At a Crossroads | Jordan B. Peterson | 2022 Commencement Address

so you seniors you graduates you're at a pinnacle of sorts with any luck it won't be the last one that's one metaphor pinnacle another how about a crossroads you're at a crossroads right you're entering a new phase of your life you can you're someone different than you were four years ago and hopefully someone better likely someone better and you have another opportunity now to be the next iteration of yourself that you can be at a crossroads you know the metaphor works because you make a decision you go one direction or another and there's an old blues idea that you meet the devil at the crossroads i always wondered why that was i thought it through it's a really compelling idea you know it's a it's an image that has a good narrative fit and it sticks in your memory once you hear it why do you meet the devil at the crossroads at midnight maybe that's when you examine your conscience or it examines you and then you might ask well why do you meet the devil at the crossroads and the answer is most fundamentally because when you come to a place in your life where you have to make a choice and i think this is actually true of every choice we ever make but it's more evident when the choice is more weighty let's say as the choices that lay themselves out now in front of you are weighty you aim up or down and there is always an agent of temptation at every choice point enticing you to aim down and i thought a lot about what aiming down means and so i'll run through that for a bit the spirit of temptation manifests itself for example in the story of cain and abel and so cain falls prey to temptation and god bluntly informs him when he complains about his fate that the temptation was freely chosen and that he could have done differently and better and cain becomes this is in the aftermath of the improper sacrifices that he makes the sacrifices that he makes that are not everything they could be they're not in the service of the highest good that are deceptive and arrogant simultaneously because when we make improper sacrifices we believe in the deepest part of ourselves that we've pulled one over god and isis suggests that that's a temptation you might want to avoid that presumption and then you might say well if you're tempted to aim down you're tempted to make improper sacrifices you're tempted to arrogantly presume that you are going to get away from it with it that you're not going to be called on it what are the pathways down that might manifest themselves in front of you and i think the the two stories that follow the story of cain and abel detail that so after cain and abel comes the flood and that's no accident the narrative placement of those stories is definitely no accidents it's unbelievably sophisticated from a literary perspective philosophical perspective theological perspective existential perspective one form of temptation is the nihilistic chaos that's symbolically represented by the flood right it's the proliferation of sins and sin is a word both its greek and its hebrew derivation are related to archery so the greek derivation i hope i haven't got this wrong because i know there are greek scholars in this audience so um the the the word is derived from the greek word hamartia which means to miss the mark and it's an archery term it's lovely i it's a lovely notion to know that because to sin therefore means to miss the target which implies that it has something to do with aim or the lack thereof i love that i think it's so apt and the derivation of the word sin from the hebrew source actually relies on the same imagery and so to sin is to aim wrong or to miss the mark there's a variety of ways you can miss the mark right don't aim at all that's a good one assume there is no such thing as aim assume all aims are equal well you sin you miss the mark what can happen well one way is you can descent into a kind of nihilistic hopelessness and that's not you can understand that you know you meet people in life whose lives have been so hard you you hear their stories they've suffered so much and they're bitter and they're hurt and they're resentful and you think oh my god it's no wonder you're bitter and resentful i mean look what you've gone through and but you also notice that their bitterness and their resentment and their hopelessness and their chaos and their anxiety it's not helping right it's worsening the problem it's not making it better and i'm not saying that people can always resist that but i i i have certainly seen that it's not helpful but i've also met other people you know who have had stories equally catastrophic sometimes more catastrophic sometimes so catastrophic you can't even believe that they survived who are not embedded or made residential by those experiences and who continue to aim up and so that makes a mockery of the of the of a kind of casual determinism right is that you end up chaotic nihilistic hopeless anxious etc merely as a consequence of the unbearable tragedy of your life because if that was the case then everyone who had a series of unbearable tragedies which by the way will be almost all of us in one way or another at one time or another would end up in that catastrophic chaos that that once that if manifested broadly enough in a society produces a flood of that ends everything and that's well that's the story of noah in large part and noah you know he's wise in his generations was a lovely phrase because it means for his time and place he was a good man and that's that's a lens through which history might well be viewed you know we're very presumptuous as moderns we look back and we think well you know this person who did all these remarkable things said these things that we now regard as inappropriate and therefore can be dispensed with it's like well what makes you think that you're above that criticism 100 years from now that you know the best you can do is to be as good as you can in your time and place and if you can manage that well good