kind of going like this as you move towards the goal. But a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don’t ever set up the criteria for success.

And so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely, the probability that you’re going to stumble on it randomly is zero. And so there’s a proposition here and the proposition is if you actually want something, you can have it. Now the question then would be, well, what do you mean by actually want? And the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible. And that’s a sacrificial idea, right? It’s like you don’t get everything. Obviously. Obviously. But maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask.

But asking isn’t a whim or today’s wish. It’s like you have to be deadly serious about it. You have to think, “OK, like I’m taking stock of myself and if I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation, and I don’t mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that I would aim at?” Well, one of the things I found is that in test of this theory, let’s say. You could try this. This is a form of prayer, knocking. Sit on your bed one day and ask yourself, “What remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life?”

And if you actually ask that question, but you have to want to know the answer, right? Because that’s actually what asking the question means. It doesn’t mean just mouthing the words. It means you have to decide that you want to know. You’ll figure that out so fast. It’ll make your hair curl. It’s as if Jung thought about this. He thought that people had two poles of consciousness and one was the individual consciousness that we each identify with. And the other was something he called the self. And the self is the, you might think about it as the divine within. That’s close enough approximation. It’s the universal part of your consciousness. It’s your conscience. That’s another way of thinking about it. Whatever your conscience is.

But it’s something that you can consult. It’s like the Socratic demon. Socrates said that the thing that made him different than everyone else in Greece was that he consulted his demon, his genius. He asked himself how it was that he should conduct himself in the world. He did that. Whatever it was. He didn’t try to force a solution. He didn’t try to force a solution selfishly. He asked, “I’m going to manifest myself in the best possible manner in the world. I would like to do that. What would that be?” Well, you’re perfectly capable of thinking. God only knows how.

You’re perfectly capable of immense feats of imagination, dream, and fantasies. God only knows how you do all of that. What would happen if you consulted yourself about the best possible outcome for you? You might get an answer.

Well, that’s what this proposition is. Or what man is there of you, whom, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your father, which is in heaven, give good things to them that ask him?

Well, this is a question about the fundamental nature of being, I suppose. And one of the hypotheses in the New Testament, which is different, it’s a different hypothesis in some sense than the one that structures the Old Testament, is that faith makes being good. It’s a very interesting proposition.

And so the notion would be, and it’s an action-oriented issue as well, you act out the proposition that if you act properly in the world, that being will reveal itself to you as benevolent. But you will not know. You’ll never know unless you do it. So this is a call to that. Act out the proposition that if you act properly, that being itself is benevolent. There’s no reason to assume the contrary.

I mean, to assume the contrary would be to be as cynical and bitter as possible. And it’s not like we don’t have reason for that. It’s not like I don’t understand why that happens to people. Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do you even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets. And that’s a reciprocity issue, right? It’s like, well imagine what would be, this is another thing I learned from Jung, because if Jung reversed this, because this is often read, it’s the golden rule, it’s often read as be nice to other people.

It’s like that is not what this rule means. It doesn’t mean that even a little bit. It means something like, and we’ll reverse it so that we’ll concentrate on you rather than the other person to begin with. It means something like conceptualize how things could be great if they were great for you, if you were taking care of yourself, and then work to make that the case for everyone else.

You know, you see that in Buddhism because Buddha reached Nirvana, right? That’s the theory. And then he was tempted with the offer to stay there. And he rejected that offer and came back to the profane world because he felt that the attainment of Nirvana was insufficient unless everyone attained it simultaneously. And so it’s something like that. But it’s treat yourself properly. That’s a hard thing to do because you’re a fallen, shameful, cowardly, deceitful, malevolent, mortal creature. And so it’s not easy, and you know it, and it’s not easy to treat something like that properly.

And it isn’t obvious that people treat themselves better than they treat other people. I don’t think that’s obvious at all. But maybe you could start with yourself and think, okay, I’m going to take care of myself as if I have value. What would that look like? And then I’m going to work to extend that courtesy to everyone else. And that’s, well, the hypothesis here is that if you take all of the moral wisdom that mankind has generated over its millennia of struggle, evolved and then manifested metaphor story and then codified into law, articulated law, and you pick one principle that dominated all of that, this would be the principle.

And it’s interesting, too, because it’s the law and the prophets. And the law is the rules, but the prophets are the process by which the rules are being updated. And so the prophets are superordinate in some sense to the law. And the proposition that’s set forth in this particular statement is that this maxim, which is optimize your own mode of being and then work to do the same for everyone around you, is not only the thing that’s at the core of the law, but it’s at the core of the process that generates and updates the law. It’s a hell of a thing for someone to say.

Enter ye in at the narrow gate, because that’s what straight means. Enter ye in at the straight gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that lead us to destruction. Well, who in the world could possibly argue with that? Everyone in their right mind knows that there’s a million ways of doing things wrong. And one way, if you’re lucky, to do things right. And so the notion that it’s a very, very narrow pathway that you tread upon if you’re doing things right, that’s wisdom.

That’s the line between chaos and order that you’re supposed to be on constantly, right? It’s a very, very thin line, because if you’re a little bit too far in one direction, then it’s too much chaos. And if you’re a little too far in the other direction, then it’s too much order. And both of those aren’t good. The balance has to be exactly right. And you can feel that, and I truly believe you can feel that, and I think it’s your deepest instinct. It’s your deepest instinct, and I mean that, I mean that biologically.

I don’t mean that metaphorically. I think that your psyche is arranged to exist in a cosmos that’s composed of chaos and order. I think that’s why you have the hemispheric structure that you have. This is deeper than metaphor. And then when you feel as if you’re meaningfully engaged in the world, when the terror of your mortality strips away, and you’re engaged. And it’s timeless, that’s the deepest instinct you have telling you that you’re in the right place at the right time.

And then what you do is practice being there. Practice being there. And that’s that narrow spot. It’s so difficult to find. You wander around it. Maybe if you’re lucky, you can watch. You can watch. This is an experiment. “Watch yourself for two weeks like you don’t know who you are because you don’t. So watch yourself for two weeks and notice there’s going to be times when things are proper. They’re arrayed properly for you.”

