Biblical Series XII: The Great Sacrifice: Abraham and Isaac

[Music] thank you thank you so I've been thinking about things that I'm happy about and what I'm most happy about so far is that I haven't spilled my my bubbly water into my computer so far while I've been doing these lectures that's always I'll probably do it tonight now that I'm bragging about having avoided it so thank you all for coming this is the last lecture in this 12 part series I did mention that I have made arrangements with the theatre at least to do this once a month for the next four months and we'll see we'll play it by ear past end I want to continue and I'll find another venue and perhaps to do it every two weeks but certainly once a month and maybe I can even get deeper into the material if it's only once a month so that would be then and then we'll really slow down to a snail's crawl yeah so this is a tough one tonight you know it's something a story that everyone with any sense should approach with a substantial degree of trepidation I've been working on my book this week on Chapter 7 which is called do what is meaningful not what's expedient and it's really it's been a very difficult chapter because I'm coming to I'm trying to to extend my understanding of sacrifice which is of course what we're going to talk about tonight in great detail and and I've been wrestling with exactly how to do that and I'm going to read you some of that I think today don't generally read when I do my lectures but this is so complicated that I'm not confident of my ability to just spin it off you know sort of what would you call it spontaneously that's the word and so and it'll also give me a chance to test out whether what I've written which I've been struggling with has the kind of poetic flow that I'd like to have if you're writing it's really good to read things aloud you know because you can tell if you've got the rhythmic cadence right then so so anyways thank you all for coming many of you have I believe attended all 12 lectures and that's really remarkable it's amazing that you know this place has been full every single lecture it's completely unbelievable that would be the case and you know about more than two million views of this is being watched more than two million views it's not 2 million people because it would be the same people I would suspect many times but that's also crazy but it's a crazy world and it seems to keep me getting crazier so hopefully this is some addition to stabilizing it and making it slightly more sane that's the hope anyways so we've got a couple of stories to deal with tonight complex complex stories not really easy to comprehend in any sense of the in sense of the word I mean with the story of Isaac God calls on his his chosen individual Abraham the person who's made this contract with to sacrifice his son and it's how in the world are you supposed to make sensible any sort of sensible sense out of that it's exactly that sort of story that makes modern people who are convinced that the faster we put the biblical stories behind us the better it's it's grist for their mill you know because it seems like such a incomprehensible and even barbaric act on the part of God and so you know I hesitate to even approach it because well because there's so many ways that the an interpretation of that sort can go wrong but we'll see how it goes and so let's walk through it and see what happens so we start with the story of Sarah and Isaac and the Lord visited Sarah as he had said you remember when Abraham was in the midst of his appropriate sacrificial routines which we've characterized as his return to the contract he made with the idea of the good the contract with God he was informed by God that he would get what he most wanted which was an error and it despite his advanced old age and of course Sarah was very skeptical about that as she had every reason to be but this story opens with with the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham and the Lord visited Sarah as he had said and the Lord did unto Sarah as he had spoken for Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the set time of which God had spoken to him and Abraham called the name of his son that was born unto Him whom Sarah bear to him Isaac and Abraham circumcised his son Isaac being eight days old as God commanded him had commanded him and Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born unto him and Sarah said goth had made God had God have made me to laugh so that all that here will laugh with me and she said who would have said unto Abraham that Sarah should have given children suck for I've borne him a son in his old age and the child grew and was weaned and Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was weaned I suppose one of the one of the purposes let's say perhaps the literary purposes of this story is to exaggerate for dramatic purposes the importance of a child you know when people are young and I think this is particularly true in the modern world they seem to often regard the possibility of having a child as an impediment to their lifestyle you know and of course in some ways I suppose that's true although you have to have quite a lifestyle before a child actually constitutes an impediment because having a child in your life is actually something that's remarkable almost beyond belief you know you can have a relationship with a child that is better than any relationship you've ever had with anyone in your life if you're careful and if you're fortunate fortunate being fortunate helps you know I've seen many people delay having children and for understandable reasons it's no simple decision to have a child and of course now we can make the decision to have a child which of course people couldn't in in past ages really but sometimes you see people delay and they delay too long and then they don't get to have a child and then they're desperate and you know they spend a decade doing fertility treatments or that sort of thing and immersing themselves in one disappointment after another and it's just at that point you see exactly how catastrophic it is it can be how catastrophic it can be for people not to have one of the not to be able to undergo one of the great adventures of life let's say and one of the things this story does by by delaying the arrival of Isaac and delaying the arrival of Isaac continually is to exaggerate the the important significance of the child because it is until you're deprived of something it's truly not until you're deprived of something that you have any sense of what its value is and Isaac was waiting or Abraham was waiting a very long time a hundred years a very long time and the same with Sarah and so they're unbelievably excited and of course this also heightens the drama that's inherent in the entire sacrificial story because it's not only that eventually that Abraham is called upon to sacrifice Isaac which would be bad enough under any other any circumstances whatsoever self-evidently but the fact that he's been waiting a century for the arrival of this child desperately and made all the proper sacrifices and lived in the appropriate manner to allow this to occur dramatically heightens the literary tension now you remember Hagar this is the next part of the story Hagar was is was Sarah's handmaid and when Sarah was unable to bear abraham a child she sent him Hagar and Hagar immediately got pregnant and and gave birth to Ishmael and the story picks up from that point here and if this is quite interesting I mentioned the other week when I was talking to you guys a couple of weeks in a row just how interesting it has been to scour the internet for the for the paintings that are associated with these stories there's just a there's an amazing wealth of great paintings that illustrate every single bit of the of every single biblical story and it's it's it's a it's really been enlightening to me to find out just exactly how poorly educated I am you know like I I'm a what would you say I'm I'm a great admirer of artistic talent and of artistic endeavor but there's so much I don't know about the history of art that it's just absolutely beyond belief and to see this treasure trove of images that I really had no idea that existed of course they're spread all over the world and it's only been in recent years that you could have access to them and in this way just it's just it's a it's a it's a constant revelation of the depth to which these stories have absolutely permeated our culture and the loss that it would be if we didn't know them properly and and take them with a degree of seriousness that they deserve so anyways this is one of those great images and Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian which she had born unto Abraham mocking wherefore she said unto Abraham cast out this bondwoman and her son for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son even with Isaac and the thing was very Grievous in Abraham's sight because of his son was being quite a bit of tension between Abraham or between Sarah and Hagar as you could imagine there might be why wouldn't there be I mean first of all Hagar had the first child and and that elevated her status and she was Sarah's made handmaiden so that's obviously going to be quite awkward and then she she lorded it over Sarah because of the fact that she got pregnant so easily and now we see this situation where Ishmael is doing the same thing with regards to Isaac and that causes a substantial amount of trouble the family is a familial division occurring here God said unto Abraham let it not be Grievous in thy sight because of the lad and because of the bondwoman in all that Sarah hath said unto thee hearken unto her voice for in Isaac shall thy seed be called and but also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation because he is thy seed that's so that's it that's an interesting outcome to you know we we pointed out before we discussed before the fact that because Abraham has made has lived his life properly and has kept the contract with God there's every evidence in the story that no matter what the vicissitudes of Abraham's life you know how the Great Serpent that he sits on in some sense weaves back and forth there's always the promise that things will work out positively and you know you could read that as naive optimism but I think it has a lot more to do with the actual power of keeping the contractual agreement because I really do believe and I've spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about this over the last couple of weeks in addition to the decades before that is that it and all that's happened since I've been doing these biblical lectures is that my conviction in this is being strengthened which is quite interesting is that if you if you do what it is that you're called upon to do which is to lift your eyes up above the mundane daily selfish impulsive issues that might be set you an attempt to enter into a contractual relationship with that which you might hold in the highest regard whatever that might be to aim high and to and to and to make that important above all else in your life that that fortifies you against the vicissitudes of existence like nothing else can and I truly believe that that's the most practical advice that you can possibly that you could possibly receive you know I received I was answering questions last night I did this Q&A which I do about once a month for for the people who are supporting me on patreon which I also release on YouTube and somebody asked you know they were struggling with their religious faith and they asked what they could do about that and I'd also been thinking about the the difference between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky which I'll discuss in a minute and I was trying to answer this question with regards to religious faith because this person was shaky in his faith in life let's say which is a better way of thinking about it and and it seems to me that the way that you fortify your faith in being and in life and your own existence isn't to try to convince yourself of the existence of a transcendent power that you could believe in the same way that you believe in a set of empirical fact I don't I don't think that's the right approach I think it's a weak approach actually I don't think that the cognitive technology that I don't think that's the right cognitive technology for that set of problems you know that's more technology that you'd use if you're trying to solve a scientific problem it's more like it's more something that needs to be embedded in action rather than in stainable belief and the way that you fortify your faith in life is to assume the best something like that and then to act courageously in relationship to that and and that's that's tantamount to expressing your faith in the highest possible good it's tantamount to expressing your faith in God and it's not a matter of stating well I believe in the existence of a transcendent deity because in some sense who care who cares what you believe I mean you might and all that but but that's not the issue it's not the issue the issue it seems to me is how you act and I was thinking about this intensely when I was thinking about Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky because of course you know that Nietzsche was the philosopher who announced the death of God right and who was a great great critic of Christianity at vicious critic of institutional Christianity in the best sense you know and he announced the death of God and he said that we'd never find enough water to wash away the blood it wasn't a triumphant proclamation even though it's often read that way and don't choose conclusion from that from the death of God the fact that our ethical systems were going to collapse when the foundation was pulled out from underneath them he believed that human beings would have to find their own values to create their own values and there's a problem with that because it doesn't seem that this is something Carl Jung was very thorough in investigating it doesn't really look like people are capable of creating their own values because you're not really capable of molding yourself just any old way you want to be like you have a nature that you have to contend with and so it isn't a matter of creating our own values because we don't have that capacity it might be a matter of rediscovering those values which is what human was attempting to do now and and and so I think Nietzsche was actually profoundly wrong in that in that recommendation I think he was psychologically wrong now you know Dostoevsky wrote in many ways in parallel to Nietzsche was a great influence on Nietzsche their lives parallel each other to a degree that's somewhat miraculous in some sense it's it's quite uncanny Dorothea Eskie was obviously a literary figure whereas nature was a philosopher a literary philosopher but still a philosopher and Dostoyevsky wrestled with exactly the same problems that that Nietzsche wrestled with and but he did it in a different way he didn't literary matter and he has this great book and The Brothers Karamazov and in that book there's a hero of the book is really a lyosha who's a monastic novitiate a very good guy kind of not an intellect not an intellect but a person of great character you know and but he has a brother Ivan who's his older brother who's a great intellect and and a very handsome so a brave man and like Dostoyevsky's villains Ivan isn't exactly a villain but that's close enough Ivan our Dostoevsky makes his villains extraordinarily powerful so if dusty esti is trying to work out an argument he he closed the argument in the in the flesh of one of his characters and if it's an argument he doesn't agree with and he makes that character as strong as he possibly can as strong and as attractive and intelligent as he possibly can and then he lets him just have at her and so Ivan is constantly attacking Elly OSHA and from every direction trying to knock him off his perch of faith let's say and and elosha Alyosha can't address a single one of Ivan's criticisms and and he doesn't have the intellect for it and and and Ivan has a devastating intellect it's devastating to him himself as well what happens in the brothers karamazov essentially is that Alyosha continues to act out his commitment to the good let's say and in that manner he's triumphant it doesn't matter that he loses the arguments because the arguments aren't exactly the point the arguments in some sense are a side issue because the issue is and this is the existential issue the issue is not what you believe as if it's a set of facts but how you conduct yourself in the world and so Dostoyevsky he grasped that