for you if you can transcend that well then maybe you're some sort of saint and you're probably not so aiming at just the first is not such a bad upper aim and so there's the chaos domain and i would say those of you who are graduating you want to be tempted into that you know one of the things i've thought a lot about in relationship to faith you know we have this idea it's not a good idea and it's certainly a idea for which religious people are often pilloried that faith means the sacrifice of reason and the willingness to believe things that are patently not true and when religious people debate scientists they're often sort of hung out to dry on exactly those presump presuppositions their willingness to accept on principle propositions that seem on the face of them impossible i don't think that's what faith is at all in in some fundamental sense i think faith is a form of courage you know if you're hurt by life and you will be it's understandable that you might react in a nihilistic and hopeless fashion and become anxious and depressed and cynical and bitter and all of that that's a bad pathway and i think part of what helps you through that is faith and and part of that faith is that it's incumbent upon you and actually in your best interest and everyone else's to maintain faith in the fundamental goodness of existence including your own despite the evidence to the contrary right because you can draw conclusions from suffering in two ways right one is that you have a duty and perhaps the capability to transcend the suffering and still serve the good or you can derive the conclusion that life is so unbearable that it would be best terminated which is the conclusion that girth as mephistopheles derives for example in faust he says well the world is rife with suffering and it's so unbearable that consciousness itself all being should cease to exist that would be better nothing is better than something if something is rife with suffering and you can derive that conclusion and you'll be driven to it in some of the farther reaches of your life when terrible things happen to you but i would say faith is the courage to not take that path despite the evidence that that might be justified and so i think it is a form of courage in the highest sense and i also think it is a redeeming form of courage one of the things i told my daughter who was very very ill for a very long period of time and in tremendous pain and suffering the high probability of continued slow painful inevitable degeneration was do not let your illness do not take advantage of your illness as an excuse and i told her that when she was in grade two you know it's no joke to tell someone that because i knew she'd had every reason to be embittered but i also knew that if she was in combination with her illness the two things might be worse than fatal and you know if you don't think there are things that are worse than fatal you have not suffered because there are things that are much worse than fatal and there's certainly not something you want to doom your child to so that's the that's one temptation right that's the temptation of a kind of faithless hopelessness and an army you might say existential angst that you allow to pervade yourself and i'm not saying you won't have your reasons because you will i'm saying that the reasons don't justify the conclusion and they certainly don't justify the conclusion not self-evidently and they don't justify the conclusion in any simple deterministic sense you know i met met a woman once in my clinical practice man this was something she was as damaged a person as you could hope to contemplate so she looked like a street person she'd come to this behavior therapy clinic that i worked in as a student and she was dressed like a street person you know she had this old ratty winter jacket on that was really dirty and and she stooped over she wasn't very tall to begin with she stooped over hunched over and she approached everyone like like this which made people shy away from her because it's an odd method of approach but the reason she did that was she was really so timid and so humble that it was if as if anybody that she approached had a light that was emanating them to from them too unbearable for her to behold so it wasn't so much an oddity although it was as an uh well pretty natural humility and i thought she had come to the behavior clinic because she wanted help she was an outpatient at a at a psychiatric hospital that i worked at and she couldn't communicate very well partly from because of her shyness partly because her first language was french which maybe she could communicate perfectly well in french but i doubt it um she was not an intelligent person technically speaking you know she she was intellectually impaired and probably in the bottom tenth percentile of the population that's a pretty rough place to exist cognitively you know you're barely literate at that point and and her mother was a was very ill and was uh bedridden and her her mother had a boyfriend who was a violent alcoholic schizophrenic who was always haranguing her about satan and like man she had a rough life it was she just didn't have anything going for she wasn't an attractive person physically you know people shied away from her she just was the downtrodden of the earth you know in the realist sense and that bloody woman you know she actually came to that behavior therapy clinic she'd been an inpatient and this was a rough place man because it was a hospital after the institutionalization and there were tunnels connecting some of the wards to other wards because it's so cold this was in montreal so cold in the winter they built a hospital on these tunnels and i took my brother there one day and it was like walking through dante's inferno i mean if you were so psychiatrically impaired that you weren't released in the 1980s when the institutionalization was maybe at its peak you were so damaged that there was just no possibility that you could function in the outside world