It’s not easy to notice because when they’re arrayed like that, you’re so engaged, you don’t exactly notice, you know. But you’ll see, “Oh, I’m in the right place.” It’s like, okay, how’d I get here? What am I doing right? You know, how is it that this could happen more often? I’d like this to happen more often. How would I have to conduct myself in order for that to happen more often?”

And then you practice that, and then maybe instead of 10 minutes a month or 10 minutes a week, it’s like 15 minutes a day, and then it’s half an hour a day, and then it’s an hour a day, and then it’s four hours a day. And maybe if you’re extraordinarily careful, then you get to a point where you’re like that a good proportion of the time. “Because straight is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” That’s particularly good advice for today’s political situation, I can tell you.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? Even so, every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. Well, that’s what I learned from studying the history of totalitarianism in the 20th century, is that a corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit, and that’s for sure.

And it’s so funny, you know, people who think, when they’re thinking about their relationship with divinity or their relationship with God, they think it’s a primitive and childish way of thinking. “What if a miracle just manifests? Why can’t a miracle just manifest itself? And I would be convinced.” And the funny thing is, is first of all, actually you wouldn’t be. If a miracle actually happened, you would actually forget about it in about six months. I mean, you’d think that’s not true, but it’s true. You would actually forget about it, because that’s what people are like.

But there are negative miracles that are happening all the time, which actually lends some credence to my supposition, and we don’t pay any attention to that. If we can’t learn from what happened in the 20th century, then we are absolutely incapable of learning. Because what happened in the 20th century was as bitter a set of lessons as you could possibly imagine. And it’s associated precisely with this. A corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit. Neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

“Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.” Well, that’s a flood motif right there. It’s like we’re constantly the archetype of the tree. That’s the archetype of being. It’s the archetype of the self often. What’s the warning here? If you’re mostly dead wood, you’re going to burn up. And you can think about that metaphysically. You can project that into eternity, and you can think about that as a form of hell. And the funny thing is that when that’s happening to you in real time, it is like an eternity in hell.

It’s a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it. But you can strip the metaphysical elements off, and you can say, ‘Well, if you’re mostly dead wood, then a spark will light you on fire.’ And that’s also very much worth thinking about. Wherefore, by their fruits shall ye know them. Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father, which is in heaven.

That’s an interesting line, I think. I mean, one of the proper critiques of traditional Christianity, maybe this is the sort of critique that Nietzsche put forth, was that Christianity had degenerated in its moral mission. Jung was a little bit more sympathetic, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. But Nietzsche’s idea was that Christianity had lost its way when it generated the presupposition that humanity was saved in some final sense by the sacrifice of Christ.

It meant that the work was already done, and I’m being harsh in my judgment for the purpose of rhetorical simplification. But the idea was that if you just professed faith that that had already occurred, then you were granted eternal salvation. It’s like, well, it’s not so straightforward, and I think that that’s what this line actually represents. It says how you enter into the kingdom of heaven.

And again, you can think about that under the aspect of eternity, or you can think about it as a psychological statement. And the answer is quite straightforward, is that you do what Noah did to make him immune from the flood, and that’s to walk with God. And that’s what this sermon is about. It’s laying out the practical elements of that. And the practical elements are, aim at the highest possible good, and lay that out in the world.

And then you may have the opportunity to inhabit the highest possible good that you’re positing into existence. Perhaps not, but you can’t think of any more practical way of going about that. I mean, if you build a house, then maybe you can live in it. If you don’t build a house, you’re not going to be able to live in it. If you don’t build a good house, then you’ll be able to live in a good house. And if you build a perfect house, then maybe you can live in a perfect house.

But if you just say that the house has already been built for you, and that you can just say that the house is being built for you, well then, the probability that you’re going to be able to live where you need to live is, there’s no probability that you’re going to be able to live where you need to live. Many will say to me in that day, that’s the judgment day, ‘Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works.’

And then I will profess unto them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you that work iniquity.’ See, that’s judgment day, you know. That’s an archetypal idea. And partly it’s archetypal, because every day is judgment day. And the part of you that’s equivalent to the logo, say, the part of you that’s your own ideal, sits in eternal judgment on your iniquity. And that’s the source of guilt and shame, and withdrawal, and then resentment, and then murderousness, and then genocide.

It’s because you can intuit the ideal. And the problem with intuiting the ideal is that an ideal is always a judge. There’s no difference between an ideal and a judge. And so you’re eternally judged by your own ideal. If you have no ideal, well then, you’ve got no direction and no meaning in your life. And then of course, the more extreme the ideal, the harsher the judge.

That’s actually why Jung was very curious about why the book of Revelation was tacked onto the Bible, because the book of Revelation, that’s a very weird book. And you know, in the Gospels, Christ is, I would say, perhaps primarily merciful. There’s maybe a war in his character between truth and mercy, but it’s one of the two, perhaps mercy. And Jung’s observation was, the Gospel Christ was too merciful. And that’s why the book of Revelation was tacked onto the New Testament.

Because in the book of Revelation, Christ, who’s the ideal, who’s above the pyramid, right, the transcendent ideal, is nothing but a judge. And everyone fails. And of course, the ultimate ideal is the ultimate judge. And so that’s the archetypal reality there. And you can say, ‘Well I don’t want to be judged, and so I’ll dispense with the ideal.’ But then you’re Cain, because Cain is exactly the person who dispenses with the ideal.

And so there’s no escaping from it. There’s no escaping from eternal judgment. That’s the archetypal story. You know, people put a lot of work into these representations, you know. And there’s thousands of them. They weren’t messing around. These are serious pieces of work. You know, we don’t understand them, but that doesn’t mean that the people who created them didn’t know what they were doing. These were geniuses who created these pieces of work. It’s not like they understood in an articulated manner exactly what they were trying to represent.