and it's one of the things that makes him such a amazing amazing literary figure an amazing genius because he was smart enough to to formulate the arguments in a manner that no one else really could with the possible exception of Nietzsche and that's quite an exception and yet he could still using his dramatic embodiment he could still lay out solutions to the problems that he was describing that are extremely compelling and both crime and punishment which is an amazing thrilling engrossing book and The Brothers Karamazov all of dusty-ass Keys great books really circulate around around those profound moral issues and so I've learned a tremendous amount from reading him so and God said unto Abraham let it not be Grievous in thy sight because of the lad and because of thy bondwoman and all that Sarah hath said unto thee hearken unto her voice for in Isaac for in Isaiah Excel shall thy seed be called and also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation because it as I seed alright so I commented that Abraham is being blessed in multiple directions even when things are going wrong and this is pretty bad because his family in some sense is breaking up the there's this emphasis in the text that because he's kept this contractual relationship with God that that he's in an arc we could say at that we could put it that way and that the that he'll he'll triumph through the vicissitudes of life which is the best you can hope for and it's quite interesting again one of the things that's so powerful about the Abrahamic stories is that it's not like Abraham even though he's chosen by God it's not like he has an easy time of it he has a rough life I mean it's a successful life and all that but it's not it's not it's not it's not without its troubles that's for sure it's got every sort of trouble you could possibly imagine pretty much and and that's one of the things that makes the story so realistic as far as I'm concerned and Abraham rose up early in the morning and took bread and a bottle of water and gave it unto Hagar putting it on her shoulder and the child and sent her away and she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba I found the funny I guess this had more of an emotional impact on me this week than it might have because my daughter just had a baby a week ago and so I've been thinking about this sort of thing know was so happy that that's happened and I was trying to put myself and uh what would you say the conceptual space of the people about who these stories or people who these stories are about and trying to you know notice that the catastrophe that this sort of breakup would actually constitute and you know and the visual images really helped with that because they're they're so carefully crafted and and they hid the story from so many different directions that you know they add that an additional layer of ocean meaning to it which I found very very significant and the water was spent in the bottle and she cast the child under one of the shrubs and she sent to wander in the desert you know so it's not just that she has to leave Abraham's household it's that where she goes is not really amenable to life and so it's it's an extraordinarily dramatic and terrible tale and she went and sat her down over against him a good way off as were a bow shot for she said let me not see the death of the child and she sat over against him and lift up her voice and wept and God heard the voice of the loud and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven and said unto her what aileth thee Hagar fear not for God have heard the voice of the lad where he is rise lift up the loud and hold him in 9 hand for I will make him a great nation and God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water and she went and filled the bog with water and gave the lad drink and God was with the lad and he grew and dwelt in the wilderness and became an archer that's actually a relevant detail to the fact that he became an archer because I think I mentioned to you at one point that the word sin is derived from a Greek word amar kiya even though it sounds nothing like that word and Hammar kiya is actually a an archery term and it means - it means to miss the bullseye and that's a that's a lovely metaphor for sin I think because it's associated so tightly with the idea of of goal direction and and aim you know because there's an emetic Oracle idea that's embedded in that in that image and that is that you know a human being is something that specifies a target which we do all the time with their eyes by the way I mean our eyes our target specifying mechanisms you know we have very precise central focal vision and we use our focal vision to target the aim of our behavior and so we are aiming creatures there's our it's built right into our Plouffe or body or we're built on a hunting platform or aiming creatures and we do that cognitively as well as behaviorally and so as hunters we take aim at things that we take aim at moving targets and we're very good at bringing them down and we've been doing that for who knows how long millions of years really even chimpanzees are carnivorous by the way at least but from them about 6 million years ago so we've been hunting and aiming for a very very long period of time and we still have aims in our life right and that's how we describe them what are you aiming at or what are your aims what are your goals what's your target it's all based on not hunting metaphor and the fact that Ishmael becomes an archer means that he's someone who can take him at the center of the bullseye and hit it precisely and so that's an indication that he's a good man right so and and I suppose also part of the part of it carries part of the narrative weight of the story because of course he's Abraham's son and you'd expect Abraham's son to be someone who's very good at taking aim and he dwelt in the wilderness of paran and he could live there and survive which is no trivial thing and his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt okay so that's the story of Hagar and it's a fairly straightforward story it's complex emotionally but it doesn't and it and it brings up the terrible theme of familial catastrophe and the complications of romantic and familial relationships and all of that but it's really serves as a pro drama to the next story which is the one that's so complex and so difficult to understand and it came to pass after these things that God did tempt Abraham which is a funny thing for God to do I suppose and said unto Him Abraham and he said behold Here I am and God said take now thy son thine only son Isaac who the lovest and at the end of the land of Moriah and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee up and Abraham rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and took two of his young men with him and Isaac his son and clave the wood for the burnt offering it rose up and went unto the place of which God had told him then on the third day of journeying Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off the neighbor hem said unto his young men abide ye ye here with the ass and I and the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you it's really one of the first times that we've come across the word worship if I remember correctly and that's a very difficult word to contend with to know is he if you like me or if you're like me when I was a kid because I haven't thought about this for a long time it was never really obvious to me why God would want to be worshipped you know as to go to church and you offer up your praise and thanks to God and you say well really does that make a lot of sense it's like why in the world is that what he wants it's like it's almost like you're you're you're you're kneeling down in front of an ancient Middle Eastern you know tyrannical Emperor and and vowing your submission and that never sat well with me and I suppose it doesn't sit well with many people and I think that's because it's it's not the proper way of conceptualizing it like what happens when you see what Abraham does continually and this seems to be implicit in the use of the word worship in this particular situation is that you know he as we discussed he has an adventure in his life that comes to an end so there's an episode in this life it comes to an end and then there's a period of you might consider it re where he reconstitutes himself to some degree and it's that's when he makes the sacrifices and it seems to me that it's that reconstitution that constitutes the worship the worship is something like you know this is alluding back to my original proposition that it's how you act that's the issue and the worship is the decision to enact the good in whatever form it is that you can conceptualize it as well as trying to continually reconceptualize the good in a manner that makes the good that you're conceptualizing even that much better right because when you start aiming the probability that you're going to be aiming in the right direction is very low but hypothetically as you aim and as you practice and as you learn the target is going to shift in front of your eyes and you're going to be able to follow whatever more clearly and so and that seems to me and especially given the context that this word is used in this particular story is much more appropriate interpretation of what constitutes proper worship and I suppose it's akin to the later Christian idea that it's the imitation of Christ that's the sacred duty of every Christian of every Christian and every human being I suppose insofar as that's an archetypal idea an idea is something like well it's the embodiment of the good that's the issue and it's not your stated belief in the good and you know when nature was criticizing Christianity this is actually one of the things that he brought up as a major issue he said that he believed Christianity had lost its way because it had introduced a confusion between stated belief which is say your belief in the divinity of Christ whatever it means if you state that it isn't obvious what it means that when you state that because it isn't obvious what it would mean that you believe it or even what it is that you're believing in as far as Nietzsche was concerned in some sense not only was that beside the point it was dangerously beside the point because it actually allowed the Christian believer not to adopt the moral burden that was actually appropriate to the faith which was - and this is I'm using a kind of a Union concept here to manifest the archetype within the confines of your own life and that's to make the divine that your relationship with the divine your relationship with the transcendent an infinite into something that's actually realizable in the context of your own life which is to say well you know you're supposed to you're supposed to again to act out the highest good of which you're capable now that will transform your life to some degree into an archetypal adventure there's no way around that because as you attempt to climb a higher mountain let's say or to aim at a higher target or something like that then the things around you will become increasingly dramatic and of import that happens by necessity obviously because if you're aiming at something difficult and profound and you're really working at it then your life is going to become perhaps increasingly difficult and profound but that might be okay you might that might be exactly what you need as an antidote to the implicit limitations that face you as a human being so and I am the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you now there's an implication here too that it's a foreshadowing that that Abraham offering up his son is actually a form of worship and that's that it's continuous with what he's already done and well now I'm going to read you some of the things that I've written and then all return to this and we'll see how that goes so life is suffering that's clear there's no more basic irrefutable truth it's basically as we've seen what God tells out of and Eve immediately before he kicks them out of paradise quote unto the woman he said I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee and unto Adam he said because you have hearkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast eaten of the tree which I commanded thee saying thou shalt not eat of it cursed is the ground for thy sake in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee and thou shalt eat the herb of the field by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken for dust you are and to dust you will return rough you know and we've associated that with with Adam and Eve's eyes opening and then becoming self conscious and discovering the future and becoming fully aware and falling into history and it seems to me to be a very realistic existential portrayal of the predicament of humankind what in the world should be done about that the simplest most obvious and most direct answer pursue pleasure to follow your impulses live for the moment do expedient lie cheat steal deceive manipulate but don't get caught in an ultimately meaningless universe what possible difference could it make and this is by no means a new idea the fact of life's tragedy in the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish gratification for a very long time now even reading young he often writes as if before the rise of the conflict between religion and science and which culminated saying each his pronouncement about the death of God that people lived ensconce quite safely within a religious conceptualization that have you´d their life with meaning and that that was and that was just the state of reality you know but there's ancient writings that makes it quite clear that the crisis of faith that characterizes a modern people were certainly far from unknown in the past and here's one of those writings this is from wisdom - the Revised Standard Version short and sorrowful is our life and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end and no one has been known to return from Hades because we were born by mere chance and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been because the breath in our nostrils is smoke and reason is just a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts when it is extinguished our body will turn to ashes their spirit will dissolve like empty air our name will be forgotten in time and no one will remember our works our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud and be scattered like mist that is chased by the Rays of the Sun and overcome by its heat for our allotted time is but the passing of a shadow and there is no return from our death because it is sealed up and no one turns back come therefore let us enjoy the good things that exist and make use of the creation to the full as in youth let us take our fill of costly wines and perfumes and let no flower of spring passes by let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither let none of us fail to share in our revelry everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment because this is our portion and this is our Lord let us oppress the righteous poor man let us not spare the widow nor regard the gray hairs of the agent but letter might be our right for what is weak proves itself to be useless it's an amazing piece of writing you know it starts with an announcement of the rationale for nihilism and ends with the justification for a fascist tyranny you know and it's it's thousands of years old it's it's a remarkable thing to see and to be laid out so concisely the pleasure of expediency may be fleeting but it's pleasure nonetheless and that's something to stack up against the terror and pain of existence every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost as the old proverb has it why not simply take everything you can get whenever the opportunity arises why not determine to live in that manner what's the alternative and why should we bother with it our ancestors worked out very sophisticated answers to such questions but we still don't understand them very well this is because they are in large part still implicit manifest primarily in ritual and myth and as of yet incompletely articulated we act them out represent them in stories but we're not wise enough yet to formulate them explicitly was still chimps in a troop or wolves in a pack we know how to behave we know who's who and why we've learned that through experience our knowledge has been shaped by our interaction with others we've established predictable routines and patterns of behavior but we don't really understand them or know where they origin ated they've evolved over great expanses of time no one was