Pod Insights The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast What to Do When Life Feels Empty About this episode What does a 75-year-old man leaving his father's house for the first time have to do with the darkest question a human being can ask about themselves? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson traces a single obsession — how ordinary people commit extraordinary evil — from a teenage encounter with books about Nazi Germany and the Soviet gulag, through unsettling visits to a maximum security prison, to a startling personal reckoning with his own capacity for darkness. What he found waiting at the bottom of that question wasn't despair, but something far more unexpected: an ancient story about calling, sacrifice, and the kind of adventure that makes the weight of being alive feel worth carrying. The story of Abraham turns out to be less about faith in the conventional sense and far more about a question you already know the answer to — whether you're listening.
Lecture filmed in Little Rock, Arkansas on February 27, 2024
Unlock the ad-free experience of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast and dive into exclusive bonus content on DailyWire+. Start watching now: http://dwpluspeterson.com/yt
ALL LINKS: https://feedlink.io/jordanbpeterson
// LINKS //
Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com
Books - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/books/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 11,922 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Well, polls tell you what voters said at one moment, but Kalshi gives you another way to follow a race, a live market that moves as traders respond to new information. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers are competing in one of Kalshi's most traded midterm matchups. You can visit Kalshi's midterms hub to track how the market views the race and then trade an event contract on the outcome you think is going to happen. If you're right at settlement, each winning contract is worth $1. See the market, make your call, trade what happens next on Kalshi. Use code DAILY, D-A-I-L-Y, to get up to $25 when you trade $25. That's Kalshi, K-A-L-S-H-I. Kalshi, trade on anything. 18-plus only. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply.
0:44 Speaker 00 Event contracts trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Kalshi products are not available in all jurisdictions. Prices, values, and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, you can go see kalshi.com/regulatory.
0:58 Jordan B. Peterson? Hello again, everybody. Today, we're releasing the third lecture from my last tour. Each of them stands alone, but together, they provide a detailed analysis of the deepest, most meaningful, and most influential stories ever told. Our attention turns today from Cain and Abel and the discovery and significance of sacrifice to the conceptualization of life as romantic adventure. This is captured in the great account of Abraham, who was called, as we all are, away from the security and familiarity of our childhood surroundings into the uncertainty and possibility of our adult lives. What could we possibly become?
1:41 Jordan B. Peterson? What could we possibly offer if we swore above all to aim up regardless of the catastrophe and tragedy of our lives? Watch and see.
2:03 Jordan B. Peterson? Thank you.
2:08 Jordan B. Peterson? Thank you.
2:10 Jordan B. Peterson? Thank you all for coming. So I'm gonna jump right into the story and then elaborate on it as we proceed.
2:23 Jordan B. Peterson? I want to talk to you tonight about the story of Abraham. Not all of it, it's because it's a long story. We'll see how much we can get through. I guess I'll start by telling you what a story is. Because that'll lay open... Thank you, thank you. That'll lay open why I'm presenting the material that I'm presenting. I didn't really expect, when I first embarked on my career, that I would
2:56 Jordan B. Peterson? become interested in biblical stories.
3:02 Jordan B. Peterson? It happened because I was fixated
3:08 Jordan B. Peterson? on
3:10 Jordan B. Peterson? the deepest problem that I could
3:14 Jordan B. Peterson? find, which was the problem of evil. I became aware of what had happened in Nazi Germany when I was about 13. And it was shocking to me, and I started to study...
3:32 Jordan B. Peterson? I started to study what had happened there at that point.
3:37 Jordan B. Peterson? I didn't really know how to go about doing that, but I had some... I had a librarian there who was quite literate, and she pointed me in some useful directions. I read first book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I read when I was about 13. It was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Dinesevich", and it was the first book that had come out of the Soviet Union, really, during a period of thaw in the early 1960s, that revealed what had happened under Stalin. Then I read "1984" by George Orwell and "Brave New World", some Ayn Rand as well at that time. Starting to wrestle with the problem of good and evil.
4:19 Jordan B. Peterson? It's a variant of wrestling with God, I suppose, and that is a variant of...
4:26 Jordan B. Peterson? Wrestling with decision-making in general. The landscape that you live in when you make decisions is the landscape that has good and evil as its far-reaching borders. It's good to understand that. Why would I say that? Well, you know that, really, because you know that you can make a good decision or a bad decision. And so, the mere fact that you understand what that descriptive phrase means indicates that you understand at some level that when you're making a decision, you inhabit a moral landscape. And you know you can make decisions for good reasons or for bad reasons. And you also know that
5:15 Jordan B. Peterson? the consequences of your decisions can be good or not.
5:22 Jordan B. Peterson? And so, if you take that conceptualization and you just extend it to its ultimate reaches, so that you're characterizing the entire domain, you get the landscape of good and evil. And I was interested in the far reaches of the dark side of that continuum. The problem with studying that, for me, eventually became... It was what knocked me out of my sort of rationalistic, moral relativism. It wasn't easy for me to... I left the church when I was about 13. I went to church with my mother up till that point. It was just a kind of middle-of-the-road Protestant, exactly the kind of Protestant
6:06 Jordan B. Peterson? church you'd expect to characterize Canadians. It was the United Church, you know, which has got so woke, you can't believe it. It's just done. I think the woman who runs it is an atheist. So, you know, that's just not good.
6:25 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, and they worship pride, essentially. So, and that's also really not good. It's hard to go more wrong than that. You have to really work to go more wrong than that. Anyways, I studied totalitarianism for a long time. And even more specifically, because I didn't really think that the totalitarian problem was the problem. So, that would be the problem of... That's a political or economic or sociological problem, in some sense. How do you characterize an authoritarian state or a totalitarian state? Maybe you're interested in the economic conditions that might give rise to such a state,
7:09 Jordan B. Peterson? what it's like politically. That's descriptive in some ways. That isn't really what I was interested in. I was interested in the psychology of a totalitarian state. And interested not only in that, but in the dark elements of the psychology of the totalitarian state. Because I was very curious about how people could do terrible things to other people. And I wasn't even curious about that. I was curious about how someone could do something terrible to someone else, like truly terrible, unimaginably terrible, and enjoy it. And then, more than that, I was interested in how that was possible.
7:52 Jordan B. Peterson? See, because to understand how that's possible, you see, this is the key thing. You have to understand how you could do it. Because until it's you, it's irrelevant. It's not real. You'll come up with some explanation that divorces you from the phenomena. You'll make the assumption, for example, if you're watching Schindler's List, that you would have been Oscar Schindler. It's like, that's just not how it would have worked out, ladies and gentlemen. You can tell that by watching what happened during the so-called COVID pandemic. People who stand up against the pathological mob, they're few and far between.
8:33 Jordan B. Peterson? So, how is it that you could participate in the ultimate atrocities that the worst possible state could promote? How is it that you would come to that? Couldn't you? Couldn't you come to that?
8:50 Jordan B. Peterson? I didn't really understand, I didn't understand exactly how you could come to that point until I visited a maximum security prison. I had this professor there at the University of Alberta. He was an odd character. He taught a, he was an adjunct professor, so not a full-time, part-time professor. He was the head psychologist at this maximum security prison. And it was a nasty place. It was full of exactly the sort of people you'd put in a maximum security prison, you know, repeat offenders. You know, 1% of the criminals account for 65% of the crimes, say. So, everything has its specialization, and crime is like that.
9:34 Jordan B. Peterson? And if you're, there are criminals who are repeat offenders, and then there are criminals who are violent repeat offenders, and they're the ones who generally end up in maximum security prisons. So, they're tough places, and I went to this prison a couple of times, and I met some people there that really made me think.
