Purpose, Fatherhood, and Spiritual Awakening

you talk about men being husbands fathers Warriors Builders priests and Kings right then you can imagine that there's something behind that that makes all of that makes it possible for all of that to become manifest and that's the monotheistic spirit that the biblical Corpus is attempting to to characterize right and it looks to me anthropologically it looks to me like what's happened and I'm not going to speak religiously but it looks to me like what's happened is that people in their various tribal groups had dramatized patterns of adaptations Central patterns of adaptation and then characterize those Central patterns of adaptation with the attributes of something like a Transcendent deity and then as the tribes aggregated themselves each of those visions of transcendent deity had to be integrated that actually often necessitated War there's actual war between different tribes for what vision is going to be dominant but there's metaphysical battle too you know even chair eliada the Romanian historian of religions talked about the universal battle between the Gods in heaven which was an attempt at in the metaphysical realm the pleuroma is what Jung called it for these Concepts to go to war with one another to and then arrange themselves in a hierarchy and so anyways it's quite fascinating to see that the same underlying Drive there's actually quite a few similarities in our experience you know you have Scandinavian ancestry you had a child had uh arthritis as well and you seem to be wrestling with many of the same problems that have beset me for you know forever so that was kind of it's interesting to see that I also read the guardian article Guardian review of your book which was everything you'd expect and hope for from the guardian a hope for is is there I haven't read it so you're so you're one up on me there but uh well you can just imagine it oh I'm sure if they're praising you then you've done something wrong that's my usual motto yeah yeah well it's it's uh that's the thing you know if if there's to some degree if you're not irritating the correct people you're doing something wrong that's something we could talk about too because one of the dangers of the sort of Enterprise we're involved in is the possibility of you know increasing the degree of polarization rather than offering a positive Vision which is what you're trying to do it's a strange book for a politician to write so let's start with that why do you write this book tell everybody a little bit about the book and then tell me why you were motivated to write it well I was motivated to write it because I've got two little boys at home I'm a father of three and my two older are boys and then I've got a baby girl who's two years old but really Jordan it was thinking about them they're ten and eight my boys and uh my oldest is Elijah and my second is Blaze and I write in the book about Blaze Pascal so you begin to though I don't draw this out on the book I don't say it explicitly if you read the book you begin to get a sense of why my boys are named to the way they're named and why these ideas that I write about are so significant to me they show up even in my kids names and lives but thinking about my boys is Elijah what's your sorry the other boys Blaze for Blaze Pascal yeah yeah yeah who I write about in the book but it really it was it was thinking of the of my boys and my obligation as a father to help them grow into the men that they're capable of being that set me thinking about the book and then in my work representing Missouri in the Senate you know I get to meet so many men from around Missouri from around the nation frankly and seeing their struggles is seeing being the the the sense of alienation they're dealing with the sense of depression the sense of lack of purpose I have so many young men tell me that that they feel like they don't have any any vision for their lives uh that they feel that they the the media is against them as men that their educational system is against them as men so it was really trying to key off of that and offer a a positive affirmative vision for what men are for and why it's good to be a man so the this idea you you covered a couple of things there so that with your sons for example that you would like to encourage them to be the men that they're capable of being you know and I kind of Wonder I don't know if this is a reasonable proposition or not but it might be the maternal tendency is I think to value children for what they are and the paternal tendency is to Value children for what they could be and then if you have that nicely balanced and I mean the a man can value children for who they are as well and a woman can encourage what they could be but broadly speaking the symbolic proclivity the essential proclivity seems to be that and I think that's partly perhaps you tell me what you think about this women have to bear the responsibility for primary caregiving in early infancy in particular first year and there isn't a lot of there's a an awful lot of taking care of immediate needs in that first year like that child's immediate needs are Paramount because the child is so utterly dependent born early as our human infants are and in the state of utter dependency and then first women have to wrestle with the difficulty of trans forming from that state of hyper caregiving where needs are predominant the needs of the moment are predominant into facilitating the independence of the child and that seems to me to be where the paternal and the patriarchal the father is particularly Paramount to to encourage maybe that's the primary paternal role is to encourage so is that in keeping with the experience that you had as a father and is that does that make sense to you is there anything you'd add to that no I that is that has been my experience and I can remember before I was a father and I tell the story in the book when I was a coach I was a young man I was 23 at the time I was coaching a group of of rowers uh kids a young high school team a crew team and uh this was in the UK actually and I remember I tell the story in the book I had this moment where there was a scene in during one of our training sessions where I saw one of the rowers encourage take a leadership role with one of the younger ones and in that split second I saw like a flash what this this kid this you know he's probably a junior at the time 17 years old what he might be in the future I saw maturity in him I I saw characteristics I had never seen before and I just it struck me it's like oh wow he could really become something he could become a great leader a strong leader he I saw a flash of the