But what they were representing were the metaphors at the core of our culture. To the degree that our culture is functional and good, these are the metaphors upon which it’s founded. And they’re not for the faint of heart, you know. You say religion is the opiate of the masses. It’s like, yeah, then how do you explain this? Exactly. You know, because if it was opiates you’re after, you might just get rid of that panel.

Especially when the other thing that’s so interesting about the proposition, if you look at Revelation and you look at the judgment, almost everyone ends up on the right side of this panel. So if you were just conjuring up some sort of pathetic wish fulfillment, why in the world would you tilt the scales in that manner? You think that’s supposed to make people feel good? I don’t think so. There’s almost nothing about this picture that should make people feel good.

It should, if you understand it properly, it should terrify you to the depths of your soul. That’s what the picture is for. “Therefore, whoever heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man which built his house upon a rock. And the rain descended, and the winds blew, and the floods came, and beat upon the house, and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. And everyone that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not shall be likened unto a foolish man which built his house upon the sand. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell, for it was founded upon sand.”

And it came to pass. This is a very interesting line. I really, I really, you know, now and then you run across lines in, this particularly happens in Biblical settings, you run across lines that you cannot believe actually exist. You cannot imagine how someone could have imagined up and conjured up the line, and these two lines are like that as far as I’m concerned.

“And it came to pass when Jesus had ended these sayings that people were astonished at his doctrine, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” And that’s something so interesting, you know, because that was another thing that really I didn’t really appreciate about the churches that I attended to. And that would be that the lessons were taught by scribes and the words were mouthed, but there was no power in them.

There was no meaning in them. It was, it was as if, well, it was like when I was 20 years old and I was saying all these things I didn’t mean, you know, they were words that sounded good. They were like, like gilded cloth, I suppose, that you can, that you can wrap around yourself, but there’s no substance to them. And there’s a big difference between listening to something that has substance and listening to something that is spoken because it sounds like it should sound good.

And this line says that whoever spoke the lines that we just described was someone who sounded like he knew what he was talking about and not someone who was just repeating something for the sake of sounding good. And it certainly seems to me that the lines that we just reviewed have the awesome impact of authority.

Back to Noah. “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations and Noah walked with God and Noah begat three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth.”

The earth was also corrupt before God and the earth was full of violence, filled with violence. Any of you see the new NRA ad? You might want to look that up. I would say that’s the most shocking manifestation of political polarization in the United States that I’ve yet seen. Most of it I’ve seen on the left, right? What shocked me mostly has been on the left. But the new NRA ad, that’s a whole new thing.

So it’s this attractive woman. I’m doing a voiceover. She kind of looks like Demi Moore. Well, she’s kind of tough looking. I guess Demi Moore could look tough now and then. And she has contempt on her face. And that’s a dangerous thing. And in the background, there’s nothing but images of Antifa riots and Berkeley riots and fire and protest.

And she’s describing that as a conspiracy, essentially, a conspiracy that involves the intellectual elite, including Hollywood, which is named by name. The accusation is that there’s a cabal of corrupt intellectuals, let’s say, who are bringing the country to its knees and that it’s time to get your goddamn guns. And so look up that and see what you think, because there’s lots of people who would be perfectly happy if that was the direction in which we’re headed.

And one of the things that I’m hoping is that we might be able to talk our way through it. But we’re in a situation where every act of individual idiocy will push us one iota closer to the break. And that’ll make the 15% of the population or 30% of the population who would love to see everything degenerated into chaos perfectly happy because that’s their aim.

“The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh is corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, ‘The end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them, and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood, rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.”

“And this is the fashion which thou shalt make of it. The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits, the breadth of it 50 cubits, and the height of it 30 cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above. And the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof, with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. And behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh wherein is the breath of life from under heaven, and everything that is in the earth shall die.”

“But with thee I will establish my covenant, and thou shalt come into the ark, thou and thy sons and thy wife and thy sons’ wives with thee.” That’s a fairly optimistic twist on the story, because not only is it Noah, but he gets to save his whole family and down a couple of generations. And so, that’s a good thing to think about. It’s like, as things, you know, I had this client, and she had a very hard upbringing, I would say.

Not a lot of encouragement, to say the least. Let’s say a fair bit of discouragement. And she had a son, and what was really interesting about her in relationship to her son is that all the things that she could have learned to do to him, given her extensive experience with being made as miserable as possible by someone who was hell-bent on bringing her to her knees, she refused to do to her son. Right? She learned the opposite lesson from all her misery and torment, which was not to move that forward down the generations.

And so, the idea here is that if you walk properly and aim properly and act properly, if you walk with God in the manner that we’ve been discussing, perhaps that isn’t only good for you, perhaps it’s also the thing that will save your family, and then by implication, perhaps save society. Because that’s exactly what happens with Noah, right? First it’s him, and then it’s his family, but everything else goes. And so, by saving himself, by acting properly, and by saving his family, he actually saves the world.

It’s interesting, you know, like the most profound people that I’ve read, who’ve meditated deeply on the problem, say, of totalitarian catastrophe, and I would put Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the top of that list. You know, his entire corpus, three volumes, 700 pages long each, in tiny type, is a long stream about the absolute necessity of individual honesty and ethical behaviour as the only bulwark against totalitarian catastrophe. And I’ve read many writers who’ve attempted to diagnose the problems of the 20th century, and I think Solzhenitsyn, he came to the same conclusions that Viktor Frankl came to, as a consequence of his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps.

And Frankl, I’m also an admirer of Frankl, but Solzhenitsyn takes it to an entire different level of profundity, and makes an extraordinarily strong case that not only do societies deteriorate, because the people within the societies become individually corrupt, but that the only way to stave that off is for the individuals within that society to reject that corruption in the confines of their own personal lives.

And he tells endless stories of people that he met in the gulag, in the work camps, in the death camps, in the Soviet Union, of people, and this is what he learned, of people who were so incredibly tough, that even under conditions, the most possible extreme conditions, there wasn’t a chance that they were going to step off that straight and narrow line. There was nothing the authorities could do to move them.