formulating them explicitly at least not in the dimmest reaches of the past even though we've been telling each other how to act forever one day however not so long ago we woke up we were already doing but we started noticing what we were doing we started using our bodies as devices to represent their own actions we started imitating and dramatizing we invented ritual we started acting out our own experiences then we started to tell stories we coated our observations of our own drama in those stories in this manner the information that was first only embedded in our behavior became represented in our stories but we didn't and we still don't understand what it all meant the biblical narrative of paradise in the fall is one such story fabricated by our collective imagination working over the centuries it provides a profound account of the nature of being and points the way to a mode of conceptualization and action well matched to that nature in the Garden of Eden prior to the dawn of self-consciousness so goes the story human beings were sinless our primordial parents Adam and Eve walked with God then tempted by the snake the first couple ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil discovered death and vulnerability and turned away from God mankind was exiled from paradise and began its effortful mortal existence the idea of sacrifice enter soon afterwards beginning with the account of Cain and Abel and developing as we've seen through the Abrahamic stories after much contemplation struggling humanity learns that God's favor could be gained and his wrath averted through proper sacrifice and also that bloody murder might be motivated among those unwilling or unable to succeed in this manner when engaging in sacrifice our forefathers began to act out what would be considered a proposition if it were stated in words that something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present recall if you will that the necessity for work is one of the curses placed by God upon Adam and his descendants in consequence of original sin Adams waking to the fundamental constraints of his being his vulnerability his eventual death that's equivalent to the discovery of the future the future that's where you go to die hopefully not too soon your demise might be staved off through work through the sacrifice of the now to benefit later it is for this reason among others no doubt that the concept of sacrifice is introduced in the biblical chapter immediately following the drama of the fall there's little difference between sacrifice and work they're also both uniquely human sometimes animals act as if they're working but they're really only following the dictates of their natures beavers build dams they do so because their beavers and beavers build dams they don't think yeah but I'd rather be on a beach in Mexico with my girlfriend while they're doing it prosaically such sacrifice work is delay of gratification but that's a very mundane phrase to describe something of soul-shattering significance the discovery that gratification could be delayed was simultaneously the discovery of time and with it causality long ago in the dim mists of time we began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with we learned that behaving properly now in the present regulating our impulses considering the plight of others could bring rewards in the future in a time and place that did not yet exist we began to inhibit control and organize our immediate impulses so that we could stop interfering with other people and our future selves doing so was indistinguishable from organizing society the discovery of the causal relationship between our efforts today and the quality of tomorrow motivated the social contract the organization that enables today's work to be stored reliably mostly in the form of promises from others understanding is something that's often acted out before it can be articulated just as a child acts out what it means to be mother or father before being able to give a spoken account of what those roles mean the idea the act of making a ritual sacrifice to God was an early and sophisticated enactment of the idea of the usefulness of delay there's a long conceptual journey between merely feasting hungrily and learning to set aside some extra meat smoked by the fire for the end of the day or for someone who isn't present it takes a long time to learn to keep anything later for yourself or to share it with someone else and those are very much the same thing as in the former case you're sharing with your future self it's much easier and far more likely to selfishly it immediately Wolf's down everything in sight there are similar long journeys between every leap and sophistication with regards to delay and its conceptualization short term sharing storing away from the for the future representation of that storage in the form of Records and later in the form of currency and ultimately the saving of money in a bank or other institution some conceptualizations had to serve as intermediaries or the full range of our practices and ideas surrounding sacrifice and work and their representation could have never emerged our ancestors acted out a drama a literary fiction they personified the force that governs fate as a spirit that can be bargained with traded with as if it were another human being and the amazing thing is that it worked this was in part because the future is largely composed of other human beings often precisely those who have watched and evaluated and appraised the tiniest details of your past behavior it's not very far from that to God sitting above on high tracking your every move and writing it down for further reference in a big book here's a productive symbolic idea the future is a judgmental father that's a good start but two additional archetypal foundational questions arose because of the discovery of sacrifice of work both have to do with the ultimate extension of the logic of work which is sacrifice now to gain later first question what must be sacrificed small sacrifices might be sufficient to small to solve small singular problems but it's possible that larger more comprehensive sacrifices might solve an array of large and complex problems all at the same time that's harder but it might be better adapting to the necessary discipline of medical school for example will fatally interfere with the licensee estoppel giving that up as a sacrifice but a physician can to quote George w really put food on his family that's a lot of trouble dispensed with over a very long period of time so sacrifices are necessary to improve the future and larger sacrifices can be better second question introduction we've already established the basic principle sacrifice will improve the future but what's implied by that in the most extreme and final of cases where does that basic principle find its limits we must ask to begin with what would be the largest most effective most pleasing of all possible sacrifices and then how good might the best possible future be if the most effective possible sacrifice could be made the biblical story of Cain and Abel Adam and Eve's sons immediately follows the story of the expulsion from paradise as mentioned previously Cain and Abel are really the first humans since their parents were made directly by God and not born in the standard manner Cain and Abel live in history not in Eden they must work they must make sacrifices to please God and they do so with altar and proper ritual but things get complicated Abel's offerings please God but Cain's do not Abel is rewarded many times over but Cain is not it's not precisely clear why although the text strongly hints that Cain's heart is just not in it maybe the quality of what Cain put forward was low maybe his spirit was begrudging or maybe God was just feeling crabby and all of this is realistic including the texts vagueness of explanation not all sacrifices are of equal quality furthermore it often appears that sacrifices of apparently high quality are sometimes not rewarded with a better future and it's not clear why why isn't God happy what would have to change to make him so these are difficult questions and everyone asks them all the time even if they don't notice asking such questions is indistinguishable from thinking the realization that pleasure could be usefully forestalled dawned with a difficulty that's almost impossible to overstate such a realization runs absolutely contrary to our ancient fundamental animal instincts which demand immediate satisfaction particularly under conditions of deprivation which are both inevitable and commonplace and to complicate the matter such delay only becomes useful when civilization has stabilized itself enough to guarantee the existence of the delayed reward if everything you say will be destroyed or worse stolen there's no point saving it's for this reason that a wolf will down 20 pounds of raw meat in a single meal he isn't thinking man I hate it when I binge I should save some of this for next week there's a developmental progression from animal to human it's wrong no doubt in the details but it's sufficiently correct for our purposes and theme first there's excess food large carcasses mammoths or other massive herbivores might provide that way a lot of mammoths maybe all of the with a large animal there's some left for later after a kill that's accidental at first but eventually the utility of for later starts to be appreciated some provisional notion of sacrifice develops at the same time if I leave some now even if I want it now I won't have to be hungry later that provisional notion then develops to the next level if I leave some for later I won't have to go hungry and neither will those I care for and then to the next level I can't possibly eat all this mammoth but I can't store the rest for too long either maybe I should feed some to other people maybe they'll remember and feed me some of their mammoths when they have some and I have none then I'll get some mammoths now and some mammoths later that's a good deal and maybe those I'm sharing with will come to trust me more generally maybe then we could trade forever in such a manner mammoth becomes future mammoth and future mammoth becomes personal reputation that's the emergence of the social contract to share does not mean to give away something you value and get nothing back that's only instead what every child who refuses to share is afraid that it means to share means properly to initiate the process of trade a child who can't share who can't trade can't have any friends because having friends is a form of trade Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer to a neighbourhood asked a new neighbor to do him or her a favor citing an old maxim he that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged in Franklin's opinion asking something for someone asking someone for something not too extreme obviously was the most useful and immediate invitation to social interaction such asking allowed the neighbor to show him or herself as a good person at first encounter it also meant the neighbor could now ask the newcomer for a favor in return because of the debt incurred in that manner both parties could overcome their natural hesitancy and mutual fear of the stranger it's better to have something rather than nothing it's better yet to generously share the something you have it's even better than that however to become widely known for generous sharing that's something that lasts that's something that's reliable and at this point in abstraction we can observe how the groundwork for the conceptions of reliable honest and generous have been laid the basis for an articulated morality has been put in place the productive truthful sharer is the prototype for the good citizen and the good man we can see in this manner how from the simple notion that leftovers are a good idea the highest moral principles might emerge it's as if something like this happened as humanity developed first were the endless tens or hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of written history and drama during this time the twin practices of delay and exchange began to emerge slowly and painfully then they became represented in metaphorical abstraction as rituals and tales of sacrifice told in a manner such as this it's as if there's a powerful figure in the sky who sees all and is judging you giving up something you value seems to make them happy and you want to make them happy because all hell breaks loose if you don't so practice sacrificing and sharing until you become expert at it and things will go well for you no one said any of this at least not so plainly and directly but it was implicit in the practice and then in the stories action came first as it had to as the animals we once were could act but could not think implicit unrecognized value came first as the actions that preceded thought bodied value but did not make that value explicit people watched the successful succeed and the unsuccessful fail for thousands and thousands of years we thought it over and we drew a conclusion the successful among us delay gratification the successful among us bargained with the future a great idea began to emerge taking ever more clearly articulated form and ever more clearly articulated stories what's the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful for the successful sacrifice things get better as the successful practice their sacrifices the questions become increasingly precise and simultaneously broader what's the greatest possible sacrifice for the greatest possible good and the answer has become increasingly deeper and profound the god of Western tradition like so many gods requires sacrifice we've already examined why but sometimes he goes even further he demands not only sacrifice but the sacrifice of precisely what is loved best this is most starkly portrayed and most confusingly evident in the story of Abraham and Isaac Abraham beloved of God long wanted the son and God promised him exactly that after many delays and under the imperative possible conditions of old age and a long barren wife but not so long afterward when the miraculously born Isaac is still a child God turns around and in apparently barbaric fashion demands that his faithful servant offer his son as a sacrifice the story ends happily God sends an angel to stay Abraham's obedient hand and accepts a ram and Isaac stead that's a good thing it doesn't really address the issue at hand why was God's going further necessary why does he why his life impose such demands we'll start our analysis with the truism stark self-evident and understated sometimes things do not go well that seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world with its plagues and its famines and its tyrannies and its betrayals but here's the rub sometimes when things are not going well it's not the world that it's the cause the cause is instead that which is most valued why because the world is revealed to an in terment degree through the template of your values if the world you are seeing is not the world you want therefore it's time to examine your values it's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions it's time to let go it might even be time to sacrifice what you love best so that you can become who you might become instead of staying who you are something valuable given up ensures fused future prosperity something valuable sacrifice pleases the Lord what is most valuable and best sacrificed or what is at least emblematic of that a choice cut of meat the best animal in a flock a most valued possession what's above even not something intensely personal and painful to give up that symbolized perhaps in God's insistence on circumcision as part of Abraham sacrificial routine what's beyond that what pertains more closely to the whole person rather than the part what constitutes the ultimate sacrifice for the gain of the ultimate prize it's a close race between child and self the sacrifice of the mother offered her child to the world is exemplified for example by Michelangelo's great sculpture the Pieta Michelangelo crafted Mary contemplating her son crucified in ruins so she's sitting most of you know the sculpture she's sitting and the body of her son is in her arms adults on and it's broken and he's been destroyed and it's a very beautiful but very tragic work of genius work of genius level representation Michelangelo crafted Mary contemplating her son crucified and rude it's her fault it was through her that he entered the world and it's great drama of being is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world every woman asks herself that question some say no they have their reasons Mary