9:55 Jordan B. Peterson? One time I was at, I was, I was in the gym in this prison. Prison looked like a high school, which I thought was kind of indicative of what high schools are like. And it had a gym and an exercise yard, and in the gym, mostly the gym was taken up by weight benches, and there were a lot of monsters in there. Guys who'd been pumping iron pretty hard for a long time, and they were, you know, murderers and rapists and weightlifters, and so, pretty intimidating bunch. I'd worn this preposterous getup, I guess even then.
10:40 Jordan B. Peterson? I'd gone to Portugal and I bought this cape. I went to this town that was basically a castle on top of a mountain. Place hadn't changed much since 1890, and this was back in the 1980s. They sold these Dracula capes that were made out of wolves, like Sherlock Holmes, from the Victorian era. So I bought one of those capes. I used to wear it around the university in Edmonton. And I wore it out to this prison, which might not have been the wisest choice. Anyways, I was in the gym with these monsters and a bloody psychologist left. Because he was an odd guy, which he didn't have to be an odd guy to be a psychologist for a prison full of murderers and rapists.
11:24 Jordan B. Peterson? It's like, you're not going to be a run-of-the-mill person to end up there. And he definitely wasn't. He's a great professor, he's very eccentric and interesting. Anyways, he left. So I was in there with all these prisoners and they surrounded me. And then they started to offer to trade their clothes for mine. And I didn't like their clothes, but I wasn't exactly sure how to say no, as you might imagine. And then this little guy came up. He's, I don't know, five foot six or something. And he said that the psychologist had sent him to get me, which was unfortunate phrasing as far as I was concerned.
12:07 Jordan B. Peterson? But I thought I must go with him, because it's like 1:00 AM and 20 of these guys. And so we wandered out into the exercise yard. And he was a pure normal, sort of nondescript-looking character. You wouldn't have given him a second glance on the street. We got about 50 yards out into the yard. And then the psychologist showed back up at the doors to the exercise yard and motioned us back. And I was just relieved about that. Then we went to his office and he told, he said, "You know that guy that took you out in the yard?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "He took two cops out. They stopped him on a road when he was driving. They stopped him."
12:50 Jordan B. Peterson? And he was armed and he pulled a pistol on the guards, on the policeman. He shot them both in the back of the head. And one of them, well, he was describing the fact that he had two little kids. And so that was rather shocking. The shock, I suppose, was not just the brutality of what he had done, although that was plenty brutal. It was the juxtaposition of that brutality with his apparent nondescript normality. Like, this wasn't a guy that... There was nothing intimidating, apart from the fact that he was in a maximum-security prison.
13:33 Jordan B. Peterson? There was nothing about him that marked him out of the ordinary. So that made me think a lot about the relationship between good and evil as it pertained to a single individual. And then I met this other guy. He came into the prison psychologist's office one day when we were sitting there, and he was a real psychopath, real narcissist. Interesting person to watch, as psychopathic narcissists are, and you can tell because there's so many movies about them. He knew everything, as far as he was concerned. It was so interesting to watch him, because he'd been in prison for like 20 years, a long time. He didn't really even know how the outside world worked anymore,
14:16 Jordan B. Peterson? but there was nothing you could tell him that he didn't know. And he was just 100% self-centered. And so it was interesting to watch him. And the psychologist was playing with a deck of cards, and the prisoner said, "Why don't you give me those cards? I'll show you a trick." And so the psychologist handed... His name was Patrick Thauburger. The psychologist handed him the deck of cards, and he shuffled them, and then he put the cards in front of me, face down, and then he named the first card and flipped it, and he was right. And then he named the second card and flipped it, and he was right. And he went through like a third of the deck and got every single card. And I thought, "How the hell did you do that?"
15:01 Jordan B. Peterson? He said, "I memorized them when I was flipping them." He said, "Don't ever play cards with someone who's been in prison." I found out later that this same man and one of his compatriots had...
15:16 Jordan B. Peterson? "Identificaron a alguien en la prisión que se pensaba que era un asqueroso, de manera justa o incorrecta, y podría haber sido el caso, y lo sacaron con una tubería de acero y lo que hicieron fue ponerlo a la silla y golpear una de sus piernas en una pulpa con una tubería de acero.
15:37 Jordan B. Peterson? Y pensé en eso, ya sabes, es una cosa divertida pensar. Pensé en eso durante... realmente ocupó mi imaginación durante dos semanas, diría. Y esto fue mientras estaba leyendo el libro de Solchenitsyn sobre el Guleg Arca Palago y varios cuentos de brutalidad totalitaria en Alemania Nazi y demás, y algunos trabajos psicoanalíticos. Y ahí es donde emerge la parte de la historia.
16:05 Speaker 02 "Imagina a tu favorito profesor. Díselo en una malla, ponlo a esteroides y luego añade algunos elementos cinemáticos. Eso es lo mejor que puedo describir una conferencia de la Academia Peterson.
16:19 Speaker 03 "Fui a la universidad porque tenía que hacerlo. Fui a la Academia Peterson porque quiero hacerlo. Todavía pago la universidad de hace diez años y también estoy cuestionando el valor que obtuve de la universidad.
16:27 Speaker 02 "En las universidades tradicionales, muchas veces es muy frío. No traen la misma energía que los profesores de la Academia Peterson.
16:35 Speaker 03 "Es una experiencia completamente diferente aprender de alguien que realmente quiere enseñarte.
16:39 Speaker 04 "Si estás en la oficina de la oficina, este es el momento.
16:43 Speaker 05 "Ese cosa que te llama, no tendrás una respuesta a ella a menos que te inscribas y lo veas por ti mismo. Tienes la oportunidad de investigar ese llamado.
16:57 Jordan B. Peterson? "Ya sabes, al mismo tiempo, esto es algo difícil de relacionar, en realidad.
17:02 Jordan B. Peterson? Al mismo tiempo, me encontraba poseído por algunos impulsos oscuros que no entendía. Por ejemplo, cuando estaba sentado en clase, a veces recibía el impulso de pegar a la persona delante de mí con un lápiz. Y nunca había hecho nada violento en mi vida. Sabes, era un tipo de pensamiento obsesivo y no tenía idea de qué hacer con eso. Thought at all, and it was unsettling. It didn't happen very often, it wasn't very powerful. But the mere fact that a thought like that could even enter my mind was upsetting. And that was happening at about the same time, and it was related to what I was assessing.
17:44 Jordan B. Peterson? Because I was trying to, I was actually trying to come to terms with the human proclivity for evil. And that means to come to terms with your own proclivity for evil. That's what it means, if you really want the understanding. It's personal, it's not political, it's not economic, it's not sociological. My first degree was political science, and I was interested in economic determinants of behavior to begin with, and political determinants. But I soon realized that that wasn't where the action was. The action was in the soul. That's a good way of thinking about it. The real answer to the deepest problems were psychological, and the deepest psychological problems are spiritual. That's like a definition of deep. And so all these things were tangled together.
18:25 Jordan B. Peterson? And I thought about what had happened at that prison, and I imagined myself doing it, which is a... You have to break a barrier to do that, right? You have to break the barrier, that's the assumption, that you aren't the sort of person that could do that. But I wasn't so sure of that, because it looked to me, from what I had read, that if you put people in the appropriate circumstance, there's very little they won't do. It's a rare person who won't go down that road when the opportunity makes itself known, especially one little move at a time, which is how totalitarian states develop, right?
19:07 Jordan B. Peterson? It isn't that you go from normal to Nazi in one leap. It's like, it's 10,000 little steps, and each step is a little farther into the abyss than the previous one, and nowhere along the way do you ever wake up and say, "Well, that's just too much." Now, if you examine the whole pathway, from beginning to end, you'd think, "Well, that was too much." But each little nudge, you can rationalize with your silence or with your acquiescence, with the fact that you'll put up with it, with the fact that you don't want to take the trouble.
19:45 Jordan B. Peterson? With the fact that you want to hide, with the fact that you want to maintain your own pristine view of yourself.