so the people that were left were sort of the the most demolished of the most demolished and so just walking through there for my brother who had no experience in such things was traumatizing you know and and she had been in the inpatient ward for some time and then was released and she wanted to talk to the hospital administration because she got out she got this dog that she took care of and went for a walk and she really liked this dog and she took care of it you know and she walked with it and she wanted to see if she'd go find one of those on impatience who was worse off than her and take them for a walk every day with her dog you know it's so funny you meet someone like that and they just have nothing they have nothing in the world that you would recognize as any marker of success or or status or ability or they're outcast and tortured and and then none of that nonetheless you know a woman in that dismal state was able to rise above her own catastrophe which was like manifold and find someone worse off to try to serve you know you don't need many experiences like that to convince you that there's things about the world that you truly don't understand on the ethical front you know so i would say when you're at the crossroads and you're counseled to despair you know rise up in courage and see if you can resist it it's better for you and it's better for the people around you so that's the flood man and so the story that falls out of the tower of babel you know i was reading a wikipedia article on the tower of babel the other day i'm always curious about how these things are represented most publicly right and wikipedia is a great way to do that because it's collectively edited and the interpretation was essentially it was the description of how the languages of the world arose and i think i don't think that's what that story is about at all except peripherally i thought yeah you just missed the point 100 i mean babel is babylon first so you need to know that and babylon is the state that's gone mad and it's an it's a continual temptation for human beings to build complex organizations right that get too high and so what does that mean how about too many layers not local enough not distributed enough right two separate from the people that they serve i think the eu did that i think that's why the british left that's the tower of babel in fact they used unbelievably they used a famous painting of the tower of babel as a representation of the eu in some of their literature which i think it was a painting by brugel but i'm not sure of that but that was just like okay i don't i just do not understand how that happened at all um in any case this tower of babel it's it's also a luciferian story you know lucifer is the spirit of intellect the lightbringer who who's flown too high and challenges god himself and falls and in milton's story lucifer is called on his pretension by god and said you know if you because he is god's highest angel gone most catastrophically wrong so a symbol of intellect that in combination with the notion that he's a lightbringer it's a symbol of prideful intellect and it is the prideful intellect that raises itself against what is most properly placed at the highest place which is what god is whatever that is whatever it is it's not the intellect that's a subordinate spirit and if it isn't then it becomes aimed essentially at something approximating hell and perfectly capable of creating it and then perfectly capable of ruling in it and so god when god calls lucifer on his rebellion he says if you but repent you could be welcomed home and lucifer says well i am the sort of spirit that even if i once repented i would be instantly tempted to merely repeat my my mistake and he says as well i would rather rule and held and serve in heaven it's like hey man there's a choice for you at the crossroads and so you know people have asked me for example i'm very opposed to the idea that the fundamental human motivation is power which is pretty much what every student is taught at every level of their education in every educational institution except a handful now across your country fundamental motivation is power there's no place for people of good will to meet and have and engage in constructive dialogue dialogues none of that because our fundamental motivation is nothing but the will to power and so there is no place for people of good will to meet there is no such thing as dialogue it's all a mask a rationalization a post-hoc rationalization for pretension and power it's such a dismal philosophy it's so d you could not and i i believe this technically you could not formulate a more pathological philosophy it obliterates your faith in society and it eradicates the notion of the individual it removes the notion of good faith and good will and it makes communication impossible it's like that's a temptation to engage in that sort of destruction as a consequence of your intellectual pretensions let's say and for all of you this is going to face you too this pretension you know so maybe you're not the hopeless type and and and the temptation that assails you at the crossroads isn't your degeneration into a kind of faithless nihilism maybe it's a self-aggrandizement in some sense instead and that you feel that now you have the opportunity to serve your own ambition well we can take apart what that means because i think it's worthwhile psychopaths serve their own ambition and they're the people who are most truly motivated by power by the way if you think about it clinically and they're not very successful all uh protestations to the contrary they never rise above about three percent of any general population and maybe it's a better strategy to be a psycho manipulative psychopath and to lay inert on your in your bed in your mother's bedroom when you're 40 but it's not an optimal strategy and so you can be get away with it being a psychopath because you can mimic competence and you can take advantage of people who have learned to expect the best from