answers yes voluntarily knowing full well what's to come as do all mothers if they allow themselves to see it's an act of supreme courage when it's undertaken voluntarily in turn Mary's son Christ offers himself to God and the world to betrayal torture and death to the very point of despair on the cross where he cries out those terrible words my God my God why hast thou forsaken me that is the archetypal story of the man who gives his all for the sake of the better who offers up his life for the advancement of being who allows God's will to become manifest fully within the confines of a single mortal life that is the model for the Honorable man in Christ case however as he sacrifices himself God his father is simultaneously sacrificing his son it's for this reason that the Christian sacrificial drama of son and self is archetypal it's a story at the limit where nothing more extreme nothing greater can be imagined that's the very definition of archetypal that's the core of what constitutes religious pain and suffering define the world of that there can be no doubt sacrifice can hold pain and suffering in abeyance to a greater or lesser degree and greater sacrifices can do that more effectively than lesser of that two there can be no doubt everyone holds this knowledge in their soul thus the person who wishes to alleviate suffering who wishes to defy the flaws in being who wishes to bring about the best of all possible futures who wants to create heaven on earth will make the greatest of sacrifices of self and child of everything that is loved to live a life am dat the good he will forego expediency he will pursue the path of ultimate meaning and he will in that manner bring salvation to the ever desperate world on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place far off it's not an accident also that it's in a mountain right because a mountain is something you have to climb and you have to climb to the pinnacle of a mountain and the mountain is upright and the mountain stretches up to heaven and it's a long journey to specify the right place on the highest pinnacle and and that's symbolic because of course it's a pinnacle that you're always trying to reach just like you're always trying to aim you're always trying to climb upward at least that's the theory depends to some degree of course on your definition of upward and Abraham said to his young men abide here with the ass and I and the lad will go yonder and worship and come to you again and Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it upon Isaac his son and he took the fire in his hand and a knife and they went both of them together and Isaac spake unto Abraham his father and said My father and he said here am I my son and he said Behold the fire in the wood but where is the lamb for a burnt offering and Abraham said my son God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering so they went both of them together and they came to the place which God had told him of and Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar upon the wood and Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son and the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven and said Abraham and he said here am I an angel said lay not thine hand upon the lad neither do thou anything unto him for now I know that thou fearest God seeing thou hast not withheld thy son an only son from me when I was answering the questions last night at this Q&A this guy asked me this question he said that he had parents who were desperate anti-social alcoholic addicted friendless and that they didn't want him to leave their home he was the only relationship they had but that was of he was the only relationship they had and he asked what he should do and I told him that he should leave and the reason for that is that you have a moral obligation as a parent to encourage your child to go out into the world right and to be whoever they can be to be the best they can possibly be and in doing that you're offering you're encouraging them to pursue the good you're sacrificing them to the good you're not keeping them for yourself selfishly you're telling them that they can go out and live their life and live it properly and and that's the parallel to the idea of the sacrifice of Isaac as far as I can tell you don't want for your son what it is that you want for him you want for your son what would be best for him and for the world and you let go in precise proportion to your desire to have that happen you know the psychoanalyst the great psychoanalyst I say the psychoanalyst I think this is actually Freud's dictum but I'm not certain of that he said the good mother fails which is a bit a brilliant observation because when you have an infant do you do everything for the infant because the infant can do nothing for him or herself but as the infant matures and is increasingly capable of doing things for him or herself then you pull back right you pull back and everytime the child develops the ability to do something you allow them or encourage them to do it and you don't interfere you know so if your child is struggling getting dressed well obviously there's some times that you help them but mostly you let them learn so that they can know how to do it in the future that's better for you and it's certainly better for them there's a rule if you're working with the elderly in an old-age home and the rule is something like don't do anything for any of the for any of the guests let's say that they can do for themselves because you compromise their independence and so as a mother you pull back and you pull back and you let your child hit him or herself against the world and you fail to protect them but by failing to protect them you encourage and ennoble them to the point where you're no longer necessary now they may still want to see you and it would be wonderful if that was the case but the point is is that you're supposed to remove yourself from the equation by encouraging your child to be the best possible person that person can be and you sacrifice your desires all of your desires to that your personal desires even your desires for your child in relationship to you because you want them to move forward into the world as a light right as a light on a hill that's what you want if you have any sense and so you don't get to keep your children at home because you need them now I'm talking generally obviously and there are circumstances under which families make their own idiosyncratic decisions and I'm not trying to dam everyone with a with a casual gesture you know but the point is still strong that the good father is precisely someone who is willing to sacrifice his child to the ultimate good that's dramatized in this story you know and it's brutal but the world is a brutal place and much wisdom comes out of catastrophe and this is an indication of how much catastrophe our ancestors had to plow through had to work through in order to generate the sub structure for the conceptions of freedom even that we have to they for freedom and the good and that's how the story appears to me now I think there's more to it I think if there has to be more to it it lays the groundwork at least in the Christian context for the eventual emergence of Christ as I alluded to in my reading that story obviously has to be unpacked and unpacked and unpacked just like it has been for the last two thousand years it's also an indication here of well I would say the transmutation of sacrifice into an increasingly psychological form which is a development that we've tracked all the way through the Old Testament up to this particular point first acted out then represented in ritual those would be the rituals of sacrifice then laid out in story then turned into a psychological phenomena so that now we're capable of making sacrifices in abstraction right to conceptualize a future that we want to let go of the things that are stopping us from moving forward and to free ourselves from the chains of our original preconceptions and that's laid out in these old stories as the optimal path way of being and there's a philosopher of science named Karl Popper very sensible and down-to-earth person who was talking about thinking and its nature and he was thought about thinking in a Darwinian fashion he said the purpose of thinking is to let your thoughts die instead of you it's a brilliant notion and so the idea is something like you can conjure up a representation of yourself you can conjure up a variety of potential representations of yourself in the future you can lay out how those future representations of yourself are likely to prevail or fail you can call the potential use in the future that will fail and then you can embody the ones that will succeed you do that well simultaneously conjuring up a representation of your current state and determining for yourself because of your undue suffering which elements of your pathetic being need to be given up so that you can move forward into that future and the goal what is it that you're aiming at with that work and not sacrifice that's the ultimate question it's the question I was trying to address in that writing what is it that you're trying to do when you're trying to improve the future we believe that the future can be improved we believe that it can be improved as a consequence of our sacrificial work and so once again what are the limitations what are the limits to that what are the necessary limits to that I would say we don't know I would say as well that that's actually something that the entire corpus of biblical stories is trying desperately to articulate to figure out and articulate right we we conjured up this remarkable idea the future exists we can see it even though it's only potential we can adjust our behavior in the present in order to maximize our probability of success in the future how best to do that well the idea is something like don't hesitate to offer the ultimate sacrifice if you want the future to turn out ultimately well now obviously that idea is closed in metaphysical speculation and religious imagery but it still remains an intensely practical issue right what is it that you could contract for let's say if you were willing to give up everything about you that's weak and unworthy the there's a there's a continual hints of that in the Old Testament right because what happens with Noah of course is that he establishes the proper covenant with God the proper contract with being let's say and thrives as a consequence and the neighborhood does the same thing there's a strong intimation that that's how the world is set right now that idea develops and magnifies as the stories progress into something like into something like the concept of heaven on earth the notion being that the proper sacrificial attitude produces a psychological state and then the social state that's a manifestation of that attitude that decreases the probability that the world will Carine into hell and increases the probability that people will live high-quality meaningful private lives in a society that's balanced and capable of supporting that and none of that seems to me to be questionable really I also don't think it's anything that people don't actually know you know people have told me many times that when they listen to me talk they are hearing things that they already know knew but didn't know how to say it's something like that and this is one of those things that I think is exactly like that I mean I think it's at the very core of our moral knowledge and which is our behavioral knowledge and our perceptual knowledge I mean let's get this straight moral knowledge is no trivial matter it's knowledge about how it is that you orient yourself in the world there's no more profoundly necessary form of knowledge oh it's predicated on on something that's exactly like this we know that we have to make sacrifices we know that we have to omit what's good so then why isn't that we don't aim at what's best and make the sacrifices that are necessary in order to bring that into play I think it seems to me that in some sense that's self-evident the question is why we don't do it but there's answers to that too already in material that we've covered life is hard and it hurts people it's ripe with limitation and some of its arbitrary and it's no wonder and some of its unjust and some of it's worse some of its malevolent which is even worse than something I haven't talked about at all in this lecture it's not surprising that that combination of vicissitude can turn people against being but I think even when that happens and even when people have the kind of history that if they revealed to you you would say well it's no wonder you turned out that way the people who turn out that way still know that it's wrong they still know that however deep their own suffering however arbitrary their own suffering however much that's caused by the malevolence of others as well as the tragedy of existence that that does not in any way justify their turning away from the good and I believe everyone knows that I believe that they know it implicitly even if they don't allow themselves to know it explicitly and I believe that if they violate that idea then they violate themselves and that they end up in Kane's position which is the position of the man who's been given a punishment that is too great to bear an angel said [Applause] lay not thine hand upon the loud now to do without anything unto him for now I know that thou fearest God seeing thou hast not withheld thy son thine only son from me and Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his thorns by his horns and Abraham went and took the RAM and offered him up for a burnt offering instead of his son and Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah Jireh as it is said to this day in the mount of the Lord it shall be seen and the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time and said by myself have I sworn saith the Lord for because thou has done this thing and has not withheld thy son thine only son that in blessing I will bless thee and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is upon the sea shore and thy seed shall possess the gates of his gate of his enemies and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because thou hast obeyed my voice so Abraham returned unto his young men and they rose up and went together to Beersheba and Abraham dwelt at Beersheba and it came to pass after these things that it was told Abraham saying he hold Milka she has also borne children unto thy brother Nahor and Sarah was a hundred and seven and twenty years old those were the years of the life of Sarah and Sarah died in quor'toth Arba the same as Hebron in the land of Canaan and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and a weeper well I don't exactly know what to do now because that [Applause] I'll review what we've what we've covered and then I'll bring this to a close we can have some more questions than would be usual tonight so what have we established by this point the stories that have been revealed so far are something like they contain the idea that there's something divine that's analogous to the human capacity for communication and attention that's at the it operates at the genesis of being itself that's the initial account in the Old Testament it's an account that places the role of Spirit centrally in the in the nature of being now I'm not exactly sure what to make of that because in some ways I'm is materialistically oriented as modern people typically are but the stories make sense to me in many ways the idea that there's something world creating about human consciousness and that that's akin in some sense to the divine force that called order out of chaos at the beginning of time seems to me to be a very powerful metaphysical idea and it also seems to me to be an idea that is immovable at the foundation of Western culture because our entire legal system our society our expect mutual expectations all of that are conditioned to the final degree by our presupposition that each of us has an intrinsic value that transcends the local conditions of our being and it's with that presupposition that we've been able to establish the society that functions a society that functions and functions well and it has its current characterization and that's a nun it's an unlikely occurrence and it's a non-trivial reality and I don't see any way out of that way out of that conclusion I don't see anything that that can easily be replaced with and so god calls being into order into being out of chaos at the beginning of time and the tributes to human beings the same essential capacity then we turn to Adam and Eve in the garden and