19:53 Jordan B. Peterson? Anyways, I thought about it for about two weeks, quite obsessively. If I think about something, I tend to think about it like for 16 hours a day. You know, it's just non-stop trying to crack the problem. And that's how you crack problems, I suppose.
20:16 Jordan B. Peterson? And I had the realization one day that I could do that.
20:21 Jordan B. Peterson? And the impulses I had, the impulse that I mentioned, that went away. And so that impulse was part of something within me that was trying to make its presence known, right? My capability for participating in abysmal acts.
20:47 Jordan B. Peterson? People have dark fantasies, you know, and like you can watch them in yourself if you're willing to. If you get angry, especially if it's resentful,
20:57 Jordan B. Peterson? you can watch the background fantasies that are associated with that and the temptations that are associated with that. And if you are honest, you can see that they'll
21:11 Jordan B. Peterson? they'll take you to some very dark places. And I think that's true of everyone. It's particularly true of the people who think that it's not true of them. So I realized that I could do that.
21:30 Jordan B. Peterson? And that helped make the problem that I was wrestling with real.
21:38 Jordan B. Peterson? Así que me convencí de dos cosas. Me convencí de que
21:44 Jordan B. Peterson? el problema fundamental de la malevolidad era un problema individual. Así que el problema fundamental con Alemania nazi es el guardián de campamento Auschwitz, que es una persona normal, que disfruta su trabajo. Ese es el problema. Si lo dices y lo haces focal, ese es el problema. Ahora, la pregunta es: ¿es eso tú o es que es alguien más? Si es alguien más, si es un psicopático, deviante, que es apenas humano, no tienes un problema. Si es tú y crees que es un problema, tienes un problema. Y pensé que tenía un problema. Es como, está bien, lo veo.
22:30 Jordan B. Peterson? Así que este es un problema psicológico o espiritual. Así que
22:37 Jordan B. Peterson? me convencí de la realidad del mal, porque creo que es muy difícil leer historias de los actos ultimáticamente barbaros que la gente perpetró en los Estados totalitarios del siglo XX, sin creer en la realidad del mal. Creo que si lees a través de esas historias,
23:00 Jordan B. Peterson? el resumen de esas historias es algo como una historia del mal. No me importa lo que lo llames, eso es lo que se vuelve. ¿Es real? Bueno, es real lo suficiente como para matar millones de personas y torturar a millones más. Es bastante real. ¿Es relevante para ti? Es relevante para ti si eres capaz de participar en ello.
23:20 Jordan B. Peterson? Así que me convencí de que el mal era real y me convencí de que teníamos una responsabilidad personal por eso.
23:30 Jordan B. Peterson? I became convinced at the same time that the pathway to the totalitarian state that motivates atrocity is associated with deception, with lie, with the lie. That a totalitarian state isn't a top-down oppression of freedom-loving individuals by a small coterie of pathological elites, but the grip of every single person in this society by falsity and untruth. So here's a definition of a totalitarian state. A totalitarian state isn't run by psychopathic thugs.
24:15 Jordan B. Peterson? A totalitarian state is the state that exists when every single person in this society lies to themselves and everyone else, including those they love, about absolutely everything they think, say, and do. And the more comprehensive that grip, the more thorough the totalitarian state. And when the grip of the lie is complete, there's nothing that's beyond you. Okay, so then I thought, well, how do you understand that proclivity for evil? Does it indicate that there's an opposite proclivity? Right?
25:00 Jordan B. Peterson? So, you know, Nietzsche announced so famously in the mid-1800s that God was dead. But that didn't get rid of the problem of evil. Quite the contrary, and he knew it wouldn't. And one of his prophecies was that we would see the deaths of 100 million people in the 20th century as a consequence of the ideological possession that would flood in to supplant what the concept of God had protected us from. And that absolutely 100% happened, exactly the way he predicted it would. Same with Dostoevsky, same prediction.
25:39 Jordan B. Peterson? We're left with the reality of evil, and we're left with the question of ultimate good. Like, the dissolution of God, the disappearance of God, the collapse of religious belief is something like the disappearance of the transcendent good. But if you're stuck with evil, the abysmal evil that was on display in the 20th century, the problem of good doesn't go away. It's even brought into more stark relief. That's partly why you like to go to movies that feature anti-heroes, like really bad people. The reason you want to go watch that, unless there's something off about you, is to flesh out what the most terrible
26:24 Jordan B. Peterson? pattern of action represents, so that you can go the other way. The thing about coming to the realization of the existence of evil is that you've instantly, even if you don't know it, come to the realization of a transcendent good, because the transcendent good is whatever gets you the farthest possible away from that. Okay. Then I started to understand that that landscape, which is the landscape of good and evil, was the landscape of stories. Right? And then I started to understand that stories varied in their depth. Now, we kind of know that, right? You know that you can watch a shallow story,
27:07 Jordan B. Peterson? you can watch a movie that's just light entertainment, or you can read a book, or you can watch a movie that moves you profoundly to the depths. And so you know there's a hierarchy of depth that characterizes the literary world. As you're more sophisticated, you read deeper books. They move you more profoundly. They shift the structure of your perception more comprehensively. It's effortful. Light, difficult things are effortful.
27:43 Jordan B. Peterson? The deepest stories are religious.
27:47 Jordan B. Peterson? Okay, that's a definition. Right, because you could ask, even as an observant scientist, "What's the domain of the religious?" And it's characterized by many features, so...
28:02 Jordan B. Peterson? The domain of the religious includes the experience of awe. That's a good marker. The awe you experience when you look at the night sky, or perhaps the Grand Canyon, or when you're in love. That's another indication of your ability to see what's beyond. That's not a proposition. It's not a set of beliefs. It's an experience. So that's part of the domain of the religious.
28:31 Jordan B. Peterson? Our stories are often about what inspires awe. People can inspire awe if you admire someone deeply. That's a form of awe. And it's a compulsion to imitate. And that's no different than the instinct to worship. Those are the same thing. That's all the same thing.
28:54 Jordan B. Peterson? The domain of literature is the landscape of good and evil. And the deepest literary stories are religious.
29:08 Jordan B. Peterson? So I started to analyze stories, and I started to find out who was good at that. And the people I found that were the best at that were the psychoanalysts. Freud initially, and then his compatriot Carl Jung in the school that he established. And so then I started reading everything I could get my hands on from that school, and as much mythology, religious story, as I could from all sorts of different cultures. And I started as well walking through the biblical stories and starting to piece together what they mean, what they signify. And so...
29:53 Jordan B. Peterson? ...to understand that, along the way, a few other things.
30:01 Jordan B. Peterson? You know, when you look at the world, you can't see all the world. You understand that. There's... the world is insanely complex. This is why we can't be guided by facts alone. People say, "Follow the sciences," because they don't understand this. You can't follow the science, because science is not a navigation tool.
30:23 Jordan B. Peterson? Science is a descriptive enterprise. And describing the landscape and figuring out how to navigate through it are not the same problem.
30:34 Jordan B. Peterson? The facts alone can't tell you what to do, no more than if someone drops you in a desert, the landscape around you can tell you what direction you should walk in.
30:45 Jordan B. Peterson? When you are interacting with what's real, you have to choose what to attend to and you have to choose what to ignore. You have to prioritize your attention.
31:00 Jordan B. Peterson? There's no difference between
31:05 Jordan B. Peterson? the universe of value and your prioritization of your attention. Think about this, for example. You go on a date with someone for the first time, and you're in a noisy restaurant, and there's 50 conversations. And you could listen to any of them.
31:23 Jordan B. Peterson? Or you could look at your phone. Because there's a million conversations on there.