others and so you can manipulate them but you produce nothing on your own and one of the things that's really interesting about psychopaths is they don't learn from experience which means not only do they betray other people constantly but they betray their own future selves and there's really no difference between your future self and someone else right you know if you're going to act ethically and this is a very good way of thinking about acting ethically you act in a way that works for you now that works for you tomorrow that works for you next week and next month the next year and in five years and in ten years and for you and your family and your friends and your broader community and all of that simultaneously and that's that's a place to find purpose in your life to manage that balancing act simultaneously and to sacrifice your narrow self-oriented pretensions ambition all of that the celebration of your own intellect the the construction of your own empire for your own narrow purposes part of the reason you shouldn't do that even though it's tempting in some sense especially if you have the ability is because do you want to rule over hell i mean and that's another interesting question with regards to the question of whether power is a valid motivation it's like okay well kim jong-un let's take him he's a manifestation of a power player you are you think it's better to be leader of north korea than to be just an ordinary peon there are you so sure it's better to rule over hell than just to be a servant in hell it's not obvious to me that's not success by any stretch of the imagination the most powerful devil that's like the worst possible failure and so you know you're called upon to to take the lessons that you've been taught in a university like this that the teachers attempts to teach you to abide by the eternal verities to sacrifice your own narrow pretensions in the highest sense to something that's truly better not because you should in some figure finger wagging sense but because there is truly nothing better and perhaps you don't have the wisdom to see that because it's difficult to see it's difficult to have a purview broad enough to encompass those expanse of time in community and see what pattern of behavior is to be manifested in proper service to balance all of that in some musical manner but that's definitely the that's definitely the appropriate pathway it's the best possible path of action and anything you pursue that isn't that is insufficient especially for people of your ability and i would also say and this is very much worth thinking about too you know there is this idea that your great country is founded upon for example that each individual is of divine worth you know i made reference to this client i had when i was a junior therapist and so even the the most what would you say ignored and and and alienated marginalized let's say to use a word that's been overused have something of real value to bring into the world and this is the case you're a particularized creature as a son of god or a daughter of god let's say you have something to bring into the world that no one can else no one else can bring in and so if you fail in that duty then you deprive the world of that and maybe you shouldn't do that like maybe everything's lesser if you do that and you don't know how much lesser you know because the world is also constituted in a very strange way you know dostoevsky said that we're not only responsible for what we do but for what everyone else does which is truly an insane thing to say but also in some sense fundamentally true you know i don't know how it is that each of us can bear the burden of the world on our shoulders singularly because i can't really comprehend how things can be structured in that manner but i do believe nonetheless that it is the case and so that if you forswear your responsibility to the highest good then you tear something out of the fabric of being that that is of inestimable value and i do believe you will pay for that if you do it and i would suggest that you don't pay that price because it will not be pleasant that's definitely hell and if you don't think hell is real you haven't thought about it enough it isn't a matter of other people believing foolish things it's a matter of you being so naive and so well protected that you have no idea how the world is constituted and so and so that's well that's the temptations let's say chaos and nihilism and hopelessness or intellectual pretension and the desire for self-aggrandizement and narrow power don't do that it's not helpful it won't do you any good and it it's beneath you you know it's beneath you to do that and you and you that will manifest itself in your life that that that that subordination of what's highest in you to those lesser gods let's say that'll manifest itself in the torments of your own conscience and no one escapes from that you know and so don't do that don't make that choice at the crossroads and then we might say practically speaking because i'm a behavioral psychologist you know i like to be practical well that's what you shouldn't do what should you do practically well we could walk through that you know a little bit practically i'll have lots of clients and students who were chaotic in their orientation life they didn't know what to do and they didn't know what to do about not knowing what to do it's like i don't know what to do with my life and i don't know what to do about my ignorance and my act my reaction to that in some sense wasn't exactly the reaction of a a clinician because not a typical clinician because typical clinicians are liberal protestant in their fundamental orientation and they tend to think of psychological development as something like self-actualization right it's really a self-development process but i i that wasn't my my observation partly influenced by the developmental psychologist sean piaget i had a more communitarian view of human development than that and my observation was that most people