And just watching that was enough to transform Solzhenitsyn, because of course one of the things he wondered was, after spending a good amount of time in the work camps, was, “Well, just exactly how did I get here?” And it wasn’t, well, it was Hitler’s fault, and it was Stalin’s fault, although it was definitely the fault of both of them. For Solzhenitsyn it was, “Well, it was also his fault, because he was playing the same game, he just wasn’t as good at it.”

“And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shall they’ll bring into the ark to keep them alive with thee, they shall be male and female.” And so there’s another message in this story, which is that it isn’t only Noah and his family and human society that’s dependent on Noah’s appropriate actions in the world. It’s the entire living planet, and in an era of excessive and extreme and genuinely disingenuous environmental catastrophizing, that’s something to consider very seriously.

Think, perhaps there’s nothing better that you can do for everything all things considered, including those things that are outside the confines of human society, than to get your act together and align yourself properly along all of the dimensions of your being, from the tiniest microcosm to the ultimate macrocosm. And that’s the way that all of being is redeemed. That’s what the story suggests. And we read it, you know, a cynical modern people, we read it as if it was written by primitive people who thought that it was really the case that someone could build a boat and put two of every kind into it, and thereby save the world.

It’s embarrassing to see things interpreted in a manner that shallow, especially by people who don’t have ignorance as a justification. You know, these stories have to appeal to everyone, right? And there’s lots of people in the world who aren’t very bright. And so they tend to take things concretely, like a child would take things concretely if you read them a story, and this story can be taken concretely. But it has to be, because these stories have to be for everyone. But if you’re sophisticated, that doesn’t mean that you should dismiss it as if it’s written for a child.

It’s maybe you have the obligation to look a bit deeper and think for a moment that it wouldn’t have been conserved for these many thousands of years if there wasn’t something more to it than a casual intellectual dismissal would indicate.

“And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee, and it shall be food for thee and for them. Thus did Noah. According to all that God commanded him, so did he.” And the Lord said unto Noah, “Come thou, and all thy house into the ark, for thee I have seen righteous before me in this generation.”

Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female, and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female, and of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female, to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth. For yet seven days I will cause it to rain upon the earth, forty days and forty nights, and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him. And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.

And Noah went in, and his sons and his wife, and his sons’ wives with them, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood, of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of everything that creepeth upon the earth. They went in two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.

And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day, were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, and the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

And the same day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark. They and every beast after his kind, and all of the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort. And they went into Noah unto Noah into the ark too, and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.

That makes Noah the ultimate shepherd, right? Shepherd of all things. Tender of the garden and shepherd of all things. That’s a hell of a role. And maybe that’s the one that keeps you afloat during the flood. And they that went in went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him, and the Lord shut them in. And the flood was forty days upon the earth, and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth, and the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth.

Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail, and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man, and all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed, which was upon the face of the earth, both man and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven. And they were destroyed from the earth, and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days. And God remembered Noah and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters receded. The fountains also of the deep, and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained, and the waters returned from off the earth continued. And after the end of a hundred and fifty days, the waters were abated.

And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen. And it came to pass at the end of forty days that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made, and he sent forth a raven which went to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth.

And he also sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground. But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him in the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth. Then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark, and he stayed yet another seven days. And again he sent forth the dove out of the ark.

And the dove came into him in the evening, and low in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off. So Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. And he stayed there yet another seven days, and sent forth the dove, which returned not again unto him any more. And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth. And Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked up, and behold, the face of the ground was dry. And in the second month, on the seventh and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried.

And God spake unto Noah, saying, “Go forth of the ark, thou and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives with thee, and bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth.” And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with them. Every beast, every creeping thing, every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.

And Noah built an altar unto the Lord, and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done, while the earth remaineth seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.” You know, I’ve heard commentators, like David Suzuki for example, claim that the substructure of Western culture, in lines such as this, deliver the earth over to human beings and justify our ravaging of being. But I don’t think that that’s a very careful reading.

And it seems to me that given such matters, given the importance of such matters, that a very close reading is actually necessary. You know, in the story of Adam and Eve, when Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden, God tells Eve that she’s going to be subordinated to her husband. He doesn’t say that that’s what should happen. He says that’s what’s going to happen. And the same thing, as far as I’m concerned, is contained in lines like this. It isn’t necessarily that this is something that should happen. It’s something that did happen.

It’s quite remarkable, you know, to think about how long ago these lines were penned. It wasn’t obvious until perhaps the 1960s that we had dominated the earth so completely that its very future existence was in our hands. And that’s a prophetic element of this tale. “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.” Like that’s exactly right.

“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you, even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require, at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother, will I require the life of man.” This is a hard section to interpret, but what it means is something like this: God describes the dominion over the planet that revivified humanity will have, and notes the power that goes along with that, then puts a limitation on it.

The limitation is: maintain the sanctity of life despite your power. And although it’s not easy to extract from the manner in which this is being translated, what God is telling Noah is that if you kill yourself, if you kill someone else, and if any animal kills a human being, that there will be a price to pay for that. So there’s an opportunity, which is that the descendants of Noah can dominate the earth, but there’s a moral limitation placed on that, which is nonetheless life itself is to be regarded as sanctified and sacred.

“Whoever sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made he man. And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.” And God spake unto Noah and to his sons with him, saying, “And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you, and with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, and of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; of all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth.”

“And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of the flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.” And God said, “This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.”

“And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud. And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you, and every living creature of all flesh; and the water shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.” There is a negotiated agreement there of sorts, and the negotiated agreement is, as far as I can tell, to the degree that humanity agrees to act in the manner of Noah, then the threat of catastrophic destruction will remain at bay.

“And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.”

And God said unto Noah, “This is the token of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.” So that’s a good place to stop. And there’s no lecture next week, by the way, because the theatre was booked, so there’ll be a one-week break. And then when we get back, we’ll finish the story of Noah. There’s not much left of it.