31:29 Jordan B. Peterson? But if you have any sense, that's not what you do. What do you do? You prioritize the conversation that you're having with the person that you're having dinner with. That's what you do with your guests. What that means is that you, of all the things you could attend to, you focus on the interactions between you and the person that you're attempting to shower with hospitality. You eliminate from your perception a multitude of potential phenomena, and you highlight a tiny proportion of what you're offered. You do that all the time. Every time you focus your eyes, you do that.
32:11 Jordan B. Peterson? Every time you take a step forward, every glance you take, you...
32:23 Jordan B. Peterson? Sift the world through a structure of value. The way you do that habitually, that's your character. That's your personality. A representation of that, a stateable representation of that,
32:37 Jordan B. Peterson? that's a story. The reason you like stories, the reason you need to hear them, is because you want to know how people prioritize their attention and their perceptions. Their attention and their actions. And the reason you want to know that is because there's nothing more valuable to know than that. That's why, when you talk to someone, you look at their eyes. You look at their eyes so you can see
33:03 Jordan B. Peterson? where they're pointing their eyes. You look at their eyes so you can see what they're attending to. You look at what they're attending to so that you can understand what they're prioritizing. You do that so that you can gain insight into their character and understand them. That's how we do it. When you go see a movie, you watch someone act out the priorities of their attention and action. And that's the characterization in the movie. And you do that so that you can benefit from observing the consequences of that characterization.
33:37 Jordan B. Peterson? The deeper the movie, the more general significance the characterization has.
33:46 Jordan B. Peterson? So, I could say that every decision you make reflects the decision between good and evil in a
33:54 Jordan B. Peterson? attenuated way.
33:58 Jordan B. Peterson? Such that the your description of the micro decisions you make might not be that interesting. But if I took a set of decisions that people made, that a set of people made, and I distilled those decisions to their essence, and I extracted out a characterization in consequence, that distilled characterization would be of general utility and general interest. And that's what a good storyteller does. And you know this because a good storyteller maybe writes a villain. And a complex and compelling villain. And so, that villain is...
34:34 Jordan B. Peterson? First of all, the distillation of everything that could be villainous about one person, because the filmmaker will just show you the essence of that. But then even more than that is that a very well-developed fictional villain will be villainous in the way that ten villains in the world might be, right? It's a distillation of the essence of villainy. It's a purification. That's what stories do. They distill and purify the moral landscape. And you want to watch them because the representation of the distilled moral landscape is a powerful, generalizable tool. It's an abstraction.
35:17 Jordan B. Peterson? And then we go again. Once again, the deepest distillations are religious characterizations. So the ultimate fictional character becomes a god. Now, you have to understand what I'm not saying. I'm not trying to reduce the domain of the religious to the fiction that people juxtapose against fact. I'm trying to make a claim for what we do when we fictionalize. What we do when we fictionalize is we abstract. That's not the replacement of fact with falsehood.
35:55 Jordan B. Peterson? That's the sifting and winnowing of fact until nothing remains but the purified essence. It's the most real, not the least. Now, you know this already, because if that wasn't the case, then there'd be no such thing as deeply profound literature, right? Because if fiction was the falsification that bore no reality to... that bore no relationship to reality, then there'd be no such thing as deep literature. It wouldn't have any bearing on the world. But we know that that's opposite of the truth.
36:40 Jordan B. Peterson? The deepest literature has the most bearing on the world.
36:44 Jordan B. Peterson? And again, even as a matter of definition, the deepest literature is religious. What happens in the biblical corpus? It's a series of characterizations. What are their characterizations? Well, they're twofold, essentially. There's a characterization of what should be put in the highest place. It's an investigative inquiry into the nature of that which should be put in the highest place. So that's a characterized, a series of characterizations. And then it's a characterization of
37:18 Jordan B. Peterson? man's character in relationship to that. That's what the biblical corpus is. And it's a distillation of such characterization that has made itself manifest over some tens of thousands of years, at least. Longer, at least that. At least that in story form. Way longer in behavioral form. Way longer than that. So let's talk about this characterization. Well, I can, I'll start with this story.
37:56 Jordan B. Peterson? "And the Lord said unto Abraham, 'Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee.'" Okay, so now that's, it's one line. Okay, so what happens in this line? Well, we know some things about Abraham. He's old, he's like seventy-five. And where does he live? Well, he lives in his father's house, among his family, in his country. And he's seventy-five. So what are we to make of that? What's a little old to be in your father's house? Right, there's a serious problem of failure to launch here.
38:38 Jordan B. Peterson? Right, okay, so now we could delve into that and see what that signifies. Okay, so now, we know that Abraham's father is a wealthy man. And what that means is that Abraham is provided with everything he needs. Okay, now imagine that you're offered a political utopia. This is the standard political utopia offering. What did Dostoevsky say about the political utopians? So imagine we can arrange your life, so, and this is Dostoevsky's words, "So that you had nothing like a description of California. You had nothing to do except to sit in hot tubs of bubbling water, to eat cakes, and busy yourself with the continuation of the species."
39:23 Jordan B. Peterson? Right, so that's Dostoevsky's characterization of the utopia. And he analyzes this, and said, "Okay, well, imagine we could bring that about. What would human beings do in response?" And Dostoevsky's answer was, this is in Notes from Underground: A Study of Resentment. He said, "Human beings would immediately do something destructive and insane just to break that utopia, that hedonistic utopia, just so something interesting would happen." And he said, "And isn't that for the best?" That's a very interesting critique. It's a very sophisticated critique.
40:06 Jordan B. Peterson? You know, often you hear critiques of utopian socialism. A critique will be, "Well, what is on offer is impossible." And of course, that's true, but that's perhaps not the deepest critique. The deepest critique is, "That's not what you want." Or maybe even one level below that. "That's not what you should want." And you might say, "Well, why wouldn't I want to have everything I need delivered to me with no effort?" And the answer is, "Because you're not an infant in a crib."
40:37 Jordan B. Peterson? Right? And if you're 75 years old and you're living like that, it's like
40:42 Jordan B. Peterson? something's gone wrong. And seriously wrong. Well, then you think, well, is that in accordance with your experience? It's like, well, think about what we do when we go watch movies. We don't watch people shop, we don't watch people eat. We don't watch people sleep. Even in security and comfort, right? We're not that interested in watching satiated people in their unconsciousness. Which is an infantile existence. What we want to see on the screen is romantic adventure.
41:17 Jordan B. Peterson? And so then you might think, well, that's what we're built for, actually. That the ideal life isn't the utopia of infantile satiation. But something like the life of romantic adventure.
41:33 Jordan B. Peterson? So let's assume for a moment that that's the case, just for
41:39 Jordan B. Peterson? what? For the sake of nurturing the hypothesis and then we'll we'll add an additional observation. So now there's a characterization of man that we already described. Abraham is living this life of infantile satiation. And at some point, it's insufficient for him. A little late. But better late than never. And there's actually an optimism in that because in this story puts forward the claim that it is better late than ever and then maybe it's never too late. And so even if you lived a life of infantile dependency. You could still wake up and go have your life, go have your adventure.
42:22 Jordan B. Peterson? Now, you know, you think about what you do for your kids, you know, if you have any sense.
42:28 Jordan B. Peterson? What did my mother say when I left home? I left home about 16. My mother's a very nice person. And she said something. My life went better when I left home. I was having some friction with my father for a variety of reasons, many of which had to do with me, many of which had to do with being 16, some of which had to do with it was time for me to go. And when I went, it was much better and I got along with my parents much better. And my mother, who's a very nice person, said, "If things were too good at home, you'd never leave." And now and then, my mother, you know, she could strike with her tongue like a snake, even though she's a very nice person. And that was one of the times that I saw
43:12 Jordan B. Peterson? her, the stronger character in her underneath her maternal solicitude. Because she was the kind of mother who wanted her kids to go. Have your life. Right? That's the maternal sacrifice that a true mother is called upon to offer, her children to the world. Right? And my mother was good at that.