find the sa the cardinal meanings in their life not as a consequence of the development of their self whatever that is but in service to other people in in the adoption of responsibility you know because you're told be responsible and it's a finger wagging thing again you know that if you were a good person you'd be responsible you do your duty but no one ever says well because that's where you find the abiding meaning in your life and you need that meaning to sustain you through suffering and that's definitely the case you know i was very ill for a number of years and a lot of what got me through that wasn't my own special nature let's say but the support of my family and the support of my friends and the support of the broader community made a huge difference not only psychologically because i knew people were supporting me but also practically you build yourself a community you sacrifice yourself in the service of other people not so much because you should although you should but because that is where meaning is to be found and you need a deep meaning to sustain you through tragedy that's the ark and you find that deep meaning and you know there's a notion that it's better to give to receive than to receive and it sounds like a hallmark greeting card in some sense and and people are cynical about that too yeah you say that because you should be good and think that and but if you watch yourself you'll see that it's true because one of the things that's been really uh pronounced element in my life is that you know people thank me from time to time from for things that i've done or said and there isn't a better experience than that you know that you've put something out that's actually a manifestation of what you truly believe and the consequence of that is part of the redemptive process for someone else there is nothing that's better than that zero nothing in fact i don't think there's anything that's even in the same conceptual universe of that in terms of its intrinsically rewarding properties there's nothing better than to have people as perhaps particularly people you've never met tell you that what you have been doing has had a salutary effect on their lives that's and so that's a hell of a fine thing to aim for and why not import you know because you could do it if you put i don't i wouldn't even say necessarily that you put other people first because i think that's a mistake but i do think it's the case that you treat other people in the manner that you would wish to be treated if you were treating yourself properly and that's also a sophisticated thing right to learn to treat yourself properly because that doesn't mean you get to fulfill every momentary whim because that's what you do when you're two and two-year-olds can't live without their parents you know you have to be wise enough to govern your current behavior in light of the future and that's really what it means to be an adult it's what it means to forestall gratification and to and to attain the responsibility of an adult and the reason that you should do that because you should is because it's actually better you know in all ways it's it's an it's a panacea for suffering to adopt that responsibility and so i would tell my clients and students as well it's like well let's just take a look at where other people find meaning you know and and we'll see how your life matches with that do you have an intimate relationship yes or no the right answer is yes now maybe not for you and maybe you don't right now and maybe you have your reasons not to because you're a singular person in that regard but probably not because that's like a third of life and so if you don't have that that might be one of the reasons you're not doing so well and the fact that you don't have it might be an indication that you're not oriented in the proper direction i can give you an example that i had many people questioned me when i was just on tour this is a question that came up quite rapidly often um in the q and a sessions how do i find the right person when i'm dating how do i find the person who's right for me when i'm dating and i got that or on the internet uh i got the question like three times in a row and i thought because i always think this what about that question what's wrong with that question something wrong with that question how about how do i conduct myself so that i am the best possible partner now that's a whole different right that's a whole different conceptual universe and virtually no one ever asked that question and i would say well if you want an answer to the first question which is how do i find the person who's right for me you actually start by asking the second question which is what can i bring to the table for someone else and if you're really good at bringing something to the table for someone else hey man people might be lining up to be your partner and if they're not then you might think well maybe i'm just not bringing the right thing to the table and that's worth thinking especially if you're desperate you're lost and you're alone it's like hmm maybe i got this wrong and i you know i usually sort of top that with the suggestion that even if you did find the person who was perfect for you and they're that perfect what makes you think they wouldn't take one look at you and run screaming away and they likely would if they were that perfect because you know really are you that much of a catch and if you think you are you know that might be part of the problem um so so look so that's one right intimate relationship so i would say to you at the crossroads develop a vision for your relationship you know there's a gospel saying which is of course impossible to comprehend or believe knock on the door will open ask and you will receive seek and you will find and people think well no way the world's not constituted like that it's like it goes back to the idea of aim if you don't aim at it you're not going to hit it and you know it might also go back to a question about what do you mean by ask and what do you mean by want because it isn't just some casual request you know you're praying to god i wish you know i wish i could find my wallet or something like that as if he's the casual grantor of magical wishes like like like a fairy with a magic wand you know it's not that asking means asking means something like this i am willing to give up everything that i'm doing wrong so that i can put things right if i could know what right was and that's a non you're on your knees when you say that man and maybe if you're on your knees you get the answer and so that's worth thinking about so you know if you knocked and you wanted to walk through and you asked and you wanted to learn you know and you sought because you wanted to find maybe you would receive and be answered and find but not without aim and so i might say well look if you could have the relationship you wanted you get to have the relationship you want and need but you have to know what it is and so then you need a vision of that it's like an and a developed vision you know no i need to find the person right for me it's like what do you mean by that you know how about how are you going to treat your partner when they come home from work how about something that concrete or how would you like to be treated when you come home from work or what sort of partner do you want in relationship to their attitude towards children you have to make it real you know like it's the story of your own life which by the way it is and then maybe you find it because at least once you've developed the vision if it manifests itself you'll recognize it that's something so then you need an intimate relationship well why don't you set your family right you know you need siblings maybe you don't have them set your relationship with your parents right fix your relationship with your father with your mother with your siblings the same thing and what sort of relationship do you have want to have with your children you know if you could have what you wanted i had a very good relationship with my children my daughter as i said was very ill so that made things complicated but i had a great relationship and still do with my son it's it's one of the lights of our life and we concentrated on making that relationship pristine you know both of us and my wife as well and so imagine well i want my son to love me i want my son to respect me and vice versa i want a child who can make mature decisions i want someone i can rely on i want someone who other people gravitate towards because i can have what i want if i'm willing to make the proper sacrifices and so that's that's a good thing could you set your family straight well you need a job or a career and so what can you offer and what can you bring the world in that regard and not and then i would say well if you're thinking about career success in this tower of babel manner then that's a temptation but you might think well how much could good could i do if i had the opportunity in the shortest possible period of time if i went all in and then that's there's a name man there's a name and then you might think well what would that look like you know if i was a light to my community if i was a light to the people i work with who would i be if i was like that and and then you can conceptualize that and you can see when you deviate from it and why couldn't you correct for the deviations and move towards that and then you might say well you are going to make productive use of your time outside of work productive and generous use of your time productive generous and meaningful use of your time how about that you're going to control your your susceptibility to temptation regulate your alcohol and drug use because alcoholism takes out lots of people regulate your sexual temptation can control yourself for some reason that's worth controlling yourself for you know because there's something to being civil right there's at least the momentary pleasure it's not nothing and you're not going to sacrifice that if you have any sense unless you sacrifice it to something clearly better you know most this is classic clinical finding with regards to alcoholics the only cure we know for alcoholism is religious transformation even the hardcore secular researchers know that they don't know why but they know that's the case and part of the reason for that is that if you're an alcoholic you really like alcohol it's an end it's an anti-anxiety agent of potency and it's a stimulant it's a great drug and so once you have a great drug a great spirit let's say you need something better to replace it with and maybe you can find something better it appears that way because people do and then they stop drinking and so and then there's service civic service to your community you know i've been thinking about church lately people have abandoned the churches and vice versa in many ways and people think you know i can't believe what the church teaches it's like first of all who cares what you believe like who are you anyways right well really it's like i'm 16 i don't like what the church teaches yeah that's who you are you're the judge of the church and you're 16. and that's like that's commonplace i know it's funny but it's not because that's a common place so that was certainly me at 16. who could believe that you know i'm above that it's like really here's this 15 year old juvenile delinquent from northern alberta and it's like who cares about saint augustine anyways you know what did he know so yeah so civic duty well i'm not going to go into politics because it's a snake pit you know or maybe you're cynical about social institutions it's like well go fix them right you know they'll give you something to do if they're so wrecked great well it's an opportunity you see something broken fix it and then you're the person who fixes it like good for you man it's like you got something to do really and then people think hey you're the guy that fixed that maybe you could fix this and this and this and this and then you fix things and your life just expands you know i guess i'll tell you too something about telling the truth so one thing i did a 1985 82 83 82 i i swore that i would stop lying i said i'm going to try not to say anything i know to be untrue you know that doesn't mean i swore to tell the truth because truth that's hard but you can consciously stop lying when you know you're lying you can stop doing that and that has been revolutionary for me and and one of the things i've really realized in recent years and this is very much worth knowing is that many times when people speak to each other they have an agenda in mind you know you want something from someone maybe you want a job and you want to craft your image to get the job right so you say what you need to say to get what you think you need the problem with that is what do you know about what you need you're so accurate about that are you and you think you know what you need exactly and so you're going to falsify your utterances to bring about the desired end and you're going to use the other person as a target of your manipulation well that's like you write an essay because that's what the professor wants to hear it's like you don't do that because you don't falsify your words because hypothetically they're divine and the whole stability of the state rests on them hypothetically and maybe really too and so you don't do that and so instead you strive to tell the truth and maybe that's an aim too and then it's an adventure because i'll tell you one thing if you tell the truth you have no idea what's going to happen to you because you have to let go of that it's like i'm going to say what i think and then what i'm going to assume faith i'm going to assume that whatever happens if i am telling the truth is the best thing that could happen because the truth brings about what is best and even if it looks hard for me because it might be you know because people take the easy way out often when they lie even if it looks bad for me that doesn't mean it's bad it just means i don't see the whole i don't see the whole picture and you know if you believe that the truth will set you free and that there is such a thing as the truth and that the truth is redemptive then you're pretty much stuck with that conclusion but one of the remarkable things about that and this really is worth knowing is that if you do that you will have your adventure right the that's the abrahamic adventure you know the call from god that justifies your life because of the excitement of what you're doing and the truth does that and then if it's the truth man it's your adventure because what bloody adventure are you having if you tell someone else's story it's not yours and maybe if it's not yours it's not good enough for you and then you suffer and then you're bitter and then you're cruel and then you're resentful that's not good or you get arrogant so so you break up your life you know into practicalities your career your education your intimate relationship your marriage your friendship hopefully your intimate relationship and your marriage are the same thing your use of time outside work your civic duty you know when you develop an image for yourself a vision for yourself on all those fronts and assume that you can have with the proper sacrifices what you need and want and then i'll say something interesting about that because that's the pursuit of goods in a practical way right and what's valuable in a practical way in an implementable way and you pick those pathways and you dedicate yourself to their optimization along any of those axes and then you learn to optimize a name and then you see once you've learned to optimize a name across a set of goods you start to aim at what is what unites those goods because that's what makes goods good it's whatever is common across a set of goods that's the highest good or a higher good and so by practicing any good in any rigorous sense and making the proper sacrifices in that direction you simultaneously learn to approach the good that is the sum or the essence of all those proximal goods and i would say that the the essential insistence in christianity is that the good that unites all those goods is the same good that's reflected in the image of christ which is an image of acceptance of the suffering of life and the necessity of serving the lowest as the highest calling and that's something and it might be true like really actually 100 percent true more true than anything else and i actually think it is partly because the freest societies that we have that the world has ever known the more successful societies are predicated on precisely that idea as an unshakable foundation a self-evident truth in the case of your country and so it might be true and if it is true and if that is real then why in the world would you ever attempt to do anything else and it's kind of earth-shattering in some sense to take this with real seriousness you know it's all very frightening if you're not afraid by of that of that vision you know and what it implies for you and your soul then you didn't understand it but it's also an unbelievably what would you say endlessly promising vision of what your life could be and you know you might think well i need a life so rich that i can justify its suffering and that's really asking for something because there's no shortage of suffering in life and it's no one thinks their own suffering isn't real and maybe there's a possibility that there's some aim that's so high that that the attempt that the attempt alone to move in that direction is of sufficient value to act as a panacea for the suffering and so you could say at the end of your life oh my god that was so hard it was worth it and so that's the choice you make at the crossroads if you have any sense oh thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 782,263

Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america

Id: HvHjhtM8D7w

Length: 42min 57sec (2577 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2022