We’ll talk about the Tower of Babel, which is a very short story, but a very, very interesting one. And then we’ll move on to the story of Abraham. And so, thank you very much for coming, and we’ll see you in two weeks. Thank you very much.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

JORDAN PETERSON: Now, is the person who has the notification for the meetup after this here, and do they have the notification? Okay, because if you give that to me this time, I’ll remember to read it before everyone leaves. So, do you want to start?

Okay, so, let’s see if the mic is working, because lots of people will listen to this question.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So, you said on a recent live stream that you didn’t have enough energy to answer this question, but you said it was intriguing. So, I was wondering if you had the energy to answer how someone might help someone that has borderline personality disorder.

JORDAN PETERSON: By example. No, no, no, I don’t mean that precisely. I mean that, let’s not take borderline personality disorder precisely as the example, okay? I understand the question. The question, to some degree, is how do you help someone that’s lost? And the answer to that is, if they aren’t willing to not be lost, you cannot help them. And I would also say that as a clinician. You see, I mean, it’s a statement that’s informed, I would say, by my mythological knowledge, but also by straight clinical wisdom. Not mine, particularly.

One of the things that Carl Rogers pointed out was that there were necessary preconditions for entering into a therapeutic relationship. And that would be really any relationship where the mutual flourishing of the two people involved was the paramount goal. And one of the preconditions was that both people had to want that to happen. Rogers believed, he didn’t know how to get the horse to drink once you had brought it to the water.

And I thought about that a lot, because when people are really lost, sometimes they’re so lost that they can’t be found. And I think the only thing that you can do in a situation like that is get your life together. And manifest the reality of an alternative mode of being. That’s what you’ve got. And so, that’s the only way I know of to solve an intractable problem.

And I would say, the reason that I went down that direction with regards to Borderline Personality Disorder is because it’s one of the most serious of the personality disorders, very difficult to treat. And so, I’ll generalize from that to situations that are very difficult to deal with. And you know, there’s a statement too, and this has nothing to do with Borderline Personality Disorder per se. There’s a statement in the New Testament that’s really vicious. In fact, there’s a number of them, but this is a particularly vicious one. And that is, don’t cast pearls before swine.

And what that means is, if you’re trying to help and it doesn’t work, then stop helping. It’s not helping. Right? It may be just wasting your time. It might be making things worse. Now, if you’re offering something and it’s not taken, then perhaps you should be offering it somewhere else. And sometimes, if you offer a hand and the person won’t take it, you have to stop offering the hand. And then what you do is you go off and you have your life. And sometimes that means in people’s lives, for example, that they have to leave their family members behind.

There’s a scene in the New Testament, this is another very harsh scene, where Christ is walking down the road with his disciples. I hope I’ve got this story right, but I’ve got it essentially right. And his mother calls to him and says, I believe that he’s supposed to come back to the home because his uncle has died and that there’s going to be a funeral. And he turns to his mother and says something like, let the dead bury their dead. I’m about my father’s business. It’s something like that. And you read that and you think, huh, that should have been edited out.

No, but it shouldn’t have been edited out because it’s exactly right, because sometimes the thing you do is walk away. Because there’s no other solution. And if you are trapped in pathological relationships and you see no way out of them, if someone who is sinking has their hands around your neck and is pulling you down, you’re not obligated to drown with them.

Now, there’s a rule, too, if you’re a lifeguard, you know, some of you have had lifeguard training. How do you approach someone who’s drowning and panicking in the water? Feet out, right, like this. It’s like, I’ll save you, but that doesn’t mean you get to drown me while I’m doing it. And if it’s you drown or both of us drown, it’s you drown. And that’s wisdom. That’s not cruelty. Right?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I have a couple of questions about dialogue and engaging in dialogue with people. So, the first issue that I face is I have a very high need for intellectual stimulation. And I don’t get that with most people. It’s something like, you can have a dialogue for a time, but then…

JORDAN PETERSON: It’s high trait openness.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: But then they sort of run out of ideas and they can’t keep up and it sort of falls apart. And I think this is a problem that intellectuals have quite frequently is that they sort of, once they start reading difficult and rewarding stuff, they stop wanting to talk to regular people and I think that contributes to the disconnect that you see between intellectuals and working class people and stuff like that.

And the other question I had was about…

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, wait. I don’t know if that’s the question. I mean, I believe there’s a question in there, but I…

AUDIENCE QUESTION: The question is how should we address that? How should I address it? And is that something that can be addressed?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, part of the answer to that is that’s what the universities were for. I mean, not everybody is equipped to or interested in engaging in high-level discussion of abstract and creative ideas. You know, you hear this idea that everyone’s creative. That’s a lie. It’s as straightforward as that. True creativity is very, very rare.

And so, if you happen to be a creative person or if you happen to be someone who’s profoundly interested in ideas, you are in a pronounced minority. Just as you are if you happen to be extremely extroverted or extremely agreeable or extremely conscientious. These are minority issues, and what you do is you find like-minded people who are capable of engaging that. You know, heavyweight weightlifters compete with heavyweight weightlifters for a reason, and everyone thinks that’s fine.

The same thing applies to intellectual and creative endeavors. So, what you do is you try to find a community where that’s the nature of the community, and you likely have to find a relationship like that as well. I don’t think so. I think what contributes to the siloing is the arrogance that goes along with it. Because you can be interested in ideas and you can be creative. Well, that’s the arrogance of the intellect, right? That’s the thing the Catholic Church has warned about for centuries, is the arrogance of the intellect.

So, because if you’re wise as well as smart, and there is no relationship between being smart and being wise, they are not the same thing. There is no quick pathway from smart to wise. And many of the people who I’ve known who were very wise, some of them were intellectually impaired and were still wise. So, it’s the arrogance that brings up the block. I see this, for example, happening in the United States in particular, because the last time I went down there, for example, I had friends down there, and some of those friends are very, very smart people.