43:38 Jordan B. Peterson? And so,
43:41 Jordan B. Peterson? if you're treating your children properly, you don't entice them into a prolonged state of dependency and infantile satiation. That isn't good for them. You know it. That isn't what you want for them. And that's an interesting thing too, because you could imagine that you want nothing more than to shelter your child from all possible harm and damage. But
44:09 Jordan B. Peterson? you don't want that. You don't want them, you don't want to protect them from serpents. That's a way of thinking about it symbolically. You want to make them into snake handlers. That's a more profound form of security. So if you make your child, if you encourage your child to become adventurous, and alert, and awake, and undaunted, and faithful, and courageous, then that actually provides them with the best form of security possible, because it means they're going to be able and ready for whatever comes their way. And that's way more secure in the final analysis than anything you could produce by maintaining them in a state of suspended infantile satiation.
44:54 Jordan B. Peterson? Freud was very good at analyzing this. He characterized the mother who enticed her child into a relationship that was too close, let's put it that way, as edible and devouring. Okay, so what do we know from these first lines? We have a characterization of man and God.
45:19 Jordan B. Peterson? Man, as represented by Abraham, might fall prey to the temptation of infantile security, but will eventually become dissatisfied with that. What's God in this characterization? God is the voice of adventure that calls even to the unwilling. Okay, now what you have to understand, you have to understand this. This is a definition. Okay, this is what modern people don't understand about these stories. There are multiple characterizations of what God is in the opening stories of Genesis. In the initial Genesis story, God is the spirit that brings order to chaos, which is what you do in your household.
46:04 Jordan B. Peterson? He's the spirit that Adam walks with unselfconsciously in the garden, which is what you do when you're attempting some recreation in your backyard.
46:23 Jordan B. Peterson? He's the spirit that calls the unworthy out for the poor quality of their sacrifices. That's the God that makes himself manifest in the story of Cain and Abel. See, these are definitions. So what the writers of the biblical stories are trying to wrestle with is...
46:49 Jordan B. Peterson? ¿Cuál es el carácter que debe poner en el lugar más alto? ¿Y cómo conceptualizas eso? ¿Y cómo existes en relación con eso? Y así hay una hipótesis que se basa en ello, y la hipótesis es monotheística. Es que todas estas diferencias son unidas en una cosa que está correctamente puesta en el lugar más alto. Y así la hipótesis sería que el espíritu que hace orden de la caos, el espíritu que castiga a los orgullosos, el espíritu que llama a aquellos que hacen sacrificios de segundo lugar, el espíritu que advierte del inundación impending, esa es la historia de Noah, el espíritu que castiga a los tiranos, esa es la historia de la Torre de Babel. Todos son la misma cosa.
47:32 Jordan B. Peterson? Y si tienes algún sentido, existes en relación con esa cosa y te es unido a ella. Te es unido a su manifestación dentro de tu propia vida. Te es unido a permitir que eso te posea a través de tus decisiones. Y luego esa historia se elabora más allá en la historia de Abraham. Y así Abraham está viviendo una semi-vida. Y llega una voz a él, o un impulso, o un sentimiento, no importa realmente, y dice:
48:02 Jordan B. Peterson? "Sal de allí". ¿Ahora qué hace a Abraham creyente? Él escucha. Bueno, ahora tienes que preguntarte esto sobre tu creencia. Esa voz se hace manifestar a ti todo el tiempo. Cuando estés en una situación relativamente cómoda y podrías quedarte allí, podrías vivir allí, podrías rociarte allí, podrías...
48:35 Jordan B. Peterson? podrías dejar de avanzar.
48:39 Jordan B. Peterson? Ou vous pourriez faire appel à la call of adventure, et ensuite en exécuter. Ok, donc que faites-vous dans ces deux circonstances ? Vous placez la foi dans un esprit ou un autre. L'un est l'esprit de stasis et de confort, et l'autre est l'esprit d'aventure. Vous pourriez dire : "Est-ce que vous croyez en cela ?" C'est comme si la croyance était représentée dans votre décision. C'est la croyance. La croyance n'est pas votre déclaration sur la question de savoir si vous pensez que cette voix existe. C'est une préoccupation secondaire. La préoccupation principale est : Quand quelque chose profond dans vous pose le commandement de avancer, êtes-vous prêt ?
49:26 Jordan B. Peterson? Et si la réponse est oui, alors la chose suivante qui se passe... La chose suivante se passe. Donc Dieu dit essentiellement : "Si vous faites appel à la voix d'aventure, je ferai de vous une nation grande, et je vous bénirai, et je ferai que votre nom soit grand, et vous serez une bénédiction." Maintenant, c'est assez d'offre. Donc voyons si nous pouvons en décomposer. Eh bien, rien d'aventuré, rien de gagné. Les gens certainement savent ça. C'est comme si... Comment est-ce que vous commencez votre voyage, disons, vers la grandeur, vers quelle grandeur vous pourriez concevoir ou gérer ? Quelle serait la grandeur ? Eh bien, dans cette histoire, elle est conceptualisée comme
50:11 Jordan B. Peterson? la fondation d'un, non seulement d'une nation, mais peut-être d'une multitude de nations, d'accord ? Donc les actions que vous faites sont la fondation d'une grande entreprise.
50:23 Jordan B. Peterson? Comment cela se manifeste-t-il ? Comme le call à l'aventure. Donc nous pourrions demander : "Comment cela se manifeste-t-il ?" Parce que c'est bon de faire des choses comme ça pour que vous les compreniez vraiment. Eh bien... There are other characterizations in the biblical corpus of the nature of God's voice. So I'll give you an example. This is a very good example. So before Moses becomes a leader, like Abraham, let's say, he encounters the burning bush. Okay, so what does that mean exactly? Well, he's just going along his business. He's a shepherd at this point. And a shepherd is the beginnings of a leader, right? Because a shepherd is a caretaker, and a shepherd in biblical times
51:06 Jordan B. Peterson? was also someone who was keeping the lions and the wolves at bay, right? It wasn't a job for this faint of heart, and you had to live off the land at the same time. It was a tough job. He's a shepherd, and then that's going pretty well. And he's wandering around by Mount Sinai one day, which is the place of holy encounter, by the way. And something catches his attention out of the corner of his eye, and he decides to leave the beaten track and go investigate. Okay, so how does that work in your life? Well, are you interested in some things?
51:43 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, yes. Did you choose them? Or did they choose you? Now, that's a weird question, right? Because my sense is that, well, try to make yourself interested in something you're not interested in. Right, right. That's very... Now, that's weird, right? Because if you were yours, you could just do that. You'd just say, "Look, I need to do this, so now I'm interested in it." And then away you'd go, and there'd be no resistance. You'd just tell yourself what to do. In a way, that is not how it works, not in the least. You can't tell yourself what to do any more effectively than you can tell anyone else, maybe even less effectively. And that's strange, because, well, it certainly indicates
52:27 Jordan B. Peterson? that you're not under your own control, and that's a... Then what... Who controls you then? There's a question for the ages. And more strangely even, if you can't control what you're interested in, what controls it? It's not random. It's not random unless you're insane. And even then, it's not random. It's more random, that's for sure. But what calls you is not random.
52:58 Jordan B. Peterson? So what is it? Well, the biblical answer to that is: What calls you is God. Definition!
53:06 Jordan B. Peterson? Okay, now you've got to think about that in the context of your own life.
53:12 Jordan B. Peterson? Ask yourself if...