they're unconscious by all appearances allied tightly with God but unconscious they don't seem aware of the future they don't seem aware of themselves they don't seem aware of their own vulnerability they make the fatal error of having their eyes open they discover their own vulnerability they also discover their capacity for evil we reviewed that to some degree what's the association because it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil the fruit of which they eat what's the association between the discovery of vulnerability and the emergence of moral knowledge it's something like as far as I can tell that you actually don't know how to be evil or to be good until you're actually aware consciously of your own vulnerability because the essence of evil is the exploitation of vulnerability perhaps for the sake of that exploitation and I can't understand how to hurt someone until I know exactly how I can be hurt myself and I can't understand how I can be hurt myself until I become cognizant of my mortal limitations until I understand what brings me pain until I understand the suffering that goes along with my mortal limitations my my inevitable death and the suffering that goes along with that and with the with the accrual of the knowledge of mortality and good and evil Adam and Eve are cast out of paradise and history begins and that seems right to me because I don't think that history did begin before human beings became self conscious so there's something about that that's right if his three doesn't really begin until people become aware of the future history doesn't really begin until until people work and start to build right we still live we would still be ensconced in essentially an animal existence until we're aware of the future and start to buttress herself against it start to wear clothing start to build buildings start to make cities all in all in consequence of having become aware of the fact that we're fragile and that the future is a dangerous place so that seems to me to be existentially correct and then we have the story of Cain and Abel brilliantly placed immediately afterwards and so those are the two first two people in history essentially and they make sacrifices so that goes along with the idea of the discovery worked and necessity of work and the discovery of the future and then exactly what you'd expect would happen one segment of mankind let's say makes the sacrifices properly and prevails in the other segment makes the sacrifices improperly and fails and that's perfectly reasonable given what you see around you because that's what seems to happen all the time and then more interestingly I would say that the sacrificial failure produces embitterment right and that embedment produces a hatred for being and a desire for revenge that seems perfectly appropriate when I look at people who are bitter and who want revenge it's generally because their sacrificial efforts have failed now I'm loathe to say that that's a matter of their own doing although sometimes it clearly is the embittered and vengeful complained to God and blame him for the structure of existence you know I read about the Columbine massacre and the kids who undertook it that'll make your hair stand on end if you want to read something that will really disturb you reading Erich Harris's writings will really disturb you no matter how much you know about human beings reading Erich Harris's writings will disturb you and Harris's Kane you know he says it straightforwardly he hates human beings hates being itself he would destroy everything if it was within his power to do that and of course him and his colleague were motivated to produce far more carnage than they managed that day what was successful was only a fraction of what they had planned and and Harris said very straightforwardly that he was that he had set himself up as the judge of being and that it lacked all utility in his eyes human beings certainly should all be did all be removed from the face of existence because of their pathology and the fundamental horrors of being itself so there's nothing in the Cain and Abel story that isn't real it's real and Kane complains to God as people will when their dreams are dashed and then it's goes for people who don't believe in God - it doesn't really matter you know it's harder I suppose if you're atheistic to figure out who to blame but that doesn't mean that the sentiment well it doesn't mean that the sentiment is any different right the same drama is being enacted you shake your fist at the structure of being rather than at God himself but it doesn't make any difference except in the details so God responds to Cain and tells him that he's got no right to judge being before he gets his sacrificial house in order and even worse he says that Cain is the architect of his own downfall and the invited catastrophe in his own house into his own house willingly and entered into a creative union with it and therefore brought about his own demise and it's that additional self-knowledge and you can imagine to you know imagine that you're in you're facing your life you're facing the failures of your life and let's say that you've had a failed life and you're bitter about that and then you meditate upon it and you think why has this come about and then you think well perhaps I did something wrong you know when Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago which is the book that detailed the catastrophes of the Soviet you and help bring it down it is one part of that book that just struck me so so viciously when I read it he he was in the car in the GU leg and he was there for a very long time and he said that he observed a variety of people in the camps who he really admired they were rare they were usually religious believers in his in his experience who were not participating in the pathology of the camp's at all period no matter what he said he learned a lot from watching those people he had a hard time believing that they even existed that they could even exist but he said that one of the things that he was brought to as a consequence of watching those people live their contract with goodness out even under the most horrifying of conditions was that it was possible that he himself was responsible for his position in the camp now it's a very dangerous line of argumentation you know because who wants to be the one who blames the victim for the catastrophe you know you have to be very careful when you walk down that road but Solzhenitsyn was speaking about himself and he said well he was a communist you know and he arrogantly and forthrightly moved the movement out into the world and had not fully gone over his life with a fine-tooth comb to find out what mistakes he had made that brought him so low but his contention eventually was that part of the reason that he ended up where he ended up was because he and many others had completely forfeited their relationship with the truth and allowed their society to degenerate into deceit and tyrannical catastrophe without mounting sufficient opposition and so he decided when he was in the camps to straighten himself out bit by bit and that culminated in the production of the Gulag Archipelago in that book really demolished once and for all any moral credibility that the communist totalitarian systems had left and so one man in the depths of catastrophe who and through good example at least in part to stop lying produced a book eventually the demolished the foundation of the very system that had imprisoned him and that is really worth thinking about that's one example of the absolute grandeur of the human soul and the capacity for transformation that it has when let loose properly on the world so let's say you're conceptualizing your own failure you know and you meditated on it and you come to the conclusion that God forced Cain to pay not only have things not been going very well for you but it's actually your fault and not only that you brought it on yourself and not only that you knew it all the time well then you might think you'll wake up and fly right right you'll get your wings in order and fly right but there's no reason to assume that at all and that's not what happens to Cain that just makes him more bitter right and you can understand that if you think about it just for a second it's like bad enough when something horrible happens to you but then to have to swallow the additional pill right have to take in the information that you could have done something different it was avoidable and you knew it at the time and you decided to do it anyways and I think people are in that situation a lot more often than ever anyone is willing to admit you know you have that little voice in the back of your head that says don't do it and you override it and you know it's arrogance that makes you override it it's always arrogance you know it always warns you to always arrogance yeah I can get away with it it's like no you can't I don't think you ever get away with anything so and maybe your experience has taught you different but my suspicions are it hasn't and if you think it has well the other shoe hasn't yet dropped so Cain doesn't take the opportunity to let God's wisdom reorient his character and that that could have been outcome he could have got down on his knees so to speak and said oh my oh my god I've been wrong all along I've been living improperly I've been making the wrong sacrifices Abel deserves everything he has I got exactly what was coming to me you know could I possibly now Street myself out and and and and and live in repentance and improve my position but that's not what he did at all he said all right fair enough I get it it's like I'm going to go after the thing I most admire and I'm going to destroy it and I'm going to do that despite its cost to me and I'm going to do that just to spite the creator of being that's exactly what Paris did at Columbine it's exactly what he says in fact it is uncanny writings it's why the mass murderers always shoot themselves afterwards not before because you might wonder if you're so upset with the structure of being why you don't just commit suicide in your basement why do you have to go out and mass murder before you top it off with a gun to your forehead well you don't make the point as effectively if you just commit suicide in your basement it's like well I'm I life means nothing to me but neither does anyone else's and neither does the structure of being itself and I'll take all my revenge as much as I possibly can and then just to show you how little I care I'll cap myself off at the end and I would say also people say all the time I don't understand how that could happen it's like I don't believe that I think an hour of thought of real thought real thought about your darkest feelings about existence itself illuminates the pathway to that sort of behavior quite clearly I think if you I mean I might be wrong I might be a darker person than most and it's certainly okay okay well at least I think there are plenty of people out there who are sufficiently dark to know exactly what I mean what I'm saying these things and I would also say that if it doesn't leap to your understanding how that pathway might be illuminated then you need to know a lot more about yourself than you actually know now because whatever you might say about someone like Eric Harris he was a human being too you know there's this idea in the New Testament that Christ was he who took the sins of the world unto himself it's a very complicated idea but part of it part of it part of it is associated with the idea that he met the devil in the desert as well to take the sins of mankind onto yourself as to understand that within you dwells exactly the same spirit that commit the atrocities that Columbine or that ran the camps at Auschwitz and to actually understand that that's part and parcel of your makeup and then to take responsibility for it and I think that in the aftermath of the terrible 20th century that's what we're left with we are left with the necessity to take responsibility for the most terrible aspects of ourselves and that way perhaps we can stop those terrible things from happening again that also means you know that you don't look for the you don't look for the what would you call it the purveyor of malevolence outside yourself right it isn't someone else even though sometimes it's someone else you know you know what I mean it's like there are identifiable perpetrators but that's not precisely the point the point is something more like that the proper place for the encapsulation of that malevolence at least the proper place to start is within the confines of your own existence and then perhaps within the confines of your family and that way you're not a danger to those that you miss apprehend as malevolent and evil because you won't get your aim right to begin with you'll identify them improperly and you'll take your revenge in a manner that allows you to omit your own responsibility to act out your unconscious desire for revenge and to move the world just that much closer to help also Cain kills Abel and then Cain gives rise to his descendants one of whom is the person who's the first artificer in weapons of war and then comes the flood right which seems perfectly miraculously reasonable to me because what those stories do it's so amazing that the story of Cain and Abel segues into the story of the flood because it is the case that the catastrophes that beset society can best be conceptualized as the spread of individual pathology into the social world and the envy what would you call these the magnification of that pathology to the point where everything comes apart and I truly believe that if you familiarize yourself with the last hundred years of history that that's the conclusion that you would derive and the people who are most wise that I've read who commented on that say the same thing over and over which is the key to the prevention of the horrors of Auschwitz and the gulag in the future is the reconstruction of the individual soul at level of each individual and that's a terrible message because it puts the burden on you but it's an amazing message because it also means that you could be the source of the process that stops that catastrophe and malevolence from ever emerging again and you know it's hard for me to imagine that you have anything that could possibly be better to do with the time that you have left well then we see Noah who walks with God and who's generations are in order right which means that he's entered this contract with the good let's say that has the protective function of the ark he's put his family together and he can ride out the worst catastrophe and he's actually our ancestor right so interesting it's that these people who get their act together properly and make a contract with the good are constantly presented as the genuine ancestors of mankind and that's a really positive element of the story as well and it's one I believe because well it hasn't been easy for us to get here you know we are the descendants of the great heroes of the past and if you took all those heroes and you and you and you and you told their stories and you distilled their stories into a single story maybe you'd have a story like the story of Noah or the story of Abraham you know the story of the successful the story of our forefathers you know I'm not the cancer on the planet that certain people tend to think that we are and so the goal is to be one of the people like that and there isn't anything better that can possibly be done and the alternative is something like hell and so Noah rides out the storm and that's what everyone wants because you want to ride out the storm you don't want to be happy because that'll just happen if it does or if it doesn't but you definitely want to constitute yourself so that you can ride out the storm because the storm is always coming and so then you're fortified against the worst and that's what you want because well the best you can handle the worst you have to prepare yourself for and then we see the same thing repeated in the story of Abraham essentially right Abraham makes this contract with the good and constantly renews it that's cough ice and his worship he constantly renews it and he has the adventures that are sufficiently typical of the adventures of a human being who's alive and engaging in the world right he he bumps himself up against all the horrors of existence and yet the story is told in such a manner that reveals that his primary ethical commitment to the overarching good is sufficient to protect him against the vicissitudes of existence well that's an optimistic story and as a pessimistic person I