And some of them were talking about the Trump voters, and they were talking about the Trump voters with contempt. And I thought, “You better watch that, because that’s 50% of the damn population.” And it might be convenient to think that they’re stupid and beneath you, but it’s not conducive to a civil state. And there’s no evidence that it’s true because there isn’t a straight line between intelligent and wise. And so, I think that if your character is developed and you’re intelligent, you can have your siloed creative community.

But you develop enough wisdom so that you can see all the things that people can do that are of high ethical utility that are outside the intellectual domain. You know, and I think that’s why in the New Testament, I think that’s why Christ is a carpenter, right?” Because, well, first of all, a carpenter is one of those jobs that when you’re dishonest, it manifests itself immediately because what you build falls down. And so if you’re an honest carpenter, you build a good house. So there’s a nice metaphor there.

But it’s also a warning in some sense against the equation of intellectual brilliance with moral superiority. And so if the intellects would drop their moral superiority and fat chance there is of that, then that divide between the working class, say, and the elite would resolve. And there’s every reason to have respect for decent working class people. I mean, it’s on their labor as the left wingers at least hypothetically agree that the entire edifice of the culture is resting. So you can have your cake and eat it too, but you have to not assume that your niche makes you superior.

And it’s very difficult for smart people, especially smart… There’s this scene in Nietzsche’s, it’s in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Zarathustra, the prophet, comes down from the mountain and he comes into a public square. And there’s this crowd around this little midget who’s only about this high, who has a gigantic ear, and everyone is marveling at him. Well, that’s what the modern intellect is like. It’s a midget with a giant mouth generally, not an ear. And the being is underdeveloped, but the intellect is hyper-activated, and it makes the person extraordinarily unbalanced.

And it’s partly because they can’t compete outside the intellectual realm, and that makes them very bitter, because they tend to think, “Well, God, I’m so smart, everything should just come to me.” It’s like, sorry, that’s not how the world works. And that attitude is immediately evident to people that they’re talking to, when they talk in the manner that they talk, if they are arrogant intellectuals of that sort. You see that, and The Simpsons did a good job of that with Comic Book Guy. I mean, he was completely useless in every possible dimension, with an IQ of about 160.

And it’s very annoying to people who have an IQ of 160 that they can also be completely useless. But it happens a lot.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, Dr. Peterson. Long time, no see.

JORDAN PETERSON: How are you doing?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Good, thanks. So, I was first going to ask about your thoughts on a very popular TV show, Rick and Morty.

JORDAN PETERSON: You know, someone just recommended that to me, and they said they thought I would find it funny. And that makes me nervous, because I like The Simpsons, and I like the Trailer Park Boys. I actually like the Trailer Park Boys. And so, someone said, I know it’s so sad, you know, but they said that I would like Rick and Morty, so I’m kind of afraid to even watch it.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: It does have a nihilistic theme to it, I would say. So, that was just quite telling of the young population, which they fall in love with, everyone’s talking about it.

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, well, I’ll definitely watch it, because I’ve been looking for something to watch when I’m brain dead at night.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: But I decided to tell them my question from a different angle, if I may. And it’s about the case that governments, let’s say, such as Russia and Iran, or even in more extreme cases like ISIS, they do not want to conform to the nihilistic aspects of the West. And as a result, they’ve taken an anti-Western approach. As someone with a Middle Eastern background, I’ve been trying to figure out where the origins of this hostility more precisely comes from, and why things are the way they are.

I recently found out that certain key Iranian philosophers and political activists who were partially intellectually responsible for the 1979 Iranian Revolution were highly influenced by the anti-Western Heideggerian philosophy. And this is partially why they believe that an Islamic state would be a necessary counter position to the nihilistic Western thought. I know that you also come there with Alexander Dugan, Putin’s advisor.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes, except Dugan doesn’t really seem to have a coherent answer. He says that an answer like that is necessary, and that hypothetically it’s something that Russia might be able to offer, but the details seem to me somewhat obscure. In the Russians, maybe the Russians are doing what Solzhenitsyn suggested in returning to Orthodox Christianity, although Russia is corrupt enough so that it’s very difficult to tell from the outside if that’s mere collusion between a corrupt church and a corrupt state, or if there’s something genuine going on there.

Now, you know, I would say there’s a question under your question, which is, tyranny or nihilism? Well, that’s a good question, man. That’s a good question. Well, lots of people would pick tyranny over nihilism. And so if that’s the only choice that people are offered, then… And I also think that tyranny is stronger than nihilism. Because what are you going to do, organize nihilists? Hardly. Well, look at what happened to… what was that thing in Central Park, you know, against the 1%? Jesus, I mean, what a dismal affair that was.

We’d like things to be different. How? Well, we don’t know. So, you can just run over that. If you’re tyrannical and organized, you can just run over that like there’s nothing there at all. And I think there is a danger. And I do think that we’re enticing the Islamofascists, let’s say, by our nihilistic weakness.

And I think more than that, I think that we’re doing something more than that, because one of the things that I’ve been curious about, and I’m going way out on a limb here, is I’ve been really interested in the alliance between the neo-Marxist nihilists, or the neo-Marxist postmodernists, especially the feminists and the Islamofascists. I just don’t get that. It’s like there’s something very, very interesting going on there. And I think part of it is that when you drift too far into the nihilistic substructure, there’s a huge call for tyrannical order that manifests itself unconsciously.

And so that’s the dynamic that I see playing out in that peculiar relationship between the modern neo-Marxist feminists and the Islamofascists. I don’t know. That’s a very interesting idea that you brought to mind. I had no idea that there was a relationship between Heidegger and what happened in Iran in the 1970s. If you could send me a citation about that, or something to read, I’d be very interested in doing that.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: [inaudible]

JORDAN PETERSON: Thank you. That’s the closest thing I think I’ll experience to Arnold Schwarzenegger actually delivering that line.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: You gave a talk at the University of British Columbia back in April, I believe, titled “The Left-Wing Case for Free Speech.” And in this talk, you founded on the concept known as the Pareto distribution.

JORDAN PETERSON: The Pareto distribution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not Ross, but yeah.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Whereby, I guess, the square root of the number of people involved in some sort of productive endeavor do half the work.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, would result in half the production. Oh, it’s a nasty law, yeah. It’s also known as Price’s law.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: There’s like 400, 500 people in this room right now, and we’ve all cleaned up our rooms. But what you’re saying is that if you say that this Pareto distribution is approximating a natural law, like we all understand the force of gravity, and there’s no escaping the influence of gravity. That means that there’s only 20 people in this room who are going to be candidates for accomplishing the goal of being the next Gordon Peterson.

JORDAN PETERSON: Hopefully there’s fewer of them than that. Okay, two things. The first is it isn’t obvious what the population would be that you would compare this population to, right? Because you could say, well, the boundary is the 400 people in this room, but it isn’t necessarily the case. The 400 people in this room might be the square root of the broader population who are interested in this sort of thing.

But with the Pareto distribution, what you also see is that it’s self-similar. And so, let’s say there’s 400 people doing something, 20 of them are doing half the work. But if you take those 20, four of them are doing half the work of the 20, and one of the four is doing half the work of the four. And so, why am I telling you that?

Well, first of all, it isn’t that there isn’t useful work to be done at multiple slices of the Pareto distribution. But the other thing is, it’s also the case that there’s not only one Pareto distribution. Because you might say, well, if it’s just the square root of the number of people in a domain that are doing half the work, then what do you do with the rest of the people? And the answer to that might be, well, they’re in a different Pareto distribution as well, where they’re doing something productive.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Is this just a consequence of how successful or effective the competence hierarchy is?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I think it’s a good question. So the basic rule is, for example, if you take 100 scientists in a given domain, 10 of them will have published half the papers. And this works with everything. It works with every creative domain. The rule applies. So, now the question is why? And I think the answer to that seems to be, and I’ve watched people who’ve become spectacularly successful, and what happens is that zero is a really bad place to be. Right? It’s really hard to get out of zero.

And that’s often why people are trapped in poverty. Because if you have nothing, getting to something is virtually impossible. Once you have something, getting to a little more of something is actually quite a bit easier. And so, what seems to happen, this is also called the Matthew Principle, right? It’s the same principle, so that’s a New Testament citation, let’s say. “The Matthew Principle is, to those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”

That’s another one of those lines in the New Testament that you’d think that a good editor would have just got rid of. But I think what it is, is that every time you make a step forward, the probability that you’ll be able to take the next step forward increases. And it seems to increase in a non-linear way. So the world that the Matthew Principle describes is non-linear. So you might say, well, what’s your trajectory if you’re moving upward? Well, it’s not this. It’s this. What’s your trajectory if you’re moving downward? It’s not this. It’s this, right? You fall, you fall, you plummet. You rise, you rise, you transcend. It’s something like that.

And you might say, well, that’s a hell of a world, but whatever, it has to be run by some principle, and that’s the principle that it appears to be run by.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do you identify yourself with pragmatism from several occasions?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Does that mean that, like, just do whatever works without regard to the other?

JORDAN PETERSON: No, no, no. It doesn’t mean that at all. What it means is that every truth claim you make, including those that are implicit in your actions, carries with it an ethic that justifies or doesn’t justify the action.

So, for example, let’s say I have a tool, and I say it’s an axe, and I go out in the forest, and I try to cut down a tree with it, and it doesn’t work. It’s not an axe. It’s something else. There is a good book on pragmatism called The Metaphysical Club: History of American Ideas. It’s one I would really recommend. And so what the pragmatists, I can’t give you a full answer because this is such a complicated issue.

But what the pragmatists were wrestling with back in the late 1800s, the late 1800s, this was William James and his crew in Boston, including a philosopher named C.S. Peirce, who was perhaps America’s greatest philosopher, they were wrestling with the same issue that the postmodernists would wrestle with a hundred years later, which is things are indefinitely complex, and we’re not very bright. So how is it that we can make claims to truth about anything?

And what their hypothesis essentially was, is that with every action and with every truth claim, you simultaneously demarcate a territory within which that claim is valid. And you determine whether the claim is valid by noting whether your prediction about the outcome of your action or your belief is commensurate, is in keeping with, if the outcome is in keeping with the prediction, then what you’ve said or done is true or good enough, and that’s as good as you get. And so that’s the pragmatic perspective.

And then when the pragmatists encountered Charles Darwin’s works, they immediately recognized that Darwin had generated a pragmatic solution to the problem of the impossibility of being. The impossibility of being is this: There’s way more cosmos than there is you. You are going to die. You cannot generate a sufficient solution to the problem of your being. No one can. Nothing can. It’s like the environment is a snake that moves unpredictably across time, and you’re trying to stay on its back.

Well, how does the Darwinian process deal with that? It produces infinite variance, roughly speaking, almost all of which die. And that’s how it solves the problem across time. The things that exist, the things that stay alive, are true enough. And that’s the best you get. That’s the argument I was trying to have with Sam Harris, because Harris doesn’t take his evolutionary theory seriously enough, but we kept getting bogged down. Anyways, that’s the best answer. I’d like to agree with that, but it’s not true.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: [Inaudible]

JORDAN PETERSON: You really do like to ask hard questions, don’t you? I think it depends. See, this is also why I like the [Piaserean] take, let’s say, on pragmatism, because I think that pragmatism as a philosophy has the limitation that you just described. But only if you think about the games as limited. If you have to play the game in an iterative way, then that issue resolves itself.

And the game theorists have done a good job of mapping that out. It’s like, you could say, let’s say, pragmatically speaking, there’s no reason I shouldn’t deceive you once if I can get what I want. It’s, yeah, yeah, except that I’m probably not only going to interact with you once. I’m going to interact with you a lot. And even if it isn’t you that I interact with, it’s going to be a bunch of beings that are so much like you that it might as well be you. It’s going to be me, if nothing else.