53:18 Jordan B. Peterson? Consider the success that you have, insofar as you have success. And then ask yourself:
53:25 Jordan B. Peterson? What was the pathway to that success? How much of that was a consequence of following your calling? Now, if you have a job that pays you well and you hate it, you're not interested in it, that's not exactly success. And the security that the money hypothetically provides, which would be part of that provision of infantile gratification, it's insufficient. If you hate what you have to do to provide that, if you're not engrossed by what you're sacrificing,
54:05 Jordan B. Peterson? you know that you're much more likely to commit to something if it grips you. Okay, so then you've got to ask yourself: What does that imply? I can tell you what it implies in the biblical context, because the voice of God is characterized as the interplay between two forces frequently. One is what pulls you forward, right? It's an invitation, it's a calling. It's what makes itself manifest behind everything that interests you. You can think of everything that interests you as a portal through which the divine light shines. That's a very good way of thinking about it. And you know that the thing you're interested in isn't the thing itself, because you can pursue something you're interested in, and then your interest will shift, which shows you that whatever it was that was pulling you forward was not that specific thing,
54:49 Jordan B. Peterson? but that that thing was a pointer to something else. Right? Interest is not enough, right? Because your interest can lead you astray, especially if you're not disciplined. So you need conscience as well. And there's ample characterization of God in the biblical corpus as the voice of conscience. And so then you could imagine that what calls you forward is the interplay between calling and conscience. Right? Conscience keeps you on the... Your calling attracts you forward and defines the path, and your conscience keeps you on the straight and narrow. And the interplay, it's a definition again, the interplay between those two things, which aren't exactly you. You're subject to them, that's why they're not you.
55:34 Jordan B. Peterson? They have an autonomy, which is why they're not you. You can't tell your conscience what to do. It tells you when you make a mistake. That's not the same thing at all, and it's akin very much to the phenomenon of interest. It's like, you can't... You can respond to what you're interested in. You can even pervert what you're interested in. But it's very difficult to make it out of whole cloth. It's something that you abide by, or not. The insistence in the first few sentences of this story is that if you follow the voice of adventure,
56:16 Jordan B. Peterson? the voice that calls you forward, if you commit yourself to that fully, fully, then you will become a great nation, blessed with a great name, and someone that does nothing but good. That's a pretty good deal. That's a good deal, and that's the deal that's on offer. And that's a very strange thing to think that that's the deal that's on offer, because maybe that is the deal that's on offer. Because you could imagine, you can ask yourself, this is a good question, you ask yourself, if you attended to everything that interested you, who could you become? If you took it seriously,
56:59 Jordan B. Peterson? if you noticed that that was what was calling you forward, if you didn't shrug off that opportunity and responsibility, which are exactly the same thing, if you were full-heartedly committed to that, if you were willing to make the sacrifices necessary to walk that path, no matter what, who could you become? There's been studies of what people regret when they're old. They don't regret so much the mistakes they've made. They regret more the mistakes they didn't allow themselves to make. Right? They regret...
57:38 Jordan B. Peterson? Banal normality. And I think part of the reason they regret that is because life is too
57:46 Jordan B. Peterson? crucial to be satisfied with banal normality. It's too difficult. There's too much suffering intrinsic to it. The burden is too heavy. What justifies the weight of life?
58:02 Jordan B. Peterson? Security?
58:05 Jordan B. Peterson? There are always times when people long for security, but security doesn't secure you. You're still faced with the problem of mortality. You're still faced with the problem of malevolence. What can justify that? Well, how about a great adventure? You act like that's the case because you'll go watch people have a great adventure on a screen. So then you might ask, "Well, where do you find your great adventure?" Well, that's part of what the biblical stories are trying to represent.
58:36 Jordan B. Peterson? Calling. So what happens to Moses is he goes off the beaten track. So you can imagine this in your own lives, you know? Maybe you have a job that's providing for you and it's providing a certain degree of stability, but you feel that something is missing. You're in Abraham's position. And you have these interests that have always lurked in the back of your psyche, you know? And that maybe you've been afraid to pursue. You don't think enough of yourself. Maybe you think they're a bit crazy. Maybe they're too daring. Maybe you think people laugh. God only knows what you think. You think whatever you think that stops you. That's plenty of things. It's usually fear of failure, fear of success, fear of opinion, fear of the effort. Who knows?
59:19 Jordan B. Peterson? But let's say in the depths of your despair at your
59:27 Jordan B. Peterson? too constrained life, you
59:31 Jordan B. Peterson? Allow yourself to be gripped by something that compels you. But that's what Moses does. He goes off the beaten track and he looks at this... He looks at what calls to him, and what is it? It's a burning bush. Okay, what does that mean? Well, the tree, it's a tree. It's a tree of life. A tree is a symbol of life. And it's burning because things that are alive burn, right? That's metabolism. Everything that's alive is on fire. And things can... Living things can make themselves manifest with hallucinogenic intensity. That's what happens when you fall in love. That's what happens when you have a child. You see the life burning in a manner that's compelling. So Moses, he goes to investigate this thing that calls to him,
1:00:16 Jordan B. Peterson? and he gets closer and closer to it, which means he interacts with it more. He gets... He approaches it. And then he realizes that he's starting to tread on sacred ground. Okay, so what does that mean? It means if you follow your interest, it will take you down into the depths. No matter what the interest is. It will discipline you and broaden you and deepen you until you get to the bottom of things. He takes off his shoes and he approaches closer. And he takes his... Takes off his shoes. That's a shedding of his old identity. Shoes are emblematic of identity. You can walk a mile in someone's shoes and then you can understand them. He takes off his shoes. He doesn't know where he's going. It's a symbol of humility. It's a symbol of willingness to learn more.
1:01:01 Jordan B. Peterson? He takes off his shoes and continues his intense meditation, and the voice of God itself speaks to him from the midst of the bush. And it reveals itself as the spirit of being and becoming. "I am that I am. I will be what I will be." It's both of those. All the Hebrew in that announcement of God's identity is without tense. "I am... I am what I was. I am what I am. I am what will be." That's the spirit of being and becoming. What does that mean? It means if you pursue whatever calls to you with enough intensity, you'll get to the bottom of things. And the voice of God itself, the spirit of being itself, will make itself manifest to you. And what's the consequence of that? For Moses, that's when he becomes a leader.
1:01:45 Jordan B. Peterson? So here's a question that pertains to our question at the beginning of the lecture. What's the opposite path to the hellish abyss of totalitarian atrocity?
1:01:58 Jordan B. Peterson? You become the leader who can lead people out of tyranny and slavery, across the desert to the promised land. And you become that by following the calling that takes you to the depths, that enables the structure of existence itself to reveal itself to you. That motivates you to become a leader despite your inadequacies. Moses was a man who couldn't speak. He had a speech impediment. There's something wrong with his ability to communicate. And God basically says to him, "That's your problem. Sort it out." And that's a fair statement, because if you're called upon to be a leader, there's going to be things about you that are inadequate. "That's your problem.
1:02:42 Jordan B. Peterson? Find someone to help you. Build a team." You don't have an excuse. And this is what Moses done, is he allies himself with his brother Aaron, who's a public speaker essentially, a politician. Moses is a prophet, and Aaron is a politician. And that's a nice dynamic, because the prophet keeps the politician in line, right? But the politician gives voice to the prophet. It's a good partnership, and it works out quite well for them and for the Israelites. And Moses asked, "Why will the Israelites listen to me?" And God says, "Tell them God sent you." And you might say, "Well, why would someone believe that?" And the answer is, "It would depend on how you said it."
1:03:26 Jordan B. Peterson? And I'm dead serious about that, right? And so if what you said wasn't a lie, maybe people would listen. And you might say, "Well, how is it that God would speak to me?" I know the answer to that. "Listen." "To what?" "To the voice of your own soul." "How's that?" And what's so terrible about that, in a sense, is that there's nothing you want to do more than that. And what's the consequence? Well, the consequence for Abraham is that...