appreciate an optimistic story that's believable and the great demands placed on Abraham it's not as if this just comes to him as a gift he has to be willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary in order to maintain that contract and so that seems to me to be realistic there's no reason to assume that life isn't so difficult that it actually demands the best from you that it's actually structured in that manner and that if the you are willing to reveal the best in you in response to the vicissitudes of life that you might actually prevail and you might actually set things straight around you and law and what if that was true that would be a remarkable thing and I can't see how it cannot be true and I can't see that it's not stamped on the soul of everyone who's conscious I think we all know this perfectly well although the stories remind us you know Plato Socrates believed that all knowledge was remembering you know he believed that the soul before birth had all knowledge and lost it at birth and then experience reminded the soul of what it already knew and there's something about that that's really true because you're not just a creature that emerged 30 years ago or 40 years ago you're you're the inheritor of three and a half billion years worth of biological engineering right you have your nature stamped deeply inside of you far more deeply than we any of us realize and when you come across these great stories these reminders they're a reminder of how to be properly and they echo in your soul because the structure is already there the external stories are manifestations of the internal reality and then they're a call to that unter internal reality to reveal itself well then we come to the end of the Abrahamic stories least this section of them with Sarah's death and Abraham is called upon to make the supreme sacrifice and interestingly not because he's willing to make the supreme sacrifice he actually doesn't have to and that's an interesting thing as well because I believe that it's reasonable from a psychological perspective to point out that the more willing you are for example to face death perhaps the less likely it is that you're going to have to face it at least in an ignoble manner and so with that then we'll bring this 12 part series to a close you know I think that applause is for everyone and I hate to say that because it sounds so new agey ha ha ha but you know it really does it really does seem to me that this is a participatory exercise you know and that and that it would not be possible for me to go through these stories without having you here to listen and so and I always think when talking to a crowd that it's a dialogue you know it's a dialogue you said and you listen and you've all listened and and and thank God for that you know and that gives me a chance to think and it gives me a chance to watch and it gives me a chance to interact because you know you're emblematic of of humanity at large I suppose that's one way of thinking about it and for me to be able to craft what I'm saying so that it has an impact on all of you here also means that I can simultaneously craft it so that it has an impact that in principle can reach far beyond this place and so you know I'm hoping that I'm really hoping that one of the things that can start to happen with this at least is that we can put our culture back on its firm foundation because it's something that's desperately needed and in order to do that we have to understand both the evil and the nobility of the human soul and that's like--that's that's a fundamental truth you know and I don't think you can get to the nobility without a soldier and through the evil I really don't believe that at all it's no place for the naive to go that's for sure but anyways I would like to thank you as you thanked me for your close and careful attention and your support during all of this it's been a really a remarkable experience it's certainly sort of developed beyond my my dreams so on to the questions hi dr. Peterson it appears to me from this series and from the biblical stories themselves that the emphasis of the stories is the utmost importance of the fool for the maintenance and adaptation of being or society the figure will lunge headfirst in the uncharted territory explicitly aware of the danger and risk of loss and confronting what cannot be understood but unafraid and with the zeal and that the dangers of ideological possession just as much are just as much of a concern as that individuals are unwilling and perhaps unable to form an opinion and take a stance one way or another when confronted with a fork in the road or a decision that must be made you've seen this apathy apathy throughout the universities as I have too in the public schooling system my question is how can one model being the fool to plunge into the unknown and publicly fall on your face in pursuit of learning in a way that clearly demonstrates the urgency and utility of the fool well there isn't any difference between the pool and someone whose courageous right from an archetypal perspective and I mean Abraham is a fool obviously when he starts his his adventures I mean the story lays it out in that manner he's far too old to be leaving home for example he's a late bloomer you know and and then he has he has a lot of catastrophic adventures along the way and certainly you could imagine that had you encountered him when he first encountered the famine in the land of strangers when he first went out that the idea that he had he had followed his misguided intuitions would have been self-evident but in the Abrahamic stories there is this call to get out and do and that's it and the thing is is that you know one of the things I've learned to put it to make it concretely is that like I've done a lot of different things in my life and every time I did a new thing I was a fool I did it badly I was an imposter right and and and because I when you first start to do something you don't know what you're doing but that that's okay that's an acceptance of your vulnerability right and your ignorance that's humility in some sense the willingness to be a fool in a nude in the land of strangers that's it the willingness to be a fool in the land of strangers and that's an act of courage because you also reveal your vulnerability to the world by stumbling around but as long as you're stumbling forward then you're going to move forward now how do you do that more concretely are you aim at an ideal right and you aim at an ideal that's beyond you now maybe you don't aim to begin with it an idea that ideal that's so beyond you that you're crushed by its magnificence you know maybe that's that's that's too demotivating to move you but you could at least conceptualize yourself as the you that you are with fewer of the faults that you know of and that's a good start and I also think that's associated with the idea of humility take stock figure out how it is that you're not who you could be and then move in that direction and accept the consequences you know you're you're going to get slapped a lot but maybe with each slap you'll straighten up a little bit especially if you listen even to the people who are slapping you because sometimes they're the ones who can reveal for you very quickly where it is that you're weak and insufficient so that you won't have to be that way in the future so yeah [Applause] hello dr. Peterson I have no questions for you all I ever wanted to do is just stand in front of you and be able to thank you for everything you've done fine my pleasure oh good morning citizen Peterson you got a short one yeah I do I mean a question eight is the best question relax trust me this one's good but first I'll break the ice now I'm going keyboard up said so state now no icebreaker you want me to get right into the real question I want you to get right into the question all right so this question is about hyper critical thinking yep now everyone knows the critical thinking is a great thing to develop you have to be able to cook I guess think about your ideas so if information is presented do you have to decide if it's legitimate or if there's some sort of deceit behind it but when it's taken to its extreme no matter how great or noble somebody is you can always find a crack in the armor and try to figure out how they're covering up something that's not great about them you know and you might then discredit everything they do is just a facade okay so let me stop you there for a sec because I want to address two of the issues that you already brought up so there's there's the issue of hyper critical thinking partly in relationship to yourself and partly in relationship to others so I'd like to address the issue with regards to yourself to begin with so there's this idea that Carl Jung developed um he extracted it I don't know from where from some ancient writings that he was familiar with I believe they were Jewish writings he said that classically speaking traditionally speaking God was viewed to rule being with two hands the right hand and left hand and the right hand was justice and that was you're going to get what's coming to you but the left hand was mercy and the idea essentially was that the cause could not exist without the proper combination of justice and mercy you should get what's coming to you but people are fallible and they make mistakes and so it's reasonable to apply that to yourself you know there's an idea that's being developed by psychologists over the last few decades that people are basically narcissistic and that they generally feel that they're better at most things than other people I don't buy that I don't think the experimental evidence for that is very strong and I certainly haven't seen that for example in my clinical practice where I've seen that people are generally far harder on themselves than they are on other people one example of that I've written about this in my new book too is that you know if you have a pet that's sick and you take it to the vet and you get medication you're very likely to give the pet the entire course of medication to go to the pharmacy to get the prescription filled to give the pet the medication to follow it through but if you are the person who has the problem yeah you all laughed if you know the story it's like a 30 you won't even go fill the prescription and of the remaining 2/3 of you half of them won't take it to completion and you think well why are people like that and I think it's because they know themselves they have contempt for themselves because of their flaws and then they come to despise themselves and I think that's a big mistake that's Locke that's too much justice and not enough mercy and you know Jung wrote about the biblical injunction that you should treat your neighbor as if he were yourself essentially but he talked about that as an equation which was quite interesting so because it's often read as something like you should be nice to people which is not what it means at all because first nice is a very low-end virtue but it isn't what it means what it means is that you should you should treat your neighbor as if he or she is someone that you wish to encourage and develop but that you should also have exactly the same attitude towards yourself which is weak sort of in some sense regardless of what your opinion is of yourself critical let's say hyper critical even is often the case with people who are anxious or perhaps who are hyper conscientious you have to put forward to yourself the same sympathy we could say that you would extend to someone else that you cared for that's the thing is that you have to come to treat yourself as if you're someone that you care for and I mean that technically you know you detach yourself from yourself and you think okay well if I was going to construct a mode of being that was optimal for this person that I happen to be what would that look like and that's sort of independent of whether or not you think you deserve it it's like maybe you deserve it maybe you don't innocent until proven guilty that's a pretty good policy but you should come to lay out a mode of being for yourself that gives you some credit you know when that will also help you in your dealings with other people but it's often very difficult for people to do that to themselves okay so that's the that's the first part of that perfect so it starts out with this hyper critical thinking and you talked a lot about Nietzsche's assertion about the death of God but I see it sort of more like a willful destruction of the heroic ideal and I guess several months ago I had occasion to look up a definition or explanation for the zeitgeist of modern victimhood outraged culture and I saw it in this particular case and I found and this paragraph okay this has what you called the rhythmic cadence that just made my hair stand up on sense and if you could look at it and read that this is better than the Lawson the image of man that dominates in modern literature in visual art cinema and theater is primarily a group gloomy image the Great and the noble are suspect from the outset they must be torn from their pedestal so that one can see through them morality counts as hypocrisy enjoy a self-deception anyone who simply puts trust in the beautiful and the good is either inexcusably in genuine or acting with evil intent the truly moral attitude is suspicion and its greatest success is in exposing criticism of society is obligatory it is impossible to find words lurid and brutal enough to describe the dangers that threaten us this delight in the negative is not however unlimited there exists at the same time an obligation to be optimistic and the failure to observe this obligation does not go unpunished for example anyone who expresses the view that not everything in the intellectual development of the modern period has been correct that is necessary in some essential areas to reflect on the shared wisdom of the great cultures has chosen to make the wrong kind of criticism he finds himself suddenly construct confronted with a resolute apologia for the fundamental decisions of the modern age no matter how much delight one may take indication he is not permitted to call into question the view that the fundamental trajectory of historical development is progress and that the good lies in the future and nowhere else you know I thought a lot about nihilism let's say and and its justification and I think that a very powerful justification for nihilism can be found in the mirror observation that life is rife with tragedy and malevolence of which there is no doubt but then I got suspicious of that rationale for nihilism over the years because a counter position to it emerged and this is something Nietzsche of course concentrated on as well that had more to do with resentment it's like you can imagine negation of the heroic ideal from despair from the despair of save produced by tragedy and by exposure to malevolence but it's also it's completely and delightfully irresponsible to negate heroic ideal because it means that you don't have any responsibilities and it seems to me that if you're nihilistic and prone to criticize the heroic foundation of let's say Western culture that one of the first questions that you could ask yourself is what makes you so sure that you're appropriately cynical suspicious and critical and not just running away as fast as you possibly can from every bit of responsibility that you could possibly adopt and I think that that's a perfectly reasonable perspective and I think that that is reflected to some degree in what the person who wrote this paragraph was attempting to you guess who it was or was that fair no I can't really no ha ha ha ha ha ha I left you a hint off at them who is it Cardinal Ratzinger come ah all right I'm going to take another question and well done hello hello how are you doing doing good dr. Pearson it's been a pleasure 12 weeks 12 12 moments let's say okay so two weeks ago we talked about your mischievous suggestion I might say to cut the university's funding by 25% and how that might have influenced that sort of language and Andrew sheers platform right yeah and so and then you discussed how you're not exactly sure what your role is in all of this and and that you don't want to be in a war and you don't want to be using warlike language and and I think I think what you what you want to be doing is is you're trying to restore order but not not but not but not have conflict and and so I so I so after the after the lecture two weeks ago I asked you like maybe I maybe I should do some sales work for your post modern lexicon website and but I think I've found a better niche for someone of my temperament to help this cause so I think that so I go to the house University and because so many students are dropping out especially men and especially at I think minorities they've created this team called the Student Success team or something Student Success advisors yeah and you've been extracting credibly successful crowdfunding for your research and on your patreon and I think like how much does it cost for a single person to do the self altering program well it's two for one so it's about fifteen dollars okay so okay so nothing then basically um but I was thinking that we could somehow we could incorporate the self authoring program into this into this new advisor committee at Dow so that students can knock yourself out man do it that's what that's the other like the data for the future authoring program is quite clear if students even do it for an hour before they go to university they have a thirty thirty percent less chance of dropping out the first semester so you know and it would really night be nice to see some student organizations that were seriously devoted to facilitating student success you might think that's what student organizations should do in fact well it seems rather self-evident when you think about it but you know so I would say like if you're oriented in that direction get outer so it's a fine plan and it's I like the emphasis of it because you're directing yourself towards the facilitation of individual accomplishment and you're at least going to do very little harm that way and that's a really good start man you know that's that because that's that's what you should think about when you're setting out to make things better the first thing you should think is I'm not so sure I know what I'm doing so why don't I first attempt to do the least amount of harm possible and by concentrating on helping someone develop their own plan and and implement that into the future encouraging them with regards to whatever success they would like to find their way there's a pretty low probability that you're going to act the terror tyrant and and and play a detrimental role so good luck maybe we can communicate thank you yes I'm gonna send you an email thank you very much hi dr. Peterson this is the first of these lectures that I've been here to listen to but I've listened to all of them on YouTube so far oh boy they're not close enough all right wait that's good okay yeah and I've been trying to think up this question since basically the first lecture because I'm a seminary student at an evangelical seminary and a lot of what you've been saying has really been resonating and it's and it's really been fascinating to listen to and you know there's many people who have been asking you questions like what do you believe about the resurrection do you believe in God are you a Christian and all these sorts of things and you know I've been listening very closely to all your answers and have groups of friends on Facebook or bowling following very closely say or what Peterson said this time maybe he's one of us finally or something like that but but at the same time other ways that you explain some of the stories sound very close to what we call theological liberalism you know in the 19th century the idea that using historical critical methods of reading and interpreting the Bible and understanding Jesus more as a moral figure than as a literal historical figure and whose atonement provides satisfaction for man so I tried to figure out what the question was because I could interpret what some of your answers were so I'm going to put it in more of a general way okay where exactly do you see yourself differing from traditional Orthodox evangelical Christianity and and why would you differ there given how much you you seem to understand the importance of the biblical stories and the Western history in Western history okay okay well that's a good that's a good question well I offer obviously I have to answer in a general way I mean I think that one of the things that makes me different is that I take the idea that things are fourteen billion years old seriously you know and and the idea of evolution seriously I mean as Daz does the Catholic Church by the way and so but I don't see that as an impediment to the pursuit that I'm undertaking now I don't know how to bridge that gap precisely but I'm not that worried about it I mean you can't bridge every gap it's just not possible it would require infinite knowledge okay and how so that that's one major because I'm coming at this from the scientific I really am coming at this from the scientific perspective you know like I try to make sure that everything that I talk about is commensurate with current scientific knowledge now current scientific knowledge no doubt is airing in all sorts of ways like I think our notion about exactly how evolution progresses is flawed in many many ways and the recent discoveries in the field of epigenetics which show that you can actually transmit acquired characteristics you know has really put a whole real serious stick in the spokes of the evolutionary bicycle let's say but but then I also think the question is miss asked in some sense because I gave this lecture series a specific title for a specific reason and the lecture series is the psychological significance of the biblical stories now I'm not claiming that my psychological analysis exhausts the significance of the biblical stories you know they have multitudes let's say layers of meaning and some of those layers of metaphysical and some of them are more specifically religious and I'm trying the best I can not to wander into those domains like I do because it's impossible to keep yourself bounded you know when you're a discursive speaker let's say I'm trying to what I'm trying to do is the sort of thing that Jung did essentially is to take a look at these old stories and say okay well let's look at this from the perspective of the human psyche and let's see what the significance can be and not to say that's all the significance there is who knows what significance there is one thing I have learned about the biblical stories is that no matter how deep you go into them you are not at the bottom and so that's been very very interesting to me and god only knows about the metaphysical substructure of reality because human beings certainly don't so I don't I don't want to claim that what I'm doing is a religious interpretation although you know it drifts into that direction I want to stay within the purview of my expertise such as it is and to say well if you look at this psychologically here's what you can extract as as pragmatically existentially and clinically meaningful and the rest of it well the rest of it has to be left in advance and because I don't have the capacity to investigate claims that go beyond that that does not mean that I'm saying that what I'm doing is reducing these stories to their psychological significance even though the psyche is a grand thing I'm not trying to do that it's not reductionistic it's a take on it so people can make up their own minds metaphysically and they also have to make up their own minds about how they're going to act which is really the crucial issue as far as I'm concerned so you bet I I had a question with respect to daddy presented I believe two weeks ago sorry a question with respect to data even presented I believe two lectures ago regarding the use of psilocybin in treatment of mental illness yes yes so subsequently I looked up some of the recently published a literature and one yeah studies that I found extremely striking was one that was published less than a year ago in The Lancet which is a very high-end yes well respected journal yeah and what they looked at was efficacy in patients with severe treatment-resistant depression and what they found is that in 11 out of 12 of the patients they showed significant remittance following it a single dose of the substance up to three months following the single dose without additional dosing so this not only substantiates I suppose my own experiences but when you read some of the commentary or review articles surrounding these types of topics not with respects to depression but things like post-traumatic stress disorder addiction they'll unequivocally state that these types of results are completely unprecedented and the realm of psychiatric medicine yes so I was wondering - good comment as to whether or not that type of this rhetoric is overblown and if not do you see these being more mainstream in your future or suspect they'll fall victim to something along the lines of regulatory capture no I don't well I don't think they're over statements and I think I know some of the people who are engaged in this research and they're actually very conservative people like their brave people but I mean conservative in the best sense you know they're not they're not Timothy Leary yeah and I'm not trying to put down Timothy Leary I'm really not but you know some caution would have been a good thing although you know when something like when the psychedelics burst onto the scene no one had any idea what to do with them right so and we still really don't but the new research is being conducted very very carefully but it is really remarkable that those episodes are used or those terms are used to describe the results because those are the lancet for example is one of the top end medical journals you don't see grand claims in The Lancet right scientists don't write that way there they're trained from the very beginning to downplay their results but they're quite struck by the fact that these effects occur with single doses now I think that what we don't know about psychedelics could fill many many many thick volumes and they're and they're absolutely mysterious in their function purpose effect consequence all of that and I've always thought that it was really appalling that we stopped investigating them back in the 1960s although it's not been that long you know 20 years historically speaking it's really nothing but and no I don't think that there'll be that the research will be stopped by regulatory capture because the people who are doing it now I think learned their lesson from what happened in the 60s and are doing it pretty damn carefully so we can hope that more results like this are produced and that they're replicable and that perhaps they'll prove helpful with any luck yep hi dr. Pederson I found this lecture series really really enthralling and it did why no I spent my time to explain that I might answer the question yeah that's okay all I'll get let you get to the question but I'm curious like what why do you think that is because it's a strange thing to have happen like it's a lecture on the Bible for God's sake you know it's like it's not something you'd go to a venture capitalist with a business plan for so like what what is it about it you think that's been that that's had that effect on you ha I asked you a question instead look I don't want to I don't want to put you on the spot if you want to just move to your question that's fine but if you have an answer to that I would be very interested in doing what it is well it's it's a thrill to encounter a kind of means to a metaphysical system that's so persuasive and potent and I've hadn't really experienced that a whole lot in my life huh that's what universities are supposed to do for people eh that's what universities are supposed to do for people they're not supposed to take people who are barely hanging together and break them and make them weak they're supposed to equate them with the heroic the heroic sub structure of the human psyche so that they can move out into the world and thrive and it's an absolute crime that isn't what's happening so hooray for that [Applause] occurred to me that the kind of tradition and genre that you are working in here is that of this sermon now are you comfortable with that categorization and why or well see where you go with it haha well that's the essence of my question are these sermons and might no one demo I don't know h er I don't know you know sorry what was the last part light one call you a preacher well you'd certainly call me one and you know I think that there's a certain overlap and the overlap but this is being characteristic of my approach to education right from the beginning because I have some rules about what I lecture what about the topics that I lecture about and the way that I deal with it so the first rule is I don't want to tell you anything that isn't useful I'm a pragmatist you know like I'm an American pragmatist that's part of my philosophical grounding and I believe that knowledge is tool like and that the proper thing to do is to to equip people with the tools to move effectively in the world and so I want to make sure that if I offer a story or a fact for that matter I also say well here here's why you need to know this fact it will actually improve your life or it'll stop you from wandering into a pit which is approximately the same thing and then it will also knowing this will also make you more effective actor in the social world and that will improve the social world right and hopefully that will improve the environmental world etc etc and so I would say to the degree that those who produce sermons are concerned with producing alterations in behavior which is our moral alterations say then I share the same territory with them but I wouldn't say that that's something that should be only relegated to the domain of the sermon because I believe that it is the job of the universities for example especially in the damned humanities to ennoble people and to enable them to adopt the mantle of proper citizenship and that we've forgotten that we've forgotten that or we're avoiding it or refusing it or something like that you know and I think we're using the death of God as an excuse so I think that to the degree that I'm a preacher I'm making an error you know and also to the degree that I'm politicized I'm making an error I'm wandering out of my proper territory when that's the domain that I'm in but when I'm attempting to assemble multiple layers of facts towards a practical end which is what I'm trying to do and the end is the the annulment of the individual right that's my goal then then I'm in my proper domain I'm going to make mistakes you know I'm going to wander out of my territory and I try not to do that but you know it's well it's part of being a fool you're going to make mistakes so yeah thanks very much no problem doc thanks for continuing to do all the cool stuff that makes everyone love you that's great not everyone well uh yeah yeah yeah that's a generalization there's lots of people that seem not to love me yeah and I can't blame him really anyway yeah I'm going to lead into a question here so him in your book maps and rare book maps of meaning uh I got that quote from Dostoevsky about how humankind mankind - given all the cakes in the world yet oh my god so yeah if you get oh my god is right man that's one killer quote that's from notes from the underground eh everyone should read that because everyone's underground and it's a great it's a great little journey through that yeah so it's basically as you give if you have the perfect utopia I often use it basically if you have your most perfect utopia humans will find a way to screw it up yeah it'll go out of the way I do at least yeah because it's what we like we like chaos and the unknown just talked about this yeah that's the thing is is that we're heroic adventurers right we're not we're not Sybarite laying on a beach although when you get the opportunity to do that like make sure you take it but that's that's not what that's not that's not the proper calling of the human soul right we're out there to conquer chaos and the unknown and it's in that we find meaning and that's better than the utopia that's what Dostoyevsky god bless his soul Dostoyevsky had that he was such a genius he had everything that was wrong with communism figured out even before it started amazing really like if you read the possessed or the devil's which I would highly recommend although it's a hard book to get into it takes about a hundred pages to really get get it get moving but Dostoyevsky talks his main character in that novel is a person who's again a very powerful person who's completely possessed by what's essentially the communist ideology and he's very effective at moving it forward and Dostoyevsky lays out brilliantly exactly the catastrophic consequences of that both personally and socially and he did this like thirty years before the Russian Revolution it's just it's uncanny I don't know where the hell that guy was from must have been his epilepsy you