And so the pragmatic game stretched across time would include the necessity of iterability in relationship to the validations of the truth claims. That’s how it looks to me. I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to stop you. Say that again.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: [Inaudible]

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes, but that’s not all I am.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So this is on behalf of somebody. Dr. Peterson, having listened to your expositions on the mythological evolution and amalgamation of religion, and keeping in mind your working definitions of belief and truth, and despite the obvious reasons for somebody of your background to identify most with Christianity, my understanding is that you believe Christianity to be the most complete and articulated form of many of the metaphysical ideas that preceded it and led up to that.

Keeping that in mind, would it also be accurate to therefore say that you’re not only a believer in Christianity but also, if to a lesser degree, also a believer in Marduk, in the ancient Egyptian gods, and the subsequent gods that you’ve spoken of here that led up and contributed to the form of Christianity that you’re discussing and that you identify with?

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, I got to take that one apart a little bit. I’m bounded in my judgment with regards to Christianity by my ignorance. I’m no student of Hinduism. So I can’t make the claim forthrightly that there’s something intrinsically superior to the Judeo-Christian tradition because I don’t know enough to make that claim. The claim I can make is that there’s something that’s dreadfully right about the core elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

And I’ve seen analogues to that. Like, one of the things I’d like to do, for example, is to do a short series on the Tao Te Ching, because that is one remarkable document. And once you know, especially, you might want to read it, you can go online and read it, it’s very short, Tao Te Ching, t-a-o-t-e-h c-h-i-n-g, and it’s the fundamental text of Taoism. And once you know that the world of being is made of chaos and order, and you know that that’s represented by the yin and the yang, all of a sudden you can understand the Tao Te Ching.

And it’s brilliantly simple and straightforward in its exposition, but it also seems to me to be entirely commensurate with the line of, let’s call it logic. It’s more like the mode of description of being that’s encapsulated in these stories.

Now with regards to being a believer, people ask me all the time, two things, say, do you believe in God and are you a Christian? And the answer to that, both of those, is actually, there’s two answers. One is, what the hell makes you think it’s any of your business? That’s the first answer. And the second is, why do you think that you mean the same thing with those questions that I would mean with my answer?

So, you know, because it’s such a funny thing, because I’ve spent like three, and this is no accusation with regards to your questions in the least, you know.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I think it’s more about trying to track the development of these ideas and, you know, the residual truth and psychological significance of all these other traditions.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, you know, I’ve been floored by other mythological structures, like when I first understood or thought I understood the meaning of the Mesopotamian creation myth. It’s just, I’ve never recovered from that, I would say. And the same thing is true of the investigations I did into the Egyptian myths of Horus and Isis and Osiris and Seth. And they’re so relevant. I mean, they’re so unbelievably relevant.

See, this is a problem that none of us really know how to solve. It’s like there are sources of wisdom all over the world, let’s say. And they need to be made commensurate with one another, which isn’t to say that they need to be turned into a fast-food mall. You know, that’s like multiculturalism, right? It’s like all the food of the world served in the most terrible possible manner, all in one place. It’s something like that. And you don’t want to do that with comparative religion. It’s just water everything down and say, well, it’s all nice. It’s like, no, it is not nice.

Yeah, or that it’s all the same because it’s not all the same. So, the job of communicating between those domains of wisdom is really continuing, right? It’s been a problem ever since the beginning of civilization. But it’s continuing. And I would say the psychoanalysts, Jung in particular, took huge, huge steps in the direction of doing that in an extraordinarily positive way. And not a simple-minded way at all. And not just hand-waving that, “Oh well, everyone has won and all shall have prizes.” Not that. Last question.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Actually, it’s kind of in the same vein, but it’s in regards to another kind of mythology. So, in terms of, I guess, Carl Jung’s own mythos, sorry, I’m extremely tall. But a lot of the, I actually got found some kind of archetypes, like, for example, in my own life, but also I’ve noticed in European life.

So, for example, in regards to Odin and Norse mythology, with Carl Jung’s essay, I’ve only been able to actually skim it because I’ve been trying to find something, because it felt like there was always this kind of psyche that was almost underneath, I guess, Western civilization. And we see it really embodied in this specific figure, this deity, the wanderer, the knowledge gatherer, the seeker, but he’s also a war god. He’s all these different aspects that are an accumulation of what seems to be something that’s distinctly Western.

And I feel this is almost like the symbol, in a way. Of course, it’s not always positive.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, there seems to be something, maybe there seems to be something, I do think that the idea of the individual has been articulated most fully in the West. I don’t think that’s really a contentious claim, actually. That doesn’t mean that the latent structures from which that idea might emerge weren’t also many other places simultaneously.

And the other thing from, let’s say, from a biological perspective, is that we’re only talking about differences of a few hundred years, in terms of the manifestation of these ideas, right? From an evolutionary perspective, that’s instantaneous. It’s like, well, a new idea has to arise somewhere, so it’s going to be somewhere first. But it’s spreading, I mean, Christianity, for example, spreads so rapidly that it’s absolutely beyond belief, and it’s actually spreading more rapidly in China now than it did in ancient Rome.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Well, in regards to that, it’s also been seen almost in the wake of a dying Christianity. I’ve noticed that there’s been a tendency to go towards, I guess, paganism, right? I understand that some people laugh it off. You have Wicca, which was mainly a manifestation of Aleister Crowley and his works, which were then pended off to whoever actually made the actual ideology.

And then, next thing you know, we’re finding something almost more stable in, I guess, Norse mythology, and it seems like it’s acting almost as a pendulum swing from something that…

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, the thing is, when one mythological structure collapses, it’s going to collapse into another mythological structure, or another set of mythological structures, because you can’t get out of the mythological structures. There’s no possible way of doing that. And so, I wouldn’t say necessarily that the fact that other belief systems emerge in the aftermath of the collapse of the overarching belief system, I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad idea. I think that it has its attendant dangers.

And so, I should stop, because I’m starting to get tired, and I’m not going to be able to formulate any clearer answers than that, and it’s also ten o’clock, so we also do have to stop. Thank you.

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