1:04:05 Jordan B. Peterson? "I will make of thee a great nation, I will bless thee and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing, and I will bless them that bless thee, and I will curse them that curse you; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed." Wow, that's quite the bloody offer. So imagine this, so here's the deal. If you attended to what called you forward, hemmed in appropriately by your conscience, you would become the sort of person whose pattern of action would be so beneficial that every single person would benefit from it. It would be the best thing that could possibly happen to you, but simultaneously it would be the best thing that could possibly happen to everyone else. That's a good deal. You might think that's worth taking some risks for.
1:04:48 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, the funny thing about risks is like, you're taking risks. You walk across the street, right? You have children, you're gonna die, you're in this. So, the question of risk isn't the issue, the risk is already there. The question is, what do you do with the risk? And you have an adventure with it, and maybe that's, in some perverse sense, why the risk is there, because there's no adventure without risk. And maybe you could have an adventure that was so glorious, that it would justify the risk.
1:05:29 Jordan B. Peterson? The secret to life, is that the secret to life, to have an adventure so superlative that you say to yourself, "That was difficult, but I'd do it again, it was worth it." It's what you want for your children, right? You see your children struggling forward, and that's painful, and what you wanted for them is to have a life that's so full and abundant and rich and varied and remarkable and miraculous, that the price they have to pay for it, which is their mortality, let's say, is, you could celebrate that.
1:06:03 Jordan B. Peterson? "And shall all families of the earth be blessed." It's a lovely statement of the harmony that could obtain between the psyche and society. It's a representation of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is a place where you're doing exactly what you should do, and so things are good, but they're getting better. And at the same time, what you're doing is doing exactly that to everyone who's around you. Right? So that's a harmonious balance. It's not a competition between you and everyone else, because this is not a zero-sum game. It's a game that returns more the more you give. That's a sacrificial motif. Life is a game whose returns are dependent on your offering.
1:06:48 Jordan B. Peterson? Exactly that. That's what God tells Cain and Abel. Your return is dependent on the quality of your sacrifice. What's the ultimate sacrifice? Then that's the question there. What's the ultimate sacrifice? Actually, the biblical corpus as a whole proceeds to that revelation. What's the ultimate sacrifice? Child and self. Right? So that's... That happens in the story of Abraham. Abraham's called upon to sacrifice his son. Why? Because you have to give up everything to what's highest. And what happens when he decides to do that? He gets his son back. And it's part of the process by which he establishes
1:07:30 Jordan B. Peterson? the great nation that's blessed, that makes his name a blessing. The willingness to offer up everything, even what you love most dearly, to what's properly highest is the most abundant pathway forward. It's a terrifying idea. God approves of the proper sacrifice. I was thinking about this. Maybe I'll close with this.
1:07:57 Jordan B. Peterson? Dios castiga a Cain porque Cain hace sacrificios de segundo tipo. Así que eso significa que Dios es el agente que castiga el sacrificio de segundo tipo. Es una definición. ¿Crees en eso? Bueno, puedes preguntarte estas preguntas en lugar de suponer que sabes la respuesta. ¿Crees que puedes escapar con ofertas de segundo tipo? ¿Ha funcionado para ti? O podemos hacer la pregunta más enfatizada. ¿Alguna vez has escapado de una oferta de segundo tipo de manera que te hace orgullo de lo que has hecho cuando miras atrás cuando estás desesperado?
1:08:34 Jordan B. Peterson? Porque sé a qué te miras cuando estás desesperado. Miras hacia atrás a través de la detritas de tu vida para ver si hay alguna evidencia de que en algún momento de tu vida hiciste una oferta digna que fue aceptada correctamente, que produjo al menos durante algún momento la estabilidad de tu propia psique y la difusión de lo que era bueno entre la gente que te rodea y eso puede ayudarte a pasar por una noche oscura. Y así puedes preguntarte: ¿Qué pasaría si lo hicieras todo el tiempo? Con todo compromiso. Tú estás completamente comprometido de todos modos.
1:09:12 Jordan B. Peterson? Ese es tu destino. Tu destino es estar completamente comprometido en la realidad, pero tal vez no por elección.
1:09:21 Jordan B. Peterson? Quizás alinear la elección con la inevitabilidad.
1:09:27 Jordan B. Peterson? Abraham quiere ofrecer su hijo. Eso es lo que Dios mismo hace en la aventura cristiana, ¿verdad? Es un eco de esa idea de que la relación adecuada entre los seres humanos y lo más alto es una relación sacrificial y Cristo es el icono de la oferta de la Símbolo a Dios. ¿Y qué significa eso?
1:09:49 Jordan B. Peterson? Significa exactamente eso. Significa que la oferta que es más agradable para Dios es tu Símbolo.
1:09:58 Jordan B. Peterson? Obviamente, es obvio que ese es el caso. Es como si tuvieras que revelar todo lo que tienes dentro de ti. Tienes que ofrecer todo lo que tienes dentro de ti. Y tienes que hacerlo de una manera sacrificial. ¿Entonces qué quiero decir con eso? Ese es un nivel más profundo de realización sacrificial. Puedes pensar que cuando aprendes, eres ignorante y aprendes. Así que eres ignorante y algo te se ha añadido. Pero eso no es como funciona. La forma en que funciona es que estás equivocado. Vas de la cabeza hacia ese error. Una nueva realización se revela.
1:10:39 Jordan B. Peterson? Y para aceptarlo, tienes que permitir que lo que estabas equivocado sobre muera. Preguntas por qué la gente se aferran a sus viejos hábitos, incluso cuando saben que son destructivos. Y la respuesta es que no quieren dejar... No quieren dejar de lo que se aferran patológicamente. No quieren dejar de lo que han elevado patológicamente al lugar más alto. No están dispuestos a ofrecer el sacrificio de lo que es inmortal para progresar. Hay una insistencia al final de la historia de Adam y Eva. Adam y Eva fueron tirados del paraíso debido a su orgullo. Y Dios bloquea las puertas del paraíso.
1:11:22 Jordan B. Peterson? Pone un ángel a cada lado, un cherub. Y los cherubs llevan una espada. Los cherubs están acompañados de una espada que está en fuego, que gira en todas las direcciones. ¿Entonces qué es eso? ¿Qué es una espada que gira en todas las direcciones, que está en fuego? Bueno, el fuego quema. El fuego quema la madera muerta. Una espada se corta. Una espada quemada se corta y quema. Una espada quemada que gira en todas las direcciones es la espada que se corta y quema, de la que no hay escape. Bueno, eso obviamente bloquea el camino al paraíso, porque en el paraíso, nada que sea insuficiente es permitido existir.
1:12:02 Jordan B. Peterson? Y así, si estás tomando tus pasos hacia el paraíso, vas a enfrentar la espada que quema y corta. Y tienes que permitir que todo eso que es inmortal sea sacrificado. Y eso es agradable para Dios.
1:12:20 Jordan B. Peterson? Why people resist enlightenment?
1:12:24 Jordan B. Peterson? I mean, you've got to ask yourself, like, if it was a simple matter of
1:12:30 Jordan B. Peterson? incremental forward progression towards an ever more enlightened state, everyone would just do it. There's no cost. Well, what's the cost? Well, maybe you're 95% dead wood. Right? And so that's a lot to shed, to move forward. Especially when every cut is going to be painful. You know that that's the case. If you're arguing with your wife, you're arguing with your husband, and you come to the realization that you were wrong, you'll dissolve in tears. And the reason for that is because you have to let that part of you... The tears are grieved for the part of you that has to die. The stupid part of you that has to die. And you can easily get into a situation where that's so much of you
1:13:14 Jordan B. Peterson? that you're unwilling to undergo the winnowing process. And then you live in purgatory.
1:13:25 Jordan B. Peterson? So Abraham departed, as the Lord had spoken unto him, which is what you did when you left home.
1:13:32 Jordan B. Peterson? However imperfectly. And Lot went with him, his nephew. And Abraham was 75 when he departed out of Heran. And he took his wife and Lot, his brother's son, and all their substance they had gathered, and all the souls that they had gotten in Heran. And they went forth to go into the land of Canaan. And into the land of Canaan they came.