man he could be and suddenly and seeing that I realized my role my job as a coach to him was to help encourage that and call it forth and for me Jordan I tell that story because that is a to me a parallel fatherhood that helped me get ready for what I think fatherhood is which is to see that in my kids my boys and my girl and to help call that forth to help call forth what they could be and to be willing to sacrifice myself and my interests in order to see them develop and grow I um was fortunate enough to conduct a seminar in Exodus in Miami and um one of the stories we evaluated in some depth was the story of the burning bush in that story which occurs in that episode which occurs before Moses is a leader he's wandering along minding his own business intent on his own purposes you might say and something captures his interest and Glitters and gleams since it's a phenomenon phenomenon means it's from the Greek famous thigh and feisty means to shine forth and so something grips his attention and makes itself manifest and he turns off the path to investigate it right he decides to further investigate and he does that of his own free choice the story makes that quite clear so something calls to him but he it's him that decides to go investigate it as he gets closer to it he hears a voice and it tells him that he's starting to tread on sacred ground and so he has to take off his shoes and what that seems to mean is that if you if something makes itself manifest to you and you pursue it deeply you go deeper and if you go deep enough you go you enter sacred ground and that's by definition right because what's deep and what's sacred that's the same thing technically it's the same idea and everybody has a sense of depth compared to shallowness let's say and so Moses doesn't stop merely because he's on sacred ground he continues to investigate further and he at some point as a consequence of his engagement at least in part it's the voice of God itself that speaks to him and it speaks with the voice of being and becoming God says something like I am that I am or I am what I will be or I have been what I will become it's the voice of being and becoming and of Eternity that speaks to him and what that seems to mean is something like if you pursue something that captures your interest with sufficient intensity then the voice of being itself will make itself manifest to you and that's what happens when people take something seriously you know and that's when Moses becomes a leader right because that's when God tells him to go talk to the Pharaoh it's not until that transformation occurs and it's very much akin to the story that you tell about because it's it's a minor story in some ways right that that experience you had when you were coaching rowing you know it's it's a mundane story it's the sort of thing in some way that could happen to anyone but you said it struck you and it also shaped the way that you conceptualized fatherhood and that you could see the potential in this young man all that happened at the same time yes yes all that have happened at the same time and it was a significant moment it was a mundane setting I suppose much like a bush in the wilderness right but it was a significant moment in that it it really shaped my sense of at the time as a 23 year old you know coaching a group of kids what is it I'm supposed to be doing with these kids and it just like a flash it I I thought I'm supposed to be helping them not only become better athletes of course but to become the men that they might be and there was a sense of sort of responsibility that came with that having seen who these kids might be having seen what they might be having seen their potential I was obligated to help call that forth and I think as a father that's absolutely what we do as fathers and that's the responsibility we have as fathers well you know it's interesting one of the things that has been phenomenon that's been continual in the lectures that I've been doing around the world is the proclivity of the audience to fall absolutely silent when I discussed the relationship between responsibility and meaning and I'm suggesting to the people that I'm talking to that one of the things that you need in life is a meaning that will sustain you through suffering that's almost like a definition of a deep meaning right it'll sustain you through suffering and I offer the possibility that the place you find out is in responsibility this is something conservatives have been bad at they're bad at it because they Hector and lecture young people about what they should do as if it's a kind of detached morality you should be good because being good is the right thing you know it's like an abstract call to duty and there's something in that I don't want to be cynical about that but that's not the core issue the core issue I think is the fact that in that adoption of responsibility you find the deepest meaning and that's really true on the mentoring front you know like my graduate supervisor for example his name was it's Robert peel he's still alive I still work with him and I went to his first shift which was a celebration of his academic career when he retired and he had about 40 people there they were students mostly that he had mentored and there's an extremely positive event and the reason for that was because Bob was a very very good Mentor he gave credit where credit was due he tried to develop people and he didn't take he he distributed his ideas widely and was generous with them and he taught people how to be independent and how to conduct themselves as independent researchers and he helped them develop their lives and their careers as scientists and academics and clinicians and he was really good at it and he really liked doing it that's the that's the crucial issue here is that there's a meaningfulness in mentorship that justifies the sacrifice because you might say well why bother developing other people and part of the answer to that this isn't just a hedonistic answer is that well there isn't anything that's more delightful and meaningful to do than that as far as I can tell I mean maybe my relationship with my wife in some ways would triumph over that and some of the intellectual interests that I've pursued but other than that that pleasure in in aiding the best in other people to come forward I don't think there is a deeper pleasure than that

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Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson live, jordan peterson livestream, jordan peterson shorts, jordan peterson tiktoks, jordan peterson motivational clips

Id: KoZ487aG3SQ

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023