know so yeah I'm glad I got y'all excited him keep going here basically I used to use that you know it's kind of late that a lot of that comes from the left-wing this utopia we're going towards with the universal income and the AI and suddenly the whole populations can become insanely creative and with no incentives but it's not that utopia is not there it's not like this thing that hasn't happened yet we're in it we're in it this is the best thing ever and like all of humanity the Western civilization like oh my god putting the material sense I mean oh it's just toilet paper toilet paper it just happened anyway that's so serious like so we have this beautiful thing and people are trying to take it down at all cost and and now we go into the dark phase of my into my question here which is and it actually goes into Charlottesville had you know with with that with with the initial purpose of protecting the statue was a good thing I don't I'm not I don't know about Confederacy except for the big thing but honestly it's a it's a slippery slippery slope and the confused souls who in the bad make this darkened souls for sure not good they screwed up big-time the purpose behind it it's so important because it's going to be fought founding fathers next anyone who ever contributed to anything to Western civilization as we know it is already being it's already being done James Madison High School in the States it's getting renamed because some girls one of the students felt unsafe and so yeah this is a serious issue I wanted like I feel like we're really up against the wall now because now they found their Nazis man the Nazis are flooding the streets now so how do we how do we possibly you know kind of save our cakes you had to bring it up didn't you well having the right degenerated to the identity politics does not seem to be a positive solution so one of the things I would say is that like I understand why the identity politics that has been practiced so assiduously and so devastatingly by the left has been co-opted by the right I understand that but then here's what I would say to the people on the right who are playing that game if you play the game of your enemies and you win you win their game you don't win that's not victory you just become the most successful exponent of their pathology how is that a good thing it's a bad thing so what does that leave people as although as an alternative well I don't think that the Caucasians let's say should revert to being white I think that's a bad idea it's a dangerous idea and it's coming fast and I don't like to see that I think the whole group identity thing is seriously pathological I think we've made big mistakes in Canada I understand why at least to some degree in that respect and that large mistakes are being made all over the Western world where we're making you group identity the most important thing about you I think that's reprehensible I think it's devastating I think it's genocide 'el in its ultimate expression I think it will bring down our civilization if we pursue it we shouldn't be playing that game so what's the alternative you know I've thought for a long time about a political career really forever since I was like 12 really for a long time and I've always decided against it because it seemed to me that the proper level of analysis with regards to the solution of the problem that we're facing isn't political and that's why I think it's a mistake when what I'm doing gets politicized either by me or others I think that the way that you deal with this is to put yourself together I really believe that is that because I think that individual people are far more powerful they're certainly far more evil than they're willing to consider but that's also a sign of their unbelievable power so I think that what you do is you aim high and put yourself together and stay the hell away from the ideologues because they're hiding they're hiding behind a wall they're not able to come out and fight on their own behalf and so the way forward through the ideological mess and that's the lesson of Western culture is to place the individual at the place of paramount importance and to make the group identity emerge only when necessary and secondarily if ever and so you can do that you can do that now you can do that tomorrow like you can put your life together and again as I mentioned to the other young men who asked the question is you won't hurt anyone doing that right you pick up your goddamn responsibilities sort yourself oke fix up your family right and then you can be a force for good in the culture and if enough people do that the ideological mess will just evaporate it'll just disappear I think that's the way you show people the right path forward to is that you say well look um we would like we would like it so much if you could thrive as an individual drop your cult-like affiliation right step out of the shadows the demonic shadows you ideological possession and step forward as a fully developed person into the light do it by example that's your that's your best bet man so that's what it looks like to me I'm going to take one more question and then I'm going to there is a young man from Kentucky here Brian it's Brian here ok so I'm going to answer one more question and I'm going to let you take Mike okay all right good evening dr. Peterson good evening everybody I also want to thank you first for your lectures that I've been following on YouTube mainly and to say that they have been well life changing wouldn't be an overstatement great and I'm one of the crazy people increasing your views on YouTube because I flew in from Belgium last night to be here and and it's like 3 a.m. for me right now and English is not my first language so bear with me I I would have many burning questions to ask you but I thought it was fair and necessary to pick one and it would be this one there are concepts that recur in your lectures with this one you only mentioned once in your early videos on Bill c16 about self-esteem you said you don't believe in the existence of self-esteem the way to teach children they're all special you think you boost their confidence but the only result is that some get a narcissistic the reason why I'm interested in that is about standing up for yourself and it is and when I try to you know do it yeah I see that rational argument facing rationality doesn't get the best result in negotiations that's why you learn how to be socialized by playing rough and tumble it's not an intellectual conversation that gets you socialized so I'm also reading that book suggested about by Stephen Hicks explaining of modernism yes I wasn't really familiar and I've been listening to a lot of talk to him later this week so that might be fun and I'm trying to read with fresh eyes because having it doctrine aided by you of course very critical and there's one more point that I have to agree with the postmodernist and that is the world seems to me as I observe it a place where powers are at play it's not rationality delete that so when I'm in a weak position and I want to fight back not to get resentful I find that it's not a rational argument that will get me there there's something else that I don't do and that I should be doing and I don't know what it is so you see the relation with self-esteem seems to me that people who think of themselves start in a better position in this game ok so ok ok great yeah alright so there's a lot in that question so the first thing is is there's a problem with the measurement of self-esteem and that actually matters because self-esteem is a psychological concept a scientific concept if you like and you have to get the measurement right and you can predict self-esteem almost perfectly by measuring someone's extraversion and subtracting from that their negative emotionality or neuroticism so it's actually just a combination of big five traits and so people who are extroverted who feel a lot of positive emotion and who are and who don't feel a lot of negative emotion score high on scales of self-esteem ok so conceptually it's a non-starter because you're not going to move people's levels of neuroticism let's say by trying to get them to feel good about themselves ok now having said that that doesn't mean that you shouldn't encourage people right now there's this psychologist named Jerome Kagan who's quite a great psychologist developmental psychologist I think he's emeritus at Harvard at the at the at the moment he studied temper mentally inhibited children you can so they're basically kids who are high in neuroticism probably low and extraversion and he found that if those chilled and you can identify them as early as six months right it's very very inculcated in their temperament he found that if you encouraged them in the world you could shift them into a more stable personality configuration and what you basically did was when they were manifesting signs of distress instead of encouraging them to withdraw and retreat which is what they might be attempting to do you encourage them to go out and explore so for example if you have a temper mentally inhibited child and you go to a playground and there's kids out there like you have an extroverted emotionally stable kid three years old as you put them on the ground their feet are already moving right like a puppy over water and you let them go and they just run to the to the kids and they're there and then you have to drag them away but if you have a temper mentally inhibited child the child will sort of stand around your legs and sort of peek out you know and then what you do is wait it out let them watch encourage them to move a little bit forward encourage them to take their steps out into the unknown and the strange land and don't let them withdraw like you can do it you have they're slower to warm up they'll warm up they'll habituate and if you continually expose your inhibited child to the things that make them anxious in measured doses then you can transform their psychophysiological temperament now you're probably not going to shift them way the hell out onto the extroverted emotionally stable end but you can make a big difference that's very different than making them feel good about themselves which is such a you need to curse you need to curse when you discuss that concept right so it isn't the improved their self-esteem it isn't how you feel about yourself right it's how you act effectively in the world and how you're trained to do that so okay now then you were talking about negotiation right and you said well don't you said something like don't people who feel good about themselves aren't they able to negotiate better and it's I know that's a poor paraphrase excuse me but negotiation is actually a practical issue to some degree like the first thing is that you have to figure out what you want because you were saying well it's not merely rational it's like yeah yeah that's for sure you have to bargain from a position of authority let's say not power Authority is a better word but you don't have authority unless you know what you're talking about and unless you can bring some unless you can bring some let's say force it's not that's not the right word you can negotiate without anyone unless you can say no and you can't say no unless you've set yourself up with alternatives so when you go to your boss and you negotiate for a raise you need to have the sort of CV that enables you to go find another job and you have to have your CV prepared and you have to have looked for another job and you have to be able to get one because then you can go in there and say I'm not as productive as I could be at my current level of remuneration it's not reflective of what I'm able to do and I want this and this is what will happen if you give me this this would be the good things that will happen and what do you think of that and the person is going to know even by the way that you hold yourself while you're having the discussion whether or not you're someone with options and you can't fake that well you can but it's not helpful like it just doesn't work for very many iterations you have to it's it's not rationally you're preparing yourself for battle that's what you're doing and you can't be weak when you prepare prepare yourself for battle because if the person says no I'm not giving you a raise which is exactly what they should say because what are they going to do just like sprinkle the money around you need to be able to say okay then there will be consequences that you don't like and that's what it means to say no to someone no means if you continue to push this things will happen that you don't like now in that case it'll be all be part and take my talents with me and if they don't care well then you're in the wrong business or you don't have any talents to begin with right which is so it in order to negotiate properly and then this is more difficult for people who are agreeable for example because there tend to be more conflict averse you have to put yourself in a position where you can you can push back as hard as you're going to be pushed on and that means you have to open your you have to open up your space of available options because otherwise the person says no one that's it you're done well you'll lose that it's it's as straightforward as that now with regards to the self-esteem part is practice on small things because you build the skills forget about the self-esteem it isn't about being confident or feeling confidence or any of that it's about knowing bloody well how to negotiate start with small things you know so you'll notice that there are things in your relationships in particular that aren't the way you want them to be and that you could see how could be improved it's like figure out how they can be improved negotiate with your partner make the incremental improvement keep doing that you'll get better and better at it and then you'll be able to go out and have a harder negotiation in the world so to set a skills there's an attitude behind it you know and it's easier for some people than others but fundamentally it's a set of skills no problem alright so now we have something interesting and I expected to close this off with the floor is yours dr. Peterson I'd like to say thank you for making your videos available online they've had a great effect on me over the last year I actually found them a few years ago but sometime around July or August of last year I got hooked I would wake up at like 5:00 a.m. in the morning to watch your maps of meaning releases the new ones the old ones excetera I found myself inspired by both the academic and technical material as well as what I might term the more fatherly directives or wisdom I shared this with my family and my friends as well as my girlfriend she's here tonight as well she's been following the biblical series but what I'd like to say is thank you for inspiring me to stand up and face something that I've been afraid of all my adult life and thank you for granting me the permission to ask this question here it's actually for my girlfriend will you please stand up you so some might say given that we are a couple of primates full of snakes it's pretty miraculous that we haven't killed each other but I think you're pretty great and we've been talking about commitment and I think I'm ready I know I'm ready to commit to a life with you of sorting ourselves out I'd like to clean some rooms with you and even as scary as the shackles of marriage have been made to sing to us I'm thinking about forever and simply Mao in my words I love you dearly you feel like home I never want to lose that will you marry me if you want to come here so you're saying you're gonna shackle yourself to me and never run away then I shall suffer the rest of my life with you you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 934,408

Rating: 4.865715 out of 5

Keywords: atheist, bible, christ, christian, christianity, existentialism, faith, free speech, god, gods, jesus, jordan peterson, lecture, openness, personality, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, religion, spirit, toronto, truth, university of toronto, yeshua, Abraham, Ishmael, Sarah, Hagar, sacrifice, delay of gratification, Jordan B Peterson, University, biblical lecture

Id: -yUP40gwht0

Length: 153min 32sec (9212 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/IssphitiKOzS]

I was there for this, but was at the back. That guys always asks really long, involved questions; also he's pretty short. Didn't catch the dick joke, I thought he was referring to the guy's height. Funnier now that I get it.

[u/broscienceisfine]

What makes you think that was unintentional

[u/robertjuh]

You got a short one?