1:13:57 Jordan B. Peterson? What's the land of Canaan? It eventually becomes the promised land. By the way, in the story of Exodus, Canaan is the land of the future. That's a good way of thinking. That's where you're headed. And Canaan is the land of the future that's inhabited by...
1:14:14 Jordan B. Peterson? Los canenenses en la tradición bíblica son descendientes de Cain y son ciudadanos de la sociedad hedonística y tiránica. Eso es lo que te diriges hacia cuando te mueves hacia el futuro. Lo sabes, porque lo que te enfrentas cuando te mueves hacia adelante para tratar de establecerse es la ocupación del lugar que deseas establecer por las fuerzas que ya gobernaban allí. Es una historia universal de la humanidad.
1:14:51 Jordan B. Peterson? El impulso en el corpus bíblico es que se asume que si te adhaces a las dictadas de la voz que te llama a la aventura y estás dispuesto a hacer los sacrificios adecuados, los habitantes de Canaí se dispersarán mientras te acercas.
1:15:14 Jordan B. Peterson? Vamos a simplificar eso por un momento.
1:15:18 Jordan B. Peterson? Imagina que tienes una equipo de deportes de la escuela secundaria. Es el tema de cada uno de cada diez películas estadounidenses. Una equipo de deportes de la escuela secundaria. Y tal vez haya dos personajes en la equipo de deportes. Hay los dos jóvenes talentosos, uno de los cuales es un gran jugador de la equipo y el otro que es tal vez un poco más talentoso, pero algo narcisista y arrogante. Y la historia presenta el triunfo y los pruebas del niño que no solo es talentoso en los requisitos del juego, sino que es talentoso en levantar los espíritus de sus compañeros
1:15:57 Jordan B. Peterson? jugando el juego justamente y poniendo su éxito atlético en el contexto adecuado. Así que está jugando una multitud de juegos, ninguno de los cuales es subsumido por la competencia atlética.
1:16:12 Jordan B. Peterson? La historia, si es una comedia, una historia redentiva, es que el buen deporte...
1:16:22 Jordan B. Peterson? Prevails. Do you believe that? Imagine you have a son who's playing on a sports team and he's highly skilled. Maybe he's talented, spectacularly talented, but he's kind of a prick. You know, and so when he's running down the soccer pitch with his scoring opportunity and one of his teammates has a stellar opportunity himself, he doesn't pass, he takes the shot for himself. And if he does score, even in some spectacular manner, he has a celebration by himself and after the game, he complains about his teammates. And you see this making itself manifest on the, on the playing field and
1:17:03 Jordan B. Peterson? he's celebrated and rightly so for his skill, but you're deeply ashamed of his conduct. Why? Because you believe that your son should act like, you believe that if your son acted properly, that the inhabitants of the land of Canaan would scatter as he approached. And when you fail to see that make itself manifest, it makes your soul ache. Because you don't want him merely to be skilled unless you're a narcissist who's collecting his trophies. You want him to be skilled in a way that makes him into a man. And that's what you want. And that's the call to adventure that Abraham undertakes.
1:17:45 Jordan B. Peterson? And Abraham passed through the land unto the place of Sikkem, unto the plain of Moora, and the Canaanite was then in the land. And the Lord appeared unto Abraham, and he said, Unto thy seed will I give this land. And there builded he an altar unto the Lord, who appeared unto him. I'll close with this. Abraham advances in good faith. With each advancement, there's a sacrifice. Okay. You know that makes sense. Have you ever advanced in your life without a sacrifice?
1:18:18 Jordan B. Peterson? ¿Es el caso de que si los sacrificios son de la calidad más alta posible, el avance es más rápido y se orienta en una mejor dirección?
1:18:30 Jordan B. Peterson? Si te están llamando a hacer más, que es lo que tu disciplina te permite hacer, y estás dispuesto a sacrificar las malas costumbres que te están deteniendo, el sacrificio doloroso de tu orgullo y de tu hedonismo que puede tener, ¿eso no hace que tu camino hacia adelante sea más suave? ¿Y no es el caso de que estés más en consonancia con tu alma cuando haces eso? ¿Y no es el caso de que todos los que te rodean estén emocionados hasta la muerte si no están tristes y resentidos por el hecho de que tuve suficiente carácter para bajar la estupidez que estaba impidiendo tu progreso cuando la oportunidad de ser mejor se presentó? ¿Y no es exactamente eso lo que quieres para tus hijos y para aquellos que amas? Y eso es exactamente lo que Abraham dramatiza.
1:19:13 Jordan B. Peterson? Cada aventura que undertakes es un poco más difícil. El sacrificio que se le llama a hacer es un poco más profundo, mientras que culminan en la necesidad de sacrificar a su único hijo, a pesar del hecho de que le han prometido el destino de ser el padre de las naciones. Se le llama a hacer el sacrificio ultimate, como todos nosotros, por inevitabilidad, voluntariamente o involuntariamente, en celebración o golpeando y gritando. Y nuestra noción, nuestra noción fundamental, es que si está en celebración, entonces no tiene que ser golpeando y gritando.
1:19:56 Jordan B. Peterson? Bien, entonces recapitulamos.
1:20:05 Jordan B. Peterson? Las historias representan personajes en movimiento. El personaje es el patrón de priorización de la atención, acción y priorización de la atención. Es una representación de lo que es importante para esa persona. Cuando vas a ver una película, ves lo que es el personaje principal que está orientado, y inferes su carácter de tu análisis de su objetivo, y te lo envolventes para entenderlo cuando entiendes su objetivo.
1:20:38 Jordan B. Peterson? Las historias más profundas representan las características más profundas.
1:20:46 Jordan B. Peterson? El carácter de lo que se debe poner en el lugar más alto y que se debe imitar está representado en el corpus bíblico en una multitud de formas que se convergen en una única caracterización, un aspecto de la cual se presenta en la historia de Abraám, que presenta al hombre como el espíritu que, no importa cuán protegido pueda ser, todavía puede responder al llamado de la aventura, y Dios como precisamente ese llamado.
1:21:22 Jordan B. Peterson? Con la insistencia que se encuentra en la narrativa, que el calentamiento adecuado de ese llamado
1:21:33 Jordan B. Peterson? hace de cada hombre el maestro de un destino infinito.
1:21:39 Jordan B. Peterson? Así que eso es lo que vale la pena pensar.
1:21:46 Jordan B. Peterson? Hay una enjuiciación cristiana de que tienes que levantar tu cruz y llevarla voluntariamente. Eso es la aventura de tu vida. Esa es la posibilidad de tu vida. Es la catástrofe de tu vida. Son lo mismo. Y en esa catástrofe están las semillas de la aventura. Si la aventura es llevada a cabo con suficiente fe,
1:22:11 Jordan B. Peterson? la catástrofe es prestada.
1:22:19 Jordan B. Peterson? Ese es un buen lugar para terminar.
1:22:40 Jordan B. Peterson? Gracias.
1:22:43 Speaker 00 Well, some races draw attention, others become the race everyone watches. In Texas, James Talarico and Ken Paxton are facing off in one of Kalshi's most traded midterm markets. Follow the race in real time on Kalshi and then trade on the candidate you think is going to win. Each correct contract is worth $1 at settlement. Don't just follow the midterms, trade what happens next on Kalshi. Use code DAILY, D-A-I-L-Y, to get up to $25 when you trade $25. That's Kalshi, K-A-L-S-H-I. Kalshi, trade on anything. 18-plus only. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contracts trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Kalshi products are not available in all jurisdictions. Prices, values, and available markets may differ from those mentioned.
1:23:27 Speaker 00 For more information, see kalshi.com/ regulatory.
Previous The Problem That Won’t Let You Go Next What To Do When You Have No Vision For Your Life Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated